Tom Facchine – Current Islamic Political Engagement
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
Happy to be a stand in for the
sheikh, not Sheikh Mohammed Shanaeid, this week.
He asked me on the spur of the
moment, so we apologize for the short,
runway in the short amount of time in
which this
particular lecture was advertised.
But
everything happens by by
the will of Allah
and the timing couldn't be better. A lot
of people have been asking me and specifically,
and I'm sure you're talking about it over
coffee in your homes and in the masjids,
about what
the Muslim strategy should be
when it comes to the elections coming up,
what should be our attitude and our strategy
towards building power locally.
It's a huge topic. It's a huge topic
and one that because of the events in
the aftermath of October 7th,
we have been thinking, I think it's all
it's as if someone has turned the light
on,
the things that maybe we
weren't considering before,
things are now up for consideration.
And I'd like to start today's presentation, and
the title of this presentation is, Islamic political
engagement.
And it's just something I've been I've been
writing about for the last 10 months. I've
actually got 85 pages of unpublished written work
that's supposed to come out for Yaqeena's student,
I think first in sort of segments and
then eventually into a book,
if Allah wills.
But I'm gonna share with you just a
couple very, very short anecdotes just from this
week.
In fact, just from the last 3 days
that demonstrate the need for sophisticated
thinking on this front.
I received an email
just a couple of days ago
from a bunch of brothers who are in
a place where I'm about to travel in
the next few months.
And they let me know about a situation
where there was a young brother in his
twenties
that
was convicted of material support for terrorism
in
the mid 2000 tens.
In the mid 2000 tens,
he got caught up with,
some things with,
and he actually gave money to someone who
went to go fight.
And he came back to the US. He
himself did not go fight, and now he
is serving over 10 years in prison
for what he did.
Now the interesting thing about this story
is that the prosecutor
that he was initially sentenced to, I think,
18 months.
And the prosecutor
who appealed his ruling
multiple times, not just once,
was a Muslim
and appealed and appealed and appealed until he
got over 10 years in prison.
I'm just gonna leave that dangling. We're gonna
talk about we're we're gonna go to another
anecdote.
Not too far from here,
there was someone I know very, very dearly
who was involved with fundraising,
And some of the more wealthy
community members
are giving 1,000,000
of dollars
to political action committees
on both the Republican and the Democrat side,
thinking that they're doing Dawah to these organizations.
When in reality, these organizations are playing them
for their money.
Absolutely no strategy whatsoever.
So I wanna give you these almost, like,
3 characters. I just threw out 3 characters.
You've got the young, passionate, idealist
guy who gets mixed up in something, you
know, some sort of, like, quixotic
quest for, you know,
swords and steeds and things like that, ends
up with over 10 years in prison.
You've got the careerist,
the person who's got political aspirations, who's, an
attorney somewhere, who throws the book at this
kid
in order to sort of advance his career.
And then you've got the, you know,
your handful of of rich and wealthy people
who have no idea what to do with
their money in a way that creates power
for the Muslims.
Now this is a perfect cross section of
where we're at
and the need
for better thinking
when it comes to Islamic political engagement.
Neither of these three characters
are acting strategically
or in a principled manner that one could
say that this reflects,
a truly Islamic
attitude towards
building political power for the Ummah.
And hopefully, we hope in this very, very
short time that we have to talk, we
hope that we will go over some things.
Maybe this is not exactly what you expect.
Maybe you expect me to begin talking about
Green Party and this and that and a
third. We're gonna get there towards the end.
But if you don't get the foundation right,
okay, you will not really move the needle
when it comes to not just this election
that's in front of us, but we're talking
about the next 10, 20 years
of Muslim life in the United States.
And I'd like to briefly remind, you know,
I'll try to leave as much time as
possible for questions. I know people are gonna
have a lot of questions for this, especially,
so if you're able to keep them in
mind. And for the sisters, I don't know
if one of you has a piece of
paper. You can write down, questions or collect
the questions from the sisters' side, and we
can make sure that we give you a
fair shot as well.
The starting point
that I would like to begin with, and
and I think that is essential that we
begin with,
is to recognize
our collective
failure.
And I say that with complete
solemnity
and,
seriousness,
That whatever we have done
politically
as a Muslim community
for the last 20 years, the last 30
years, the last 40 years, whatever we did,
it was not enough to stop the genocide
in Gaza.
Whether you take the figure of 40,000,
which is the, you know, official Gaza Health
Industry, or you take the Lancet figure of
a 186,000
or more,
brothers and sisters, which the prophet told us
that their honor is more sacred than the
Kaaba,
that whatever we did,
it didn't stop it.
Now if we lived in Egypt or if
we lived in Bangladesh or if we lived
in other places of the of the world,
we could have maybe
an easier excuse. You know, it's not Bangladeshi
bullets
that are ending up in the skulls of
children
in Khan Yunus.
It's not,
Egyptian AI
that is hacking into WhatsApp
and
tapping off
Israeli intelligence as to the movements of people
in Gaza. All of those things come from
the land in which you and I live.
All of those things. Every single bullet,
bomb, airplane, ship, tank, cargo vehicle comes from
this country that you live in. And most
of you are citizens in, and most of
you have a vote in, and most of
you pay taxes in.
Right?
So is our responsibility
more or less
than the rest of the ummah? I think
it's more.
I think it's much much more. If the
prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam
compared the ummah to one body,
the imagery might go like this.
That if the heart of the ummah is
Gaza and firlstein,
then there is someone
stabbing
the heart of this ummah.
And we are the right hand.
And we are failing
to prevent
that person with the weapon
from stabbing the heart of our body.
We have a collective obligation.
A very serious
collective obligation in front of Allah
to do whatever
is possible
and principled
to stop that hand from stabbing our own
heart.
Now what's the folly involved? You know, I
always get somebody who asked the question, and
people start to chuckle and get nervous, but
I'm actually really happy when people ask this
question. Why don't we just go over overseas
and pick up arms?
That's always the question that some young guy
asks.
And I'm happy that they actually trust me
to ask that question,
because I tell them
that would be something that would be so
easy for the US government to deal with.
Because it has the laws on the books
to prevent that and to charge you and
to throw away the key and to do
whatever they want to do with you. It's
very easy to deal with that. And, of
course, it's not we don't believe that it's
licit in our religion, Austin. But even if
we imagine for a second that it was,
it's probably one of the stupidest things you
could do when it comes to actually moving
the needle and changing things for your brothers
and sisters in Islam,
in Gaza, and Palestine. Why again? Because it
all starts here.
It all starts here.
Again, every gun, every bullet, every bomb, every
boat, every ship, every tank, everything starts here.
Without even Netanyahu and all of the Israeli
politicians have said it explicitly. Without the United
States,
without it's like, on life support. Right? It's
like a tube, an IV that continuously
feeds and continuously feeds.
And some of us are dumb enough
to be tricked when they when they start
to say, we want a ceasefire,
when they're still feeding the tube.
And they're still giving $20,000,000,000
of weapons this week, and they'll give 20,000,000,000
more next week, and they'll keep on signing
and sending those weapons
and telling you that they want a ceasefire
and telling you that they want an agreement
or or some sort of exchange,
betting that you're gonna be dumb enough to
believe them.
That starts here.
So we have to really look in the
mirror and we have to say, what happened?
What did we do?
What did we fail to do? Whatever strategy
it was
that we had to build power in this
land, to have an influence
on the foreign policy of our own nation,
the United States of America,
we have to admit
that it categorically
and catastrophically
failed.
And why do I start with this? Because
there's some people that are still holding out.
There's some people that say, no. No. No.
We just keep on building the relationships.
We just keep on, you know
I call this Biryani diplomacy, by the way.
Which Biryani diplomacy is very nice for Dawah,
but we're not talking about Dawah. We're talking
about politics.
And Siessa
is an entirely different thing than Dawa.
And so
the idea that we will be able to
ingratiate ourselves
and be likable enough
and be charming enough and develop friendships and
let these people basically become our friends,
so that then they'll protect us or not
kill us,
that that has been proven completely
false.
Every single relationship that we had,
every single inroad that we thought that we
were making
has run dry. It has come up completely
useless.
It has not been able to be leveraged
for anything.
0.
So I'm insistent on this. And if people
disagree, we can disagree, and we can talk
about it in the time for questions.
But we can't move on
unless we accept our past failure
and come up with an entirely new strategy.
That when 911 happened, and this was a
pre social media world,
and this was a very scary time,
and basically the Zionists for decades
had been building out laws to criminalize
resistance in Palestine
and also to criminalize
Islam here,
at home,
there was sort of a
a challenge
and we kind of ducked that challenge.
And there were reasons for that and we're
not necessarily blaming.
We turned into relief work.
We turned to things that were safe.
Schools were getting shut down. People were getting
shipped back abroad and deported. Lots of things
were happening. It was a very scary time.
Completely understandable.
But we also have to reckon with the
fact that that response
also kicked the can down the road to
today.
That the issues that we did not rise
to meet
in the time after 9:11
have now come back around.
Maybe
you could argue
more difficult, maybe a little bit less difficult.
There's some things for us and some things
against us. But my point in bringing that
up is that they will continue to come
back around
until we actually solve them. They're not going
anywhere.
The Zionist aren't going to rest.
Evil will not rest and we'll talk about
that in a second.
They will continue trying to criminalize Islam
until you can't say
but they'll call you a terrorist.
And there's some interesting history with that with
the legislation but that's not for
our topic tonight.
So we have established a couple things. First
of all, our collective duty, our unique collective
duty. We are uniquely responsible
as Muslims in the United States of America
to help the Palestinians
and to help especially
the people of Gaza.
And that everything that we've been doing up
until now has failed, and we need to
come up with a new strategy,
and we need to
reanalyze the problem even.
Sometimes,
the problem with your strategy
is a result of the way that you
understand the problem.
Right?
If I'm sure how many doctors we have
in here? Probably a lot. Right? Raise your
hand if you're working the medical field in
some capacity.
Okay. So if you have a misdiagnosis.
Right? Somebody misdiagnoses
something.
They come in with a cough.
You say it's COVID. It's not. It's something
else
for those of you who believe in COVID.
We all believe in COVID. Right? There's no
holdouts.
20 24 guys, I mean, we can
you say it's COVID. It's something else. It's
walking pneumonia or whatever.
Your prescription for that thing is going to
be completely
different. And so sometimes you have to go
back to your diagnosis. What is it actually
that we're trying to solve?
What is it that we're trying to overcome?
What's the anatomy of it? What's the nature
of the problem?
If we misunderstand the problem, then our solutions
will also fall short,
Which is why
I have a bold proposition.
I believe that only
Islam can truly save Palestine.
I believe that only Islam can truly stay
save Palestine. And that's something of a slogan,
and that's difficult because now we have to
get past
the level of slogans. What I mean by
this is that
I went to these big marches
that were held in Washington DC. I'm sure
many of you did as well. I think
there was one in November. There was another
one maybe January, February, sometime in the winter.
There was another one that happened more recently.
And I remember, I think someone from the
Palestinian feminist collective, that group, was on stage
and had the mic and, you know, these
things are put together mostly by secularists, mostly
by Answer Coalition and these types of groups.
And,
you know, she was screaming at the top
of her lungs,
we want a secular Palestinian state.
And I thought, like, that's kind of interesting
to say. Like, I wonder I wonder if
there are other people here that that disagree
with that. I wonder what the role of
Islam
is
in a in the future of Palestine. Just
a thought.
And then later, I had an interview with,
doctor Anas Atikriti from the UK, and you
can look this up on Yaqeen Institute. He
was on our our program.
And he made this point, he said, you
know,
we have to be careful because sometimes
the language that we're fed from outside
our own communities
doesn't reflect our values,
and it leads to other problems.
Because and he said it and he was
pretty he was fairly provocative. He said, what
good has we don't just want a state
in Palestine.
He said, what good has a state done
in Egypt?
What good has a state done Jordan?
What good has a state done the Emirates?
And he had a point.
He had a point that if we don't
take care to build something that is going
to be resistant
to different types of hegemony, different types of
power, different types of encroachment and destabilization,
then we'll get the same situation in Palestine
that we have in Egypt. We'll get a
corrupt dictator ruling over it
that's subservient to Western interests,
selling out the people on the ground, squashing
Islam, all these sorts of things.
That being said, we have to keep in
mind,
we have to keep divine guidance front and
center,
which is the entire point of this writing
in this lecture, that divine guidance has to
be front and center. It's not simply
an issue of social justice. Right? Social justice
is a term that many people in the
activist space use.
It conveniently
makes the divine
optional.
Society is not something that necessarily
has to have a god involved.
Nor are these things
simply an issue of settler colonialism, another sort
of, you know, frame and lens through which
to look at this. Of course, there are
dimensions that that's true,
but there's more than that that's going on,
especially for a committed Muslim.
That at the bottom of this thing,
at the bottom
the issue,
the problem
is shar,
is evil.
And that this is one of the greatest
manifestations
of evil
in our time. We can also say, monkar.
These types of descriptions and these types of
of concepts
that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala gave to us,
that exist in our own tradition, that weren't
handed to us by some sort of political
theorist, or some social theorist or somebody
who doesn't have our values, doesn't share our
motivations.
Now
why is this significant? What's the difference between
someone who looks at this issue and says,
no. This is an issue of human rights.
Right?
Versus, actually, this is an issue of good
versus evil.
There's a lot of consequences to that difference.
The person who looks at it at just
that this is an issue of human rights,
we're not saying it's not about human rights.
That has a dimension to it, but it's
not exclusively about human rights. Because,
institutions we have across the world that are
supposed to be the enforcers of these human
rights.
What have they done for Palestine?
Are Palestinians considered human
within
the
ecosystem of the international
legal order?
Our Muslims is the turbaned,
bearded Muslim man,
considered a full human
according to these ways of looking at the
world.
Or
are they the ones who are the first
ones to go? This is like a horror
movie. You know, they say the black guy
is always the first guy to get killed.
That's how it happens in Hollywood.
Right? Within these discourses,
the bearded turbaned Arab man is the first
one
to be bombed, to be droned.
So how far can human rights get us?
How far can this discourse get us
if it doesn't address
the difference in what we think is a
human being and what other people think is
a human being? Other people don't recognize divine
rights. Other people don't recognize that Palestine is
a waqf, was made a waqf by Omar
Ibn Khattab, and that it's impermissible to sell
it. It's impermissible to give it up. It's
impermissible to
normalize
and to allow the Zionist to take it
over.
And how we make sense of this problem
is very, very important.
And that's not to say again that this
is an exclusively Islamic issue. There are people
who are human rights activists. You're
welcome. You can come and join and we'll
all try to do what we can for
Palestine together. But the problem is
the problem is that as many people who
are active in the activist space are well
aware,
that many people are so scared
of the post 911
war on terror sort of situation
and climate,
that they're very uncomfortable
allowing it to also have an Islamic dimension.
They're very uncomfortable
with people coming to a protest and saying
or
saying
They're very uncomfortable
with Muslims who are clearly practicing Muslims
praying at a protest.
Here locally, we don't see that. We've I
think it's better here in the Lehigh Valley
than in many many other places across the
nation.
But in many other places across the nation,
there is a push to silence this part
of the movement to help Palestine.
That's right. The values that are shared by
the overwhelming majority of Palestinians, not all of
them, but the overwhelming majority of Palestinians
are often silenced and suffocated
here
in the place where
we attempt to,
do what we can.
So we have to keep Islam front and
center. If you and I are going to
do what we can, we have to be
acting from our Islam and through our Islam.
That human rights have failed. Let's be honest.
The UN is a joke. Let's be honest.
The entire international
liberal order that existed after World War 2
has also failed. And so what do we
have to lose
by looking at this through a more Islamic
lens? That Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala calls us
to struggle.
And yes, the word for struggle is jihad.
And no, jihad is not limited to military
actions.
If you go into any book of, the
definition of jihad is,
as giving honor to the religion.
And giving honor to the religion is something
that there's many many ways to do it.
Giving the in public is.
Right? Representing in a principled way, your faith
is This is something that we shouldn't shy
away from. Even though we know that there
are people who want to criminalize this word,
that again, if we allow them to, then
they will soon be criminalizing
even more basic things to our faith than
that.
If we look at it through an Islamic
lens,
then we have to
head back to our sources
with a different type of lens, a different
type of eye. What are we looking for?
We're looking through the Quran, we're looking through
the seerah, we're looking through the sunnah of
the Prophet
with different eyes.
What does the Quran have to say about
politics?
What does the Prophet
have to teach us about politics?
What does the Sirah
of the Prophet
have to teach us about politics?
A lot.
A huge amount.
And unfortunately,
this is something we are very very weak
in and undeveloped in.
Where are the books
that explain
the
Siasi dimension or the political dimension of the
Siira?
In English, no less. They're very very few
and far between.
So we have a lot of work to
do. One of the things that we find
when we return to our sources and we
look at these sorts of things is that
Allah condemns
weakness
from our ummah.
Weakness is not a praise worthy character whatsoever.
Allah
condemns weakness
both implicitly
and explicitly.
Implicitly,
in the story of Lut,
when Lut alaihis salaam
is confronting
sort of his people and his people are
busting down the door to try to get
at the angels who are disguised as his
guests, what does he say?
He says if only I had against you
some sort of power
or could take refuge in a strong support.
Meaning that if Lut alaihi salaam had access
to power, he would have used his power
to stop the monkar,
to stop the shahr, to stop the evil
that was going on.
That this weakness
is
not a good thing.
We also have an ayah
in Surah Al Imran where Allah
blames
people who claim that they cannot leave an
oppressive situation, but in reality they can.
It's almost a counter intuitive
to read. Because normally, especially in our modern
sort of lens, we're used to
immediately sympathizing with the oppressed and that's good.
But in this particular ayah, Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala tells us that the angels basically called
them out and said, no. You have the
opportunity.
You had the ability and you failed to
use your ability.
And so actually, you are you are blame
worthy.
Indeed, this is the English translation. Indeed, those
whom the angels taken death while wronging themselves,
the angels will say, in what condition were
you? We they will say, we were oppressed
in the land.
The angels will say, was not the earth
of Allah spacious enough for you to emigrate
therein?
For those that refuge is *, and evil
it is as a destination.
Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala also explicitly condemns weakness
when he says, do not weaken and do
not grieve while you are superior if you
are true believers.
And he also says do not weaken in
the pursuit of the enemy. So we see
that weakness, this idea that we're just to
be absolutely
meek,
and, you know, if we're just able to
completely roll over and play dead that we'll
be safe
is not something that we find in the
Quran.
It's not something that we find in Islam.
Now the corollary of this
is that if weakness is blameworthy,
then power
is an obligation.
Building power for your community is actually an
Islamic obligation. Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says,
Prepare for them, the enemies of Islam, the
people that want to see you dead.
And Allah has shown us many of them
in the last 10 months.
Prepare for them what you can of power.
And he leaves power,
nakira.
He leaves it
undisclosed. He gives some examples after it, but
they're not exhaustive.
Anything that gives power to the Muslims in
order to establish a type of deterrence
to stop Muslims from being harmed is something
that is necessary for us to do.
That could be electoral,
that could be financial,
that could be organizational,
that could be institutional. There's many, many, many
things, especially in the United States of America
where we have many freedoms that we don't
have in other places.
The avenues that are open to us to
actually build collective power
are much more numerous
than what you would find in many places
in the Muslim world, where you even have
this conversation and we're all going to jail.
Right?
So
what type of
blame is it on us
that if you the average person in Jordan
or the average person in the West Bank
or the average person in Egypt, what would
they do
for the freedoms that you and I have?
The abilities to affect things that you and
I have.
And here we are
not using them or not using them intelligently.
A'ib.
This is a shame and it's something that
we have to fix.
The Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam told us
that there will come a day where this
weakness would overtake us, and that the weakness
is
rooted in a spiritual malfunction,
or a spiritual disease, or a spiritual shortcoming.
He said, Alayhi Salatu Salam, the people will
soon summon one another to attack you as
people.
When in eating, invite others to share in
a dish. Somebody present asked, will that be
because we're few
at that time? He said, alayhis salatu salam,
No. You will be numerous at that time.
But you will be as scum and rubbish
like that carried down by the by the
waves or by the torrent. Like the the
stuff on top of the water.
And Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala will take fear
of you
from the hearts of your enemy,
and will put in your hearts fear of
your enemies.
Somebody asked,
what is this wahm? Like what is the
thing that is afflicting us? The prophet called
it wahm and the companion asked, what is
it? And the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam
replied, love of this world
and dislike of death.
That
the long and short of it is that
we're not prepared to sacrifice.
We're too attached to the dunya.
We're too afraid to do what needs to
be done. Pooling our money, pooling our talents,
pooling our our resources
to actually build something that is a counterweight
that might affect the foreign policy of the
land in which we live.
What's stopping us
other than ourselves? What have we seen the
last 10 months?
Are the Zionists more numerous than the Muslims?
Not really.
Many people they say, APAC has so much
money, we'll never be able to raise that
much money. I guarantee you we have that
much money in the Muslim community first of
all. But even if it weren't true,
doesn't it take much more money to prop
up falsehood
than it does to establish the truth?
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala goes to the Quran
and I definitely recommend people to review
chapters such as Surat Al Anfal and Surat
Al Maidah and Surat Al Tawbah. You'll find
time and time again these verses where Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala is talking about the battles.
One of the most dangerous things to the
Muslims
is the fear
and the hypocrisy that's in the hearts of
the Muslims themselves. He doesn't talk about the
fear fearing the enemy. He doesn't talk and
the Muslims were going up against forces that
were 3 times bigger than them, 5 times
bigger than them, 10 times bigger than them.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala doesn't really talk much
about that. He talks about the fear and
the cowardice
and the attachment to the dunya that's in
the heart of the Muslims.
In fact, he says,
so you see those in whose hearts is
disease hastening to associate
with those who deny. And their justification for
doing this
is saying we're afraid that a misfortune may
strike us.
So basically you have a situation where there
are Muslims that are throwing in their lot.
Imagine they're working for the Department of Defense.
Imagine they're working for the State Department. Imagine
that they're working for Lockheed Martin. Imagine they're
having these relationships and they're working on this
da'wah.
And what's their justification?
They say we're afraid that a misfortune may
strike us.
We're afraid that if we don't play the
game we're going to be criminalized. We're going
to do this. Allah says but perhaps Allah
will bring conquest or a decision from him
and they will become over what they did
regretful.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala tells us time and
time again that we are to fear none
above him. Subhanahu wa ta'ala.
And so as much as we might fear,
yes, a Trump presidency, or yes, sort of,
you know, the derailing of democracy, or yes,
being criminalized,
or yes, being accused of being terrorists. I
was just accused of being a terrorist last
week. This guy that was on Fox News,
Ryan Morrow,
wrote a a hit piece against me and
Omar Suleiman saying that we're terrorists supporters.
Yeah. Do I do I have dreams
at night in which I'm being tortured? Yes,
I do.
Is there fear? Yes, there is. But my
fear for Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is greater.
My fear that the prophet salallahu alaihi wasallam
would reject me at the haud
because I failed to help my brothers and
sisters in Palestine.
That I would get to him alaihis salatu
wa salam
and I lived in comfort and I lived
in opportunity and I had freedoms and I
had chances and I didn't take them
because I was afraid.
And the prophet salallahu alaihi wasallam would turn
me away and say I have nothing to
do with you. I fear that more and
you should fear that more
than whatever they can do to you in
this dunya.
Fear
is worship of the heart
and nothing
should be feared more than Allah subhanahu wa
ta'ala.
And if we are failing in a collective
obligation,
Farul Kifaiyah, which is protecting our brothers and
sisters and building this type of power so
that we might protect our brothers and sisters,
then
all of us are responsible.
So building power is a must. It's not
a luxury. It's something that absolutely
has to happen.
That
we will not be able to do anything,
or move the needle, or change anything in
this country if we are not able to
build some type of power. I'm trying to
skip over things to get to I know
you guys are
wanting another juicy parts about the election and
stuff like this.
But power is built like a pyramid. One
of the mistakes that the Muslim community has
made
has 2 parts to it.
One, is to get tricked by identity politics.
They will always find one of us to
trick one of us. Always.
This is always the way. Even in the
Quran,
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala tells us a story
of
Qarun.
Do you know who Qarun was?
Ibn 'Ami Musa Alaihi Salaam. Ibn Kathir Raheem
Allah, he says that Qarun was the first
cousin of Musa
Alaihi Salaam.
And that
Firaun specifically used Qarun, gave him all this
money, bought him.
Qarun's a collaborator.
Right? He's the colonial enforcer. He's the overseer.
He's the
the supervisor
in order to keep Bani Israel down.
When the whip cracks,
Qarun's on the other side of it not
Firaun. Firaun keeps his hands clean.
It's Qarun who is the one who holds
the whip. Isn't that how it happens with
us?
Yes. That is how it happens with us
as well. They will find the Muslim Zionist
over here. They will find the Muslim who
has ambition over here. The Muslim who's attracted
to the dunya or addicted to the dunya
over here, they will pay them a handsome
salary. They will give them a speaking tour.
They will give them a book, you know,
to write. They'll take care of everything.
And our response
has to be more strategic and more principled
than that. Because if we take one person
and throw them up, let's say, to the
federal level,
what are we thinking that that person is
accountable to?
Let's imagine we take someone here.
I take Abdullah.
Pennsylvania's finest.
Abdullah is going to be
our representative. We found we have enough population
in this district. We're gonna all get, you
know, get out the vote. We're gonna get
Abdullah up to the federal level. Masha'Allah.
Here comes the Democratic party. I said, Well
you're gonna need money for your campaign, Abdullah.
This Muslim community of yours, how much are
they gonna pay you? Oh, maybe we scraped
together. We're giving our money all in relief.
Right? All relief. Muslims give their money to
relief which is
It's not bad
but we're not stopping what causes the the
need for relief in the first place.
When your own country
We're talking about not outside of natural disasters
here. Outside of natural disasters, our country's foreign
policy creates the need for relief.
And we think we're just going to give
money in relief.
So the Democratic party comes to Abdullah and
say, you know, your community is giving all
this money to relief, but I see they
haven't really given much to you. Your, you
know, average congressional campaign probably costs between $60,000
and $100,000.
Here's a $100,000.
Who do you think he's accountable to?
Is he accountable to us?
No.
He's accountable to the Democratic Party. He has
to dance by their tune,
and he will.
If we don't have
an entire pyramid beneath Abdullah,
that we both support him,
he doesn't need support from anyone else,
and he's also accountable to us. You see
how that works?
That we have to make sure that we
build well, the first thing that we've done
is we fall and pray to identity politics.
They always how many people were celebrating Obama?
Admit it back in 2008.
Admit it. It's a safe space.
Yeah.
Cheer. We're Hussein.
I was in Turkey. I was in Turkiye
when Obama was elected. Every single Turk on
the street said, Hussein.
Wink wink.
Obama Muslim.
Obama Muslim. Wink wink. Everybody was saying that
in Turkey.
And then he had his speech that he
gave in Egypt. He gave a lot of
lip service that we thought we thought it
was fatmubin.
And then he started CVE.
And then he started droning.
And he was responsible for
countless deaths of Muslims across the Ummah, and
even assassinated American citizens abroad.
So we're tricked very easily by identity politics.
We have to look at principles and we
have to look at values more than we
look at identity. That's the first thing. And
the second thing is that we need to
be build power up as a base, as
a pyramid. You have to start locally. You
know, SubhanAllah,
when I was up in Utica,
the city council,
our district,
all you needed was 200 votes
to put someone on the city council. Very
easy for a masjid to do.
Even figuring out the number. What's the district?
What's the word? How many votes? What were
the history of the last three elections? How
much does it take? How much is it
gonna take?
It's very easy stuff. School boards. Nobody wanted
to be on school boards until LGBTQ came
along.
Then people started paying attention.
Usually,
if you hang around long enough and you
know enough people, these are easy positions to
get into.
How many opportunities like this have we had
that we haven't taken advantage of? And then
we wonder why we have no say. We
wonder why we have to run to this
person, the next person begging them
to not hurt us or to not force
our kids to learn x y or z
or etcetera.
But we haven't put in the work, and
we haven't built power slowly
from the ground up.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said
that Allah will not change the condition of
a people until they change what is in
themselves.
Very well known ayah.
Often
misinterpreted and misapplied.
Because it also has to be paired with
what the Prophet salallahu alaihi wa sallam said,
when he said, whoever among you sees an
evil, then let him change it with his
hand.
And if he cannot, then with his tongue.
And if he cannot, then with his heart.
And even that, that's the weakest of faith.
So the change is not just,
yes, you have to pray on time. Yes,
of course. Nobody disputes this. But you also
have to take the opportunities for change, the
asbaab that Allah Subha Wa Ta'ala has created.
If you know that the United States of
America
operates on being organized and being able to
get a lot of people to do the
same thing at the same time, and be
able to organize your money and apply it
in very strategic ways, then this is one
of the asbaab that Allah has created. This
is one of the means that he created
for you to take care of your community
and even save people abroad.
So then you have to you can't expect
a different result
if you did not change what you're doing.
We're running up in time. I'm trying to
be I'm trying to be brief and and
cut to the chase and I especially we're
gonna have a lot of questions, I know.
When we look at
all of the different
types okay. I'll talk about allyship and coalition
building, though I'll talk about it only just
a little bit because I have an article
out on that in Yaqeen Institute called, you
know,
I think it's called Avaza and Intersectionality or
something like that.
One of another one of our mistakes in
addition to being tricked by
identity politics, somebody that looks like us, has
our name, etcetera.
And thinking that we can just throw someone
to the top level before building a power
base beneath them is also
an over reliance
on
allies.
And what I mean by this is that
often
our what we have to offer as Muslims
and our perspective, our Islamic perspective gets completely
lost and completely swallowed and completely erased
when we step into these quote unquote alliances.
Many of these so called allies
only like you
if you leave part of your deen behind.
And that's just true.
Many of them are not really comfortable
with
a believing Muslim.
They want the cute Muslim. Islam cute. They
want the
the the watered down Islam.
They want the progressive
Islam.
They're filled with anxieties about you, what you
really believe.
What do you really say about us when
you're in your masjids?
And up until this point, we have only
had a relationship
of
being
essentially
uncritical
of these people who are supposedly here to
help us.
To the point that
it doesn't seem like we're respected very much,
and it doesn't seem like we're allowed to
negotiate anything within this relationship.
So we will
keep quiet
when there is, just as an example,
a protest and out come the rainbow flags.
And then many people from the Mesi don't
wanna go. Why would I bring I wouldn't
bring my kids to a to a protest
when queers for Palestine is in the front
row.
Correct?
I don't know about you, I wouldn't.
But then there's other people, oh, they're our
allies. They do so much for us. They're
always
what are they really doing for us?
Is the genocide over
or is the genocide still going on?
We have to have
metrics
and criteria
by which we are able to judge
what's actually getting accomplished here.
We can turn out a 100000, 200000,
500000
people in Washington DC,
And at the end of the day, we
really just made a bunch of noise
and told invented.
Did we really achieve any objectives?
And even if people are coming from a
good place
that have very different values from us, and
we appreciate their solidarity,
are they helping us achieve our achieve our
goals?
Do we have the same goals?
Or are they even holding us back
from potentially
doing things in a different way that would
get our goals achieved?
When anybody
who's a conservative
looks at any pro Palestinian rally and they
say, oh, this is Antifa. Oh, this is
just the left. Oh, these are all the
Neo Marxists.
Allowing our movement to be so easily categorized
in this culture war, is that helping our
cause? Or is that potentially holding it back?
These are things that we really have to
think about.
And I'll I think I'll just wrap it
up real quick and then get the questions
so I know people are gonna wanna talk
about things.
The biggest threat,
the biggest threat that we have to achieving
our goals, to building power,
and to actually achieving change
are the unprincipled
people in our midst.
The people who
either
there are some people with without good intentions.
There are other people that have good intentions,
but they're just not strategic enough. I'll give
you two examples.
K?
Example number 1
was a certain Pennsylvania based
Muslim group
who
the second
Kamala Harris
became the
assumed
nominee
before she named her vice president, came out
and endorsed her.
Okay?
This is an example of political illiteracy.
Why?
Because
politics works
by
having something that this other person wants.
And you hold on to that thing
to try to extract as much as you
can out of the other person,
and then exchange it for something real.
You don't give it up and then hope
to get something else in the future.
Right? That's essentially
bad politics and that's what was going on
here. Logic number 1,
school of thought number 1,
if we support them first
they'll see how much indebted to to us
they are
and then they'll come around and they'll do
something for us later. Never happened.
It's never happened. It doesn't happen that way.
Example number 2 was the abandon Biden campaign.
The abandon Biden campaign
said we are going to make you lose,
Democratic party, no matter what.
Okay?
Things were stirring for a while.
Biden has his first debate, tanks it.
All of a sudden, Biden's gone.
Okay?
The Democratic party does not want an open
convention, so they maneuver and they play all
their dirty tricks. I'm in a lot of
WhatsApp groups with with delegates. They play every
dirty trick in the book to make sure
it's a no contest for Harris.
The abandoned Biden says, okay, now we're abandoned
Harris.
Harris has two choices,
between Walls and between Shapiro.
Shapiro is probably a bit worse,
though neither neither of them are good. But
Shapiro is probably a bit worse.
The abandon Biden campaign continues to hold on
to its leverage.
Harris goes with walls,
hoping that the Muslims will be stupid enough
to think that he's actually pro Palestinian.
K?
We continue to hold on to our leverage.
We're still critiquing her. We're still protesting her
at the Democratic National Convention still going on
right now.
Now she has to start to pay lip
service. She's saying, well, we want a ceasefire
even though she's still sending money and she's
trying to play both sides. What I'm saying
is that when you hold on to your
leverage, you can keep someone moving.
You keep someone
on the defense. You keep pushing them and
pushing them and pushing them.
Some people within the abandon Biden campaign, they
wanted to endorse Jill Stein in May.
I told them, no. Don't do it.
Hold on as long as possible.
And then a secret between you and me,
Jill Stein came to abandon Biden
earlier this month
and told
abandon Biden, you can name our vice president.
No strings attached.
You can decide who our vice president is.
Someday I'll tell you that story in full
and how we drop the ball on that.
But see what holding on to your leverage
can do. When you hold on to your
leverage Anybody listen The way I give it
the example, everybody here we have connections with
with back home in some way shape or
form. If you go to the souqh,
if you go to the marketplace,
you don't start haggling
until you walk away from the table. If
you're not willing to walk away from the
table, you're not really haggling.
He's going to dictate his price. He's got
you.
This is politics.
Okay? And until we get this in our
heads, we will never ever ever start to
build power. And what's crazy is this is
actually
how the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam conducted politics
himself. Things that you probably never heard of
or if you've heard of them before you
never heard thought of them in that way.
Do you know what the Battle of Badr?
The prophet, the prophet, the alaihi wa sallam,
we know of the story about when they,
they reached the wells of Badr, and you
know, the whole thing around that. The prophet,
the alaihi wa sallam, did something very interesting.
He took one of the companions and they
walked away from the camp,
And they walked out of eyesight from the
camp,
and they ran into a Bedouin.
And the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, he wanted
to gather intelligence
as to where the enemy army was.
And so he asked the Bedouin, he said,
hey.
We heard that the, the Muslim army is
in the area. Is that true? Where are
they at?
He's acting as if he's not part of
them.
The prophet said,
alharbhuda.
That war is deception.
And so he's making it seem like he's
not part of the Muslim army. Why? Because
he wants to test this guy. Is he
going to tell him the truth or not?
The Bedouin says, yeah. Yeah. They just came
up and they're camped here and it's only
so far away and it was exactly correct.
It was exactly the correct location of the
army. So then the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa
sallam asked him where's the army of the
Quraysh?
And now he can trust the answer
because he tested him.
The savvy of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam.
The political savvy
is absolutely off the charts.
How he conducted himself for the Treaty of
Hudaybiyyah.
Making the Quraysh people misinterpret the Treaty of
Hudaybiyyah
may be worse than anything in the Surah.
They imagine that the tree of Hudaybiyyah is
about compromise. It's not at all about compromise.
The tree of Hudaybiyyah is about making your
enemy think that they're getting something.
When in reality you're getting everything.
Every single
shard, every single condition and stipulation of the
Treaty of Hudaybiyyah benefited the Muslims. Every single
one.
But on the outside it seemed to be
the opposite.
Right? One of the conditions okay. 10 years
no fighting.
Anybody can enter into any alliance that they
want.
If someone in Medina
apostates and wants to join the Quraysh, he's
allowed to go.
If someone in Medina Excuse me. In Mecca
converts to Islam, he's not allowed to join
up in Medina. Does this benefit the Muslims
or not? It benefits the Muslims.
Why would you want
an enemy within your own territory?
Get them out of there.
And won't you want someone behind enemy lines
when it's time to liberate Mecca? Of course,
you would.
The Quraysh thought they were getting away with
something. It was all on the benefit of
the Muslims. The prophet
was extremely
savvy politically. He knew exactly what he's doing
after Uhud.
The Muslims, some scholars say, we lost Uhud.
Some say it was a draw or something
like that. Anyway,
it was very dangerous.
The Quran start to retreat
in the desert.
Okay?
What was the first thing the Prophet sallallahu
alaihi wasallam did?
He gathered everybody and he said, Let's go
pursue them.
They're wounded. They're dying. They're weak.
But he did it because he wanted to
give them the perception that he had back
up.
Afraid that
they would change their minds, come back to
Medina and finish the job.
And that's exactly what happened.
The Quraysh stopped halfway.
They said, wait a second. Where are we
going? Why are we running away?
We can go back to Medina and finish
these guys. And then their scouts said, uh-oh.
Muhammad's coming with reinforcements. Let's get out of
here. And they ran back to Mecca.
All of it was a bluff.
The prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam understood how
politics works. People are not your friends.
This is the biggest lesson that muslims have
to learn.
People
are not your
friends.
Your only friends
in this dunya
are Allah
and the messenger alaihis salam
and the people of faith. That's it.
And we can do dawah to other people.
We smile. We give them khidma. We give
them service.
We give them our That's the time for
Biryani diplomacy when you're doing dawah. Bring them
into the masjid. Give them some food. You
know, make them see the beauty of Islam.
But when it comes to politics,
you have to understand
that no one
is your friend.
And that it's just about
power responding to power. And the actions of
the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam demonstrate that
he understood that perfectly well. So what should
the Muslims do in November?
ICP is a 501c3.
I cannot tell you who to vote for,
who not to vote for. However, I will
say this,
that the Muslim community
in 2024
is voting for 2028.
The Muslim community in 2024 is really voting
for 2028.
If there were a situation
in which
somebody Let's let's give this example.
Imagine you have
an
abusive spouse.
And that can go either way by the
way. There are spouses that the husband is
abusive, there there are marriages where the the
wife is abusive.
Imagine an abusive spouse.
Physical violence,
manipulation,
gaslighting, all these horrible things.
When do they start
actually listening to you?
If you say, you know, no matter what
you do I'm gonna run back to you.
Or I'm really afraid of another relationship
more than you so I guess you're you're
better than some other people out there.
Or you know I'm starting to reconsider. I'm
not quite committed.
Uncommitted, you could say.
How does that work?
That doesn't do anything.
The person knows that they have you. They
know that you will
push comes to shove, you will come running
back time and time again.
The only way to deal with an abusive
spouse
is to wait till they leave or kick
them out and change the locks,
and then they take you seriously.
And politics is all about being taken seriously.
Okay. There's so much more to talk about,
but I know that there's probably some burning
questions. So maybe we should we should have
some time for questions. Do we have a
floating mic? I don't know if the sisters
were able to write down anything.
Abdullah.