Tom Facchine – Muslim Votes Swing 2024
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
Shabbat shalom everybody, this is Yachin Institute's live
stream program every Wednesday night 8 p.m
New York time.
I'm your host Imam Tom Fekini, good to
be with you again this week.
We've had a jam-packed week, a lot
of emotions all over the place.
We're going to talk about the sham hearing
that happened this morning.
I was texting back and forth with Sheikh
Omar Suleiman while it was going on.
A very, very embarrassing stain on an already
besmirched American political system.
The trial about hate crimes against Muslims in
which the mother of Wadi Iq, the young
boy who was stabbed in Illinois, was present
and it was just a complete mockery of
anything resembling virtue and righteousness.
We'll talk about that.
We're going to talk about Biden's slow, meaningless
reaction to the martyrdom of Sister Aisha Noor,
who we featured last week.
The Houthis launched a supersonic missile at Israel
and hit.
Now that wasn't something that happened this last
week.
Former President Donald Trump was almost assassinated again,
right?
So we've got a lot to talk about.
Yet another person, another man in the United
States immolates himself, sets himself on fire outside
of the Israeli consulate in Boston.
And we've got polling, we've got data starting
to come in to show where the American
Muslim community is standing or where they're leaning
towards.
Come November, we've also got the normal segments
we have on Tafsir.
Today we're doing sort of the Masad.
And finally, personal development, how to make your
bad habits unattractive.
But first, you know what we do?
We go to the chat and we say
Salaam to the Ummah, we see who's with
us.
Now we're going to do things just a
little bit differently this week, where we're going
to put all the questions and we encourage
everybody to send in your questions, we will
get to them.
But I'm going to basically group them and
address them towards the end of this particular
segment before we go on the current events.
But we're going to see who we have
with us and give Salaams before going into
the questions.
So first one in today was Chavis Carrondo.
Wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Glad to have you with us.
Jannah Seeker, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
A Qadri, mashallah, who has a political recommendation
for us.
Welcome back to the program.
Sariha Ahmed from Atlanta, good to have you
back with us again.
Zahir Yunus, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Good to have you back with us again.
Ameen to your du'a, wonderful du'a.
May Allah bless you as well.
Very, very kind words.
We ask Allah to accept even a small
portion of what we do and to forgive
us for our shortcomings.
Leila Kuziez, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah, from
Central Illinois.
And I like the fact that you specified
Central Illinois, so we know that you're not
from Chicago.
Springfield, maybe somewhere around there.
Welcome to the program.
Rai Rai, I'm not sure what you're talking
about, but welcome to the program anyway.
Seamus, ahlan wa sahlan.
Oh, very good.
Seamus coming in with guns blazing.
Wa alaikum salaam.
We've got Samiha, wa alaikum salaam, from Dallas.
I'll be in Dallas this weekend, inshallah ta
'ala.
Come through.
There's an educational conference for Palestine that's happening
on Saturday, and I'm doing some events Friday
night at some of the masajid, I believe
with mass.
Rahman Baloch from Durham, North Carolina.
Wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Iman, wa alaikum salaam, from the Maldives.
And what else have we got?
Cheetah, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah, from Indiana.
Sireh Ba, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
We're gonna come back to that comment of
yours, Sireh.
I like it.
I like what you're thinking.
So here, Yunus has a bunch of stuff
for us to think about.
Layla, yeah, 100%.
We'll talk about that.
Very good.
Oh, I'm glad that you brought that up,
Layla.
I recently, I dealt with this two nights
ago in a WhatsApp chat as well.
And there's an important thing that you're touching
on here, and you've got a very, very
strong point that we need to address, and
we will do that, inshallah.
It's me, Sahil, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah,
from UK.
All right, very nice.
Mrs. S., wa alaikum salaam.
Pat Mack, what is this?
This is called a live stream.
Ahlan wa sahlan.
Amina, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Norte, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Disha Jackson-Simmons, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Good to have you with us.
Abdurrahman Suleiman, wa alaikum salaam, from Nigeria.
Excellent.
Juju's Back, from SoCal, wa alaikum salaam wa
rahmatullah.
Good to have you with us.
Rashida, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
And you've got a nice political message for
us here.
Sidi Nuriati Studio, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Good to have you back with us.
Salman Sayyid, from Newark, California.
I thought you were going to say Newark,
New Jersey.
I was like, ah, from Newark.
Newark's in the house, but okay.
Newark, California.
Never been there.
Hasbullah Islamic, from Malaysia, wa alaikum salaam wa
rahmatullah.
Welcome.
Glad to have you with us.
Nuseiba, from Worcester, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Always good to have you with us, Nuseiba.
I know you're your future imam.
Good friend of mine.
May Allah bless you.
That means I'm going to have to come
and pay a visit to Worcester, inshallah.
Actually, one of the brothers reached out to
me to come in November, but unfortunately, I'm
a little bit busy until the new year.
Shafi, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah, from Tallahassee.
Zinfinit, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Sarah Adams, from Tampa, wa alaikum salaam wa
rahmatullah.
Bing bong bo, bing bong, bing bang, bro.
Wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Alicia Martinez, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Is that a Venezuelan flag in your profile
pic?
I'm trying to make it out.
Jameela, G26.
Yeah, you got a question.
We'll get back to that in a second.
Salim and Nawab, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Ah, alhamdulillah.
I'm excited to be coming, inshallah ta'ala.
Very, very important place, Michigan, obviously.
Even without the election, Michigan is an important
place.
Happy to be visiting there soon, inshallah.
TNT, wa alaikum salaam from Florida.
I'm from Columbia, excuse me, sorry, Alicia.
No offense.
From Columbia by way of New Jersey.
I'm from New Jersey as well.
Welcome to the program.
Bienvenido.
Glad to have you with us.
Oh, look at this.
Salman Sayed, you're just made my day right
here.
Check this out.
Guys, put this up here.
This is proof that I'm winning.
I can't eat biryani without thinking about biryani
politics.
Win.
W.
Watermelon786, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah, joining from
Michigan.
Aminata Nagum Diop, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Good to have you back with us.
Sakina from Philly.
Philly in the house, wa alaikum salaam wa
rahmatullah.
Good to have you with us.
That's the John right there.
Disha from Clifton Heights, PA.
It's me, Sahil from the UK.
Yes, very good.
Dark, I like Muslims.
Hey, sir, why?
Mariam Ghazaleh from California.
Welcome.
Muaziyub, salaam from Bosnia.
Yes, I know where Bosnia is.
Muaziyub.
Steima, kakoste, dobra.
People of Bosnia are wonderful people.
I love the people of Bosnia.
May Allah bless you and your nation.
Valerie de Leon, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Welcome back.
Good to see you again.
Anna Eaton from Charlotte, North Carolina, wa alaikum
salaam wa rahmatullah.
I know some folks from Charlotte.
We've got some questions.
We'll get them.
We'll get them.
We'll get them.
I promise you.
Halija from Singapore, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Salaam at the tongue.
Very, very happy to have you with us.
Welcome.
D.K. Larussa from Louisiana.
Yeah, we try.
We do what we can.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Everything, listen, we know this D.K. Larussa.
We know that everything that Israel has ever
accused the Palestinian of, they are guilty of
themselves.
So we know that that's a qaeda and
we see it every day.
Mariam Fofana from NYC.
Welcome.
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
Perwaiz, wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
D.
Belovin, wa alaikum salaam from Brunei.
Dar salam.
I wish, I wish I could, inshallah, I
hope to visit Brunei.
Okay, here we go.
Wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah from Bangladesh.
What's cooking?
It does smell like elections.
We hope that you're well.
Let us know in the comments.
Are the floods better?
What's going on?
Like we haven't heard it.
Bangladesh, unfortunately, has fallen out of the news
cycle and we pray, we continue to pray
for the courageous people of Bangladesh.
Now Seamus is going in, man.
We'll get there.
Yikes.
Wa alaikum salaam from Dallas, Texas.
That's a funny username.
Muhammad Salim from Malaysia.
Wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Salaam at the tongue.
Aba khabar, khabar baik.
Wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Muhammad Aziz Ar-Rahman from UK.
In the house.
Okay, we got a question.
Questions are coming in.
Ali Adam from Texas.
Wa alaikum salaam.
Hassan Raza.
Wa alaikum salaam.
Ata Tareen.
Wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Oh yeah, absolutely going to talk about Lebanon.
100%.
Don't you worry.
Libra.
Pius from Connecticut.
Ahlan wa sahlan.
Hafsa Fuad.
Wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
More people from Singapore.
Chilby Diva.
Wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Ahlan wa sahlan.
From Toronto is in the house.
Wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
The Six.
Dion Nawalo.
Yeah, we're going to talk about Sakina Hassan.
We're going to talk about it.
Surah Tawbah 100% all day.
Sean Stukes.
Wa alaikum salaam.
Brooklyn.
Brooklyn's in the house.
Boogie down Brooklyn.
Mike Siddique Towns.
Wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Okay, very good.
Wa alaikum salaam wa rahmatullah.
Yes, that is the adhan in background.
We've got it looped in by a microphone.
We're going to get to it.
All right, so Farhad Rashid.
Wa alaikum salaam from New York.
Jamila.
Wa alaikum salaam.
All right, so we're going to go back
now that we said salaam to everybody.
Let's let the adhan finish out first.
Can you respond to my comment?
Which one?
Allahu Akbar.
Allahu Akbar.
Okay, let's get to it.
You guys have a lot of good questions
and comments.
Let's get through them before we move on
to the current events.
Trying to start from the top here.
All right, now Siraibah all the way back.
Siraibah says salaam alaikum.
Will Shuyukh in North America issue fatawas about
the permissibility or impermissibility of assisting oppressors in
their dhulm against Muslims, in this case voting
for blue or red parties?
I really wish they would.
And I am trying behind closed doors to
try to appeal to some of the scholars
and the fatwa bodies that we have here
to take a stance on the elections.
And that's something that a lot of people
don't want to touch.
Now, if you're a 501c3, that means if
you're categorized as a charity organization in the
United States, there are certain things that you
can and cannot do when it comes to
telling people who to vote or who to
not vote for.
But I think that there's a way that
we can talk about it without talking about
it.
And I haven't succeeded yet, but I am
attempting to try to make some moves on
that front.
So pray for my success, please.
Zaheer Yunus says boycotting leaders and systems that
perpetuate the suffering of our ummah is a
powerful form of protest.
I 100% agree.
Just as we refuse to support companies that
contribute to injustice, we must also critically assess
the leaders we endorse through our votes.
Very, very well said.
Now, Leila, I'm so happy.
Leila Kouzias, pardon me if I'm mispronouncing that.
I really appreciate this comment.
She says, I'm Syrian, feeling betrayed by many,
even Muslim, organizing chats.
If I raise a question on Stein's stance
on Russia and Assad, people flip out at
me.
How to combat destructive black, white, good versus
evil thinking.
Wallahi, I dealt with this two days ago.
It was the last thing.
I broke my rules, guys, for those of
you following the atomic habits.
I brought my phone to bed, and the
last text I sent at night was responding
to this issue because we had Syrians in
the chat that are feeling queasy about Stein.
I did say, it's like, listen, and we
had other people, people that are going hard
for Stein, that were saying, well, maybe you
guys are just supporting the Democrats, or you're
trying to pull something funny, or you're trying
to stop our momentum, or you're an op,
all these sorts of things.
I tried to say, Leila, I said exactly
what you're trying to say, that if our
Syrian brothers and sisters can't bring themselves to
vote for Stein, I completely understand that.
That is something I could never find it
in myself to blame somebody for, and they
have a right to do that.
I do personally think that voting, let's see,
this is the Yakhin program, I can't say
this, so you know, if you follow me
off of the Yakhin program, you know what
I think, okay, about what is the most
strategic move for the Muslims, and I've said
it's not because of Stein.
It's not because of who it is.
In fact, I don't trust any of the
politicians that are running for the President of
the United States.
I don't.
I don't.
I think that people who think that any
of them are saviors are, they're deluding themselves
a little bit.
However, there are other reasons, and there's other
calculus to why it would make sense for
the Muslim community to, first of all, punish
one of the parties that is incumbent.
Second, to attempt to create enough leverage on
an existing well-established third party such that
they might control their agenda, their campaign, and
even in the future, their candidates that they
run.
There's a strategic interest in that.
There's a strategic interest in the Muslims eroding
the stranglehold of the two major parties, the
two-party system, quote-unquote, on American politics.
Those are all strategic interests, but if somebody,
especially someone from the Syrian community, says, I
can't bring myself to vote for this person,
I completely respect that.
We have a duty to not cast doubt
on their intentions by dismissing that.
I think that that's insensitive, and I think
that that's wrong.
We recognize that this is one of the
problems of the anti-imperialist left, the secular,
the secularists.
A lot of the anti-imperialist left, they
think in very antagonistic terms, meaning that many
of them have sympathy for the butcher Assad,
and for Putin, and for Russia, and for
all these others, simply because they're anti-Western,
okay?
And even there's some Muslims, and Muslim da
'is with YouTube channels, right, who have book
clubs on books they don't understand, and if
you understand who I'm talking about, then you
understand, that have a similar sort of thing.
Their whole shtick is anti-Westernism, to the
point where they're not willing to be just,
okay?
That is black and white thinking, that is
just oppositional thinking, it's antagonistic thinking, that is
not the thinking that we're encouraged to have
as a Muslim.
What does Allah ﷻ say in the Qur
'an?
He says it twice, He said, establish, be
just, and establish justice, even if it's against
yourselves, right?
So we have this thing where, again, as
Malcolm X said very powerfully in English, we're
for the truth no matter who says it,
okay?
And the converse of that is true as
well, we have to call out falsehood wherever
we see it, even if it's from one
of our own.
We are not going to make the same
mistake as Musa alayhi salam, before he was
a prophet, okay?
So no disrespect to Musa, but when he
was called into a fight, and there were
two people in the fight, and one of
them was someone from his tribe, and the
other was someone from another tribe, the tribe
of Fir'aun, and he assumed that he's
jumping in the fight on the side of
his tribesman, and he assumed that that was
the right thing to do, and he soon
found out that it was his own guy
from his own side, from his own tribe,
that was wrong.
And so he had a moral decision to
make, and he made tawbah to Allah ﷻ,
and he asked forgiveness, and he asked for
guidance, because the nature of this mistake was
this sort of tribalistic, antagonistic thinking.
It's not my tribe versus your tribe in
the sense that not everything America does is
good, not everything that America does is evil,
not everything that the West does is good,
not everything that the West does is evil.
We have nuance, we have our own miqyas
and mi'yar, we have our own metrics
given to us by divine revelation in which
we're able to hold the actions of all
the world up to a mirror and say,
that's right, that's wrong, that's right, that's wrong,
and we don't have a problem if that
doesn't put us in a comfortable category that
somebody else has prefabricated for us.
And we have to make sure that we
keep that nuance, because if we don't, then
we're going to end up in situations like
you find yourself in, where we're now alienating
our own people, our own brothers and sisters,
our Syrian brothers and sisters, especially in this
case.
Why?
To play some sort of tribalism or some
sort of groupthink, right?
So we have to, we have to, this
is, I see this as part of political
maturity, that we have to mature beyond this
sort of like, we're not rooting for sports
teams.
This isn't like Liverpool versus Manchester United, right?
We're not like just my team, no matter
what.
We have to actually care about what is
true.
And when someone from our own is in
the right, we support it because it's in
the right, not because they're from our own
team.
And if something from our own team is
in the wrong, then we call it out
because it's wrong and vice versa.
So I'm really, really happy that you, I
mean, I'm not happy, but I'm grateful that
you brought that up.
Let's see.
Okay.
So Zahir Yunus is dropping facts.
Let's see what else we got.
What were some other questions that came up?
Okay.
So Rashida said, you all need to check
out the Green Party and vote green.
Okay.
Bismillah.
I'm just going to let that sit there.
Y'all can marinate on that.
Jamila said, when are Muslim leaders and men
in general will be held accountable for not
upholding their oaths to Allah, saying they will
fight in the cause of Allah for the
oppressed and the weak?
Allahu Akbar.
I mean, I think I agree with you
Jamila in general.
However, I would add the caveat to those
who are in the United States of America
and the Western nations that are arming Israel
and that are actively participating.
They're not just, you know, just cheering it
on.
They're actively participating in the genocide in Gaza.
Our duty here, the most effective thing that
we can do is to change the foreign
policy of the nations in which we live.
We have the ability to do that.
We have the money to do that.
We just have to be organized enough and
smart enough to do that.
And that will do the greatest good.
What else do we have?
Yes.
Very good.
I'm very happy that biryani diplomacy is in
the vocabulary now.
We got to make it viral guys.
We got to make it viral.
So Jamila continues saying that Biden isn't Muslim,
nor did he make an oath to Allah
to fighting and protecting the Muslims.
Yeah.
So why should we expect?
And I agree with that Jamila.
A lot of us, we have these unrealistic
expectations.
Like these people are moral exemplars.
Our system is not set up to select
the most moral and righteous among us.
And we're going to talk about this actually
in a bit when it comes to our
leaders.
Our leaders are not moral and righteous.
And that sham of a hearing that happened
earlier today, which we will also show a
clip of in a bit inshallah ta'ala,
also demonstrated that the people who are in
charge of our nations are not the most
moral and righteous people.
So we have to temper what we expect
from them and build a counter power that's
able to influence them in other ways other
than pleading and begging in this sort of
humiliating way.
Peace from America.
Should we vote?
I believe yes.
I believe that you should.
I do not see voting as impermissible.
I do not, and I will have a
forthcoming blog entry on this for Yaqeen Institute.
All the arguments against voting from an Islamic
perspective, I do not consider, I have not
seen them, I do not see them to
be sound.
I think they're too categorical.
That voting is a political technology.
It actually has an usl in the way
in which Abdurrahman ibn Auf, he polled the
people of Medina to see who he should
put his tie-breaking vote towards when he
was part of the council to appoint whether
it was Uthman or Ali to be the
khalifah after Umar ibn al-Khattab, right?
So there's nothing necessarily inherently wrong with it
that you can't excise out.
The people who are saying that this is
like, you know, basically aqeedah, that when you
vote, you're saying that you love someone's law
more than Allah's law.
I don't buy that for a second.
So I think that it is prudent, not
in every situation.
I'm not one of these people who is
on the other extreme saying, you have to,
it's wajib to vote, it's the only thing
that, no, but I think that it's permissible
inshallah ta'ala and Allah knows best.
So yes, so DK Larusa had said, so
happy to have learned from us.
Okay, you're going to talk about, oh yeah,
we already said that, yes we will.
That's going to be part of our current
affairs program, so that's coming up in just
a bit.
What else do we have?
Yeah, so Seamus also brings up the point
that we're talking about, about Syria, and he's
talking about the online space.
So he's saying pro-Palestinian figures online are,
you say mostly I see it maybe like
a 50-50 split.
Some of the big channels are, some of
the big channels are propped up by Russians
during the Syrian war.
Unfortunately, non-Arab Muslims who didn't follow events
are affected.
I was too during mid-teen years.
Yes, those are valid points.
Okay, very good.
So question, it's me Sahil.
If a man's wife passes away, does the
marriage break?
Can he still touch his wife?
I'm assuming that you're talking about, you know,
literal touching for purposes of washing one's body.
In that case, yes, that, you know, you
are able to wash the body of your
wife after she passes away.
This is something that even the Prophet ﷺ
did, so that is perfectly fine.
Yes, I thought, Tarim, we're going to talk
about Lebanon, as we said.
Anyone have any actual questions?
What are we to do, Sakina Hassan says?
Okay, we have to get over the idea
that we support somebody unconditionally, or that we
support somebody, and then that they will do
something for us in return.
That's not how politics works.
You have to hold on to something that
somebody else wants, or be able to deliver
a credible political threat, such as making someone
lose an election, and then wait for them
to come to you and negotiate.
And if they don't come to you to
negotiate, then you actually have to follow through
on either punishing them politically, or withholding that
thing that they need so that they suffer,
and make them suffer politically until they come
to you, and then you're ready to negotiate.
But this whole idea that you're going to
negotiate or get anything just from doing favors
for them, no, that's humiliation.
That's not anything.
What else we got?
What else we got?
What else we got?
Let's see.
We've got some people, more people came in.
I think everybody just came in.
Rochester, Minnesota in the house, all right.
Okay, we just addressed that gratitude.
What are we to do?
I feel like voting for independent may be
a win for Trump, and voting for Harris
gives me heartburn.
Well, you know what?
I told this to somebody in Houston the
other week.
I said, first of all, your vote doesn't
decide who's the president.
I got news for you.
You ever hear of the Electoral College, right?
The Electoral College decides who the president is,
and we've seen in past elections that when
push comes to shove, the Electoral College can
go against the popular vote in a close
race.
So that almost frees you up to sort
of vote your conscience and not worry about
it too much, because you don't really have
the ability to call the shots like that.
They made sure of that.
Yeah, so Mohammed Abu Ramadan asks, you mentioned
on the MBF podcast that you don't trust
Jill Stein.
Can you expand on that?
Well, yeah, I mean, Jill Stein has mentioned
particular troubling rhetoric on the Muslim Brotherhood and
Syria, and she's parroted some sort of war
on terror discourse.
Now, she has people in her corner, and
I do know some inside information as to
some of the people who are advising her
where she's trying to learn.
But is it out of her own conscience,
you know, or is it sort of politically
expedient because her success in this election is
extremely dependent upon Muslim and Arab voters?
I can't answer that question.
Only Allah knows that question.
But let's just say I don't trust that
person in the sense that I don't trust
politicians in general, that most politicians know which
way the wind is blowing, and if it
works for them, they will blow in that
way, so to speak.
Now, that doesn't mean that we can't use
that for us, as I said before.
If you look at three political parties, look
at Republican, Democrat, and Green, which one is
most indebted to the Muslim vote?
I mean, the Democrats stand to lose big
in November if they completely continue to ignore
us and not give us anything.
But the Green Party is extremely dependent on
our vote.
And so what opportunities does that open up
in order to negotiate what's on their platform,
what's on their campaign, what are the policies
that they want to run, or who's going
to run on their ticket in 2028?
You understand?
That's how it works.
Yeah, we're going to talk about exploding pagers.
May Allah bless you, PetePenn12.
May Allah protect us all.
At the end of the day, Allah is
in control.
Allah is in control.
And we don't fear the blame of the
blamer.
We do what we have to do, and
we speak the truth.
Many who have gone before us have paid
the ultimate price.
Aisha Noor has paid the ultimate price for
speaking the truth.
It's written.
It's already written already.
Whether we're going to have to pay that
price or something less than that, we don't
know.
Okay, our Muslim children says, Salaam Imam Tom.
Have you been tracking the discourse online about
Halal, Zabiha, meat?
UK Muslims and US Muslims are going at
it, as they are once to do, Omar.
Not sure if Yateen has discussed this previously.
I'm not 100% if they have discussed
this previously or not, but I will say
this.
When it comes to the US and the
UK beefing, you know, the US and the
UK are very different scenarios.
You know, the UK has much more of
a dense sort of critical mass of Muslims
that keeps cultural gravity a lot more, and
it's a smaller place.
So what are you all like 10%
of the population in the UK, something like
that.
Whereas the population is not only smaller in
the United States, but we're also very spread
out.
The United States is an enormous place in
addition to other factors.
So the dynamics are different.
This isn't an excuse for anything.
But what I'm trying to draw attention to
is that rather than beef back and forth,
and the UK Muslims acting like they're on
a high horse and the US Muslims acting
like they're enlightened, which is honestly sometimes what
it boils down to, we have to look
for how we can benefit each other.
I really believe in squashing this beef and
trying to benefit each other.
Now, one of the videos that I saw,
I think it was a TikTok video that
somebody showed me, because I'm not on TikTok,
that somebody showed me was one of the
British sisters demonstrating how it has become a
cultural force within the UK, that the Bihar
Halal meat is something that even non-Muslims
go after.
And I think that that was a really
interesting point.
And I think that sometimes in the US,
we think a little bit too individualistically and
not enough civilizationally, that if you want to,
and Dr. Sohail Hanif has made comments similar
to this in some of the talks I've
been with him, where he said that if
you ask a faqih about eating pork, they'll
explain to you the situations in which it's
permissible to eat pork.
So they'll say, yes, if you're in the
desert and you're starving and there's nothing else
to eat and you don't like it and
you only eat what you need, then it's
permissible.
That's what we call bare minimum fiqh.
And that's the job.
That's his job.
He's not doing anything wrong.
However, he's not necessarily telling you how do
you avoid a situation where you have to
eat pork in the first place?
How do you make sure that you have
enough provisions when you go out into the
desert?
How do you make sure that you don't
end up in a situation where you might
have to compromise your principles?
So we need that dimension to the situation.
That's one thing that the UK, I think,
can benefit from the US is that the
companions didn't operate on bare minimum permissibility when
it came to fiqh.
Check exactly how the companions reacted when the
hijab came down, when the amr or the
command for women to cover themselves with hijab
came down.
Women grabbed pieces of cloth here and there
and they cut them up and they covered
themselves the best.
They didn't want to be like Bani Israel,
right?
They didn't want to be like, oh, what
color is the cow?
Oh, well, what type of cow?
Oh, well, how old does the cow have
to be?
They were like 10 feet, 100 percent, let
me grab whatever I can and put it
on as best I can.
And that's why to this day there's a
disagreement between the fuqahat.
Is it required niqab or not?
Is to cover your face something that is
extra and praiseworthy or is it something that
is merely, or is it something that is
actually required of everybody?
Why don't we know the answer to that
question?
We don't know the answer to that question
because the companions weren't concerned about the bare
minimum.
They wanted to do as much as they
could.
And so we have to be super careful,
especially us in the US, where we don't
have as much cultural force as the Muslims
in the UK.
We have to be very, yes, we can
find ways out, right?
We can find, I don't want to call
them hijab, but we can find rukhsah, right?
We can find exceptions, we can find dispensations,
we can find, you know, sort of leniency.
But is leniency the best way for a
civilizational project?
Is leniency the best intergenerational plan?
Are we also taking care at the same
time to account for this fact that we
need to do as much as we can?
And so if there's an option, everybody, when
it comes to halal meat, you should be
eating the best you can.
If you have an option, you go into
a store between eating meat that was raised
locally by a Muslim farmer and it was
slaughtered in a way that you know is
permissible versus some, even like, you know, halal
stamped meat from New Zealand or Brazil or
whatever, you should no doubt, if you have
the financial means, you should no doubt go
with the first one.
That's just like no-brainer.
Let alone Chick-fil-A and, you know,
whatever the, you know, the Christians are doing.
Is it permissible?
That's not relevant.
That's not what I'm saying.
It's not relevant whether it's permissible or not.
That's always going to be a matter of
difference of opinion.
But what's the best thing that you can
do and why aren't you doing the best
for Allah?
Why aren't you putting your best into Allah?
And we know this logic when we talk
about, talk about going to the gym, right?
Like for the guys.
If you go to the gym, I shouldn't
say just for the guys.
I'm sure a lot of ladies go to
the gym too, inshallah.
When you go to the gym, you can
put in your least amount of effort.
But what are the gains that you're going
to get out of it?
All of your exercises, your reps, like your
even, like whatever.
You can put very, very little, the bare
minimum and say that you did it, okay?
But is that a way to get healthy?
Is that a way to make gains in
the gym?
No, it's not.
So why would we treat our deen like
that?
Why would we treat our, you know, our
meat and our food and things like that?
Exactly.
That's not, that's not, doesn't work like that.
Laila, I'm glad to hear that we experienced
a similar thing there.
So Laila follows up the exact reaction I
got.
Why don't you go vote for Kamal Astaghfirullah?
Aren't you just a DNC apologist?
Yeah, yeah.
This is suah adhan.
This is adhan, right?
There's no, there's no evidence for this.
Walaikum salam.
Mariam from Kuwait, welcome.
100% Valerie, I really, really appreciate your
comment.
What makes me so outraged is that we
are seeing a hate crime happen in a
hate crime hearing.
Allah, it was disgusting.
And we're going to talk about it in
just a minute.
Let me see if there's any other comments,
concerns, or questions in the, okay.
So Laila follows up.
I've been behind organizing for third party since
day one, but downplaying the trauma of Syrians
or even becoming as an apologist is disgusting.
I mean, Alhamdulillah, the greatest compliment you could
have given me is that you feel seen
by that.
I'm glad that you mentioned this and I'm
glad that you feel seen and I'm 100
% with you on this.
Muzammil, that's a really interesting question.
Salams, does the same reasoning about Syrians not
supporting Stein apply to African American Muslims who
are supporting the Dems?
It's just another strategy, correct?
It depends.
There are situations in which that logic, I
could imagine it working.
However, I think it's a little bit different.
And many of the situations on the ground
are not like that.
Okay.
And what I mean is that, what is
Harris going to do for Black America?
Seriously, like she made her bones being top
cop in California, very, very, you know, tough
on crime sort of tack that she was
trying to push, very harmful to the African
American community in California, right?
So you see the difference here, right?
She knows that she has to play up
to that particular thing in order to get
support, but what's the ROI on that, right?
What are you actually getting in return?
If there's a local situation, I think that
logic works much more at the local level,
like the city and the state level where
like in Philadelphia, for example, where many of
the African American community, they're very, very invested
in the Democratic party.
And that's what sort of is part of
the machinery in Philadelphia.
However, when you go to the national level,
I don't see, I don't see Harris being
so good necessarily for, and I could be
completely ignorant about this.
And if I am, like I said, there
are situations in which I think it's true,
but I think that we have to separate
that out from people who are just careerists.
Okay.
Just after their own appointments, that's a different
thing than saying that the entire African American
community is going to benefit more from Harris
and that we're not willing to break rank
to vote for a third party.
That's one thing.
And my career, I've got this position, I've
got this, whatever, that's a different thing.
So if we're able to make that distinction
and introduce that nuance, then okay, like I
can see situations in which that also holds
true in that scenario as well.
What else we got?
What else we got?
NoSlava asks, I'm a little embarrassed about my
ignorance with this, but what happens if a
whole demographic of people all across the US
decides not to vote?
Does it matter?
I'm glad you asked that NoSlava.
This is actually my number one example that
I bring up to demonstrate to you and
to anybody else that consent of the governed
is a myth.
It's a myth that John Locke invented in
order to justify the rise of the liberal
nation state.
It sounds like a great idea, but if
all of America stayed home and didn't vote,
do you think the government's going anywhere?
Like seriously, do you think they're just going
to quit and say, well, I guess we
lost the popular mandate.
I guess we got to go home now.
No, they're going to hold on to their
power.
They're going to hold on to their power.
So that's a very important element to the
argument about is voting permissible or not, because
some of the critiques of voting being permissible
imply that if you didn't vote, then the
system would collapse or that somehow democracy would
fall.
No, no, it's not going anywhere at all.
Let's see what we got.
So Abdullah says, are you excited to eat
Dallas USA halal and not UK halal?
Asking for a friend.
UK halal is delicious.
I try to eat the best I can
wherever I go, and I feel like that's
what we should be doing.
Juju says, I feel like Imam's leaders are
not discouraging Muslims from working in companies complicit
in war crimes like Raytheon.
I know working living is inherently in the
U.S. may be harmful to people.
I 100% agree with you, Juju.
And I do know, I do know religious
leaders who do, but we have to be
real here.
Very few, unfortunately.
And this is a problem.
Let's call a spade a spade.
In the Dawa sphere, you see the different
types of talks that bring in the big
conferences and the big shuyuk and the big
things.
How often do we see instructions about not
working for Lockheed Martin, not working for Raytheon,
not working for BlackRock, not working for these
companies that are, yeah, that are literally killing
our brothers and sisters abroad?
I think that not enough attention is going
towards that, and I feel like a whole
lot more attention should be going towards that.
And yes, Zaheer, Yunus, I agree.
Recent behavior of members of Congress highlights a
profound need for leaders who genuinely care about
justice and human dignity.
Righteous rule.
We're going to talk about that.
Righteous rule.
Sireh Ba says, how do you, how to
deal with family members who are planning to
vote Team Blue?
Wallahi, it's heartbreaking.
I mean, the thing that I, it depends
on the person because people are motivated by
different things, but I always ask people, how,
how much do you value Palestinian blood?
That's just not my thing.
I mean, I think about Hind when I,
when I'm going to go into that voting
booth.
I think about Sidra when I'm going into
that voting booth.
I'm thinking about Khalid Nebhan's granddaughter when I'm
going into that voting booth.
And that's all I need.
So Furry Finance asks, many queer people have
solidarity with Palestine.
What is the Islamic view of building a
coalition or big tent with other groups to
achieve Palestinian liberation like Ibn Khaldun's Asabiya?
Well, a couple of things to unpack there.
One, queer people is not our terminology.
We don't accept that because people have desires
and people are not their desires.
So if you have desires, romantic desires, sexual
desires for the same *, that doesn't make
you a queer person, right?
If you were born a woman and think
that you should be a man, that doesn't
make you a queer person, not, not an
Islam, right?
That you actually, the reason that we have
our desires is to struggle against them.
And that goes for any desire, whether your
desire is to cheat on your spouse or
to commit zina, any type of zina, right?
Or to steal or to backbite or to
gossip or to envy or anything.
Okay.
So your desires are one thing and you
are another thing that we have to make
sure that that's not lost sight of.
Secondly, there is no one Islamic view, the
Islamic view, because this is a muhtatat al
-umur.
This is something that is new.
This is a new issue.
All right.
It's not something that we have direct guidance
from the Prophet where he said, look, in
2024, there's going to be these groups and
there's going to be this issue.
And you have to ally with this group
or that group or that group.
So we are extending and extrapolating Islamic guidance
in this terrain, which means that it is
a zunni matter.
It is something that is somewhat speculative.
It's not completely speculative.
Like this is a reasoned argument and it's,
um, what's the word for it?
Educated sort of arguments or educated reasoned arguments.
But we don't have the level of certainty
to say that this is the Islamic view
on it.
Now, getting to the spirit of your question,
I've addressed this in an article for Yaqeen
Institute called something like intersectionality and the movement
for Gaza or the encampment movement, something like
that.
I think that we have to really consider
how historical change happens and how power is
built.
I think that it's been a liberal notion,
this idea of the the ultimate coalition of
all of the aggrieved and minority groups, which
is going to overthrow whatever system oppression or
all of the systems of oppression and different
people will disagree about that.
I'm skeptical of that.
I'll be honest.
I don't see that as how history changes.
I think that history is changed by a
small dedicated group of very impactful people that
are disciplined, hopefully that are righteous.
I think that that's how the movement of
Islam came about.
I didn't see it necessarily as a coalition
of aggrieved sort of members of society.
I saw it more as a consolidation or
coalescence on values.
And it's definitely sure that we don't share
the same values as some of the people
that many people would hope that we would
group up with in coalition work.
So that's my sort of thing.
I think that the Muslims have prioritized, and
you'll see this in the piece that I
wrote, you'll see that the Muslims in the
West have prioritized so-called allies at the
expense of shoring up Muslim mobilization.
I think that's a mistake.
I think that we are very, very underutilized.
Our own communities are underutilized.
And that once we get our own house
in order that we can make a huge
impact even before we enter into coalitions with
other people.
Salam, I'm not seeing your question.
Yes, so you can email your question or
you can send it in.
I apologize.
I'm not masoom.
I do make mistakes.
So I'm not intentionally skipping anyone's questions.
Okay.
What is this?
Atlanta Hafeez says, Wa alaikum salam.
Everyone is focusing on the presidential election.
It's very important to also focus on senators
and reps.
We need to assess their policies and work
local level also.
100% agree with you.
Nobody likes to do the local stuff, even
though that's where most of our work needs
to be done, especially when it comes to
running our own people.
However, I do think that we can use
the unprecedented amount of attention on the presidential
race to hopefully convert it into more sustainable,
perennial, or we should say annual, continuous persistent
work on the local level as well.
What do we do in December?
I think is going to be really key
to once the federal stage has settled, to
start to look for opportunities at the local
level 100%.
Good point.
Let's see what we got.
Fiona asks, how do we get out of
this mindset that the world itself will inevitably
be corrupt, even shown by the guaranteed minor
signs of the day of judgment saying the
world leaders will be corrupt?
Yes.
So that's sort of a fatalism and a
defeatism that I also agree that we should
not fall into, or we should be careful
to fall into, because the hadith of the
Prophet ﷺ, who said that even if the
day of judgment were to be established and
you have a sapling in your hand, your
duty is to plant the sapling.
That is your responsibility.
Our duty to act never goes away, even
if all the major signs are upon us,
which they're not.
And many of the minor signs have happened,
but many of the minor signs also haven't
happened, right?
So sometimes we use the eschatological language as
an escape and as an excuse to not
do anything.
And I disagree with that.
So here, Eunice asks, can you please clarify
this on if you're voting in Western elections
like the US, how should one assess if
voting aligns with Islamic values and promotes justice?
It's a big question.
I mean, but you have to look at
things, first of all, if you're doing taqrij
fiqh, you're going to sort of like, analyze
first, is the default, what's the default ruling?
Is the default ruling that voting is permissible
or impermissible?
That establishes what, where's the burden of proof
lie?
My perspective is that the default ruling is
that voting is permissible until there is something
that enters into it, that proves that it
is impermissible.
Why?
Because this is not, not a taqifi or
ta'abudi matter.
This is something that has to do with
maslaha.
It's not an expression of aqidah.
It's not an expression that we, that we
like a sharia other than the sharia of
Allah or anything like this.
It is simply, you know, it is a
tool, and tools can be used for good
and tools can be used for evil.
Now, that's the details where you have to
get into whether it becomes specifically permissible or
impermissible in a certain, in a certain scenario
or not.
Suraya Azmi, Walaykum As Salaam Wa Rahmatullah.
Yep.
Yes, the uncommitted movement.
Achaa.
Suraya.
100%.
The uncommitted movement is a perfect example of
people following political winds.
I will tell you, okay, I'll tell you
something controversial and something that's half a secret,
some inside info, okay?
There are many, many leaders in the Muslim
community right now that the only thing holding
them back from telling you to vote for
a genocider is the fact that the mass
of Muslims won't take it and won't tolerate
it right now.
And I'll leave you with that.
So some people know which way the wind's
blowing.
Ameen, Jess.
Ameen.
Anna Eaton says, would love for you to
connect with Imam John.
Yes, we have a, we talk on WhatsApp
actually, Imam John and I.
He invited me to come down, but the
schedule unfortunately is already booked up until January,
so unfortunately we couldn't make it happen, but
hopefully sometime in the future.
Noreen from Pelham, New York.
Wa alaikum salam wa rahmatullah.
Oh, I'm glad that you made that comment.
I really appreciate that.
We have much to share and learn and
lean into and become collectively more aligned.
I totally agree.
I think that the U.S. and the
U.K. Muslims stand to benefit so much
from each other rather than just take pride
in dumping on one another.
Not to say that we shouldn't hold each
other accountable, but with adab, right, we have
rules for that.
Sarah says, do you know if Imran Siddiqui
and Hussam Ayloush are involved in MGAGEPAC?
I don't know.
I don't know the answer to that question.
You're going to have to ask them yourself.
SoCal folks will know.
Yeah, I agree with you, Valerie.
I agree.
Let's see.
Yeah, 100% Seamus.
Seamus brings up a great point.
What we eat might even have a spiritual
effect.
Imam Ahmed said, the hearts find comfort and
are softened by eating halal.
And we have the example of Imam An
-Nawi.
Like, seriously, if we, Imam An-Nawi, when
he moved to a place that was away
from his own family farm, he would refuse
to eat the food, except for what his
father sent him.
Like, he was that scrupulous.
And look at us now.
Juju brings up a good point about the
convenience versus inconvenience.
Yes, most of what we do in America,
they teach us to choose based off of
convenience.
And if you choose what's based off of
convenience, you're going to have a very, very,
you know, very, very precarious set of practices
that you're doing.
Tamiz gave his fatwa.
He says voting is haram.
MashaAllah.
Here comes the big sheikh.
Thank you.
Samiha says the Black Americans activists I follow
have been showing support towards third parties, and
Kamala has been polling low among younger Black
Americans, less than Biden and Hillary.
Yeah, and there is data that we're going
to release soon with Yaqeenistu that shows that
among Black Muslim voters as well, Harris polls
very poorly, unfavorably.
Like, so sometimes people attempt to speak for
an entire community, and they put themselves up
as we are the spokesmen for this community
or that community, when in reality, the reality
might be a little bit different.
MFB says if we don't vote for Harris,
what is the possibility that Trump will win?
And would it be worse for him to
win?
Yeah, I mean, he's pretty, that pretty much
almost guarantees that he will win.
Would it be worse for him to win?
I mean, this is all speculative.
Like, there are scenarios in which it's worse.
There are scenarios in which it's better.
We don't know.
And Mubeen Vaid has a really good Substack
article about this.
He has a Substack called Occasional Reflections, where
he plays out a couple scenarios.
It's not always true that the most aggressive
and belligerent person results in a worse situation.
Sometimes, and we've seen this the last 11
months, that when an arrogant leader overplays their
hand, it can actually create more blowback and
more opposition than if somebody who smiles in
your face.
And that's not a clear, you know, it's
not clear one way or the other.
No one has a crystal ball, so to
speak.
No one knows the future.
But those things are, it's not, this type
of forecasting is not straightforward.
Anybody who's saying it's going to be worse,
it's going to be better, this is not
a straightforward thing to get into.
And anybody who portrays it as a straightforward
thing is lying to you.
Clyde Donovan says, what's your opinion on the
lesser of two evils argument?
It's not a good one.
I understand that voting third party is a
good long-term play.
I know voting blue wouldn't magically fix everything,
but what can we do?
I think, as I said before, that we
have to look long-term and stop being
threatened by the carrot or the stick right
in front of us, that the Muslims have
a strategic interest in reforming campaign finance to
take away the power of AIPAC and the
lobby.
We have a strategic interest in breaking the
two-party monopoly, right, that gives us horrible,
horrible, horrible choices.
And we need to, our votes need to
reflect that strategy.
So J.L. asks a question, based on
your info, who do the Palestinians and other
victims of oppression within the UMA want us
to vote for?
Well, here I'm going to say two things.
One, J., is that it's not that simple,
because you will find Palestinian people or oppressed
people with all sorts of different opinions.
Some of those opinions are good and some
of them are bad.
There are people who are oppressed who have
bad opinions, right, that this doesn't make you
sacred.
This is one of the things that we've
gotten from leftist politics.
That is not true, okay, that you can
be oppressed and be horribly wrong, okay, about
stuff.
So that's one.
Number two is that I would encourage you
to look at the late Rifat al-Arir
and what he said about it, Rahimahullah Sa
'ad, because he had some of the most
insightful opinions before he was martyred.
I agree with M.B. that election day
needs to be absolutely, absolutely has to be
understood as a referendum on Palestine.
We can't let any other issue take center
stage.
Al-Barakah publication says, why aren't Muslim politicians
rising up?
I'll say which ones?
Make your own party and contest for elections.
Yeah, I think that that's where we're headed.
I think that's where we're headed, but we're
not there, to be frank.
If you were to look at the average
or the pool of Muslim politicians that we
have, you wouldn't expect that type of behavior
from them.
We need a whole new class of people,
a whole new way of approaching this thing.
Okay, yeah, Sa'adah, you are late.
Better late than never.
We're still on questions.
Just ask your question here.
I just don't see your question.
Yes, that is true, Israeli lobby has also
bought local representatives.
They're up and down.
Who am I voting for?
Justice wants to know.
Am I allowed to say that on the
Yaqeen program?
Who am I voting for?
I mean, you also know who I'm voting
for already.
Yeah, Sa'adah says, regarding Jill Stein, I've
seen Syrians say that she's an Essidist and
that it would be foolish for Muslims to
vote for her.
I've seen Syrians say both.
There are Syrians that have said that she's
an Essidist.
There's Syrians who say that that's not true,
that she was misinformed and she's retracted and
she's learning.
You know, so again, you can't like fetishize
what Syrians say because they're going to be
all over the place.
Okay.
But there are concerns.
And if Syrians and Syrian Americans have second
thoughts and hesitation about voting for her because
of her history, then that's that's not cool.
You know, that's understandable.
Totally.
100%.
Sergio says, what is the halal way to
vote in the U.S.? I'm a new
Muslim.
I don't know who to vote for in
line with the faith.
Well, it's not a straightforward question, Sergio.
First of all, welcome to the faith.
I'm your brother in Islam, also a convert.
It's not so straightforward.
Ask your heart.
Ask Allah to guide you and don't be
persuaded by these sort of like non-Islamic
arguments like lesser of two evils or what
if this or what if that.
Try to vote your conscience.
Try to do the best that you can.
Oh, oh, Soraya says, agree with the brother.
In Georgia, no peace, no peach is also
about supporting all our pro ceasefire allies, state
reps and senators, e.g. Yes, we're naming
names.
Okay.
We'll leave that there.
We'll leave that there.
Javi's telling me to come to Australia.
Yeah, I know it's been in the works
for a while, inshallah.
Aykaldari says, and now you see these Muslim
leaders like Keith Ellison coming out to defend
Kamala and attack Stein 100%.
Yep, they're tap dancing.
Yeah, I'm going to disagree with that, Justice.
So Justice says, I say Muslims just sit
back and watch the West fall.
They are destroying themselves.
Okay, Habibi, but like if I'm a convert
and we've got converts all up and down
on this program in this chat, I mean,
where are we going to go, Habib?
Right?
We're from here.
Arab world doesn't give citizenship.
Okay.
It's like, you know, this is dichotomous thinking.
I see that this is Da'wah.
And I'm glad that you brought this up
because this has to do with the Hidra
conversation.
A lot of people too, they go right
to, oh, time for Hidra, time for Hidra.
Y'all know that that's only one opinion
from the Aramat, right?
When you talk about the classical fiqh on
whether to make Hidra or not.
Some of the Madhahib, they advocated for, yes,
like you, when it becomes sort of negative
or whatever, you pick up and you leave,
assuming that you have some place to go,
which is not the reality of converts.
But the other, the other is the Shafi
'iyah and the Ahnaf, right?
Would say that, no, you are Riba'at.
What you're doing is Da'wah and Riba
'at.
And you actually have a duty to stay
and to try your best and to make
the best out of it.
So it's not, it's not a clear thing.
Watermelon asks, did Imam Tom celebrate Mowlid?
Oh man, Watermelon, you're trying to get me
in trouble.
Listen, if you want to know, if you
want to know a balanced position on the
Mowlid and all of what it could mean,
because here's the thing, guys, we get triggered,
we get triggered by names and terminologies.
Somebody says Mowlid, they understand one thing.
Some, another person says Mowlid, they understand another
thing.
Okay.
You have to get into the substance of
what you're referring to.
If I handed you this cup and I
said, here, drink this water, but it's actually
Khamr.
It's actually alcohol.
Then it doesn't matter what I call it.
It's Haram.
Okay.
Now, if I hand you this cup and
there's water inside of it, I say, here,
take a swig of this whiskey.
And you look inside and it's water.
Did the fact that I call it whiskey
make it Haram?
No, it's permissible.
So we have to get past labels and
look at the reality of things, the substance
of things.
Okay.
And if you want the most balanced and
thorough opinion on the Mowlid, you can go
to to the Mortanian Shaykh, Ad-Dudu.
He has a very, very clear tafsir.
Shaykh Ad-Dudu has a very, very clear
tafsir about all the things that would make
it Haram and all the things that would
make it, maybe not Haram.
So you should look into that.
Okay.
I do agree though, Fiona, that one of
the, I mean, there's no doubt that historically
the Mowlid was started as a response to
the Christians and how they celebrate the birth
of Jesus alayhi salam.
Right.
So that's, especially for converts, that can be
a very uncomfortable thing.
Like we just left that.
All right.
Like now you want us to celebrate that.
Victorious Drusilla, welcome back to the program.
Okay.
MashaAllah.
We've got a lot of good conversation.
We've been in this an hour, folks.
We haven't even gotten the main course.
Seamus asks, are you familiar with Jan Islam's
work on politics and Islam?
Nope.
Not familiar.
Oh, wait a second.
He's on Twitter, correct?
I've heard of him, but no, I'm not
familiar.
Not familiar.
I agree.
T-O-P-E-N-T.
We should be able to say majority of
us are employed by Muslims.
That's power right there.
A hundred percent.
We need to stop this mentality that we're
just going to be employees.
We need to start running things, right?
Employing our own.
That's power.
A hundred percent.
Val Farrujia says, if it's Italian pronunciation, I'm
going Farrujia.
I'm a new Muslim and I want to
wear hijab, but I live in a tiny
community and will be considered an example of
a Muslim woman to many uneducated people.
Should I do that anyway?
I don't know what to do.
I mean, listen, I mean, what's the, what's
the bad?
I don't see the bad part here.
I was expecting to say, but you're going
to be threatened or you're going to have
physical harm, you know, that you're running into
the fact that you're an example of a
Muslim woman to many uneducated people might be
the start of a lot of hair.
Might be the start of a lot of
good that they need to see Val.
I'm assuming a short for maybe Valerie or
something like that.
They need to see that Tom and Valerie
are Muslims, not just Mohammed and Fatima and
hints with all due respect to them, that
they need to see that Islam is not
just some sort of foreign force, that it's
also something that belongs here in your community.
Sarah says, do you see Muslims in the
West going away from identity politics or getting
immersed in it even more?
I see a crucial opportunity here, Sarah, because
we've been burnt by identity politics so much.
And we have started to see, especially on
the Palestinian issue, how identity politics are used
against us.
So I wanted to throw what Saraya said
in conversation with that, because just because you
have a representative who's a Palestinian and has
a hijab and is a Muslim and doesn't
guarantee anything, right?
Qaroon, guys, remember, remember who was Qaroon in
Surat al-Qasas.
It was the first cousin of Musa alayhi
salam.
Ibn Kathir says it in his tafsir.
Okay.
Or as they say, all skin folk ain't
kin folk.
Okay.
The people can check all the boxes on
your identity politics.
It's about, are they for the truth or
not?
We have seen situations in which a non
-Muslim, a kafir, is actually more on the
side of truth than some of the Muslims
or the Muslim representatives or some of the
people who put them forth, put themselves forth,
rather.
So we need to be very careful not
to get duped by the identity politics, and
we need to pay attention to the substance
of the thing.
Yeah, 100%.
So Zinefinit brings up a good point.
We live in a day and age where
our scholars are making * permissible.
Alhamdulillah, I'd say that that's a bit of
exaggeration.
That's still seen as way outside the mainstream.
There have been a couple people that have
tried to do it, but they're not considered
part of the mainstream whatsoever.
But the general sort of gist is true
that people will try to make permissible anything.
So if your attitude towards society is only
to find a way to make it permissible,
you're going to end up with no deen
very, very soon.
Hey, here we go.
I really appreciate this.
Don't celebrate Mawlid if you think it's bid
'ah.
Celebrate Mawlid if you think it's not.
Just don't push your opinion on others.
Move on.
There is a bigger issue to deal with
instead of the Mawlid.
Yes, it is khilaf sa'ir.
That's the fancy term for it within fiqh,
that it is a valid difference of opinion.
And so if it's a valid difference of
opinion, you have perfect license to act on
what opinion you think is correct, but you
don't have to force the rest of the
ummah to follow your opinion.
I agree, Sada.
I would rather Western hegemony fall and that
the Western governments focus on their own nation
and help improve the lives of their own
people.
And this is what the people who are
the neocons and the neoliberals don't understand, who
thinks that people like me are just like
anti-American or this or that.
No, I want the US government to just
take care of its own territory.
I don't want military bases all over the
world.
I don't want the United States interfering in
elections in Muslim countries.
I don't want the United States taking out
foreign leaders through CIA coups and stuff like
that.
I want the United States government to focus
on its own people, right?
That's not a crazy thing or an unjust
thing to ask.
Appreciate all the conversation, everybody.
Mashallah, we've got a lot of good stuff
flying around.
Sada, good point.
Differences of opinion from what I've heard and
the ones who do it, praise the Prophet,
alayhi salatu wasalam, in a halal way, like
nasheed, seerah, dua, et cetera.
No free mixing, no musical instruments, exactly.
No dancing.
That's what I mean when we have to
go into the substance of a thing, right?
Because if someone says mawlid and they think
the worst possible thing that they've ever seen
called mawlid with dancing and musical instruments and
free mixing and all this other stuff, they're
like, whoa.
That's very extreme.
But if it's something that is, yeah, a
bunch of dudes in the masjid just singing
nasheeds and learning about the seerah of the
Prophet, alayhi salatu wasalam, it's like, is that
really that bad, right?
So we have to understand.
Wow, there's quite a lot going on.
Here we go.
We're talking about all the hard stuff.
You're welcome, Val.
Hopefully it was beneficial.
Courtney G's up in here.
Mashallah.
Ay Qadri, that's true.
That's true, Ay Qadri.
That's true, Ay Qadri.
You're right about that, about the attack on
Jill Stein.
I'm starting to think we might not get
through all these comments.
Allahu akbar.
Which is a welcomed barrier that was to
break.
All right, Bismillah.
Yeah, let's switch it up here.
Let's go to our current events.
We got a lot of stuff to get
through.
It's already a packed show, and you guys
are making it popping, which I appreciate in
the chat.
First up, we said we were going to
talk about it.
We're going to pagers.
Okay, so what happened was, just yesterday, hundreds
of pagers that were used by Hezbollah members
exploded simultaneously all across Lebanon.
They killed at least 12 people, injuring over
3,000, and another round happening today.
They were in Beirut, in southern Lebanon, the
Daqaa Valley, lots of different places.
Now, there were not just fighters that were
affected by this.
They were innocent children.
This was something that was major.
Imagine all the people who carry around these
devices, and all of a sudden, they explode
on you.
Now, exactly what was going on, it was
later uncovered that Israel basically intercepted these shipments,
that they knew that this is the type
of device that they use, and they planted
explosives, because there was a lot of panic
at first about, well, do they really have
the ability to hack into your phones?
Can they make my phone explode?
Can they make your phone explode?
That's pretty scary to think.
But this is also a trend, and it
links up with our second topic, which is
about the perception of power is more powerful
than even your actual power sometimes.
Of course, Israel would like people to think
that it can hack into any one of
your phones and make it explode whenever it
wanted to.
Now, on the flip side of this, what
happened earlier on the week, let's go to
it, guys.
The Houthis from Yemen launched a supersonic missile,
or a hypersonic missile, traveled over 2,000
kilometers, that's over 1,000 miles, in just
11 minutes to target a military position in
occupied Palestine, and it hit.
So this is wild, because if you know
anything about how Israel's projected power rests on
part of its sense of invincibility, that the
Iron Dome, and this, that, and the third,
and you've got U.S. battleships off shore
with Tomahawk missiles and with other things that
are ready to intercept.
So Israel really relies on this perception of
you can't touch it, that no matter what
you do, like when Iran tried to fire
missiles at Israel, you've got Jordan sending up
missiles, and you've got all the nations around
it that have normalized with it, working to
defend it, this idea of being untouchable.
So this is a very, very old tactic
of Israel, trying to both, in the one
sense with the pagers, trying to seem like
they can strike anywhere, anyone, at any time,
and on the other hand, seeming like they
are untouchable.
And these perceptions that they have sought to
create are sort of the basis of their
perceived power.
Now, what's significant about the Houthi action is
that, similar to other actions, it demonstrates that
that's just a perception, that in fact, that
Israel is much more vulnerable than it would
like other people to believe, obviously, because if
people believed it was vulnerable, then they would
be more willing to attack it, or to
defend themselves, in many scenarios.
And so we see how there's always this
chess match going on, there's always this chess
match going on, and this is something that
we actually get from our own tradition when
it comes to power and the perception of
power.
Recall that after the Battle of Uhud, the
Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, the first thing that he
did, even though they had suffered many casualties
and were not in a state of soundness,
or of health, or of comfort, he ordered
them to rally, and he ordered them to
march, he ordered them to march on to,
and to pursue the enemy, into the desert,
even though they technically might have, some people
say they lost Uhud, some people say it
was a draw, either way, it's very counterintuitive
to imagine that you would then go after
the same enemy that you almost lost to,
or almost were defeated by.
But he did it because he wanted to
ensure that they did not come back, so
it was a bluff.
The Prophet ﷺ, he pursued them in the
desert, so that they would think that he
had reinforcements, and he brought fresh legs, and
that they were going to now fight them
again.
And sure enough, this is exactly what happened,
the Quraysh stopped outside of the city, outside
of Medina, they said, wait a second, why
are we, why are we retreating?
We could have gone back and finished the
job.
And then their scouts detected that the Muslims
were actually coming after them, and they said,
whoa, wait a second, Muhammad has reinforcements, let's
go back to Mecca, let's retreat all the
way.
So that was the idea about the perception
of power, that the perception of power is
often more important than real power itself, and
that this is something the Prophet ﷺ understood
perfectly, and something that is always being negotiated
and jockeyed around in the unfolding conflicts that
are going on in the Middle East.
The second thing we have, or the third
thing we have, former President Donald Trump, there
was an assassination attempt against him this past
week, a lot of speculation as to the
person who was the suspect, Ryan Wesley Ruth
or Ralph, he had a rifle equipped with
a scope, he was found with it, and
he had been lurking in the area for
about 12 hours before one of the service,
the Secret Service agents found him.
Now, why is this weird?
Because Trump was actually not planning on being
there that day, that he decided to go
golfing, and it was very last minute, so
people are wondering now about security, is this
something that is, there's someone on the inside
giving information, this is something that is very,
very unsettling for many people.
But one of the things that I'd like
to highlight here is that living in a
time of perhaps unprecedented political violence in the
United States, and we could argue that point,
you could argue that it's not unprecedented, but
certainly it's not typical to see presidential candidates
having their lives threatened with this regularity.
And we have to, and Trump was very,
very explicit when he blamed the Democratic Party,
and especially sitting President Joe Biden, for using
incendiary rhetoric that would maybe inspire people to
try to do such a thing.
And it's definitely true that we see rhetoric
from both sides that is very, very easily
linked to violence, and that there has been
an increase in this type of political violence,
that either side, when you undermine the rules,
when you undermine the legitimacy of the other
side, you create the possibility for violence and
things spinning out of control, right?
And this is a huge problem.
This is a huge problem when it comes
to governance and rulership that is not done
by righteous people, that if you want, perhaps
even more important, we could debate that, then
the system, the system's important, we won't say
that, but also important is the morality of
the people who make up that system, that
when the righteous rule, when the righteous have
power, everything in the world is taken care
of, at least to the best of our
abilities.
However, when the wicked run the world, when
the wicked are in power, everybody suffers.
And this is something that Allah ﷻ actually
references in the Qur'an, if we can
bring it up guys, in Surah Al-Hajj,
I believe, right?
Okay, to the end of the verse, he
says, وَلَوْ لَدَفْءُ اللَّهِ النَّاسَ بَعْضَهُمِ بِبَعْضٍ لَهُدِّمَتْ
سَوَامِ وَبِيَعُونَ وَصَرَوَاتٌ وَمَسَاجِنٌ يُذْكَرُوا فِيهَا إِسْمُ اللَّهِ
كَثِيرًا Okay, so we see that this is
a really, really, that 30 there is out
of place, but that's okay, that we see
that this is a really critical point that
the righteous have a mandate to rule, the
righteous have a mandate to organize society and
to lead.
Somebody has to lead at the end of
the day.
And if the righteous people don't lead, then
it's going to be left to everybody else.
Moving on, what else we got?
We have another individual setting themselves on fire
outside of an Israeli consulate, this time in
Boston.
Matt Nelson, September 11th, no less, on the
anniversary of September 11th attacks.
Outside of the Israeli consulate, he set himself
on fire because of Israel's actions in Gaza
and the U.S. support for that war.
He was burned over 70% of his
body.
He was rushed to the hospital.
This is the third self-immolation in this
past year.
Now, let's just skip, guys, let's skip over
his clip, but let's go to how the
portrayals from the news differ.
Okay, very good.
So we see that this is getting a
little bit of coverage, but not really very
much coverage.
Let's move on.
Let's keep going.
We've got also this past week, the Ministry
of Health in Gaza has just published a
649-page document with the name, age, gender,
and ID number of every Palestinian killed in
Gaza from October 7th to October 31st.
And that info has for over 34 out
of 40,000, the first 14 pages are
just those that are aged zero, under one
years old.
So unfortunately we see, but not surprisingly, and
this is going to run us into our
later sort of coverage of the disgraceful hearing
that happened this morning, where Palestinians having to
prove that they deserve to live, having to
prove that they deserve to live in their
own land, and they even have to prove
that they were murdered.
So Palestinians being systematically dehumanized, ignored, and erased
at every single opportunity and stage.
Now, before we get to covering that hearing,
we have some polling that's come in in
the last week.
We'll skip to that, folks.
Jill Stein is ahead when it comes to
polling Muslim American voters.
We had numbers come in from CARE, numbers
come in from Pew.
We've got numbers come in also from Yaqeen
Institute as well that we haven't published yet,
right?
But they're all saying the same thing, that
Stein is polling better than Harris within the
Muslim American community.
And that's a big deal.
It's a big enough deal that the Democrats
are starting to panic.
We've seen the attacks on Jill Stein and
third party in general start to escalate, whether
it's from the progressive left or the quote
-unquote progressive left, such as AOC and the
Squad.
We've seen Keith Ellison, we've seen local people,
local representatives or state representatives all attack third
parties, and specifically Jill Stein.
We even saw Mehdi Hassan the other day,
who gave an interview, Jill Stein and her
running mate Butch Ware, and hammer Jill Stein
on the Syria issue and on Russia, which
in and of itself is not a problem.
But Mehdi, if you have a big problem
with war criminals, then why would you suggest
that we vote for a war criminal?
How do you compare those two things?
If you are against someone who supports a
war criminal, why are you calling for the
Muslims to vote for a war criminal?
Because Harris is a war criminal.
This happened on her watch as well.
And Trump, probably sure, put him in there
too.
So don't act like you care about supporting
war criminals when you yourself are not ready
to use that term for Biden or for
Harris.
And we remember that Mehdi Hassan did not
abandon Joe Biden as the presidential nominee for
the next election until his debate.
The loss of Palestinian life was not enough
for him.
Anyway, we digress.
So we see projections for the third party
vote share, and especially in Michigan.
Listen, the numbers are very clear.
Harris has nine scenarios in which she wins.
She has nine pathways to getting the electoral
college votes that she needs to win.
Six out of those nine scenarios involve Michigan.
Michigan is by far the most crucial state
in the upcoming election.
Don't let anyone tell you any different, though
the other states are important as well.
But she is getting walloped in Michigan when
it comes to support.
Muslims are tired of it.
Muslims are tired of having to choose the
lesser of two evils.
We're tired of being told, well, if you
don't vote for me, then you're going to
have someone worse over here.
We're tired of the fear politics.
We're tired of the cynicism.
We're tired of the fakeness.
Muslims are tired of being lied to.
They're tired of being ignored.
The Democratic Party has just marched on with
its policies as normal and acted as if
we're stupid enough to think that just once
in a while saying, oh, we're so sorry
for all these tragic deaths.
So we wonder how they're happening.
I wonder who could be supporting these tragic
deaths or causing them to happen as if
we're stupid.
So we're seeing that this is definitely showing
up in the polling data.
Michigan, to a less extent Arizona, but even
Arizona, she's pulling well.
Pennsylvania, she's pulling well.
So this is a big deal.
The other numbers we have from CARE, let's
say that shows that Stein is leading Harris
in three key swing states in Michigan, Arizona,
and Wisconsin.
Her lead is the biggest in Wisconsin and
then in Michigan, but also significant in Arizona.
Nationally, it seems to be a tie.
If you average out all the states, it's
29%, 29% between Harris and Stein, which
shows a significant development.
16.5% of Muslim voters are polled
as being undecided, which is also significant.
That 16% has to make up its
mind and decide what it's going to do.
I'm trying to run through the numbers here.
So the main takeaway is that Muslims are
fed up.
We're fed up with the bad options that
are given to us.
We're fed up on voting for people that
we despise.
We're fed up not voting for on principle,
and this election very much is about Gaza,
as the Yakhin data will show when we
come out with it.
Muslims in America are voting because of the
Gaza issue, and they are voting informed by
the Gaza issue.
Next thing we have, all right, we've got
Biden and Harris statements on Ayshanour Ezgi Egi,
which are very disappointing and very belated.
Okay, the martyr that we discussed last week,
a Turkish American from the Seattle area.
Now, we finally saw some very, very belated
words from the president, but we see a
lot of hedging and a lot of relying
on Israel to investigate itself, as it always
had.
Biden said specifically that he thought that there
was a ricochet or something like this, which
is completely contradicting the firsthand eyewitness accounts of
what happened on that day when she was
martyred.
There's calls for accountability, very belated calls for
accountability, and Israel must do more.
Israel must do more.
Yeah, Habibi.
Yeah, Sheikh Biden.
You're the one giving them the weapons.
You're the one giving them the bullets.
You're the one sending them everything.
What are you talking about?
They need to do more.
You need to do more.
You need to do more to cut off
the funding, to cut off the military support
for a quote-unquote ally that has demonstrated
that it has no hesitation whatsoever to gun
down Americans or anybody else to destroy the
entire world just to pursue its own agenda,
right?
The absolute worst ally you could ask for,
just to use a real politic sort of
lens for a bit.
With that being said, we have some different—do
we have anything else on?
Yes, okay.
Witnesses challenge Israel's account of the U.S.
activist killing.
Big surprise there.
Did Israel—look at this, mashallah—did Israeli forces kill
American Turkish activist Ayshanur Agyi intentionally?
Okay, first of all, you're making her foreign
by doing that, and second of all, as
a question, there's no doubt.
There's no doubt.
Very good.
What else we got?
Is that all we have on this?
We're ready to go to the trial?
I call it a trial because it was
a trial.
It's supposed to be a hearing.
All right, let's go.
So we've got this absolute travesty, miscarriage of
justice this morning, and as I mentioned, you
know, Imam Omar Suleiman and I were texting
back and forth while it was going on
because he was there.
Yeah, he was there, and it was absolutely
despicable, the sorts of things that went down.
Let's take a look and a listen.
You support Hezbollah, too, don't you?
Again, I find this line of questioning extraordinarily
disappointing, Senator.
You have Arab American constituents that you represent
in your great state.
Yes, ma'am, I understand that, but my
time is running to and I apologize, but
is that a yes or a no?
Yes or no question to do I support
Hezbollah.
The answer is I don't support violence, whether
it's Hezbollah, Hamas, or any other entity that
invokes it.
You can't bring yourself to say no.
I can say no.
I can say yes.
What I can say is your line of
questioning.
Do you support or oppose Iran and their
hatred of Jews?
Again, I'm going to emphasize Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas,
none of them is going to...
You can't bring yourself to say no.
Sir, I don't support...
It's real simple.
Excuse me, I'm going to...
As a Muslim woman, sir, I'm going to
tell you I do not support Iran, but
what I will tell you is that this
conversation...
I'm running out of time.
You called our decision to cut funding.
You called our decision to cut funding.
Well, first, what's the United Nations Relief and
Works Agency?
It's UNRWA, which is the institution that exists
to provide services and aid to the nearly
six million Palestinian refugees.
And you called our decision to cut funding
for them, quote, an incredible moral failure, close
quote.
That is absolutely correct.
But again, I would suggest that conversation is
about...
We did that because nine UNRWA staff members
were fired for actually helping Hamas on October
7th.
Isn't that the case?
I don't believe that that's correct in terms
of...
Let me ask you one more time.
You support Hamas, don't you?
You support UNRWA and Hamas, don't you?
Sir, I think it's exceptionally disappointing that you're
looking at an Arab American witness before you
and saying you support Hamas.
You know what's disappointing to me?
I do not support Hamas.
You can't burn yourself to say you don't
support UNRWA, you don't support Hamas.
I was very clear in my support for
UNRWA.
You don't support Hamas.
You should hide your head in a bag.
So, absolutely ridiculous scene.
And in the crowd was the mother of
Wadia, the six-year-old boy who was
stabbed 27 times and murdered in an obvious
hate crime.
But this individual, this shaitan, knows exactly what
he's doing, this Kennedy.
And the sister who was responding to him
was probably a little bit too polite.
What should have been said to him is,
how much did AIPAC pay you to say
this?
How much did AIPAC pay you to ask
these questions?
That he knew exactly what he was doing.
It didn't matter how much she said to
disavow this group and disavow that group.
She is always going to be criminalized and
securitized because this person, look at that face,
that person is a bought by a foreign
entity.
And it's always the people that are bought
by foreign entities that are accusing you of
being under the influence of a foreign entity.
Every accusation is a confession, as we've learned
the last 11 months.
And absolute travesty, a travesty, when we look
at all the hand-wringing that has been
going on about supposed anti-Semitism going on
college campuses across the United States, when this
anti-Semitism, and I'm only putting it in
quotes because we're talking about protesting in support
of Palestine, which is being conflated with anti
-Semitism, in which Jews themselves are participating.
And this is dealt with with every sense
of gravity and graveness and seriousness when it
comes before the Congress.
And yet, when the shoe is on the
other foot, we see how things go down,
that it is not an exaggeration to say
that the United States government, to a large
extent, is occupied by foreign interests, is occupied
by Israeli interests, and that those interests buy
American politicians, and they produce situations like this.
And if the American people think that it's
only going to be the Muslims that are
going to catch the brunt of this, then,
in time, I think it will show that
it will be more than that.
Very, very upsetting.
Let's take a second and go through the
comments real quick.
I know you've had a lot to say,
and then we'll circle back to our next
segment here.
Sada asks, what do you think of the
slow turn to perceiving China as an ally,
especially among Muslim countries, when what they're doing
when it comes to injustice to the Uyghurs?
That's a very important question and a very,
very important thing to keep in mind.
A lot of people, and this goes back
to our idea about letting the West fall,
etc., etc., which is quixotic.
I think you guys are being simplistic when
you're talking in those terms.
And Sami Hamdi has said this in his
talks as well.
It's not logically sound to assume that a
fall of Western hegemony automatically results in better
situations for the Muslims.
There are scenarios in which it's worse.
There are scenarios in which it's the same,
but different.
There are scenarios in which it's better.
Rather than allow yourself to go down this
sort of escapist thinking and think that, oh,
well, we just have to watch as this
falls and then we'll be ascendant or whatever.
No, it's not.
You have to always look for what you
can do and your opportunities to build power.
That is 100% true.
So there's no guarantee whatsoever that China would
be a better ally or a better protector
or a better hegemon than the United States.
In fact, they might be worse.
We don't know.
So all of that needs to be taken
into account when we're making political calculus and
decisions.
Let's see what else we got.
A lot of people, a lot of good
comments.
Salmon roll.
Welcome back.
Mariam asks, why the assassination attempts now?
Somebody's trying to utilize the instability and chaos
in the political scene for ulterior motives.
Muslims must align and unite now more than
ever.
Definitely seems that there's some major, major, major
shifts are happening, and we really, really need
to get our act together.
If we don't, it's really going to be
a problem.
100% AQadri, if Stein didn't have momentum,
the Dems wouldn't be panicking.
You know that you hurt them when they
start to address you and attack you, which
is why I was happy to see myself
on the Israeli Post.
I mean, sorry, the New York Post.
And Valerie, you're 100% right.
That was literally, as Imam Omar Suleiman pointed
out in his interview, it was an act
of hate speech that was happening at a
hearing on hate speech.
It's a panel.
But we shouldn't be too surprised.
We shouldn't be too surprised because Zionism and
other forces have created the dispensability and the
killability of and the inhumanity of Muslims and
Arabs in order to make the Zionist project
possible and the sort of American Empire project
when it comes to the invasion of Afghanistan
and Iraq possible.
That the bearded guy with a turban is
not considered fully human.
You pick up that rock, and you say
Allahu Akbar, and you're not considered fully human.
All of a sudden, you become eligible to
get droned out of existence by huge weapons
and bombs and state-of-the-art sort
of weaponry.
That that is enough to disqualify you from
humanity in this particular time in which we
live.
And that's what we're up against.
Interconnected Revert, which is a funny username, says,
seems like a matter of time before nations
come together to retaliate against Israel, at which
point USA will send our young men and
women to go do their dirty work.
Well, I don't know.
We'll see.
We'll see about that, I guess.
There are situations in which you could imagine
that happening, and then there are situations which
you can't.
Rhonda Blackston is 100% right.
I'm glad you said that because Kamala stated
she would support Israel.
Yeah, I mean, she told us who she
is.
Sada, 100% right.
Tired of proving we're not terrorists.
The idea of a terrorist, Sada, was invented
for us, not for anybody else.
People point out this all the time.
Why don't white Christians or Christian nationalists or
this group or the KKK, why isn't the
KKK a terrorist group?
Because the idea of terrorism was invented.
The word was coined to make you and
me seem like criminals and dangerous and violent.
That's it, period, right?
And so that's what's there.
As long as that's going to be the
way the law works, we need to find
a way to dismantle that thinking and that
language and that law.
Mariam asks, why are some Muslims so attached
to the Democratic Party?
Victory isn't linked to personalities but value.
Whoever is not willing to carry our demands
is simply replaceable.
Last sentence is very powerful.
I appreciate that.
I think there's a lot of reasons.
Some people, it's a conflict of interest.
They have their careers or their organizations or
even their non-profits are tied into the
Democratic Party's sort of funnel and tentacles of
funding.
That definitely exists.
Other people are just duped.
They really believe that those few breadcrumbs that
they throw to us once in a while
that make us think that they actually care
about us or that they actually, you know,
want to see us succeed or represented.
Or they're under the delusion that if we
just get enough representation on the inside that
somehow it's going to change.
Yeah, 100% Ronda.
Twice criminalized, black and Muslim.
Yeah, no, A Qadri, you can definitely tell
the tenor in which people approach an interview,
right?
Who gets the kid gloves and who gets
the teeth?
100%.
May Allah help you.
G screenable.
May Allah bless you.
I do agree with that, Juju.
I do think Democrats underestimate the Muslim's connection
to the ummah.
They think that we only think, they didn't
think that Gaza and Palestine would be this
big of a deal to us.
They undermessed that.
They definitely, I think, underestimated that.
Yeah, that's the thing.
A Qadri points out, someone said Kamala saying
we need a deal but can't make it
happen.
Makes it seem like she and the US
are weak and can't get the government of
7 million to do what they want.
No, that's 100% false.
They don't want to stop funding Israel because
it's a racket.
Like funding Israel, all of the tech, all
of the computer chips, all the weapons, it's
a racket.
And it's a very lucrative racket for the
people who are in on it, right?
And so there's this like, oh man, we
wish that they would stop.
Oh, you're the ones that get to decide
whether they stop or not.
Just stop sending the weapons.
Yeah, we were all angry, Valerie, 100%.
It was like listening to Piers Morgan.
It was like Piers Morgan was there.
You know, Valerie brings up an interesting point.
He should be accountable for his hate speech.
I agree, but one of the problems that
we run into and that we face as
the Muslim American community, and this is a
real issue that we have to think our
way through, is that when we strengthen the
vehicle of hate speech, we know that that
vehicle has been hijacked and used by Zionists.
They're trying to conflate criticism of Israel with
hate speech and antisemitism.
And so whenever we strengthen a particular vehicle
or a legal discourse or something like that,
we have to consider also the ways in
which it can be used against us, which
is unfortunate that we have to think that
way, but it's reality.
Yes, MB, 100%.
Compare that to the same way they question
the leaders of the universities.
But they will be questioned by Allah ﷻ
if that gives us a little bit of
solace.
Imagine them being questioned by Allah ﷻ with
fire under their feet.
But you know, Allah ﷻ told us something
very important, and we can bring this up,
guys.
Do we have the ayah?
Sidi Fatihah, welcome to the program.
Good to have you back.
Brings up a good point.
Anything that is on camera, it's only used
for public opinion.
So it's a show, right?
He knows.
He's not really looking for a real response.
This applies to both sides.
Answering the question doesn't matter anymore.
He's not listening.
He's performing, okay?
He's performing.
I 100% agree with that.
All right, go for it.
Sorry about that, guys.
So Allah ﷻ says in the Qur'an,
You will certainly be tested in your possessions
and yourselves, and you will surely hear from
those who have been given the scripture before
you and from those who associate others with
Allah abuse, much abuse.
You will hear lots of abuse from them.
And what we just heard was abuse.
Make no mistake.
But if you are patient and fear Allah,
then it will be, this will be something
of determination.
Alhamdulillah.
That it will take determination to do it,
and it will increase us in determination.
Yes, 100% they are bullies.
Attica.
Buongiorno.
Sto bene, grazie.
That's true, Musa.
Musa Blue says, Black Americans have faced this
racist treatment for years.
That's true, 100%.
I like that we got trolls.
That shows that we're making gains.
Alhamdulillah.
Okay, Jane Da Silva, she says that, because
somebody asked me this earlier, but there's a
website by Code Pink that lists how much
each person gets accepted from AIPAC.
That's useful.
That is useful.
Somebody's saying that, no, let's just leave it,
leave it down there.
It's not even worth it.
There is nothing in history, in human history,
like the chattel slavery of the North Atlantic
slave trade.
There's nothing.
So, I mean, if you talk about slavery
in Islam, or slavery is practiced in Arabia,
you shouldn't call it the same word.
It's something entirely different.
The chattel slavery that was practiced in the
United States and the Americas was one of
the most inhuman things that was ever practiced
on any group of people in the history
of humanity.
And you can tell a tree by its
fruits.
You can tell a tree by its fruits.
Okay, first of all, the slavery was racialized,
which wasn't how it happened in other places,
especially in Arabia.
Second of all, the slavery that was practiced
in the Americas was slavery that it sought
to be perpetual slavery.
It was turning people into cattle.
It was attempting to separate people from their
traditions, their culture.
They purposely put people in different tribes and
groups so that they didn't have any common
language, they couldn't speak anything.
They cut up all relationships to their homeland,
to their culture, to their identity, to their
language, to their families.
And so they attempted to break people psychologically
and breed them like cattle.
That was North American or Western Hemisphere or
American slavery.
If you look into Islam, you look into
who were the governors and who were the
leaders who were the top of society.
A great many of them were freed slaves,
or the children are freed slaves.
So those are two very, very different institutions,
and they shouldn't be conflated.
I agree.
Muslims need to move and vote as a
block, and our fuqaha can help us push
that in direction.
May Allah accept and help me.
May Allah help me.
I'm trying, guys.
You guys gotta keep me in your dot,
please.
Yeah, so Sada Chavez, thank you for bringing
the point of terrorism and xenophobia being intentionally
linked when it comes to Islam.
Timothy McVeigh bombed Oklahoma City in 1995, and
the word terrorism was weaponized in 0100%.
Terrorism, even legally, I've reviewed it with lawyers,
seriously, on the books, in the law.
There's one little clause about domestic terrorism, but
legally, domestic terrorism doesn't really exist.
Really, terrorism under US law is you have
some sort of, you're acting in cahoots or
inspired by a foreign terrorist organization.
That is legally how they treat it, and
so they very much, it's very, very much
given to us, even by Zionist movements, even
back to the 70s, in order to criminalize
the PLO first, and then later movements after
that, and to criminalize anybody who supports them,
or would even think of supporting them.
And then later, it was used for other
groups.
Everything has a history.
Yeah, Neutrino, you got a point there, 100%.
Juju, also agree, 100%.
We're growing up, Juju.
We're realizing that being liked does not keep
us safe.
Being liked does not keep you safe.
You know, Catherine Martin brings up an interesting
point.
She said, get rid of all the guns,
tanks, etc., go back to bows and arrows.
I bet there will be more compromise between
countries.
I mean, that's interesting.
The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said that before the
end of the world, it's going to go
back to that.
Well, we don't know.
They say, like, World War III will be
fought, whatever World War III will be fought
with, World War IV will be fought with
sticks and stones, or swords and shields, and
stuff like that.
And that seems to confirm, or to conform
to, prophetic guidance as well.
There's definitely something about the limits of violence,
when it was a weapon that you had
from your hand, versus something that you can
press a button and just wipe out entire
villages.
That's crazy.
Sada says, wouldn't servant or servitude be a
better term?
Yes, it would.
We shouldn't really call it the same thing.
Good stuff.
Wow.
Allahu Akbar.
I made it to the end of the
comments.
Never thought that would happen.
Good problems, people.
Good problems.
Let's move on.
So, we've already reacted to what we're going
to react to.
Let's go to tafsir.
Tafsir, explanation of the Qur'an.
We've been going through the short surahs, from
the back to the front.
Today, we have Surat al-Masad.
And Masad is a translation of a twisted
rope fiber, okay?
There's a pun that Allah makes, okay?
So, after A'udhu Billahi Minash Shaitanir Rajeem.
Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem.
Okay, so do we have?
Yes.
May the hands of Abu Lahab be ruined,
and ruined is he.
His wealth will not help him, nor that
which he earned.
He's going to enter the fire, a blazing
flame.
And his wife, too.
The carrier of firewood around her neck is
a rope of twisted fiber.
A lot to unpack there.
Abu Lahab was one of the uncles of
the Prophet ﷺ, who knew that Islam was
the truth, but rejected it, because it was
against his worldly interests.
And he said this word, basically sending a
curse to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.
And these words were revealed, straight away, on
the spot, to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, to
answer.
Say, so, and Allah is making different puns,
actually.
Like, so far you heard, you know, that
this is rhyming.
So, he uses rhyme.
And he also makes different puns here.
So, he plays with his name, Abu Lahab.
Lahab used to mean, or Abu Lahab, it
means like, lahab is a flame.
And similar to how, maybe in contemporary colloquial
English, we would say that someone is hot,
right?
They're attractive, they're beautiful.
That this was something that meant that he
was an attractive person.
But Allah flips it, and basically says that
he's going to end up in a flame,
right?
Meaning the flame of fire, of hellfire.
So, he uses that against it.
And then he also mentions his wife as
well, which is a carrier of firewood.
It was an expression to indicate that she
was someone who carried tails, and spread lies,
and slander against the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.
And that he then makes another pun, and
says that there's going to be a twisted
rope around her neck on the Day of
Judgment.
Now, they used to have ropes carry firewood,
and that you would wear it around your
neck.
And Mas'ad rhymes with everything else in
the surah.
But the imagery of having a twisted fiber
rope around your neck in a strangling way,
not in a way where you're just carrying
firewood, but in a strangling way on the
Day of Judgment, is pretty intense.
So, what's the unique word that we have
in this particular surah?
What do we got?
Yeah, the ultimate clapback, Abdullah.
All right, numbers are in.
A little bit less from last week, but
it's all right.
73% of you are right.
Say, Tabbat is the unique word.
This word only occurs in this surah.
Because remember, one of the linguistic miracles of
the Qur'an is that every single one
of the 114 chapters has at least one
word that is completely unique to it, that
doesn't happen anywhere else in the Qur'an.
So, Tabbat is that word in this particular
surah.
The other examples, we had Aghna, 17%.
No.
And then Naran, 8%.
No, definitely not Naran.
So, the idea of Tabbat is that Abu
Lahab would not just quietly disagree, but that
he would try to, very, very similar to
how you all pointed out that with this
trial, I think that Fatihah pointed out that
with the trial, or the hearing, everything's performative.
People are just performing in front of cameras.
They're just trying to get the sound bites,
and they're trying to be blustery and things
like that.
They're not actually having a conversation with each
other.
They're performing for other people.
And that's what Abu Lahab was doing.
Rather than just say, go home and disagree
by himself, he made a big show out
of it.
And he tried to say in a very
public way, to influence everybody else around, to
say, curse be to you, Muhammad, and to
try to throw shade at him, and to
try to basically discredit him.
Now, the interesting thing about this ayah is
that, and this verse, sorry, this chapter is
that it's very, very short.
And Allah tells him what's going to happen
to him, that he's going to end up
in the hellfire forever, for eternity, because of
his rejection of the truth, his knowing rejection
of the truth.
Now, if Abu Lahab wanted to prove the
Qur'an wrong, all he had to do
was say, all he had to do was
embrace Islam, accept Islam, become a Muslim.
And he would have proved the Qur'an
wrong, but he was so arrogant that he
couldn't even bring himself to do that.
And this is an important point when it
comes to the nature of kufr.
Allah ﷻ says in the Qur'an, that
the nature of kufr is this type of
arrogant refusal.
A lot of people, I don't necessarily, particularly
like the translation as just unbelief.
I don't think that, or disbelief, that's a
little bit too weak, right?
Like kufr is like, it's to cover, you're
arrogantly rejecting, you're a denier, right?
It's not even like, well, I need to
think about it.
No, it's like you, you know it's true,
and you reject it.
Good stuff.
Run through the comments real quick, and then
we'll do our last segment.
Make sure that you keep those questions coming.
If you have any questions about the Qur
'an, I've got some people who are new
converts, some people that are just interested in
Islam.
You know, you're free to answer, or free
to ask anything.
We've got one more segment to tonight's show
on personal development.
We've been going through the book Atomic Habits,
and then we're going to sign off for
the night, inshallah.
Yes, it's true, Sada, Abu Lahab's wife did
used to cover the path of the Prophet
ﷺ with thorns, which also ties in with
the imagery of her punishment.
Watermelons drop in Lupe Fiasco lines, mashallah.
A match made in heaven set the fires
in *.
Very nice.
Yes, I'm glad that you said that, Watermelon,
because I do follow that sort of stuff,
just a bit, just a bit.
His recent deviance and kufr aside, I appreciate
that you said that.
I know, when I first learned that he
was Muslim, it was kind of exciting, but
then, you know, unfortunately.
It's Catherine, so welcome.
You're totally welcome to guess.
We can tell that you're new.
It was in Arabic, so no worries about
it.
You're perfectly free to guess and do whatever
you want.
We're just happy to have you along with
us.
Kathy Stone Street, wa'alaikum salam wa'rafatullah.
Yes, Valerie, can you imagine getting called out
constantly, every day, every day, until the Day
of Judgment?
Subhanallah.
How would he prove the Qur'an wrong
by accepting Islam?
Because Allah said that he was going to
be in hellfire forever.
If he accepted Islam, then he would not
be in hellfire forever.
G Dude asks, what motivated Abu Lahab to
be so vehemently against the Prophet?
Was it his worldly desires?
Yeah, it was against his interests.
It was a conflict of interest.
He wanted to keep the gravy train rolling.
You know, idol worship was big business.
And dedication to your tribalism, right?
Dedication to your tribe.
You're admitting, basically, that your tribe was wrong
about something, which is sort of difficult.
Sara Chavez asks, I grew up with a
sort of secular sense of Islam.
However, I feel now in my adulthood that
my knowledge is severely lacking, and I'm wondering
if I should take shahadah and begin my
journey anew.
Bismillah.
You know, if you're making salah, which I
hope you're at least making some, if you're
able to make salah, you're taking the shahadah
in your salah.
So there's that as well in your prayers.
You got it, Catherine.
We're here for you.
Yes, that's correct.
Shahab Khan.
Kufr means to cover something up.
Allah ﷻ uses the term kuffar in the
Qur'an with two valences.
One of the meaning is farmers, right?
You'll see that later.
But then also it means the plural of
kafir, which is someone who rejects Islam.
The meaning of covering.
Yeah, it's like you know in your heart
that it's true, but you cover that up
for various reasons.
All right, very good.
All right, so let's roll.
Let's go back to our last segment for
today and wrap it up for the night.
We've been going for two hours.
But that's a credit to you all.
So personal development, we've been talking about the
book Atomic Habits.
We've been going through it chapter by chapter.
And today we are in the chapter about
making it unattractive.
So if you know James Clear, he breaks
down sort of the four laws of habit
forming or habit formation.
Make it obvious was number one.
And number two is make it attractive.
Now every law has its corollary or its
opposite, which is true.
So your good habits, you have to make
them obvious in order for them to be
successful, meaning the cues that are going to
trigger you're doing that habit.
And so if there's bad habits that you
have, you have to do the opposite.
You have to make them unobvious.
You have to hide them.
You have to make them invisible.
Okay, now the second law was make it
attractive.
And we talked previously about trying to make
your good habits attractive so that you'll want
to do them.
We talked about tying it to things that
you want to do, right, the things that
you need to do, balancing them and tying
them to the things that you want to
do.
Temptation stacking was one of the words that
was used, right?
Like every time I watch TV, I'm going
to do pushups during the commercial breaks or
whatever.
So you're tying the things that you need
to do to the things that you want
to do.
Okay, but now we're going to talk in
this chapter about the opposite or the implication
of this law, which is to make your
bad habits unattractive.
Okay, so how do you go about making
your bad habits unattractive?
One of the things that, oh, we had
homework too.
All right, so I'm going to ask you
about the homework and then I'll keep going
and then I'll see what you guys said
in the chat.
So before we had asked you, one of
the things that he mentioned before was leveraging
social peer pressure, basically.
If you want to be good at something,
you should surround yourself with other people that
are good at that thing.
If you want to be good at Arabic,
let's say, or you want to be good
at Quran, or you want to be good
at anything, then you should make friends with
people who are like that and spend time
with them and you will eventually have a
much easier time becoming that as well.
So your job was to spend more time
with the people who you wanted to be
more like.
And I had a very easy time doing
that because I was recently hanging out with
Sheikh Mohammed Shinawi and other people and people
who I respect a lot and look up
to.
And so that was easy for me.
But how was it for you?
What was the thing that you wanted to
be more like and were you able to
even connect with one person who had that
quality or that skill?
That's what I want to hear from you
in the chat.
Now, as I explained that today is about
making your bad habits unattractive, and he starts
pointing out by why we have bad habits
in the first place.
And this is really key.
And I think it's really also empowering that
everything that you do has an underlying motive,
okay?
Whether it's a good habit or a bad
habit, there's an underlying reason why you're doing
it.
And your current habits are not always the
best way of addressing the problem that you're
facing or the reason, the motive that you
have to do that thing in the first
place.
For example, okay, let's say that you want
to unwind.
At the end of a day, you had
a stressful day at work or whatever, or
with family, whatever's going on.
You want to relax.
There's multiple things that you can do to
relax.
You can listen to Quran, you can take
a shower, you can work out, you can
go for a walk, you can spend time
in nature, you can scroll on your phone,
okay?
Scrolling on your phone is what a lot
of people reach for because it's convenient, because
it's right there.
But is it the best way to address
that underlying motivation of wanting to relax?
It's probably not the best way, okay?
So you have a craving or a sense
that something is missing, or even better, you
want to change the way that you feel.
Most habits are about wanting to change the
way that you feel, but you have to
realize that the action that you are doing,
the action that you're doing, is not necessarily
the best way of having it done, okay?
And so then you actually start to look
at yourself like, whoa, boy, okay, well, I'm
scrolling through the phone because in this moment,
I feel lonely.
In this moment, I feel like I want
some human interaction.
I feel like I want to unwind.
What's a better way of unwinding?
What's a better way of having human interaction?
What's a better way of, you know, doing
these sorts of things?
So going through these sorts of motivations is
really important and can be empowering, and you
can actually start to pay attention and look
at your habits and say, huh, well, I
do have this underlying feeling.
I have to address that.
I can't just stop the habit.
I'm going to feel a bad way.
No, I want to address the underlying feeling.
I want to feel different, but I need
to take control of the decision and the
habit that I'm choosing to achieve that change
of feeling, and I need to choose a
positive one.
I need to choose a constructive one.
I need to choose a better one than
the one that I'm currently doing.
And he has a real quick aside that
I think is relevant.
I actually want to bring up where he
says that.
A lot of people think that emotions cloud
your decision making, and he says that's not
true, and I agree with that.
I think that's a really super important part.
I think that post-Enlightenment Western values look
at emotions negatively.
Oh, you're just being emotional.
Oh, he's in his feelings, right?
But feelings are actually really critical.
Emotions are essential to making decisions.
There's no possible scenario in which you can
put your emotions aside, and they've actually done
studies on people, right?
Well, they've observed people who had some sort
of brain injury that incapacitated the parts of
their brain that are responsible for emotion, and
you know what the consequence is of a
person who loses that part of their brain?
They can't make decisions.
Isn't that crazy?
They can't feel happy.
They don't feel sad.
They don't feel angry.
They don't feel anything.
They look at a decision, and they'll sit
there for hours and not be able to
decide what to do.
I was surprised by that.
Rather than emotions getting in the way of
our decisions, you actually really need your emotions
to make decisions in the first place.
That's why he's going with the whole move.
Well, we don't necessarily want to get rid
of the emotions.
We just want to observe and pay attention.
You have this emotion.
You feel lonely.
You're choosing to do X action or habit
to change the fact that you feel lonely.
Scrolling social media.
Let's think about a more positive and constructive
and rewarding activity, and one that's actually going
to more successfully deal with the fact that
you feel lonely.
Joining a club, joining an activity, going to
the mess sheet, whatever it is.
Then the next thing he says, we'll end
with this.
He says, one of the things that you
can do, because sometimes your good habits are
hard.
Let's imagine the same scenario.
You're feeling lonely.
You can A, choose to scroll through your
phone, Instagram or whatever, or you could B,
get off your, you know what, and go
to the mess sheet and go to a
class.
Which one's easier to do?
It's easier to scroll your phone 100%.
It's hard to, okay, you got to find
your keys.
You got to get in the car.
You make sure guests is in the car.
You got to go and do all this
other stuff.
Oh, so-and-so is going to be
there.
I don't really get along with them.
All these reasons that stop us from going.
So how do you get over that?
That's how he ends the chapter.
He basically says that you have to trick
your brain to learn to enjoy the hard
habits.
So if going to the mess sheet is
hard compared to scrolling your phone, but you
know it's the right thing to do, then
you've got to figure out a way to
trick your brain into liking it.
And there's a few different techniques he gives.
One of them is the language that you
use in your internal speech for how you
talked about.
So instead of, for example, oh, I got
to go to the mess sheet.
I have to go.
No, I get to go to the mess
sheet.
I get to go to the mess sheet
every day, every week, every whatever, right?
Focus on what you're gaining.
You can even say it out loud.
I'm going to the mess sheet so that
I can stop feeling so lonely.
Or I'm going to the mess sheet so
I can build positive relationships with the brothers
and the sisters, okay?
Now, what if you feel nervous?
What if you're going to the mess sheet?
We have people who are converts here or
people who are interested in Islam, and they're
nervous to go to the mess sheet.
And that's the reason it's holding you back.
Well, he suggests what a lot of professional
athletes do, which is the pregame motivation ritual,
right?
Is that a lot of athletes, yeah, they
get nervous as well.
When you step up to the plate, when
you're about to go to bat, bases are
loaded, two outs, bottom of the ninth, World
Series, game seven, that's a nervous situation.
You're taking your free throw, game seven, series
is tied, 3-3, one second left on
the clock.
You are in a very, very nerve-wracking
situation.
What's going to save you in that situation
to do your habit the way that you
want it to unfold?
To have a ritual, a ritual that motivates
you.
And you can tell yourself and reframe that
you're just getting excited and that you're using
your adrenaline rush to power you through this
thing.
So there's whatever you can do.
You can psych yourself up.
Anybody who works out, goes to the gym,
you probably are very familiar with this.
Sometimes you have to psych yourself up.
Sometimes it's a machine or it's something that
you listen to, part of the Quran.
Sometimes it's a certain YouTube video.
Sometimes it's something that makes you angry, right?
If you want to look at what's going
on or the particular sort of hate that's
directed at Islam or the people of Islam
or things like that, motivates you to go
to the gym and pump that iron, right?
Then you can use that as your ritual.
So your homework for this week is to
develop a motivation ritual for yourself.
So identify one hard habit, the right thing
to do, but you're lazy to do it,
it's inconvenient to do, and develop a motivation
ritual that's going to help you to do
it.
Sada Chavez asks, is this drawn weekly?
Yes, it is.
Yes, it is.
The algorithm got you.
Sometimes it works for you, sometimes against you.
Yes, it's weekly, Wednesday night at 8 p
.m. Eastern time, as our studio guru Abdullah
pointed out.
ABCC asks, is it okay not to ask
for hidayah for transgressors, especially now a days?
Nobody's forcing you to ask for hidayah for
the transgressors.
If you do, that's fine, but that doesn't
preclude struggling against them.
Juju asks, can kufr be translated also to
willful ignorance or stubbornness?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, that kind of covers more stubbornness
or obstinance, but willful ignorance, yeah, or criminal
neglect even, depending on the situation.
Something like that.
They say that there's different types of kufr
and things like that.
Excellent, Juju.
Glad that you are.
Excellent.
Look at that.
So, Juju's doing the last homework.
So, here we go.
And he wanted to be good at tajweed,
so he started to go to take a
tajweed class, and the students are really good.
I guarantee you, Juju, inshallah, if you stick
with it, you're going to be good at
tajweed.
May Allah bless it.
Mariam says, one of my goals was to
advance my level in Spanish.
Hey, I have that goal too, Mariam.
So, I made a language exchange partner, and
I am making an effort to talk to
a regular or to practice the language.
Man, yeah, I need to do that.
Ashik says, I might have to see your
talks with Brother Paul again about restating Orientalism.
Yeah, I owe him.
I owe him a later, a recent episode.
Good.
Samiha says, don't know if this counts, but
I want to be well-read and reflective
of what I read.
So, I've been watching Vlogging Theology to be
more like Paul Williams.
I think that's a great recommendation.
We all could stand to be a bit
more like Paul Williams.
That's good.
I think that counts, Samiha.
Applepie asks, I want to know how to
start studying in a structured and systematic way.
Where should I start from, and what should
I study on a daily basis from both
the Qur'an, the Surah, Hadith, and the
Prophet Ali, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam.
There's curricula, Habib.
There's curricula.
If you read Arabic, they're in, I don't
know of any in English, sorry, but in
Arabic, websites like Taqween will give you every
single discipline, every single text, this, that, the
third, subdivisions.
You'll be good, right?
It's in Arabic, though.
Fatihah says, I want to be more like
mom.
So, I spend more time with her every
day.
That's amazing.
May Allah bless you and your mother and
your family.
Abdullah was traveling alone, so did not do
the homework.
Disappointed, Abdullah.
But I tried to listen to more interviews
and lectures from the people.
Okay, so that's something.
Applepie asks, and how to stay consistent with
Islamic learning in the long term?
The key to that is to take a
sustainable load.
You never want to move backwards.
And that's actually something that James Clear gets
to later in the book, about taking it
one step at a time, not rushing.
The person who's the most successful is the
person who's the last one standing, the one
who doesn't stop moving, and doesn't stop going
forward.
You don't have to run, you can crawl,
but don't stop going forward.
A Qadri says, SubhanAllah, anytime I start feeling
down about anything, I try to say Alhamdulillah
out loud.
My sister, Mashallah, Mashallah, models this so well
for me.
Very thankful for her, Alhamdulillah.
May Allah bless you both.
That's awesome.
Great tip, by the way.
We learned earlier in this book, how just
enunciating it out loud is a very, very
helpful, helpful technique.
Kathy says, I wanted to begin reading more
Qur'an, so I started a goal of
a Juz' a day.
That's Mashallah, ambitious.
Mashallah, I'm pretty much keeping up with my
goal, Inshallah.
All right, and if you ever get to
a point where it's become too much, rather
than quit the goal entirely, maybe break it
up, okay?
Abdullah F.
says, some good habits, reading Qur'an, exercise,
martial arts, spending time with family.
Good.
Try your best, Kathryn.
Just try your best.
There we go.
No leaving the house after 8 p.m.
That's a good, that's a good, a good
technique for success.
We talked about, I think, last week or
the week before, about not putting yourself in
tempting situations.
That was one of the most important things
for people.
People who have good habits aren't, they don't
have more willpower than other people.
They just spend less time in tempting situations.
I find that very profound.
Right, like a Qadri about prayer.
We use all the time, I have to
go quick pray.
Astaghfirullah.
May Allah forgive us.
I get to go pray.
I get to take time out of my
day to connect with Allah subhana wa ta
'ala.
Sada, I'm not, I'm actually not a baseball
person, believe it or not, but I have,
I play and have played plenty of sports,
so I'm familiar with most of them, except
for curling.
I have no idea how that works.
And cricket, I apologize to our subcontinent brothers
and sisters.
The only thing I know about cricket is
from Lagan.
Juju, that's amazing.
I love that you mentioned that.
Thank you so much for mentioning that.
I went to the masjid for tajweed, and
then when I walked in, I slipped and
fell.
That is incredible, because you persisted beyond that.
That was like shaitan's last attempt to try
to stop you.
The shame or humiliation or embarrassment or whatever.
That's great.
And yeah, testing your sincerity.
And I've definitely, man, I've had a lot
of, I've had a lot of experiences like
that.
Literal and figurative.
Mashallah, excellent stuff.
Props to Ustad Adolf Mann.
Phillies fans in the house.
Oh man, it's gonna get wild in here,
Sara.
Calm down, Sara.
Okay, let's go, let's go.
What else do we have?
What will happen if I skip my espresso
for a day?
I'll get a headache.
Yeah, so I make sure to not skip.
We persevere.
Okay, Amina is also starting Spanish.
All right.
Okay, our prophet said we should learn to
be good in swimming, archery, and horseback riding.
I'm not good in any of these.
Bismillah.
Let's go.
Let's start an archery club or go to
your local archery range or horseback riding.
Those are, take a swimming class.
These are things you can do.
These are things you can do.
Sara aims to go on the halaq on
the weekend.
Bismillah.
Mariam says, I think the flaw in the
author's claim here is his focus on pleasure
and displeasure, as in pleasure must be present
for us to successfully build a habit.
Yeah, I don't, I think that you've got,
you're onto something there.
Perhaps it's more like a realist take if
we want to be charitable and say that
you're probably going to be more successful at
establishing that habit if it's pleasurable.
You're right, though.
You're right, though.
He's definitely not coming.
I mean, he is a person of faith.
He's a very strong Christian, but he's definitely
not coming at it from our worldview, so
there's always going to be little divergences.
Yeah, that's a great point, Big Bang Bro.
Allah is asking us to come and to
talk to him, so we get to pray.
Allahu Akbar.
Okay, Watermelon says, goal was to spend more
time outside, now making after us for the
time to do so.
Awesome.
Now doing so several times a week.
Excellent.
Good job.
Glad to hear you're having success with that.
Do you have a recommended list of books?
I've got a million books I could recommend.
Okay, so Juju says, I started to make
one of my habits unattractive.
I used to gossip a lot because I
ruminate a lot and vent.
Ah, that's interesting.
I started reading Surah Huma during prayers.
Oh, awesome.
I'm working with a therapist to stop ruminating.
That's great.
That is excellent.
Good for you.
So I need to ask a difficult question.
I have a question to ask.
It's okay.
What do you do in Islam in a
relationship with abusive parents according to Allah?
Okay, so first of all, Allah didn't talk
about abusive parents in the Qur'an explicitly.
So, you know, again, sometimes we need to
get away from simplistic answers.
What's like the Islamic thing to do?
The only Islamic thing to do?
Like sometimes you have to extend or extrapolate
or apply general principles.
And some of the principles that Allah Subhanahu
wa ta'ala puts down in the Qur
'an with it comes the parents is goodness
to them, but not disobeying Allah to please
them.
Okay.
And a certain sort of distance if they
are attacking Islam or anti-Islamic or something
like that.
Okay.
So we also have to clarify what we
mean by abuse.
Do we mean words?
Do we mean physical violence?
Do we mean other stuff, right?
If you have the ability to distance yourself
and get under a different roof and be
independent, then there are situations in which that
is called for and warranted and not un
-Islamic.
However, to know the specifics of your situation,
you should talk to someone in person.
Specific fatwa like that are best handled by
people in person that are able to know
your specific situation.
Big baller Brandon.
Habibi.
Ameen.
May Allah bless you, man.
ABCC says, can you suggest a book in
English on the seerah of the Prophet ﷺ?
Yeah, I mean, there's several.
I mean, if you're more into the academic
sort of, how am I going to put
this?
If you're more, if you care very much
about the authenticity and the accuracy of all
the information that's presented and you want a
more academic text, then The Sealed Nectar is
probably one of the best available in English.
If you're looking for more of a thematic
reflection on some of the elements of the
seerah, then In the Footsteps of the Prophet
ﷺ by Tariq Ramadan is good.
And there's others.
When the Moon Split is good, it's very
basic, right?
If you're just looking for exposure, familiarity with
like sort of the main things that happen.
Okay.
So there's lots.
Zaat Academy is nice, Mariam.
I'm familiar with them and their teachers.
Alhamdulillah.
M.
Joe.
Wa alaikum assalam wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh from
Melbourne.
Intention for 2025, M.
Joe.
Inshallah.
Yeah, Abdullah, you're not even here to give
me the decaf.
I don't know what you want, man.
All right.
Thanks for joining us, Catherine.
Appreciate it.
May Allah bless you.
Thank you for joining us.
Hopefully, see you again.
Applepie asks, in Islam, can male and female
work together in the corporate sector or should
there be segregation?
What do you mean work together?
You mean like in the same office, alone?
Don't do it.
If we're talking about they're on opposite ends
of the hall, that's a different issue, right?
So there's details that need to be parsed
out here.
Is one of the people have to do
it?
Okay.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, we do the same thing.
We do the same thing.
I mean, my name is Arshad Saeed from
Canada.
Fatiha.
Yes.
Martin Lings.
Okay.
For Sira.
Okay.
Very good.
Martin Lings is good, but there are some
things you should check out my paper on
perennialism.
Martin Lings was at the very least affected
by perennialism.
If not a perennialist himself.
I know that's unfortunate news for a lot
of us, but you can check my article
on Yaqeen Institute for the sort of, he
slips it in there once in a while.
It's not too, it's not, it's not very
explicit like in his other works.
Like what is it?
Ancient beliefs, modern superstitions and things like that.
G Screenable is studying Mandarin.
May Allah bless you.
All right, cool.
May Allah bless you in that.
Ilyas, you missed the homework.
Go back and listen to it.
May Allah bless you.
That's very sensitive of you.
Yeah.
I mean, I try to, I try to
be in the service of the people.
I want my reward too.
You know what I mean?
Very good.
Oh, I've reached the end.
All right.
May Allah bless you all.
I had a very nice time tonight.
I think this is the longest one we've
ever done.
So keep it up.
If you keep on getting more and more
interaction, we're going to have to stop paying
attention to every single comment, but we're not,
we're not there yet.
But in the meantime, until that happens, may
Allah bless all of you.
And it's great to connect with you once
a week.
And we ask Allah for forgiveness and for
our shortcomings.
And inshallah, we will catch you next week.
Subhanakallahu wa bihabdika sharafan la ilaha ila al
anta, astaghfirullah wa atubu ilayk, until next time.