Muslims Should Do This DAILY

At one point, we tried to do a book club at the mesquite. And the question was asked when the book club was getting going, you know, how many books did you read in the last year? Or what are some of your favorite books that you've read in the last year? And the answer was crickets. And then it came out that most people, if not, almost everybody hadn't read a book in the last calendar year. And that was a moment where it's like, wow, how things have changed. I mean, how far we've come this OMA as one of the world leaders in scholarship and producing literature and producing literary material. And now many of us don't make the time or don't take the initiative to, to read. And that's really a

shame. Reading, and particularly reading books is literally probably the most effective and efficient way to expand your horizons intellectually, to expose yourself to new ways of thinking to new ideas, and to inform yourself. And that's not to say that all reading does that there's bad things out there to read, or there's trivial things out there to read, we're not, you know, obviously, if you read trashy romance novels, you're not going to expand your horizons very much. But to not read anything at all, you're going to simply be stuck in the same ways of thinking, stuck in the same sorts of ideas. And you're going to be limited towards kind of, you're going to be

limited to just picking up things from your interpersonal reactions, or movies or TV or whatever. What's the problem with that? What's the difference between the medium of the book and the medium of television and movies and things like that, when it comes to entertainment, right? They call those things entertainment for a reason, it's a presentation towards you, right? It's being presented towards you in a very prepackaged form. And that's not to say that some movies and some television shows aren't extremely thought provoking. But a lot of times those benefits that we might get from movies and television, they're latent benefits, right? They're secondary benefits, or indirect

benefits, that are actually primary benefits of reading a book, right? And a lot of times, actually, why does everybody complain? Right? They say, if there's a movie that came out, and it used to be a book, you know, Sal, the book was so much better. Everybody says that. Why? Because when it was the book, you were imagining things for yourself, you had such a much more robust engagement with that text, you were using more of your brain, now that you're seeing it on the big screen, it's being presented for you, the dots are being connected for you is being shown to you in a prepackaged way, everything's already. How does this character look? And how does his voice sound? And, you know,

what does the

you know, the Talon look like? And all these sorts of things, it's being presented to you, your brain doesn't have to do that work anymore, right? So it's a much more passive medium that a book is okay. The other thing that we find is that, what do we read? Because it's not that we're reading nothing, most of us read, but what are we reading? We're reading Twitter threads, for reading, you know, Facebook posts, and we're reading maybe maybe some of us are reading articles, right? Online, if you were to for the people who are maybe I can't read or I don't have the time or whatever, if you were to tally up all those things that you read, how many books would it be for you to tally up

all the Twitter threads that you read, and all the Facebook posts, it would probably come out to be a few books a year. So really, it's not about you can't read or you can't find the time, it's that you're prioritizing a different type of medium, right? And everybody knows, it doesn't need to be repeated that the medium of Twitter or the medium of Facebook is very, very limiting to how much first of all, how much is going to be able to be communicated, right? It's something that privileges shorter, you know, shorter text over something that's that, that takes more space and takes more time to talk about. And second of all, there is more of a process of duration, right? You're part of

the algorithm, right? So the algorithm is going to throw you something based off what they think that you want to see. And so we have these silos that happen, you're going to be stuck in sort of the same thoughts. It's, some people are able to use social media in a way that actually pushes the boundaries of their thinking. But most people don't. Most people, it's just things that confirm what they already believe. Right? So reading books is very important. And everybody you know who's able to and it doesn't have to be an English it can be if you're not a native English speaker, whatever your native language is, but to read is important to have that relationship with text to experience

and educate yourself through various types of media, not just the same old, same old social media and movies and shows to have a couple of books a year and a couple movies maybe and a show or whatever that way you have. It's almost like food, right? You can't just eat bread, right? You need to have some vegetables need to have some fruit, you need to have some you know, healthy fats, you need to have meat, these sorts of things, right? Media and ideas are the same. You can't just limit yourself to just junk food, right? And if we're gonna say anything's junk food, then it would probably be, you know, Twitter and Facebook. But you know, you have to have a healthy diet, you have

to have variety and you have to have different you have to have mechanisms and avenues for you to get different perspectives and to expand your intellectual horizons.