Sherman Jackson – Changing the Present, Dreaming the Future

			Matter regime T
		

			Al Hamdulillah mistana who want us to fiddle want to study?
		

			When are the bIllahi min Cerulean fusina Min se Melina miyetti Allah Allah medulla or Manuel de
Falla. Hady Allah, wa shadow Allah ilaha illallah wa salam ala wai shadow Ana Mohammed Abdullah
Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa sallam rubbish roughly Saudi. Were certainly
Emery was not looked at and Melissa and Colleen
		

			what can you Sharon FC? Will philatelists any when other adults
		

			will
		

			be ready to help me Rapala anime my bad Salam alaykum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh.
		

			First of all, I have to confess that I am
		

			just a little bit starstruck
		

			as I stand before you tonight. I don't know
		

			if many of you know the value that Dr. Nasir has represented in our community, and I can speak
		

			quite personally on this on this point. As a former student of Dr. Nasir, and as an academic, I
think that oftentimes Muslims
		

			don't know just how wrenchingly challenging it can be to try to sustain a dignified existence as a
believing practicing Muslim in the academy. And for me, Dr. surfacey Nasir has always been a beacon
of inspiration. And he has been,
		

			he has been a beacon of inspiration.
		

			Not because and I hope that this comes through the way exactly that I mean it not because I have
always agreed with everything that he has said. And I think that he is a man of integrity, who like
myself, believes that we don't need a community of zombies. So it's not a matter of always agreeing
with what my brother or sister says. But in everything that I've ever read by him, and every time I
ever heard him lecture,
		

			the deep, profound, uncompromising belief in Allah in his book in His Messenger, and then the Day of
Judgment, comes through with such uncompromising clarity. It has been an inspiration that has
sustained myself, and I can assure you, many other students in the western Academy, and if he's
still here, I know he's getting up there and yours but I just want to say publicly and in His
presence does that too Kamala hair, and thank you very much. And I pray that Allah continues to give
you yours and enables you to continue to inspire us Your presence has been most valuable, most
valuable indeed.
		

			Now, I have very little time and I want to apologize to the organizers for going over time last
night, I will not do that tonight.
		

			I have one order of business that I have to take care of. Last night there was a Hadith of the
Prophet Alayhi Salatu was Salam. Which in my presentation, I completely mangled. And so for the
interest of those who may have taken an interest in that hadith, I just want to give it to you as it
is, and have been our best and not the Allahu Taala and Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi wa sallam,
female Yoda we are not Beta Beta Kappa Allah and this is also a Muslim. Call it and Allah cuttable
has a net you will see it from a beginner Delica from an hunmanby hasenhuttl in Colombia melihat
Ketubot Halawa endo who has an atom cannula when hunmanby Hefa Amina had kept about how long I just
		

			have a gel endo Astra has an antigen Elizabeth immediately they often often cathedra when hung up is
a yet in Colombia Imelda kept Ebola and who has an atom cam
		

			Allah, when hunmanby have amla, Ketubot Allah who say yet and where Haider. This is the Hadith that
I tried to sort of unsuccessfully
		

			add in braid or abbreviate last night. And I just wanted to give it to you as it actually is, so
that my slate will be clean before Allah subhanaw taala on the Day of Judgment. Moving on to the
topic at hand,
		

			it's very difficult to follow Dr. Nasir
		

			who took you to such elevated heights and then to bring you back down to the lowly heights that I'm
used to operating on. But I am what I am. And I thank Allah for His bounties. And so I'm going to
give you what what I have. I think the issue of changing the presence
		

			requires that we first come into some clear understanding of what that present is.
		

			To my mind, we live in a very highly integrated world.
		

			And some of us have talked about this already, the internet cell phones, I mean, we can be in
contact, we can know what's going on from time to time, in real time, second by second.
		

			And all of this is shaping human relations.
		

			And I think that in all of this, none is more important to understand
		

			our present and to begin to dream clearly, to go back to the point of Sheikh Habibullah Jeffery,
		

			I think we have to understand what this is producing in terms of cultural evolution, and what may
soon develop into a cultural revolution that is quietly creeping upon the world.
		

			And this cultural revolution has to do with the fact that
		

			cultures and peoples are coming into mutual contact and interaction, on levels and in ways that are
unprecedented in human history. And this presents new cultural challenges, new ways of coming to
terms with cultural diversity, with cultural authority, and with the ability to carve out one's own
cultural identity.
		

			And I think that where we are successful, and managing cultural diversity, then we are in a position
to pool our resources in such a manner that might enable us to rise to some of the challenges such
as those Dr. Nasir laid out tonight.
		

			And when we're not able to rise to this challenge, then the tendency is, however silently to have us
divided, unable to cooperate with each other, each going our separate way, and not being able to
pull our resources so and in a certain way.
		

			The cultural challenge is as serious as any other because it will determine what kind of human
relations we have, both on the level of sort of micro communities on the on the global level as
macro communities. Now, I tried to very briefly lay out some of this last night, and I want to try
to just very quickly and embrace it.
		

			And hopefully fill out a picture. And so that I can talk about what I think the present challenge is
and what a reasonable dream for the future might be. I said last night that the 19th century saw
Western societies thoroughly dislocate non western societies culturally.
		

			And this was, I think, especially true for Muslim societies. And I think that the cultural
dislocation was much more severe and went much farther than any other influence that affected the
Muslim world. And I think that some of what Dr. Nasir actually implemented, has a lot to do with the
loss of cultural authority in the Muslim world. One of the reasons why it is very difficult to get
Muslims to think independently and to think spontaneously, as they interact with the sources of
their own religion is because the cultural authority in the world today rests outside the Muslim
community. And so you're not going to be really considered a scholar really considered a scientist
		

			really considered this or that unless what you do somehow earns the esteem of people who happen not
to be Muslims. And so it is very difficult to incentivize Muslims to think independently where that
independent thought as Muslims will will not be recognized in those centers that happened to be the
validators of
		

			of human activity in the world today. And that is fundamentally at its heart, a cultural issue.
		

			And so the issue of culture and cultural authority is a very, very important one for us as Muslims.
		

			Now, culturally, I think Muslim societies were pushed on to a certain path of westernization.
		

			And I think perhaps no one captured this phenomena and this reality, as poignantly as as another
Iranian intellectual, who was a Marxist and
		

			soon came to discover that Islam was a much more profound outlook on life than Marxism. And so he,
he became very dedicated to Islam, a man by the name of Joel Mudd,
		

			who coined a very
		

			poignant phrase that captures what has happened in the Muslim world, he called it Lazada. He, which
translates as West stuckness, that the Muslim world became struck in armored by everything that
seemed to have a Western signature to it. And this became something that sort of swept across the
Muslim world, now hand in hand with this westernization when the marginalization of the religious
establishment and the religious scholars of Islam.
		

			And so for a time
		

			coming out of the 19th century, even into the 20th century, what we have is the incursion of Western
cultural motifs on the one hand, and very thin filters, very weak filters that were put in place,
Islamic parameters, Islamic values, Islamic ways of seeing things, such that what was coming in
could be effectively filtered, so that the good could come in, and that the back could be kept up.
This was a very wrenching process for much of the 19th century, coming even into the 20th century.
And I think that if, if any of you, if this sounds a bit abstract, and we want to bring it down to a
more concrete level, I would invite you to do the following.
		

			Those of you
		

			who are from the Muslim world, or whose families come from the Muslim world, go back and look at
some family albums from the 1940s, or the 1950s, or even as late as the 1960s, and see what you see.
		

			And we will see almost a total sort of
		

			disabusing Muslims of their Muslim cultural sensitivities. I won't go any farther than that. I'll
let some of you tell others about it.
		

			But this was a very serious and profound dislocation. And it happened. And there's no point in
denying it.
		

			Fortunately,
		

			as the 20th century wore on,
		

			we see the reemergence of the religious establishment,
		

			and especially a number of religious scholars who begin to recapture some of their standing in
Muslim society.
		

			And this is a phenomenon that brought with it the ability to begin to reestablish reconnect with a
classical Islamic tradition, to the point of being able to put back in place some of those filters
that might enable Muslims to know about the whole process of interacting with these western cultural
motifs in a way that was consistent with Islam. And we began to see a number of
		

			very important and influential intellectuals and Muslim jurists. I mean people like Chuck usable
kind of Dawie people like Sheikh Abdullah bin baya shaken booty, shake, Bin baz and others, whether
we fully agree or not, with these people, I'm talking about their reentry into the fold in such a
way that they begin, they begin to guide Muslims in terms of how they will come to look at the
Western motifs that were coming into their midst. And so when we end up in a situation where we can
re establish the tools and the tools with which to differentiate between non Muslim on the one hand,
and an Islamic on the other, have been there for a very long time. In fact, this was the process by
		

			which Islam
		

			I'm traditionally spread into the societies in which it spread, that Omar Farooq Abdullah has has
spoken about this, how Islam spread into various societies and how it interacted with local
cultures, how it was able to let in the good and keep out the bad and empower those local cultures
so that they themselves could go on and produce organically rich communities that could go naturally
in their own environment. These tools had been there for a very long time. And as the Muslim
religious scholars begin to re enter the fold, these tools began to be reassessed, re accessed, and
the filters began to get re established, and suddenly make a very long story short, in my
		

			perspective, what happens here is, this process of reestablishing these filters, enables the Muslims
to avoid to avert the twin cultural enemies of Islam,
		

			and the twin cultural enemies of Islam, or cultural nativism,
		

			whereby the mere fact that something was done in the past means that it is right, good normative for
the present. And we see many is in the Quran about this in number.
		

			And this is very, very common feature in the Quran. Very early, we saw we found our father's
following away, and we are simply following their path. With no ability to distinguish between
whether what our fathers were doing was right was healthy, was functional, or not, the mere fact
that they were doing it is enough to establish it as something that we should do. This is a cultural
nativism, which is an enemy to Islam. The other enemy is cultural promiscuity.
		

			Whereby, again, we have no filters, and whatever the newest fad is, we simply take it on, because
it's a fad. And because we want to be seen as being up with the latest fad. And we can see aspects
of this and what the Prophet did sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, both in Mecca and Medina, there are
several Hadith in which the Prophet says explicitly Holly fully yahood, one machete King.
		

			This was not differ from the Jewish ways and from the ways of the machete King. This wasn't an this
was not an an absolute command. But there were always areas in which the Prophet warned us not to be
culturally promiscuous, because the reality is, is that and by the way, advertisers know this very
well. And that is that, along with a cultural practice, may come a whole bunch of other associations
that go along with it. And that's why, you know, what do cigarettes have to do with a pretty woman
has nothing to do with it? Well, they want to try and convince you is that if you smoke these
cigarettes,
		

			you will get this kind of a woman. I mean, that's the association. And these kinds of things are
very, very carefully crafted. And so we cannot be culturally promiscuous. Because when we adapt
certain kinds of cultural practices, along with them come other things that we should not, that we
should not be involved in. And so what we as Muslims have to have is the right filters, to begin to
let the good in and keep the bad out.
		

			Now, the result of what Muslims went through,
		

			has produced a very interesting phenomenon. And that phenomenon is that and this may strike you as
being somewhat counter intuitive. But I just want you to reflect on it for a moment.
		

			The reality is that Muslims have become much more culturally ambidextrous, and quite comfortable
with assimilating Western and other non Muslim not an Islamic ways. And when I say assimilating
them, I don't mean being assimilated to them. That's a different process. to assimilate something
means that you exercise agency, you are a subject, not an object, you are taking it on, on your own
freewill not having it imposed upon you. As a result of this experience of the 19th. And early part
of the 20th century, Muslims become much more culturally ambidextrous, they are much more
comfortable with assimilating particularly Western ways. And you understand what I mean by
		

			assimilating Western ways. I don't mean by I don't mean by that happened imposed upon them. And I
don't mean by by that doing that in a way that's culturally promiscuous, but Muslims are quite
comfortable with this whole enterprise, switch the camera to the West.
		

			The West throughout this period, was the dominant party and all this
		

			And because of this, they had what may turn out to be the False luxury
		

			of indulging a sudden cultural nativism,
		

			without ever having to worry about cultural promiscuity. Because even when it adopted from other
cultures as the dominant cultural motif on the planet, they can always claim it as their own. So
they had what they could always look at as sort of an organic cultural evolution, never having other
cultures imposed on the west. But what this ultimately
		

			turns out
		

			to produce
		

			is a situation where the West in many ways seems to have landed in a position or situation that is
the opposite of that of the Muslims. And so what we find is a West that is not very culturally
ambidextrous, that is not very comfortable with assimilating non western ways, and especially the
ways of the Muslims.
		

			We see this very clearly
		

			in what's going on in the world, as I said last night, and this is very difficult for Muslims to
begin to even probably accept, because we're so used to thinking of the West as as culturally
dominant, impregnable edifice on the planet. But the reality is, is that, as I see it, the West in
many ways right now is quite culturally threatened.
		

			It does not know how to assimilate certain cultural features in a way that they can make it sit as
its way of life.
		

			They don't have the tools with which to do that. We as Muslims have those tools, but the West seems
to lack it. Now we see this in any number of instances, we can see this in what's going on in places
like France. We can see this in what's going on in places like Switzerland. You can't even have
minarets. Why? Because they're environmentally unsafe. Why? Why can't you have minarets, because
they threaten us how
		

			they threaten us culturally, we are unable to go outside and look at minarets, and still feel like
we're in Switzerland. They threaten us culturally. We see this in what's going on in Germany.
		

			Right, where Chancellor Merkel has come out publicly and said what multiculturalism is a failure.
		

			Multiculturalism is a failure. And therefore, we want to act in such a way that preserves the
integrity of German culture. This is what is happening now. We see this in what is going on even in
the United States, I'm not going to talk about Canada. I don't know that much about it. And I'm a
visitor here I want to behave. But I don't think that we should overlook the cultural dimensions
that is animating movements, such as the Tea Party in the United States, even to this day. These are
people who want to see America culturally, reflect its own cultural sensibilities. And it has
difficulty it has difficulty in adjusting to the fact that, well, there are Muslims in America now.
		

			And they are Americans. And they're not going anywhere. And they have their cultural contributions
to make to America as well.
		

			This is what is going on in the world. Right now. We have a situation where Muslims are culturally
ambidextrous, where the West is not. And now we have to find a way now of navigating this very fact.
The reaction to Muslims first and foremost, in the West, the primary action is cultural. It is not
religious. Now, I'm not one who will completely disaggregate culture from religion, but when they
see us, and this is a very potentially dangerous thing that we have, because they're reacting to us
culturally, they never get to know our religion.
		

			How many of them that they know about veils and hijabs and nightclubs, and all these other things?
What did they really know about Turkey?
		

			What do they really know about what Muslims actually believe in terms of the core of their religion?
We never get to those things, because we're so bogged down in these cultural issues. Right now for
me, and by the way,
		

			there's a racial element to this as well, but
		

			That's another story. And I know Imams aid and Dr. Omar and Sheikh Hamza and others don't want to
see me get started up here. So I'll just
		

			leave that one aside.
		

			But I think it's very important for us to understand what's going on here. Let me wake everybody up
and
		

			even take a chance on getting in a little bit of trouble with my wife.
		

			And give an example of what I'm talking about.
		

			When I mentioned names like Bill Clinton,
		

			John Edwards,
		

			Arnold Schwarzenegger.
		

			What do they mean?
		

			Now, it's not only what they did, but it was the impact these things destroyed, families, destroyed
relationships, destroyed political careers. Now all these men happen to be very wealthy.
		

			All right, and I want her sisters just to relax for 30 seconds, just
		

			take a deep breath, just relax, I'm not just relax.
		

			All of these men could have supported these women, as wives, all of them could have.
		

			And the fact that this was not an option,
		

			continually, actually promotes the very activity in which they were involved. And yet, if you were
to say, Well, why not allow them to have more than one spouse,
		

			and discuss it rationally,
		

			we will be greeted with the whole idea that this is not our way of life.
		

			We're not in discussion rationally, this is not our way of life.
		

			Why are you so threatened by
		

			we can talk about gay marriage and all these other things. Why are you so threatened by this, this
is what I'm talking about, in terms of the lack of cultural ambidexterity in the west today, and
Muslims need to understand this, because this has to do a lot with our future. Now, for a lot of
people.
		

			This is a lot of people like this, like to see the West in this, this crippled sort of condition or
what they might interpret as a, as a sort of crippled condition.
		

			For me, however, our contribution, especially as Muslims living in the West, has to be to model how
human communities can deal with the fact that we have to move through the world in a way that we are
culturally ambidextrous, that we are able to understand what is essential, and what is non
essential. And in so doing, we can move through adopt this, drop that without dropping the ball. But
in order for us as Muslims, to be able to do this, we ourselves first have to go back to our own
tradition, re access those tools, and re establish our filters so that we can first of all, get rid
of much of the cultural nativism that is in our own community, because it is killing us here. And if
		

			you don't believe me, ask the converts. Muslims, we complain about, you know, Canadian, non Muslims,
American non Muslims, they don't accept us, they're culturally bigoted. And we have some of this
same cultural bigotry in our own communities. People who convert to Islam looked at the, the, the
ethnic nature of our massage at some of them. If you don't look like me, you don't talk like me. You
don't dress like me. You don't eat like me. You're not welcome here.
		

			You're not welcome here. How can we can't How can we can't be more culturally ambidextrous, and say,
Well, the way you look is not essential. But why you dress is not essential, as long as it satisfies
the conditions that have been set bogged down by the Quran and Sunnah.
		

			Why can't we model this cultural ambidexterity to the point that we can begin to grow organically in
this part of the world. I think that
		

			much of this
		

			much of this
		

			much of this, it has to be it has to be addressed, because this cultural nativism is causing more
problems than we are aware of. And many of the young people
		

			will tell you this, getting married as a young Muslim was a cultural nativism that we have in our
communities, it has turned into an almost impossible affair. It's not a matter of how pious he is,
it's not a matter of how much or she is her education, anything other than the fact that they happen
to come from a different culture. This we have to find the tools to overcome, we have to be more
culturally ambidextrous. And if we as Muslims are not modeling this in our own communities, we
cannot expect others, others to Mali visa vie us. I have no more time left. So I have to stop here.
I wanted to say that
		

			we have to recognize that we all have feelings. And we all feel dislocated sometimes, but we are
representatives of the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. And we have to remember, we
have to remember that he was always a person who was willing and able to take the high road. He was
always a person that was willing to take the road of accommodation. And that is the model that we
should follow here. And if we do that we can make a genuine contribution to the societies in which
we live.