Minute with a Muslim #084 – Allah Made Us A Middle Nation

You know, lost pounds on the Koran described us Muslims as a median community or a middle path. And we've found in so many of the videos that we've done that that's true when it comes to the conception of who God is when it comes to esotericism versus esotericism. Right, the ritualistic nature, but yet the spirituality, all these sorts of things, Islam is a good middle, right? Not a contrived, middle, but a good middle way. And when it comes to individualism versus collectivism, and this is also true. So we live in an extremely individualistic time and place in North America 2022. And a lot of the sort of wisdom of the Koran or the wisdom of the last panel data is lost on

that individualistic mindset. I'll give a couple examples. People raise a fuss about inheritance law, right? Why do women get less than men? Well, first of all, that's wrong. Because it's not a blanket. Women get less than men. There are situations where women get more than men, if you have three or more daughters, they inherit two thirds is the largest fixed portion that you can receive. So daughters versus fathers or daughters versus uncles, there's lots of situations in which women inherit more than men. But what is the actual technical truth is that if there are brothers and sisters, they're all siblings, then the male siblings, right, the boys, the sons are going to

receive more than the daughters or the girls, their sisters. And so the individualist raises a fuss like this is not fair, right? We imagine we imagine this sort of situation where the son flies in from New York and the daughter flies in from California and they meet their parents have just passed away, and you give somebody cut someone a check over here and cut someone a check over there, and they go live their separate lives, if that's the relationship that we're imagining between the brother and sister, then it would seem to make sense that they should both get an equal share that they should be treated as individuals. But Allah subhanaw taala doesn't just treat us as individuals

and the *ty I was formed, not just treating us as individuals treating us as families, treating us as brothers and sisters, as parents as guardians, people with responsibilities, people with duties and so you wonder why somebody gets more than somebody else? That's because within the same system, guess what the brothers responsible for his sister financially, if something were to happen to her, God forbid health? Or she gets divorced? Or, you know, widowed, maybe her husband passes away? Who's going to take care of her if her parents aren't around? Is she supposed to just live as a single mom alone scraping by Allah subhanaw taala says, No, he has a responsibility. And so

because he has a responsibility, that responsibility is offset by a privilege. Yes, there are privileges and responsibilities. A lot of people within our individualistic time, they envy other people's privileges, and they don't envy other people's responsibilities. And the two have to go together, right? You don't get the privilege without the responsibility in a snap. Okay, so there's a lot of sort of things like this inheritance law is just one example where we look to things and we say, well, that doesn't make sense. But really, why doesn't it make sense is because our sensibilities have been skewed by individualism, and we think too much of ourselves as individuals,

as opposed to something that's more collective. Is there an extreme on the collectivist side? Yes, but we'll hold off on comment there until we live in a time where that's actually relevant.