Tofael Nuruddin – Friday Forum Worldviews Compared Environmental Ethics in Islam
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AI: Transcript ©
We have a Eid night market that's going
to be take place on Wednesday, June 28th
from 9 p.m. to 12 a.m.
There will be various vendors, inshallah.
We also have various summer programs that are
going to be starting in July for the
kids.
For more information, please check out the website.
We also have a couple of classes that
are in progress.
We have the Basics of Islam class with
Sheikh Osama and Amal Fikri that takes place
at 6.30 on Saturdays at this masjid.
And we also have a class with Sheikh
Osama, the Diseases of the Heart that takes
place on Sundays at 6.30 p.m.
inshallah.
So if you are available, please join us.
And there's also a Tajweed and Quran class
that's being offered on Saturdays with Sheikh Hatanani
at 6.30 p.m. Before we get
started, just a couple of, just wanted to
give a quick introduction to the Sheikh and
also in terms of the overall format.
So alhamdulillah, if anybody has any questions, please
use, we'll be using the Slido app.
And we can, if there's any questions, feel
free to ask in person.
And we'll also have the Slido app as
well for anyone that has any questions.
Just a quick, just a quick intro on
the Sheikh.
So Sheikh Tufailuddin is from Montreal, Canada.
Alhamdulillah, at the age of 14, he memorized
the Quran.
He went on to further Islamic studies in
South Africa.
He also studied a variety of sciences and
Islamic studies.
He graduated from Dar al-Uloom at Zadville
in South Africa.
And he also has ijazat and hadith from
multiple elderly scholars.
He later specialized in legal responses at Jamiat
Qasim al-Uloom.
Alhamdulillah, and he's today, tonight, like I said,
he'll be discussing environmental ethics.
And capitalism.
So with that, I will turn it over
to Sheikh Tufail.
Salallahu alayhi wa ala alihi wa afhabihi wa
barakahu salam wa tasliman kathiran kathira.
My dear respected listeners, first what we'll do
is we'll go over an outline of what
we're going to discuss today.
So initially, what we'll do is we'll explore
some environmental problems.
Like what are some issues that we run
into as a society and as individuals in
terms of problems related to the environment.
Many of us might not be aware of
environmental problems.
That's kind of the specialty of consumerism that
we're so engrossed in our lives that we
don't really know or care too much about
what is happening around us, especially in the
environment.
So we're going to go over some environmental
problems.
Then we're going to go over some environmental
solutions.
Like what are some contemporary solutions that are
offered and some ideas that have been thought
of to solve some of these problems.
And then I will problematize those solutions.
I will say that those solutions are not
actually real solutions.
And I will shift over to a structural
solution.
Structural means that instead of focusing on individual
problems and offering individual solutions, we should look
at it as more of the entire system.
Why is the entire system rotten and what
can we do to fix that?
And my suggestion, my proposition will be that
Islam is a solution to that.
We'll explore Islamic ethics and especially economic ethics
and environmental ethics that relate to the solutions
that we can offer basically to a modern
society.
Another thing that I will do is I
will also explore indigenous beliefs and indigenous practices
that will show us that any community and
society that bases itself in fitrah, which Islam
does.
Everyone understands fitrah?
Fitrah is basically the innate nature, the intrinsic
nature that Allah has created us with.
Like for example, how do we know that
killing is bad?
This comes from the fitrah.
How do we know that stealing is bad?
Some of these things basically Allah programmed us
with them.
That's basically the fitrah.
So that's basically what we'll do.
I'll offer some perspectives from indigenous world views
and indigenous practices as well, just to show
that it's not just Muslims.
There are some of these beliefs and some
of these systems also exist in other communities
and other traditions as well.
So first looking at some problems, obviously this
is by no means comprehensive at all.
But these are some problems that we come
across.
We have contamination and destruction of natural resources.
So throughout the world you'll find different places.
But one of the examples that I give
is Chemical Valley in Sarnia.
So Sarnia is a city in Canada.
It's closer to Detroit.
So there's literally a place called Chemical Valley.
The reason why it's called Chemical Valley is
because there are so many industries and so
many factories.
And that has caused a lot of the
water there to be polluted and contaminated.
And there's actually indigenous tribes that live there.
And many of them have been affected.
Some of them had cancer.
Some of them had a lot of birth
issues, birth defects.
Kids had birth defects.
And all of those have been traced back
to the chemical contamination in some of the
natural resources.
And there are plenty of examples of those.
You'll see that recently in Europe they did
a study.
And they tested random people to see how
much their blood was pure.
And they found that some people, 3%
of their blood was contaminated with microplastic.
So this is another huge problem.
What do we do with the plastic that
we have?
We can't just dump them in the oceans.
Which is something that is done.
And so because of that now, even though
that water is filtered, but you can never
really get microplastics.
So what ends up happening is that there's
actually plastic flowing through our blood.
So these are some of the problems.
Contamination and destruction of natural resources.
Another problem is animal agriculture and industrial farming.
So basically, if you look at back in
the days, you would have smaller farms.
People had their own animals and they would
take care of those animals.
And earn some kind of livelihood through those
animals.
They would slaughter them, sell the meat.
Or have them basically procreate and then have
more animals.
And then they could basically do business with
those.
Or they would have milk.
Or they would have eggs that they would
sell from chicken.
And so on and so forth.
But what happened is with the advent of
capitalism, you want to maximize things.
So what they did is industrial farming.
So now you have massive farms.
Huge farms with thousands and thousands of cows
kind of stuck together.
And lamb and chicken kind of stuck all
in one place.
And some of them you'll see that they're
really kind of trapped.
They don't really have space to move around.
And very unnatural systems.
Another thing that happens is because of some
of the things that are injected in cattle.
Those chemicals end up coming in their urine.
And that urine goes in streams of water.
And those streams end up affecting the soil
from which certain plants grow.
And so there's been meta studies, multiple studies
that have shown that bees started to die.
A lot of bees in Canada started to
die.
And the reason for that is because the
pollen that certain flowers had, those were actually
contaminated.
So you can see how far reaching the
effect is.
There's some random animals in some farm.
But then you find a lot of bees
dying because they're affected by the pollen.
Which is watered by contaminated water that's coming
from these farms.
So that's basically some of the harm of
animal agriculture and industrial farming.
Then there's carbon in the ozone layer.
I don't think I have to explain this
one.
We all know about global warming.
And then there's water wars.
This is a really interesting topic.
There's a lot of documentaries on this.
I'm not going to go too much into
it.
But this is kind of a crazy idea.
The privatization of water.
Water is something that was supposed to be
free.
And it's basically the most abundant resource that
earth has.
But we found ways to privatize it, basically
commercialize it.
Take something that was a commune, something that
was free for everyone.
And say, you know what, I will come
here, I will take this water.
And now I will actually make it a
commodity and sell it to people.
The effect of this is insane.
There were incidents in Africa where basically they
privatized water.
So people of a certain village who were
next to a water source couldn't use that
water.
Even though for hundreds of years they've lived
right next to it and they've used it.
But now because it's been privatized by corporations,
they can't take water from there.
Not only that, they have meters.
So they have meters that they have to
pay.
And if they basically stop paying or they
can't pay enough, that water stops running.
It's not like North America.
In North America, subhanAllah, we're very spoiled.
You go to the kitchen, turn on the
faucet and let it run.
It will keep running.
But that's not how it is over there.
Many of their water sources are metered.
It actually happened.
In one instance in Africa, there was a
mother at home.
They had a fire and her daughter basically
caught on to fire.
And she didn't have enough water at home
because she didn't pay for it.
She didn't have enough water to put out
that fire.
And water is so expensive for the people
of the village that they saw it happening,
but they couldn't do anything.
Everyone felt like, you know, I need the
water at home.
And they couldn't do anything to help that
little girl.
So these are things that we don't really
– they're on the news, but we don't
really pay attention to those.
We're more interested in the political feuds between
Democrats and Republicans and what Trump did and
how many times Biden fell down and so
on and so forth.
We're kind of more interested in these things.
And then you have natural disasters.
It's been studied and proven that some hazards,
environmental hazards, are actually caused because of environmental
problems.
So these are some of the problems.
Again, this is by no means comprehensive.
These are some of the problems that we're
facing in the world today.
I would say that global warming is maybe
one of the biggest ones as a source
of anxiety, especially for younger people because, obviously,
you know, older people slowly, slowly, they're coming
to an age where they're older and they
realize that they have to go.
But younger people, as the generations keep coming,
they realize that global warming is really a
thing and it's affecting us and then what's
going to happen next, right?
So it's actually a cause for anxiety for
a lot of people.
Some of the suggested solutions, like what are
some solutions that we use today?
So you have, you know, environmental activists, right?
People that fight for the environment.
They will take political and legal recourses.
So like, you know, suing companies that are
not maintaining certain regulations and so on and
so forth.
Or having, you know, maybe some liberal politicians
on their side that are more concerned about
the environment and using them to come across
some solutions and so on and so forth.
So these are some strategies that have been
used.
So you would have, like, you know, sit
-ins, right?
They would go in front of the company
and kind of demonstrate over there for days
on end to pressure them to change their
strategies.
You also have technological solutions.
I found this really interesting.
So there were some ideas as to, like,
how can you solve some of these issues?
So when it comes to global warming, does
anyone know what causes global warming?
Any ideas?
It's pretty straightforward.
That's fine.
Anyone else?
Like, what causes the actual warming?
I mean, you said that the globe starts
to warm, but what causes the warming?
Yeah, so you've said it but not in
a very detailed way.
Do you want to elaborate?
What is a greenhouse gas effect?
What is that?
Right, exactly.
So basically, we all know what the ozone
layer that protects the Earth from certain harmful
rays from the sun.
So what happens is because of pollution, it
weakens, basically.
The ozone layer weakens, and the harmful rays
that come from the sun, instead of bouncing
back off, they end up penetrating the Earth,
and it warms it more, and it kind
of gets trapped in there, right?
This is one aspect of it.
Some of the solutions that were thought of
to solve this, there were some really interesting
ones.
So one of them is kind of creating
a volcanic effect.
So as we know, when a volcano erupts,
large amounts of sulfur goes into the sky,
right?
So for a very, very long time, for
basically years, you have a lot of sulfur
that's kind of just roaming in the air,
and what that causes to happen is it
cools down the area.
So one of the ideas was to take
mass sulfur and just disseminate it in the
skies, right?
Another idea was basically to take carbon and
trap it beneath the Earth.
So these are some technological solutions that some
scientists thought of.
Obviously, there's a whole cost question, like how
much is it going to cost to mass
spray sulfur in the skies, and also to
carbon trapping, and then putting it underneath the
ground, and then what effects would that have?
Like if you have lots of carbon just
trapped beneath the Earth, what would that cause,
right?
So these are some concerns that would come.
So as we can see, political legal recourses,
they're not really yielding much, because corporations have
lots of really good lawyers, they have lots
of influence politically as well.
They don't run countries, but they do run
countries, right?
So really, what can you do?
Like these are not actual solutions.
This is basically what I argue.
I think, number one, they are reactive instead
of being proactive.
So basically, there's already a problem.
There's an environmental problem, and you're reacting to
that, right?
Instead of being proactive.
The Islamic method, as Inshallah will see, is
proactive.
Proactive as in it gives you a certain
mindset that will never even allow you to
have this problem.
Do we understand the difference between the two?
Reactive versus proactive?
Reactive means a problem already happened, and now
we're kind of like scrambling to see how
we can solve it, right?
Instead of doing that, proactive means that the
problem didn't happen yet, but the solutions we
have in place make sure that that problem
never happens.
So this is my argument that the Islamic
solution is a proactive one as opposed to
all these solutions that we discussed which are
reactive.
And also, microscopic versus macroscopic, right?
So these solutions that we discussed, they address
individual issues.
So let's say, for example, somebody has a
problem with, oh, there's too many cars.
There's too much pollution from cars.
There's too much pollution from these industries.
So an entire group of activists, they will
go and fight basically this car problem, right?
An entire group of activists, they will go
and fight these industries or these factories.
This is a microscopic solution.
We're only focusing on one tiny problem and
seeing how we can patch that.
Once you're done with cars, you're going to
have like five other headaches, right?
You still have industrial farming.
You still have these other environmental concerns that
are also there.
So microscopic versus macroscopic.
I argue that the Islamic solution will take
care of all of these problems all at
once.
So to understand basically how we even have
environmental problems, my suggestion is that it comes
from a capitalistic mindset.
What is a capitalistic mindset?
So we all know what capitalism is, right?
It's basically the notion of free markets and
anyone can earn as much as they want
and there should be basically no limitations to
that.
That's like an ideal capitalist society.
Obviously, almost any society that we go to,
there are regulations.
You can't invest anywhere you want, right?
Can you invest in any company?
What if you have insider information about a
certain company?
It's illegal for you to trade, right?
So there's always checks and balances.
So when we say we have a capitalist
society, we're kind of fooling ourselves.
It's never really capitalistic anyway.
But the capitalistic mindset is individualistic.
As a matter of fact, just to zoom
out of this, what I propose is actually
the Western mindset in general.
The Western mindset in general is a very
individualistic one.
And we can see this in political philosophy.
We can see this in law.
We can see this in many other regions.
And individualism, which is the focus on every
individual, it promotes competition instead of cooperation.
We're always taught to compete, that I must
have more money than this other person.
In Islam, that idea is completely different.
In Islam, actually, the Sahaba were taught to
make sure that their brothers actually have more
than themselves.
It's a crazy idea.
Very crazy idea.
In Islam, the Prophet ﷺ taught the Sahaba
that we must help our brothers actually make
more than us.
And I'll give one example of this, inshallah.
But before we go to the example, can
I ask all of the people that are
leaning on the wall, come closer, inshallah.
Unless you have an actual back problem or
you're very senior, please come closer, inshallah.
It'll help us focus.
It'll help us be more engaged.
It'll help us, inshallah, have more adab towards
ilm and so on and so forth.
Can we ask everyone, inshallah, if you can,
if you don't have a back problem, please
come closer.
So, it promotes competition instead of cooperation, right?
Because the idea is I have to make
more money and more money and more money
and we're always competing with each other.
So, what happens is that forces over-utilization
of resources because there's limited amount of resources
and now there's more people coming in, more
people coming in the market and everyone is
trying to make more and more money and
you have limited resources.
So, what you will need to do is
now start to exploit those things that were
not even resources before or commodities before, like
water, for example.
Once you're done with all the avenues of
business, what do you do?
Things that are not a source of business,
you try to make money off of that,
right?
That requires the destruction of the ecosystem.
And to destroy something, you must have a
lack of care and other it.
So, what that means is basically, if I
care about someone, I'm not going to destroy
him, right?
If I care about a plant, let's say
there's a plant at home that my mother
took care of for 20 years and after
that, basically, she passed away and that plant
is still there.
I have an attachment to this plant, right?
I don't want this plant to get destroyed.
Does that make sense?
Anything that we're attached to, we don't want
to destroy it.
The only way we're able to destroy parts
of the environment is because we're not attached
to it.
So, it creates this lack of care and
other it.
This is a quote from Robbins and other
scientists in their book.
They mentioned that accumulation is necessary to the
continued expansion of the capitalist system.
The more owners earn, the more they can
put back into production and the more surplus
value that they can appropriate.
So, now what we're going to do is,
let's compare how both of these systems work.
So, you have capitalism and then you have
the Islamic and indigenous systems.
So, capitalism is very individualistic, right?
It promotes us making more money, every individual
worrying about their own balance, basically.
And then it's also anthropocentric.
It focuses on…
Anthropocentric, does anyone know what that means?
It's a big fat word.
But what does anthropocentric mean?
Does anyone know what anthropology means?
Study of?
Biology?
No, not really.
Of people, humans.
So, anthropo and then centric, what would that
mean?
So, does it mean people centric?
People centric, yes.
Very good, human centric.
So, basically we consider humans like the most
important thing and everything else as not important,
right?
In Islam, we don't see it like that.
We see the entire ecosystem, the entire world
as communitarian.
So, basically the fact that we're only a
component of the world.
Everything that we're interacting with is an entity
and we have to respect it in some
ways or the other, right?
So, for example, the Prophet ﷺ, he promoted
care for other Muslims, right?
In Sahih al-Bukhari, the hadith comes, المؤمن
للمؤمن كالبنيان يشد بعضه بعضا That a mu'min,
a believer, is for another believer like a
building.
That part of it strengthens the other part.
يشد بعضه بعضا In a different hadith, the
Prophet ﷺ says, مثل المؤمنين, the example of
believers is like what?
مثل الجسد مثل المؤمنين في توادهم وتراحمهم وتعاطفهم
In their love, their compassion for each other,
their mercy for each other.
How are they?
مثل الجسد They're like a body.
When one part of the body is aching,
the rest of the body loses sleep over
that, right?
So, the Prophet ﷺ always promoted this unity
and this kind of love and compassion for
each other.
And that's not only for Muslims, even for
non-Muslims.
So, we see that in Imam Bukhari ﷺ
has a book called الأدب المفرد So, Imam
Bukhari ﷺ, one book of his that we
know that's very famous is?
Which one?
صحيح البخاري صحيح البخاري, right?
Does anyone know the actual title of صحيح
البخاري?
I'll give you something if you know this.
Any students of knowledge here?
Do you actually know it?
You know the whole thing?
Yeah, the whole name.
Okay, did you guys know that صحيح البخاري
is not actually the actual title of the
book?
Some of you knew, okay.
The title is الجامع المسند الصحيح المختصر من
أمور رسول الله ﷺ وسننه وأيامه So, this
is the actual title of the book.
Ibn Hajar says من حديث رسول الله ﷺ
وسننه وأيامه So, there's a slight difference of
opinion on this one.
But the majority of محدثون they say الجامع
المسند الصحيح المختصر من أمور رسول الله ﷺ
وسننه وأيامه Like that, صحيح مسلم also has
a long title of its own.
جامع الترمذي also has a title of its
own.
Actually, there's an entire booklet dedicated to this
topic.
Sheikh Abdul Fattah Abu Ghudda, who is a
Syrian scholar, one of the greatest living محدثون
of the last century.
He was originally from Syria, but he ended
up living in Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh.
He actually has a book on this.
It's called تحقيق اسم الصحيحين وجامع الترمذي Anyway,
so what was I saying?
Imam Bukhari, he has another book called الأدب
المفرد In الأدب المفرد, there's a narration from
عبد الله بن عمر بن العاص عبد الله
بن عمر بن العاص, after the demise of
رسول الله ﷺ, a very strange thing happens.
His servant brings a goat, right?
And they slaughter the goat, and they cook
it, and they're about to eat.
And عبد الله بن عمر, he asks his
servant, he said, Did you give it to
our Jewish neighbor first?
And the boy said, No, I haven't given.
He said, Go, go, run.
Give it to our Jewish neighbor first, because
the Prophet ﷺ mentioned so much emphasis about
the rights of the neighbor that I thought
even part of the inheritance would be given
to the neighbor.
So we see that the Prophet ﷺ promoted
also loving and caring not only for Muslims
but also for non-Muslims.
Obviously, we disagree.
We disagree with the non-Muslims on certain
theological matters, but it doesn't mean that we
hate them or anything.
It means that the Prophet ﷺ had love
and compassion for every single person.
We know the very famous incident when this
young boy, this Jewish boy was passing away.
The Prophet ﷺ came and gave him dawah.
He came and preached Islam to him at
that point.
We know that Abu Jahl, the Prophet ﷺ
knocked on his door so many times.
He never had a hatred for any of
these people.
So sometimes we misunderstand our deen.
Sometimes we misunderstand what the Prophet ﷺ actually
taught.
It doesn't mean also that we become like
buddy-buddy and we become them.
It doesn't also mean that.
There's those boundaries.
There's those limits.
But it also doesn't mean that we should
have love and we should have care.
And not only non-Muslims but also animals.
We see that love for animals is also
found.
In Sunan Abu Dawud, there's one narration in
which the Prophet ﷺ, he comes to the
masjid and there's a camel that's outside the
masjid of the Prophet ﷺ.
And that camel is making certain noises.
And so the Prophet ﷺ goes and Allah
gives him the ability to understand what the
camel is saying.
And so then he went to the masjid
and he asked.
He said, whose camel is this?
And one sahabi said, Ya Rasulullah, this is
my camel.
And the Prophet ﷺ got extremely angry.
And he said, why do you burden your
camel so much?
Your camel is complaining about you.
So we see that this love for even
animals is something that the Prophet ﷺ also
taught us.
And also, does anyone know why Abu Huraira
was actually called Abu Huraira?
By the way, that's not his real name,
right?
That's not his actual name.
Yeah.
His love for cats.
Yeah.
Because the Arabic word for, well one way
to say it is qit.
But what's another way to say cat?
Hira.
And Huraira is what?
It's small.
It's small.
It's tasgheer.
Yeah.
It's musaghar from Hira.
So you have Huraira, right?
So he was called Abu Huraira not because
he was the father of kitten, but because
he played with them a lot and he
loved them a lot.
And the Prophet ﷺ is the one that
gave him that nickname.
Does anyone know what his actual name was?
MashaAllah.
Abdurrahman Ibn?
No.
Abdurrahman Ibn?
Sakhar.
Very good.
By the way, this is just one of
25 opinions about his actual name.
We don't actually know his name 100%.
There is a scholar by the name of
Abdul Hayy Al-Laknawi, an Indian scholar who
wrote a book called Zafar Al-Amagni.
It's like 700 pages long, and in there
he has a long discussion about the actual
name of Abu Huraira.
So that's also another example, right?
Love for animals.
So we showed that the Prophet ﷺ promoted
love for Muslims, non-Muslims, animals, and also
the environment.
We find this in Sahih Al-Bukhari, right?
In Sahih Al-Bukhari, the maternal uncle of
the Prophet ﷺ, Sa'd Ibn Abi Waqqas r
.a, one time he's making wudu from a
river.
Now you tell me, is it possible to
waste water if you're making wudu from a
river?
Is it possible to waste water?
Generally, we would say no, right?
Why?
But before we give the answer, why can't
you waste water if you make wudu from
a river?
It's just like it's continuously flowing, right?
You're making wudu from there, and then it's
going back there, and it's just flowing.
So how can you waste water?
But as the sister mentioned, the Prophet ﷺ
said, yes, even from a flowing river.
So Sa'd Ibn Abi Waqqas had this exact
question.
Even if it's from a flowing river, and
the Prophet ﷺ said, yes, even if it's
from a flowing river, you can be wasting
water.
So consume less water.
And this is something that our parents, when
I was small, my mom actually taught me,
don't turn the faucet fully on.
Just turn it on as much as you
need.
A lot of times we see that for
washing our hands, if we turn it on
a little bit, this is enough.
But we like to blast it for some
reason.
Same thing for the shower as well.
There's a very interesting discussion in hadith, how
much water did the Prophet ﷺ use for
wudu, and how much did he use for
ghusl?
The amount that he used in Sunan Abu
Dawud, the hadith that comes, for wudu he
used to use, does anyone know?
Yeah.
Yeah, but we're talking about specific measurements.
Does anyone know?
No.
Okay, you know how we have units of
measurement in the imperial system, which America uses
as opposed to the rest of the world,
that uses the metric system?
Arabs also had their own units of measurement.
So they had something called a mudd.
Anyone ever heard this term before?
Mudd.
Sa'a, mudd.
You guys heard this term, yeah?
So mashaAllah some of the older aunties, mashaAllah
they heard of it, right?
So mudd was a unit of measurement.
One mudd the Prophet ﷺ used to make
wudu.
Any idea how much is one mudd?
750 milliliters.
So this is 500, if you add another
half bottle, that's 750.
That was how much the Prophet ﷺ used
to make wudu.
Can we do wudu in this much?
We'll probably finish our arm with one bottle,
right?
Or maybe our face with one bottle.
Or maybe two arms will be enough for
this one bottle.
So the Prophet ﷺ used one mudd for
his entire wudu.
And for his ghusl, he used two mudds.
So very, very little amount compared to the
20 minute showers that we have, mashaAllah.
So again, I proved that the Prophet ﷺ
showed us to have compassion with Muslims, non
-Muslims.
So all humans, and then animals, and also
the environment as well, right?
So inshaAllah if we can pay attention for
a bit.
Sisters in the back, please if you could
just pay attention.
So the Islamic system is communitarian because you
view yourself as one small piece in part
of a larger system, right?
You're not the center of it.
You're not the most important thing.
In other religions actually, they are very anthropocentric,
which is the idea that basically you are
the most important thing and you can do
whatever you want with the ecosystem around you.
The Prophet ﷺ teaches us that, no.
You are living and interacting with other beings,
other entities in that system that you have
to respect, and you have to be grateful
for, and you have to acknowledge.
It promotes acknowledgement, gratitude, and respect towards the
human and natural community.
And we see this, for example, when we
eat, right?
When a person eats, what are you supposed
to say after you're done eating?
Alhamdulillah, alhamdulillah illa li'a ta'amana wa
saqana wa ja'alana muslimeen.
And many other du'as.
Basically what we're doing is we're being grateful
for the food that we have in front
of us.
So gratitude is something that's huge in Islam.
Now, why am I talking about gratitude so
much?
We're going to explore these two things.
One is communitarianism and gratitude.
I think these two are solutions to all
environmental problems, right?
Gratitude is because if you're grateful for something,
then you're respectful in the way you use
it.
If I don't respect this table, you know,
when we were students of knowledge, when I
was still memorizing the Qur'an and when
I was studying hadith and fiqh, we were
told to respect the benches.
We were told to respect pencils and pens.
We were told to respect books.
You don't just put a book on the
ground, for example.
We were taught that when we walk with
a book, hold it to your chest.
When you walk with the Qur'an, don't
just hold it on the side.
Hold it to your chest, right?
Don't ever put the Qur'an on the
ground.
Keep it in an elevated space.
To the point that even which book, if
you have books stacked, which books should you
have first and which books should you have
after?
Starting with the Qur'an, then books of
tafsir, then hadith, then shuruh al-hadith, and
then fiqh and so on and so forth.
There's a whole hierarchy of how you should
even place books.
So much adab exists in our deen.
So much, you know, and this shows the
way we're interacting with things is not in
an entitled way.
These are all mine.
I can do whatever I want with them.
Does that make sense?
Like how gratitude and respect have to do
with the way we consume things and the
way we use things.
Make sense?
So basically, this is basically my argument.
That Islamically, there's two aspects.
One is communitarianism, and the other one is
gratitude, which solves all environmental problems.
And then we're going to see how it
does that.
So communitarianism as a holistic solution, this is
basically how you form arguments in philosophy.
You have premise one, premise two, and a
conclusion.
So premise one is human nature feels closeness
to community.
Anything that is within our community, we feel
closeness to it.
Like if somebody is part of my family,
I feel close to that person.
If someone is part of my friend circle,
that's also my community.
I feel closeness to them.
Premise number two is humans are reluctant to
exploit that which they consider close.
So if I consider someone part of my
community, I'm not going to exploit them.
I'm not going to abuse them, right?
I mean, obviously, there are rare exceptions.
But usually, if someone that we're close to,
we don't want to exploit them.
To exploit something or to harm something, we
need to first other them.
We need to first consider them as non
-humans or not worthy of living or not
worthy of existence and so on and so
forth.
So I'm going to bring just a small
political example.
If you look at the way Palestinians are
treated, this is the first thing that is
done.
Dehumanization.
First, they are dehumanized.
They're shown as like, yes, the rest of
the sophisticated and modern world deserves certain rights.
But these people, they use certain words.
I'm not going to use those words here.
But if you go on YouTube and you
see interviews just with, I'm not even talking
about people in the military.
I'm talking about regular people on the streets
when they're asked like, oh, what should be
done with babies of Arab-Palestinians?
What should be done?
You should see their answers.
So it shows that from a certain propaganda,
what's being pushed is first dehumanization, that these
people are not worthy of existence.
They're not worthy of living, right?
And that's what makes it easy even for
younger people to go and commit atrocities to
those beings.
And you'll see this as a pattern.
Anywhere in the world, in history, where lots
of people were killed, it's because they were
first dehumanized.
Same thing if you see indigenous peoples, when
the British and the French, they came here.
This is actually found.
If you look at Thomas Hobbes, does anyone
know Thomas Hobbes?
Does nobody go to school here?
He was a political philosopher, right?
He actually, the reason why we have governments
is one of the people behind that is
Thomas Hobbes.
He provided an entire theory as to why
we should have governments.
So Thomas Hobbes actually writes that people deserve
rights, except these people in knowing these native
areas in America.
And you'll find racism like this in many
Western philosophers' writing.
So premise number two is humans are reluctant
to exploit that which they consider close.
And then the conclusion from that is that
when one views fellow humans, animals, and nature
as part of their community, they will not
take advantage of it and they will not
exploit it.
Communitarianism in indigenous traditions, this is something that
you will see and inshallah we'll give examples
also and similar examples in the Islamic tradition.
But a very interesting thing, Father Lemoine, who
was a French missionary in the mid 1650s,
he says this, he writes this, that no
hospitals are needed amongst these people because there
are no mendicants nor paupers, basically poor people.
There are no poor people.
As long as there are any rich people
amongst them, everybody's rich, right?
A whole village must be without corn before
any individual can be hungry.
So the idea is basically that if you
have even one rich person in one of
their clans or one of their tribes, no
one can be poor.
Why?
Because they all take care of each other.
And this, I don't want to skip ahead,
but inshallah we'll see a very, very similar
notion in Islam as well.
The way wealth was understood.
So this is a really interesting topic.
I'm not going to talk about it in
detail here, but how do we understand wealth?
The way we understand wealth today is completely
misconstrued.
It's a completely rotten and corrupt way of
understanding wealth.
Wealth is not something that is meant to
be hoarded and amassed.
The Sahaba never did that.
You cannot find one example of a Sahabi
or the Prophet ﷺ who amassed and hoarded
wealth.
Aisha, one thing she was known for, that
if she had any dirham or dinar throughout
the day, evening wouldn't come, except that she
had already spent it.
We all know about this, right?
And the Prophet ﷺ as well, right?
مَا قَالَ لَا قَطُّ He never said no
to anyone.
Anyone came, even if he didn't have anything,
he would borrow from others and give it
to other people.
The Prophet ﷺ, he would say, I hate,
I hate that I have some dirhams or
dinars left over with me.
And today the way we understand wealth is
the more someone can amass and hoard, the
better the person he is, the smarter and
the more successful he is.
Which is funny because wealth is not something,
in Latin we say inse, it's not something
that is intrinsic.
Like what does money actually, what is it
worth?
Nothing.
What is money worth?
Like by itself, what is it worth?
Nothing.
It's only worth something when you can get
commodities through it.
Does that make sense?
Like if you couldn't buy anything, like let's
say I had stacks of hundred dollar bills
here, right?
I filled this whole table up with stacks
of hundred dollar bills.
But I tell you that, this is out
of date, you can't buy anything with this.
Is this valuable?
All of a sudden, with that one sentence,
this loses value.
Which shows that money itself doesn't have value.
It only has value, why?
Because we can get other things through it.
Does that make sense?
But funny thing, today we've made money the
purpose itself.
We run after money itself.
Like the more money a person has, not
the more luxury he has, not the more
happiness he has, but the more money a
person has, we consider him successful.
Which is a very interesting way to look
at things.
But so, in many civilizations before, the way
wealth was understood, it was demonstrated by how
much leaders could give away to others, not
hoard to themselves, right?
And then there are many other examples as
well.
Is there just one more question?
Can we save the questions inshallah till then?
So I was going to address those examples.
Like we have certain sahaba that were very
wealthy, right?
Like Uthman r.a, Abdur Rahman ibn Auf,
Anas ibn Malik.
There are many sahaba that were rich.
They did not hoard wealth.
There is a difference between being rich and
hoarding wealth.
Hoarding wealth means that you are connected to
this wealth.
And you see, you measure your success or
you measure your own identity by having this
wealth with you.
The sahaba r.a, Allah gives them barakah.
Many of the sahaba, Uthman r.a for
example, he was so wealthy that in Ghazwat
Tabuk, one third of the army, he funded
it himself.
Imagine how much dough you gotta have to
be able to do that, right?
How much wealth subhanallah Allah gave him.
Abdur Rahman ibn Auf in one halaqah one
time, actually converted how much he left behind
into today's time.
Accounting for inflation, how much can be calculated
to today's time.
But, that was not them hoarding wealth.
That was the barakah that Allah gave them.
If they saw a poor person, they asked
right away without any questions, they would give
it to that person.
If the demand came, that you have to
spend in the path of Allah, they just
gave it away.
They didn't think of anything, right?
So, that's basically the difference.
There's small nuance between these two.
Let's shift to communitarianism and Islamic legal theory.
Legal theory just means usool al fiqh.
So, there's a couple of things to see
here.
We mentioned that there's communitarianism in the indigenous
peoples.
No one could be poor as long as
there's one rich person.
Similar thing we see in the sahabah.
Ibn Kathir, rahimahullah, he has a book of
history.
Does anyone know what the book is named?
It's like a testing date.
He has a tafsir, that is true, but
he has a book of history too.
Sorry?
Mashallah, very good.
Al bidaya wal nihaya.
I'm sure many of you knew it but
just didn't think of it, right?
So, Ibn Kathir, rahimahullah, he has this book
of history, al bidaya wal nihaya.
Why is it called al bidaya wal nihaya?
Al bidaya means the beginning, and nihaya means
the end.
Why is it called the beginning and the
end?
Does anyone know?
Prophecies, what else?
End of times, yeah, he talks about end
of times.
What else?
So, Ibn Kathir, what he does is, what
he was trying to do in his book
is encompass all of time.
So, he started with the first thing that
Allah ever created.
And he has a whole discussion on this.
Was it the pen?
Was it the water?
Was it the arsh?
What did he create first?
And then he goes into a whole discussion
about that.
Then he goes into the creation of Adam,
and so on and so forth, all the
way till the Prophet, and then the Umawis
after that, and then the Abbasis, and then
he comes to his own time.
And then from there he shifts to the
prophecies hereafter.
Malahim, and the Dajjal, and the Ajuj and
Ma'ajuj, and basically the end of the
world.
So, Al-Bidaya wa'l-Nihaya.
So, in Al-Bidaya wa'l-Nihaya, he
reports this one incident from a Sahabi by
the name of Rib'i Ibn Amir.
So, Rib'i Ibn Amir, many of us
probably never heard his name.
He was not a very famous Sahabi.
He was part of the army that went
to Rome.
And they came to a point where they
came across the Roman general whose name was
Rustam.
And so basically, Rustam calls him to his
palace.
And Rib'i Ibn Amir, he was the
one who was delegated from the Muslims to
go talk to him.
And as he goes to the palace, it's
like a fancy palace.
There's all sorts of luxuries.
The carpets are made of silk, and they
have all these nice and fancy cushions.
And he's wearing a beautiful crown with jewels
and diamonds, and so on and so forth.
Lots of wealth.
And Rib'i Ibn Amir, he's wearing simple
clothing.
Ibn Kathir also described that it was torn.
There's patches on his clothes.
And he's just riding a simple donkey.
And he takes that donkey inside the palace.
And as he gets to this fancy carpet
in front of Rustam, he drags his spear
through the whole thing and rips the whole
thing.
Basically kind of showing that I don't care.
All this flaunting of wealth that you're doing
in front of me, I don't really care.
So, Rustam is also very impressed by this
person.
That this guy comes in and he sees
all of my wealth, he sees all of
these people that obey me, all the power
that I have, and he simply doesn't seem
to care.
He must be a big shot.
So he asks him, Asayyiduhum ant?
Like, are you their leader?
And Rib'i Ibn Amir says, no, I'm
not.
But he says that, however, the Muslims are
such that the powerful, they take care of
the weaker ones.
The people that are rich, they take care
of the poor people.
We're just one unified body, right?
So we see that this same idea was
there in the time of the Sahabah.
And there are many, many, many examples of
this.
Basically selflessness and how much they cared for
others and the fact that there's so many
examples of them.
As a matter of fact, one of the
descriptions in the Qur'an is يؤثرون على
أنفسهم ولو كان بهم خصاصة They would give
preference to other people even though they had
a need.
The سبب النزول for this is one Sahabi,
one time he came to the Prophet ﷺ
and he said, Ya Rasulullah, I'm hungry.
I need some food.
And so Rasulullah ﷺ asked the people who's
ready to feed this person?
So one Sahabi says, you know, I'll take
you home.
So he takes him home.
He asks his wife what is there.
She says, you know, there's only a little
bit of food left for us.
And so he says, you know, don't worry
about us.
Put the kids to sleep and what we're
going to do is give this food to
the guest and we're going to put a
lamp and pretend like we're eating food through
the silhouettes and the shadows.
It'll look like we eat while he eats
thinking that we are also eating.
And they weren't eating anything.
So they did a ruse.
Now people today, they also have ruses and
they also have strategies and tactics to make
more money, right?
And to have more.
But this Sahabi he's making a ruse so
that he can't have any food but he
can give it to basically his brother in
Islam, his other Sahabi, right?
And so that's the love that they had
for each other, the compassion that they had
for each other.
So we have a couple of economic and
legal principles here.
Number one, you can take a look at
ghaban fahish.
There's a legal maxim.
Legal maxim is a fancy word for qaida
fiqhiyah, right?
Against ghaban fahish.
Ghaban fahish basically means that you're excessively profiteering
from an item so there's a cost price
to something like let's say to produce this,
it costs me 50 cents but I'm selling
it at 5 dollars, right?
This is ghaban fahish and this is haram.
Not allowed to do that.
In the free markets, do whatever you want.
This costs you 25 cents, sell it for
100 dollars.
If someone buys it, someone buys it.
It's their problem.
And this is something that we saw during
COVID.
Does anyone remember when people were like hoarding
hand sanitizers and like tissue paper, toilet paper
and then Amazon had to like ban their
accounts and stuff.
Fun stuff.
in the capitalistic society unfortunately we don't have
any kind of structural solutions against that.
Then you also have a qaida fiqhiyah that
states al ghurm bil ghurm which means that
profit earning is only legal through risk sharing.
So it's actually haram for us to invest
in avenues where there's no risk sharing.
Like if somebody tells you that come invest
in these apartments and you will have a
guaranteed return of this much percent.
Like 20% you will get a guaranteed
return.
There's no risk of you losing that money.
This model is haram by default.
Why?
Because there's a qaida al ghurm bil ghurm.
These are obviously taken from the Quran and
hadith.
And again, this is in a TED talk,
Gajowski, he's an economist.
In a TED talk he mentioned that the
role of the bank in Islamic finance is
not to accumulate profits nor to multiply wealthy
clients' savings.
Rather it is to support entrepreneurship and local
development.
Marketing ethics as well, you'll see that in
marketing ethics it's haram for a person, for
example, to display something if it's not like
that.
Like I'll give you a typical example.
Let's say, we're just going to use classical
examples for the sake of it.
Let's say you're a farmer and you go
to the market and you have mangoes.
It is impermissible for you to put the
good mangoes on top and hide the bad
mangoes to make it seem to people as
if you're only selling good mangoes.
And in sharia there's something called khiyar ru
'ya.
Anyone that did basic fiqh knows about this,
right?
Khiyar ru'ya.
Khiyar ru'ya means that if you didn't
see something properly, you just bought that mango,
you didn't look at it properly, you go
home and you realize, oh, there's something wrong
with this mango, then you're actually allowed to
go and return it to the person.
He has no choice but to take this
back.
So, in terms of marketing as well, there
are ethical points that limit us.
And the last thing that I will mention
in Islam, riba.
Why is riba haram?
Why is riba haram also stems from communitarianism.
It's out of compassion for others.
Why?
Because riba, interest, makes sure that the rich
get richer and the poor gets poorer.
Does that make sense?
Who lends?
What kind of person lends?
Lends money.
A person who already has extra money, right?
Who's a rich person.
And who borrows money?
Who?
Needy people, right?
Interest makes sure that the lender, the rich
person, gets more back from the person who
already doesn't have money.
Do you see why this is zulm?
Why this is oppression?
And this is why Allah Subhanahu wa ta
'ala, the words that he used are very,
very harsh.
He says, فَإِن لَّمْ تَفْعَلُوا فَأَذَنُوا بِحَرْبٍ مِّنَ
اللَّهِ وَرَسُولِهِ If you don't stay away from
interest, Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala says, declare
war.
فَأَذَنُوا بِحَرْبٍ مِّنَ اللَّهِ وَرَسُولِهِ Declare war with
Allah and His Rasul.
And there are multiple ahadith as well that
go against the interaction of riba with people.
Basically, money cannot generate money in Islam.
You can't have money coming from money.
It has to be from some kind of
labor, it has to be from some kind
of commodity, from some kind of service.
So even for example, when you're investing, investment
is allowed in Islam.
You're allowed to invest in certain businesses.
But why?
Because there's labor in it.
So it's not money from money.
And there's also risk that is being shared.
It's possible that the business will go up.
It's possible that there's going to be losses.
So, if at any point, there's money generated
from money, then that is un-Islamic and
that is against the sharia.
These are very, very well-known principles in
Islamic finance.
We can have an entire halaqa on that,
but this is not the place for it.
But it shows us that in economic ethics,
we have certain guidelines that limit us and
that push us to care for other people.
There's other examples as well.
For example, in one hadith, the prophet ﷺ,
this is in Sahih Muslim, he says, المحتكر
ملعون One who does ihtiqar is cursed by
Allah.
Does anyone know what ihtiqar is?
Yes.
Very good, very good.
So, ihtiqar is basically hoarding or what we
can call price gouging.
Basically, you hoard something to create a crazy
demand in the market so that you can
sell it for a higher price.
Let's say you're the only one who supplies
mangoes in a certain city.
What you do is you say, oh, you
know, we don't have mangoes at this time.
Keep waiting, waiting, waiting.
And now when people are willing to pay
any price for it, then you sell it
for a higher price.
Which is another example of what happened during
COVID with hand sanitizers.
Who buys them now anymore?
But once upon a time, it was like
a dollar and then all of a sudden
it went to like $12.
MashaAllah.
So that's basically price gouging.
You hoard something, create more demand, and sell
it for a higher price.
So, like this, there are many examples in
Islam that limit us to have compassion for
each other.
So, communitarianism, why is it a holistic solution?
Because you're switching from an economic structure that
tells you to exploit other people, that tells
you to exploit, okay, in an ideal company,
I don't know if anyone owns a business
here, but if you do, in an ideal
company, what do you want to do with
an employee?
Just between me and you, you know, secretly.
What do you want to do?
Make the most money out of them, but
how do you want to treat your employee?
Pay him the least and have him work
as many hours as possible, right?
In a kind of profiting system, that's how
you look at it, right?
The less money I pay him, the more
money I make.
And the more work hours I can get
from him, the more money I'm making as
well, right?
So basically, when you have an economic structure
in which money gaining is the philosophy, is
the ideology, then you're always looking for strategies
to exploit others.
So if you can't do it in North
America, what do you do?
You go in, like, Indonesia.
You go in Bangladesh.
You go in third world countries where you
can pay people pennies and make as much
money as possible from them and not provide
them any kind of healthcare, pay them less
than minimum wage, get them to work as
many hours as possible, and so on and
so forth, right?
And this is not something I'm inventing, this
is something that does exist in the world.
I don't know if you guys know about
this, I'm sure you know.
There are many companies that do this, right?
What they'll do also is they'll go to
those third world countries, and now those countries
are dependent on these companies now too.
Because, for example, let's say Tesla.
I'm just giving the example of Tesla.
I'm not saying they did anything wrong.
But let's say they go to Ghana or
something, right?
All of a sudden, they're providing many jobs
to people.
All of a sudden, people are getting taxed,
and the government is generating a lot of
revenue.
Do they want to see Tesla leave?
Do they want to see that?
No, right?
So what makes sense for the government to
do?
Whatever you want to do, do.
If you want to pay people this much
as wage, no problem.
You do your thing.
At that point, even governments are basically indebted
to these corporations.
This is my point, that structurally, we have
a problem.
It's not individual problems that we have, but
the entire system is problematic.
The way we see this whole thing is
a problem.
So when we switch from that, moving to
a more ethical gift economy, like, for example,
the Islamic economic system, then we promote holistic
changes in society in how we view the
world around us.
And then this leads to the removal of
overexploitation of nature.
So that's basically how communitarianism is a holistic
solution.
And then we have acknowledgment.
Remember, we talked about gratitude, right?
So gratitude, the way it generates preservation of
the nature, is because when we have value
for something, we have respect for it.
When we have respect for it, then we
acknowledge what it is.
When we acknowledge it, we're grateful for it.
And when we're grateful for it, we use
it moderately, right?
For example, just give you an example.
If you have like Belgian chocolate at home,
and you got this like, you know, you
went to Switzerland, and you got it straight
from there, and you only have one bar,
what are you going to do?
Are you going to eat the whole thing
at once?
No, you're going to have moderate use.
Does that make sense?
Like if you have something that is not
usually found in society, or you got it,
you know, after a lot of effort, then
you slowly, slowly use it, right?
And that's basically what I'm showing you.
That if you have value for something, you
respect it.
If you respect it, you acknowledge it.
If you acknowledge it, you're grateful for it.
If you're grateful for something, you use it
moderately.
Does that make sense?
Gratitude is something that's also found in Islam.
There are too many examples of this.
The Qur'an starts with gratitude, right?
What is the first word that we recite
after the Basmala?
الحمد لله رب العالمين الحمد لله رب العالمين
It starts with gratitude.
And the Prophet ﷺ in one hadith, a
very famous hadith, he says, مَنْ لَمْ يَشْكُرِ
النَّاسِ لَمْ يَشْكُرِ اللَّهِ He who is not
grateful to others is also not grateful to
Allah ﷻ.
So, gratitude is something that is wholly embedded
in Islam.
And I give examples.
For example, when a person wakes up, what
do they recite?
Do we know it or do we not
know it?
Raise your hands if you know it.
Not memorized?
Okay, inshallah we should all learn it, right?
The du'a when we wake up.
Does anyone want to volunteer and recite it
for us?
Sure, go ahead.
الحمد لله الذي أحيانا بعدما أماتنا وإليه النشور
And what we're doing there is we are,
again, being grateful to Allah ﷻ.
We're saying, الحمد لله.
All praise is due to Allah الذي أحيانا.
The one that gave us life بعدما أماتنا.
After He gave us death.
Sleep is like death.
وإليه النشور And to Him we return.
Similarly, for example, when we eat, we are
grateful to Allah ﷻ.
When we use the washroom and we come
out.
This seems like a very mundane thing, right?
Everyone uses the washroom.
But when we come out, what do we
say?
غفرانك And then?
The hadith is in جامعة ترمذي.
Who knows?
That's after wudu.
But after we use the washroom.
غفرانك.
And then?
Yeah, after the washroom.
Not after shower.
After we, like, use بيت الخلاء.
After we defecate or urinate.
And we come out.
غفرانك الحمد لله الذي أذهب عني الأذى وعافاني.
Right?
The hadith is in جامعة ترمذي.
What are we saying?
We're saying all praise is due to Allah
ﷻ الذي And this hadith is so interesting.
غفرانك.
غفرانك means Oh Allah, I seek your forgiveness.
Now, the محدثون have gone into lengthy discussions
as to why we're seeking forgiveness.
And one of the reasons, subhanAllah, this is
amazing, I think.
One of the reasons that is listed is
the fact that the Prophet ﷺ would say
this because during the time that he was
in the washroom, he couldn't do dhikr of
Allah.
So, outside of the time that he was
in the washroom, he would always do dhikr
of Allah ﷻ.
In the small time, obviously, we're not allowed
to.
So, because of that, he's asking for forgiveness.
There's other reasons as well.
And then we say الحمد لله الذي أذهب
عني الأذى وعافاني.
That we're praising Allah ﷻ, the one that
took out الأذى, basically, filthy things or harmful
things from our body.
وعافاني, and he gave us good health.
Many examples, right?
When we eat, we're praising Allah.
When we use the washroom, we praise Allah.
We wake up, we praise Allah.
We get into the car, we also praise
Allah ﷻ.
So, anywhere and everywhere in our life, we're
always being grateful.
So, gratitude in Islam is something that is
ubiquitous, something that is found everywhere.
And then moderation in using resources in Islam
is something that is also found كُلُوا وَشُرَبُوا
وَلَا تُسْرِفُوا This is something that Allah mentions
in the Qur'an as well.
Imam Qurtubi r.a. mentions that a form
of wastage is that a person eats after
they're full.
SubhanAllah.
Think about this.
How many of us, we have nice burgers
and stuff and we're already full but we
continue to eat.
We overeat.
I don't know if you guys ever, I'm
not promoting watching the movie, but read the
novels for the Hunger Games.
You guys know about this district where people
are super rich and they had this pill
that they took.
So, they would have all these sumptuous feasts
and then they would take that pill so
that they could vomit it and eat some
more.
So, we're kind of headed towards this weird
direction where we just want to satisfy, satisfy,
satisfy and satisfy more.
So, Imam Qurtubi r.a. says a form
of wastage is that a person consumes even
after they're already full.
Like that, Imam Ghazali r.a. and many
others also discouraged eating to one's fill as
well.
And then we gave the example of Sa'd
ibn Abi Waqas when he was making wudu
that the Prophet ﷺ told him not to
waste water.
This is something also that we find in
indigenous traditions.
We'll end with this inshaAllah.
That you find also many, many forms of
gratitude.
They have a thanksgiving address which is something
that whenever they have gatherings, the indigenous people
they read these out.
They thank the fish in the sea and
they thank the water and they thank all
these different natural resources and it shows that
they also feel this gratitude with the environment
that they're interacting with.
So, the idea is basically that when a
person is grateful for the things around them,
they're also humble.
If a person is grateful that he can
get coffee, then our interaction with this coffee
will be a humble interaction.
I'm not going to feel entitled that I
need to have this.
Today, unfortunately one of the biggest problems in
society is this problem of entitlement.
If I go to the store and they
don't do my order exactly as I put
it, we get so angry.
Why?
Because I'm entitled to this.
We don't consider that this person woke up
early in the morning, they had a long
day, they had many things to do, and
then of course they're being paid for it,
but it is their kindness that through them
we're also receiving the service.
How much are we grateful to people for
that?
We take all the benefits in the countries
that we're living in, but how much do
we consider that they've made our lives easier
and what can we do to give back
to the society?
What can we do to spread hidayah, to
spread goodness, to contribute to the society?
So, when we're grateful, we become humble as
well.
When we're humble, then we have moderate use
and the way we interact with the environment
is different.
The very, very last thing before our conclusion,
I'll have the conclusion slide here, but the
very, very last thing I'll mention is there's
an effect of colonialism as well in the
way we view the economy, in the way
we view the environment, in the way we
interact with each other, and the way that
we have our world view is based in
imperial and colonial understandings.
So, the reason, you know, I've heard many
people say that, oh, Islam promotes a capitalistic
society.
The Sahabah practiced capitalism of their time.
This is completely false, completely wrong.
Capitalism is a man-made system.
Other people, they'll say that socialism or communism
is something that, oh, Islam practiced a form
of socialism.
This is completely wrong also.
What does Islam do?
It has its own independent economic system, the
same way that we have our own political
laws, the same way that we have our
own legal theory, the same way that we
have our own morals and our own ethics.
We don't need other societies to come and
tell us what is good and what is
bad.
We don't need for anyone else, and this
is unique from every other religion.
This is why I say that Islam is
not a religion.
Islam is not a religion.
It's not something that you do on Friday.
It's not something that you do on Saturday
or Sunday.
It's something that embeds your entire life.
It's something that tells you how you wake
up, how you talk to people, how you
build your family, how you sell and buy.
It tells you what you can sell and
buy.
It tells you how to eat and walk.
It tells you how to smile, how to
talk to people, and so on and so
forth.
Islam is an entire way of life.
It's not just a religion.
Colonialism does this to us, that we kind
of misunderstand what an ideal economy should look
like.
We forget about it and we forget about
the gift that Rasulullah ﷺ brought to us,
which is a holistic and a perfect system.
So just to conclude, what we can see
is that our society and infrastructures would benefit
from reshaping this worldview.
The way we view money, the way we
view interaction with others, the way we view
the economy needs to be rebuilt.
Otherwise, we can have all sorts of activism,
but this is just going to be one
small solution to a larger problem.
We can have all these technological solutions.
We can have electric cars.
Maybe everyone started driving electric cars.
You'll have a new problem.
The batteries, right?
We all know about this.
And then let's say you had hydrogen-based
cars.
You still have a problem with mass production
of animals and the chemicals that are put
in them, the chemicals that are put, pesticides
that are put in, or even additives and
preservatives that are put in our foods, and
so on and so forth.
You still have a million other environmental problems,
but if you change the entire mindset, then
everything gets changed, right?
So if you adopt, if we adopt these
Islamic moral philosophies or we adopt these other
forms of ethics, then this helps us.
These are proactive solutions instead of being reactive
solutions to environmental problems.
So we make dua to Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala that we are able to educate
ourselves.
The solution to this is receiving an Islamic
education.
Sometimes we think that if I know how
to pray, and I know how to recite
the Qur'an, and I give my zakat
and my sadaqah, and I go to hajj,
I'm a very, very good Muslim.
If I come to the masjid five times
a day, I'm a very good Muslim.
Mashallah, you are a very good Muslim, yet
you still have a lot to do, right?
Islam is a mindset, and we have to
understand what this mindset is.
We have to learn what this mindset is,
increase our knowledge, and then apply this to
our modern-day society.
May Allah give us all the tawfiq.
If there's time for a Q&A, inshallah
we'll take any questions.
I think we just have a couple of
minutes.
Jazakallah khair, Sheikh, for discussing this topic and
providing your insights.
No questions came, but there was just one
comment.
So one comment regarding this.
If water rises by 10 feet, the person
is saying that half of the US will
be gone, and banks and insurance will not
finance or invest in major countries like the
UK or the US, since they would be
wiped off because of the water or the
climate change.
I don't know about this 100%.
What I do know is that instead of
actually the UK and the US being affected,
what's going to be affected is the third
world countries.
One of the countries that is seen as
very close to maybe drowning because of global
warming is Bangladesh.
So you have large amounts of flood in
those countries.
You actually don't see the effects of the
pollution that we...
The US alone, in terms of consuming, they
consume 25% of the overall natural resources
that are used.
So that's basically their consumption, and then you
have the rest of the world.
But then the effects of environmental problems are
seen in third world countries.
Also the things that we dump, like environmental
waste, usually in America it's going to be
a poor neighborhood because obviously you can't go
do that in a rich neighborhood.
So it's always the poor people who are
being affected more.
Just one question in regard to the topic.
So a lot of...
And it's related to capitalism as well.
So as you may know, a lot of
investors now are asking companies about what their
sustainability...
How are they concerned about climate change?
What are they doing to prevent climate change
and other sustainability topics?
And they're asking them to embed sustainability into
their business strategy.
What are your thoughts on that?
So it's nuanced.
So obviously something is better than nothing.
So if they're doing something at least to
help, that's good.
But I also don't think that's even close
to enough.
Because usually what you find in these is
that again, it's an individual solution to a
larger structural problem.
What we need is a complete change of
mindset, the way we view wealth, the way
we view the treatment of employees and the
treatment of resources, and so on and so
forth.
JazakAllah khair.
Alright, I think we are up on time.
Oh, go ahead, sister.
Yeah, yeah.
That's a good point.
But that's a very good point.
Like how can we have this ideology embedded
within us?
Well, actually, you know, what's happening to the
world over time is that everybody has kind
of shifted to a western system.
So I don't blame, like, you know, maybe
we would like to, mashaAllah, as Muslims, we're
very good at self-blame.
Which we should do.
Introspection is good, right?
Muraqaba is good, muhasabah is good.
But I don't think we're fully to blame
for that.
You'll see this in Africa, you'll see this
in many Muslim countries.
Before the colonizers came, they were very good
people.
They were very, very good people until certain
mindsets, certain laws were put, and they were
pushed to certain boundaries, and people changed a
lot.
Their economic conditions is also something that was
very well-engineered.
A lot was stolen from, if you look
at just India alone, you know, how much
was stolen by the British government from them.
Literally worth trillions today that was taken from
them.
So those kind of economic conditions that they
go through now, and because of that, maybe
their selfishness or whatever, that's kind of imposed
on them.
That was something that was put on them.
We had an ideal society in Islam, and
then we had other influences and that kind
of change.
And again, I don't want to fully blame
it on other influences.
Obviously, we also have to do some reflection
within ourselves, and like I said, most Muslims
are not educated.
Like, how many of us think about these
things?
Think about, like, why is riba haram?
Why are these laws there?
There are so many examples of economic laws,
financial laws, and there's wisdom behind them.
How many of us get educated about those
things?
So I think lack of ilm also is
there.
Amongst the sahaba, you never had a jahil
sahabi.
You never had a sahabi who wasn't always
constantly learning.
Does that answer your question?
Well, is there an example?
I think due to, like, mass westernization, it's
a more rare thing to happen due to,
you know, mass capitalism being pushed and, like,
you know, war being waged on you if
you don't practice, you know, capitalism and so
on and so forth.
People are kind of forced into this worldview.
However, they do exist.
Like, I think you will still see that.
Like, I remember, you know, when I traveled
in many third world countries, people are very
hospitable there.
They're not as, like, aloof.
And when we come to, like, North America,
you'll see, like, everyone doing their thing, which
is maybe good.
The more industrialized, the more, like, signs of
capitalism you see somewhere, like New York, for
example.
I always see New York as, like, the
prime example of that because all money is
in New York.
Like, New York is the heart of the
US, right?
This is where all the money is.
You know, Wall Street is there.
But the more you see that happening, the
more, kind of, you see people being drawn
more, kind of, like, away from each other.
So, you know, if you...
I remember when I first went to New
York, it's been, like, what, two or three
years?
I said, I smiled at somebody, a random
person.
Our eyes crossed and I smiled at them.
They looked at me in a weird way.
And so the person who was walking with
me said, you're not supposed to do that.
You're not supposed to smile at someone, you
know, random strangers.
They're going to think you're weird.
Whereas if you come to where I live,
you know, in Canada, it's a rural area,
and if you drive in that road and
there's random strangers there and they see you,
they'll wave at you.
While you're driving, they're walking and they'll wave
at you.
So, you'll see more, like, human connections in
more rural areas, and the more industrialized, the
more capitalized a place gets, the more, kind
of, inhuman, the more, you know, away they
get drawn from each other.
So, I think you do see it.
You see this communitarianism, but in smaller communities
and more rural areas, I think you can
find it.
If you go to, like, villages back home,
I remember, you know, in Bangladesh when I
visited as well, people in the villages, they're
very, like, tight-knit, I think.
Any other questions?
I think it's time for Isha.
Jazakallah everyone.
Inshallah.
Please join us next week for another Friday
Forum.
As-salamu alaykum.