Tom Facchine – Remembering Aysenurs Courage
AI: Summary ©
The speakers emphasize the need for political involvement to avoid political chaos and emphasize the importance of pushing for change and being mindful of political actions. They also emphasize the importance of addressing political issues to avoid political chaos and provide examples of political science topics, including the dean's proposal to submit the state for political review and the success of political science and political theory. The importance of learning about the Q par and spending time with a good person is emphasized, as well as the importance of following social norms and learning about the Q par for success. The segment ends with a plan for the week and a discussion of the homework and a schedule for the week.
AI: Summary ©
As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah everybody.
This is Yaqeen Institute's weekly live stream.
I'm your host, Imam Tom Fekhini.
Welcome to the program.
A very, very important show that we have
tonight.
Obviously, our sister Aishah Noor Ezgi Aghi is
on all of our minds here in the
U.S., our latest martyr from our community
who was murdered in cold blood by the
IDF in the West Bank.
We'll be talking extensively about that.
We're going to have a guest from CARE
to help talk about the situation who's local
to that area.
I know a lot of people who have
either knew her directly or new people who
knew her have reached out to me in
the past week, giving me a portrait of
her courageous life.
We'll be talking a lot about her legacy
and what we can all learn from her.
May Allah shower her in mercy and accept
her sacrifice.
We're also going to be talking about some
of the tensions that are boiling over when
it comes to the lack of, let's say,
people have run out of patience.
There are some people such as in Jordan
and in other places, I think now Egypt,
that have taken on vigilante acts despite their
government attempting to suppress them.
We'll talk about that.
We will have our normal segments on the
Qur'an and tafsir going over today, Surat
al-Ikhlas, and then also the Atomic Habits.
We'll be talking about how to make our
habits more attractive and specifically the power of
social norms.
Before that, as always, let's hit the chat.
This is your opportunity to ask whatever questions
you want.
Let's say hi to everybody.
As someone has said, we'll say hi to
the whole ummah because the whole ummah usually
shows up.
Mashallah, Tabarakallah.
Atiyah is first in the door.
Zaheer Younis from London.
Thank you for tuning in tonight.
Shayma Budadi.
I hope you're well.
Commentaries here, Zaheer Younis.
Yes, good to have you with us.
Nasir Mahmood.
Rahmatullah.
Rahmatullah from Durham, North Carolina.
Alhamdulillah.
All things considered, we thank Allah for the
opportunity to distinguish ourselves and to try to
work to what He is happy with.
Sara is back.
Happy to have your great questions with us
as always.
Starting right away, Sara asks, Have you ever
heard of Graham E.
Fuller?
Your opinion on him and his book, A
World Without Islam?
If so, your thoughts?
Nope.
I mean, I vaguely, vaguely, vaguely heard of
the book.
I haven't read it.
Not really familiar with the author, so I
plead the fifth.
Rick Rashid.
Rahmatullah from Canada.
Good to have you back with us.
Mohamed Aziz Al Rahman.
Yes, okay.
Munira Hayati Muhtar.
Rahmatullah from Malaysia.
Salamat Datang.
Wonderful place, wonderful people.
Glad to have you with us.
Amina.
Welcome back.
Fatima Muhammad from Trinidad.
Who else do we have?
Someone who's a bunch of numbers for your
username.
Welcome to the program.
Saliha from Atlanta.
Good to have you back again.
I see a lot of familiar faces or
familiar usernames at least.
Nabiisa.
Welcome to the program.
Dark Phoenix from Baltimore, Maryland.
Good to have you with us.
Okay, so here, Eunice, is a question.
I've been reflecting on Aishah Noor's martyrdom and
its broader implications.
How can we better understand the legacy of
figures like Aishah Noor in the context of
current geopolitical tensions?
We're going to talk more about this.
This is a dedicated segment of the program,
but one of the things that I've been
hitting on last weekend, I was in Houston
and then to Chicago, meeting with a lot
of the youth, meeting with a lot of
the Muslim American community's leaders, and discussing martyrdom
as a paradigm.
We need to be prepared to sacrifice and
to pay the ultimate sacrifice.
I firmly believe that.
I don't think anything gets done if you
don't have that attitude.
That's, I think, one of the main takeaways
from Sister Aishah Noor.
I know that one of her final requests,
or maybe not requests, but something that she
said to someone that she knew that she
was in contact with, was that we need
to do more.
I don't think that you can really effectively
make change if you're not willing to pay
the ultimate price and to sacrifice everything.
Not that every single one of us will
have to end up sacrificing everything, but that
is definitely—if we're talking about tearing down the
system of the power structures of Zionism and
Islamophobia and everything that is securitizing Muslims across
the world, and criminalizing Islam, and criminalizing us,
and creating this sort of plausibility structure within
which Palestine can be occupied—if we really want
to help bring it to an end, then
we need to be prepared to sacrifice everything.
I ultimately believe that wholeheartedly.
So that's my biggest takeaway, but I'm sure
there's others, and we'll talk about it.
Suzy Baroud, from Seattle.
So I know that Sister Aishah Noor was
part of the Seattle community.
We have over on our side, on this
coast, the east coast, we have some people
who are also part of the Seattle community
that come here seasonally.
So welcome to the program.
Seattle was a nice city, by the way.
I was able to visit it this year,
mashaAllah.
Fatima 77, says, on the anniversary of 9
-11, wanted to see what's the best way
to engage, want to express sorrow for lives
lost while also being outspoken about the countless
Muslim victims of the U.S. war on
terror.
Yeah, 100%.
Well, here's the main point and the main
takeaway, Ayatollah Qadri, and that is that the
United States, the most dangerous thing to the
United States of America is its own foreign
policy, period.
Put it up on the wall, put it
in lights, put it on billboards, whatever you
need to do.
That message has to be, of course, Islam
does not condone the targeting of civilians, true
civilians, not fake civilians like some people like
Israel try to fudge those boundaries and use
human shields and these sorts of things.
We're talking about actual civilians.
Islam is completely against the targeting of civilians.
However, the United States has to have a
reckoning with its own foreign policy.
There is no doubt that 9-11 does
not happen without the foreign policy of the
United States.
How do we know?
We have the explicit writings of the person
who masterminded the attack, Osama bin Laden, who
wrote a whole manifesto, and what he is
complaining about, as many people learned this year
on TikTok, many young people, Gen Zers and
below, learned that his main complaint was the
foreign policy of the United States of America.
As Muslims, we've obviously gone through the process
of condemning that particular act, and that's not
something that we support.
It's not something that's legitimate Islamically.
However, if the United States does not want
to make itself a target, then it has
to stop destabilizing the Middle East.
It has to stop, get out of the
Middle East, all the military bases, all of
the meddling, all of the intervention within its
politics and the coups and everything that it's
doing, it has to get out.
And that is the absolute safest way for,
or that's, I say, the best way for
people in the United States to stay safe.
Zahir Yunus says, how can individuals and communities
effectively apply the principles from Atomic Habits to
create positive changes?
Well, let's talk about it when we get
there, inshallah.
I mean, it's a good question, but it's
kind of deep.
Nusaybah Qasim, wa alaikum salam wa rahmatullah.
Welcome.
Seamus says, seems like Netanyahu has decided, by
the way, wa alaikum salam Seamus, good to
see you.
Seems like Netanyahu has decided it is perfect
time to implement plans that will secure long
-term security for IL.
I'm not sure when these people use these
little letters what they mean.
They did airdrop mission for Syrian-Lebanese border
and kidnapped a scientist.
You know stuff that I don't know, Seamus.
I haven't been paying attention to that.
Okay, for Israel.
Okay, I see.
Yeah, I mean, well, there's a game of
chicken that's being played.
I mean, it's like sort of a high
stakes situation where Netanyahu is, he is an
accelerationist of sorts to say that, you know,
he's going for everything.
Okay, either he's going to win everything or
he's going to lose everything.
And I think one of the hopeful things
about the last 11 months is to see
how quickly the house of cards of support
for Israel is falling apart.
That doesn't mean that we're even halfway there,
but we've seen the political support and the
mass be ripped off and all these things.
You know, Israel is under the highest scrutiny
or the most amount of scrutiny and the
most fundamental scrutiny, like scrutiny about the very
idea of Israel, whether it should have existed
in the first place.
We haven't seen this type of thing, at
least in Western discourses.
The Overton window has shifted.
Okay, and that's a positive thing and we
should welcome that.
Nope.
Your username makes me laugh.
Let's see, we have Wasi Ahmed.
Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what you want
us to do there, Wasi.
Are we supposed to continue watching this slaughter
on our phones and just say meaningless words
that fall on deaf ears?
I mean, come on, dude.
Like, that's very rhetorical.
Like, am I going to say, yes, actually,
we're supposed to keep saying meaningless words?
No, but there needs to be a critical
assessment of strategy and how we're going to
get to the objective that we want to
get to, right?
And there might be discourse involved in that,
and those words are not meaningless.
Yes, there are some people that are just
saying thoughts and prayers, raise your hands, dua,
and we're not denigrating dua here, but there
are some people that make it a false
dilemma, saying that the only thing that we
can do is dua, where we have rights,
we have political options in the United States.
The United States is where the genocide is
coming from and being supported and funded by,
and we have duties that we have to
absolutely do when it comes to building political
power and doing everything possible to change the
foreign policy of the United States.
That is completely granted, right?
However, people might criticize some of the steps
involved in that process and say, well, what
you're just doing is useless, etc., and that
would not be true.
So if by gathering the 313, if by
that you mean getting people together to exercise
our political power to stop the genocide, to
change the foreign policy of the United States,
then I agree with you.
All right, let's see what we got.
Julia, good to have you back with us.
Fatima 77 has a question.
The hypocrisy of the United States leaders is
right in our faces.
Is there an Islamic perspective on this?
Yes, absolutely there is, and I've just turned
over a blog post for editing that should
be out early next week, inshallah, talking about
the way that American Muslims approach politics has
to completely change, that we are in election
season, and in election season you see this
dynamic where people are forced to settle, or
at least they are told that out of
fear of the other side and what the
other side is going to do, that they
have to settle for less.
You can't have principles.
You can't expect everything to change at once.
You can't expect the end of the occupation
or an arms embargo on Israel.
You have to just get in line and
get behind the one party that they're trying
to tell us to support, and then we'll
talk about that later.
That's completely false thinking.
It's thinking that has tricked us time and
time and time again, election after election after
election.
We need to change the way that we
deal with politics.
We need to look at politics as an
exercise of building power and not trying to
just ingratiate ourselves, which literally usually means humiliating
ourselves, to people who are in power and
expect them to do what we want later
on.
There's a very powerful example from the Seerah
of the Prophet ﷺ that I use that
I'll go into when the blog post is
out.
It's the example or the situation where the
Muslims were marching on Mecca, and they were
about to conquer Mecca, and Hatib ibn Abi
Balt'a, who is a companion of the
Prophet ﷺ, and he's a veteran of Badr,
and he is somebody who has esteem, and
his intentions are beyond question.
We know that he is in Jannah.
We know all these things.
However, he made a political mistake during this
time.
He had family that were in Mecca, and
he attempted to send a letter secretly through
a servant to the Quraysh to warn them
that the Muslims were about to march on
Mecca and conquer it.
The Prophet ﷺ was given revelation, and he
ordered Ali and al-Muqdad to go track
down the servant and apprehend them and the
letter.
And so, this is something that was a
major deal.
Once they brought it back, the companions were
upset.
The Prophet ﷺ asked for an explanation.
Hatib explained himself, and he was ultimately forgiven
because he did it out of a good
intention.
However, it was definitely a political mistake, which
is why the Prophet ﷺ acted against it,
first of all, and secondly, why companions like
Umar ibn al-Khattab wanted to basically execute
him for treason, even though, again, they were
stopped.
They didn't actually end up doing that because
that particular act showed a lack of sound
political thinking.
Hatib was basically assuming that if he did
a favor for Quraysh, that Quraysh would do
a favor for him, yet he had no
leverage or no guarantee that this would be
true.
It was pure, you know, wishful thinking.
This is exactly the political thinking of the
Muslims in America up until now.
We think that if we do favors for
somebody, support somebody, prove our loyalty to somebody,
that then they will like us and then
they will protect us and do something for
us, and that has not happened.
Look at how loathsome we are to both
parties.
Look at how each party and each presidential
candidate competes in demonstrating their love for Israel
and demonstrating how little they care about Muslims,
and Aishah Noor is a perfect example of
that.
How little, you know, Biden not reaching out
to the family, nothing going on when it
comes to that.
This is a slap in the face, but
we allow them to get away with it.
We allow them to get away with it
by not holding out, by not punishing them
politically, by not approaching power in the proper
way.
So there's definitely an Islamic perspective on that.
Michelle Rousseau, welcome to the program.
Who else do we have?
Okay, who else we go?
Yeah, I mean, you got a point there
when you're talking about taking our lexicon back.
You talk about jihad and things like that,
but jihad, and we'll talk about that.
Actually, we're about to do a video with
Yaqeen Institute.
If you go into any book of fiqh,
jihad is bringing honor to the deen, bringing
honor to the religion, and that has several
practices tucked inside of it.
Some of those practices are warfare and military.
Other of those practices are not.
There might be a situation where you're picking
the most sound and the most likely to
succeed tactic, and that is something like exercising
political power in different ways that are not
military or warfare.
So it is true we do not characterize
jihad.
Sometimes there's a caricature.
The Islamophobists would want us to think that
all jihad is just like Osama bin Laden
and this sort of terrorism and things like
that.
That's not true.
But then the other extreme is to say,
oh, jihad is just washing the dishes, which
is also not true.
No, jihad is bringing honor to the religion,
and there are many practices tucked within it,
and those practices are selected due to their
appropriateness given the circumstances.
But I agree with you that we should
not give up that word or surrender it
to people who want to tuck it into
the war on terror discourse, because if they
criminalize jihad and they want to criminalize jihad,
then it's just a stone's throw away to
criminalizing Allahu Akbar, criminalizing the Qur'an itself,
as some people have stated is their objective.
Aisha Mukhtar, welcome to the program.
Yes, we have a lot to talk about
today.
Glad you're here with us.
Seamus brings up Shireen Abu Aqla.
Yes, we're going to talk about her as
well.
There's a pattern of behavior here.
Aziz from Denver.
Watermelon786 from Detroit.
I might be coming to Detroit in October,
inshallah ta'ala.
MOR, also from Michigan.
Let's see what we got here.
Yes, that's a good point, Aisha.
Aisha brings up, you know, she's talking about
the highlighting of her Turkish heritage as a
way to distance the United States from any
sort of responsibility and the fact that she
was an American citizen, but that highlights the
fact that her life is viewed as inconsequential
and unimportant by the United States government, and
we'll talk about that.
Fatima Ghali from North Carolina.
Yes, Fatima77.
Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11
whatsoever.
Sariha asks, how can we make our voices
stronger?
By clicking up, by organizing ourselves.
Laura from Al-Maghribah.
Hope you're well.
Let's see.
Abdulwahid says, convey message of Islam to all
people of the world and to everyone who
will come.
Also convey message of Islam to all world
leaders.
Yes, however, one of the things we have
to make sure we get straight is that
politics is not da'wah.
If people come to Islam, alhamdulillah, and we
always want even our enemies to come to
Islam, but the Prophet ﷺ also did politics
that was not da'wah or was, you
know, dealing with the reality on the ground.
So we have to, sometimes we make mistakes
by assuming that we approach all politics and
political situations the way that we approach da
'wah.
And this is Biryani diplomacy, and that's not
good.
And we'll talk about that, and I'm writing
about that.
MB from Hershey, PA.
A Kamil from Minnesota.
Seamus.
Oh, I got you.
I got you, Seamus.
Valerie De Leon.
Good to have you with us.
I'm in Dallas next weekend, actually.
I believe, if I recall correctly, that you're
from the Dallas area.
There's actually going to be a conference on
educators or for educators on educating about Palestine
that I'll be part of, inshallah ta'ala.
Jane Da Silva saying, vote for Jill Stein
2024.
She is for stopping the genocide and stopping
all wars.
This is Yaqeen Institute.
This is 501c3.
I can't tell you who to vote for,
but listen to Jane.
Nusayba Qasim says, I would never underestimate the
power of du'a either.
Yes, very good.
Who is really in control at the end
of the day?
I've become ever more reliant on Allah for
the smallest of things since 10-7.
That's beautifully said.
And of course, I would never, ever seek
to belittle the power of du'a.
What I'm afraid of is certain da'is
and religious leaders who push du'a at
the expense of taking care of their fard
al-kithayah, because we also have fard al
-kithayah when it comes to building capacity and
building power and doing those other things.
Everybody knows.
I've never met a person that says that
du'a won't work in the Muslim community.
I don't know if that person exists, right?
Everybody agrees that du'a works, and Allah
is ultimately in control.
However, we are responsible for doing more than
that, and there's a lot of people not
talking about what those other things are.
What else we got?
Shayma says, some tried to use Bedri Sahaba's
story for an excuse for those who do
similar actions today.
Yep, that doesn't work.
That is
true.
Okay, we shouldn't go into that.
There's a lot to say about certain candidates
and their politics on other issues.
There's a difference.
I'll say this, Shayma, because Shayma brings up
Jill Stein's attitudes and policies and positions on
Syria, which she has retracted, by the way,
officially.
However, there is an important distinction to be
made between voting for somebody like you think
that you're just turning over everything to them,
and that's the person that you want to
implement all their policies, versus voting for somebody
because you know it's going to have a
certain effect on the terrain, the entire terrain
of political calculus of everybody.
So those are two things, right?
And there are separate things.
Juju from SoCal, welcome back.
Sam Ahad, welcome back.
We have Mariam from Kuwait, Shafi from Florida.
Zaheer Yunus says, let Aisha Noor's story be
a call to action for greater awareness and
meaningful change, as we strive to confront the
systemic issues that perpetuate such tragedies.
Boom, put it in lights.
I like it.
Very good.
Nope asks, what podcast did Imam Tam say
he had shared his election opinion on recently?
LOL.
That would be Dr. Shadi Al-Masri's podcast,
Safina Society.
I think he calls the podcast nothing but
facts.
Salam says, Imam Tam, was my question inappropriate?
I think you skipped me.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to.
I didn't see your question.
Ask it again.
Someone told me it's halal, but there's ikhtilaf.
I wanted to make sure by asking.
I'm sorry, I didn't see it.
Could you ask it again?
Thank you, Valerie.
A Qadri says, really don't understand the mentality
of Muslims who are voting for Kamala.
Yeah, me neither.
Well, actually, I can't say that.
I do understand it.
It's just wrong.
Just because she made token gestures doesn't absolve
her of complicity, 100%.
She is actively in power.
She is actively part of the administration that
is committing the genocide.
She has stated her goals and her support
for Israel time and time again.
There's really no mystery going on here.
Some people are looking for the smallest excuse
to run back to their abusers.
Very good.
Seamus reminds us of Nooruddin Zengi's actions before
Salahuddin.
Good.
Nice.
Juju says, I see Muslims giving others nasiha
on social media, maybe with good intentions, but
it sometimes comes off as hypercritical.
How do you draw the line between nasiha
and staying quiet?
Good.
Well, what nasiha means literally is loyalty.
That nasuha is sincerity and loyalty, right?
That's why the hadith of the Prophet ﷺ
where he says, what is nasiha?
It's not nasiha lillah wa li kitabihi wa
li rasulihi, right?
So how do you have nasiha to Allah
if nasiha is just advice?
That's not correct.
That's an overly specific translation.
Nasiha is loyalty and sincerity.
And so part of your loyalty and sincerity
to somebody is to, if they're in error,
to attempt to guide them away from error
in the most beautiful way possible, in a
way that's most likely that they would accept
that sort of admonition, okay?
Which I think answers your question.
Furoha Mousi, wa alaikum salam wa rahmatullah wa
barakatuh.
MB says, since Linus Lobby is behind the
politicians, we will need definitely to change our
strategy to make our voices heard.
Yes, there's a scenario where we need to
tackle campaign finance, okay?
The reason why AIPAC can buy politicians is
because money buys elections.
That's it.
That's the way that the United States election
law is set up.
Money buys elections.
If you're able to change that so that
money no longer buys elections, AIPAC disappears.
Iman, wa alaikum salam wa rahmatullah.
Joining from the Maldives.
Excellent.
Apologies for the late hour for you, but
welcome anywhere.
We're happy to have you with us.
Aliya Kojak, you came to see me in
Houston, alhamdulillah.
I'm glad that you were able to catch
the program.
Qadi Aladeen, wa alaikum salam wa rahmatullah wa
barakatuh.
Murad from Allentown, wa alaikum salam wa rahmatullah
wa barakatuh.
Yes, 100%.
Very good.
So we've run through all the comments.
Allahu Akbar, only took us 30 minutes this
time.
Salam to the ummah.
You know, we do have the whole ummah
in the house, and we love the ummah,
and the ummah, you know, we are with
the ummah, and the ummah is with us.
That's true.
Seamus brings a good point.
Some people treat non-malicious, ignorant Muslims and
hostile enemies with the same tone, right?
Right?
Allah says in Surah Al-Kahf, to be
patient with the people who call towards Allah
ﷻ.
However, that doesn't mean that we don't have
standards and hold people accountable, especially when they
have sickness in their hearts, and they love
the dunya too much.
Iraj Khan, good point.
It's 538.
That's not that bad, Iman.
It's Fajr time.
You're part of your Fajr routine.
Miracle Quran, wa alaikum salam wa rahmatullah.
You're 100% right, Leticia.
Last point about the mediation team.
Yes, the United States, it's a lie for
the United States to pretend like it is
a mediator in this conflict.
The United States is perpetrator in this conflict.
They do not have an unbiased sort of
role to play.
They are on one side.
And so how are you going to let
somebody who's on one side be a mediator,
quote-unquote.
Anyway, here we go, guys.
Let's kick it to current events.
Our main headline, Sister Aishah Nur, Ezgi Egi,
may Allah shower her with mercy and bring
sakr and solace to her family, and to
all of those who knew her, everybody who
I've talked to the past week has said
what an amazing and inspiring person she was.
Aishah Nur was gunned down in cold blood
by the IDF in the West Bank.
She is a US citizen and activist.
She was murdered during a protest by a
single sniper bullet to the head.
This is not an isolated incident.
This is something that is a regular practice
of the Israeli occupying forces.
However, as we're going to see very, very
soon, the response has been completely weak because
the racket that is the military industrial complex
and its intersection with the occupation of Palestine
is too lucrative for most politicians to even
pretend that they care.
So let's go.
Oh, awesome.
Excellent.
Wonderful.
Let's cut folks in the studio.
Let's cut to the images or the video
of her funeral.
So one of the most powerful things that
I saw was Sister Aishah Nur was given
her last rites in Palestine, allahu akbar.
And I have to say, seriously, goosebumps when
I first saw this.
May Allah give us all a good end
like Sister Aishah Nur.
When we look at it from a materialistic
perspective, we say that yes, there is a
tragedy to this.
However, think about it.
You are somebody who went to Palestine in
solidarity with the people of Palestine, and now
you die a hero and you're buried in
Palestine.
Honestly, it's something to aspire to, in a
sense.
It is something that is very, very humbling
and touches the heart.
Now, we also have a reaction from somebody
who was on the ground with her that
will describe to us sort of the circumstances
and the situation.
Let's cut to that, gentlemen.
There were two shots fired from the rooftop.
I've been doing this for 20 years.
I know the difference in sound between tear
gas, rubber-coated bullets, live ammunition.
These were two separate shots of live ammunition,
shot one after the other.
The first one hit a metal object, and
then a young man from the village, and
he's dying.
And then I heard another shot.
And then I heard people calling my name
in English.
I found her lying on the ground beside
the tree, bleeding from her head.
I put my hand under her head to
try and stop the bleeding.
I took her pulse.
She had a very weak pulse.
We called the ambulance.
From there, we evacuated her to the village's
medical center, where the doctor came into the
ambulance and continued into the hospital, where they
tried to resuscitate her but failed.
Now, given this horrendous act, which obviously it's
not horrendous for her afterlife, but it's horrendous
in the sense of the injustice that her
demise is predicated upon, the response to the
United States government has been complete cowardice and
unaccountable nonsense.
The same sort of deflection and denial and
gaslighting that we have seen and come to
get used to for the past 11 months
was on full display when it came to
reporters questioning the White House and the White
House staff representatives about what was going on.
Let's cut to the clip where we have
a confrontation between the—well, we have the response
from the U.S. White House representative.
Each circumstance is unique and different.
Anytime an American citizen or a civilian loses
their life, it is incredibly tragic.
The circumstances around how that happens is important.
The facts matter.
I am just not going to get ahead
of the process as it relates to this.
So, look, what you just heard me say
to Simon, we expect Israel to make their
findings public.
We expect those findings to be shared transparently
and as thoroughly and as soon as possible.
Beyond that, I'm just not going to get
ahead of what those findings determine and should
that require any additional steps needing to be
taken.
To get this straight, the United States is
willing to perpetuate and the United States president
is willing to perpetuate atrocity propaganda, things that
never happened on October 7, such as beheaded
babies, such as babies in ovens, such as
all this nonsense.
Yet, when it comes to one of its
own citizens being taken out by a single
sniper bullet to the head, that all of
a sudden we throw our hands up in
the air and we become become overcome with
it.
We have no idea what happened.
We're going to allow Israel to investigate itself.
How many times has Israel been allowed to
investigate itself?
This is a very, very structurally similar thing
to when police brutality happens in the United
States and we allow an internal investigation to
take place.
I wonder what is going to be the
result of that internal investigation where people are
shuffled around and there's some sort of PR
around it, but nothing is done, which demonstrates
to you the callous nature of the United
States government and how indebted and controlled they
are by their interests in the occupied territories
and the Israeli project.
This is something that even Dwight Eisenhower, the
former president of the United States way back
in the 50s, warned people about as he
exited office.
He warned people about the military-industrial complex.
He warned what would happen if war became
profitable.
You see the money, the guns, and the
bombs flowing in one direction.
Israel is a racket.
The occupation of Palestine is a racket in
which many U.S. politicians and their friends
make a whole lot of money.
Then, when a United States citizen dies, that
United States citizen is not worth stopping the
racket.
We will do whatever political cover we have
to do in order to maneuver around to
keep the racket going, the money flowing, the
bombs flowing, and everything else.
That's not to say that everybody is just
about the money.
There's other people who are in it for
ideological reasons and things of this nature, but
for sure, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is
so lucrative to the United States and to
the elite of the United States that they
are willing to allow American citizens to be
murdered in cold blood and not do a
thing about it.
Just like we talk about the governments in
the Middle East being against the interests of
their people, the government of the United States
of America is absolutely no different when it
comes to being completely indifferent to what is
actually good for their own citizens.
Now, this is not, again, an isolated incident.
Aisha Noor, Rahimahallah, belongs to a long list
of American citizens that the U.S. government
has done nothing about and has allowed Israel
to murder in cold blood, to act with
complete impunity, and not be held to any
standards whatsoever, not even an independent investigation, just
to be told, trust us, bro, it was
a mistake, we don't know what happened, it
was confusing.
So we have Rachel Corey, obviously, and then
Shirin Abu Akhle, and then now Aisha Noor,
and there were others, there have been others.
So we don't expect much from the United
States government when it comes to holding Israel
accountable.
However, what we do know is that politically
we need to make the support of the
Zionist occupation of Palestine so politically costly to
the politicians of the United States that they
will start holding these incidents accountable and will
end them and will actually end all support
for the genocidal occupation.
And to join us, oh, we have one
more thing to cover, we noticed, okay, let's
go to the tweet by Sami Hamdi, our
brother Sami Hamdi.
One of the ways in which the media
responded was to attempt to portray her as
foreign.
Now, it's true that she and actually, there's
a very powerful video of Erdogan commenting on
the issue and expressing his dismay.
Whatever you think of Erdogan, the fact that
you're being mentioned by heads of state in
solidarity is something major.
However, her Turkishness was used to distance herself
from her American-ness and to basically explain
that she was dispensable, that she was killable.
And this attitude was taken even further by
the Florida Republican.
Do we have that, guys?
Do we have the Florida Republican's tweet when
he said basically, he called her a terrorist
very, very, very brazenly and said, let them
fire away.
And it's basically advocating to show you how
crazy the situation has gotten and how nothing
will change until we take back power from
the people who are currently in power.
That people are actually cheering.
United States government officials are cheering on the
murder of their own citizens in Palestine in
order to tap dance for their masters.
What a world that we live in.
But that being said, we have someone, a
very special guest with us tonight.
He is somebody who, when we reached out
to the family of Sister Ayshanur, they directed
us to the executive director of CARE Washington,
Imran Siddiqui.
Imran Siddiqui is a well-known human rights
advocate and advocate for Muslims on the West
Coast, up in the Pacific Northwest.
And he has joined our program today to
help talk about what's going on with the
family, how is everybody getting on, what are
the responses that we've seen from the government,
and where we can go from here.
Welcome to the program, Brother Imran.
Assalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.
So give us sort of a picture.
I've heard a lot, but maybe a lot
of people aren't familiar with Sister Ayshanur.
What was her sort of role in the
community?
What is she known for?
And what is sort of the legacy that
she leaves behind?
Yeah, may Allah accept her and give her
the rank of a martyr, inshallah.
This is obviously something that was really difficult
for a lot of local activists.
I did not know her personally.
I moved here at the end of 2020.
I was in Arizona prior to this.
But from all accounts of especially the younger
folks that are here, subhanAllah, I mean, just
to see the energy of the youth this
past year during this genocide, they've really been,
I think, leading us.
The older generation is what I probably belong
to now in terms of what they've been
doing on college campuses with the encampments.
And to a person, the fact that her
name is Ayshanur, she was a beam of
light to a lot of the folks in
the activism community.
Going back to not only standing for Palestine
and Muslims, she was standing against the police
brutality during the George Floyd protests back in
2020.
She was back doing that, and she was
probably in her early 20s during that time
frame.
During these latest encampments on campus, she was
there, very visible.
So many of the activists that I know
through my work at CARE that I interface
with a lot, they've come across her.
SubhanAllah, my nephew was up here visiting just
a few months ago, and he attended a
book talk, and he actually met her at
that event.
So every person that came in contact with
her really speaks to just her level of
determination, her principledness.
And the thing is that we don't really
think about just what level of thought and
care she put into this.
She went into this situation where a lot
of us don't have the intestinal fortitude to
even put ourselves in the things we love
in this dunya, in harm's way, or to
sacrifice to go out there.
And she didn't go to Gaza.
She went to the West Bank.
And even in the West Bank, she knew
that her life was in danger, and she
had somebody appointed, somebody who I know, friends
with who I've done a lot of work
with, a campus leader who was her point
of contact in case any harm came to
her.
So she even thought, if I die, if
some harm comes to me, I'm going to
have all my ducks in a row, and
I'm going to make sure that I have
the correct spokesperson for me.
I don't want my death to be made
into something that it's not.
I don't want the eyes to be taken
off the genocide that's happening to our brothers
and sisters over there.
Now, that's extremely significant.
So maybe walk us through that tussle, because
as we know, when something like this happens,
the government is trying to spin its own
narrative.
The family is trying to represent, and the
appointed representatives are trying to do justice and
represent what happened and the way that the
deceased wants it to be represented.
How has that been?
How has been the response from either local
government or federal government?
And how has the family been trying to
challenge the sweeping that's under the rug, essentially?
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, what we've seen over
the past 11 months during this genocide, I
don't think anything is necessarily surprising to us
in terms of the words that come out
of the government officials' mouths.
So I mean, first and foremost, I don't
think anybody expected there to be just some
miraculous turn of events.
And this goes back, you know, you mentioned
Rachel Corey, for example, you know, who was
martyred 20 years ago.
You know, her family was on a call
with me and many of the other local
activists trying to talk them through, okay, this
is what you have to do here, you
know, leading us through, like, their trauma from
the past.
And when Rachel Corey was brutally murdered 21
years ago, the government didn't really say anything.
There's a whole long line of people you've
seen, Shereen Abu Akhla for Khan Dogan during
the 2010 freedom flotilla.
You have Tawfiq Abdul-Jabbar, who was killed
in Gaza as well, and another American that
was killed there as well.
The government always, unfortunately, has a second set
of principles when it comes to those who
are Muslim or those who stand for Palestinian
rights.
And so I was just looking back at
Twitter right now, when there was a little
scuffle that was taking place between Syria, Lebanon,
and, you know, Israel, the Biden administration sent
out a tweet saying, if you harm an
American, we will respond.
And so when they're directing that ire towards,
you know, a Muslim country, or those who
they deem to be their enemies, their tenor
becomes, oh, we're going to take care of
every American that's out there.
But when it's an actual American that's killed
by their ally, where's that same energy?
It doesn't exist.
And there's been a response from, you know,
some selected members of Congress, Pramila Jayapal, and
some of the other local members of Congress,
the first few days afterward, I mean, you
would expect something if an American is killed
overseas.
As those of us who were born and
raised here, I think we've been told that
myth, you know, growing up that, you know,
if something happened to me, I have this
American passport.
And that's like, you know, this is like
gold basically across the world.
But we have to really sort of demystify
a lot of these these thought processes, you
know, there's a second set of rules when
it comes to us.
And yeah, I mean, you know, the Biden
administration was very slow and deliberate.
I think they've issued a few things today,
it's still like very weasel words when it
comes to how they're they're talking about, you
know, we deplore the death of they won't
even like talking voice when Israel kills an
American, you know, they try to basically all
levels of plausible deniability when it comes to
Israel and allowing themselves while they're conducting a
genocide to investigate themselves is one of the
most laughable things.
And so I think the the family from
day one, you know, centering the family has
been extremely, extremely important.
That's why we've sort of taken very careful
steps in how we've approached media and not
trying to be too out there and in
your face that the family really wants there
to be an independent investigation.
They don't want a Israel obviously to investigate
their own crime and be like you said,
America's providing the weaponry, it's providing the cover.
They don't want America to necessarily investigate either.
They want an independent investigator and they want
some type of accountability on a world stage.
And they've been communicating through a variety of
channels.
You know, we have these young activists who
are acting as their as their, you know,
spokespersons.
And so we're just trying to, you know,
push, push the envelope as much as we
can, inshallah.
Yeah, inshallah.
I'm amazed at how just deliberate it seems
like Sister Aishanour was with everything.
Like, usually it's a moment of chaos.
But like you said, you really can tell
that she had everything lined up.
That's really, really amazing.
Now, when you talk about the family and
the solidarity between the families of say, you
know, Rachel Corey and Sister Aishanour, is there
any sense or have you ever picked up
on any sense of progress?
I mean, Rachel Corey was murdered at a
different time, all right, when there was a
lot less scrutiny on Israel, there was no
social media, right.
And so these sorts of things, they have,
I guess, let's say, they're much more easily
accessible.
And media has been more democratized since then.
Do we get any sense that any progress
is being made?
Or is it pretty much the same stuff
all over again?
I think it's progress that's being made.
I think the machinery of both parties, you
know, both major parties, to be quite frank,
are, you know, the leadership within each of
the parties continues to just run interference for,
you know, the occupation and will continue to
do so.
You see a continual growth of voices who
try to at least stand up, I think,
within the political system.
You try to see people who are, you
know, even on a local level, like a
lot of times we look at, you know,
sort of the federal level elected officials, they're
sort of, you know, stuck in their own
thing.
They receive funding from AIPAC and a lot
of these different sources.
But we need to, that was one of
the things that was in the chat as
well.
I mean, we do need Muslim PACs as
well.
We need Muslims who are involved at all
levels, you know, trying, if there's PACs that
are out there doing, you know, spending billions
of dollars to do evil, I think AIPAC
spent $100 million in this last election cycle
to spread evil.
We need to, we have the money and
the resources within our community, try to, you
know, promote candidates who are doing good as
well.
I think that's one lesson.
And I mean, it may not work out
at the end, but it's not about that
for us.
You know, at the end of the day,
it's the effort inshallah that we make that
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala rewards us for.
So even if we're not necessarily seeing the
progress, you know, in our lifetime or in
front of our faces, we at least have
to use every mechanism at our disposal to
try and like move, move the meter.
And I think, you know, just last thing
I would say on that is that, you
know, here locally, I would say it's changing,
you know, 70% of, you know, at
least the Democrats that were over here in
this state in Washington supported a ceasefire, which
a ceasefire is not necessarily like the best
thing in the world.
It was like stopping the, you know, the
mass killing that's taking place.
And they voted to, you know, at their
local Democrat convention to pass a ceasefire resolution.
So that means that I think a lot
of people on the ground level, at least,
their conscience is shifting.
So the mass conscience is shifting, because they
have more access to information, they have more
access to social media in terms of the
truth of what's coming out of Gaza and
worldwide.
So inshallah, hopefully that's, it's heading the right
direction.
But you know, there's a lot of corruption
still in the system.
Yeah, and absolutely.
I mean, some of your points are really
important.
We have the duty to try, right, regardless
of, you know, whether we win or not,
like we definitely have, I believe, a religious
obligation to try super PACs and sort of
advocacy is one route, you know, electoral is
another route.
And there's other routes that, you know, for
building political power, that we need to stop
spectating and get in the game and do
what we're, and I agree, like, very capable
of doing.
Like, if you look at the money that
we've splashed into relief, or the money we
splashed into our masjids, or our banquets, or
our big conferences every year, we definitely have
the juice.
As they say, we definitely have the ability
to be putting 15% of our current
expenditure into political sort of avenues.
I want to throw sort of like an
open ended question to you.
And you can take it or leave it,
you don't have to answer it.
But if imagine for a second, we reach
a day where US politicians behave fairly, when
something like this happens, right, that there is
justice, that they are treated the same.
What is it going to take?
Yeah, I mean, that's a tough one.
I think it has to become politically toxic.
I mean, it has to become politically toxic
for somebody to just continue to support something,
things that we've seen.
I mean, we've all gone through collective trauma
this past 11 months.
We've seen images that, and our kids have
seen images that no human being should see.
And our sense of fitra tells us that
this is horrible, this is horrific.
And this is not normal for us to
witness.
And our eyes are not lying to us.
And I think the vast majority of people
out there understand that our eyes are not
lying to us at this point.
But at the end of the day, the
people within the party machinery and the leadership
within these parties, they don't think that it's
politically toxic to take these positions.
You saw, you know, this Vedant Patel and
the Matthew Millers of the world who are
standing in front of, you know, people and
they just spit out the talking points, because
they don't feel like they're going to lose
anything.
But there has to be a tipping point,
where supporting a genocide, supporting these, it's happening
on a world scale already.
And you've seen changes already happening in places
like the UK, where the elections, you see,
you know, pro-Palestine and Muslim candidates that
are winning in these areas.
But there has to be a tipping point
where this is politically unacceptable.
We're living through a very historic time, where
we've witnessed one of the worst atrocities, and
it's been broadcast in front of our eyes.
So we cannot let these people forget, and
we have to continuously remind them.
Absolutely.
And so, Panela, exactly what you said about
being politically toxic, we have failed to punish
this behavior politically, right?
And as long as we fail to punish
it, we really can't expect anything different.
That exactly what you said, it has to
be so, we have to get to a
point and reverse engineer it, what are all
the steps to make it so politically costly
to support the occupation of Palestine, that no
politician would touch it, unless they were crazy,
and they wanted to lose an election.
But until we get to that point, we
don't ultimately have any right to expect anything
differently.
And I don't think we're going to see
anything different.
So, you know, this is a super important
dynamic with the upcoming election.
And you know, people are trying to, okay,
get back in line, Muslims, get back in
line, don't make too much noise.
But we're gonna, there's gonna come a tipping
point where we bite the bullet, and we
basically say, this is our red line, this
is where you stop pushing us around.
And we will tolerate short term harm for
a long term gain, if it means actually
stopping, you know, making people respect us and
realizing that you can't just do anything to
us.
Any comment on that?
Or any other final points that you'd like
to add before, before departing?
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you.
I think we just got to continue specifically
on this story, I think, you know, continue
to make noise with these people.
When you see, you know, these mouthpieces have
a separate system of humanity for a person
like Aishah Noor or other Muslims that have
been killed or those who have been marginalized
by genocide, don't can, you know, we've got
to continue to push them forward.
And that means your elected officials as well.
If for those of you who are in
the US, you know, why hasn't your member
of Congress issued a statement, this is an
American, you know, like, if this is supposed
to be the land of the free and
the home of the brave as they purport
to be, then we have to, we have
to hold them accountable.
But yeah, I mean, it's going to take
a lot of work.
And I think we as a community have
to be strategic, we have to continue like,
you know, the ulama and the activists, we
have to get together, we have to also
have some type of, you know, sessions like
this, where we sit down together and really
strategize, you know, like, on a granular level,
how we plot out, you know, the political
power of this community.
And so that's something we're trying to do
from a CARE perspective.
I know that as many, you know, nascent
organizations that are starting, and Yapin is doing
some great work in terms of the education.
So Anshela will be able to continue the
conversation with you all.
And I'm always happy to come and join
you all as well.
Look forward to it, Imran.
I agree.
We are all we have, right?
After Allah subhana wa ta'ala, we have
us.
Allah gave us each other to plot our
way out of this mess.
I believe that wholeheartedly.
And I look forward, pleasure meeting you.
And I look forward to following up with
you at some point and continuing the conversation.
Thank you so much for joining us today,
Imran.
So there you have it, folks.
Now we have some, I see that the
guys in the studio have prepared some other
things that we've discussed.
Okay.
We're going to talk about reflection on Sister
Aishah Noor's legacy and her martyrdom.
So let's just bring up real quick that
tweet from the Republican congressman.
Okay.
He's from Florida, which wouldn't shock a lot
of people.
No offense to our wonderful people from Florida.
But we know that some of the politicians
in Florida be wild and out a little
bit.
So he said, one less Muslim terrorist.
And then he did a hashtag, I know,
fire away and these sorts of things.
And just to expose the corruption, whether this
person is a true believer, he's ideologically motivated
or not.
The only type of person that acts like
this is a person who does not fear
any consequences for acting like this.
And Muslims will not stop being humiliated until
we impose, organize and impose political consequences for
acting and speaking like this.
So that's an extremely important thing to keep
in mind.
And you have to consider, from everything you
do, from how you vote in November to
everything that you do locally and politically to
build power, where you put your money, as
we were discussing with Brother Imran, what are
you doing to create a scenario in which
it is politically costly for people to, so
people can't get away with this sort of
stuff.
We also, I think, have a quote from
Aishah Noor.
Can we run that, guys?
Okay.
So this was, I highly encourage, by the
way, our dear brother, Muhammad Jallal, from The
Thinking Muslim in London, the UK, has a
great write-up on martyrdom.
He offers reflections, Aishah Noor, Ezgi Ege and
notes on martyrdom.
Read it.
It's really, and she's holding a quote there.
You can really tell, SubhanAllah, you can tell
that, I mean, I didn't know the sister
personally, but she is super smart.
And you can tell that she is super
sharp.
When you look at sort of all the,
I mean, at such a young age as
well, like all the things that she was
taking into account, she understood international solidarity.
She understood the way that many, many issues
intersect, and she was fearless.
SubhanAllah.
May Allah have mercy on her.
Okay.
Oh, here's the, oh, so what that card
says that she's holding is, wasat, so she's
talking about, you know, Allah's statement in the
Quran about being ummatan wasatan.
Wasat, to me, is the ummah I need
to support my journey in full submission to
Allah, a community, a community, excuse me, dedicated
to supporting each other to the straight path.
And that's your sister and her advice to
you.
So may we all live up to that.
Now, SubhanAllah, when I was reviewing the Quran
and thinking about what was going on this
past week, these verses came to mind, and
we've talked about them before, but I want
to bring them up to look at them,
how they fit together.
They're verses you've heard before, but as we
know, sometimes, even the companions that happen to
them, that things you've heard before and things
that you know, when things, when different scenarios
happen and play out, they take on new
meaning.
So Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, and
you know, this is true, وَلَا تَحْسَبَنَّ الَّذِينَ
قُتِلُوا فِي سَبِيلِ إِلَٰهِ أَمْوَاتَهُ Don't say, or
don't even think that those who have been
killed in the way of Allah are dead,
بَلْ أَحْيَاءٌ عِنْدَ رَبِّهِمْ يُرْزَقُونَ that they are,
instead, they are alive, that Aisha Nur is
more alive than you and me right now,
that she has witnessed as a shaheedah, somebody
who has witnessed the reality and gone through
the steps, that she is more alive than
you or I are alive right now.
And then Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says,
فَرِحِينَ بِمَا أَتَاهُمُ اللَّهُ مِنْ فَضْلِ that pleased,
she is pleased, they are pleased, the martyrs
are pleased by what Allah subhanahu wa ta
'ala has given them of His bounty, وَيَسْتَبْشِرُونَ
بِاللَّذِينَ لَمْ يَلْحَقُوا بِهِمْ مِنْ خَلْفِهِمْ that the
martyrs of old, all of them, all the
way back, are gladdened by the martyrs of
today, and are, we have a translation here
on, they're receiving good tidings about those who
will be martyred after them.
So even the people that will come later,
that after Aisha Nur, Aisha Nur will be
gladdened by the fact that there are other
people who are going to, to be joining
her.
أَلَا خَوْفٌ عَلَيْهِمْ وَلَا هُمْ يَحْسَنُونَ This is
the promise of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.
The next ayah, okay, because we're going somewhere
with this, okay, يَسْتَبْشِرُونَ بِنِعْمَةٍ مِنَ اللَّهِ Okay,
they receive good tidings and favor from Allah
and bounty, and Allah does not, Allah does
not allow the reward of believers to be
lost.
Those believers who respond to Allah and after
injury has struck them.
And I found that significant when going after
these ayahs, أَلَذِينَ اَسْتَجَابُوا لِلَّهِ وَالرَّسُولِ مِنْ بَعْدِ
مَا أَصَابَهُمُ الْقَرْحِ That we understand that there
is going to be pain.
They understand there is going to be lost.
We understand that there are going to be
martyrs, that we understand there are people going
to be arrested, people are going to be
thrown into jail, people are going to be
put in solitary confinement.
This is the dunya.
And the Prophet ﷺ said that the dunya
is a prison for the believer.
And it is Jannah for the denier, the
rejecter.
Sometimes we act as if we want Jannah
right now.
If you want to stand up for what
Allah loves, if you want to do something
for Palestine and work towards a free and
just Palestine, then you need to be ready
to sacrifice.
And you need to be ready to sacrifice
everything.
That this is a celebration of Aishah Noor's
success, Aishah Noor's victory.
And what is on you and me now
is to follow in her example of her
willingness to sacrifice and to do it gladly,
realizing that the dunya is absolutely nothing.
Go to the next one.
Now, this is amazing that this ayah comes
after this.
This is the last ayah we're going to
end on.
The last ayah in this tarqeeb at the
end of the page, if you're using the
Medina Mus'haf, الَّذِينَ قَالَ لَهُمُ النَّاسُ إِنَّ
النَّاسَ قَدَ جَمَعُوا لَكُمْ فَخْشَوْهُمْ That Allah is
contrasting this person, the martyr, somebody like Aishah
Noor with somebody who they are hypocritical.
They have disease in their hearts.
They love the dunya too much.
What's that person's attitude?
They run to us and they try to
spread fear.
They try to spread fear.
They're fear mongers at the end of the
day.
And they say to everybody, إِنَّ النَّاسَ قَدَ
جَمَعُوا لَكُمْ فَخْشَوْهُمْ Look at how much people
you're up against.
Look at how many people, how much money
they have, how strong they are.
You'll never change anything.
You'll never do anything.
You better just fall in line and do
this thing and save your own self.
If you look in the Quran, that is
the attitude of the hypocrites.
Time and time and time again.
Just save yourself.
We're afraid of fitna.
And then Allah says, سَقَطُوا We didn't go
out and sacrifice everything because we were afraid
of falling into fitna.
No, you just fell into fitna.
That is the attitude of the hypocrites to
succumb to fear.
The attitude of the martyr, the attitude of
those who Allah is pleased with is the
opposite.
فَزَادَهُمْ إِمَانًا وَقَالُوا حَسْبُنَا اللَّهُ وَنِعْمَ الْوَكِيرُ That
they understand that no matter what they are
up against, no matter the odds, Allah is
in control.
Nobody is in ultimate control other than Allah.
And if the situation happens, if Allah had
decreed it, that you or I have to
die for a good cause, then الحمد لله,
Allah has decreed for us good.
الحمد لله, Allah has given us حسن الخاطمة.
الحمد لله, Allah has given us a good
end.
And we rejoice and consider ourselves among the
successful.
So this attitude shift is absolutely important.
And you're going to see a lot of
people that are cowards.
And that's just facts.
Sorry, I have to say it bluntly.
You're going to see a lot of people
now, come out now, between now and November,
now and after November, that in their hearts,
they are afraid.
And they will come to you like this.
This is what they're essentially saying to you.
Look at all of what you're up against.
Don't be brazen.
Don't be too idealistic.
Don't be impractical.
The practical way is to take the deal.
The practical way is to support first and
then hope for some crumbs later.
And that's not what Allah ﷻ wants from
us.
I know there's probably a lot of people
pinging us in the chat.
Let's go see what we've got here.
We've got some people from Minnesota.
Welcome.
Sarah says their dead are in * while
ours are in heaven.
Allahu Akbar.
Completely true.
Their dead are in * and ours are
in heaven.
Ameen.
Latisha says may Allah grant victory to all
the oppressed and get rid of the evil
oppressors.
Ameen.
Yarab.
Salmon roll.
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh Awesome username.
Salmon rolls are delicious.
Ryan Christian.
You saw me in Houston.
I'm glad that we were able to catch
each other.
Watermelon786 hits on it perfectly.
Yes, the attitude of the government is Israel
first even before American lives.
100%.
That is what they are teaching us.
And their stock holdings like Fatima points out.
People pointing out the lack of accountability.
About the murderer investigating himself.
Exactly it.
You guys are sharp.
Relying on Israeli findings.
Exactly.
Yeah, it makes my blood boil too, Zaheer.
Be happy.
Puts it nice.
This guy is the epitome.
You're talking about the White House correspondent or
the White House representative.
The epitome of a habitual gaslighter.
A mouthpiece for Zionists.
He will get what is due to him
very soon.
Inshallah.
Yes.
And Eman also anticipated us talking about the
Turkish origin in order to sort of distance
herself from being an American who presumably their
life would matter.
But even if she's an American, her life
doesn't matter because it's not lucrative.
It goes against the lucrative Zionist project.
Yes, Sheyma.
They only care about their own interests.
And I want to put this out here.
Nusaybah, you win.
You win, Nusaybah.
Put this up.
What's worse is that Muslims amongst us would
still pursue lucrative careers in Raytheon and others
such as Lockheed Martin saying that Dean and
Dunya are separate.
Put it up in lights.
A hundred percent correct, Nusaybah.
Thank you so much for pointing that out.
How can we expect anything to change when
we don't hold our own accountable?
When we look and see someone's working for
the Department of Defense who's signing off on
all of these arms shipments going abroad and
we see that as a success.
Nobody will question you at the Iftar parties
and say, Oh, Mashallah, he works at the
Department of Defense.
Mashallah, Tabarakallah.
Astaghfirullah.
This is something that is a shame.
It's a shame on the Muslim community that
we will be so addicted to this Dunya
and so addicted to status that we turn
our nose down at someone with a humble
halal job, whether a janitor, a street sweeper
or anything, and we would praise somebody and
not find it problematic for somebody to be
responsible for the murder of Muslims across the
world.
Where are our priorities?
We have to fix that first.
I completely agree that.
Mariam has another good point.
It's not just that Muslims don't get the
same treatment.
We are accused without proof, and Israel, yes,
well said, is defended despite the proof.
A hundred Columbia students are terrorists with no
proof, and their academic jobs can be put
into jeopardy.
We can have all the proof in the
world against the IDF, and it doesn't mean
anything.
A Qadri is right.
They will not value our voice until we
withhold our vote and our support.
Yes, agreed.
Iman brings up a good point.
Yes, Israel tells us who they are.
Rachel Corey was run over by a bulldozer,
and after her death, Zionists made pancakes with
her face and mocked her.
What have we seen in the last 11
months?
Yes, Madiha, that's a good point as well.
I'm just trying to run through the chat.
We've got a lot of things.
The Israeli exception.
That's a nice term for A Qadri, the
Israeli exception.
Seamus brings up a good point.
Seamus says, politically, the Muslim community is very
reactive and not proactive, unfortunately.
However, I would like to say, I do
have hope that the future is going to
change, and I have two reasons.
The last 11 months, I've seen a huge
shift, and a lot of people have started
paying attention, and they're opening up new ideas.
Secondly, I have seen the youth, the Muslim
youth of this country, and I have high
hopes for them.
They are people who are not content with
the Biryani diplomacy.
They're not content to do what everybody has
been doing for the last 20, 30, 40
years.
That hasn't gotten us anything, to be frank.
It has not gotten us anything.
Stay tuned.
Inshallah ta'ala, next week, my blog piece
will drop going in on Biryani diplomacy and
going in on how accepting our failure politically
is an essential first step to getting it
done, to changing it.
Now, Madiha says, I don't agree.
We will never be able to out-donor
AIPAC.
I want you to put that comment up
here because she's not wrong.
Madiha, you're not wrong.
However, will we have to out-donor AIPAC?
The truth requires a lot less support than
falsehood.
Falsehood requires so much work, so much money,
so much bribery, and buying people off to
prop it up.
But the truth, it has grassroots support.
It has automatic support.
Once it's a ball rolling downhill, it will
have much more momentum.
I agree, Madiha.
In her next comment, we need to work
towards outlawing corporate donations.
I completely agree with that.
Citizens United has to be reversed.
The entire election law has to be revised.
I know it's not an attractive political issue
to get involved in.
Dealing with the issues of immigration and other
issues are much more kept front and center
for us.
But I really do think that strategically, one
of the places where Muslim Americans should start
directing their political attention and building a coalition
around is electoral reform.
Because if you can change the way that
decisions are made, you change the entire terrain.
If you change just one decision, okay, you've
changed that one decision.
But if you change the way that decisions
are made, you change a hundred decisions.
Omar Dilan asks, I feel that I'm not
doing enough for those suffering.
How can we set an expectation for what
Allah ﷻ expects us to be doing for?
How do we know we're doing enough to
not be held accountable on the Day of
Judgment?
I mean, I think it just has to
be, first of all, you have your hearts,
okay?
What do you feel?
Does this keep you up at night?
Okay, now, you don't want to numb yourself
with like, you know, we talked about that
last week.
However, you should feel angry.
You should feel disturbed.
You should feel frustrated.
These are perfectly acceptable feelings.
Now, what can you do or what is
expected of you depends on your capacity, right?
Anybody who has a higher capacity has a
higher responsibility.
And so, the Prophet ﷺ said, if you
see a munkar, you see something that is
evil, change it with your hand.
Change it with your hand.
Whatever you're able to change with your hand,
whether it's in your family, it's in your
job, it's at, you know, like with people
who are around you, social media, whatever, then
you have that responsibility to change it with
your hand.
And if you can't, then with your speech
and what you say and what you write
and even things, and then if not, then
at least you hate it in your heart.
Yes, Valerie, I also agree.
Thank you, Muslim.
He's the man.
Actually, stay tuned for this, guys, crossover coming
up.
In October, Muhammad Jalal is going to be
coming to the U.S. and build up
to the elections, and we're going to be
doing an interview.
Inshallah, I'll be doing an interview with him,
and he's going to be interviewing other people.
So, much love to our brother Muhammad Jalal.
May Allah protect him and his family.
Selma Z asks, I wonder if there's legal
ground for Aishah Noor's parents to sue that
congressman from Florida.
Whether there is or isn't, I think, you
know, unfortunately, an even larger question or a
larger issue is, what is the atmosphere that
has made it possible to say such things
in the first place?
Again, someone who says that does not fear
being politically punished.
They think that they're going to get away
with it.
We have to make sure they don't get
away with it, whether it's through a law,
which I'm kind of, I guess, pessimistic about
that because the law is sort of not
neutral, but even just when it comes to
votes and donations and things like that.
Yeah, that's true.
Miraj Khan demonstrates the lengths that the Biden
administration will go to make it seem like
an accident, right?
This is getting to be like the guy
who accidentally ate a shawarma while he was
fasting, right?
He fell on the ground and the shawarma
just fell into his mouth, right?
That's basically what the Biden administration and government
is telling us when it comes to people
who are obviously murdered.
Mohamed Fatouh asks, do you think America is
manipulated by Israel or that America merely shares
their interests?
Example, I don't buy that Israel violated Joe
Biden's red line, but that it was all
just play.
Yeah, I agree with you in that particular
example, definitely.
I think it's both.
I think that there are public statements from
Netanyahu and others that demonstrate that they find
Americans very gullible and American politicians very gullible
and easy to manipulate.
That's publicly available information.
However, it is true that American politicians, the
scenario right now, again, is that it's very
lucrative to support the racket that is the
Israeli occupation of Palestine.
It is a way to launder money.
It's a way to make tons of money
on stocks.
It's a way to make tons of money
in the weapons industry, tech, AI, all these
sorts of cutting-edge technologies that are tried
out on Palestinians.
This is a huge cash cow for a
lot of people in the U.S. government.
There are other people who are ideologically motivated,
and so there's a share of interest in
that way.
But definitely, Israel manipulates the United States, their
politicians, and their law.
Israel has been shaping U.S. law since
the 1960s when it comes to attempting to
shape language and craft language that will criminalize
the PLO first and then other factions later.
This is where the United States gets its
anti-terror laws from.
If you look in the books, and I'm
working on some things that will come out
hopefully before too long, that will show the
lineage.
I think there's other articles out there that
show the lineage of laws in the United
States that are supposedly anti-terror laws.
They are almost handed to us from Israel,
specifically with the PLO and resistors to the
Israeli occupation at the same time.
So it's both.
Abdullah asks, how can we eliminate the fear
in our hearts by causing our loved ones
distress if we are martyred or suffer loss?
I don't have a question for that.
I don't have an answer to that question,
Abdullah.
Sometimes you might feel guilty by that.
I agree.
But I don't know.
We believe that Allah is al-razaq.
That's all I can say.
We believe that Allah has determined our wealth
and where it's coming from and every single
penny that we're going to get.
So that too is part of our test.
Zaheer says, her legacy calls upon us to
unite and amplify our voices and work tirelessly
for meaningful change.
Yes.
Salmonroll, do you have any comments regarding the
protests against the Weapons Expo in Melbourne, Australia?
I did not see the Weapons Expo or
the protests, so I need to know more
information about it before commenting.
Okay, making our way, making our way through
the comments.
Good point, Mariam.
Mariam says it very well.
Our battle is that of conviction and belief.
If we recalibrate and readjust our polluted perception
of dunya in accordance to Qur'an and
Sunnah, we'll overcome the centuries-old regress, inshallah.
I agree.
Well said.
Mohamed Berri.
Wa alaikum salam, Abdullah.
Okay, we made it through.
CM, yes she was Muslim.
100% she was Muslim, bro.
What you talking about?
Ubaid Abu Bakr.
Wa alaikum salam.
Yes, 100%.
Ubaid, thank you.
Thank you.
We need to stop normalizing Muslims joining the
military and take Mohamed Ali as an example.
Wallahi, there's nothing that makes me more sick
than to see Muslims taking pride in their
sons and daughters being tools for the imperialistic
foreign policy of the United States and perhaps
being in a situation where they would murder
other Muslims for no good reason other than
to, again, continue the racket that is the
military-industrial complex and U.S. elite financial
interests abroad.
That is a stain, honestly, and if the
shoe fits, wear it.
Let's just say this.
If you were organizing a conference or you
were involved in some way in inviting somebody
that matches this description, then if the shoe
fits, wear it.
Iman asks, what are your thoughts on loyalty
oath law that forbid boycotting or criticizing Israel
enacted in several states?
Can it be reversed?
Absolutely.
Listen, here's one thing we have to understand.
Everything can be reversed, okay?
What happened when Roe versus Wade was passed?
The Catholics plotted for 50 years to reverse
Roe versus Wade.
If Roe versus Wade can be reversed, we
can reverse anything.
People misunderstand and they think that law is
just etched in stone.
No, the way that law is crafted, the
way it's interpreted, the way it's applied are
all battlegrounds.
They call this lawfare, right?
That is where we need to also be
directing our attention, and this is where we
need something like a CAGE, the UK organization.
We have CARE, but CARE, for the most
part, they work on anti-discrimination law.
I'm not aware of any sort of thing
that they're doing that is...
I'll put it this way.
We need organizations that are explicitly going to
look to crafting the law and changing the
terrain of the law, not just operating within
the law, but looking for how we can
shift it in the future.
So these types of loyalty oath laws and
Sharia is haram for them.
They're going to make illegal the Sharia or
you're not allowed to have halal meat or
all these different things.
These are purity tests that Zionists keep the
politicians busy with, and if we were smart,
we would do something similar.
Like every single thing that happens, just like
Brother Imran said, are you going to put
out a statement?
Are you going to do this?
Here's something to vote on.
Here's something to vote on.
They put measures into Congress that they don't
even plan on getting, that are purely symbolic,
right?
They don't have any enforceable action, but they
do it in order to test the waters,
to see who is supporting them and who
is not, so that they know who to
primary and who to go after.
That is how politics works right now, and
we have to get in the game.
So yeah, it can be reversed and it
has to be reversed.
Okay, so Samuel is educating me regarding the
Melbourne Weapons Expo.
Pro-Palestinian activists and anti-war protesters gathered
to protest the role of the displayed weapons
in global conflicts, particularly Gaza.
Protesters accused companies at the Expo, especially Israeli
firms, of profiting from violence against civilians.
That's 100 percent right.
That's 100 percent right.
I mean, you know, the entire military industry
is implicated in these conflicts and others, especially
in the occupation of Palestine, and weapons are
one of the biggest industries in the world,
one of the most lucrative industries in the
world, and we absolutely have to not normalize
it.
We have to stop it from being normal.
People just coming here, you know, and showing
their weapons as some expo, as if it's
like a tech expo, and these weapons are
now going to end up being turned on
our brothers and sisters abroad.
That's absolutely uncalled for, and we have to
stop it.
So props to them, to the protesters.
Zaheer asks, what role can religious leaders and
scholars play in ensuring that the legacy of
martyrs like Aishah Noor is used to promote
peace and reconciliation rather than further division?
By peace and reconciliation, I infer from how
you phrase your comment that you mean within
the Muslim community, because as we know, quote
-unquote peace and reconciliation is often the term
that is used for gaslighting us when it
comes to foreign policy.
The so-called peace process in Palestine was
a sham.
It was only meant to give political cover
to taking more Palestinian land and delaying and
subverting, sort of dividing the Palestinian sort of
factions and resistance and things like that, to
create this dynamic of good Muslim, bad Muslim,
good Palestinian, bad Palestinian.
These are the good Palestinians that we'll work
with.
They're the ones who are amenable to Israeli
interests, such as the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud
Abbas and others, and the bad Muslims and
the bad Palestinians are the ones who are
outside of that.
So that's not the type of peace and
reconciliation we want, right?
What we want is religious leaders demonstrating courage,
standing up for the legacy of Aish Anoor,
calling out their government officials, and helping guide
their community to a sensible, reasonable, political strategy
that will create a scenario in which, just
like Brother Imran said, supporting Zionism is toxic.
Letitia asks, why do Americans think they should
only vote either Democrat or Republican?
I think if there is no suitable candidate,
just don't vote.
Or protest, vote for somebody else.
Yes, 100 percent, you're right, because people misunderstand
what voting is for.
I had a sister approach me with a
question in Houston last weekend, and she was
having this dilemma.
She's like, well, I want my vote to
count, and I had to tell her, like,
sister, do you realize that the process of
appointing the President of the United States is
not through popular vote?
It is through the electoral college.
Your vote, strictly speaking, doesn't matter in the
way that you think it does, in a
sense that your vote does not actually put
somebody in power.
The electoral college and the elites put people
in power.
They've made sure to put safety valves and
escape hatches in order to make sure that
you don't have too much power.
What is the election for?
What does your vote do then?
Your vote is an exercise demonstrating your ability
to organize.
When it comes to the Muslim American community,
this is why I say it's better than
staying home from voting.
I don't think that staying home is necessarily
the best thing, because we need a quantifiable
way to register our dissent and a quantifiable
way to register that we are not happy,
and not just Muslims.
Do you know that the majority of voters
in the United States of America are independent?
They are neither Republican or Democrat.
However, you would never know that, because the
way that the legacy media talks about it,
it only talks about it in terms of
the two parties.
The two parties are bought by the elite
interests, and they don't want that to get
out.
They don't want the people uniting behind a
third-party option or a different option, because
that wrecks it for them.
This is just like Coke and Pepsi colluding.
They set the prices themselves.
They are very, very similar.
They're hardly distinguishable whatsoever.
The entire interest of the elites in the
United States of America, the political elite, revolves
around the chokehold of the two-party system.
They want you to think that your vote
doesn't have any say, or you don't have
a say, or all your vote doesn't count,
or these types of things.
Until we act otherwise, courageously, boldly, then it's
just going to be the same situation over
and over again.
Is American Israel preparing for Dajjal right now?
I don't know, Habibi.
I don't know.
It might not be that deep, Siyam.
It might just be about interests.
But anyway, we need to move on to
our next segment.
We've got some current events.
Thank you, everybody.
Excellent commentary, as usual.
We have a very special segment of the
Ummah that watches this program, and I really
cherish your questions and your commentary.
Moving on to current events, we're talking about
the differences between governments and their populaces.
That is on display very, very strongly in
the Middle East, where we've seen sort of
wildcat acts of violence against IDF soldiers.
There was a gunman in Jordan, or a
Jordanian gunman, who killed or gunned down three
guards at the West Bank crossing.
This is an indication that the Jordanian people,
who we know, and we've seen the protests,
the Jordanian people are with the people of
Palestine.
However, it is the government of Jordan that
holds them back time and time again.
So you see the Jordanian government's reaction.
They condemn the attack.
It was just an individual.
Please, Israel, don't think that this is the
changing policy on us.
It was just a lone wolf, a lone
actor.
It has nothing to do.
We're free from them.
We have nothing to do with them.
Look at how controlled they are by Western
Israeli interests.
Of course, they coordinated with Israeli authorities to
investigate and retrieve the body, and they're using
the word escalation as a scare tactic to
basically say, we don't want this type of
behavior anymore.
Now, in the public, of course, he's treated
as a hero, because he had the courage
to do something that even his government didn't
have the courage to do.
Many people who viewed it permissible, there's a
difference of opinion, but they led Salat al
-Ghaib.
They prayed janazah prayer over him in absentia,
and of course, they criticized the government of
Israel, excuse me, the government of Jordan for
siding with Israel.
May Allah accept him as a martyr, to
be honest.
His name was Maher Diab Hussein al-Jazi,
39-year-old Jordanian citizen from southern Jordan.
He drove his truck to the crossing.
He got out of his truck, and he
unloaded.
We've got some comments.
Yeah, yeah, no, we covered that already.
Okay, good.
Mashallah.
Let's see.
Iman says, two Moldavian women were arrested for
protesting in front of various embassies and their
residences.
Religiously, ambassadors are people given protection.
Does this mean we should not protest against
them?
Sorry, I'm trying to follow here.
They're protesting in front of embassies.
Religious ambassadors are people given protection.
Sorry, Iman, I don't understand the question.
Who should we or who should we not
protest against?
I lost it.
Madiha points out, AOC smearing Jill Stein means
they would rather you stay home.
Yes, thank you, thank you, thank you, Madiha.
Good point.
They would much rather you stay home, because
they're not going to report on how many
people didn't vote.
You never hear about voter turnout, which in
some elections is quite low, right?
What you're only going to see is so
many voted over here, so many percent voted
over there, so many percent voted over here.
Okay, so that's how they also control that
narrative.
Nusrat Ghori asks, what do you recommend subject
children should read in college to have political
knowledge?
They have to take a lot of electives
besides their major.
Nusrat, I'm offended by your question, because it
presupposes that they can't be political science majors,
and I was a political science major, so
we need more political science majors.
Break the trinity.
Break the trinity of doctor, lawyer, engineer.
That's the trinity in the Muslim American community.
It doesn't make any sense strategically.
First of all, doctor, lawyer, engineer, you're not
as powerful.
You're just an employee, okay?
And what good has being just an employee
done us when it comes to Palestine?
Not very much.
If you want political understanding, then you should
be a political science major.
You should go into political theory and do
these things and study these things, and you
will understand.
We have a very, very low political IQ
in the Muslim American community.
Your average doctor, lawyer, engineer is not going
to be able to figure out a political
strategy, and that's no shade to them.
They can save people when they have a
heart attack, and they can build bridges, and
they can litigate and help us out legally,
but when it comes to political strategy, we
need more people from the Muslim community, bright
minds, valedictorians, people who ace their tests, straight
-A students.
We need them in political science.
We need them in other areas as well.
A Qadri hits it on the head as
usual.
My observation of American Muslims.
I'll let you read it.
True.
Okay, so Iman is trying to make me
understand.
In Islam, ambassadors are people given protection by
the leader of their nation.
So does that mean that people of the
nation can't protest?
No, you're not attacking them.
This is a protest.
Protest is your demonstration of your disapproval.
So this is not analogous whatsoever to attacking
messengers or ambassadors or things like that.
Now, there's a situation if you're throwing objects
at an ambassador.
Then you could say maybe you have an
argument, but when it comes to protesting at
an embassy or protesting an ambassador, you're really
protesting the government because they're representative of the
government, and that's something that is understood politically
as normal.
Yeah, you see AOC and the other supposed
progressive Democrats that people, even Muslims, used to
be so in love with going hard against
Jill Stein and trying to scare Muslims into
running back to our genociders.
A Qadri, you're a disappointment.
No, I'm just kidding.
You're not a disappointment.
We love you, but you were political science
but then ended up in finance.
That LOL.
I imagine like a tear rolling down your
cheek when you say that LOL.
There we go.
We got Abdullah.
Yes, we need filmmakers.
We need educators.
We need educative administrators.
We need people writing curriculum.
We will not survive or thrive as a
community unless we have people covering all bases.
So, let your children be filmmakers.
Abdullah will take care of you.
Yes, Sarah.
Parents will say, then what can you do
with that anyway?
I'm living proof.
Do we believe Allah is Ar-Razak or
no?
Do we like seriously, do we believe that
Allah is Ar-Razak?
We act as if becoming an art major
or becoming a humanities, a major in the
humanities.
Have you met somebody who's homeless?
I really want to know.
I've never seen a Muslim who their kid
lives on the street in a tent because
they decided to major in the humanities or
political science or anything like that.
100% Sarah.
Imam Tom says, could you recommend a few
fundamental books on politics, political science to build
a decent base?
Let me think about it.
There's definitely a lot, but I have to
think about it to make it concise because
I could just start wrapping off things off
the top of my head, but I would
like it to be concise.
Very good.
Excellent stuff.
Like Sarah says, Allah always exposing people, always
exposing people to a Sarah.
Last 11 months, Allah has done us the
favor of showing people, they're showing us people's
true colors, whether it's our own community or
elsewise, there is no pretending anymore.
Okay.
And so it's up to us to realize
it.
Exactly.
Neutrino says, I believe the recent trend in
most votes is that if every opinion is
counted, did not vote would win.
Yes, you're right.
It seems to be a trend across the
globe.
People have stopped drinking the Kool-Aid.
Yes.
However, the problem with that is Neutrino, that
does not translate into political power.
And this is one of the things that
actually exposes the lies of liberalism.
Because liberalism is, among other things, predicated upon
this idea of social contract theory.
John Locke and others wrote about it.
This idea that we enter into an agreement
with the nation state, we give up some
of our rights so that we receive protection,
and the government is responsive to us.
I ask you, I ask you sincerely, if
everybody stayed home and didn't vote, would the
government say, well, I guess we don't have
any popular support.
I guess we have to quit.
No, it's never going to happen.
Okay.
So that's a nice idea.
And it was a nice justification for the
nation state, but it's not descriptive of actual
reality.
The actual reality is that the nation state
is about force.
Okay.
And it's about exercising a monopoly of force
and violence, which it is what it is.
Every nation state is like that, you know,
but we don't do ourselves any favors by
pretending that it's not.
So if that's the reality, then does not
voting really do anything?
Well, voting doesn't do a whole lot either.
Don't be tricked into that.
But registering your vote in a strategic way
in order to sort of at least take
away the two-party monopoly is probably a
good place to start.
A hundred percent, you man.
A hundred percent.
All right.
Let's go on now.
We've got some other things that I suggest
that you read, talking about reading suggestions.
We have a blog piece now.
Yeah, we do have a blog piece Institute
about martyrdom.
Okay.
The martyrs of Gaza are soaring in the
heavens.
I recommend this by Dr. Omar Suleiman.
I recommend it.
It's something, if you have to brush up
on what it is to be a martyr
in Islam, what are the sort of the
reward of a martyr, like what's the attitude
of a martyr, then you can go to
that.
We'll drop that, try to drop it in
the description or even the chat so that
you can open that up and review it.
And we also had a very, very nice
guest article for Al Jazeera dropped today.
Dr. Omar Suleiman, at it again.
Very, very prolific op-ed writer and an
effective op-ed writer.
I highly recommend you read this.
Israel continues to kill Americans with impunity.
It just dropped this morning.
So if we could also, gentlemen in the
studio, link to that somewhere, either in the
chat or in the description.
And with that, let's do some tafsir.
Pope Reese says we should have more media
-related strategies to counter the propaganda.
100% right.
And one of the great organizations that has
come out of the last 11 months is
the Unity Lab out of California.
They have been doing work with billboards in
very, very busy places in Times Square, in
New York, and also in New Jersey, and
also in LA.
They have made such a dent in such
a, what would I say, they have made
such waves that now they're being targeted by
Zionists because they're afraid, because they run billboards
saying things like, stop funding Israel.
This is how much Israel has been getting.
And it's starting to make a difference.
It's starting to actually get to people.
So they're going through being doxed and things
like that.
So if you check out, if you're looking
for a place to worship Allah through your
money, there's many good causes.
Unity Lab is one of them.
I know the people who run it.
They do good work.
Yes, Eik Hazra brings up a good point.
The Sira, 100%.
But MB, I will say this, when we
talk about the Sira and the Quran, we
need to have scholars that are going to
tease out the political implications.
And that's a lot of the work that
I've been doing over the past 10 months.
And you're going to see a lot more
stuff being published soon, inshallah.
Sada says, nation-state only accepts your religion
as long as they're okay with it.
Otherwise, it's a no-go.
The dean is being forced to submit to
the state, 100%.
You know, I have a feeling that you've
seen my videos on blogging theology.
Eik Hadri says, yes, that's also why I
love this generation.
This generation's fearless, the generation coming up.
Yeah, let Canary Mission do what they...
I got my Canary Mission profile last week
or two weeks ago.
Let them do it.
Let them do it.
It's like, we're not afraid anymore.
Back in the days before social media, this
stuff had a lot more power, because you
weren't able to tell who else was being
doxed.
You were very alone.
And so they get you to self-censor,
because you feel like you're the only one
going through it.
Now we're able to link up, and to
support each other, and to expose the exposers,
and to watch the watchers.
All right.
Tafsir.
Let's go.
What do we have this week?
We have Surah Al-Ikhlas.
Okay.
أعوذ بالله من الشيطان الرجيم بسم الله الرحمن
الرحيم قل هو الله أحد الله الصمد لم
يلد ولم يولد ولم يكن له كفوا أحد
Surah you all know and love.
When you're, you know, in your salah, it's
one of the go-to's.
Say, He, Allah, is one, the Eternal.
He does not beget, nor was He forgotten,
and no one is comparable to Him.
So we started the poll.
Okay.
There's a poll.
What is the unique word?
What is the unique word that is found
in Surah Al-Ikhlas of the choices that
you have?
That's good to hear, Sara.
Glad that you're watching those.
I have to get back to, you know,
if, Paul, if you're watching, I owe you
a text.
Sorry about that.
I have to, uh, we have to keep
going with restating Orientalism.
I've been very, very busy, but I owe
him another session.
Give a couple minutes for the poll.
One of the mistakes, I'll say this about
reading in political science and political theory.
A lot of people make the mistake of
thinking that you just have to read the
classics.
Like, now you have to read everything by
Locke, and everything by Rawls, and everything by,
you know, Marx, and everything by, like, you
know, you'll never finish.
One of the important things about getting familiar
with any discipline is to lock in on
the most important works, and the works that
will save you from reading other works.
Okay.
So that's how you are efficient when you're
covering ground.
So, for example, you know, you can understand
a lot Foucault by reading Talal Asad.
Okay.
Asad is based on a lot of Foucault's
thought.
If you read Sabah Mahmoud, you can understand
Judith Butler without necessarily reading Judith Butler, you
know, which is not very fun to do,
by the way.
Sabah Mahmoud, may Allah have mercy on her,
is a lot more fun to read.
So those sort of strategies.
But I'll give it some thought and try
to come up with a sort of a
syllabus.
All right.
Poll is done.
Here we go.
We have three choices.
We had 81%.
We take it easy on you guys, to
be honest with you.
I mean, this is a pretty easy question.
81% of people said that Asamad is
the unique word.
They would be correct.
15% said which is not correct.
Allah says, when he's talking about Ibrahim several
times throughout the Qur'an.
And then 3% of you said when
we had in the last weeks and the
weeks before.
So absolutely not, not a unique word.
But maybe you didn't understand the question.
And of course, Mariam.
So Mariam brings up a good point.
Sorry, real quick, we'll go to this.
There's the Western political tradition, which we shouldn't
sleep on, just to understand it.
And then there's also obviously the Islamic political
tradition when it comes to Siyasha, Sariyya, Ibn
Taymiyyah, obviously has critical works in that.
There are very important works that need to
be, need to be mined and represented.
Like the thing about our traditions, we have
so much that's there, but it needs to
be extracted, distilled, repackaged, and applied to today's
situation.
All right.
So Asamad.
Asamad is a very, very unique word, not
just in its occurrence in the Qur'an,
but also in its meaning.
Okay.
Asamad covers a lot of different meanings that
are not necessarily possible to translate within one
word in English.
If you go to a website that, that
collects English translations, like Islam Awakened, you will
see multiple, multiple translations for Asamad.
Asamad has to do with being eternal.
It also has to do with being the
one whom everybody relies on.
It also has to do with being the
one that is self-sufficient.
Okay.
So there's this, this idea of everything returning
to Allah for aid and assistance and sustenance,
and Allah not needing anything else or anyone
else.
Okay.
It also has connotations of sort of like
a leader.
And as I said, sort of this eternal
character.
So all of this is here in Asamad.
Some people translate it as the absolute, some
people translate it as the self-sufficient master.
You can sort of see how it charts
and maps onto these sort of different connotations
within the Arabic.
However, for our purposes, you know, I think
that one of the significant things we were
talking earlier about, a stealth for Allah becoming
an art major or a political science major,
or, you know, paying the ultimate price and
going and, you know, putting yourself in a
risky situation for a righteous cause, right?
When we realize that Allah subhanahu wa ta
'ala is the ultimate authority and the eternal
and the one of whom everyone depends, even
when we're talking about AIPAC, okay, we're talking
about AIPAC, oh no, they have so much
power.
They don't really, first of all, but that's
another discussion.
We have to realize that everything happens by
the will of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala
and Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has the
ultimate power.
Sometimes we get spooked by not knowing the
how.
We know what we want to do, right?
We know what the right thing to do
is.
We know the issue.
We know we want to support Palestine and
end the Israeli occupation of Palestine, but we
don't necessarily know how.
Now, there's a certain degree to which we
have to theorize and put our heads together
and plan, but there's another sort of type
of thought that maybe can get dominated by
too much relying on material means, basically not
recognizing Allah's hand of providence, to use a
phrase in all of this, that Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala will deliver results in ways
that you cannot anticipate, okay?
So some people, they look at, you know,
the situation, they say, oh, we're too empowered,
there's no possible way we're ever going to
do it.
That's a similar attitude, by the way, of
Bani Israel, when Bani Israel was led out
of Egypt by Musa alayhi salam and was
led to the gates of Palestine and then
were promised it, all they had to do
was go in and fight and take the
means, and they were promised that they would
win.
And what was their reaction?
No, you and your Lord go and fight,
we would rather stay home, okay?
This is an attitude that demonstrates a lack
of awareness of who Allah subhanahu wa ta
'ala is, okay?
And it is, if you have a lack
of awareness of who Allah subhanahu wa ta
'ala is, you will have a lack of
reliance upon Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, okay?
That's the main point here.
So sometimes we don't have to figure out
every single thing.
Some of the things, sometimes we have to
just worry about knowing what the first step
is.
We know that we need to be righteous,
we need to fear Allah alone, and we
know what the first step is, and we
take the first step, and then Allah will
open doors in ways that we can't even
perceive.
You can also notice this in the attitude
of Musa alayhi salam, in the story that
as it's told in the Qur'an, where,
I believe in Surah An-Naml, when he
is first, or is it Shu'ara?
I believe it's Shu'ara actually.
Yes, it's Surah An-Naml, where he is
given his prophetic mission.
At first, he demonstrates not unwillingness, but skepticism,
right?
He's finding all these sorts of reasons why
it can't work.
Now, by the end of the story, he
has seen Allah's providence, and Allah's sustenance, and
Allah's support and aid, so much that when
his back is up against the wall, or
literally against the Red Sea, and the forces
of Fir'aun are coming, and his people
are They're saying, oh no, we are mudrakoon,
they're gonna catch us.
Musa alayhi salam says, no, my Lord will
guide us, and will guide me, and that
is the type of reliance that we're looking
for.
So, sometimes, we have to realize that we
have to trust in Allah, and meditating upon
Allah's name, As-Samar, will help us develop
that realization, and also develop that reliance.
My son has been trying to get into
the film industry for the past 20 years.
He books small parts, but when he gets
a good part, his part gets cut for
the most stupid excuses that you can think
of.
Maybe you can hook up with Abdullah.
Abdullah, help him out.
Abdullah's gonna hit the connects, inshallah.
All right, we're going on almost two hours.
Let's finish up tonight with our personal development
section on atomic habits.
We had a very, very interesting chapter on
the pull of social norms, but first, I
want everybody, if you can, to share your
experience with the homework.
The homework was the idea of temptation bundling.
Taking the thing that you do, that you
want to do, watch Netflix, eat ice cream,
chocolate, whatever it is, and tying a positive
habit to it.
There's a couple ways to do it.
One of the ways is after I do
the thing that I have to do, then
I will reward myself with doing the thing
that I want to do.
I do this at work all the time.
I'll set my timer for 20 minutes, or
for 30 minutes, or 40 minutes, or an
hour, and I can shoot through for that
amount of time without looking at any distractions,
especially when I'm writing.
Today, I cranked out a blog piece for
Yachin Institute that if I'm able to sustain
this with 100% focus, then I'll give
myself a five-minute break to check messages
or to go get a snack or something
like that.
Did you have any experiences?
Did you try this?
Was it effective?
What did you do?
Let us know in the chat.
While you're letting us know, we'll talk about
today's lesson.
Abdallah, troll me with decaf.
Come on, man.
Today's lesson is part of making it attractive.
We're under Law 2.
Law 2 about building good habits, lasting habits,
is making it attractive.
The first is make it obvious.
The second is make it attractive.
The second point about how to make it
attractive is to use our social natures as
human beings for us and not against ourselves.
Now, when it comes to the pull of
social norms, he breaks it down into three
main categories, looking at who we follow.
Who do people follow and imitate in life?
We follow people who are close to us.
Number one, that's the first category.
Number two, we follow the many, the majority.
And number three, we follow the powerful and
the famous.
These are the three main types of people
that we imitate.
When you see the hairstyles or the clothing
styles or anything else that we have, these
are the types of people that you see
the youth follow and that even adults they
follow them as well.
So when it comes to the close, obviously
that means the people who you are around,
the people you surround yourself with.
If you want to be a good basketball
player, you need to befriend good basketball players.
You need to hang out with other good
basketball players.
If you want to be a person who
is, and I saw there was a question
here about from a Muslim's point of view,
if you want to get closer to the
deen and learn Islam, socially you should surround
yourself with other people who have that same
goal, who also want to learn about Islam.
It will become very, very easy and automatic
to do so.
If you want to be a good student,
just good at studying, then you're not going
to hang out with the flunkies, the people
who don't take their studies seriously.
You need to hang out with people who
are serious students, and so on and so
forth.
The second, talking about the many, that people
tend to follow the and so you have
to recognize that when you're trying to construct
a habit, that the habits that go with
what society is already doing are way easier
to establish than habits that cut across the
grain of what society is already doing.
So for example, when beards became popular, there
was a very, very distinctive time in American
fashion where beards for men became very popular,
and people would joke, but it was a
valid point that now that the kuffar are
growing out their beards, this is the perfect
time, brother, you should grow out your beard
too.
Now obviously, the hope is that the beard
stays no matter what, but just to get
your foot in the door, just to get
your foot in the door, this is a
good opportunity to take advantage of.
If dressing modestly becomes the next big thing
in American society, then the sisters who are
struggling with hijab or struggling with dressing modestly,
here's your chance.
Now is your entry point to start doing
that habit, and hopefully then the habit will
stick to the point where then no matter
which way society goes, it'll be easier for
you as well.
And then the third point about the powerful,
okay, that was an interesting time, yes, and
the suit and the pants, the pants that
were above the ankle as well, that was
kind of funny.
The powerful, okay, people are addicted to success
for good reasons and bad reasons, okay.
There's an assumption there, and it's an assumption
that Allah refutes in the Qur'an, there's
an assumption that most people have that the
people who are successful deserved it, okay.
We're taught in Surah Al-Qasas the story
of Qarun, who was the most successful person
for Bani Israel, and yet it was because
he was a sellout.
And so we know that this isn't true,
but unfortunately the situation is that most people,
they follow celebrity.
Most people, they follow and imitate powerful people.
Why do all the soccer players or the
football players get imitated?
Because they are seen as successful.
Why do celebrities get imitated?
Because they are seen as successful.
So again, that's another sort of thing where
we can pay attention to the good, like
there are things that can be used.
For example, some of professional athletes, and I'm
very critical of sort of how sports is
so monetized in our society and the role
it plays in our society.
However, there are really interesting parallels to the
discipline and the habits that professional athletes have
to have with being a good Muslim.
And so sometimes you can enter that door.
You can say, well, huh, I wonder how
my favorite athlete approaches their day.
What does their regimen look like?
How do they balance their various commitments?
Like you can use that for you.
So this will be the homework this week.
And we'll circle back to the chat and
see how you did with the homework last
week.
But the homework for this week is going
to be to befriend somebody or spend more
time with somebody who is good at the
thing that you want to be good at,
or who has already the habit or the
quality that you want to have.
Okay, you understand that?
So if you want to be a person
of the Qur'an, the following week, this
coming week, you need to spend some time,
more time than you normally would, with somebody
who is good at the Qur'an.
Okay, that's going to be your challenge, and
I'll think of something that I'll do as
well.
But I saw some interesting comments in the
chat.
Let's go back and see what people's experiments
were with the previous homework.
So Nusaybah says, treat myself with YouTube shorts
after cleaning, which I abhor.
May Allah make it easy for you, Nusaybah.
I don't think I've met anybody who likes
to clean.
But yeah, that's a good example.
Murad says, I usually do 50-10, 50
minutes of deep work, 10 minutes to check
messages.
That's a good, nice, very nice.
So that's a very common tactic.
Ayman Tarib, from the greatest country on earth,
Texas.
Come to you from the Dallas area.
Inshallah, I'll be in Dallas this coming weekend.
No, stop for a while.
Two weekends, I apologize.
Not this weekend, the following weekend.
What is that?
The 22nd?
21st, 22nd?
Inshallah, I'll be in Dallas.
So if you're in the area, maybe there's
a chance to hook up.
Good.
Okay, A.
Khadri says, I'm an extroverted introvert, so I'm
trying to go to more physical halakas and
then reward myself with Yemeni coffee.
Yo, Yemeni coffee is a great reward for
anything.
Inshallah.
MB says, we need to stop associating education
with a college degree.
100%.
Schooling gets in the way of education more
often than not.
You can read Paulo Freire's, what is it?
Unschooling Society.
Is that the book, or is that Ivan
Illich?
Anyway, Deschooling Society is an important book, and
it shows you how the education system is
kind of a racket.
There are many out there with PhDs that
can't think and have no knowledge, and vice
versa.
My father never got a college education.
Very, very intelligent man.
May Allah guide him to Islam.
Okay, we'll end with this.
Pope Marie, okay, so last chance for questions.
Anybody have any questions or final thoughts?
You can send them now.
Pope Marie says, please make dua for my
son, Ali.
May Allah have mercy on him and grant
him generosity.
Ameen.
Ameen.
May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala have mercy
on Ali.
Sorry for your loss.
May Allah make it easy for you and
grant you patience.
Abu Hakim Hassan, coming in right at the
end.
Anybody have any final thoughts, questions?
You're also free to share your plan.
Let me think.
What's going to be my thing that I'm
going to do?
Who do I want to be more like,
and who am I going to hang out
more with?
I want to be more like Sheikh Mohammed
Shanawi.
I'm going to hang out more with him
this week.
That's easy, right?
Inshallah.
Okay, well, there's nothing else left.
We've gone for two hours solid, so thank
you everybody again for your excellent participation, your
questions, and your comments.
Insightful as always.
We will see you next week, inshallah ta
'ala.
I look forward to it.
Until then, stay safe and take care.
Subhanakallahumma wa bihamdaka sharwan laila l-anta astaghfiru
tubu ilayk.
Until next time, salamu alaykum.