Tom Facchine – Non-Muslims Should Learn From Those Who Know

			If I want to learn about biology, I'm going to talk to somebody who's probably like a professor in
biology or somebody who's authored authoritative works in the field of biology, right? I'm not going
to go to somebody who had took biology once in ninth grade and hated it, right? So you need to go to
people who have some level of expertise. Now, expertise is kind of a funny thing. And it's really
kind of politicized these days, you've got some people who have used expertise in a gatekeeping way
to control people and to kind of filter out sort of oppositional viewpoints and things like that.
And that's on one extreme, but then you have the other extreme that just doesn't recognize any
		

			expertise at all. And acts like every single person has the same access and the same ability to come
to conclusions. You know, the person who's just reading online in one language, right, compared to
the scholar who knows five languages who's able to access manuscripts, no, they're not equal, right.
So if you want to understand about Islam, you should go to somebody who is qualified to do so
whether that might be a local mosque, or an Imam, or something like that, where somebody who they
should at least know a couple of languages, they should at least be fluent in Arabic and able to
access Islamic texts, they should have, you know, an understanding of the Scholastic tradition,
		

			because if you're going to go to somebody who's just your average sort of practicing Muslim, you're
going to get all sorts of things, you know, and converts to the religion find this as well, because
when we become Muslim, a lot of people who don't have any sort of training, they start telling us
what to do and what not to do. And this, that, and the third, and some of the stuff is true. And
some of it's not some of the some of the stuff they've just picked up from their culture over
hundreds of years, or the particular place where they were born, and actually has nothing to do with
this time at all right? So you have to know where to look, when it comes to anything. If you want to
		

			learn, you have to go to the source, and you have to know where to look. And so Islam is no
different than anybody in central New York or anywhere. But I assume people are going to travel
locally. If you're in central New York, or if you're in the Mohawk Valley, if you're in Utica, the
message is open, come to the message and ask because you're not going to figure out a slam by the
news. You're not going to learn about a slam by going online. Right and looking through the
internet. You're going to find what people put on the internet and we know how that is. So if you
want to understand about us, then come talk to us. Come talk to us. Come talk to me, and we'll have
		

			a conversation