Tofael Nuruddin – Liberalism and Islam Worldviews Compared and Ways Forward
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AI: Transcript ©
My dear respected brothers, elders, sisters, youngsters, and
dearest ʿalama-e-kirām, salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi
wa barakatuh.
Alhamdulillah, we had a long day and we
heard a lot about, you know, liberal ideologies,
the impact of liberalism on our societies, the
violence of liberalism in our countries, and the
overall goal of liberalism.
We've defined what liberalism, philosophical liberalism is.
And we've also distinguished that what we're talking
about today is not, you know, liberals versus
conservatives.
That's not what we're talking about.
When we talk about liberalism today, we're talking
about philosophical liberalism, which actually Democrats and Republicans
both follow.
And we saw kind of a history, right?
Mawlana Abdullah's presentation, we saw a history of
how it trickled down and where it originated
from and how it came to us today
in Western societies.
Now, what I want to do now is
look at, number one, what is the purpose
of liberalism?
What are they trying to achieve, right?
And we're going to go through very specific
things and we're going to compare it to
an Islamic worldview.
During the initiation, I talked about the fact
that other ideologies have a problem with Islam.
Why?
Because it's not like other religions.
Other religions will tell you what to do
on Saturday, will tell you what to do
in the church, will tell you what to
do in the synagogue.
But it doesn't tell you how to live,
right?
Other than, you know, very basic things, very
basic overview, it doesn't really tell you how
to run a political system, what the justice
system should look like.
It doesn't tell you much about ethics and
meta-ethics, right?
But Islam does tell you all of these
different things.
Therefore, this clash comes between other ideologies in
Islam.
And what we're going to do today is
compare.
Well, first of all, find out what a
worldview is.
And then we're going to compare worldviews.
We're going to compare a modern worldview or
a liberal worldview with an Islamic worldview.
So just a few key terms that we're
going to start with, inshallah, just so that
we understand some of the terminologies that are
mentioned.
Some of these words might look like big
words.
Don't get afraid, inshallah.
We'll break it down, okay?
And inshallah, the purpose today is to learn,
right?
Inshallah, I can ask some of the brothers
in the back if you can pay attention.
Inshallah, we'll benefit.
We'll benefit.
We'll have something to take back and teach
others, inshallah.
So these are some, you know, it seemed
like big words.
But inshallah, we'll break them down and try
to understand what they are.
So number one, we have metaphysics and ontology.
How is the world and what exists, right?
What is real, basically?
And we're going to see, basically, that certain
things are considered real or unreal in a
liberal worldview.
And then when you compare to the Islamic
worldview, we'll see what we consider real and
unreal.
Epistemology is what do I know and how
do I know it?
We covered a little bit of Islamic epistemology
in the previous session, in the panel discussion,
when we talked about the preservation of hadith,
preservation of knowledge, the transmission of knowledge.
That's all part of epistemology.
Then theology.
Theology, most of us know what that means.
You know, is there a God?
If there is a God, who is God?
Ethics and metaethics.
What is right?
What is wrong?
How do we know what is right and
what is wrong?
Political philosophy.
How do we govern and obey?
Like, why should we obey a government?
Maulana Asadullah went through a detailed explanation, you
know, taking people like Thomas Hobbes, you know,
John Locke, and there were others as well.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, he was a
very well-known, you know, political thinker as
well.
Why should we have governments and how should
we govern?
And then we have legal theory.
What is considered fair law?
And then aesthetics.
What is considered beautiful and how do we
know what is considered beautiful?
And we'll see, actually, aesthetics is a very
interesting thing.
And the reason for this is because, subhanAllah,
I gave examples earlier, right?
When liberal forces came to other countries, right
now, in a liberal world, for example, black
is considered bad and white is considered good.
Where did this come from?
Why must it be, right?
Even in the Indian subcontinent, for example, or
in Arab countries, or in African countries, if
someone is a little lighter, they're considered more
beautiful.
Why must this be a truth?
You know, why must this be in the
time of the Sahaba radiAllahu anhu, in the
time of the Prophet ﷺ?
There was no such distinction.
So this is very much a liberal idea
that was enforced, right?
Aesthetics.
What do we consider beautiful and what do
we not consider beautiful and how do we
know it?
So now when we compare these, you know,
worldviews, you know, this is something that there's
a professor at Brandeis University, Maulana Sheikh Yusuf
Nohan, in Waltham, Massachusetts, Brandeis University, Dr. Khal
Sharif, he's a professor there, and he came
up with this comparison between a modern worldview
and an Islamic worldview.
However, I expand on some of it and
I delete some of it, just because some
things are more relevant to a worldview and
in the context of liberal imperialism, some things
are more relevant than others.
So starting with metaphysics and ontology, we're going
to go into a bit of aqidah here,
okay?
In a modern worldview, we have materialism and
the body and mind.
So materialism, basically, whatever is, you know, tangible,
whatever we can see, whatever we can perceive
with our five senses, those things are real,
right?
Whatever we can see, what's physical and existent
in the external world, we consider that real.
Body and mind, this is a contested idea
until today, you know, especially atheists have a
really hard time explaining what the mind is,
what consciousness is.
We call this the hard problem of consciousness.
It's very hard for them to define what
makes me, me, and what makes you, you,
right?
However, obviously, if we have Islam, then we
have an answer to that.
What makes me, me, and you, you?
Our ruh.
Our ruh is something that is individuated by
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, and it gives
us our identity, our huwiyah, our shahsiyah.
In an Islamic worldview, we believe in, well,
obviously, material beings and realms, that which we
can touch and see and feel, but we
also believe in immaterial beings and realms.
We believe in the angels, for example.
We believe that they exist, right?
Even though we can't put them under a
microscope, and we can't, you know, look into
them in a physical sense, but we still
believe that they exist.
We believe in jinn, for example.
We believe that jinns exist, right?
And we believe that Allah subhanahu wa ta
'ala exists, who is also an immaterial being,
right?
He's not something that we can start touching
and feeling, right?
We can put him under a microscope.
And we also believe in the body, mind,
slash heart.
The reason why I say this is because
in recent times, in the last couple of
centuries, the way we define mind is the
cerebrum, right?
We define mind with the brain.
Our cognitive abilities stem from our brain.
However, we see that in the Islamic tradition,
we have the word qalb, we have the
word fu'ad, and they all refer to
the mind, but that's the heart.
So how should we process the idea of
mind is something that still we're inquiring through.
Through science, we're still inquiring and looking into
it.
That does a person's heart shape some of
their personality, for example, some of their emotions,
and so on and so forth.
And that's something that's still there, and that's
why I'm saying mind slash heart.
Because there is a play of the cerebrum.
For example, recent medical studies show that we
have a second gut.
Does anybody know about this?
We have the brain that dictates some of
our cognitive abilities, but also our gut also
has a huge role to play in our
mind and our thinking and our cognitive abilities,
right?
Recent medical studies have shown this.
And this is why also, for example, they
recommend things like intermittent fasting, the 16-8
rule when it comes to fasting.
SubhanAllah, if you actually think about it, that's
the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ.
You have Ghada and Asha.
This concept of breakfast is something that's...
As a matter of fact, the word Futur
is a more recent Arabic word.
In the time of the Prophet ﷺ, they
had Ghada and Asha.
And they used to eat those.
So Ghada was basically slightly before Salat al
-Dhuhr, and Asha was, you can say, slightly
after Salat al-Asr or Salat al-Maghrib.
The Prophet ﷺ had a saying, نُقَدِّمَ الْعَشَاءَ
عَلَى الْعِشَاءَ We used to precede the dinner,
the nighttime food, before Salat al-Isha.
So if you actually calculate the time between
these two, it's within the span of 8
hours.
And then 16 hours a person is not
eating.
And recent studies have actually shown that this
is the best for our cognitive abilities.
So in terms of metaphysics and ontology, this
is what we believe.
Epistemology.
How do we know that things are real?
What is our source of information?
And how do we verify that things are
true?
So in a modern worldview, we have empiricism
and rationalism.
I'm not going to go too much into
it.
These were actually initial two competing philosophies.
You have the rationalists, for example, Descartes.
And you had Spinoza and others as well.
And then you have empiricists like David Hume
and others.
And then Kant is supposed to be the
person that came and synthesized everything.
We're talking about 17th and 18th century philosophy.
This is a part of the modern worldview.
Today though, most scientists are empiricists.
There's a lot to be said about this.
In philosophy of science, for example, you can
study that there used to be logical positivists.
What they are also, there's a whole long
discussion.
But most scientists today are empiricists.
Empiricism means we believe that those things that
come to us, information that comes to us
through the five senses, those are true.
Everything else is a big question mark.
So if we cannot see it, we cannot
smell it, we cannot hear it, we cannot
touch it, and we cannot taste it, it
practically doesn't exist.
So for example, the ruh, we cannot touch
it, we can't put it under a microscope,
we can't see it, we can't hear it,
and so on and so forth.
Therefore, we don't know if it exists or
not.
That's a modern notion.
And then in an Islamic worldview, we have
obviously sense experience.
And so in a very brief sense, we
are also empiricists.
In Islam, we also perceive things through the
five senses.
We accept that as fact.
So Al-Hawasul Khums, right?
In the books of Aqeedah you'll find Al
-Hawasul Khums.
That Asbab Al-'ilmi Thalatha, number one, is the
five senses.
Number two is proper reasoning.
Proper reasoning, like logical reasoning.
Deductive reasoning, which we call Aql.
What is deductive reasoning, what is inductive reasoning,
what is abductive reasoning?
I'm not going to go into.
And then testimony, khabr, right?
We also consider khabr as a true source
of knowledge as well.
Khabr would be, for example, as a matter
of fact, subhanAllah, we rely on khabr a
lot.
For example, just a case study amongst you
guys.
Has anyone here been to Russia?
Anyone?
You're raising your hand, I don't know if...
No?
Okay.
Anyone here has been to Russia?
You know the country Russia?
Putin is the president.
We all know what Russia is, right?
Has anyone been to Russia?
No?
Okay.
Do you know that for a fact Russia
exists?
How do you know?
Did you touch it?
Did you feel it?
Did you see it?
It's through testimony.
We've seen it on maps.
Someone else, that's their testimony.
Whoever drew that map, that's their testimony.
We've heard it from people.
And we have mass transmission.
We have so many different sources telling us
that Russia exists.
We call this in Islam tabatoo.
It's mass transmitted to a point that if
somebody said to us, you know what, you
didn't see or smell or touch Russia, and
I'm telling you that Russia doesn't exist.
We're gonna say, what's wrong with you?
You're the crazy person.
Even though I haven't seen it.
But I have so much yaqeen, I have
so much belief in it, that if somebody
denies it, I'll call them insane.
So this is, in some sense, we also
consider this a sense of truth.
So that's testimony.
And then we have natural intuition, fitrah.
Fitrah is also a source of knowledge.
And we'll go more into that inshallah today.
Theology is pretty straightforward.
If you're an empiricist, you can't see or
touch God.
Therefore, God does not exist.
That is the case for a lot of
scientists.
I'm not gonna generalize and say that all
scientists follow that.
In a modern worldview though, a secular approach,
a separation of church and state, it turns
into a lot of interpretation.
Like, what is truly God?
What is the need to believe in a
higher being?
What is a higher being anyway?
If a person is a good person, should
that suffice or not?
These are the kinds of questions that are
asked.
In an Islamic worldview, we believe that Allah
SWT exists.
Ethics and meta-ethics.
Ethics, what is right and wrong, right?
In a modern worldview, in a liberal worldview,
you have utilitarianism.
I believe Maulana Asadullah covered some of that.
Maulana Shakeel also covered some of that.
Utilitarianism, in a summary, is basically the greatest
good for the greatest number of people.
Very, very simply summarized.
There are different strands of utilitarianism that I'm
not gonna go into right now because that's
not the scope of what we're talking about.
But that's the overall idea.
The greatest good for the greatest number of
people.
Obviously, there are inherent contradictions, right?
We can come up with, for example, if
you were in the 17th century in America
and there were white people and then there's
black slaves and some white girl got murdered,
all of the white people want this black
slave to be killed because of that, right?
This would produce a great number of happiness
for a great group of people.
Do we then consider this good or bad?
Obviously, utilitarians have some responses to that.
But again, there's loopholes in utilitarianism that make
it not such a great way of defining
ethics.
And then you have deontology.
Maulana Abdullah went over Immanuel Kant.
He is the one that had deontological ethics
and he bases his ethics on duty.
On the other hand, in Islam, revelation, wahi,
is a source of meta-ethics.
Wahi tells us what is good and what
is bad.
How do we know that something is good?
Because Allah tells us it's good.
How do we know that something is bad?
Because Allah tells us that it is bad.
And as a matter of fact, I think
the strongest, this is not an atheism conference,
but if we were to present on atheism,
I would say that the strongest argument, in
my opinion, for the existence of Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala is a meta-ethical argument.
The cosmological argument is a very good argument
but it only shows you that there is
a necessary being.
Then you have to use the intelligent design
argument or the teleological argument to prove that
the world as it is must be created
by a higher creator.
However, the moral argument or the meta-ethical
argument, I find it to be a stronger
one.
Why?
Because me and you can have different definitions
of what's good.
Maybe one brother thinks that if you slap
your kid, this is a good thing.
Why?
Because you're nurturing him and you're teaching him.
Someone else says, no, no, no.
Slapping children is child abuse.
Who is right and who is wrong?
You're a human, he's a human.
Who has the right to say what is
right and wrong?
Who has the right?
It must be a third being that is
a higher being than humans.
Does that make sense?
That's meta-ethics for us.
And then you have economic ethics or economic
systems.
In the modern world, you have capitalism.
In Islam, we have an Islamic economic system.
There's so much to be said about this
that it promotes communitarianism.
We talked about this a bit earlier.
It's not socialism.
It's not communism.
Islam has its own economic system which we
need to study and promote.
In the political philosophy, in the modern world
view, today's time, you either have democracies or
you have autocracies.
Democracies are supposed to be good.
The reason I'm saying supposed to be good,
I'll get to it.
According to Aristotle, he had basically five stages
of a society.
Anarchy was the last.
Anarchy means there's no government.
It's a free for all.
Right before that was democracy.
Basically, the second last form of society is
a democracy according to Aristotle.
And according to Aristotle, the best type of
a government is what he calls an aristocracy
which is not the aristocracy that we think
of today.
Aristocracy basically means that you have few educated
people that choose one leader.
And this is a form of the khilafah
and shura that we have in Islam.
So that's our political philosophy.
We have a khilafah and we have a
shura that are people of sound reasoning, people
of good spirituality and they choose a khalifah.
And if you had that, for example, you
wouldn't have Biden or Trump, people that say
very funny things and people that do very
funny things.
SubhanAllah, America has this fetish for every new
president they have to make fun of them.
Oh, this guy stumbled and fell off this
bike.
This guy signs like this.
And so on and so forth.
If you had a khilafah, subhanAllah, you would
have only the best of people leading the
ummah.
And as we can see in Islamic history,
Islamic history proves this.
That as long as there was a khilafah,
alhamdulillah, we had the best leaders.
And then you have legal theory.
In the modern world view, we have man
-made common and civil law.
Do we all know what the difference is
between common and civil law?
Common law, subhanAllah.
Any lawyers here?
Common law is basically taken mainly of the
British legal system.
It's based on precedent.
There are statutes as well.
But precedent is basically that if any judge,
there's nuances to this, but if any judge
in the past ruled something, this is a
proof for the future.
There are also statutory laws as well.
And civil law is based on the Napoleon's
summary of Roman law.
There's a lot of history there.
But for example, Louisiana in the U.S.
follows civil law.
And in Canada, Quebec follows a mixture of
civil law and common law.
This is why also when you study law,
some people study both of these.
If you go to France, there's a whole
system to it, how it differs.
For example, the judge in a common law
system, he's an arbiter.
You have the claimant and the defendant, they
make their case, and the judge is an
arbiter.
And then you have prosecutors on the side
of the government, and you have the defendants.
On the other hand, in civil law, the
judge himself is the investigator.
He has forces and police and basically he's
the prosecutor.
So there's those kind of differences as well.
We don't need to get into the nuances.
In Islamic legal theory, we derive Islamic law
from revelation, from Allah.
So we can see what a modern worldview
looks like.
Most of this stuff, we know.
These are all nice, fancy big terms, but
in essence we know all of this, right?
We all know this, right?
And what the Islamic worldview is, some of
us maybe learned something new today.
Okay, so now that we know the contrast
between these two worldviews, what does liberalism attempt
to do?
Liberalism has made it its mission to go
and spread its worldview upon other people.
Why?
Because they consider these other societies that are
not liberal societies a kind of heathen or
barbaric or unsophisticated society and their whole idea
is that it's our burden, it's our responsibility
to go and civilize them.
The natives here in America, they didn't know
anything.
They're just barbaric people.
We have to go, us as Europeans, we
have to go and teach them how to
be civilized people, right?
So this, Kipling, Kipling was actually a British
official in colonial India.
He called this the white man's burden.
He has a whole poem that talks about
this.
So the idea behind colonialism, what I'm going
to argue today, is that colonialism, we misunderstand
it.
We understand colonialism as political * and military
*, right?
We take armies, the colonizers take armies, they
go to a certain country and they take
the land there and they exploit the economic
resources.
That's how we understand colonialism.
My argument is that no.
Colonialism is much deeper than that.
Colonialism wants to go and eradicate and deracinate
and erase your identity.
Wherever it went, the idea was you shouldn't
be who you are because whoever you are
is a subclass of human beings.
And we need to civilize you, we need
to make you a proper human being, right?
So your shahsiyah, your huiyah, your religion, these
are all backwards.
We need to erase all of this and
we need to replace it with a Eurocentric
worldview.
So through assimilation, you know, what is assimilation?
We're going to see a case study, specific
instances of it inshallah.
Through assimilation, there's a shift in worldview and
then the colonized subject loses their identity.
So there are different methods for assimilation.
There's cultural conversion, right?
For example, subhanallah, if you think about it
today, right?
If a person is dressed in an Armani
suit or a person, another person is wearing
a thawb, an imami, a thawb and a
turban, who do we consider more sophisticated?
Which ones are more sophisticated ways to dress?
Which ones are?
What will people naturally say?
The Armani suit, right?
Why though?
Why is it?
Why must it be that the suit is
better than the thawb?
How did society come to this point?
This is a European imported idea.
Then you have, for example, cultural conversion actually
includes many things.
Clothing, food, eating manners and so on and
so forth.
Imposition of language, right?
So the idea is that your languages and
we're going to see very specific instances of
this through legal tools that the British used
in colonial India.
But the idea was basically your languages are
unsophisticated, uncivilized, inferior languages and we have to
teach you English.
And if you're good at English, then you're
a sophisticated person.
And then religious conversion, this is a big
thing.
Many of us are not aware of this,
but I talked about Spanish colonization before when
they went to South America.
One of their biggest missions were to Christianize
the local people by the sword, right?
And then similarly, for example, in colonial India,
you'll find the same thing.
Many efforts to convert people either forcefully or
through incentives.
As a matter of fact, today also it's
happening, right?
They'll make like nice big hospitals and like
fancy schools and they'll tell you, well, if
you're Christian, you can come.
If not, then too bad.
So sad, right?
So they have different means to convert people,
religious conversion.
And then number four is education system.
So they would infiltrate education systems, curricula and
so on and so forth to change people's
identities.
So now the idea is now that we
know that this is happening the whole day
today, you know, we've been talking about this,
that the world has been liberalized, the world
has been colonized.
Now what do we do moving forward?
What are the ways forward?
So how do we de-liberalize?
And what I'm going to do is I'm
going to look at, you know, history is
the best lesson for us, right?
We can look back and we can see
what are some people the most successful people
in the whole world at decolonization?
And what did they do and how are
they so successful?
And inshallah we'll look through an example of
Muslims that have done that.
As a matter of fact, if a person
is a post-colonial scholar and they go
through the pages of colonialism they go through
South America, Africa North America, parts of Europe,
right?
Any place that's been colonized East Asia, right?
Southeast Asia as well.
If you go through all of those parts
and you look at colonization, you will see
that people most of them they submitted to
colonialism and they were colonized.
As a matter of fact, today native people,
a lot of them don't know their native
languages.
The native people, if you see them today,
they don't know what their traditional clothes look
like, right?
Their whole identities are gone.
Their whole identities are gone.
But there is a group of people in
the whole world that this failed on.
The project of liberalization and colonization failed on.
Who are they?
We're going to inshallah come across them.
So, the people that I'm talking about is
number one the ulama, the scholars in colonial
India, in the Indian subcontinent and we're going
to explore what they did but they were
the ones that were extremely successful at disallowing
the colonial forces to change their identities.
So, how did they do this?
They had the creation of unique revivalist movements.
First, they had this unique education system.
They understood that the colonizers they're going to
infiltrate and they are infiltrating our education systems.
Then they created their own education system and
what it is, inshallah we'll go through it.
And then there's a revival of spirituality.
We see many of the ulama in India,
what they did is there was this renewed
call to spirituality connecting people to Allah SWT.
Kind of disconnecting people from everything else.
Obviously, many of them were extremely successful in
the dunya and these are not dichotomies.
These are not dichotomies.
You can be very successful in the dunya,
be very wealthy but also have no relationship
with it.
Just like for example, Uthman r.a. I'll
just give you an example of Uthman r
.a. Uthman r.a, you have any idea
how rich he was?
He funded an entire third of the Muslim
army in Ghazwat-e-Tabuk.
Imagine that, one man.
One man with so much money, so much
excess money that Ghazwat-e-Tabuk was one
of the largest expeditions amongst Muslims.
And you know, it was so crucial that
usually the Prophet SAW he used to give
different information before going to any kind of
battle.
He would say like, oh maybe we're going
there, maybe we're going there, maybe we're going
there.
Why?
Because they're spies.
And the Prophet SAW would kind of give
different information so that the spies wouldn't know
where we're actually going.
But then for Ghazwat-e-Tabuk he made
it extremely clear that we're all going for
this one.
Every single person, every man that can go,
he'll go.
And that huge army, one third of it
was funded by Uthman r.a. So he
was extremely wealthy but the wealth was not
stuck in his heart.
He didn't hoard that wealth.
So revival of spirituality, and then number three,
intellectual contributions on every subfield.
And we'll go in detail inshallah with that
as well.
And overall, we talked in the panel discussion
about preservation of intellectual lineage and tradition.
Just to summarize what happened for the brothers
that weren't here, we discussed what makes Islam
so strong.
The episteme of Islam, the knowledge of Islam.
What makes it so resilient?
And the fact that every single thing that
we know, that we consider knowledge in Islam,
is something that has a solid backing all
the way till the Prophet s.a.w.
A direct chain of transmission from us to
Rasulullah s.a.w. And I even gave
examples that if you quote, for example, Abraham
Lincoln or Einstein, we don't know who's narrating
this from them.
Unless we find it in their writings, we
don't truly know if they actually said this.
However, for the Prophet s.a.w. we
have entire chains of transmissions to him.
And I cited Alois Pregner, the German non
-Muslim scholar, who was fascinated by Muslims because
they preserved 500,000 biographies just to preserve
the hadith of Rasulullah s.a.w. Entire
volumes just written to preserve the hadith of
the Prophet s.a.w. So, there was
a focus on that from the ulama in
the Indian subcontinent.
What I'm gonna do from here is, I'm
gonna contrast what the colonizers did and what
was the response from the ulama in the
Indian subcontinent.
So, number one, you had educational imposition.
So, if you look at North America, we
talked about the boarding schools, the residential schools.
There's a indigenous scholar, you know, she's a
professor, Jane Griffin.
She writes about the history of colonization in
North America and she says that the Indian
residential schools were one of Canada's many colonial
strategies.
What was the aim of it?
It's to inculcate students in a British worldview
and to assimilate them by denigrating their spiritualities,
by telling them your spiritualities, they don't make
any sense.
They're barbaric, they're epistemologies and their relationships to
land.
Indian residential schools also attacked indigenous languages and
insisted on English only.
So, this is something that they did all
over the world, including North America.
In India, we have specific cases.
So, in Kolkata, for example, the British initiated
the school, this college called the Mohammedan College
of Kolkata.
Today, this is known for those who are
Bengali, this is known as the Alia Madrasa.
The roots of the Alia Madrasa actually come
from the British.
The British are the one that not only
they started it, but the curriculum, the administration,
all of that was actually done by the
British.
There's a lot of historical documents that allow
us to actually find information on this.
Then you also had what we call Macaulay's
Minute.
So, Thomas Macaulay, he was one of the
colonial administrators that lived in India.
He was a British that moved to India
and he was an administrator there.
So, he wrote this minute on Indian education.
A minute is basically like their suggestions.
Like, when they had their meetings, they would
suggest these things.
So, in there, what did he write?
He wrote that education would create a class
of Indians who are Indian in blood and
color, but English in taste, in opinions, in
morals, and in intellect.
So, the idea was, you can be Indian
in color, in your looks, but your brain,
your mind, we're going to replace everything that's
in there with English ideas.
And then you also had the Muhammad Anglo
-Oriental College, which is today known as the
Aligarh University.
There's a lot of history to that.
It was founded by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan,
who was very close with the British.
As a matter of fact, before initiating his
college, he went to England and he saw
Cambridge and was very fascinated by it.
And he believed that for Muslims to progress
anywhere, to go forward, they needed to be
modernized.
They needed to become like the colonizers so
that they can become successful.
So, in his college, in the Aligarh University,
they promoted the English language and not having
local languages like Sanskrit and Hindi and Arabic
and Farsi and Urdu.
So, the minute on the Indian education as
well, the one by Thomas Macaulay, this also
had many moves to basically remove Sanskrit and
Arabic.
And he says that these are barbaric languages
that don't contribute anything to anyone and they're
not good for civilization.
Therefore, we need to educate the Indian people
with English.
And then, in 1904, we had the Indian
Universities Act which was basically a way to
form and to organize all the universities that
existed in India and to create this word
of education and then initiate new universities.
And all the officials that were appointed to
the universities were British and colonial administrators.
So, the aim, an Indian historian writes that
his aim was to keep the masses in
a state of illiteracy and backwardness so as
to enable England to continue her imperialist rule.
So, even local Indians, even Hindus realized at
that time that the point behind this education
act, this universities act, was not so that
Indians become sophisticated and they become successful.
Rather, the idea is to teach them English
history, English culture, British values and so on
and so forth, so that England could continue
to rule over there.
Another goal, I kind of put this in
the presentation, but if you look into this,
you'll find that one of the goals of
education was to make sure that you could
find local Indians who can actually continue the
British rule.
So, they would be educated in the British
system, British values, British language, British culture, and
they would basically continue that for the British.
So now, what is the significance of knowledge?
Does anyone know about Michel Foucault?
He's a French philosopher, very well known, and
he's very radical in his ideas, very interesting
person.
If you take any philosophy class in university,
you'll come across him.
So, Michel Foucault, a very interesting thing that
he says, he says the power operates through
the production and dissemination of knowledge.
And he shows that there is a direct
correlation between the control and the production of
knowledge and power.
So, if you can, if you can, you
know, control education, if you can control knowledge,
if you can control what people are thinking,
then you can have power over them.
Does this make sense?
So, you can understand now why colonizers and
liberals were so invested in the education system,
right?
So, that was the first thing, right?
So, the first thing was educational imposition, right?
Keep this in your mind, because we're going
to come back to this.
So, number one, educational imposition.
Number two, sartorial imposition.
I'm going to give $20 to somebody who
knows what this means, except anyone that I've
shared this with.
You're not allowed to Google it or chat
GPT.
What does sartorial imposition mean?
You know?
Well, I mean, don't look at the information.
Obviously, that gives it away.
But go ahead, guys.
Yeah, that's very good.
So, sartorial just means related to clothes, okay?
I owe you.
Come to me after, though.
Don't allow me to forget.
Okay, so, sartorial imposition.
So, what the British did when they went
to India, and the same thing happened in
North America, is there were shirts and coats,
which people in India did not wear.
So, before the British came, who were in
power in India?
Does anyone know?
Mashallah, that's good.
We should know this stuff.
So, the Mughals, right?
And the Mughals, they were Muslims, obviously, and
for whoever didn't know, the Mughals were actually
some of the richest, wealthiest people in the
world.
They say that 25% of the world's
GDP was produced by the Mughals.
And the richest man was one of the
sultans of the Mughal Empire.
Those who are Haiderabadi, especially, they should know
this more.
So, anyway, what did people wear in the
Mughal times?
So, anyone that looks into Indian history will
see that people basically wore, like, kurta and
pajama, which was derived from the Sunnah of
the Prophet ﷺ, right?
Kurta was basically, like, long, you know, dresses
that reach, you know, mid-shin.
So, basically, that's what people wore.
Now, western clothing came.
What did they have?
They had shirts, they had coats, and so
on and so forth.
And this was by law.
This was by law.
People in the Indian military had to wear
these.
And then, wearing turbans, this was prohibited by
law.
And another thing that happened is that the
British also encouraged elites, like, you know, higher
class Indians, to start wearing western clothing.
One of those people were actually Sir Sayyid
Ahmad Khan.
He has a book called Tahdeeb-ul-Akhlaab,
and in there, he argues for this.
He says that, you know, Muslims should wear
and accept the colonized culture, and this is
a way for them to become successful.
So, he advocated for the modernization of Muslims
by adopting the colonized culture.
Now, because of this, what happened is that
there was a gradual abandonment of traditional attire.
Like, so, people slowly, slowly, they started leaving
their, you know, their thobes, their kurtas, and
their traditional clothing, and what they started doing,
they started wearing, you know, western dresses, western
uniforms, and western suits.
So, number one was educational imposition.
Number two was sartorial imposition, or imposition of
clothing.
We'll make it easy on you.
So, imposition of clothing.
Now, again, like we went through education.
Why is education so important?
We'll look at why clothing is so important.
We'll go through the cognitive effects of clothing.
There's a very famous saying in English, the
clothes make the man.
There's an entire book written by Nancy McElroy.
She's a scholar as well.
She's an expert in fashion and aesthetics, and
she has an entire book on this.
The clothes make the man.
Russell Belk, he's a business psychologist, and he
also focuses a lot on aesthetics, and he
says, nonverbal statements of identity are largely visual.
What this means is, if I'm not speaking
with my words, if I start speaking, you'll
know who I am, right?
Like if I say, assalamu alaikum, what do
you assume?
I'm Muslim, right?
If I say, my name is Muhammad, what
are you going to assume?
I'm Muslim, right?
If I say, my name is Robert, what
are you going to assume?
If I say, my name is Abraham, you
can say, maybe Christian, maybe Jew, right?
So, our identity, before its verbal cues, start
with the visual cues.
Does that make sense?
If you see a person approaching, you can't
hear them yet, they're not talking to you.
How do you identify them?
How do you base their identity?
Clothing.
Whatever they're dressing, you can say, this person
must be like this or like that, right?
Like if a person is wearing pink or
something, or they're wearing sports clothes, you can
say, this person is probably athletic, right?
They're wearing running shoes, they're wearing sports dress,
you can say, if someone is walking there
and he's wearing boxing gloves, what do we
assume about them?
Mostly a boxer, right?
So like that, whatever a person wears, identifies
them.
So this is what Russell Belk means by
non-verbal statements of identity are largely visual.
Clothing can distinguish an individual from others and
express an individual's sense of being.
This connects with the next part as well.
Dubler and Greer, they're psychologists, and they actually
show correlations between an individual's clothing choices and
their mood.
So we can see that a person's psyche,
their psychological makeup, is actually directly connected to
their clothing.
So the way a person wears certain things,
and we'll see why this is important.
Think about this, right?
If a person wore a thong for their
entire life, or like let's say an African
man in Africa wore like traditional African dress,
and then colonizers come and now they have
to wear western clothing to get a job.
When they wear that western clothing, what is
this a sign of?
Subjugation.
Mashallah, very good.
I had that exact word in my mind,
right?
When a person wears those clothes, to them
it's like, I have to do this.
And you know, we think that this is
history, it's not history.
It's happening today too, right?
If a person wears a thong and imam
and they go to work, you know, there's
all equity and equality, and you know, we
don't judge you, and all of that good
stuff.
But if a person has a beard and
they wear a thong and imam, we know
the likelihood actually, there's studies on this, I
just recently wrote a paper on this, if
a woman wears a hijab, there's a lot
of stress in their interview about whether they'll
get the job or not.
So this is modern day sartorial colonization.
It still exists.
So this is the cognitive effect of clothing.
The third thing that I haven't included in
the slides, because it's very short, is linguistic
imperialism, right?
Linguistic imperialism basically means the imposition of language
on the colonized people.
We kind of went over it through education,
but this is also a specific thing.
So I talked about Carlisle in Pennsylvania, the
boarding schools that the British had, they prohibited,
they completely forbade native children to speak their
native tongue, their native language.
They were not allowed to do that.
They had to speak English, right?
So that's a form of linguistic imperialism.
How did the ulama of India resist this?
So we're gonna actually go through some of
their fatwas.
I'm gonna argue this, that they did two
things.
Number one, they had legal tools, right?
They had fatwas that went to the public
and the public knew what to do.
And number two is they formed their own
education system.
But the education system, you have to understand
something, that what is knowledge in Islam?
And what makes knowledge different in Islam and
outside of Islam?
What makes knowledge different?
Does anyone know?
One is like its preservation, its epistemology.
We talked about this, how it's preserved from
Rasulullah ﷺ.
But what else makes a difference?
Sorry?
MashaAllah, that's very good.
Knowledge is worship.
How does knowledge become worship?
The Prophet ﷺ would make dua, What does
this mean?
What does knowledge equate to?
Something that can benefit someone in a practical
way, right?
So knowledge is not intrinsic just for itself
but it's also intrinsic for the sake of
practice, for the sake of implementation.
If a person has, they memorize all of
Sahih al-Bukhari but doesn't apply a single
bit of it in his life, where is
this person going to go?
As per the hadith of Rasulullah ﷺ, where
is he going to go?
Unfortunately, he's sinning.
Unfortunately, may Allah protect us, this person will
go to the hellfire.
The Prophet ﷺ, he says in a hadith
that three people will be thrown in hellfire.
Who are they?
One of them is the ulama, the people
that are of knowledge.
Why?
Because they'll have knowledge and in a different
hadith, the Prophet ﷺ says that the entire
population, all the people, "...
kulluhum halka illa-l-'aalimuna," the people that have
knowledge, and then "...
wal'aalimuna kulluhum halka illa-l-'aamiluna."
All the people that have knowledge, they're also
in destruction except practice on their knowledge and
then "...
wal'aalimuna kulluhum halka illa-l-muqlisun."
And the people who practice on their knowledge,
they're also all at the brink of destruction
except those that implement their knowledge, Sorry, the
people that have ikhlas in their amal, they're
practicing, but they have sincerity in their practice.
And then it says, وَالْمُخْلِصُونَ عَلَىٰ خَضْرٍ عَظِيمٍ
That the people that have sincerity, they're also
in a great danger because anytime they can
slip, right?
So in Islam, knowledge is special because it's
there for practice.
So what they'll do, the ulema of the
Indian subcontinent, what they're doing is, they want
to create a center of knowledge, but that
will become a movement of practice amongst people.
And we'll see how they do that.
So they had multiple fatwas, and we'll see
them.
They had multiple fatwas to say that wearing
western clothing or British clothing is haram, right?
Now, first we'll go through what's the rationale.
Because obviously no one can just write a
fatwa.
The fatwa has to be based on the
Qur'an and hadith of Rasulullah ﷺ.
Number one, we have the hadith that Abu
Dawood ﷺ narrates in his sunan from Abdullah
ibn Umar.
The Prophet ﷺ says, مَنْ تَشَبَّهَ بِقَوْمٍ فَهُوَ
مِنْهُمْ Whoever emulates a people becomes one of
them.
And also, we see that the clothing of
the Prophet ﷺ was preserved.
So in the shama'il of Imam al
-Tirmidhi ﷺ, he narrates a hadith from Umm
Salama ﷺ.
She says that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ
preferred wearing the qameez from all of his
clothing.
What is the qameez?
Al-Munawi ﷺ has a book called Fayd
al-Qadir.
And he basically writes a commentary, multiple volumes,
writes a commentary on the ahadith gathered by
Imam Suyuti ﷺ in al-Jama' al-Sabeer.
So al-Munawi describes the qameez of the
Prophet ﷺ as a long upper garment that
reaches below the knees and above the ankles.
So this was the sunnah of the Prophet
ﷺ.
And one of the greatest muhaddithun of our
era, of our time, Mawlana Fazlur Rahman Al
-Azami, who is a muhaddith, a hadith scholar
in South Africa, he says that the preference
for this type of clothing is due to
its modesty.
So this is why the Prophet ﷺ wore
this kind of clothing.
So this is the legal rationale.
This is the legal backdrop behind the fatwas.
So Mufti Kifayatullah, who was the Grand Mufti
of India, what did he write?
He wrote a fatwa in which he says
that everything from British hair, you know, like
hair fashion, hat, coat, pants is enough for
tashabbuh.
The tashabbuh is the term found in hadith,
emulation of others, right?
Imitation.
Referring to the principle of impermissibility of imitating
non-Muslims.
But the ruling of imitation is only if
the viewer seeing it falls into the confusion
that this person is a member of that
people.
So now to apply this fatwa, just so
someone doesn't misunderstand, it's not haram to wear
a shirt today, right?
Why?
Because everyone wears it, right?
It's not haram to wear it.
And preferably you want to wear the sunnah
of the Prophet ﷺ.
You want to wear a thawb because that's
what the Prophet ﷺ wore.
It's not haram today.
However, at that time they considered it haram.
Why?
Because nobody wore this.
Who wore this?
Only the British.
Therefore, if you are doing it, you're only
copying and you're emulating the British.
So that was the basis for their fatwa.
Qari Tayyib ﷺ wrote an entire book.
It's called At-Tashabbuh Fil-Islam.
And the beautiful stuff he wrote in there.
And today I want to go through this
passage.
This is a statement of Amr ibn Khattab
رضي الله عنه.
So there were Muslims in Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan, as we know, was not originally Muslim,
right?
Muslims, you know, migrated there, moved there.
So majority of the people were non-Muslims.
There was a fear that the Muslims of
Azerbaijan would start maybe copying the non-Muslims.
Does that make sense?
You see what's happening?
Azerbaijan is a modern-day country.
Back in the days, it was known as
Mawrana.
So when Muslims moved there, they were minorities.
So they're Muslim minorities.
There was a fear that they might, you
know, start wearing the clothes of the non
-Muslims.
They might start adopting their culture.
So what did he say?
He said something beautiful.
He says, therefore, wear the izan.
He says, فَتَّزِرُوا وَانْتَعِلُوا.
He says that, you know, start wearing the
izan.
Izan is lungi, right?
He's telling the Muslims there, wear lungi, wear
shoes.
Put on khufz, khufz, leather socks.
And abandon pants.
Not because it's haram to wear pants.
It's because the Arabs, they were used to
wearing those lungis, right?
And then he says, adopt the attire of
your father Ismail.
And then he says, and beware of decadence
and the clothing of the non-Arab, right?
He says that, إِيَّاكُمْ وَاتَّنَعُوا وَزِيِّ الْعَجَلُ.
Like, be aware of becoming relaxed and adopting
the ways of, you know, non-Arabs.
And then he even says that, adopt the
ways of ma'ak.
He says, utilize the sun.
Because basically Arabs, they used to bathe in
like, you know, rivers and like springs.
They weren't used to like bathing houses.
This was a very like Roman and Persian
thing.
And a lot of Arabs, they started to
do that now.
They had like those bathing houses.
You guys know what I'm talking about, right?
Bathing houses.
Yes, no?
Have you ever seen like those Greek pictures
of naked dudes, naked guys going inside those
bathing houses?
So basically, a bunch of men used to
like, have these like swimming pools that they
all used to share.
And the Arabs were not used to that.
Arabs, they, number one, they had a sense
of subtle.
And then they used to, you know, use
like, they either used the Prophet ﷺ had
a container that he used to use for
his ursul.
And they used to go to the river
basically.
So he tells them to do that.
And then he says, adopt the ways of
Ma'ad.
Dress in coarse and old clothes, old cloth,
right?
And like, harsh cloth.
Ride *.
So again, Arabs were used to not having
saddles.
So he says, you know, don't start using
saddles because that's not the way of the
Arabs.
He says, practice archery.
And jump on your horses.
Jump on your horses means, you know how
we have like stirrups?
Like people climb on the stirrups and then
they get on the horse.
Arabs were used to just jumping on the
horse.
They were like rough and tough like that.
So the point of Umar ﷺ is not
that, oh, if you use the stirrup, this
is haram.
That's not his point.
He's saying, maintain your identity.
Maintain your identity.
Go back to your history.
See who your forefathers are.
See whose legacy you're carrying.
See who's sitting on your shoulders.
Like you, every single Muslim here, you're a
carrier of the tradition of Rasulullah ﷺ.
When people look at you, you are the
representatives of Rasulullah ﷺ.
You are representing the Sahaba.
You are representing none less than Abu Bakr
and Umar ﷺ.
Because Abu Bakr and Umar, they're not here
today.
So if people look at you, they're like,
oh, this is what Islam teaches.
This is an Islamic identity.
So that was the point of Umar ﷺ.
Qari Tayyib ﷺ, he quotes this in his
book.
And the second thing, so remember we talked
about three things, right?
Number one, we talked about imposition of education.
Number two, sartorial imposition or imposition of clothing.
Number three, imposition of language.
So through these fatwas, they took care of
clothing, right?
They also had another fatwa that I haven't
put here.
A few of the Indian scholars, one of
them, Ali Tanvi and others as well.
They wrote fatwas about learning English.
Some of them forbade learning English unless it
was used for a good purpose.
So they talked about the extrinsic harms of
learning English.
It doesn't mean that you shouldn't learn English.
You see, I'm talking English with you, so
we're good here.
But I'm talking about at that time, right?
And basically their point was resistance.
These guys are the British, the colonial forces
are forcing it upon you.
You must resist that.
So the second way that they resisted all
of this was the inception of the Deoband
Seminary.
So this was founded in 1866 in the
courtyard of the Chatta Mosque in Deoband, UP.
UP is Uttar Pradesh for whoever is from
India.
And basically it started very simple.
It was one teacher and one student, just
one teacher and one student.
And they initiated this madrasa movement.
What was the purpose of this madrasa?
That we're going to create a group of
people that are going to decolonize.
They're going to learn their identity.
Because remember, if you have knowledge, you know
who you are.
If you don't have knowledge, you don't know
who you are.
True or no?
Like if a person, mashallah, you know, he
has a PhD in computer science.
He can tell you about like the ethics
of coding.
Like white hat and black hat hacking, for
example, ethical and unethical hacking.
But this person cannot tell you a single
thing about the sahaba radiyallahu anhu.
Who is the, you know, the children?
Who are the children of the Prophet ﷺ?
Who is the family of the Prophet ﷺ?
You know, who are the sahaba of the
Prophet ﷺ?
He can't tell you about their history.
Then this person lacks an identity.
Does that make sense?
If somebody asks what's their identity, you have
to say he's a computer scientist.
Right?
Very hardly he's a Muslim.
So knowledge develops identity.
And so because of that, they wanted to
create a class of people that would, number
one, learn their tradition, learn their identity, and
then they would implement it and then teach
it to other people.
And so they created, you know, many many
ulama like this.
Right?
And it started with one teacher and one
student.
But subhanAllah, if you actually look at it
today, there's madrasas, there are sister institutes of
the seminary at Dawbah all over the world.
SubhanAllah.
If you go to Malaysia, there's, in the
Indian subcontinent alone, there's hundreds, there's hundreds of
madrasas of English.
And each of those madrasas are producing, you
know, thousands of scholars.
And so the British came and their mission
was, we're going to colonize you, we're going
to erase your identity.
The ulama of the Indian subcontinent, by this
movement, now there's madrasas in England.
There's madrasas in England, in Bury, in Dewsbury,
in Leicester.
There's countless madrasas there and they're producing, you
know, ulama, they're producing alimas, they're producing many
ulama that further go to university.
And ourselves, we're some of those examples that
we've studied through, you know, seminaries that are
affiliated with this seminary.
And, you know, further studied, you know, Mawlana
Shaqeel, mashaAllah, he studied in the City College
of New York, right, Mawlana Asadullah at GSU.
I believe myself at Columbia University.
So many, many ulama like that with their
identity, you know, and the idea is that
they go to communities and they teach the
local people about their identities.
They teach the local people about their histories.
They teach the local people about their tradition
and what was their language.
What was, you know, the way of the
sahaba radiyallahu anhu?
What was the way of Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi
wa sallam?
And we have thousands of madaris and, you
know, ulama that have been produced through this.
So their response to educational colonialism or educational
imperialism is that we're going to have our
own education system.
Number two, for sanatorial imperialism, as you can
see, I don't know if you guys can
see, but you can see actually all of
the students and teachers standing there, they're all
wearing white clothes that are the sunnah of
the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam.
The favorite, Imam Tirmidhi Rahman mentioned that the
favorite cloth, the color of the cloth of
the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam was white.
So they revived this tradition.
And then for linguistic imperialism, through the curriculum,
they taught people Urdu, they taught people Persian,
they taught people Arabic.
So the conclusion is what should we do?
This is a big question.
What, how, like this is nice, it's all
history.
We went through this case study, but now
what must we do?
And this is basically what my conclusion is,
that we have to adopt traditionalism for decolonization.
Number one, we have to have education systems.
We have to educate ourselves and our children.
Alhamdulillah, we have so many professionals in America,
so many Muslim professionals.
Some of the top surgeons, some of the
top eye doctors, ophthalmologists are Muslim.
Some of the top scientists are Muslim.
Alhamdulillah, this is amazing.
If you go to the IT sector, you'll
find so many Muslims, right?
Alhamdulillah, this is the ni'mah of Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala.
But those professionals must also educate themselves in
Islam.
So therefore, we must create these part-time
programs, these weekend programs, so that people that
are busy at work, people that are in
colleges, people that are in high schools, they
need to come and educate themselves on their
Islamic identity.
When you have this Islamic education, your worldview
will start to be shaped.
Now you know what your epistemology is.
Now you know what your ontology and metaphysics
are.
Now you know what ethics you follow.
Now you know what are the proofs for
the existence of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.
And so on and so forth.
Now you're educated, so your worldview is formed.
And when you have that worldview, you apply
it.
And people see you.
They see, mashaAllah, Muslim, right?
They're wearing Islamic clothing.
They're speaking Arabic, and so on and so
forth.
And lastly, this shapes our identity.
And people will recognize us as Muslims.
And we will be able to, you know,
identify ourselves with confidence that we're Muslims.
If anyone has any questions regarding the presentation,
inshaAllah, please do ask your questions.
Okay, so inshaAllah we can get ready for
wudu.
If you have any questions, you know, I
saw many people that are taking pictures and
taking notes.
So if you have any questions, I'll be
here inshaAllah.
Feel free to contact me after Salatul Aisha.
And feel free to also send your questions
here.
If anybody has an urgent question, we'll answer
it inshaAllah.
Jazakumullah khair for your attendance.
For all the people that are here today.
Yes.
It's a very good question.
So basically, the donkeys that we have today,
they're like attached, right?
They had one cloth that they would tie.
So there was this natural opening in between.
So they had a way to cover their
satr and also wear that.
And also on the other hand, also you
can find that their lungis were also very
wide.
So even if they didn't have this opening
in between, it was wide enough that it's
like my foot.
I can ride my motorcycle.
I ride a motorcycle with my foot on.
It's wide enough that you can actually sit
comfortably.
So that's a very good question.
Jazakumullah.
Okay, inshaAllah.
We'll wrap it up.
SubhanakAllah wa bihamdik.
Wa nashhadu an la ilaha illa Allah wa
astaghfirullah wa atubu ilayh.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.
How did you know that I'm here?
Very good answer.
I was wondering, where did you educate?
Columbia?
Where did you study there?
Philosophy.