Tom Facchine – Should Muslims Attend Interfaith Events

			There's two types of interfaith events. Okay, the first type of interfaith event is something where
people are actually interested in learning about Islam, or they're interested in, including you.
Right at a community level, right? Something's going on. For example, we had a situation in upstate
New York where some people were were shot and murdered. And some of those people were were Muslims.
Now, the churches reached out and contacted us. And they wanted our participation in a sort of vigil
event, because they realized that it affected us too. Okay, these types of events are usually fairly
harmless, right? With the exception of if there's particular acts of worship going on, that
		

			obviously, we wouldn't want to participate in as Muslims. But when it comes to just the bare fact of
participation in them, it's usually not a problem, because no one's looking to shape you, no one's
looking to steer you, no one's trying to recruit you into their agenda, right. But there's another
type. The second type of interfaith event, which is really just a Trojan horse, which is other
religious groups are trying to coalition build around a certain type of politics, and they want you
to be part of the team. And so they're basically asking you to adopt their politics. And it's
usually of the liberal sort, we usually don't get approached by folks on the right for this sort of
		

			collaboration, usually, it comes from the left. And so in that sense, really, they're looking for
you to prove to them that what they want Islam to be is really the real snap, right, they want a
certain type of Islam that adheres completely to, to liberal values, and liberal political positions
and things like that. And they're basically hoping that that's what Islam really is, and hoping that
that's what you're about. And so they're going to invite you to participate in an interfaith event
where basically the message is, while we're all the same, you know, look at how we're all sort of
the same here. And that's the type of participation that I don't see any real benefit in for the for
		

			the Muslims or Muslim communities, you know, the whole purpose of supposedly tolerance and
pluralism, etc, is that I get to meet me and you get to be right. So what's the point? If you're
asking me to be it defeats the purpose entirely. Right. And that's a quick litmus test, if you if
you are trying to test some sort of organization is coming your way, you have to basically put them
to the test. Are you ready to accept Islam the way it is? Are you ready for me to represent this
faith faithfully, right. And it's physicians, and it's what it teaches. It's normative sort of
project for society and whatever. If not, then maybe the event shouldn't go on or the coalition, you
		

			know, shouldn't happen. And it doesn't make sense. Unfortunately, a lot of sort of what are called
interfaith events are really an attempt to do Dawa, to the Muslims, to call them to be something
that they're not to try to persuade them to leave some of their commitments, their religious
commitments in order to conform more to sort of what society expects, or we should say, liberal
values and what sort of the left expects, so you need to be very, very carefully need to be very,
very smart when it comes to interfaith work. And you need to make sure that whatever benefits are
going to occur due to collaboration and coalition building, do not come at the cost of compromising
		

			acceptance of Islam, as it is right or accepting you as a Muslim who holds the beliefs that you do,
right, if the price to participate in a certain thing is pretending that I don't have a certain
stance on this issue or that issue or pretending that Islam doesn't say what it says about this
issue or that issue, then that's a price that we shouldn't be willing to pay. And Allah subhanaw
taala warns us in the Quran about exchanging the guidance of Allah for a paltry price or for you
know, for very little and this is one of those one of the illustrations of what that looks like,
right? We don't exchange the guidance of Allah for anything, right. We need to be we need to be
		

			pushing other people, you know, and that's, I think the key. The key thing when it comes to our
motivation and our intentions, we need to be doing data to other people. We don't let people do that
to us.