Tom Facchine – Understanding The Room For Context In Fiqh

			But
		

			there's a certain context to fic that gets erased with the internet, right with large federal
websites and these sorts of things. And even our professors and the NRC. Medina, they used to tell
us this stuff, you know, they'd say, for example, somebody asked you what's the ruling of not
wearing the niqab? Right. So to wear the niqab in a place like Saudi Arabia, it means a certain
thing and to wear the niqab in in Turkey, for example, or another place means something very, very
different. Okay, somebody who doesn't wear the niqab and parts of the Arabian Peninsula, it's like a
big deal. Like, it's like, wow, like, this is actually a symbol of something else. In the context,
		

			that means that maybe somebody has a very weak relationship with their religion, or they're not very
practicing, or, you know, whatever it can be in other places in the Muslim world, like such as
Istanbul, for example, you find someone who is wearing hijab, but doesn't have any pub, and this is
like a champion of faith. Right? This is somebody who's overly involved, right? Somebody who's like
on the, you know, who's on the frontier, like holding down the faith. Yeah. So there is, especially
in federal work, especially in federal work, there is room for context, and you need to understand
what things mean, in a particular situation to a particular type of person, I, you know, just got
		

			off the Zoom call with somebody who was thinking about accepting Islam, and the person who kind of
approached me and kind of, you know, set me up with this person, they were from a different country,
and they were really having a hard time kind of getting through to this person, because they were
from two completely different cultures. And I just know exactly, I can imagine what happened, right?
Certain things that somebody says they might, you know, sound the alarm bells in your head and be
like, Oh, my God, that should occur, oh, my God, that's this, or Oh, my God, that's that. But you
need to find a way to address the concern underneath of the form, right? So for example, this person
		

			was really interested in Eastern religions and these sorts of things. And they said that, you know,
they really kind of liked the idea of, you know, God being everywhere, okay, well, if you're from,
if you're from a certain background, you're gonna freak out at that, and you're not going to know
how to handle that. And you're gonna respond like a stoke for law. How could you ever say that,
right? But I understand what the person meant. And the person was coming from a position where hyper
individualism and alienation from the environment, all these sorts of things, what's appealing about
it is that we're part of the connected whole again. And so when I'm talking to that person, I'm able
		

			to say yes, in Islam, we do believe that we're part and we're connected of everything, and we have a
responsibility to all creation. However, we don't take it so far, where we say that the Divine is in
everything, and I am divine and you are divine in this sort of nonsense, right? So if you understand
the context and understand where someone's coming from, you are in a much stronger position to do
Dawa and to explain Islam and to explain what are the boundaries of obedience and disobedience that
person because you understand where they're coming from?