Usama Canon – Intersection of Identity MSA National
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the ongoing struggles of young Muslims in their roles as leaders and the importance of rewarding them for leadership. They stress the need for leaders to be leaders and leaders to be rewarded. The importance of belief in Islam and the need for personal growth is emphasized. Consent to spirituality and avoiding double talk is emphasized, along with advice for navigating the journey of identity. The speakers also advise on keeping company with older people and avoiding being a service-oriented person.
AI: Summary ©
Bismillah, walhamdulillah, wassalatu wassalamu ala rasulillahi wa ala
alihi wa sahbihi wa minwala Assalamu alaikum warahmatullahi
wabarakatuh Assalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh Alhamdulillah,
one of the most inspiring things beside my
dear beloved young brother Majid, Majid's words of
wisdom was hearing Nisreen say that we're all
young Muslims, still trying to fit in that
category It's very inspiring to be amongst all
of you and to feel some of that
youthful energy and attempt to kind of draw
on it and build upon it I'm glad
to see, or I saw Dr. Alpoff and
Dr. Jawad here, I think they stepped out
but those of us that are in the,
what you may call, young-cles category, young
uncles are always inspired by MSA and it's
exciting Next week will make 18 years for
me as a Muslim, inshallah ta'ala and
during the 18 years and shortly before embracing
Islam I've been a beneficiary and I've been
honoured in many different spaces to be at
some level hopefully a servant of MSA and
I pray that Allah reward everybody who's ever
participated in anything related to MSA and that
Allah increase MSA and Isna and we should
be prayerful for our predecessors and what I
mean by that is that there are a
lot of people who 50 some years ago
and obviously beyond that worked to set up
the very path that you and I tread
on today we should be prayerful for them,
we pray that Allah reward them abundantly that
Allah forgive them, that Allah be merciful to
them and that inshallah our children and their
children's children will be inshallah participants in these
very important and very blessed spaces May Allah
bless you all The topic is very timely
and frankly given Majid's and Nasreen's comments there's
not a whole lot that I would like
to add but I want to first say
that I think the topic is very timely
given the very interesting and extremely confusing time
that we live in Young Muslims today are
not only wrestling with identity within the already
difficult and very complex framework of nature and
nurture but are also being nurtured by a
seemingly omnipresent geopolitical madness everything between ISIS and
the genocide in Gaza Ukraine, Ebola and the
national issues of police brutality or if you
will state sponsored terrorism against men of color
and women of color everything from criminal terrorism
to those very real things to the deadly
diseases all of that we're processing in the
very same news feed and I say that
perhaps in a proverbial way in the very
same news feed in which we see people
posting pictures of their chicken wings and their
feet on the beach and then another picture
of a mutilated child etc.
etc.
and then we have the ever influencing and
extremely problematic in you dating pop culture all
of you will probably come to those interesting
moments that I've come to where you become
a parent and one of my teachers said
whoever made up the terrible twos has never
had a 12 year old and my 12
year old is a really good kid but
last night as I'm trying to pack and
trying to get ready to get on a
plane to come to Isna he said Baba
what does turned down for what mean?
and I was like what?
he said what is turned down for what?
and I was like I don't know what
does it mean?
what are you talking about?
and he's like well what does it mean?
I was like I don't know did you
google search it?
he's like I was afraid to and I
was like Alhamdulillah that you're afraid to so
then I google search it and I was
glad he was afraid to because you know
this is the reality we're talking about what
is shaping young Muslims identity today we've got
to be clear about the fact that it's
no longer just a Sunday school or just
a halal or just mama or baba but
there are several hands at play in this
regard and I'm saying all of that really
to just kind of problematize this whole issue
a little bit this issue of identity and
more importantly to invite you and invite myself
to think beyond the evolving Muslim identity as
an evolution that is happening to some external
lab rat and rather that we realize we're
all part of that evolution we're all part
of that evolution in terms of the communal
evolution but we're all part of that evolution
because we are all evolving ourselves in this
very moment كل يوم هو في شأن every
day Allah is in another glorious affair and
every moment He is creating and recreating you
and creating and recreating the world may Allah
help us understand that so when we talk
about this idea of evolution and I don't
mean it in like a darwinistic way we
embrace it and we honor it and we
recognize it as an act of God and
in that regard we have to be people
who say am I indeed evolving, am I
progressing, am I growing the Prophet ﷺ is
reported to have said من استوى يومه فهو
مغبون somebody who is the same person two
days in a row has been duped, they
have been cheated in other words time is
working against you والعصر إن الإنسان لا في
خسر by time man is at loss so
if we are not evolving, if we're not
growing, if we're not bettering if we're not
implementing those very important lessons that Majid called
us to رضيت بالله ربا Wallahi just this
week I told students that we should be
saying that three times in the morning and
three times in the evening because we have
fallen into unfortunately a type of Burger King,
have it your way, is there a way
to download hashtag easy Islam approach to where
we think we're going to grow or evolve
without doing some work but how many of
us really when Majid said we should say
رضيت بالله ربا نور بالإسلام ديننا و بمحمد
صلى الله عليه وسلم نبي و رسوله and
the different variants of the sahih hadith in
which that dua is found how many of
us really said you know what I'm going
to say that three times in the morning
and three times evening and if you didn't
do any, literally we come to conferences, we
get excited we meet people, we buy some
miswaks in the bazaar and then eat a
halal taco from the halal taco truck out
front and then we go home or did
we take something we can implement what did
the Prophet say in one of the variants
of that hadith he said whoever says it
three times in the morning and the evening
كان حقاً على الله يرضيه Allah took it
upon himself as a right as a responsibility
if you will to please that person so
we have to be people who work and
we should definitely be thinking about are we
evolving one of the things I would like
to ask and I'm asking this rhetorically for
you to think about is how have we
learned Islam and is the way we have
learned Islam is it exacerbating an already very
difficult journey in other words have we learned
an Islam that bifurcates us have we learned
an Islam that makes this whole experience kind
of a almost social schizophrenia you talked about
ironically you're at MSA marriage has got to
come into the talk somehow it's got to
fit in there somehow but you talked at
the end about identity and appearance you guys
have probably heard about that website hopefully you
haven't hopefully you haven't gone to it I've
never been to it but I've heard about
it a website called Hot or Not and
people put up their pictures and they grade
it from 1 to 10 if you're a
10 you're hot if you're a 1 you're
not you know what I'm saying and so
are you hot or not no the person's
hot or they're not you know كل جرف
يعني أم غزال as they say even a
monkey in his mother's eyes is beautiful so
you may not be hot by the standards
of somebody assessing you on a website but
in your mother's eyes boy you beautiful in
your mother's eyes you're beautiful in your dad's
eyes you might just be acceptable but in
momma's eyes in momma's eyes in momma's eyes
you're beautiful so do we have like a
hot or not type of understanding of Islam
in other words am I a good Muslim
or a bad Muslim good Muslim bad Muslim
hot or not imam ash-shafi'i said
something very important I want you to think
about that he said no Muslim ever obeys
Allah without sometimes disobeying him and no Muslim
ever disobeys Allah without sometimes obeying him so
who's ever good outweighs their bad we consider
them amongst the righteous in other words this
is all a process when we talk about
identity to try to do as much good
as you possibly can in this very very
short window of time you have been given
called life as I begin to wrap it
up I'd like to provide a framework for
us to think within number one what does
it mean to be Muslim there are all
the conversations about what it means to be
Muslim in terms of methodology and ideology and
in terms of group affiliation and in terms
of political stance etc etc there is everything
that it means to be Muslim in terms
of how much I pray, how much I
fast how I pray, when I fast or
break my fast part of the moon fighting
problem or not there is all of the
questions about what it means to be Muslim
about what I wear, who etc etc but
really what does being Muslim mean am I
Muslim it means what am I doing Islam
is ultimately what you do and this is
why when Gabriel came to the prophet he
said tell me about Islam the prophet told
him about actions Islam is that you do
these five things, the five pillars and for
time sake I will not go into them
as I assume you know them well that's
what it really comes down to what am
I doing and if we just ask ourselves
that question in like a more authentic real
kind of agitational authentic way, what am I
doing you know even in terms of politics
and activism am I a clictivist or am
I an activist am I somebody who is
just involved in online critique of situations or
am I actually doing something in the community
and in the world moving toward good and
as an agent of change, what am I
really doing as a Muslim you can look
and say what am I spending my time
doing, am I learning, am I remembering Allah
etc, being a mu'min obviously has to do
with how we know Allah, what we believe
about him, what we believe to be conceivable
and conceivable and necessary to believe about the
divine what we believe similarly for the prophet
and what we believe about the end of
time or what we believe about the afterlife
but at one level, being a mu'min the
question of being a mu'min is what do
I believe what am I thinking about where
is my heart and mind center, what am
I involving myself with in terms of my
heart and my mind and that's part of
identity as well but part of identity and
I think this is really important is attempting
to strive to be people of ihsan because
being a muhsin rewinding when Gabriel asked the
prophet what is iman, he told him six
objects of faith, you have to believe in
these six things that you know well but
being muhsin or being someone of spiritual excellence,
being someone who excels the prophet ﷺ tells
us that it means that you worship Allah
as if you see him and if you
fail to do so you know that he
sees you but another way to ask this
question is what is being a muhsin someone
of spiritual excellence, what am I what am
I because when you ask the question of
identity naturally there's questions of gender there's questions
of race, there's questions of ethnicity, within race
and ethnicity there's questions of subsets of those
racial or ethnic groups there's socioeconomic realities there's
accolades behind your name of what you've studied,
those are all part of what you are
as you alluded to Majid but let us
not forget and I mean this in no
type of fluffy weird kind of like double
rainbow silly spirituality way, I mean this in
a real way let us not forget that
in addition to being these physical beings that
are walking around and living and marrying and
procreating and wearing clothes and going to conferences
and etc.
that beyond all of that, behind all of
that underneath all of that you're a ruh,
you're a soul that knows God you predate
the world itself, you predate race, you predate
gender, you predate space you predate time by
way of the fact that Allah created you
as a pre-eternal reality called a ruh
and he brought you forth from the loins
of your forefather Adam and asked you I'm
not your lord and you and I and
everyone else testified it, indeed you are so
beyond all of that beyond all of the
stuff of physicality which is real and as
Muslims one of the beautiful things about our
faith is we are not supposed to check
out of our physical realities, check out of
our cognitive obligations and our theological but we're
also to remember that behind all of that
I'm a soul I'm a spirit as it
were and not in some type of strange
fluffy way ya khadima jismi kim tushqa bi
khidmatihi, oh you servant of your physicality, how
miserable you will make yourself atatlub al ribha
mima fihi khusranu are you attempting to profit
from the very place of bankruptcy irji ila
ruhi fastakmal fada ilaha look back to your
soul and seek the perfection of its virtues
fa anti bi ruhi la bi jismi insanu,
it is because of your soul not because
of your body that you're a human being
so when Allah created Adam, what did he
tell the angels he said so when I
form him and then I blow into him
of my soul then prostrate to him he
didn't just say I'm going to form this
human being prostrate to him, he said fa
idha sawaituhu, so when I form the human
being wa nafakhtu fihi mirruhi and I blow
into him of the divine spirit then fall
prostrate to him, so I'm saying that to
remember that even beyond all of this stuff
and we have to be clear that as
Muslims and in conversations at MSA, we've got
to have clear conversations around identity, you'd be
really surprised the conversations that happen offline with
young Muslims when it comes to identity, you'd
be really surprised about the deep levels of
crisis that are happening for Muslim youth about
identity, what it means to be a Muslim,
what it means to keep on hijab, I
remember asking a young student, a young lady
who was wearing hijab, I said to her,
I said what's it like wearing hijab?
Why do you ask that question?
Because I never did it before it'd be
kind of awkward, like national brother wear hijab
day I'd never done it, I said what's
it like wearing hijab?
She said mashallah, it's such an honor, alhamdulillah
I was like really, is that how you
really feel?
She goes no I was like astaghfirullah, what
is she she goes it's horrible, she gets
almost hot all the time that's the other
part of the conversation that we again minimize
that it's a struggle, you know, like to
be a woman wearing hijab, it's easy for
brothers to just go undercover, you know but
the sisters rocking hijab are constantly repping the
deen, what does it mean to be, what
does it mean, like you know brother do
you have that beard because you have a
beard or just because you're trying to be
like a baseball player you know what I'm
saying, like what does that really mean, all
of this stuff of identity but we've got
to move beyond that, and we've got to
be a community that is if you will
ruh centric as it were really quickly I
would like to offer some really basic suggestions
of advice that will help us in navigating
this whole conversation of identity, number one Majid
talked about good company and he talked about
the friends that you keep and he translated
the hadith in the most liberal, completely inaccurate
but extremely on point way possible and I'm
not picking on you, I'm praising you, when
he said to the prophet said fal yamdur
ahadukum man yukhalil I think you said let
one of you consider whose YouTube videos you
watch, that's not obviously what the prophet, I'm
not picking on you, but what he's saying
is mad real, be careful of the online
that you're engaged in, and that's what you're
trying to say if I'm not mistaken, right
the prophet said so let one of you
consider who you keep company with, yeah and
not only who you sit with but also
who you sit with, who you sit with
in terms of online space, that's really important,
but the people that we interact with but
camelbacking on that, we don't say piggyback, we
say what, camelback camelbacking on that, I would
specifically invite you to sit with the elders
and the older the better the older the
better try to keep company with old people
if you can, ask them for words of
wisdom, ask them what life has taught them,
because they represent not only a very important
subset of the community about which the prophet
said salallahu alayhi wasalam if you don't honor
them you're not one of us but also
they represent a time gone by, they represent
a world that no longer exists, they saw
people that we'll never see, they experienced things
that we never experienced, so in our processing
identity it's important that we anchor ourselves and
being in touch with people who are older
than us and the older the better, sit
with them and listen attentively, if you're going
to use your phone in their presence, use
it for one thing and one thing only
and that's for the voice memo press record
and sit down and say uncle, auntie grandma,
grandpa, give me some words of advice what
has life taught you, and when they say
it, they give you the words of advice,
it might not make sense right when you
hear it, but later on at some point
in your life it's going to make sense,
it's going to click, so listen to elders,
and if you have some type of disinclination
from keeping company with your own elders, then
keep company with other people's elders in other
words if you don't have an uncle or
an auntie or grandma or grandpa that you
can keep company with try to keep company
with other people's grandparents and ask them for
advice and for words of wisdom, the second
thing I will say in terms of this
idea of identity is make sure, and thank
God for MSA and thank God for all
of you, make sure that we're a service
oriented community because one of the most important
things that will help you have a healthy
sense of identity and help you have a
healthy sense of a wholeness, is that you
be a service oriented person, by serving other
people it will make sure that it keeps
you intact, remember that in the most intimate
spaces, behind closed doors, where there was no
onlookers besides his family, the Prophet ﷺ is
described as having been in the menial service
of his family, doing things that other people
don't like to do, so from the house
outward to be service oriented people, but we've
got to be careful that we're not service
oriented when it comes to a convention, or
to an event on campus, or when there
is a camera or when I'm going to
get some exposure, but then when it comes
to the most important people that I'm to
serve, I'm no longer a service oriented person,
we've got to be very careful about that
and finally, let all of us have a
critical conversation with ourselves, about what it really
means to be me, what it really means
to be us, and let us be honest
about that, and let us support one another
in that regard, because see look the Prophet
ﷺ described the end of time, and I'm
not saying like next week or next year,
and I'm definitely not saying 2012 because that
would be awkward if the world ended two
years ago and nobody saw it but we're
at the latter stage of human existence, the
Prophet ﷺ said that my coming and the
last day are like these two, holding his
two fingers together ﷺ, he describes the end
of time as a time in which there
will be discord, strife, sedition fitna, there will
be drama, fitna like pieces of a dark
night continuous pieces of a dark night a
person in that time will come into the
morning a believer and by the evening they're
a disbeliever, then by the morning they're a
believer, and by the evening they're a disbeliever
Majid said something, and we may have laughed
or we may not have got it, he
said we're in this conference right now, but
you might have to drag me out of
the club here tonight, he wasn't, he's not
going to go to the club, I ain't
gonna let him go to the club you
can go to the club but what you're
saying is what?
we're all in the hands of Allah and
in the time that we live in, he
said, yusbi'u rajulu fihi mu'minan wa yumsi
kafira a person will come into the morning
a believer, and by the evening they've lost
their faith, may Allah save us from that
and then he says, and by the morning
they're a believer and by the evening they've
disbelieved and one of the interpretations is that
a person will go on like a rollercoaster,
like a violent ride when it comes to
faith, you gain faith you lose faith, you
gain faith, you lose faith so may Allah
ta'ala never take our faith away from
us, Ya Rabb al-alamin, and Ya Rabb
don't let our socio-economic status or our
ethnicity, or where we live or what group
we're part of, or who our sheikh is,
or anything else, ever ever veil us from
your divine reality, Ya Rabb al-alamin aqoolu
qawli hadha wa saghfir Allah al-'azim li walakum
wa nisa'ir al-muslimeen wa sallallahu alayhi
wa sallam wa alayhi wa sallam walhamdulillahi rabbil
alameen I apologize, I went one minute over,
we were supposed to end at 6.45
please forgive me for that assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh