Meaningful Solidarity
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Channel: Omar Suleiman
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spinomenal Haman hamdu Lillahi Rabbil alameen wa Salatu a Samana so they can he was unable to sell them to Seaman cathedra. The discussion is meaningful solidarity.
meaningful solidarity comes through a sense of recognition of the value of the people with whom we stand. and meaningful solidarity comes of a recognition of the issue that binds us together. Those are two separate things. So part of it is recognizing our pioneers, that we would not be able to stand the way that we do as Muslims in America had it not been for the great people that Sr. I should just spoke about briefly. And Dr. Sherman Jackson mentioned something recently that I think is very important, he said
10 times, the slaves that came to America went to Brazil.
Yet you don't see a large indigenous Muslim group in Brazil. You see it here in the United States.
Why is it that a lot chose this place?
To have expressions of Islam in the 20th century lead to Islam in the 20th century, and the autobiography of an Hajj Malik el Shabazz Rahim Allah to Allah, the fruit and Mohammed Ali, may Allah have mercy on him, the continuation in so many different forms and so many different groups that continue to uphold that Allah, Allah Allah, in the indigenous sense, and still the African American community being the largest group of Muslims in America. Why is it that a lot chose this place for that? And what is the hikma of that? What's the wisdom of that? First of all, a recognition that they gave us shoulders to stand on, as an American Muslim community as a whole. And
there's something important to be mentioned here. Muslim and black are not mutually exclusive. So when you talk about the Muslim community and the black community, sometimes you might fall into the,
the trap of differentiating those two to where they're mutually exclusive.
But what I want us to do is to understand that all Muslims owe a great debt to all of black history. Meaning the sacrifices I stood in Medgar Evers blood in Mississippi, the carport and if you don't know who Medgar Evers is you need to look it up. The carport that he was assassinated in the blood stain the carport in Mississippi.
And you could literally go to the house of Medgar Evers and stand in the carport in a pool of blood, the stain of his blood.
And then Malcolm
and Dr. King, and all of the sacrifices that went into the eventual passage of the Immigration Act in 1966, for which many, many Muslims who immigrated to this country owe a great debt to everybody that contributed to that. So all of them all Muslims, owe a great debt to all of black history. Right. And that's the past. But I want to talk about the presence.
I want to share with you something that happened in New Orleans, Louisiana in 2005. Right before Hurricane Katrina strike. So when did you move to New Orleans?
After
after 2005 not because I wanted to see if you remember this incident or not. There was a sister by the name of Dr. jameelah associate.
Dr. Jamila Arshad
was a black Muslim, married to a Pakistani Muslim doctor. And she too was a doctor.
very prominent family in the Muslim community. Very well known couple.
Have a wonderful son Nadeem, who's a friend of mine, and SubhanAllah. I just want you to think about the scene. Two very successful doctors. Dr. jameelah was on her way home one day.
And she saw a kid that was riding his bike get hit by a car so she stopped to treat the kid to help because she was a doctor
when she stopped her car to help the kid like a good Muslim and a good person would do.
A white man called the police on her because he saw a black lady
trying to help this kid and said I don't believe she's a doctor. She's qualified or that she is who she says she is. There's this crazy lady.
That's with this injured child. The police came and without asking any questions assaulted Dr. jameelah
picked her up body slammed her to the concrete to the pavement. When she said she's a doctor. They insulted her. They did not give her a chance to prove herself she she insisted that she was trying to help the child
and because of the aggressiveness that they showed
In assaulting her, they threw her into the back of the cop car.
And they lock the door on her. She had a seizure in the back of the car.
And she passed away.
The cops purposefully left her there in the back of that cop car to make sure that she wouldn't live to press charges for what she'd been through.
The only reason why they even acted was because after some time someone walked by and saw Dr. jameelah in the back of that car with foam out of her mouth and told the cop, why aren't you did you notice that the person that you have back there handcuffed in the back of the car has fallen out of their mouth, he took his time he said I don't have the keys. He called his partner, he took another 10 minutes or so to get his partner to open up the car, and which they found her having passed away.
This rocked the Muslim community.
This brought an issue
that used to be just a black issue to the entirety of the Muslim community and confronted the entire Muslim community with the question of police brutality. You could not pass this off as this was just another one of those kids
that shouldn't have been walking around with their pants sagging or wearing a hoodie or showing some sort of aggression.
You could not do that. This was literally a Muslim doctor, and she wasn't killed because she was Muslim. And that's an important point that I want to get to
a black Muslim doctor.
That stopped to do the right thing and was killed for that. And we asked a lot to accept her as a martyr as a shahida. Because she stopped to do something noble and was killed in the process. She stopped because of her Islam and her humanity and the goodness of her. But you can't make up anything about this narrative. And of course, the cop said she was aggressive. She assaulted us despite all the eyewitnesses saying otherwise. They framed turn as an aggressor and we had no choice but to take this five foot one woman, big officer and body slam her to the pavement put all of his weight on her and take her life. We had no choice.
And the story always goes that way, doesn't it? We had no choice.
Philando Castillo looks suspicious. Philando look like he was reaching for a gun in the car. So you have to get shot seven times in the driver's seat with his daughter in the backseat.
Alton Sterling, even though he's on the ground, and he has no way to reach anything. We had to shoot him dead because you never know he might have been. He was about to pull something. Jordan Edwards 15 year old boy in Dallas.
Ideal super kid. Well, the car was backing up actually no, the car wasn't backing up. So the officer fired shots into the front seat and blew his brains out literally in front of his brothers.
Oh, no. Well, they were drunk. There was no alcohol in the autopsy. Oh, the car was coming back. Actually, the body cam footage showed the opposite. The car was going oh well. He heard gunshots somewhere the officer who was by the way iraq war veteran. A lot knows what he did in Iraq.
said well, he heard gunshots somewhere in the neighborhood. And so he thought it was coming from the car.
The story always goes this way. We have a young man in Dallas, Texas, both of them john, who was murdered in his apartment sitting on his couch. Oops, wrong apartment.
like can you imagine to what extent this ridiculousness has gotten now
a white officer is able to say wrong apartments.
I was on the wrong floor. I thought I was going to mind but I got on the wrong floor. I opened it I had no choice but to shoot him because he acted aggressively. You walk into someone's apartment, pull out a gun and shoot them dead and then say oops.
But the door was the board. The door was kind of open. Actually, the door doesn't open. I've been to that apartment. The door slam shut it has a safety feature. Oh, well. I thought it was mine as a big red rug in front of his apartment to make sure that no one mistakes his apartment.
And then not only that they did a search warrant on his apartment.
And they found a little bit of marijuana. While the officer was able to clean up scrub her social media move out of her apartment before she was taken in because of the outrage in the streets in Dallas for 30 minutes, got her mug shot and now is out. And now she's in the court system and they've got her with her long gold blocks and they've they're dressing her up in a certain way and they're trying to spin this narrative of this poor young woman that's being bullied by the city of Dallas because she killed an aggressive black man.
Stephon Clark.
Oh, well, he was next to a truck. It was his grandpa's truck. Oh, well, you know, he, we thought he had a gun. It was a cell phone. Well, we thought his cell phone was a gun 21 times.
A week after both them in Dallas, Abdullah, Amanda was known as dollar beard in Michigan.
Muslim brother, who was in his house, the cops went in the middle of the night, busted down his door, said they had a search warrant, shot him 21 times in his own living room.
The problem was, they had a search warrant for the house next door.
They said, Well, he had a gun. Wait a minute.
He was trying to defend themselves. If someone busts in your house at 2am and you have a gun? Aren't you going to defend yourself?
Why did you have to shoot them 21 times in his own living room, we had no choice.
What is it that makes black bodies so disposable in America? And I say bodies not because they're reduced to bodies. I say bodies because the people that shoot them only see bodies, what makes them so disposable in America, the same thing that makes Palestinians disposable and huzar.
This is what I want you to understand for a moment. When you identify an entire group of people with an identity, a criminal identity of violent identity, a suspicious identity a terrorist identity, you can always spin the narrative
to make them only governable by force, brutality and violence.
Now, by the way, Muslims,
if you only cared about Stephon Clark, when you found out he was Muslim, you're part of the problem. You're part of Stefan was not murdered because he was Muslim. He was murdered because he was black.
Whether he was Muslim, I mean, the person who shot him those cops, the Sham didn't know he was Muslim when they shot him. So when you found out there was a lot there, janazah and that I was gonna be there any moms. And that's when he started saying that I'm going to lie and poor guy and horrible and Black Lives Matter suddenly is a hashtag that you have no issue using, you're part of the problem if that's what you did.
So we're not as Muslims, we have to, we have to take a step back. And I want us to ask ourselves this question.
Do we understand the issue and the playbook?
With all black lives in America, not just black Muslim lives, with all black lives and what's happening here? And what's happening in this country right now? 1017 people is your body counts for 2018.
Think about this for a moment.
And so you think to yourself, well, they were dangerous. Well, it's understandable. Well, maybe there was an apprehension, the cop thought the cop felt threatened. Do you know why we are ready to escape to those thoughts? Because maybe that's how we feel.
Maybe that's how we feel around young black men that wear hoodies.
Maybe we justify that with ourselves. And so while I understand why the cop did it.
We keep on making in America, black victims, complicit in their own death.
Palestinians and the reason why I'm mentioning this, by the way is because the topic I was getting was black Palestinian solidarity. Young Palestinians at the border of Gaza keep on being made complicit in their own death. Young Mexicans, we were at the border of San Diego and Tijuana.
They were going to take those troops, which by the way are also army vets. The militarization of the border that we're about to unload tear gas, again, into the people on the other side of the border, and strike them young mothers and children made them complicit in their own tragedy.
blamed the moms
blame blamed the dads blamed. I want you The point is dear brothers and sisters is that when you dehumanize a people enough,
suddenly the unspeakable becomes justifiable.
And we're able to turn a blind eye. What does this mean for us in terms of solidarity?
The Prophet sallallahu wasallam taught us to speak about wrong because it's wrong not because we could turn the wrong into a narrative that would make things right for us as a Muslim community.
It's very cheap when in order to mainstream a cause.
to Muslims as a whole, we tack it on to the black community. Just to get some some points and some traction for our
Cause without understanding the issue itself.
You need to understand the issue itself. What's happening in this country, that the same playbook that's been engineered that's been used against the Muslim community globally has been used against weaponized against the black community historically here in America. What does that mean?
The media,
which has portrayed Muslims globally, as a barbaric people that cannot but be dealt with, with military force with weapons and brutality and occupation, is the same media that has engineered us to believe that the ghettos that were created
by the circumstances that are not organic in this country
cannot but be governed by the militarization by this by this, this police force
that is trained and uses the same tactics as the IDF.
They're occupying these neighborhoods.
And it's it's really interesting that we can't see that, that we can't see the it's the same type of behavior, the same type of tactics of dehumanization being used over and over and over again. Now, I don't just want to sound angry and turn this into a rally. I want us to actually walk back a little bit and be a little bit intentional about what we take from this in terms of our own lenses.
One of the things that we what we've seen is that, historically speaking, we've had people that we've had great black freedom fighters that took up the cause of Palestine, and that's still the case today.
Malcolm X, Al Hajj Malik el Shabazz, many people don't know he went to the zoo.
In 1964, he actually went to Palestine in 1964, predating 1967, and he wrote an essay in the Egyptian Gazette on Zionism. He was the first black leader to speak about Palestine. Not only that, but you know, what's really interesting about what Malcolm did, Malcolm tied Zionism to white supremacy and colonialism. He called it a form of white supremacy and colonialism.
And he said that
portraying the Arabs as a barbaric people, disadvantaging them, occupying them,
comes out of the same machine that's used to colonize different parts of the world portray these people
as subhuman, barbaric, regressive,
unable to coexist with the rest of the world, hence, justifying
a takeover of their lands, occupation of their people
and hurting them
in unspeakable ways, and it's really interesting, because I want to tie this, I want to tie this comment to something that Dr. King said about the condition of the black American, Malcolm wrote in that essay, they clip the birds wing and then blame it for not flying as high as they do.
So you destroy the infrastructure of these people, destroy their economic potential, destroy their political independence, destroy everything that they have. So that now
5060 years later, the slums that you've created
the horrible condition, you've left these people in, you get to look back and say, We want peace with the Palestinians. We don't know why they're so angry and upset. We don't know why there's what's Why are they so violent? What's their problem, taking advantage of the image that's been put in people's minds that there are two equal parties that lives side by side that are continuing to fight with one another, and that we need to make peace with them?
completely, completely taking advantage of the past not being known to the consumer of that propaganda.
And the economic and political conditions being made irrelevant instead, what's wrong with the people on this side of the apartheid wall? Why can't they be as civilized as this group of people?
They clip the bird's wing, and then blame it for not flying as high as they do. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to a cruelty that's been employed against African Americans in this country. And a history that most people don't appreciate. Most people don't understand if they come to this country. Why is it that this condition persists? Why can't they just pull themselves up by the bootstraps? You know, Dr. King said, it's very cruel to tell a man who doesn't have boots. Why can't you pull yourself up by the bootstraps, completely ignoring slavery, completely ignoring Jim Crow, completely ignoring
Everything about mass incarceration in the world of drugs and how it's been used to maintain slavery in this country completely ignoring the school to prison pipeline, completely ignoring policing that is meant to create an apprehension with children around cops completely ignoring all of the poisons that are trafficked and put into a community to keep it subjugated. You say, why can't they just
pull up by the bootstraps?
clip the bird's wing, then blame it for not flying as high as you do. It's the same comments. The thing that I want you to pay attention to,
historically, with the black Palestinian solidarity in particular and what meaningful solidarity looks like.
Malcolm started that trend. Malcolm was also by the way it has Monica Chavez Rahim Allah I was the first one to talk about Vietnam.
The first black leader to take on the Vietnam War, that which made Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so unpopular. He was not hated. For his I Have a Dream speech.
Dr. King would be hated for taking on some of the positions that Malcolm took, that made him so toxic and untouchable.
The anti war stance, tying racism to poverty, understanding the way that racism factored into poverty, racialized poverty in this country. That's when Dr. King became too unpopular. This is a 1967 newsletter, from the SMC front from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
1967 they took up the Palestinian cause.
This newsletter had an entire section called the Palestine problem.
The Palestine problem listed out intelligent arguments against Zionism, talked about the factor of land, talked about what was going into the robing of these people and indigenous people of their resources and their land called Zionism. A settler colonial project, talked about the dehumanization of the Arabs as as part of the lead up to the occupation
and took on this course.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, of course, which many of you know which Dr. King was heavily involved in? The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also took on the anti Vietnam War stances. Many scholars say that that's actually why it krumholtz
was defunded lost the ability to function was because it took on such wildly unpopular stances. black leaders in the past took on the Palestinian cause to their detriment. There was nothing to gain for black leaders in America to embrace the Palestinian cause. They had no benefit whatsoever to doing that. There is nothing to gain today, from the movement for black lives to endorse BDS, the boycott, divestment, sanctions movement, there is nothing to gain for Angela Davis, a civil rights icon to insist upon Palestinian Liberation as part of a global struggle for liberation. Mark Lamont Hill, suffered, lost his job was ostracized, lost most of his speaking invitations, not just this
place on CNN almost I mean, tiempo looked for a way to take the job of a tenured professor, because he dared raise his voice for Palestinian rights. They have nothing to gain by attacking their cause on to the cause of the Palestinians.
What I would appeal is that for those that champion the Palestinian cause, don't just tack on the Palestinian cause to the cause of black freedom, without understanding what the cause of black freedom is, in the first place, having a substantive understanding, taking the time out to understand what is it
that exists in this country
that has maintained the same oppression that we complain about overseas, and what that has manifested itself in by understanding, the playbook of dehumanization,
erasing history, creating a different narrative about history and then taking advantage of the ignorance that you created in manufacturing through the way that you colored someone's history.
When a people are brought to that level,
that this is the only way they can be dealt with.
Then you have the struggles that we have around the world, somehow to law. I read off you know, you look at I had a friend of mine, some of you might have seen. We released that up in the Jesus collection. And I did an interview with Reverend Andy Stoker, white pastor from the United Methodist Church about discussions that we had with Jesus and then some somehow took a turn. He took his group to Palestine by the way. We have some courageous Christian groups that have endorsed BDS, the Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church to an extent the Episcopalians I'm waiting for
Muslim organizations to also officially endorse BDS, but I'm still waiting.
But
But just think about this as a white United Methodist pastor. And he was talking about how they went, they went on their spiritual trip and you know, they met with Palestinian Methodist Palestinian Christians. And then in their itinerary they decide to go to Ramallah. And so they were treated with some suspicion. Why are you guys going into Milan? They got to Ramallah and they saw this huge Nelson Mandela statue.
And they were so confused. Why is there a Nelson Mandela statue? in Ramallah? It was I mean, a whole round about this humongous Nelson Mandela statue. And, you know, he was like, we had to actually like, look it up and like, talk about why is there a Nelson Mandela statue and Philistine and Ramallah, in the West Bank in Palestine?
Because it was Nelson Mandela, who connected the Palestinian cause to his cause, and said, we know that our freedom is incomplete until the Palestinians are free.
So Mandela connected the Palestinian cause to his struggle, he already had his hands full in South Africa.
The point is, is that if you're really dedicated to these causes of anti apartheid, and anti oppression and subjugation and dehumanization, and the treatment of people like subhuman because you've socially engineered the people around them to not view them as people anymore and to make their debts forgivable
because well, what was Stephon Clark gonna grow up to be anyway, I have to share this with you because this was a comment that actually it was hinted. It was hinted that Stefan Stefan quote, you know, Jordan Edwards and Dallas.
Jordan, you know, some people would defend Jordan, I would say, you know, he was a straight A student captain of his football team, ideal kid and Jordans family. I mean, his father loved him. He's, like, the absent black father narrative doesn't work. They're the drugs don't work. They're the bat. You know, failing in school doesn't work. They're like all the typical stereotypes and racist tropes that are used against the black community. They couldn't find any of them in the media. You know, so like, great family. His father Odell, did an incredible job with his kids straight A student captain was football team, no alcohol, like they couldn't frame him. They
couldn't make him complicit, and it drove them crazy. And I hated that people would defend him. By talking about how great of a kid he was, I don't care if he was a dope pet. Who was rebellious to his parents? Who was driving his car recklessly drunk that night, did that justify his murder by an officer, a long rifle being shot into his head in front of his brothers.
So that's actually very inappropriate to sit there and to say, Well, he was a great kid, therefore, he didn't deserve to die. And someone said this to me about Stefan in Sacramento.
He said, Well, you know, he was a really troubled kid, really troubled kid.
You know, if Malcolm would have been killed, at 22 years old,
most Muslims would have been like,
he's just a pimp, a drug addict, a thief. He had no future anyway. So if a cop unjustly shot Malcolm in the streets of Detroit, or Boston, or Harlem, most Muslims, seeing that on the news, would have turned Malcolm into an afterthought, and wouldn't have said, Yeah, how long?
They would have been like, Well, I mean, look at him. You've seen Malcolm's pick, when he went into prison, look at him.
So what would have Stefan become
the potential of that young man to our community to
you don't get to judge whose value or whose life has more value than someone else. Instead, take a little bit of time to educate yourself on the systems that are used to subjugate here and abroad.
And it's not just a Muslim thing.
Okay, it's not just a Muslim thing. We have to identify those systems, and then work against those systems.
using proper strategy. Don't be opportunistic. Don't just talk about this stuff, whenever it benefits, the Palestinian cause, or the Muslim community as a whole to tie yourself on to the struggle. Think about it. And then we bring it to challenge ourselves.
Am I part of the problem? Do I contribute to this in any way? Am I one of those who has in my own life? been guilty of racism? Have I treated people differently in my own life? Do I mean Am I part of the problem? So we also have to be willing to question ourselves and I'll end with this. I think my overtime this point. I'm good at hamdulillah Okay, what's up?
Okay. hamdulillah
You know, you mentioned the quote of a blue belt. And what the prophet SAW some setup without the prophets. I said, I mentioned that you are a man in whom there is still present some jelly like you've got some traces of ignorance in you. Let's walk back the context. First of all, a Buddha was black.
To make the story confusing to some, but I thought it was a black Arab. Bilal was habashi. His mother was Abyssinian.
So when you when he said,
Yunus soda, son of a black woman, what he meant was son of an Abyssinian woman. So the insult was that you're not one of us. This is internalized racism. By the way. I'm from New Orleans and in New Orleans. Unless you're Creole and you have the complexion that I do, you probably won't rise to a high position in office and this is in the black community. Right? we internalize. You know, the worst thing is when your colonizers make you like them, and so we got our Fair and Lovely cream in the Muslim world, Mashallah. And people treat their own with such disdain, such hatred.
I mean, it's it's horrible to think about this, how this has creeped into us, who taught you to hate yourself, Who taught you to hate the color of your skin, and the texture of your hair and the shape of your nose? Who taught you to hate yourself? Right? Think about that with your Islam.
Some of the things that you now identify with your religion so who is a black man? I mean, if you were watching that if you were transported back in that story just completely changed now. You see two black men in front of you and without makes a racist comment against the guy that's the same color as him.
So let's let's let's peel this a little bit. Okay. First of all,
I was out when he came to the Prophet slice alum the prophets lie some admonished him. But here's the thing.
A Buddha did not have the Tobia the mentorship of the Prophet slice alum that the other companions did without came embraced Islam left Mecca, then joined once again on the hitbox. So he didn't he was not oriented. The way that the companions around the profits lie somewhere so on the profit slice on makes that comment to him. So that just because you said LA LA LA and then you came back later on a few years later, doesn't mean that you've really implemented the program. You haven't really got this yet. You've got some time. You've got some work to do on yourself. Right. The whole twit today politics album, Amanda comes right after a lot talks about the headwinds right after
Yeah, evenness. In a Filipina coming back Korean winter, which I'm not sure Ruben will call back later out of a lot of talks about oh people we created you, male and female nations and tribes that you may get to know one another. Then Allah mentions the bed ones. So without wasn't conditioned the way the companions were, they spent a decade with the prophets lysozyme and Mecca. This has already been taken out of their system. That's the first thing so there's some context here to the Prophet sighs I'm saying you still have the ignorance inside of you. Second thing is this.
The prophets lie Selim condemned up without him, because he made Bilal feel bad
when you get caught
using the N word,
using racist language about people, you say, No, no, no, I didn't mean slaves. I meant slaves of Allah. I mean, I beat I meant slaves of Allah, I didn't mean slaves, slaves of Allah, then why are you using it for only one group of people? We get caught using that language.
Or the other language the other racist terminology. I know daisies have their racist stuff, too. And even amongst Africans, you know, you got some, right I grew up in a Sudan in households and I was so confused the first time I heard a racist comment from a person towards I was so lost. I was like, What just happened here? I was like, that guy that just got transported into the Ceylon is watching above and below and completely confused.
I was like, why are people using this language is racist language to say no, no, but I didn't mean it that way. I didn't mean it that way. I mean, up without technically what he said Milan was the son of a black woman. So it was up without him. So he could have said, What I said was true. Don't say anything wrong. The prophets I some could have told us without. I know it's true. But why did you say that in front of them, you hurt his feelings, but he wouldn't have corrected the poison.
Instead, the prophet sly Salaam spoke to an internal condition bubble that had to get rectified.
Racism is a disease of the heart.
It's a form of kibin pride. You think Allah created someone better than someone else because of the color of their skin? That sounds very familiar.
That's Kibera. That's pride.
How dare you think that a lot created you?
more civilized.
With more potential with more value because of the color of your skin,
there is nothing more satanic than that.
What that plays out in is that we have to reassess our language. reassess our community on the inside. reassess our work with the entirety of the community on the outside.
And there's one more thing inshallah Tada. I think you gave me the signal. So I guess I'm done. Then we got to go to our panel.
And I think this is a very important point. I was at the mejlis assura banquet in New York last weekend a man talking about the Rashidi man, Paula Abdul Rashid is the student of alum and Sophia, who was sent to her but he was a student of Malcolm X, and Hadji Monica Shabazz, Malcolm receive scholarships to another university he sent allama tofik Rahim Allah to Allah to Al Azhar allama tofik, translated many books from Arabic to English, by the way, he came back to New York, the mosque of Islamic brotherhood, Imam Paulo is now the Imam of that Moses, he was a student of allama tofi. And Imam pylab said something beautiful, powerful, he said,
connecting with black leaders is not the same as connecting with black communities.
Just because you bring a mom Siraj to your event,
doesn't suddenly make you as a community anti racist. When moms or dads is brought to your event, and he raises millions of dollars for your organization, when the inner city, most of the near community can't pay the electricity bill, and you're not doing anything in the inner city of your community. You're not building relationships with the community, you're building relationship with faces and leaders. And we have to go beyond that. And so when we talk about the historic black American community and fetishize, Malcolm X and Mohammed Ali, what about the current community
that exists today? And what are we doing to build relationships with the community, not just of African American Muslims wherever they may be, but with the black community, as a whole, so we have to move beyond just building relationships with leaders and symbolic gestures, we've got to move beyond that in Charlottetown. And we have to really be willing to take ourselves to task
and that's going to require all of us I love our diversity. I think our diversity is our strength by the way, as an American Muslim community Mashallah. There is no faith community like ours. We're confused with our food, we're confused with our dress. You get people I mean, around the shoe racks this thing to, to be amazed that it really it truly is beautiful. So Hello, we're the most diverse faith community in the country. It's it's a source of pride, while possiamo be happily law hegemony and one of our co
was kurunegala to La La come is going to Arda and Sabina coleauxv come to us baton binaire Mati Juana
that what brought us all together is the rope of Allah, that we care about this Deen, what keeps us coming to the messages then getting uncomfortable sometimes and negotiating our own identities, our own cultures and trying to figure it out and come together
is that we we have a common cause and a common purpose and Subhanallah? You know, I think back to the Mexican days, I'm like what would have got all modeled the Aloha on who to hang out with Abdullah bin Massoud little deal on or after I've been over to hang out with Bill allegan robot like that stuff is amazing. But it was this common purpose. So let's also take a moment to celebrate how amazing it is when you look around the room at any message. And sometimes we don't get it until someone visits our community like wow, the diversity was crazy.
And hamdulillah I love my Muslim community. And we have a strength. But with that strength, that just means we have to work a little bit harder in sha Allah tada to listen to one another. To create meaningful bonds with one another inside our community. We have to we have to just listen a little bit more. Let people educate us about their experiences about their history. Respect the gray hairs that came before you. I don't have anybody
respect those gray hairs and it's not respect somehow is. This is my last story. I was in Detroit, and I went to the Missouri whitey Mohammed which was the first was the Nation of Islam temple number one. Malcolm ministered there for some time. And there was just the sweet sister She must have been 90 something years old, making bean pies for joumana that not noncom not, you know, new email, a lot of things like she interacted with that history and she's us you would pass by her in the muslin you would just think huh? There's history there. And there's history as well with the American with the Muslims that came here in the 60s and the 70s we need to respect that history inshallah. Honor it.
sit and talk and learn and listen. May Allah subhanaw taala bring our hearts together, make us more able to purge the poisons that exists within our community within our society.
Within our world may Allah subhana wa tada make us sincere in our pursuit for his pleasure, and our pursuit of brotherhood and sisterhood and our pursuit of justice that is pleasing to Him. May Allah subhanaw taala forgive us when we hurt someone else intentionally, or unintentionally, a Muslim, or someone else. May Allah forgive us when we use words or actions or body language or a sense of disregard that does not honor the sacrifices of people that came before us and people that exist amongst us. May Allah forgive us. Allah subhanho wa Taala guide us to actions and a path that is most pleasing Tim allama means it's a little Halo sound like Latika, lovey