Tom Facchine – What France & UK’s Electoral results mean for Muslims
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AI: Transcript ©
Assalamu alaykum.
Welcome, everybody, to Yaqeena Institute's weekly livestream program.
I'm your host, Imam Tom.
We have another
jam packed episode
for you this evening,
and thank you for joining us. Shoot us
a comment in the chat. Let us know
where you're tuning in from, and especially if
you've got any questions or anything that's on
your mind. Let us know now, and we'll
open up with that tonight. What do we
have in store for you? Well, we have
some electoral revolt
electoral results that are in, especially from the
UK and and France.
We have the Democratic Party in the United
States in a tailspin and sort of rival
factions taking sides on whether president Biden should
stand down or continue his campaign.
And then finally,
people are starting to as a ceasefire in
Gaza seems to be more and more imminent,
people are considering what post war Gaza will
look like. And so that itself is another
phase of,
sort of pushing back and making sure that,
Gaza isn't done dirty.
After that, we've got, a couple reactions. We
got some interesting thing on top. We talk
about the issue of if you were
a,
an elected representative,
what would be the criteria for participating meaningfully?
Right? A lot of times, we have only
negative examples of how you can do it
wrong, how you can be tokenized, how you
can be sort of brought in to,
serve the empire. We have a lot of
examples of that.
What would it look like to do it
right?
And, I think developing these criteria are gonna
be really important for,
actually holding elective representatives
accountable,
and realizing the need to run our own
candidates and participate,
in a different way than what we've been
doing thus far.
Then, of course, we have, Kitab al Sir,
which is talking about sort of the hadith
from Sahih Muslim that are going over the
expeditions and the, the military campaigns of the
prophet
a very, very important hadith about betrayal
and the betrayal of trust and the type
of trust that is invested in every leader.
You see how there's a theme here running
throughout that every leader has an amenah, has
a trust,
and they are deep duty bound before Allah
to not to not betray that trust. It's
been a long day folks. I'm gonna need
some water and, straighten out my words.
They need to
not betray that trust. Now what are the
contours? What's the content of that trust that
they should not betray
when they find themselves in a position of
responsibility? We're gonna have to talk about that.
And then finally, we have our book,
our personal development section on atomic habits. We're
gonna be talking about basically the setup for
the rest of the book,
How to make a good habit. How to
make a bad habit go away from a
a high level view. And then the rest
of the book will get into the nitty
gritty details. But first, your questions, your comments,
and who's with us tonight?
Salihah Ahmed from Atlanta.
Welcome, Maureen
Cleeland. I think maybe McCleeland.
I think I remember you from before. Salih
Ahmed from Gardner, Massachusetts.
Shout outs to Worcester and Utica.
Very good. Always good to have someone from
Worcester tuning in. Sara from Canada.
Ali seeks to know 254.
That's a cryptic one. I don't know what
254 is. Maybe an area code.
From Northern Virginia.
Missus
s,
testify from the Maldives. Welcome again.
We have bread and zathr.
Always making me hungry. Bread and zathr.
From Illinois.
It's great to see familiar faces every time.
So, I I noticed the the same the
same folks coming back for more.
So I asked a question. When Westerners say
that there needs to be preservation of Western
civilization, isn't it true that it can't be
separated from secular liberal values?
That's a really good question, Sara.
I think
that, first of all, the first thing that
jumped to mind, and, I think this needs
to be discussed when we talk about
this group of people. Because a lot of
times and this has
come on the heels of many of the
conversations that we've been having in the past
few weeks where people on the left are
trying to make Palestine into just a leftist
issue, or one issue among the many issues
that is only on the left. And there's
in subsuming that and assimilating it and basically
drowning the Palestinian cause as it's just a
simply a leftist issue,
It allows it to be assimilated into the
culture wars left versus right and the sort
of political scheme that the west is used
to.
Alright. Where am I going with this? Well,
people are concerned about the preservation of Western
civilization.
There's a pain point there that needs to
be taken seriously, and there is a,
even you'll find my personal opinion is that
when a large amount of people are drawn
to something,
you often find that there is a grain
of truth in it,
and there is some descriptive power to it.
Now there might be a whole bunch of
falsehood that's also packaged in within it, but
sometimes you get further by treating seriously
the pain points of other people and what
they're suffering, even if you want to provide
for them an entirely different solution. And I
say this because, you know, I was able
to travel the UK, and I was able
to travel,
Dublin a little bit. And to see some
of the issues that European Muslims are going
through and how for them it's much more
wrapped into the immigration issue. And one of
the things that's going on in Europe that's,
that also exists in the United States, but
it's much more strong in Europe, is the
sense that
we are losing,
our civilization, that we are losing our culture.
Now that's really interesting.
What culture is it that people are afraid
of losing? And what do they think is
threatening their culture? Those are the really important
open ended exploratory questions
because they're not a 100% wrong. When I
was in Dublin, I was in a in
a hotel,
and the hotel is by the airport.
And all around,
you couldn't tell that you were,
you couldn't tell that you were in Ireland.
It looked just like a strip mall, in
the United States.
Meaning, it was the same
neoliberal
neoliberal, globalist
sort of, urban planning, suburban sprawl, big box
stores, Chipotle, McDonald's
to the end of it. Now,
if you take a person in a European
country,
that sees that this is how their land
is being turned into, that you've got in
the United States, we have the Walmarts. The
Walmarts come in. They push the little guys,
the mom and pop shops, the little family
owned businesses out. And they displace them with,
you know, cheap goods that are made in
China or whatever.
They actually experience
a real destruction of community,
and that should be taken seriously. I think
that that should be taken seriously.
However,
what they ascribe as is the culprit what's
the responsible
party that is doing that? Now the powers
that be, the elites will tell them, oh,
it's the immigrants.
They've come to take your jobs, or it's
all of these people from North Africa coming,
or it's the Muslims, or it's this and
it's that.
That is a dead end, and that's where
they get it wrong. So they feel that
something
is wrong, and they're actually not wrong in
that feeling that their culture,
local culture, let's just say local cultures,
is being are being steamrolled
and wiped out. If we wanna call it
capitalism, if we wanna call it neoliberal capitalism,
if we wanna call it this sort of
homogenization,
a global culture of of consumer goods, consumerism,
whatever we wanna call it,
it is true that local
specific cultures or local cultures are losing their
specificity
and people feel that their ways of living
are being undermined and replaced and might not
be able
to continue.
That is a legitimate point.
However,
what we lose, and I was specifically telling
this to some of the Muslims in Ireland,
that we have to be careful
to not allow the Muslims to be shoehorned
into the left, as thus we're just gonna
be part of this coalition of immigrants and,
LGBTQ
and minorities,
and we're going to sort of, you know,
go with this wave.
Why?
Because Islam
actually has a better solution to that problem,
then the nativism
or the even white supremacy
that people fall back onto
to solve that same problem. Right? So people
are experiencing this thing. It's a legitimate pain
point, and they say,
oh, no. It must be the Muslims or,
oh, no. It must be the immigrants, or
our western civilization
is under threat. Right? That's a construct. That's
a social construct.
What is western civilization?
Is the western civilization
Bosnia?
Is it the Balkans?
Is it,
where does it start? You know, does it
go back to Greece? Okay. But do you
have the oracles along with ancient Greece, or
you just wanna take the democracy, quote unquote?
It wasn't really democracy as we know it
today. What about Sparta? What about, all the
different right. This is a social
construction. This is something that is more of
a narrative and a historical
revisionism than it is something that's actually necessarily
based in reality. So that's what they've been
given to say that, first of all, to
describe this is what's under attack. We said,
no. That's not what's under attack. Your local
way of life, let's just call it your
local way of life is under attack.
And it's not under attack it's not under
attack because of foreigners. It's not under attack
because of Muslims. It's not under attack because
of immigration policies.
It's under attack because of a global
monoculture.
Again, we can call it capitalism, neoliberalism,
consumerism, whatever it is. That is
that is actually erasing your culture.
But what is Islam's relationship to culture?
That's the beautiful thing that Islam's relationship to
culture is actually a mutually beneficial and productive
one. That that when Islam comes to a
land, as it came to North Africa, as
it came to Sham, as it came to
the Indian subcontinent, as it came to all
other places,
Islam dealt with culture in a much more
nuanced, and respectful, and productive way, that it
ran things through a 3,
sort of, and through 3 buckets or through
a filter with 3,
outlets.
Outlet 1 is affirmation. If there's something that
was good and wholesome in your culture, generosity,
you
know, dress that was appropriate, things like that,
Islam approved it. No problem. You keep on
doing that. That's fine.
If something was a mix, good and bad,
it purified it. Okay. So it took the
bad elements and it got rid of it,
and it kept the good elements. And if
there is something that was pure evil such
as infanticide, such as treating women like property,
these sorts of things, then Islam denied it
and got rid of it. Through that production,
through that relationship with culture, Islam was able
to do something that no other system has
done before,
and that was actually enhance
and uplift the lands that it came to.
Some people like to say Islam colonized the
world just like Europe colonized the world. Absolutely
not. When Europe colonized the world, it destroyed
entire ways of living in the world. When
Islam came to different parts and there was
conquest, it came and through conquest to different
parts of the world, it actually
synthesized and produced a local Islamic culture. There
was a local Islamic Persian culture, and a
local Islamic Egyptian culture and a local Islamic
Maghrib culture and a local Islamic Balkan culture.
That was very, very rich. Right? So
this is what we kind of, I know
it's a long rant to to an interesting
question, but I think that there's a first
of all, it doesn't necessarily have to be
tied to answer your question, it doesn't necessarily
have to be tied to secular liberal values.
There is a way in which it can
be tied to the project of actually how
Islam stands to benefit people. It doesn't come
to replace your religion entirely.
Shout out to brother Jalil who was in.
Brother Jalil, a very, very important to the,
Hispanic and Muslim community, the Latino community,
Mexican American,
Muslim. You've probably seen him in mariachi gear
for Eid.
He was struck by a car in a
car accident. Him and his family, may Allah
heal him completely. If you look up his
his thing online, you can actually donate to
his, to his his hospital bills.
He's exactly, you know, I used to see
this brother and and love the fact that
he would keep his local Mexican culture what
was up what was halal, what was pure.
And then, obviously, you leave the things like
tequila and etcetera that that aren't. Right? That
this is how Islam interacts with culture. It
doesn't dominate it. It doesn't displace it. And
I think that if more people knew that,
that that would be,
that would make a stem much more attractive.
It's a it's a very potential Dawa point.
That took us far afield. But thank you
for that question. Sara is always bringing the
great questions. I appreciate that. Ratul Dayoun, InshaAllah,
Palestine will be free soon. InshaAllah, I believe
it within our lifetimes. InshaAllah, Tada.
Okay.
Sadaf continues her question. So what they preserve
won't be something that is good for their
society? No? Or is that just okay. We
answered that. Thank you, though.
Ahel Biryani Wasamusa.
From Maryland. You can be Ahel Biryani Wasamusa
as long as you're not diplomacy
Biryani Wasamusa.
Minami Islam Khan from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Wonderful. I would love to visit Bangladesh. I
do not have any plans, but I would
absolutely love to visit Bangladesh. No many Bangladeshi
people, obviously. New York City represent, and, in
New Jersey as well.
Lovely people.
I would absolutely,
cherish the opportunity. Hopefully, may Allah make it
so.
From Florida.
From Yakarta.
Very nice. Thank you for tuning in. Our
brothers and sisters in Indonesia.
Excellent.
Juju S. Waleed from Anaheim, California. Welcome to
the program.
Sara. You made me laugh, Sara. A radical
Yakin fascist called Omar Saleh Man to sell
out and is urging people to boycott.
Yeah. We believe we believe in
If I'm a sell out, I
don't know. You know,
you're gonna boycott everybody until there's nobody left
but you. Reminds me of the. Right? You
remember the the mentality.
Right? When, at the time of the Tabireen,
when there were 2 Khadas that came to,
to to Mecca to make tawaf. Right? They
were making either Umrah or Hajj. I can't
remember.
And, the one guy says to the other,
one Khadijah says to the other Khadijah, says
can you believe
we're the only 2 people here to go
to Jannah? They're looking around at all the
Tabi'i'in and stuff like that. And then that
statement causes the one to realize the the
misguidance that he was upon,
and then says, you know what? You can
if that's true, then you can have Jannah
to yourself and I'm going to be with
the Jannah. Right? That, that comes to mind.
Very good. But, you know,
we we're not bothered by,
by,
by people and and their reactions. We just
hope that we're doing the right thing, and
we have shortcomings, and we ask Allah to
rectify us in our shortcomings.
But we keep on keeping on. And,
and we don't fear the blame of the
blamers. As long as we're right with Allah,
then
But I agree with you, Sara. It does
really show that when a slam comes to
comes out and opposes the left,
they rear back with vitriol. Look at how
much hatred they have. And I noticed that
too. Look at how the left purports to
be,
against the right and and criticizes the right
for
Islamophobia.
And yet, you know, people on the left
like to say if you scratch a liberal,
a fascist bleeds. I would say if you
scratch a leftist, a fascist bleeds as well.
That, you know, all you have to do
is challenge them in this particular way on
secularism, on the,
hegemony and colonial sort of dimensions to their
values.
And all of a sudden, we're all Islamic
fundamentalists apparently. Right? Woah. Wait a second. I
thought that was Islamophobic.
Oh, well.
Let's see. We have Jibreel from Michigan.
Who else? Amina Kasupovich.
From Tuzla. And I think that's Bosnian coffee
next to that, I hope. Masha'Allah.
Welcome to the program.
By the way, this shirt,
I don't know if you can see it
close-up, but I I wore this shirt for
Srebrenica, for the anniversary of Srebrenica, which is
tomorrow,
July 11th. Obviously, the Sobrenica massacre,
one of the most horrific events
of the Bosnian genocide.
And, a very important
reminder to all of us Muslims as to
the,
well, there's a lot of lessons. Maybe that
should be a separate episode.
But we've we've got some videos coming out.
Yaqeen Institute does, Sheikh Omar doing things about,
Bosnia instead of Bradesse in particular.
But you I don't know if you can
see it, but the tiny the tiny white
patterns on this shirt are actually in the
shape of the white circles, which is sort
of the the flower motif for remembering Sabrenitsa.
And that's purely accidental,
purely accidental, but because it reminds of Sabrenitsa,
decided to wear this shirt tonight.
Ruslan Andreevich.
From Singapore.
From Singapore, but your name is Russian. It
reminds me of Russian. I, had a a
classmate in Medina named Russan.
I have a question. I gave a 1,000
purse a $1,000 to a person who was
afterwards ungrateful and hurtful to me. I have
been making duet against them for a few
months.
Oof. Well, I don't know,
what the type of hurt that you are
talking about.
But in general, Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala tells
us in Surat Al Baqarah specifically,
that when we give charity to somebody,
that it should not be followed up with
reminders of the good that we did for
somebody.
And if you go to,
I believe,
after Surat or before Surat Al Furqan, Surat
An Nur. When Allah talks
about the ifq. Right? This is the thing
that occurred where the slander upon Aisha Radiallahu
Ta'ala Anha
and Abu Bakr. Abu Bakr is her father.
So naturally, he's very emotionally affected by the
slander against his daughter that she did something
improper.
Now,
Abu Bakr,
he was he had a relative named Mishtah,
and Mishtah was poor. So Abu Bakr was
financially taking care of Mishtah.
However,
Mislah
got involved
in the ifk. He actually was one of
those people who were spreading.
He didn't originate it, but he was spreading
the slander against Aisha. So when Abu Bakr
realized
that this person,
who he was financially supporting was actually spreading
the slander against his daughter, he cut him
off. And he swore by Allah that he
would not
support him financially anymore.
So Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala revealed in that
surah
that he should not do that,
that he should continue to support. And the
reason why
is because
is your donation truly for the sake of
Allah
or is it transactional? Are there expectations
that are coming along with that donation? Are
we expecting when we give someone something that
they're going to treat us nice
in return.
If we have an expectation that is attached
to our donation, then our donation isn't a
100% for Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala in the
first place. And Sheikh Abdullah Shanpiti used to
tell us in Medina that if you give
something to someone in charity,
you should be prepared basically for them to
spit in your face.
That this is the way to prove that
you're sincere and not actually doing business, in
the sense,
transactional sense. Like, trading it for favors or
good treatment or anything like that. It's a
very hard thing. That's a subtle thing,
Ruslan.
So
but that excludes the situation in which the
harm was was extremely serious, but that's an
important thing to keep in mind. Laura,
from Casablanca.
Welcome to the program. Good to have you
with us. Murad Ali from Alberta.
Nafisa Toubande from NYC.
Lisa Morel or Morelle. Sorry. I'm, the Italian
roots. I'm I know I I suspect that
that's French, but in in an Italian, you'll
say Morelle. Walaikum Assalamu rafter Allah.
Yeah. So we're gonna talk about that. Yo.
We have we have, welcome to free. Yeah.
We get to talk about French politics today.
Yeah. Marie Le Pen did, was completely undermined.
Of course, we'll see what Macron does, but
there's some very important lessons here. So this
will be particular relevant to you. Walaikum Assalam.
Nancy Yahia from Cairo. Good to have you
back with us again.
Ruslan. Yeah. That's that's true. It it might
be better for you. Honestly, Allah Subhanahu Wa
Ta'ala might be doing something good for you.
And that's actually the phraseology that he uses
in Surat al Nur to talk about the
ifk in general. Don't think that this is
bad for you. Actually, this is good for
you. You're talking to Aisha there. Alaykum Salam,
Azarablan
from New
Jersey. Courtney
g, Ohio.
Jabir
Qazikhil.
Hello.
Jaywalaam,
Assalam, Assalam, Assalam, Assalam, Assalam, Assalam, Assalam, Assalam,
Assalam, Assalam,
Assalam,
Assalam,
Assalam, Assalam, Assalam. Oh, Masha'Allah. Welcome to the
program.
Kawtar, walaikum assalamu raftala from Almagrib Kedir Allah
Bisa'ik.
May Sage from Uganda. Good to have you
back with us. Abdullah Amin Khan from India.
Sendev,
sheikh from Senegal. Is your actual name sheikh
or are you a sheikh?
You know, I had a, I had a
a master student that I studied with in
the Islamic University who's from Senegal. And one
of my sheiks from before I left was
from the Gambia, and he studied in Senegal
as well. Senegal, land of, land of the
of the huffal.
Very, very famous for memorizing the Quran.
Jabir from Afghanistan.
Welcome.
Oh,
tuning in from Utica. Utica's in the house.
Welcome.
Hopefully, I hope to come visit Utica soon,
It's been a minute.
I can't understand what that emoji is, Fatima.
They love Muslims if you play
maybe soccer, I think, or football. Sorry. International
lingo football. Yes. That's a that's a a
football or soccer. Well, that's true. They love
what did Mesut,
Ozil say? Right? Mesut Ozil said, when I
win, and he was the Turkish,
descended,
German footballer.
He said, when I win,
I'm a hero. I'm German. When I lose,
I'm an immigrant.
It's a tight rope walk.
From London. I was very impressed by London.
London was,
exceeded my expectations.
Julia Wati, Abduljaleel
from KL, Malaysia.
Inshallah, I'll be in KL in 2 weeks
from July 22nd to 29th
for the Umatics conference there.
Very good. Zakiyyah Rahman.
Yes. You're right. We are in a tough
situation this year. Both parties are worse.
However, Trump and his VP candidate Tom Cotton
will make it tough
for Palestine. Yeah. I mean, there's no,
SubhanAllah. We're in a tough situation. There's no
doubt about that. May Allah give us aid.
Khaid San from Dallas.
I'll be in Dallas in about a month.
Abu Dris from Seattle.
Seattle is a very beautiful city.
Enlightening talks.
It's also called neotraditionalism
and post COVID pandemic. Yeah. That's a whole
that's a whole bath. That's a whole can
of worms we're not gonna go to. Raf
Rafa Abdullah, I think, Salam Rafter from Tunis.
Do we I recommend starting a life in
France in this time. Well, I can't speak
to that personally.
However, I'm afraid to go to France
as a practicing Muslim. So I don't know.
I don't know that I would recommend. That
might be my ignorance. You know, I I
stand in the possibility of being wrong. You
should talk to maybe the sister,
Morel, who's who's with us now, who's from
France.
Minami Islam.
Very good. Start learning French in Dhaka. Interesting.
Fluent in French and let me to follow
some professor. Oh, that's very interesting, Minami.
I love learning languages.
Yeah. Ruslan, you try to pray for people's
guidance. You know, always try to pray for
people's guidance
and thank Allah for the opportunity to purify
yourself.
Let's see here. What else we got? Wati
Shazir.
Abdullah Amin
Khan.
Yes. Yeah. That's a good question. So Abdullah
Amin Khan asked a question. How did how
did leftist
hijack the Palestinian struggle discourse in favor of
them? Why are we failed to narrate the
the Palestinian struggle in our terminologies and conceptual
categories as a Muslim?
Yeah. I mean, can the subaltern speak? Right?
That's what they say in the post colonials,
circles.
Strategy, unity, sectarianism,
all things, you know, but Insha'Allah, hopefully, we're
we're coming. Hopefully, we're coming, Insha'Allah. I think
we're waking up. Munna Ahmad from Montreal. Welcome
to the program. Montreal's a lovely city.
Lars Amara,
from Sweden. I think that might be one
of our first. No. No. We used to
have someone tune in from Sweden, but definitely
one of our few people from Sweden.
Let's see who else we have.
Murad Ali asked, where do we start with
political literacy as Muslims living in the West?
That's a big question. That's a big question,
Murad.
I think that we have to I mean,
this is gonna be
this is gonna be like,
a stock answer. Cause it's a big question.
But we really do have to go through
the Quran and the Sunnah from a political
lens,
and distill some of the lessons that are
taught politically in the Quran and in the
sunnah.
Right? Just the fact that Allah Subhanahu Wa
Ta'ala talks about Qarun. How many Qaruns do
we have that have been elected to office?
People who are from us but aren't from
us. Right? That have sold us out. Right?
Karun,
explains and accounts for the phenomenon of sellouts.
And we'll talk about that in a second,
actually. We have all these interactions with power,
both from prophets and outside of that. How
does Musa, alayhis salaam, interact with Firaun?
Right?
You know, do we delay
political action until we achieve purity? How is
Musa alayhis salam commissioned? He's commissioned to do
both things at once. Right? There there's a
whole bunch of lessons to be learned but
we haven't we haven't put that lens on.
And that's part of why we started transitioning
to
studying Kitabasir,
during this program, the the book of jihad.
Because even talking about jihad, like, we see
that there's a lot of lessons just about
values, about, you know, how to stand on
principle.
What is in bounds and what is out
of bounds as a Muslim?
What's the sense of confidence that Muslims took
to the different places that they went even
when they had large numbers against them? We
really do need to mine. Right? And actually,
I did a really interesting exercise this past
Ramadan when I was making khatam of the
Quran.
I kept a a legal pad with me
and I wrote down every single ayah that
I found the Quran that had some lesson
to teach about politics.
And I'm in the process of systematizing that
into
papers, blogs, you know, trainings, workshops, things like
that. But unfortunately, it everything takes longer than
you want.
Walty
Shouser from Michigan in the house,
Minami is giving us some a little bit
of tips or in intro
to
French politics, which I know very little about,
admittedly.
Abdel Nasser, well, he was signed from Minnesota.
Lisa Morell, the far right, did win in
France. Okay. So I'm mistaken there. I didn't
expect this. Oh, sorry. Didn't win in France.
Yes. I didn't expect this. Nobody did and
we're gonna talk about that, let's say. We're
gonna talk about
the the role of statistics and polls in
politics. This is something that so many people
misunderstand.
People look at polls, and they take them
as fact.
When in reality, polls are just as much
about shaping reality
and creating reality as they are
describing reality. And one might argue even more,
but we'll talk about that in front of
Inshallah.
Aminu from Nigeria.
Zakiyah.
Yes.
Another one from Minnesota, Mohammed Ibrahim
Maryland in the house again, Khadija Aradeem Oh,
testify. Yeah. We should we could do a
whole entire episode on Bosnia. You're right. The
new generation of Muslims don't know much as
it is not talked about as much as
the Holocaust. That's true. That is true. Saudi
Ahmed,
we don't have any choice in our elections.
No. You're right. Most of us don't. How
can we motivate ourselves to vote and overcome
the stress? Well,
voting we have to understand. Voting is not
a silver bullet. And anybody who listens to
some of the work that I've done knows
that voting is only one tool in politics
among many other tools.
So you might find yourself in a situation
where
your vote has absolutely
no value whatsoever. That can happen.
You might find yourself in a situation where
the election, either local or national in your
area,
you don't have the power to vote for
someone, but you can make sure someone loses.
Okay. That's something.
You have, maybe, the ability to vote in
such a way where it's going to open
up a door for a third party or
another candidate down the line. That's another purpose
of voting. Right? So we have to get
out of the mindset of we just wake
up every 4 years and then cast a
vote and that's all of our political power
and realize that political engagement is
a 365
day a year thing. That when it comes
to recruiting candidates, running candidates, analyzing how decisions
are made, and analyzing how to change the
way that decisions are made. How do we
let so much money in politics that a
foreign nation like Israel can come in and
buy politicians?
Right? That's a huge mistake. Right? We we
should be figuring out how to end the
these sort of loopholes and close these loopholes.
So
stay tuned for more.
Yep. That's a 100% true SADA, even if
you don't have an expectation. Yep. That's a
100% true.
Arjumand Banu.
Ruslan says, yes. It is a Russian name.
I spent a few years in Russia and
learned about Islam from Central Asian Muslims. May
Allah forgive me for being insincere. No. You're
not insincere, Ruslan. If it happened to Abu
Bakr, Habibi. If it happened to Abu Bakr,
then of course it's gonna happen to you
and me. It's just that, you know, the
nature of a Muslim is that
we forget,
we're reminded.
That's what we're,
tested on. When we're reminded, do we come
back? Right? So we're all on the same
in the same boat. Laith. Hello?
Okay. Has sort of given us more about
Puerto Rico. Laith from Puerto Rico.
Comet Odyssey from Australia.
Welcome. Down Under.
Minami is keeping us informed on French politics.
We have a very educated crowd tonight.
Thank you so much.
Mohammed Nawashir,
Welcome.
From KL.
Look forward to seeing you at omadix.
Amina
from Connecticut, Wadiem Salam, Waftalah.
M y from New York, Wawdem Salam.
No worried about double comments that happens all
the time. That's the comment section. Art of
Delvey, Waleem Salam,
from Detroit. Very nice. Waleem Salam,
From California.
List of questions.
If anybody has any more in-depth questions that
I can't answer in the program, you can
always email me at imam tomfakini,
So you see my name. You just run
it all together with no [email protected].
Ami and may Allah protect the land of
Palestine 100%.
Zakkia makes a good point about voting. Yes.
Being aware. Education is a huge thing. Right?
I'm amazed. I'm amazed, Zakiah, because we have
there are environmental organizations that give out report
cards every year, for all the representatives
in a particular,
voting district or from the city level to
and municipal level to the county level to
the state level. Gives them grades. How do
they vote on this issue? How do they
vote on that issue that affects them? Right?
That's where we need to be. That's what
it looks like to be organized.
Elena,
from Turkiye.
Welcome.
Imran
from India.
Yosse, like, Saddam, Indonesia again.
Okay. Jabber's got questions about,
Lisa. I don't think I wanna kick those
to later Inshallah.
How do you, from
Ghana? Mohammed Alshad. Yes.
Absolutely.
There is benefit. Enlightening talks to studying,
the late Hadjimedic Shebaz, otherwise known as Malcolm
X. 100%. In fact, his later writings were
really, really important, especially on black nationalism and
black economics.
I had that was I had the benefit
of taking an entire college course or university
course on Malcolm X, all of his speeches,
all of his interviews,
and writings.
Very, very important stuff.
It is true, Imran, that right wing and
anti
Muslim sentiments around the globe are escalating. May
Allah protect us. But I think that there
are opportunities. Right? There are opportunities as I
tried to highlight
earlier.
Okay. Here we go.
I'm trying to get to the end of
the comments before we keep going. There's a
lot of good conversation going on today.
Keep us in your dua. Hamed from Buffalo,
Sendev. Okay. Your name is Sheikh. Okay. Very
good.
I thought so. I just wanna make sure.
Jesse Julbe from Florida. Welcome to the program.
Art Forge.
I have many I
have heard many liberal leftist pro Palestinian voices
saying that they want the state of Palestine
should be a secular democracy. What do you
think of this? I said, that's exactly the
type of colonial imposition that we're afraid of
in talking about. And this is an issue
that doctor Enes Atticriti brought up in this
program when we had him on as a
guest when he said, what is the benefit
of a secular state
in and of itself? What happened to Egypt?
Egypt has a secular state. What good is
it doing it? Jordan has a secular state.
What good is it doing it? That we
have the right to ask for more than
that. And at the end of the day,
it's up to the the Palestinians and the
people of of Gaza and and West Bank
and the rest of occupied Palestine to decide.
However,
let's just say that there is a disconnect.
There's a disconnect between
a lot of diaspora Palestinians and Palestinians on
the ground, and that,
there's some jockeying going on. And this always
happens historically if you wanna talk about the
anatomy of historical movements and social movements and
even revolutions.
Usually, what you have is a broad coalition
of people that are agitating against something. And
then everybody is sort of jockeying for,
what we're gonna talk about in just a
second, which is post war, like, what's gonna
happen after the occupation. There's different groups that
are jockeying to try to control
what that will look like.
Study Assalamu alaykum Assalamu wa Sallallahu
Juju. Should orgs or people unite to support
one humanitarian org such as,
etcetera, since they are attacked and have been
most accused, appears false, see a lot of
them. I think that a better thing, Juju,
is to analyze how the decision is made.
How is the decision made to cut off
funding to that organization? And how can we
change the way that the decision is made?
Right?
How many times have I gotten messages asking
me to to to make a call to
my senator or to send an email? They
don't listen. They don't read. They don't care.
Right? That's weak. That's not power. We have
to build power, build leverage so that we're
actually able to influence the way that the
decision is made in a way that benefits
us. That's what actually actual power is. Ismail,
would you advise someone
to avoid going to university in the US
if they can if they can since there's
a possibility that schools invest tuition, they don't
invest tuition in Israel. It's a case by
case basis, Ismael. There's not a one a
one answer,
fit all to to everything. There are some
universities that have divested,
and so it'll depend on the the scenario.
Very good. Very good. Very good.
Amin
Amin. Studio.
Cover bike.
I need to I need to brush up
on my malay. My malay is very bad.
But I can order Kopi susu and Kopi
Panas and these sorts of things. So we'll
see. Sara says, I was finishing the discussion
you had with Paul and your points on
the impact of Western academia is very informative.
So how you direct the the next generation?
Less about
directing the next generation. I think that we
need to provide them institutions so that they
can move. And that's why I think projects
like Umatics are very exciting. Projects like Yaqeen
Institute are very exciting because they
give opportunities for people to move. How can
you how can I be so outspoken on
Palestine? I don't have to worry about getting
fired. I don't work for Zionist. I don't
work for people who are funded by Zionists.
I I work for,
you know, the the organization,
and that provides me a certain amount of
freedom to be outspoken. So we need to
create these pockets, whether they're even pockets in
academia,
pockets in the workplace,
and pockets elsewhere.
Okay. Jasper's question is sort of multipart.
One of our strategies is the canvas for
a candidate to unseat the current Zionist council
member among other things. Is this the most
effective use of our time in combating the
genocide?
Well, it will have an effect. I can't
tell you if it's the most effective because
that would require me to have a knowledge
of the other possibility.
Then it would be important even if ceasefire
measures are largely symbolic. So that's the the
critic. The critic would say ceasefire measures at
the municipal level are not very influential. They
are and they aren't. You know, they they
set a discursive precedent. They are symbolic. So
when a Zionist is able to get a
city council to issue that we stand with
Israel a 100%, you know, bring all the
hostages home, like this sort of thing, it
means something
to them. And it also sends a message
to everybody else that this is sort of
the the default, and you better sort of
be careful or watch yourself if you're against
it. So if you're able to get a
ceasefire,
you know, declaration
well, my audio cut out brief briefly.
That I'm not sure if this is the
most effective thing or not to do, but
definitely there's a symbolic victory there and there's
it definitely has some effect. I can't tell
if it has more effect than other things
that are available for you to do.
Yeah, Nur Saba. Stay tuned.
Stay tuned. We'll let live stream the polling.
That's a good idea. That's an interesting idea.
Mom of 5,
Welcome. We're happy to have you with us.
Nusayba says my family and I have a
tradition of watching CNN and NBC for election
nights. I can't stand to watch those anymore.
Hopefully, we can watch our Muslim pundits from
now on. That's what we would hope. We
would hope that we're able to replace,
the bad with what that which is better.
Okay.
Just to clarify, Jesser, you know, the the
article wasn't necessarily about leaving the left, but
conditioning their support. Right now, their support is
conditional is unconditional,
and it actually is predicated upon us violating
our values.
So we need to make sure that if
they're going to support
our initiatives,
then it is principled and along our principles
since supposedly
they are
supposedly, they're they're throwing their support behind us.
Mohammed Naushed, one of the guys in the
studio will drop the email.
Yeah. I know. Right? We have whatever is
responsible for cutting out this audience,
the the audio.
Okay. Josh has got a lot of stuff,
to ask, and I'm gonna say that we're
probably gonna have to kick that to, to
email.
But there exactly, Salah. We have to put
our boundaries. Right now, we don't have any
boundaries whatsoever. We're so happy that anybody even
turns to look at us, that we just
let them completely abuse us, tokenize us, do
whatever
that they want, and then we don't have
power, and that's not good. We're after we're
after power and that we shouldn't be afraid
to say that. Everybody else says that. Everybody
else is after the same thing. That's how
things get done.
No. To be honest with you, Brett and
Zator, I don't think that representatives or senators
really care about phone banking.
I know it might have a marginal effect,
but think consider this.
Every elected representative,
they care about votes, and they care about
money,
funding.
So
if you can threaten that, or promise that,
then they will listen. The only time they
listen to phone banking is when they get
a sense, perhaps, that the phone banking indicates
that it will affect either
their money or their votes. Okay?
So don't lose the plot. Don't lose the
forest through the trees. Right? They don't care
that you call on the phone,
but they do care if they think that
the people that are calling on the phone
are their constituents that will vote otherwise.
That was exhilarating,
and
a good chunk of time. What we got?
46 minutes here?
Alright. We're gonna roll on to current events.
We got a lot to talk about. Europe's
election results are specifically wanna talk about France
and the UK. How did the Muslim vote
come into play? Right? We had a heard
a lot about the Muslim vote. There was
actually an organization, a website, Mohammed Jalal doing
his thing, thinking Muslim up in the UK,
trying to organize the Muslim vote. Did it
work? Did it not work?
Did it work a little bit? Did it
work somewhat? What can we learn about it?
We're gonna be talking about it and political
engagement.
What can a Muslims accomplish with voting? We
just talked about that a little bit. Voting
is not a silver bullet. Voting is something
that can do some things and can't ever
do other things and can sometimes do yet
other things. So we need to be crystal
clear about how voting is,
fits into our tool belt so to speak.
But let's get to France France's electoral results.
We've got, I think,
there we go. So this is this is
huge. This is very very,
significant
that Le Pen, who was
favored to win,
came in 3rd or lost. Right? Now she
didn't just lose.
She also got unseated by somebody who, yes,
they're on the left, and, yes, they're pro
Palestinian. So again, we're not,
you know,
against ever being,
accepting allyship or support
from the left. But again, it just has
to be principled.
So what we see here is that it
was a shock much like when Donald Trump
defeated Hillary Clinton. You had a in 2016,
you had a situation where
everybody was calling this for the far right.
Everybody was calling this from Le
Pen. And then it didn't happen. What does
this tell us? One thing that is super
important that I see Muslims making this mistake
every single day. Polls are not reality.
Data is not reality.
Numbers are not reality.
Okay? That the people and the companies that
run the polls and report on the polls,
they have a vested interest in creating the
perception
of a certain reality that they want you
to believe. If you believe
that Le Pen is inevitably going to win,
if you're not voting for her, you're considering
voting for somebody else, how does that make
you feel? It's discouraging.
Now this isn't conspiratorial.
Okay? This is not saying that people, you
know, sit behind in a closed room and
rub their hands together and say, you know,
it's like, oh, let's let's, just throw a
wrench and everything. But there are biases
that come out. People who run polls that
favor,
you know, that are more
democratic leaning or leftist leaning, that the even
cooked into the way that they run their
datasets, there can be bias,
and it can only portray a truth and
sometimes that truth is aspirational.
Sometimes that's what they want the result to
be
and so it actually,
causes that result. And anybody in the Muslim
world who inherited sort of Islam an Islamic
heritage should know that. Right? There was a,
there was a joke that I was told
some time ago that that that and this
is not a true story obviously, but
Trump wanted to to know how to win
the election,
and he, asked Sisi,
in Egypt, how can he how can he
make sure that he wins the election? And
Sisi tells Trump, don't worry about it. I
got it covered.
And so
he does exactly what Sisi says. The election
results come in and it turns out who
won the election, Sisi won the election with
99% of the vote. It's a joke to
demonstrate that if you're from any part or
most of the parts of the Muslim world,
you realize how
you realize how elections can be rigged,
data and polls can be rigged, they can
be biased, they can actually
indicate the reality,
more so the reality that people want to
have happen than the actual reality on the
ground. And we see this here. This is
exactly what happened. Reality on the ground was
that the people who are pro Palestinian showed
out. They showed up. And that was something
that was very, very inconvenient for the Zionists.
The Zionists are all are already sort of
putting out. I I saw a call for
people who are Jews in France to go
move to Israel.
You know, as if having a a pro
Palestinian government was going to endanger them at
all. Obviously, we know this is a fallacy
and this is wrong. So we see that
don't believe
the polls all the time taken with a
big grain of salt. This is a very,
very important,
thing. And to never give up we do
things on principle. We don't do things,
just because we think that they're going to,
come out or not come out. Next, we've
got UK's results. Now the UK's results were
a little bit more mixed. So we know
that Labour won and they won handily, and
this is something that everybody said was going
to happen. And Keir Starmer, the PM, he,
in particular, ran on a
a ticket and a platform that did not
account for the Muslims very much whatsoever.
Okay? That they were
very much they decided to capitulate and pander
to the Zionists rather than pit capitulate to
the Muslims.
However,
there are other numbers that are not told
in these diagrams that demonstrate actually how Labour
is not
as safe as they would like to portray.
There were two results
from the organization of the Muslim vote that
are encouraging. One is that the gap by
which Labour won yes. If you look at
the seats that they won, they won the
most seats by far. They won the majority.
They have enough to form a government. However,
the gaps by which they won are actually
quite small, and the gaps by which they
won their elections are the smallest that they
have been in
decades, which is very, very
encouraging.
And the second thing is that there are
actually 5 pro Palestinian
independent candidates
who won MP seats in the UK election.
Jeremy Corbyn, who's familiar to a lot of
people, ran as an independent and was elected.
Shokat Adam, Adnan Hussein, Iqbal Hussain, Mohammed, and
Ayyub Khan. So these are people that ran
on pro Palestinian platforms. They didn't run as
labor. They ran as independent, and they got
elected. This is a development, and it shows
a maturation
in the process for,
the Muslim vote and for the Muslims of
the UK.
So it's not as dramatic as a result
as perhaps that we would love, but it
is a positive step in the right direction,
hopefully.
And finally, we have, I think, well, let's
go catch up with the comments here before
we move on to talking about,
we have a reaction to
something that is,
that has to do with,
would have to do us a particular UK
politician and what principle
representation
does and does not look like.
But let's see. Here we go. What do
we have? We got a lot of questions
from Jess here. Again, I'm gonna kick that
to email.
What we have?
Yes. We do have to definitely overcome the
inferiority complex a 100%. Saw a good point.
Any plans for live dogma disrupted from Abu
Ladris.
Anything's possible. Anything's possible, Abu Ladris.
Sara says cohesive endeavor
would have helped where candidates should have stepped
down and so they could be unceded asized.
Yes. That would have that would have taken
more coordination.
But that's a good idea of an example
of of something that can be done.
That's all.
Lots of people laughing at the tears of
of Le Pen.
Is my real name Imam Tom? My real
name is Tom.
From Hershey Hershey, Pennsylvania. Like, so on, MB.
Sara, Pingadaw, welcome to the program. Welcome.
Yes. Exactly.
A Qadri from SoCal, welcome back to the
program, points out that Lianne Mohammed, who was
running on a pro as a pro Palestinian
independent, lost her bid in the UK by
very very few votes. And there were others
as well. I forget the numbers.
So quite a few independents, more independents that
we're used to seeing. Many of those independents
running on pro Palestinian,
pro Palestinian tickets, and them
getting much more
much more favorable results than the past.
I wouldn't know that, Juju. That's a good
question.
Okay? When it comes to do they have
something like, maybe some of our other viewers
that are from fans and more familiar with
France can answer that. The question is, do
they have an equivalent of the APAC lobby?
They need to weaken first before we can
have change in the US. Yeah. Definitely. I
mean, I think that one of the strategic
advantages of this particular moment in US politics
is APAC is very hemmed in in what
it can do. That people are very aware
and not happy at APAC's influence on politics.
And in fact, if you were to start
a bipartisan movement to get money out of
politics and to get foreign influence out of
politics,
I think now is the time. I think
you have the best chance to get that
sort of thing,
rolling now, especially compared to 5 or 10
or 15 years ago when it was just
sort of accepted fact,
that this is, again, an opening. We have
to look for opportunities
to move, and then move and step in
unison when we see that opportunity.
Yeah. All all elections are dramatic, Imran. India,
France, US, they all have their fair share
of drama.
Which if we're able, I'm not sure. Are
we able to cut to actually the the
Biden the Biden story first? We gotta hear,
this man first. Alright. Well, here. Let's listen
to this. So this is gonna be this
is gonna set us up for our conversation
about,
principled representation. So here is the mayor of
or the former mayor of London,
talking
being asked about the comment on the phrase
from the river to the sea. Have a
listen.
The actual phrase, you know, from the river
to the sea, it can be argued, and
there's a context involved in when you say
it, where you say it. What I would
say in a respectful way to those who
protest
is, you
know, yes, we can have a conversation about
freedom expression.
Yes. We can have a conversation about criminal
law. But, actually, if you know it's causing
offense distress
to your friends, neighbors, and colleagues who are
Jewish, don't say it. And I we can
get to conversation about freedom expression.
Okay. So as you can tell, I mean,
like, this is a very, very milk toast,
vanilla take from Sadegh Khan, and one that,
you know, does not represent,
principled
advocacy,
or representation of the Muslim community. And we'll
talk about that,
about what we would look for. Because remember,
the the whole relevance of this point is
that we don't just want Muslims in power.
Right? We've been burnt by that before. Tokenization
is a real thing. They will find the
handful of Muslims that are fringe and say
that, you know,
you know,
Islam supports
LGBTQ and Islam supports this, Islam supports that.
They will go out and find those people
and put them in power. Okay? That that
is how tokenization
works. So we need to have our own
principles and list of demands so that we
make sure that we're not being tokenized
by the people who are getting elected or
by the people who run for office or
even in our own communities,
downstream of that. So Saad Khan fails. He
fails with that.
Spectacularly
fails because he,
construes the issue or he frames the issue
of from the river to the sea as,
oh, it's causing distress,
to the Jewish community
without realizing that the Zionist
element of the Jewish community is weaponizing
their narrative of victimhood
in order to silence criticism of Israel. That's
really what's going on. Right? First of all,
not all Jews agree that from the river
to the sea, Palestine will be free is
anti Semitic. 2nd of all, it's the Zionists
who have relied specifically on trying to get
this portrayed as anti Semitic
and equated with anti Semitism so that they
can shut down any type of criticism Israel
whatsoever.
So Saad Khan had a chance, you know,
he, what do they call it?
A howler. Right? For those who watch football,
he had the ball at his feet. The
cross came in. He was right on the
6 yard line, and he totally whiffed. He
had an an opportunity to push back on
the framing of this particular thing, and he
fell for it hook, line, and sinker, which
is not that's not what we want in
politicians.
And we'll talk about that more in a
second, but first we have to,
move to our next one which is about
Biden, president Biden, incumbent president Biden,
who is participating actively in the genocide of
our brothers and sisters in Gaza as everyone
abandons him and his campaign is in a
tailspin and he is being,
basically told to step down very public ways
by even
elected representatives, some people within his party. He
is refusing.
And this is not a good look for
the Democratic Party whatsoever that they are the
time is ticking. It's very late in the
election cycle. Right?
This is something that
they should have had figured out already. They
should have foreseen this,
that he he looks really bad. The Democratic
Party looks really bad, and it's hard
to imagine,
that
anything good is going to happen for the
Democratic Party, which we wouldn't necessarily,
not expect because if we look and remember
just back to 2016,
and how they handled that election, how they
completely
sabotaged
the popular sentiment and the popular will that
was behind Bernie Sanders,
they played, you know, dirty games to sideline
him and put Hillary forth, and Hillary lost
spectacularly,
in that election to Donald Trump. It looks
as if the Democratic Party is heading in
the same direction,
for this particular election.
The unfortunate consequence of this, the so the
positive is that Democrats are very vulnerable.
And as Muslims, we should think about how
then we can actually influence that agenda.
Okay. Is that when they're vulnerable, they're probably
more vulnerable to suggestion and being steered than
if they're coming from a place of strength.
The downside is that people are criticizing Biden
and his campaign for simply his mental acuity
or lack thereof,
as opposed to being guilty of participating in
a genocide.
Next up, we've got so we've talked about
the post war plan for Gaza. This is
a very, very important,
topic, especially as it looks like a ceasefire
is imminent. The US and,
some of the resistance factions, they kind
of are closer together
on negotiations than they have been in the
past. So it looks like
some type of ceasefire is is in the
works or is imminent, we hope.
However, what is Gaza going to look like
after a ceasefire
is something that nobody knows and is the,
the sight of a lot of jockeying and
jostling. If we can go to the next
media report we have, Lancet.
Now they say that
they came out with sort of a a
bombshell figure but if you're a Muslim and
you're following this, this should not a surprise
whatsoever.
It could exceed a 186,000
deaths, the the death toll in Gaza, which
is not a surprise whatsoever.
Now the irony is that the United States
recently prohibited
the state department from citing
death toll counts from the
health care system within Gaza,
ostensibly because it's run by Hamas.
Now,
here comes Lancet, which is has nothing to
do with Gaza or anything and they come
out with a number that far exceeds by
several factors
that the figures that were the the Gaza
health system was putting out. So we see
again how statistics are never really just neutral.
They are about creating perceptions
and that's a very very important,
aspect to keep in mind. Whenever you this
is part of media literacy. Whenever you,
pick up a newspaper, you scroll through an
article or things like that, Some of the
things are made to portray,
what they want you to believe reality is.
Now we also learned that what's what's the
next graph? We have 9 and 10 people.
90 percent of people in Gaza,
have been displaced at least once since the
war began.
May Allah grant victory to the people of
Gaza and Palestine.
So we see that with the post war
plan for Gaza, there's a lot of jockeying
going on.
Israel is trying to push, and the US
is trying to push, and even some of
the Arab states are trying to push for
a demilitarization
of Gaza. This is very insulting to the
resistance
of Gaza, which has basically been the only
bargaining chip that they have.
Right? And we know again with Sabrina, just
the the anniversary of sobrenica, just a day
away,
what happened
to Bosnia and the Bosnians when they gave
up their arms and the UN came in
and demilitarized them, they became sitting ducks.
And so this is something that was well
this is well known and this is a
an easy lesson to
to to learn
from. Yes. Let's see. From the river to
the sea. Courtney, you got it. Let's go
to the comments. Let's see what we got.
I a 100% agree. In lightning talks, that's
a great that's a great point. Muslims ought
to put their money beyond their 2.5% zakat
into Muslim institutions,
Islamic studies programs, research universities. I love it.
I love it. We have plenty of Masajid.
I agree.
Club and raver
says, all the audience is waiting for the
Turks to come to the scene.
Whoever it is, from the Muslims, whoever it
is from the Muslims.
We pray for Turkiye. We hope that Allah
grants victory to,
the the Muslims of Turkiye
in all the the
struggles that they face, because they have a
lot of struggles too.
Amin, family of Quran, Amin may accept it
and forgoes our shortcomings.
Yeah. He called it. Yeah. People do like,
in Hollywood, do like George Clooney, but his
wife,
has been
silent and actually detrimental when it comes to
Palestine,
Despite supposedly being this big,
human rights advocate, it's all evaporated.
And she plays the two sides narrative as
well.
Okay. What do we have here?
Yes. Bestifies. It brings up the the point.
There was an article, I think, on Washington
Post by a Zionist that talks about having
peacekeepers from Arab nations. Yes. This is another
ploy of the Zionist to attempt to demilitarize
Gaza as if the militarization of Gaza is
the problem and not the Zionist occupation of
all of Palestine,
including Gaza in the West Bank is the
problem. Right? It is deflection. So notice how
this is why actually, you know, armed resistance
has been just historically, descriptively speaking, most effective
as a bargaining tool because it has forced
Israel to come to the table and negotiate
time and time again. And even the fact
that they are trying to do this, they
would want nothing more than the demilitarization
of Gaza and the West Bank.
Salaamullah, Alaikum Salam from Mauritius.
100%.
Great. Let's keep rolling. We have,
what can we learn? What can the US
learn? So the US elections cycle is coming
up in November. We've seen France go through
it. We've seen the UK go through it.
Other nations are going through it. What can
we learn? We have to be very very
aware
of the tactics of winning the Muslim vote.
Okay. We see have. We see the phenomenon
of tokenism is
very very rampant. That time and time and
time again,
we see that the the people or the
elites, the people in power will always attempt
to conscript
and use Muslims
who are willing to compromise their principles
in order to
save face and say that, well, we're not
really
against the Muslims. We're not really against,
sort of Islam.
And we know that this is a lie.
This is a very very thin,
thinly veiled lie. So the it begs the
question then, if we have terrible examples from
east to west, from north to south,
of token Muslim representatives that don't represent us,
then the exploratory and positive constructive question would
be what criteria
or demands should we put in place of
people who are thinking about becoming officials or
elected representatives,
that would actually mean that their presence wasn't
simply just tokenization. So there's a couple. And
I'm sure that many of you could come
up with, with your own. One of them
is very important that they have to be
accountable
to our community. They actually be have to
be accountable to our community. And that means
they need to be funded by our community
and they need to be
in our communities. Not just show up around
election time,
not just be given the minbar for free.
Right? Not,
just
they're the the person who pays with the
group that pays. They're paid by the lobbies.
They're paid by the political parties to run
and therefore they're not put up by the
Muslims and they have no accountability to the
Muslims so that their agenda is determined by
the party. Their agenda is determined by the
lobbyists.
That's not what we want. We want representatives
that are actually going to be account accountable
to the Muslim community.
Number 2, is that when people go into
a position of power,
that they have to bring their values
not just their identity.
As the saying goes, in American Vernacular,
all skin folk ain't kin folk. Right? That
they will find that we remember Colin Powell
standing in front of the UN, you know,
trying to call for the weapons of mass
destruction and and justify the invasion of Iraq.
We have the US ambassadors to the UN
with the assault and bombardment of Gaza that
are pro that are vetoing
the the ceasefires.
Right? We know that they will always conscript
one of us.
They will always use one of us
to control
and keep down us. Right? This is always
how it works. So we need to make
sure that people, when they're going to go
into politics, or they're going to go to
position,
that they are going to bring their values
with them because the system sometimes it will
tolerate the diversity of your skin tone.
It will tolerate the diversity of your clothing.
You can wear a dashiki. You can wear
a turban hijab,
but it will not always tolerate
the diversity of values.
And so we have to be insistent on
this, that we demand a diversity of values.
That if we come to office or we
come to a position, we bring our values
with us. That that doesn't mean we're a
5th column
any more than anybody who's a Christian that
gets represent, that gets elected to a position,
or a, or a Mormon that gets elected
or a Catholic that gets elected. And they
used to use the same sort of things
against Catholics.
Right?
Next
is that you have to make sure 100%
Abdullah identity politics is an epidemic
and too many people have caught that disease.
Too Too many Muslims have caught that disease.
Right? We need to give them a
I don't need to give them a shot
in the arm ASAP. Save them.
Defibrillator
clear.
Last one,
have an impact.
Don't be used. Okay?
Many people that are Muslims that get involved
in politics,
they end up themselves being transformed
rather than them having a transformative effect. That's
backwards. Right? We need to make sure
that if you're going into politics that you're
going to have an impact, you're not going
to be impacted.
And just as a case study as a
case study, if we're talking about the Palestine
issue in particular, what are you gonna see
now? How is tokenization going to come to
you? I'll tell you how tokenization is going
to come to you within from now to
November.
Everybody's gonna be ceasefire.
Everybody's gonna say, yeah. We're a pro ceasefire.
Proceed ceasefire is nothing anymore, and I'm not
saying it's nothing when it in when it
comes to we want the ceasefire. We want
the lives,
of our brothers and sisters in Gaza to
stop being killed at will as one article
said, but
all the traitors
and the betrayers are going to come with
you with ceasefire language. They're not gonna talk
about ending the Zionist occupation.
They're not gonna talk about ending the Israeli
influence on US law and politics. They're not
going to talk about,
ending the conflation between anti Semitism and anti
Zionism. They're not gonna talk about that. They're
going to portray themselves as somebody who is
pro ceasefire and act as if that is
some radical position that they're making some big
moral stand about. That is nothing anymore. If
you are somebody who's going to stand up
and you should all Muslims listening, you should
challenge these people when they come into your
mosque, when they come into your different institutions
and say,
what are you going to do to stop
Zionist influence in politics? What are you going
to do to stop,
to to stop the the Zionist occupation of
Palestine? What are you going to do to
protect
pro Palestinian
advocacy and protesting
from Zionist
claims that from the river to the sea
is anti Semitic or from them weaponizing
hate speech and weaponizing
anti Semitism,
against us in order to basically shut down
any criticism of Israel. That's where it takes,
I can't say the word. That's where it
takes stones. That's where it takes,
courage, bravery. Right? Principled, action. That's where it's
actually going to happen. So Muslims do not
be tricked. Do not be tricked. Do not
be tricked. Be aware.
Hold these people to account. Hold their feet
to the fire and don't let them play
at the police and say, oh, brother, this
is not how we do no. When Abu
Bakr Radiallahu Anhu got in front of the
Muslims and took the Baya from the Muslims,
what did he say? He said,
I am not the best of you. If
I go astray,
set me straight.
And that is the attitude that you should
expect and demand from your Muslim representatives and
your Muslim politicians.
If you go astray, we will set you
straight.
You can bet on it. Let's see what
we have in the comments.
Let's see.
Yes. Nope points out. Zionist, they think that
they're the only ones with the right to
defend themselves. That's their whole game.
Walaikum salaam waftallahi,
who we Muslims should vote for. Thank you.
There's no one answer to that question. It
depends on your district. Are you in a
swing state? Whatever.
And plus, if this is a 501c3, Yaqeen,
so I can't say that here. But if
you go to my other work on other
platforms like blogging theology and thinking Muslim, I
talk more about that there.
SADA brings up the 100%. Yes. We do
not need Garrison States. We do not want
Palestine to be a Garrison State. You said
it, SADA.
We do not want Palestine to be a
garrison state.
And the secular liberal leftist
and I know the leftist always say, we're
not liberals. Yes. You are.
You're not as different as you think you
are.
That the secular
leftist
Palestinian state that they want is very, very,
very likely to become just another garrison state
in the Middle East. We see how that
works out. Morad Ali
praises me. May Allah forgive me for my
shortcomings.
Yeah. I mean, may Allah protect us. We
believe in Allah. We believe in Allah.
Allah is the one that will,
protect us or
afflict us or expose us to affliction.
Nusayba
says at a micro level, college students can
practice this by participating in student governments. Thank
you. That's a very practical thing that everybody
can do. And I'll even raise you one
more. Organizing
the
alumni.
That is something that the Zionist have done
very effectively to the point where they can
bully around
university presidents. They can bully Yale. They can
bully Harvard. They can bully UPenn. They can
bully Oxford. They can bully Cambridge, because their
alumni donors are organized.
If you have graduated or even if you're
still a student, organize your alumni. Organize the
donations.
Another thing, no say but that you're reminding
me of is student newspapers.
Okay.
Student newspapers are often run by those who
just hang around. Right? They're not like, you
know, New York Times.
So if you are if you have just
2 competent Muslim writers
that start as freshmen
at the student newspaper. By the time that
they're juniors or seniors, they're going to be
top editors, so they will have an influence
on the discourse on campus. 100%.
You say, but says my intention back then
was to have a voice for MSA at
the table,
but I realize now that I could have
pushed for more. That's a very mature
very mature reflection.
Minami Islam Khan, thank you for joining the
program. Have a great day at work.
Yep.
You shall a 100%. Leticia
You're late, but late's better than never. Welcome.
And, buonjono Attica.
Everything is good. Bye, Benny, Gracia. Thank you
very much. May Allah bless you and your
family and everybody else watching. Pesify says, Zionists
are playing the long game. They are changing
textbooks and laws to facilitate their powers. Muslims
need to be vigilant, establish long term goals.
Yes. That's true, Pastor Fi. I was in
a, a a meeting
where,
it was going over how Zionists
have nonprofit organizations. They always have these very
vague names, like,
you know, critical studies or the organization for
global thought or, like, things that are very
vague in general, and their job is to
shape the language
that
its own occupation of Palestine is
what language is used to talk about Palestine
in college textbooks and high school textbooks.
And so they have a whole spreadsheet of
terms
where rather than,
you know, killing and murder, they will say,
you know, euphemisms. Right? Rather than occupation, they
try to minimize the use of occupation.
And there finally is a group that's pushing
back against it, but it's not Muslims.
It's not Muslims. Unfortunately, there's other people hamdulillah
doing the work, but
we need Muslims to be leading the fight
on this.
Oh, yeah. 100% Nusayba. Yeah. Quni.
Unfortunately, I was at I I was able
to go to to CUNY and show up
after the encampment got swept. Unfortunately,
many of these universities it's a game. It's
a game and we have to learn how
to play the game. Alaikum Salam Alaikum Salam,
Muhammad Jahid from California.
Okay. Moving along. We've got Kitabasir
wal jihal.
Test your end. We're gonna talk about today
a very, very interesting hadith
in which the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam
said that
the person who the
person who well, I'll I'll leave this as
a question. Okay? Let's let's have a little
bit of of interaction on this.
What will happen
to a person on the day of judgment,
okay, who betrays their trust
or betrays the trust. And this is mentioned
in the book of Jihad or the book
of Sira. So it has to do with
leadership,
specifically.
The prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam said that something
specific is going to happen to them on
the day of judgment. What do you think
it is?
Alaykum Assalamu waftallahu.
Man from Queens. Very nice. Happy to have
you with us.
The person who betrays
a trust
Yeah. So the question is the person the
prophet said, a person who betrays a trust
or the trust
is going to have blank happen to them
on the day of judgment.
Any ideas what that would be?
And I'm gonna pull up the text of
the hadith here.
This is in the Bab of Taqim and
the Ghadr, the prohibition
of Ghadr, which is basically
promising that you're going to do something or
telling people that you're going to do it
and then not doing it. You're probably familiar
with that term from the more general hadith
where the prophet
talked about,
you know, the the qualities that a hypocrite
would have. And one of them is if
they said that they're going to do something,
rather, it means that, if they said they're
going to do something, they don't do it.
So the prophet said,
avoiding shay Google safer for you. So the
prophet said
that
every single betrayer
is the word he was glad here
will have a banner on
the day of judgment
where his name is on it. Fulan, ibn
Fulan,
that is going to announce to everybody on
the day of judgment
that they were a traitor or they were
someone who betrayed
k. So their betrayal
would be made known.
Now if you go into Anewa'weez
Shar Anewa'weez sort of reflections on this. He's
got a couple really interesting things. He also
sites called the ayed,
for, for a few things. So one of
the things,
generally,
betraying trust is forbidden.
So notice how again justice. Look at how
look at how you what would a, an
an Islamophobe, and I don't like that language,
but let's just use it.
If they were to study
the book of jihad in a hadith book,
what do they think that they're going to
find?
Right?
Kill the disbelievers wherever you find them. Do
this. Do this. Do that. And what do
we have? What do we covered so far?
Right? Give glad tidings.
Spread,
make things easy for people.
Don't
do this. Don't do that. And now we
have don't betray
and don't betray trust.
So not something that people would necessarily
immediately assume.
Okay. So
first of all, the fact that this is
part of the book of jihad
shows us that
jihad is something that is within a strict
set of moral
rules that you have to follow. It's not
some sort of figment of, you know, the
the right's imagination where we're just, you know,
like, going crazy. This is something that is
because it's a sacred act, it's an act
of worship, if it's done right, it has
strict conditions as to how it has to
happen. Okay. Now the fact that it's mentioned
in this particular book is because it has
particular
application to leaders.
Okay. That leaders
have more trust invested in them than other
people, and this is backed up by the
hadith of the prophet
Right? Every single one of you is a
shepherd and you're responsible for your flock. And
then he gives through examples. So the the
the leader is responsible for all the people
that he that are under him.
The a husband, right, or the father of
a family is responsible for his wife and
his family.
The mother
is responsible for the household and if and
so on and so forth. And even a
slave is responsible for
the, you know, the wares and sort of
the the the property of of his master.
Like, this is the example that shows that
there's varying levels of responsibility. So the prophet
says that this is particularly
something that we have to be very, very
aware of about not betraying the trust, and
Imam Muslim puts it in this particular chapter
because it's most applicable
to the leader. Leaders have more responsibility
than anybody else. Why? Because number 1, the
betrayal of a leader. If a leader betrays
trust either to an somebody outside or betrays
the trust of the people that he supposedly
takes care of, it affects everybody. Whereas, if
any one of you doesn't if, you know,
we don't have a lot of authority, you
betray somebody's trust, the impact is much smaller.
Number 2, and now he says, there's no
excuse to betray if you're the leader. You've
got all the power. You've got all the
strings and levers of of the government or
whatever. You have the means to do whatever
you want.
So sometimes people betray because they're forced in
because of a certain situation
or, you know, because of a certain need
that they have. You don't have that sort
of extenuating circumstance if you're the leader. So
it's even more of a betrayal if the
person in power with all of the means
betrays.
3rd,
this especially applies to treaties and agreements, and
if you notice who's the biggest violator of
treaties and agreements in the world, it's Israel.
Right? That they have violated every ceasefire that
they've ever agreed to. They violated the UN,
you know, the Geneva Conventions, the all the
all the rules that everybody else agrees to.
They violated them time and time again.
And Kaldi Ayad says that this applies
to the general trust of leadership because
when a person assumes leadership, it's almost like
there's a social contract.
There's almost like there's a hidden agreement that
he has a duty to the people that
he acts in favor of or to protect.
And so and the Khalifa Yiyad specifically says
if he deceives them, he lies to his
people, he deceives his people.
So imagine all those Muslim candidates that are
gonna come to you,
by November saying, yeah, we support a ceasefire.
That means we're pro Palestinian.
Whoever deceives you,
okay, or abandons compassion,
that was an interesting one. I didn't expect
that, Or abandons
gentleness towards the people that they represent,
then he has betrayed the trust of his
leadership.
Very interesting. Very interesting.
Now
we're not for a liberal watered down version
of Islam.
However, some people have
gone to the opposite extreme
in their opposition to a watered down Islam
to make Islam seem harsh or to say
that, okay. Well, this scholar, at this point,
they say that you can be harsh in
this situation. 100% true. You'll find that in
the tradition.
You are allowed to be harsh in particular,
in particular
circumstances, and and the companions were, and the
tabi'in were. And there's a time and a
place for it. Even the prophet
sometimes he would get up on the minbar,
and he would speak and his face would
become red because of his anger. Right? That
it's not, you know, Islam is not just
always something cute and cuddly.
However,
notice that Qadhi Iyad stresses that
a leader has to have gentleness
and compassion
towards his people,
And if he abandons that,
he has betrayed their trust
just as if he had deceived them. I
find that very very very fascinating.
What do we got here? Yes.
Sadika, major Zionist Bloomberg just handed my university
a $1,000,000,000
donation. Oh, makes me feel like how will
we ever move the needle with these unis?
Well, I I have some thoughts about that,
Sadika.
One of them is that within our lifetime,
we have experienced the commodification
of education,
that
it is not
education you know, higher ed is not about
education anymore. It's about profit. That's why if
you go back to the nineties or before,
the presidents of
universities were educators. Okay. They were people who
had degrees in education administration.
There were people that often even lectured sometimes.
You know, like I'm talking about giving classes.
With the advent of neoliberalism,
late nineties and early 2000 and especially in
the 20 tens,
we saw the transition
to a for profit model. Now who are
the people who are presidents of universities? They're
all bankers,
Corporate,
IMF,
World Bank execs. I should know. This happened
at the university I was at.
And the whole model has been the neoliberal
model of cut costs maximize profits.
That switch
has made universities
particularly
susceptible to being controlled by moneyed interests.
So one tactic
would be to try to organize
Muslim alumni to donate,
in a comparable way as their Zionist counterparts
are doing, and and there's room for that.
But something that would be even better than
that
is to
take the profit motive out of higher ed
to make,
higher education
not about
maximizing profit, to make it more affordable, to
make to break the debt system that everybody
is profiting off of. That is something that
we need to study and figure out.
Nuraine.
Sayidoon. Wa Alaikum Assalam. Wa raftallahu from Malaysia.
Salam at the Tong. Welcome.
Juju says a bit tangential, but was wondering
what you think will happen to Netanyahu with
the imminent ceasefire. Do you think he'll be
forced to step down?
I think that he will probably eventually be
forced to step down.
I don't think that anything is really going
to happen to him in the sense of
the international criminal court or things like that.
I don't think that Israel will allow that
to happen because of the precedent it will
set against for future politicians.
Israel leans heavily on the United States in
order to exempt itself from being held accountable
to international law.
So it will
throw everything it can
attempting to escape that accountability.
So, that's all that's all I can really
foresee. Abdullah says,
what are your thoughts on Israel's being hateful
because of their
generational trauma?
A friend expressed this opinion to me today
as part of the diaspora. I am too
dumbfounded to respond. LOL.
Yeah. I mean,
we can't
I say that this is a very materialistic
sort of position. And by materialistic, I mean,
like,
it doesn't it erases the moral component and
the moral decision that every single individual and
every single community has. K?
You have a choice as to how you
respond to your trauma.
And you have an a responsibility,
if you have a trauma,
to manage it and respond to it in
a morally and ethically upright way. It is
not an excuse,
especially when, you know, Finkelstein has a book,
I believe, that's about the, the Holocaust industry,
about how Zionists
have
particularly
attempted to weaponize
that traumatic memory,
to continually
retraumatize,
but not just that,
Not just retraumatizing
the current and and control very tightly the
memory
of, of Western Western Jews,
but to
shape the way that they respond to that
traumatic memory. That's the big thing. And so
you do have to take accountability
to the way in which yeah. Exactly. Watermelon
786. 100% right there.
Right there. A 100%.
If that imagine what Palestinian
trauma would justify. If we were to go
with that logic all day, then if according
to that logic and we're not saying this.
But according to that logic, then October 7th
is not even anything.
Right? Like, so
the sword cuts both ways. Right? You can't
have your cake and eat it too. This
is very exceptionalistic
type of thinking.
Everybody has responsibility. And honestly, if you were
to look, the Palestinians have been so,
moral
in the way that they have responded to
their trauma.
They've been restrained.
There has been, I think, that you could
definitely call it restraint.
Despite all of the propaganda trying to portray
them as, you know, even the resistance factions
as ISIS or this or that, it's all
complete
propaganda. Like, that they have exercised a lot
of restraint,
given what they've been through. May Allah grant
them victory.
Nancy Yajes says, I think Calder Allag was
describing our Mexican president. Yeah. Well,
not just him.
May say, I think one of the hardest
tests Muslims can be given is leadership, 100%.
It's a test. A lot of people have
failed and continue to fail, except those with
the strongest minds. Minds and hearts, 100%.
Says, I think we can also turn that
around and say that if they've experienced it,
then they shouldn't want others to go through
it a 100%. Yes.
Should it create empathy
or pathology?
Right? We would hope that it would create
empathy rather that is a,
a cop out and is an ideological move.
Right? To sort of absolve them from any
responsibility.
And what is waiting for all those in
power now? 100% MB.
Yes. Good example. Pestify. We've talked about the,
so such so many
such disparity between how hostages are treated from
one side to the other 100%.
Saudi Amin Amin Arab.
Okay. So we're going to pivot to our
last segment here.
We've got we're going to keep going with
our book
on personal development, which is atomic habits. Now
this particular,
episode is just gonna be a setup for
the rest of the book.
And God, again, you know, I hate dust
jackets. Right? So we've got Atomic Habits here.
He's going to go over the schema of
the rest of the book. Okay? So there's
not gonna be a whole lot of practical
takeaway for this particular one, but he's gonna
set us up to understand, the rest of
the book and there's a ton of practical
takeaway for the coming chapters.
When we talk about what a habit is,
we have to properly understand what a habit
is. That's one thing that he wants us
to understand
that
a habit is a mental shortcut.
Okay.
You've done something once in a certain way.
It turned out good.
So rather than have to start from scratch
and trial and error and, like, wonder what
to do next time in the same exact
situation, your mind creates a shortcut
to basically
clear some memory
from your hard drive
and basically say, alright. This is what worked
last time. This is what we're doing.
So there are
4 stages. Okay.
To this,
this habit being formed. Whether it's a good
habit or a bad habit. And this is
something that's recognized and, you know, we'll we'll
talk about. So the first one and we
can we can show the graphic of that.
Number 1 is the queue.
Okay?
That there is a queue. There's something in
the environment that alerts you to a situation
that requires a type of
action.
The second stage is the craving. So you
noticing
that situation
causes a desire within you for a certain
thing. It could be just to change how
you feel. It could be, you know, something
tangible.
Whatever.
The third one is your response. What is
then your action that you basically develop
to respond to that craving, which is reminded
or sort of you're tipped off by the
queue. And then the last one, what's the
reward that you get
in accordance to the action that you did
in the response. Okay? So we'll talk about
this. Let's talk about maybe how to categorize.
There's a couple different ways to to categorize
this. One way of categorizing, we can split
it up into,
your relationship to reward. Everybody likes rewards.
Maybe your reward is an ice cream cone
on a hot day. It's been really hot
here, lately. Or your reward is,
scrolling through your phone. Honestly, that's all the
way a lot of people unwind
or your reward is,
you know, some quiet time alone, or to
sit down with a book. Whatever reward you're
after,
you can understand the the first three
steps of habit formation
as a relationship to that reward that you're
ultimately after. So the cue would be noticing
the reward.
Okay?
You could be I don't know. You come
downstairs, you wake up and
you're hungry.
Okay. There's your your queue.
That's your tip. That's your notice that there
will be a reward. If you feed yourself,
you will not be hungry anymore. Okay.
That generates a craving. You start to desire
certain particular
foods or whatever it is. You want something.
So that's your wanting the reward. Alright?
Your response is what you're going to do
to obtain the reward. So either you're going
to reach for something quick, a granola bar
or something like that. You're going to break
out the skillet, fry up some eggs, whatever
you're going to do. Shakshuka,
nihari, whatever it is, whatever you're eating for
breakfast.
That's what you're you're going to do and
then once you've had the reward and you've
actually successfully obtained that reward, you basically put
a stamp on that process
and your mind is now making a shortcut
and saying that, okay, next time I have
the same queue, I'm going to repeat the
same steps and that'll give me the same
reward.
We can also categorize it into 2. We
can split them up 12 in 1 camp
and 34
in another camp. 12 represents sort of the
problem phase. Okay? You notice something, then you
get a craving. That's the problem. The solution
is the response you take to get that
thing and then actually making sure that you
get it. Okay?
So
how knowing that
we should have enough information
to intentionally
notice
how to create good habits
and by flipping it and inverting it how
to create or how to stop bad habits.
We don't wanna create bad habits when stop
bad habits. Let me explain to you what
I mean. So for example,
the first law, this goes into his laws
and this is the rest of the book.
Law number
1 is
make it obvious.
If you want to establish a habit, the
habit has to be obvious And
being obvious has to do with the cue,
what's going to tip you off to do
this particular thing.
The second law
of habit formation is make it attractive.
That craving that you want, it has to
be a real strong craving or we want
to we have an incentive to make the
craving as strong as possible as long as
what we want is good.
So enhance that craving. It's going
to increase the likelihood that you're going to
be able to form a habit and stay
with the habit. Number 3
is make it easy.
Your response has to be easy. If your
response is too difficult, you're gonna fail with
your habit or you're not going to stick.
So making your response as easy as possible
is a key to a good habit. And
4,
make it rewarding.
Make it satisfying. Your reward that you get
should be satisfying. If you've gone through all
the trouble and you didn't have any satisfaction
at the end, your mind is going to
cut that shortcut and say, well, what's the
point? We didn't get what we want. Okay.
Yeah. Allahu Akbar, testifies making eggs. I ate
I've I've ate eggs for breakfast every single
morning I was in Medina. I think fried
up
eggs were there the, the staple.
I do know Nihari. I do.
I haven't had it in a long time.
I used to eat Pakistani food in Medina
sometimes.
Some there's many Pakistani places in Medina.
So here we go. So that's those are
the 4 laws that he's going to that
he's going to expand upon. We've got make
it obvious, make it attractive,
make it easy and make it satisfying and
they correspond to these 4 phases of cue,
craving, response, reward.
Now, let's say we have a bad habit.
How do we break that?
Well, it's simple. Your bad habit is made
up of the same four components.
So all you have to do is invert
the laws
rather than making the cue obvious, you actually
have to make the cue invisible.
Okay?
Instead of making the craving as attractive a
as possible, you have to actually make it
unattractive.
Instead of making the response easy,
then you actually have to make the response
very difficult to do. And then finally,
instead of making the reward
satisfying, you actually want to make the reward
or the thing that you get as unsatisfying
as possible.
So there we have it.
Good habits,
make it obvious, make it attractive, make it
easy, make it satisfying.
Bad habits, make it invisible, make it unattractive,
make it difficult, and make it unsatisfying. That's
the rest of the book. We're going to
get into a lot of other examples,
but we're gonna start that next week InshaAllah
Ta'ala. Let's see. Were any this is your
final chance for comments and questions, and then
I think we're gonna wrap it up for
the night.
What do we have?
I don't consider it as, missus s, I
don't consider it as a bad habit. 15
plus years, I only can sleep while listening
to Surah Yaseen. I can't figure out why
this Surah, Masha'Allah.
May Allah make Surah Yaseen,
a source of benefit for you in this
life and the next.
Leticia Mohammed. I'm from Trinidad. Welcome. Have you
guys heard of doubles? No. Please enlighten us.
What what are doubles?
I would love to know.
It I feel like Trinidad is going to
have really good food, though I haven't been
there.
Ahmed,
Hamdudu,
could this be applied to addiction? Absolutely.
Addiction is very very much about habit formation.
It's a big topic because a lot of
people have attempted to make,
addictions simply be about chemicals.
Right, which is sort of disempowering. It makes
you feel like there's basically nothing you can
do.
Addiction is
largely, not maybe exclusively, but largely about
habits.
That's why smokers, for example,
they will often smoke after,
after coffee. A lot of people, smoking is
tied to their consumption of coffee. And so
this becomes a cue. It develops a craving.
They have the response. They have the reward.
And it's a very, very difficult thing to
break.
There's some really interesting research that he gets
into because he does deal with addiction throughout
the book. So we're gonna see some of
that. I encourage you to tune into future
episodes,
where he's gonna talk specifically about addiction, especially
smoking,
and how this type of knowledge about habits
and habit formation and habit breaking can actually
help you with your addictions.
Has a question. If I don't mind, do
you like ricotta gnocchi
or classic potato gnocchi? K. Cause it's gnocchi.
Gnocchi as long as it's gnocchi, I like
it.
No problem.
Gnocchi is a favorite.
I so I I won't be picky.
Though I've made potato gnocchi myself, I don't
think I've remembered making ricotta gnocchi. But gnocchi
is is good no matter how it comes.
Abdullah asked a lot of my bad habits
come from trying to self soothe. Yes. What
good habits can we practice instead to self
soothe? A 100%. We're gonna get into that,
Abdullah, especially with phone use.
Especially with phone use. He talks so much
about phone use. I'm so glad that he
does. The phone is really bad. It's really
bad for habits,
because the cues are not obvious at all.
That how many times how many times do
you open your phone to do something, and
then you do 5 other things and then
you close your phone and you didn't do
the thing that you open the phone to
do. That is exactly an example of
something that it's not obvious. There's too many
cues associated with the phone. So you it's
very very difficult
to actually stick to habits that are phone
based. He'll talk about it more. So we're
gonna go into that.
But another thing that he says that's directly
related to the idea of self soothing is
that a lot of times,
the cue
is just about we have a a negative
emotion,
and the craving is that we want to
change the way that we feel.
And, so, yeah, the response that we've developed
is sort of, you know, escapism, doomscrolling, a
lot of this stuff, channel surfing back in
the day, is exactly about this. That we
really are searching for
a different feeling. We want to feel differently
than the way we feel in the moment.
And so we are
reaching for that easy response.
Doom scrolling is very easy to do. You
don't have to move. You don't have to
talk to anybody. You don't have to do
anything or say anything. You just with your
thumb or with your index finger. Right? That
is it gives us a little bit of
relief. It changes the way we feel a
little bit but at what cost? Right? So
we're definitely gonna be talking about that.
Does this apply to OCD? I have read
about the cycle for compulsion. It looks similar.
I'm less familiar with that, Juju. So, you
know, I'd be happy to benefit from whatever
you have to offer.
But
I could I could see a way in
which something that is compulsive is tied to
your habits, especially with the queue. If you're
triggered by a certain queue, then you have
to sort of you you get stuck in
this loop. I could see where that would
be true.
Ahmed says, because I'm at a level where
I hate everything about my addiction and yet
I keep relapsing. Yeah. Let's talk about it.
Then keep on tuning in, InshaAllah. Hopefully I
hope
hopefully, this book can be some, of benefit
to you. Hussein Hassan,
How do you think we should feel about
the US upcoming election? We talked about that
all day.
Sorry. You have to rewind.
It's an it's it's neither, you know, this
is not the the chance for the Ottomans
to conquer Vienna or anything else. This is
something that
is a small battle and a larger struggle
for Muslim empowerment.
And so we need to keep our eyes
on the prize and have a sense of
proportion and scope and look for our opportunities.
That's the the cliff notes.
Okay. I'll take a ask a follow-up question
about gnocchi. I'll say simple with butter and
garlic. Yeah. Garlic butter sauce is simple.
Oh, okay.
What else we have Leticia? It's basically, here
we go. What's a double? So now I
can go to trim that and order a
double.
A sandwich with 2 pieces of flatbread with
curry chickpeas and spicy condiments added. That sounds
good. Sounds good. I used to eat,
one common thing we used to eat in
Medina
was,
they will call it mashakal. Okay? Which means
mixed up mixed up or a mixture,
which was
balila, chickpeas. I think is that the wordy
word for it? Atika, could you help us?
Is that
Is it belila?
And,
and lentils.
So,
dal. There you go. Dahl and Balila mixed
up together, and then a big nice thing
of roti. That was for
2 rials.
That was good.
That was good stuff.
Yeah. Sada well, very Italian. I mean, sorry.
That's what you got.
May say how can one rid themselves of
the nasty habit of procrastination? Yes, May. We're
gonna get into that too. Procrastination is a
huge,
as a very related thing to this cycle
that oftentimes,
you know, we'll talk about it in-depth, Insha'Allah,
but oftentimes when the response is too
difficult. Right? We will reach for the easiest
response even if that means we don't actually
do the thing that we have to do.
So it's it this process does definitely play
into that.
Amin pacify Amin.
Okay. Chana is chickpeas and Urdu. So the
Balila
Omar, Help us out here. Balila is actually
Arabic for for chickpeas.
I didn't think that was true
or maybe that's a different dialect or something.
I'm not sure. So we have chananda and
roti, and then we have
Okay. So Belila comes from somewhere else.
So whatever it is, it was good.
You know, the old tandoori ovens, you know,
where they put the the roti across the
thing, and and put it inside the oven,
and then when it's ready, and they they
they take it off. That was a staple.
That was a staple food.
Okay. You all are making me hungry here.
You're all just talking about tiramisu.
Okay, but hold on there. Slow your roll
there, Iraj. Don't don't don't commit any blame
worthy innovations.
Chickpea tiramisu. I don't know about that. I'm
not sold.
Okay.
Last one I think from fcf. When you're
self soothing with bad habits, ask yourself, what
do I get from this? And is there
a better habit even just a bit better
I can get the same thing and similar
feeling from. Yes. And as we will see,
the author is going to help us make
the more positive
responses and the more,
efficient and effective responses easier.
And it's very very interesting how that I
was I was shocked honestly as to how
interesting it is to change your habits. I'll
give you a teaser. Okay. This is something
that that that he mentioned. So for example,
if you,
want to get in the habit of running.
Okay? Running is a dreadful or is a
a dreadful event for a lot of people.
You you don't look forward to doing it.
Okay?
So if one wanted to become a runner,
then the habit would simply be to,
to set out your shoes, and to put
your shoes on, and to to get into
your proper
outfit. Right? So this is a way of
making the habit easy and 9 times out
of 10, once you're in the outfit and
you put the shoes on and you've gotten
out the door, then running happens.
Okay. So sometimes it takes disaggregating
a larger habit into a smaller step that's
going to lead to
the greater thing that's actually a little bit
intimidating,
but he will talk about that
in due time.
Mahmoud Abdi,
I have a habit of drinking coffee in
the morning before I go to work. What
do you think about this habit? I think
it's a beautiful habit. I would recommend you
continue with it. I drink 3 espresso a
day,
unless it has any
negative health effects to you.
Yes. Rotia is very interesting, Attica. Have I
eaten kebab jabber? Yes. I have. All the
time.
Have you had ful? Yes. I have. Best
of luck. I've had had fool. I've had
Egyptian fool in Medina, not in Egypt unfortunately.
Also had kushri, Egyptian kushri in Medina.
They have, Egyptian places.
Yes. Foul is very good. Though I do
prefer hummus,
but it is what it is. You all
are making me very hungry. I think we
have to wrap this up.
Yeah. The the coffee stays, Abdullah. The coffee
stays. So I'd like to thank everybody for
their wonderful participation. You've all made me very
hungry and also very happy of all the
food that we have across the ummah. Have
a lot to exchange and offer each other
as Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says in the
Quran, la'ala kum, so that you all ta'arafu.
Right? That,
we are given our tribes and cultures in
order for us to know one another and
know one another. Right? So that is something
that
oh, Roti Shania is the best. Julia Wanti
Roti Shania is the best. And let no.
You guys, haram alaik.
You guys are
are are jumping the gun here. Yeah. We
are gonna have an oomatic potluck in Sala
and Citi Noriate. Yes. Nasi Lemak, Roti and
I are 2 of my favorites. In fact,
I'll be honest, and this is a little
bit of an innovation for an Italian, but
Rotich excuse me. Nasi Lemak is the best
breakfast food.
Actually, it's a tie between not see the
mock and roti tonight. Those are 2 of
the best
best breakfast foods in the world. If I
had the ability to, I would have them
for breakfast every single day, and I would
never get tired of it. And when I
was in Malaysia
last, I I did have them for breakfast
every single day.
Okay. Lisa Morel says, oh, we got a
couple of things. Mohammed says,
I have been have having a health issue
for 3 years now. It doesn't go away
no matter what. So I'm stuck with bad
habits now because good habits don't help me
anyways. May Allah make it easy for you.
May Allah make it easy for you and
restore you to health, Insha'Allah.
And we hope that there's something of benefit
in here.
Insha Allah,
I, I'm looking forward to it. I'm ready.
Lisa says, I've been waiting to learn more
about Islam or specifically about things like doctor
Omar Suleiman.
Addresses in his Jummah talks if you listen
to them. I can't major in Islam for
now. What do you recommend? Yeah. I mean,
that's a great place. Yaqeen Institute
has so much to offer when it comes
to the basics of Islam. I my wing
of Ikhin Institute deals with a lot of
sort of contemporary issues and societal issues. So
if you're looking for the basics of Islam,
then go to the Akhil Institute's website. There's
a lot of information out there for you
and videos as well. And as we've got
a very sort of,
a very,
user friendly,
experience for Insha'Allah.
Kaltar, Waraikum Salam, Raffa Allah. Amin Amin. We
forgot we forgot Moroccan cuisine,
for the for the Moroccans that were watching.
Shabekhia,
Tandrafiza,
and Cuscus on the end of it. But
anyway, yes. The Ummah would have a beautiful
a beautiful,
a beautiful what's the word? What do we
call it? Picnic or a beautiful potluck. So
may Allah swam to gather us in Jannah
Insha'Allah so that we're able to benefit from
each other. May Allah bless you all. Thank
you so much everybody for your excellent participation
as always.
Until next time. Assalamu alaykum