Tom Facchine – Is There an American Islam

			Is there such a thing as American Islam? Yes or no Yes or No, because the Sharia is what it is. And
our Aqeedah is what it is right Islam is Islam. And there are some things in our faith that never
change and are never going to change. And we need to be crystal clear about what those things are.
Right? So if somebody says American Islam and they mean like taking some of those things and leaving
other things and changing this and changing that those fundamentals and we say no, there's no such
thing as American Islam, in that basic sense that these unchanging essentials, the prayer, the
belief in Allah belief in the in the messenger is a belief in the books, believing in the supremacy
		

			of the Koran and the supremacy of the Hadith when it comes to guiding our lives when it comes to
normative and normal interpretations of the Quran and the Sunnah, not just doing anything, you know,
reinterpreting it how I want in order to meet sort of modern expectations of what we think Justice
is, when I lost that justice is really something quite different than what I think it is. Now than
in that sense. There's no such thing that American Islam is phony, if that's what American Islam is,
but but in the shin, er, there are some things that are flexible, okay. And we give examples all the
time about clothes, for example. Okay, so the Hadith told us what to cover without necessarily
		

			telling us exactly the material and style of clothing that we have to use to cover that area. Right?
So there's sort of a principle if Allah azza wa jal said something, it's for a reason. And if he
didn't say something about a certain issue, then that's also for a reason. If the city gives you
clear guidance for something that's for a reason. And if it was silent on something, that's also for
a reason, because with some certain things, there's flexibility, there's flexibility in the mud, and
that's the dowry for the marriage contract. There's flexibility for certain customs, like when it
comes to marriage, this, this happens a lot, all these sorts of different things, there's certain
		

			things a lot more optimal, right? This is one of the principles of quietus Shediac. There are
situations where the local custom actually plays a role in the implementation of the shutter. Yeah,
right. And now, if that's what we mean, if we mean like that, that area, and this has rules, and
this is a discipline, this is not something that we can just say, Oh, well, this is just, you know,
command, you know, the culture is it's the culture, it's the custom, no, it has rules. It has
conditions. It's a discipline of knowledge. And there's a whole, you know, hundreds of years of
scholarly discussion about these things, but it exists, right. And so if that's what we're talking
		

			about, if we're talking about this small area that this Sherea actually has defined, that is
eligible for things to be changed and things to have customization and to reflect local custom. If
that's what we're talking about, we're talking about American Islam, then that's fine. If we're
talking about how to prioritize and select certain principles in order to address the specific
problems of this society. That's American Islam, and that's fine. But the problem is that people
play games and people say things and they mean something else. People some people say American
Islam, and really they mean assimilation. They mean getting rid of Islam, they mean secularizing
		

			Islam, they mean changing Islam, to the point where it's just like these other sort of faiths the
way that they've gone, these other religious communities where they've lost their guidance, and
they've abandoned it entirely, whether for politics or whether for social acceptance, or whether for
money or whatever reason, if that's what we mean when we say American Islam, then we say no, thank
you.