Is It Discrimination or Affirmation

Understanding discrimination is a really important thing recently, there's a lot of legislation being adopted, you know, both nationally, but also informally when it comes to universities, colleges, right MSA is regarding discrimination, specifically discrimination based off of, you know, sort of newer concerns such as sexual identity and you know, gender identity and sexual orientation. But we really need a more robust understanding of what we mean, when we talk about discrimination, right? Discrimination can mean so many things. It's a very, very vague term. And the fear is, and it's a legitimate fear that the term discrimination is going to be wielded against us in order to

completely undermine everything that Islam is about, right. Discrimination should not be conflated with affirmation, okay, nobody has the right to expect everybody's going to affirm you in what you do, or what you believe. That's just facts. You know, that's, we wouldn't accept that with any other things. So, you know, what discrimination should mean specifically is that nobody is going to treat you in a sort of a way that's going to, you know, exclude you for things that you do and mistakes that you make. Okay, so people bring up the example all the time of like, well, some sins are treated asymmetrically. So if somebody drinks alcohol, then that's treated differently as somebody

who's you know, involved in homosexual relationships, you know, somebody comes into the masjid and they are known to drink alcohol, then they're going to be met with a lot more acceptance than somebody who is, you know, engaging in homosexual relationships. And that's true. However, what about when it comes to the person who's trying to normalize a certain belief? Does the person who's drinking alcohol believe that alcohol is halal, or is trying to tell everybody else that alcohol is halal, this is something that undermines our faith. And it's something that actually to be quite frank, as co founder, it's something that is, you know, a denial of something very, very important

in our faith. And so that's where the line should be drawn. Yes, if somebody is behaving sort of in a very an overly antagonistic way to somebody who is a sinner, but who admits that they're sinning, right, then that sort of discrimination, we need to work on that. And we need to make sure you know, you had at the time of the Prophet alayhi, salatu salam companion would come in and pee in MSG, right? And what was the way that the Prophet said, I said, I'm dealt with that person was to educate and to help and to uplift and enlighten. That's very, very different from a person who's trying to come in and change what our deen is, and change what Islam is, and say, well, Islam actually says

that this thing is permissible. That's not acceptable. In fact, you're undermining what Islam actually is, you're actually threatening this thing that everybody else believes in and everybody else sets their lives up, you know, around and informs you know, the direction that they're going in their lives. So we can't that's not something that first of all, to have an attitude of antagonism towards that is not discrimination and should not be conflated with discrimination. And that's a quite natural response. Right as Muslims we have the right to to believe in normative Islam and defend normative Islam. It can't be called discrimination when we defend normative Islam against

people who want to change it into something that it's not