Minute with a Muslim #179 – Most Western People Yearn For A Connection

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a lot of people growing up in the West, you know, we have certain cultural baggage and it shapes how we feel about certain things and how we react to certain things. I was talking with somebody who's considering becoming a muslim. And they put really nice words to it, that things that I've felt and things that a lot of other people have felt, you know, you grow up with a sense of being fractured and cut off. And we live in sort of an very individualistic culture. And we even live in a very like anthropocentric culture where it's just like human beings, you and your thing, you and your life, whatever a lot of people feel starved for some type of unity and some type of type of connection,

even the connection not just with with the divine but connection with the created world, right, they feel cut off from the the animals and the trees and nature and things like that. So then once they get this illusion from sort of Western forms of religion, they often swing back the other extreme, and they go to the Far East, or they go to Buddhism and Taoism and Zen and these sorts of things, and it's super appealing to them. For a number of reasons. One of them is because a lot of what they find there has to do with complete unity, right? The Unity even of the Divine with the creation, something that's called monotheism, right? This idea that there is no distinction between the divine

and the world, like the Divine is in everything. And so people who have kind of been cut off from feeling this connection, all of a sudden, this is like an overcorrection. It's a flood of connection, like yes, you know, finally, everything is connected, everything is part of the same sort of divine force, and it feels so powerful to them, but they don't realize that this is an overcorrection. And that we can talk about unity and talk about being connected with the creation and not necessarily go to the extent to say that the Divine is everywhere in the creation or that the Divine is one in the creation or that the creation is one with the Divine and these sorts of

things, right. And it's important for us as Muslims because we need to clarify what we mean when we say to hate and when we say to hate and we say this is oneness, this is a unity but oneness of what Unity of what right, it's the Oneness of Allah subhanaw taala, meaning that the Divine is one, okay, it doesn't mean that the divine and the created are one or that everything that exists is one No, it means that there's the Creator. And then there's the creation, we still have a very dualistic nature or a dualistic conception of reality. And we can say that Allah's oneness may permeate the creation in other ways. We're not talking about his divine self, or, you know, God forbid a substance or

anything like that. But let's say Allah is love, right? Allah's Mercy allows purpose, right? His activity, his different attributes, they might permeate creation in a way that makes us feel this sort of unity of all creation, right? That's a very, very different thing from going to the extreme and saying that now that you know, everywhere, a lot is everywhere. And every everything is Allah. And we're talking about sort of the consequences. How does this play out and this person, they a lot of people who are into this sort of thing, they find it hard to submit themselves to a regular regime of worship, right? Well, why should I have to pray five times a day? Why can't I just pray

when I want to, and I understand these two problems as being very related. If you think that the Divine is everywhere, and the Divine is in you, and in me, and equally spread out, or whatever you want to say, then what is the motivation to submit myself to something outside of myself? What's the motivation to submit myself to an external authority or some some sort of external regime of worship that tells me know that you have to pray five times a day, this is what your prayer is going to look like, you have to say certain things, you have to do certain actions, right. It's very limited, and it's very ritualized, and it's very structured, right? That the motivation to submit to something

like that is sort of dented or damaged. When we conceptualize the divine as being everywhere the Divine is in me, the Divine is in you, okay, if the divine isn't really in myself, and why should I worship anything but myself, honestly, right? It's sort of a one of the consequences perhaps, of this sort of way of thinking things. So it's important to uphold the Tawheed of Allah, the Oneness of Allah, but also the Allah's distinctness right and separateness from his creation, that he's not part of the creation. He's not in the creation, in that literal sense that people take it to because it has many consequences, part of which and worship and others as well.