Reforming the Self #35

hamdulillahi rabbil aalameen

have

almost

been forgotten and Mohamed salah, Aloha Melinda, the main founder and partner in that and I'm gonna earn money out of banana mean somebody from

near and far Welcome to reforming yourself with along with us ohanaeze Video Academy machete on.

Last few lessons have been very, very important.

And I've also tried to do a better job of condensing the material of the author because sometimes the author is so theoretical and categorical that you can kind of get lost. And so I've tried to just distill some of the things he's saying into the more hard hitting

points and the more instructive and profound kind of messages and the two previous, I should say the biggest ones we've taken away in the last month have been

essential characteristics for students, and essential characteristics for teachers.

And if you all have been following along, then you should remember some of them. We haven't, or some of the essential characteristics for a student or a teacher, and I'll be very, very lenient with you.

That's right.

One.

Yes, that's right, maybe we could say the most important thing for a teacher is to be able to discern who's going to use the superpowers of knowledge for good and who was going to use them for evil. And to prevent those who would use them for evil, as much as possible, until not indefinitely, but until they're ready for it, until they're able to

have the realization, understand the context in this universe understand their relationship to their creators upon with the audit,

to be able to properly receive and utilize those sorts of instruction. Okay, so that was probably the most important one for teachers. What about for students?

We're all students on the student.

All of you are tied to some sort of educational institution in some way. You guys are perfect students, or you guys completely, completely free of the qualities of good students, and so you don't know.

Interested in learning? Okay, well, that's a start, I guess.

If only interests were enough, right? What else is there? What must the student be?

engaged, okay, you clearly weren't following the lessons because we enjoy. Okay, student has to be humble. That's first and foremost, student has to submit themselves. And this is kind of a tricky process. It's a two way street, right? There's VM teachers out there. There's phonies. There's people who

take advantage, right? They put themselves on a pedestal of some sort of Guru. And then next thing, you know, they're in the news because it did something crazy. And then there's also rotten students who they are completely arrogance towards the subject material for the teacher, they think they know better. And so they would be similar to

somebody who's going to a doctor and telling them whatever they think they want to hear in order to get a certain prescription. Right, they're cooking the books, and trying to just, they think they know best, right? And they're just trying to use the authority of the teacher for their own ends. And you would be surprised how often

that exists everywhere in the Muslim world, including Medina.

So that was one thing that we had talked about. And then yes, he the author had gotten into kind of this

decentering understanding, and it was amazing that it coincided with the football the other week, because we in Western academia and culture, we tend to assume that understanding and education is mostly about intelligence, right? Those two things are like, joined at the hip. Right? If you don't understand, sorry, you know, maybe take up forestry or something. It's a little bit above your paygrade. And maybe you're not intelligent enough for it. Whereas the Islamic kind of worldview, understanding is a gift from Allah data. And he can give anybody that gifts, whether they match the kind of traditional markers of intelligence or not, right? So it's more of a function of care.

Arthur. And so the author was trying to shift us away from kind of sorting people, as you know, this guy's a dummy. And this guy is brilliant, you know, which does kind of invite self praise, right. And it does kind of invite this sort of arrogance. And shifting us over to like this person, a lot has granted success, this person a lot has granted understanding. And if you go to the biographical works of the setup, you know, in the early scholars, there's tons of, you know, apocryphal stories of other like very intelligent scholars who fell into sin. And then were caused basically to forget everything that they once knew. Even people who stood up to recite the Quran, they used to have the

entire end and rise and all of a sudden, their understanding and memorization was taken away from them. Because it is at the end of the day, a gift given to us by Alaskan cod.

So after he goes through that, he's going to shift to talking about society. And if we know anything about how wrong of us we're hanging at this point, he sees things big picture, right? He's interested in the individual project, right, he's been selling us the whole time on the need for respecting the aka the intellect and developing the author. But it's all geared towards something. It's not just so that we can have nice resumes and, you know, get accolades from this in that society or that fraternity or that whatever, it's so that we can actually establish a just society, a society that a lot will be pleased with. Right. And this is an all of our self interest. Because

first of all a lot about the other allows a just society to continue. And he doesn't punish it either through you know, dramatic divine punishment, nor through allowing another superpower or world power to overcome even I can't remember the text but I believe that even say me, Rahim, Allah said that Allah's powers or other will allow a disbelieving society if they are just to exist, and to stick around until they turn away from justice. That's how much love my daughter loves justice. Whereas even if you have a civilization who nominally believes in a STEM, you know, follows something that might look like Islamic civilizational culture.

Once they turn away from justice, it's only a matter of time, between the last battle to Allah lets them be overrun by somebody. And we see this with the Mongols, you know, we saw it happen with, you know, civilization after civilization.

To put it short, you know, the Muslim world has been overrun by colonialism and all these sorts of waves of oppressors, largely due to the, you know, the turning away from justice, turning away from justice. And so, all of us for how nice project is very much on this like scale of history, like he's trying to not just build an individual, but realizing that by building individuals, you're also building society. And so now he's gonna talk about kind of

this ecosystem of influencers, right? We use the word influencer these days to talk about people on Instagram and Tiktok. And, you know, I can lip sync to some certain song and put myself up on Tik Tok. And I'm an influencer. Right?

He's, he's talking about influencers, at a more pure stage in history, where things were kind of a little bit more sensible, even if the spiritual diseases were still the same. So he identifies,

first of all, I mean, he puts a lot of responsibility on the ultimate political authority, whatever it is President King, Emperor, whatever it is, because the buck has to stop somewhere, and that person is at the end of the day responsible for setting the tone in society as to what the society is going to be about. Is it going to be about entertainment? Like is, which is pretty much our society at this point, pretty much about entertainment and fulfilling our, our base desires? Is it going to be about virtue? Is it going to be about education, it's going to be about some sort of other civilizational achievement, whether it's an architecture or this or that, right? So the buck

has to stop somewhere and it stops with the ultimate leader when it comes to setting the tone. However, that person does not have so much reach that person is only able to influence things so far. At the local level. In every community, there are different stations and of influencers, and there's different types of influences. And the author is trying to show us how in a functional society, these influencers they all complement each other. Right? Because there's different types of people. So he identifies four he says, the biggest perhaps type of influence there are the prophets, okay. And what is the reach of the prophets, the prophets they influence our internal lives and our

external lives. Okay, so there's internal externals kind of his car

glories. And also they influence the masses and the elites. So here's two, here's four total categories he's looking at through, right, there's some that are going to reach the masses, some that are going to reach the elite, some that are going to reach vote, there are some influences influencers that are going to change the way you think about your life, and the way in which you see the world around you. And then there's some that are going to set rules and laws that are going to kind of govern the external part of your life, right? Like the the speed limits I was talking about. Right? So the prophets are at the top. Because the prophets, they influence all of those areas, they

influence your internal life, right? What your sense of what's going to happen to you, after you die, you know, your beliefs, right? How you feel about certain behaviors, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right, a lot of the guilt that might come from having committed a sin, a lot of that is partially given to us by the guidance of the prophesy seven, who told us that this sort of thing is going to have x and y and z consequences in the afterlife, right? So the prophets influence everything, all four categories.

Politicians, on the other hand, that's number two politicians influence what?

Okay, so let's so we've got four categories. We've got masses, elite, internal, external, so a politician is going to hit how many of those categories

masses, elite, external, yes, three out of the four, right, they can't really shape your insight, maybe like one, you know, random person might, Bernie Sanders might be an inspiration for some people. But like the vast majority of politicians, we have Congress, I shouldn't say anything on this session is recorded. Okay? The other politicians, they're not necessarily going to be like your beacon of guidance for in, you know, morality and stuff like that you're not there, you're not going to get up in the morning and think, Oh, thank God, that person is our xy and z, this particular office or that particular office, they govern the external, they say that these are the rules you

have to follow. If you know, we're not going to get mail on Sundays, or Saturdays, or you need to have this degree if you want to go here, or this is going to have a stoplight at this particular intersection. All these external parts of

our lives. The third type of influencer is what the author calls the sages. Okay? And by the sages, he's talking about people who influence the elite on the inside. Okay, so he's talking about people who are kind of like maybe you would consider the saints or people who have that kind of, they're able to motivate people, would they have a particular appeal to the elite intelligencia? The academic class, whatever have you? And then the last type, he says, are the orators please? Okay. And of all the four categories we have, what do we think the orders are going to affect?

The masses? Okay, so no elite? Yes, masses? internal, external? Answer. That's right. Internal masses. So between the four of them, you've kind of got multiple vectors of influence, okay. And

the ideal is that there's a connection between these four types of influencers, the ideal is that, the orators are going back to the sages, right? And the sages depend on the orators to kind of translate certain insights into the local idiom that people will be able to understand. Right, you can draw an example from from rap, right, and hip hop, this is something that's so influential, it literally like people are mouthing the words to songs that people make, like, multiple hours a day, a week, a year, right? That's something with tremendous amounts of influence. It's something that touches the masses doesn't really touch the elite, right? If this group of people does go off on

their own, does not have any connection with say the sages or or the prophets, right, or, or these other types of influencers, then it might degenerate into what we find just base entertainment, hedonism, shock value, right? All these sorts of things that we see. But if we can imagine a parallel universe, and in other times of history there, there was hip hop, where individual artists were influenced by larger objective, right, they were influenced by certain religious and spiritual movements. And so they were attempting to achieve some sort of social edification or social good, right.

That's a little bit of a modern day example of what the author might have been kind of shooting for. And similarly with the politicians, etcetera, etcetera. If you have virtuous politicians who have a relationship with the sages and have a relationship with the orders, then you have people that are actually public servants.

right people that are actually prioritizing the good of people making legislation and making laws that are supposed to make people's lives better, more valuable, easier, more fulfilling, and not just enriching themselves, you know, and let alone the corruption etcetera, etcetera.

So,

you can often tell how a society how well a function is how well a society is functioning by the relationships or lack thereof between these different types of influences. And today, you know, with the type of influencers, okay, if we were to use the author's for kind of categories, internal, external, massive elites, if we're going to look at tick tock, and Instagram, and things like that, where would we place the influencers on social media?

Where would they fit into the picture?

Masses? Okay. internal, external?

External?

I think it's internal, right? Because external is like things you have to do. Yeah, things you're forced to do rules, right? They're not setting rules for anyone. It's like, you know, the ice bucket challenge or whatever, right. So that's, No one's forcing you to take that challenge or whatever it's called when you dance next to your car or whatever, you know, that's all internal motivation, not external obligation. So internal masses, so they, they align with orders, they're the orders in the author's kind of calculus of thing. So this is really interesting to come to think about this are modern day orders, with the author's kind of way back. He wrote 1000 years ago, which probably

for him were like the thieves on Friday, and the poets and stuff like that. Now, he has next section is who spit to be an orator. Right? What are the qualities that somebody should have to have, before they have access to those people, they're able to influence people's internal motivation, they're able to, which is the purest form of influence, because you can make a law and someone might follow your law. But as we said, in the football before the second, you're not looking? Do you think people are going to follow that law? No, of course not. They don't, people are only following it. So they don't get in trouble. Whereas internal motivation, that person is convinced something clicked inside

of them, you reach them somehow, so that it's self policed. Like, they're the one that wants to do it, right. Like, they're the one that feels a social pressure to take the Ice Bucket Challenge, or this challenge of that challenge, or whatever it is, No one's forcing them. So it's a it's a powerful thing. And it's kind of become very lucrative, which is why so many people dream of becoming sort of like an influencer, because you've got so much reach, you've got so much influence. And now it's also a moneymaker. So his next section, is who's fit? Which is a question that we don't even think of these days, because it's not about fitness. It's just about who does it. Right. Nobody

stops and says, you know, it's like, well, wait a second, am I really fit to have a tick tock account with all these followers? Or am I really fit to, you know, have such a big following on Instagram? I know you have every single, you know, Tom, Dick and Harry up there who wants to have an account? Who, there there's a glut people are throwing out things trying to influence and then it's just by popularity contest? Who actually becomes somebody who is an influencer? So the author waves into okay, if we're going to say that these people have this influence, and this influence can be used for good it's not necessarily an evil thing. What are the essential characteristics that such a

person such a person has to have?

I'll put it to you. What do you think? What should someone with such access and influence have in their lives?

charisma and passion? Okay.

Okay, so a sort of social intelligence,

proper intention, what's going to happen if they don't?

What they're trying to achieve? Yeah, they're always going to, let's say, Okay, if a person has influence over other people,

a proper intention would look like

uplifting those people and benefiting those people in some way. Teaching them like even if we want to not even get into Yes, for Allah, um, you know, worship and etc, etc. Like, even just like, very, very dunya we write a good intention might look like wanting to benefit people in some way, cooking classes or teaching them a language or you know, and there's a lot of them. So what would a bad intention look like and what are the consequences of that?

Do

you want

okay?

So, instead of giving it's a taking it's a parasitic relationship to the influencer to the influence.

That's right.

Right.

Right.

Right. So we have people who are looking to enrich themselves, right? People who are looking to

take and abandon right, from the people that they influence. And then we have people looking to add value to other people's lives, with the people that they they influence. So that's, that's very, that's very good. That's very profound. Talking about people's intention.

One of the things that the author says is that

he says that the orator people that are in this sort of station, they have to have the can't be hypocritical. He says that first and foremost, he says, they have to practice what they preach, right? Let's take your cooking class. If you get somebody up there trying to teach, mashallah Indian cuisine or somebody else's cuisine, and you're following their stuff, and

they've never cooked the day in their life. They're just up there making jokes, maybe they're passionate, maybe they're charismatic to go at the other qualities, but they have not yet put themselves in a place to give anything. Right? What's the result going to be? It's just going to be not just a waste of time, but people are going to actually lose trust for this person they're going to,

and this type of person is going to be, let's say,

blameworthy. In the eyes of people. Okay, well, it's a cute example with cooking. But what if it's a religious person? Yeah, that's where the rubber meets the road. Because if you have somebody who represents a religious station, or is trying to represent an entire tradition, like Islam, they get on tick tock, they get on whatever. And they try to influence people. And they don't practice what they preach, they're found out now to have done this or done that, or something comes out about them. And we're not talking about slander, and we're talking about something real, and something that's open and obvious, or they just don't know what they're talking about. That person has not

just

wasted the time of the people that they influence, they poison the people's trust towards that type of person. Right? The next type of religious person that comes along, you know, it's like, oh, is this just another one of these guys? That's just you know.

And we've we've seen things like this happen, right, like people have, yeah, perfect example, how many people are bitter. And just, I mean, there's so many even like jokes about it, right? Because it was, it's such a, you know, an epidemic of sexual abuse and things like that.

And so how many people, you know, they refused to trust, the trust is absolutely obliterated. And we live in times where trust is a rare commodity, and that the lack of trust has influenced so many things, politically, public health, pandemic, everything, many, many, many things come back to trust.

The most important thing to trust is the kind of

clerical class, you know, the people who are the academic class of the religion, and it's a two way street. The people on the side of the orators, they have to be trustworthy,

they have to have purified themselves, they have to have fixed themselves. Part of why someone like Murphy make, for example, us names is so accepted, is because if you've listened to some of his interviews about himself, like previously, he's done the work. You know, like, he's gone through stuff. He's gone through hardship, and he's been putting the fire and he's coming out of the fire. And he's now just sharing very basic stuff, according to you know, and he's a very charming character and a lot of people so many people benefit from his stuff. Right? So

the opposite you know, somebody gets up and they're not qualified, they haven't gone through this stuff. They haven't done the work and they're only going to make a mockery of of the station. They're only going to hurt people's trust for that. And

regretfully, we see a fair bit of at least in the English sphere, I don't know in the Arabic sphere or even less about the Ooredoo sphere.

how things go, but I'll say that on Muslim YouTube, Muslim Twitter, right Muslim Facebook, you know, with the the Anglosphere

The English speaking segment of the world, we have a lot of bickering and a lot of infighting, a lot of reputations, and a lot of, you know, oh my god, did you see what he said? And how could he do this? And that? And you have to wonder

that I average bystander looking at this stuff. Right? Not the person who's in the comments. Yeah, go get them. You're so right, you know, but the average person who sees this stuff and turns away, what are they coming away? Looking at the entire station?

of religious speaker of student of knowledge of email, how are they, you know, making this sort of what impression is it taking away, I was told a story of somebody who

was doing Dawa in Japan. And that was big in Japan right now. There's like messages being built, and many people becoming Muslims. And so a certain person, they were Japanese, they accepted us them. And then the first thing someone started telling them was about like the sects. Now, it's like Sunni, Shia, and within the Sunni, you've got this and that, and that, and then this and that, and that, and all this sort of breakdown. And their reaction was like, Well, wait a second, wait a second. This is like I can, I just wanted to be a Muslim, I didn't want to get involved in all this sort of thing. So it's, it's, you know, discretion is important. And optics are important. And

certain things we were talking last time about context, and blacks. Maybe you guys ever heard of this concept of Media Studies? context collapse, is basically what social media has done to us, because previously, you had different identities, depending on who you were interacting with, right? So if you interact with your parents, you have a different identity than if you interact with your peers.

And you have a different identity if you interact with people younger than you, right? Social media collapses all those different contexts, because now everything's broadcast indiscriminately to everybody. Right? So now you have somebody who, they might put something out there that is suitable for an academic audience, but it's accessed by everybody. And it's not suitable for that audience. And so it becomes a problem for them. This happens a lot with Islamic lectures and things like that. Or vice versa, you know, you have many different sort of ways in this in which this sort of thing plays out. So

all that to say, is kind of

when it comes back to orators, right? What are the qualities that they need to have, they need to practice what they preach, they need to have that discretion. You don't talk with the people that you're influencing the masses, the same way that you're going to talk with other people. If you go back to those stages, where you go back to that scholarly class, and you're asking them for advice, etcetera, etcetera, everything needs to have kind of a,

a little bit of separation, but cooperation.

And he compares it to me, says somebody who gets up and speaks and tries to influence people before they have taken heed themselves. They're like a doctor who's sick, who's treating a patient. They're only going to communicate their own disease to the patient, they're not even going to be able to, it's worse than not going to be able to heal them. They're going to actually make them sick. And there's a funny story on if you guys are into Nasir lienholders stories, or Joe has stories, but you guys, do you have a different name for him in the in South Asia?

In Arabic world they call him Joe hmm. And in Turkey, they call him Nasr Dean Hoja. Yeah, he's like the kind of the, the the wise idiot figure and there's always sort of funny stories. Okay, so one of them is that he's called the Okay, so he's the judge. And the mother comes with her son. And her son is eating too many sweets. Okay. And she's like, Bobby, you know, and also the holder, I need you to pass a specific ruling on this boy banning him say and tell him it's haram to eat sweets. And he's thinks about is like, Oh, this is a tricky case. Okay. Come back in a week.

Okay, so the mother comes back with a boy again a week later. So I call the I need you to intervene that is out of control. He won't stop eating sweets. He says again, like, Come back, come back next week. And he keeps on delaying and delaying and delaying. And then after three months go by. He's like, What is this? You've been delaying and buying for time and all this stuff. He's like today, I can finally say, Boy, do not eat sweets. It's haram for you. And then she's like, why did it take you so long? He said, Well, I had the same addiction. And I had to stop myself first. Right. So he had a problem with sweets. And then he had, right he felt the need to practice what he was preaching

before he could tell somebody else to do the same.

This dovetails nicely into the next chapter. I'm the author at the end. He's talking about optics and how it looks, how the orators and the sages and the politicians and the everybody needs to work together, right, as different parts to the same vehicle and they need to

Know What conversation should be behind closed doors and which ones should be out in public and etc, etc. The next chapter is discouraging arguments and debates

among laymen in all situations and even among scholars, often.

So he says that he says that allowing average people, layman masses to argue about religious topics when they don't know the evidence, and they don't even understand what evidence is, is akin to unleashing demons from hellfire, or setting.

You know, Julian might do free. Right. So he basically says that, to recruit the masses, people who have not formally studied the religion, the systematic way, right, we're programmed with the shape or through an institute or whatever to recruit because it can be tempting, if you're X speaker or x Imam, and you know, X YouTube channel, and you've got a certain position, you might feel tempted to recruit, you know, your local congregation, onto your side to kind of, you know, make you feel like you're on the right and kind of spar with other people. I'll never forget, I was in a mesh in Minneapolis, St. Paul, in Minnesota, and I overheard one of the lay congregants who was a fairly new

Muslim,

telling the Imam

I'm so glad I go to the only machine in the city that's on the hop.

Straight from his mouth.

And I just like I had to laugh, but and feel pity at the same time and sorry, but also the blame, where's the blame? And that situation is on the mound and that situation, that email cannot allow that type of attitude to, to fester? Exactly, you cannot. And the email sets the tone, right? If you're going to,

you're basically involved in that you're recruiting your congregants to side with you on certain ideological, or theological or therapy related debates, or controversies, etc, etc, etc. You're not doing anybody, any good.

The people who are your foot soldiers in that war, the congregants who have never studied, they don't know anything about what you're trying to talk about. And it doesn't benefit them. It doesn't benefit them in their afterlife, it creates division among the Muslims, it stops the Muslims from being able to cooperate, right? You wonder you see a cities like, like these cities where there's, you know, maybe they're in our city, how many messages like 678, maybe, maybe more, how much Quattroporte cooperation is between the message

very low, we're just starting to me and so the very good relationship and the nice relationship.

But that's just like, we're in baby stages, we're taking baby steps, right? Other cities, they've been in the game for a lot longer, they've been going for decades and decades, zero cooperation, never talked to each other. Right, let alone an E prayer, let alone a Dutch Holika. Let alone switching Imams for you know, like, at least for us under the though of course street like we switch Imams like I I told the guys because I'm so was in Bosnia for the last month and a half. And so I covered for him. And after it was all said and done there, like I said, you know, every once in a while, you know, we should just like switch off. Once we have the new mesh teed up again. So come

here, and I go there and to kind of just, you know, just to give the people a different flavor. You know, that's cooperation, if you've got people if if I wanted to come in here and be like, I'm in Medina, grad. And, you know, these guys, they practice cultural Islam. And they have all these innovations, you know, and tried to kind of, you know, stir up the people about, you know, this sort of thing. Okay, that would be almost very easy to do. Right? It would make me look really good. But it wouldn't be so destructive. It would be so destructive to the fabric of a larger Muslim community. How can you and I tell this to

themselves? Well, but how can one each one of us is too small to do certain things by ourselves. If we have an Islamic school, if we want an Islamic school, do you think that we can do it just Campbell street machine? No chance. Can they do it just Court Street? No way. It's not possible. As we were sending one day I said if we ever do a STEM school, it's got to be all of us together. And he's like, I completely agree. And, but these are the things you cannot end the buck stops with the man the man cannot allow the congregants and the committee

antsy to engage in this sort of debate.

That's Saudi versus fit. Sufi versus therapy. Right? I'm sure you guys have tons of divisions in the subcontinent. I don't even know about,

you know, Shafi versus Hanafi. That's a big one, right? You know, et cetera, et cetera, these things

have only served to divide us and make us weak and make us easy prey for people who want to do us harm, both politically abroad. And politically here, honestly. And we live in that we live in the times that we live in times now, where there are certain people who want to make certain Muslim organizations synonymous with terrorist groups, right? There are certain people in the Muslim world governments that want to make the Muslim Brotherhood designated as a terrorist group.

Every single MSA in the United States is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Right? That's the organization that started the whole thing. You know, how many misogyny in America are? Have some if you go back far enough ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Right? So it might be tempting, you know, one particular state or government or for ideological movement, might want to run to the non Muslims, curry favor with them suck up to them to get them to punish their adversaries? And then who wins at the end of the day?

Nobody? Nope. We're all left scattered and weak and fighting against each other. And that's exactly how we lost Spain. That's exactly how we lost against colonialism, and etc, etc.

Right?

Correct. But it takes it takes leadership to manage though, that's the other thing. Because if you don't manage it, then everybody's going to want to split off. And once you start to split off, there's always something else to split off about. And we I'm sure, I mean, I just know a little bit of the history here. But it's the same everywhere, right? You think you think that you're only going to split off once because it's for your language, that's never happened? Ever. You split off once for the language, then you split off another time, because the east versus the West, the North versus the South, then there's this particular group and that particular group, right. And this is

not to say that we don't love messages, we love messages. But I would love if they work together. If everybody's working together, we have the same read prayers, we have the same, you know, we swap lessons that is hotpots, this and that and the other, have a rotational football, you know, sort of cycle, things like that, and you can have as many messages as you want. But if that's not the scenario, if that's not the case, if there is no cooperation between the Muslim, then it's really not doing us any good.

Why is argumentation so poisonous to anybody? Especially

to the lay people who haven't studied religion systematically? The author says because there are predators,

meaning the devils the influence the ego, that are going to overpower the intellect and the bounds of the Sharia. Right. You don't know going into it? What are the bounds of Cydia, when it comes to how much you can argue a point, you don't know before coming into it?

How to conduct yourself when to when to agree to disagree.

And so people they're going to latch on to the kind of tribalistic thing.

And they're going to end up wronging somebody and wronging themselves, right by making it into a much, much bigger deal than it has to be. And we see this a lot. People equating the differences between SRT and SRT are the differences between Hanafy and Shafi as basically being the same as like the differences between Muslim non Muslim, right, and that's a tragedy that can't happen. And this is something honestly that is even on the books with certain low level scholars if you go back far enough,

but it's a it's something that needs to stop.

He brings also for to buttress his argument he says that many scholars have penned that debate is dislike even for scholars.

So then what about people who aren't trained? It's hoped it is hoped that scholars who have enough training in the religion will know those bounds of the Sharia. And we'll know those bounds of

when to accept the truth, even if it's against what they previously said.

But even then, it's not guaranteed and how many and I've said this before, how many debates and how many rivalries between different factions if you trace them back to the contemporary I'm talking about are honestly just personal disagreements. With egos involved. It happens all

other time, sometimes it's even more dangerous that scholars are the ones arguing because the scholar is able to cloak a personal issue in religious language and say that oh, well, no, this person is off the hook or this person is violating the Sunnah this person is

Divine Alignment when I was in Medina, my shakes a population PT.

He hum the one thing I learned from him, he was never involved with this sort of stuff. But there was one particular scholar who's notorious will remain remain nameless, who

lobbed the some criticisms, his way towards our shame. And

the level of anger I heard actually heard the other states voice, right when he said what he said, and it was so hyperbolic, so exaggerated and so angry.

He says, you know, it's like, anyway, oh, I'll leave it there. But sometimes it can be even worse, right? Like, there's one one dimension that the author is making us aware of, it's worse for the layman because they don't have the training. But in another dimension, it's actually even worse that Some scholars argue and debate because they have enough knowledge, to cloak their personal issues in religious language, and that hurts everybody.

And as he says, it doesn't result in anything, this type of argumentation, except for enmity between people and rejection of the truth. And that's what everybody I think, was engaged in that sort of thing that's found, once you're in an argument, once you're in a debate, you are invested the same base, right? You have kind of put your name on the line to support a certain claim or a certain position or certain opinion. And it takes a very, very spiritually mature person to say I was wrong to admit they were wrong, to go back and say, it's like, wow, I completely misunderstood that thing. Now, what if you have hundreds of YouTube followers and 1000s of Instagram followers, and you know,

maybe a million Tik Tok followers? How hard is it, you would have to be safely to be able to admit that you are wrong in such a, an ecosystem that rewards kind of just your brand, right, your individual brand. So we ask a lot of protectors.

That takes us to the end of the class period. Any thoughts, reflections, questions that you all have?

Oh, come on, give me some?

Yes.

Yes, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, give them admin.

You know, here's an example of cooperation amongst the scholars, sometimes even mathematic when he was asked for certain fatawa or certain opinions about an issue. And he knew that he had a very strict opinion on something he would send the person to somebody else who had a more lenient dependence. Right. This is something that is

has precedent within the scholarly classes. But yeah, when it came to the Mishnah, right, the way in which they kind of hung out to dry and

and there's other things, right, like we find with what was the name? Definitely and Buhari. Right. And those that rivalry in their own town, and that was something that came is like, textbook example of what we're talking about. Right. You know, Buhari took a position on, you know,

I believe it was on the recitation of the Quran, right, saying that the, the recitation of Quran what was it, that the losses, it's not super important.

But anyway, he was branded by kind of a local authority as a heretic and like, he was even forcing his students to disavow him. Right. And Muslim in a Muslim was a student, the both of them, right, email, Holly, and this other scholars. And so you know, I'm Muslim in a very, very

kind of dramatic way. He stood up in the middle of the class. And you know, most of them had written down, right, all of these Hadith that he learned from the scholar, but once he started talking about about Iman rafati, he took all of those Hadith and he returned them, gave him back, he put them right in front of the sheikh, and he left he never went back to his to his lesson. Because that was something to prove a point. You know, that all the stuff that we're doing.

It doesn't hold a candle to it doesn't take priority over the Brotherhood of the stuff. Right

there.

can be internal issues, we can have internal disagreements, but we have to know, right? We have to keep it in house, we have to keep it in half. We can't be going out appealing to the political authorities to you know, round up X group that disagrees with us, you know, or taking our opportunistic chance to kind of ruin this individual or that individual and we see way too much of that and we see a lot of that going on with canceled culture these days. This is kind of like the original Kancil culture right people try to label you a heretic and say that this year this and that the other and try to get you

fired and expelled, etcetera, etcetera.

Sorry, let's try to argue. That's right. Yeah.

That's right.

The load organization that's right.

Okay.

Thank you all very much for attending. This will benefit us by this and make it way in our scale for us not against