Usama Canon – on Diffused Congruence Podcast The American Muslim Experience
AI: Summary ©
acquisition, including their
acquisition with native gangs and their
acquisition with European immigrants. They also talk about the challenges faced by young people in their early days as they live in a socially schizophrenic, monolithic community. The speakers emphasize the importance of creating space for conversation between children and their parents, creating space for dialogue between Muslims and their counterparts, and creating space for conversation between children and their parents. They end with a brief advertisement for a future episode.
AI: Transcript ©
Welcome to the first episode of Diffused Congruence,
the American Muslim Experience.
This is a brand new podcast and I
am your host, Zaki Hussa, and I'm joined
by my partner in this endeavor, Pervez Ahmed.
Thank you, Zaki, good to be here.
I'd like to also take this opportunity to
welcome the listening audience.
Hope you enjoy not only this show and
continue to stay with us for future shows.
So we've been planning to do this show
for a while now, we've been working on
it.
Been a labor of love and a work
in progress.
And it'll continue to be that.
That's right.
Well, explain the title of our show, Diffused
Congruence.
What does that mean?
Yeah, it's a mouthful, certainly.
So that's actually something that sort of comes
from and stems from Muslim intellectual tradition.
But what I use it here in this
context, I think, is to demonstrate the fact
that when we talk about the American Muslim
experience, we are talking about a plurality and
a multiplicity of views, opinions, points of view.
So the idea here is to showcase and
to highlight that multiplicity of views and voices
that we have from within the Muslim community
and to talk about and to share their
views on the Muslim experience in America.
Well, and I think that there's no better
way to start our show than the person
we've asked to be our guest for this
very first episode.
Somebody who I think from the moment we
thought of doing the show, I know from
my end, I was like, this is who
I want to be on.
And so we're very honored to have him
with us.
Usama Cannon joins us and he is the
founding director of Tatlif Collective, which is based
in the San Francisco Bay Area.
They also have facilities in Chicago, my hometown.
And I think for a lot of people,
Usama Cannon is the voice of the many
modern American Muslims, and he speaks to their
concerns in a way that they can recognize
and understand.
And I want to welcome him right now.
Thank you for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
Part of the reason for doing this show
is very selfish on my part because I
like the idea of being able to sit
and have a conversation with an interesting person,
and I think you have a fascinating story
that's worth sharing with not just the Muslim
community, but the broader community out there.
And I was wondering if you could walk
us through your journey.
What brought you to the point now where
we are now sitting in the wonderful facilities
here at Tatlif Collective?
How did you get here?
Where do you consider the beginning of your
journey?
Well, there's a short version, a medium version,
and a long version to that question, if
one were to attempt to respond.
You know, the long version would begin where
a group of African people were enslaved and
brought across the Atlantic Ocean, and then were
obviously slaves in this land for what ends
up being several hundred years.
And at some point, a group of those
slaves, who I do not know by name,
intermarry with some of the native peoples of
this land from the Cherokee and the Blackfoot
nations.
And then my father's ancestors are eventually born
somewhere between Texas and Oklahoma.
And sometime along that same experience, a group
of European immigrants came from a combination of
the UK, what is now the UK, between,
you know, Britain and Ireland, and probably Italy.
And at some point, my mother's ancestors get
together.
And then sometime around 1942, my father's ancestors
migrate from Oklahoma to San Jose.
And that's where I typically begin my story.
Because I just happen to know those demarcations
on my father's side the years a little
bit better than my father's.
He came here when he was a baby
in the year he was born in 1942.
And one of the interesting kind of markers
is that when he came to San Jose,
there were two Black churches in San Jose
at the time.
Antioch Baptist Church, which ends up being the
church that my family goes to for the
next several decades.
They arrived on Friday, but Sunday they were
at that church, Antioch Baptist Church, which is
interestingly just a couple blocks down from SBIA
in downtown San Jose.
My mother, by the time she gets to
high school, to make a long story short,
she's driving and she sees this young African
-American lady whose car broke down.
She's with her friend.
They give her a ride home.
And that's my cousin, Sharon, who ends up
introducing my parents.
So basically, you know, to go from slavery
to European immigration to Native American and Black
intermarriage to my cousin's car breaking down and
my mom gives her a ride home.
That's how my parents end up meeting.
Wow.
So you can imagine, you know, there's a
lot.
I think that the reason that's really significant
for me is, when you talk about being
an American, at least from the kind of
historical perspective, the Black, the Native American, and
the white experience are all very much alive
within me and my heritage.
My mother, my grandmother narrated to me, and
I believe it to be true because I
never knew her to tell a lie, that
she was a descendant of the American president
Andrew Jackson, which is ironic if you think
about his relationship with the Cherokee.
That's right.
His relationship with the other tribes in the
Southeast.
So that's really where my story begins.
It begins with the beginning of America, quite
literally.
And yeah, but grew up, I was born
in 77, grew up in San Jose, Campbell
to be specific, suburb of San Jose.
Yeah, and very much, you know, I think
the idea of being in a multiracial family
very much informs my identity, both in terms
of just personal experience, but also ultimately what
leads me to kind of look into Islam
and what have you.
And where does that part of the story
start?
So that's kind of a 1990s experience, fast
-forwarding a little bit.
My older brother gets turned on to the
Nation of Islam through hip-hop, specifically through
Public Enemy, led by the famous Chuck D.
You know, at that point I'm beginning high
school.
The 90s, as you know, were kind of
a period where there was at least a
brief resurgence of kind of black pride and
expressions of authentic black rage and attempts to
kind of revisit black identity and what have
you.
You have the Do the Right Thing by
Spike Lee and you have, you know, hip
-hop music being strongly informed by themes of
black consciousness.
That's right, Public Enemy at the forefront.
Right, and so my brother gets turned on
to the Nation of Islam, eventually joins the
Nation of Islam very formally, and is a
very active member in the Nation of Islam,
which at that time had a smaller community
in San Jose and the South Bay, teaches
me about the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and
the Nation of Islam.
And at first I thought he was mad,
just because it was so starkly different from
what I had been exposed to as a
nominal Christian, but really what kind of sparked
my interest was that social historical piece of
kind of looking at identity.
And so that led me to ultimately identify
as a member of the Nation of Islam,
which for those who know about, you know,
the Nation's teachings, there's a very serious critique
of * and the * establishment
and whiteness and what have you, and white
supremacy, to the extent that they would call
the white man the devil, which is having
a white mom, you can imagine, is pretty...
I was gonna say, I mean coming from
like a biracial background and then sort of
identifying with this very sort of prototypical black
consciousness, black nationalist movement, that must have been
a very interesting, some very interesting dinner conversations.
For sure, I mean, you know, the interesting
thing is that, like, you have the one
-drop theory, that if a person has so
much as a drop of African blood, they're
an African, and that would have had very
real implications for slaves during the period of
slavery.
For us, you know, I'm in the South
Bay, in the suburbs, I didn't grow up
in the hood by any stretch of the
imagination.
I grew up in Campbell, Las Gadas kind
of area, but what it was, was just
agitating the question of identity and kind of
how does one reconcile being black and being
white, and the Native American piece kind of
conveniently being shoved in there somewhere and oftentimes
overlooked, you know, unfortunately, people not maybe being
it for a number of reasons.
Yeah, but the really ironic part was that
my mother was always very supportive of our
of our engagement with the Nation of Islam.
My father, on the other hand, oh he
totally, yeah, he, God bless him, you know,
he took issue with it, to say the
least.
My mother was supportive, and now those are
one of the things, like, okay, the white
man's a devil, but my mom's not the
devil.
She's far from it, right.
Just to piggyback off something you just said,
you described yourself as a nominal Christian.
I was wondering if you could go into
that a little bit more about what your
headspace was in religious terms before being exposed
to the nation.
Yeah, well, you know, I think my father,
again, comes from a very devout Christian family.
They would go to church services as children
twice a week as a minimum.
My mother was, without exaggeration, my grandmother was,
without an exaggeration, his mother was, without exaggeration,
a matriarch in the church, you know, Mama
Canon.
You had, you know, this is a kind
of the traditional, you know, Mama Canon or
Mama Jackson or Mama so-and-so, but
my father, by the time I was born,
wasn't practicing.
He wasn't very devout.
I mean, he may have prayed or what
have you, but he wasn't a very committed
Christian.
My mother, interestingly, had become a Mormon as
a young lady, and eventually, she eventually departs
from that, but there wasn't a kind of
household religion, and so even the idea of
belief in God or any religious identity for
me was, began really as a personal, personal
journey.
And the church, a number of different denominations
of the church, was my first and only
real reference point.
So I thought I was Christian, but there
were certain things having to do with Christology
or having to do with, you know, believing
in Christ as divine that never really sat
well with me, and I say that with
all due respect to my Christian friends and
family members, but there were just things that
didn't sit well with me.
So that's something about being nominally Christian.
I believed in the divine.
I believed in the Most High, but I
just didn't, praying to a person or worshiping
a person is never really, which you can
imagine is exacerbated with the theology of the
Nation of Islam, which basically claims that Fahd
Muhammad was God in person.
Elijah Muhammad is a messenger of God, and
again, with all due respect to my friends
and family who identify as members of the
Nation of Islam, theologically, that never really stuck.
It was the social conversation that the Nation
was having.
It was the critique of the power structure
that the Nation was having.
It was that, you know, authentic understanding of
black masculinity and femininity that the Nation was
having that really, you know, stuck with me.
So that leads me to ultimately look into
Orthodox Islam.
So this is the early 90s?
Yeah, so this whole conversation, yeah, the first
half of the 90s, basically.
You're in high school.
So you're in high school, and you're talking
about the power structure and notions of race
and dominance and whatnot.
Did you find that you were alienated from
your classmates and whatnot?
Because that seems like a very different headspace
to be in, given what most people are
thinking about at that age.
You know, I'll tell you a story that
I think probably most accurately answers that question.
I think my sophomore year of high school,
which would have been 92, the school failed
to announce Cinco de Mayo, the famous Mexican
holidays, and we basically occupied Westmont High.
I mean, we literally walk out of fifth
period, and people who went to school with
me, they can attest to this.
It was a true story, you know, because
it's Cinco de Mayo.
You don't just not recognize it and say,
we had a large Latino population, Mexican in
particular, at our school, Westmont High and Campbell
San Jose, and we literally occupied the cafeteria.
We marched out of fifth period, and we're
like, y'all didn't make it to Cinco
de Mayo.
So basically all of the disgruntled colored folk
in our school kind of, you know, they
kind of get together, and we marched on
the school, and the dean came, and the
principal came, and they're, you know, they're trying
to like, right, kind of appease this angry
colored force of the high school that's, you
know, speaking truth to power.
But that's what kind of informed the collective
consciousness of people in the 90s, largely to
do with what was in the music.
That's right, because I was gonna say, like,
referencing the mid-90s or the early 90s,
I'm thinking also about when states were celebrating
Martin Luther King, MLK Day, right?
Remember Arizona and Public Enemy Song?
So that was very much in the consciousness.
Yeah, and the thing is, again, we were
probably...
Public History Month wasn't celebrated until the early
90s.
We were products of, you're talking not long
after Mandela's release from prison.
Exactly.
You know, I mean, I saw Nelson Mandela
at the Oakland Coliseum the year after he
was, the year he was released.
He came and spoke there, and the Coliseum
was full of people.
My sister Dawn took us to the Martin
Luther King Day parade every year.
Juneteenth, the festival was for Juneteenth, which is
a holiday celebrated particularly for blacks from Oklahoma
and Texas, because Juneteenth, when the Emancipation Proclamation
was kind of dropped, it doesn't hit Texas
and other western states until months later.
Yeah.
So black folks from Texas will celebrate Emancipation
on Juneteenth, which is a kind of later
holiday than the actual date that the Proclamation
was initially released.
This is my experience growing up, and you
know, so...
But back to the story, right?
So we occupied the cafeteria, and then they
had a club they initiated at Westmont High
called Unity Through Diversity, and there was a
staff counselor, I don't remember his name, God
bless him, and he ironically was this older
white man with this big long white beard.
He kind of looked like Santa Claus.
He was our staff advisor, and again, it
was a space for the blacks, the Latinos,
the mestizos, the mixed people, people of color
who identified as people of color, to have
a space to talk about what that meant
vis-a-vis, you know, vis-a-vis
a majority, vis-a-vis a power structure.
So that was my high school experience, man,
and that the music we listened to and
the things we celebrated were very much, they
were socially resistant, you know, against the kind
of raging...
Did you ever feel sort of torn between
cultures, in the sense that you were choosing
to identify with...
against, I should say, those exercising privilege, but
you're kind of occupying a nexus where, by
virtue of not being purely this or purely
that, you were kind of in the middle.
For sure, and I think part of that
comes from the fact that I'm as light
as I am, and growing up, you know,
I would hear people drop the n-word,
and not knowing that my father was black.
You know, I saw a side of, you
know, the underbelly, so to speak, of white
privilege as a person, an African-American who
could pass by white standards, so I saw
that, so I think that probably most immediately
informs my choice to identify with my black
side more than my white side.
I've been thinking, not even knowing the dates,
but when your parents must have married, there
were states in the country where their union
would not be recognized.
Had I been born ten years earlier...
I'm born, I'm giving away my birthday here,
but I'm born nine years to the day
of Dr. King's assassination, after Dr. King's assassination,
so figure, I mean, figure, right?
Nine years to the day after Dr. King's
assassination.
Had my parents been married ten years earlier,
their marriage and my birth would have been
illegal in 16 of the 50 United States,
and this is the thing I think so
many young people are forgetting, that when my
father was 18, he couldn't vote because he
was an African-American.
By the time he retires, or he's in
his kind of, by the time he had
retired, he sees a black American in the
White House, so a lot has changed in
our generation, a lot more than we realize,
you know.
I think what you're saying, what's so interesting
to me is, at a very young age,
you made a decision to identify with your
black side, and that, at least culturally, that
amounts to a rejection of the privilege that
comes with whiteness.
It's convenient to do that when you live
in a big, beautiful home in the suburbs.
I mean, you know, to be real, is
it like, well, we hashtag first world problems,
right?
And so, I mean, there is a piece
of it that's like, it's convenient kind of
suburban protest that is maybe not as authentic,
it's definitely not as authentic as what my
ancestors had to go through.
My grandfather told stories to my father and
to my aunties of people, you know, they
were in good with the white folks.
In Oklahoma, you're talking about maybe parts of,
yeah.
Through Oklahoma and even in California.
Okay.
He leaves Tyler, Texas very young.
Okay.
He leaves Tyler, Texas probably sometime in the
20s.
It's like the Dust Bowl.
We're talking like the, like the Joads and
the Grapes of Wrath, right?
Yeah.
Migration to California.
Yeah.
I don't know if they were fruit labor,
but, you know.
Yeah, he was a mechanic and eventually worked
for the garbage company, Green Valley Disposal.
Right.
Really interesting narrative.
You know, when I sit with my father
and my mother and other people, I ask
them to just tell us the oral history,
because that's the thing.
A lot of young people, they just don't
even ask their parents.
It's like, what was it like for you?
Their grandparents.
Yeah.
So, my grandfather would tell stories of how,
because he was in good with the white
folks, they would call him and say, hey,
Emery, look what we caught ourselves and open
a bag and they would have a black
man's hand cut off that they took from
a lynching.
Wow.
And to just, what would it, what must
it have been like?
And that he would have to hold face
and then he couldn't break before.
Yeah.
My great grandfather was lynched by the Klan
in front of his daughter.
I had uncles and, not direct uncles, but
great uncles and other family members who were
lynched and we know about that stuff.
So, yeah.
I mean, I think part of it is
the fact that I'm a man and my
father is black, and so identifying just in
terms of, you know, male identity and identifying
with the fact that most of the influential
men in my life early on were African
-American males.
I mean, my brother-in-law, Milton, is
a person who taught me how to play
basketball.
Every time I go on a basketball court,
I can't help but think about Milton.
So, it's not like a choice to identify
as much as part of just the nature
of being what one may call mulatto or
being biracial, is that I've never disavowed myself
from my white heritage and I don't hate
it by any stretch of the mind.
I may still have a critique of, you
know, the power structure.
I may still have something to say about
the stuff of white privilege, especially someone of
African-American heritage who appears to many to
be someone who is white, because, you know,
I've never met in my whole life probably
two black people that didn't know I was
black or even ask me, what are you?
But white folk ask me all the time,
you know, what are you?
So, I don't know how much of it
was a choice and how much of it
is just the reality of being biracial.
An interesting piece for so many people today,
especially people in communities like the Muslim community
that is as diverse as it is, will
get ready for the future.
That's right.
People, you know, the idea that people are
going to continue to only marry within the
pools of folks from the countries that they
or their parents have immigrated from, that's not
the American narrative and we're not going to
be around to force that and eventually our
community is going to look very different 20
years from now, 10 years from now, let
alone 20 or 50 years from now.
So, yeah, I mean, and it's good for,
it's good for the, it's good for the
species.
It strengthens, you know, strengthens people's genetic kind
of lot.
So, this is your, now you are part
of the nation and at what point do
you start having second, and what's your exposure
then to quote-unquote mainstream Islam as you
move away from that?
Sure.
So, I go through high school.
My brother is an active member of the
nation.
So, my father, because of his objection to
my membership, I was never kind of like
as formally, I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't
kind of sign up to the same extent
that my brother did, but I would go
to meetings a lot of times in secrecy
because of my father's objection.
To be honest, it's to create kind of
a vulnerable space.
My parents were actually separated at one point
because of my mother's support of my brother
taking me to the nation meetings.
That's how tense that was for my family.
You know, that my father, again, was really
against it.
My mother was supportive and my brother gets
kicked out of the house and my mother
kind of was like rolled with him.
So, literally, our involvement in the nation at
one point created enough strife that my parents
were temporarily separated.
They eventually divorced, but this was earlier on
where they were still married.
They were temporarily separated, largely to do with
that event.
So, needless to say, it was agitated.
I mean, it was, you know, and again,
the white ladies coming out in support and
the brothers objecting to it.
Why was she supportive?
My mom's a special lady and I know
everyone thinks that about their mom, but she
is a very, very, and my father's a
special man as well.
My mother, you know, yeah, man, she's my
best friend and she is one of the
most down-to-earth, loving, sincere people I've
ever met.
I think a lot of it just had
to do with her unconditional love.
You know, she's just, my mom's not a
judgmental person.
And I think it kind of goes back
to your question earlier about being nominally Christian,
is that I think, to be honest, one
of the reasons I'm able to even identify
as a religious person is that I never
had religion shoved down my throat.
You know, no one was telling, I don't
remember getting told about heaven or *, or
you're gonna go to *, or God's gonna
be mad at you when I was a
child.
I don't remember that.
That wasn't my experience.
And so I think that, like, some of
the negative feelings that people have about religion,
and unfortunately sometimes about God, has to do
with the way that religion is presented to
them as children, if we're being honest.
So, back to mom, why was she supportive?
It's because she's down like that.
I mean, she's just not in much role.
She's just, you know, mom's the homie.
That's what we would say.
She's the homie.
That's what my sister and my brother, that's
the homie.
Mom pops as, you know, he pops as
an authoritative figure in our life.
And I'm thankful to God for that now.
As a kid, I hated it.
But now, you know, looking back, you know.
So, long story short, my brother's in the
nation.
I'm kind of following along.
The situation is pretty rough for a while.
Then my brother meets a beautiful man named
Bilal, known as Imam Bilal, in the South
Bay community, who had a TV show, Bible
in the Sky.
You know, a lot of people don't realize
the centrality of Imam Bilal in the narrative
of the Yahya Rodis's, Mustafa Davis's, and his
canons, Osama Kanon's of the world.
They don't realize it.
Had it not been for him, none of
the story would have happened.
Because Imam Bilal would regularly attend the nation
meetings with Minister Khalil, Minister Joe, with the
nation, as an Orthodox Muslim.
Meets Anas, tells him about Orthodox Islam, begins
to introduce him to Orthodox Islam.
And before you know it, Anas is now
a Sunni Muslim.
Largely, almost entirely to do with Imam Bilal.
And then eventually meeting the likes of Mount
Fahim Shoaib, Allah preserve him, you know, and
other kind of central figures in the Bay
Area community.
So he becomes a Sunni Muslim.
By this point, I'm like junior summer, getting
ready to go to senior year.
And the moment, you know, we all have
those kind of, those kind of, those kind
of big moments in your life.
One of the biggest was my brother, we're
sitting in the back room of our house
we grew up in, and he says to
me, told me he's leaving the nation.
And he told me why he was leaving
the nation.
And then he said to me, just remember
that your relationship with God is an individual
relationship between you and him.
That's one thing he said.
He said, and the second thing is that
everybody has a dual or an other except
Allah.
Only Allah is one.
Ultimately, absolutely one.
And I was like, finally, like could you
guys have told me this?
I mean, it sounds like a no-brainer
to a lot of people, but it's like
you're kind of traversing all of these different
kind of really, and it was like, whoa,
like, okay, that's what I've been looking for.
And I literally feel like the room, you
know, was spinning after that, because it was
like, la ilaha illallah, like for the first
time I hear this idea of like the
absolute unity of God.
Granted, I'm like a junior in high school
still, right?
So it's like senior year becomes this really
interesting exploration of intersection between Judaism and Christianity
and Islam and Rastafarianism.
I had dreadlocks by that point.
It was kind of a really devout, you
know, Rasta-Muslim kind of strange perennial like
mix of who knows what.
But I'm thankful for that period, man, because
if it wasn't for that and what I
experienced and the meditation and the realizations and
the openings that I found that period, I
never would have become Muslim, you know.
And keep in mind, Yahya Rodis and I,
we go to school together since like sixth
grade.
Yahya is also, you know, a fairly known
Muslim scholar.
We graduate freshman year.
He goes to UC San Diego.
I go to De Anza, which is a
local junior college.
So I teach there.
Yeah, De Anza is really central in my
whole thing.
Actually, this whole story kind of happens at
De Anza college.
I don't want to get you in trouble.
He goes to UC San Diego.
I go to De Anza.
Freshman year at De Anza, I start meeting
all of these kind of real hip Muslims,
like poetry circles and poetry readings, all this
stuff.
And again, it's still this 1990s.
This is 95-96.
This is 95.
So it's still snagged up in the middle
of this whole kind of period.
And now this begins a highlight for me,
like this idea that like I want to
become Muslim.
By this point, my brother's a devout Sunni
Muslim.
And he offers a pretty heavy critique of
some of my behavior and some of my
tendencies and is encouraging me to kind of
get more serious.
And I identified as a Muslim, you know.
But I didn't like publicly identify as a
Muslim.
I hadn't formally embraced Islam.
So sophomore year at De Anza, which is
now 1996, Yahya Rodis tells his parents he
wants to leave UC San Diego.
And he's, I think it was made the
varsity basketball team.
He's doing his undergrad in economics and tells
his parents he wants to leave UC San
Diego to come back to De Anza, right?
So he's basically backtracking.
And it largely had to do with the
fact that we're both very much interested in
Islam.
And he kind of wants to come back
to this community.
He comes back to De Anza.
And freshman year, so before this happens, I
meet this guy, Brian Davis, who is another
mixed-race mulatto guy.
He knows Muslims that I grew up with.
We kind of hang out.
We're at sushi one day and he says
to me, look, I'm interested in becoming Muslim.
And he said, I'm interested in revisiting religion.
This is over a conversation at lunch.
And I said, you should become Muslim.
He says, are you Muslim?
I said, no, but my brother is.
He says, well, what do they believe?
I told him the basic tenets of the
Muslim faith.
And then he goes to Barnes and Nobles
with the intention of buying a Bible.
Walks into the religion section, passes by Eastern
philosophy, picks up the book Muhammad by Martin
Lings off the shelf, begins reading it.
And he said, I was kind of just
kind of dismayed by it or just kind
of confused by all of the son of
so-and-so, father of so-and-so.
He couldn't, the genealogy of the Prophet in
the front of the book.
So he's like, what?
He puts it back on the shelf and
then he sees the Quran.
Picks it up and opens up this chapter
on Mary, Surah Maryam, which for anybody who
at any point identified as a Christian or
comes from a Christian background, it's like, wow.
So he's weeping by the time he leaves
the bookstore, buys the Quran.
By Friday, he's Muslim.
That was Wednesday.
Wow.
So he comes back to Deanza and he's
the As-salamu alaykum, my brother guy, right?
He's that guy on campus, right?
Remember 90s, right?
He's that guy on campus.
And we used to write music together in
the piano room at Deanza.
There's like this piano room, you have to
have a code to get in.
We had snuck the code from who knows
where and we're going in the piano room
and playing, making music in the piano room.
We really bond.
That's Mustafa Davis.
So he, we're hanging out that whole year.
Next year, Yahya has come back now to
Deanza.
We all know all the different Muslims.
He's been Muslim now for, you know, just
under a year, I think.
Calls me on Thursday, September 5th, 1996, and
says, hey, do you want to go to
Juma tomorrow, the Friday prayer with me?
I said, sure.
And I knew you had to take a
bath and I knew you had to, you
know, wear good clothes and what have you.
So I get dressed up.
I'm going to MCA.
And I think somewhere in the back of
my mind, I may have had this hunch
that I was going to say my shahada,
which is to formally embrace Islam.
But I wasn't sure.
I walk in MCA, which is one of
the larger local mosques.
It's like one of these mega mosques.
It's kind of a mega mosque.
It was at a different phase of its
growth, but it was still a large congregation.
I walk in and I just look at
all these Muslims.
I'm like, man, where are you guys hiding?
Because there's Muslims everywhere, right?
And Irfan Saad that was given the khutbah
that day.
We go to Juma, pray, and then after
Juma, Irfan Bai, who's the imam, says, there's
a brother who wants to say his shahada.
And Mustafa nudges me, goes that's you, bro.
It was September 6th.
So I went and said my shahada that
day, not under any coercion, but under some
pretty strong nudges.
I already knew.
When he said the shahada to me, I
already knew it.
He was like, repeat after me.
I already knew it.
Then he goes, take beer.
I was like, I already knew because I'd
been around my brother's Muslim.
I'd been exposed to it.
So yeah, I mean, that was the beginning
of my journey as a Muslim.
So this is now, we're into 97.
This is September 96.
September 96, okay.
So now you said you were, before you
took the shahada, you were identifying as Muslim.
But I find it interesting that when Brian
slash Mustafa asked you if you're Muslim, he
said, no, I'm not.
Well, because, you know, the thing is that
like, for people who are familiar with the
historical legacy of the Nation of Islam and
the centrality of that, the contribution of the
Nation of Islam, particularly in inner city communities
and in African American communities, the Nation of
Islam identifies Muslim.
By the standards of Islamic orthodoxy and the
standards of Islamic orthopraxy, they would not be
considered Muslim.
And I say that again, as someone who
loves that community and cherishes the, you know,
the legacy, but also by the standards of
Islamic orthodoxy, orthodox Muslims are not considered the
Muslim.
And folks from the Nation know that, and
people from orthodox Muslim communities know that.
So it's not like I'm unveiling some secret.
I mean, as people know that, I think
that has to do with part of it
is that, and if you look at people
who come from the Nation of Islam to
orthodox Islam under the leadership of the late
Imam Murthi Muhammad, God have mercy on him,
there is the idea of the first resurrection
and then the second resurrection.
The first resurrection is when Imam Muhammad, under
the instruction of Farad Muhammad, comes and offers
this unique message to black people, and that's
the first time black Americans are resurrected, so
to speak.
And the second resurrection is when Imam Muhammad,
you can barely think of it without weeping,
when he brings, you know, well over, you
know, probably close to half a million, if
not a million people, eventually from the understanding
of the Nation of Islam to al-Islam,
and that's the second resurrection.
And that, I mean, undoubtedly the largest communal
conversion to Islam in Western Muslim history.
I mean, arguably one of the larger ones
probably ever in the history of Islam, but
he literally leads a mass conversion to orthodox
Islam, and it's one of the great pieces
of American Muslim history that is really, really
understudied, under-appreciated, and is basically a narrative
that is passing with the passing of those
pioneers.
And it's a very, very important part of
the American Muslim story that people who aren't
familiar with that experience, you know, a lot
of people you find in so-called immigrant
Muslim communities that even don't even know that
Imam Muhammad was an orthodox Muslim and an
orthodox imam who leads an orthodox Muslim community.
And they're people who are just kind of,
are they nation?
They don't really know, and that's part of
that kind of historical experience.
So having been in my own micro version
of that transition from the Nation to Islam,
I think that's when I probably would have
said no, i.e. I understood that the
Shahada was, you know, an articulation of belief
in the tenets of orthodox Islam.
And I also, you know, my brother told
me something probably some months before that.
He said, look, man, when you say you're
Shahada, you're forgiven any wrong you've done in
the past, but you're also accountable for whatever
you do.
So I was like, oh snap, I better
kind of, you know, get rid of, get
some of this stuff, just kind of do
some dirt, you know.
That was the kind of very faulty...
Get it out of your system.
Right?
It's like, I'm a kid, man, I'm 19
years old.
It's like, you know, whatever.
And I think that's probably what it was.
And just for context, the age difference between
you and your brother...
Three and a half years.
Three and a half years.
So were you very close?
Did you look up to him more as
a guy?
Look up is a gross understatement.
I mean, there's been no one in my
life more important in general, especially in terms
of informing my understanding of masculinity, in terms
of holding my hand through conversations about understanding
the Most High and one's relationship with the
Most High, in terms of informing my fashion
sense, in terms of teaching how to defend
myself.
I mean, Yahya and I basically ride on
his coattails socially forever, up until the point
we become Muslim and there's some level of,
you know, at least perceived kind of whatever,
prominence in the Muslim community.
And I haven't forgotten that that's all standing
on Anas's shoulders.
I think he's had his own very interesting
explorations and even, you know, as of late,
kind of maybe not even identifying publicly as
a Muslim anymore, which is part of the
story.
But that doesn't discredit the fact that, I
mean, close like the way an older brother
who kind of is raising his younger brother,
close.
I mean, yeah, he picks on me, he
beats me up, but he also is a
person who...
I mean, literally the dean of our high
school let me slide on stuff because Anas
was my older brother.
Literally.
Wow.
And people didn't mess with us when we
grew up.
I mean, yeah, we grew up in Campbell.
We didn't grow up in the hood, but
there were people fought, you know, that kind
of that jock versus rocker versus stoner versus
kind of gangster culture of kind of high
schools.
No one messed with us.
You best believe it.
They wouldn't in their wildest imagination even think
about putting hands on John Rodis or Whitney
Cannon.
That's the last thing you're going to do
because you have to answer to some people
you don't want to answer to.
So close is an understatement.
And honestly, these are the kind of conversations
people don't really hear me have, you know,
because there's this whole, it's always got to
be a chutzpah, right?
Which is, this is what the show is
about.
That's right.
So, and I think that so much of
this is lost.
I mean, just in terms of just, it's
like an oral history.
You're recording these stories and preserving them.
And so now we're into 96.
At what point do you intersect with Zaytuna?
I mean, that's why, you know, when I
tell the story, it's pretty amazing the way
that the planets align.
Zaytuna Institute is founded in 1996.
Yahya Rodis and I, you know, the way
that I kind of end up intersecting with
Zaytuna is that I become Muslim Friday September
6th, 1996.
Tuesday or Wednesday of that following week, a
man named Sheikh Khatri Walbaiba, who's a Mauritanian
scholar, comes to the Bay Area under the
auspices of Sheikh Hamza Yusuf and ends up
at MCA within a day or two of
him coming to the country, leaving Mauritania literally
for the first time ever in his life.
At this point, he's well into his 60s,
if I'm not mistaken, maybe pushing 70.
I don't know, but he was, I believe,
well into his 60s.
One of the most regal, you know, noble
people that I'd ever seen at that point.
He looked like something of a time past.
He looked like someone who came from a
different, literally a different era.
This big, beautiful white beard, this big, beautiful
white turban, this big, flowing, beautiful white robe,
and just a face that spoke of all
of these, you know, I mean, amazing poet
and amazing scholar.
And so I meet him the day Yahya
comes to MCA to say his Shahada, which
is exactly a week after me.
So imagine you've been Muslim seven years and
you're meeting like this great sheikh, and you
know, the likes of whom are frankly an
anomaly even in the Muslim majority world today.
He walks up and gives Yahya his Shahada,
and Tarif al-Raybi translates, who was a
close friend of Sheikh Hamza Yusuf.
By the time Sheikh Khatri finishes Yahya's Shahada,
he's weeping.
He's never seen someone convert to Islam before.
So Yahya kind of became his surrogate son
because it's like, and he said to him,
he said, I love you more than my
own kids.
The fact that I saw you embrace Islam
today.
So then you got this white kid from
Las Gadas and this great Mauritanian sheikh who
developed this like bond, and I got to
kind of joyride through that experience because Yahya
is my best friend.
We go to Uncle Tarif's house after Jumu
'ah, they feed us fruit, and you know,
who feeds, who cuts apples for you and
hands you, who peels oranges for you and
feeds you fruit with their hand.
I mean, I've never seen anything like these
people.
Who are these guys?
Seriously, cutting the apple and peeling it for
you, handing it to you.
The amount of love and the amount of
generosity, the amount of kindness.
And then, you know, Sheikh Khatri tells Yahya,
you got to go bathe.
And so he says, make sure you rub
your whole body, which is a dominant opinion
in the Maliki school of law that when
you perform the purificatory bath that you actually
rub everywhere.
So Yahya goes upstairs, comes back like half
an hour later, beet red, kind of comes
to cover it.
So we're learning like, you know, we're learning
like, you know, kind of, we're learning like
very proper Maliki jurisprudence, which is a form
of Islamic law, out the gate.
Sheikh Hams at that point, I think, was
abroad in Mauritania, eventually comes back.
And then we met him, ironically, not through
Sheikh Khatri and Uncle Tarif, but through a
man who, again, you know, it's hard to
not weep thinking about Uncle Muhammad Abdul-Bari,
who's an Irish American convert, who was a
longtime friend of Sheikh Hamza.
He just invites us into his house and
he's like, come over and eat.
And so we go to his house and
we're eating, hang out.
He took us under his wing.
My first iftar ever, my first time I
ever broke fast after fasting Ramadan, I was
at his home.
And he eventually introduces us to Sheikh Hamza
and they have, they have been friends for
a long time.
And so, yeah, it's within the first year
of embracing Islam that we were blessed and
very honored.
And I think very uniquely afforded the opportunity
to benefit from the great scholarship of Sheikh
Hamza Yusuf and his contribution.
You know, God bless him.
Because I'm just trying to see, like, in
terms of, you know, my own trajectory and
where the alignments are.
Because I'm thinking September 5th, 1996, that's, you
know, Labor Day, 1996, the big Isna annual
convention.
Sheikh Hamza is a prominent speaker.
I know for sure 1996 he was there.
I think that might have been the year
it was either in Columbus or it was
back in Chicago.
So already Sheikh Hamza is on the national
scene.
Is that is that known here locally?
Well, you know, those tapes, right?
Those cassette tapes.
Yeah.
Alhambra productions, Alhambra productions, the Jowl in the
New World Order.
And I mean, death and dying.
And so, yeah, I mean, actually, before I
met Sheikh Hamza, I heard a tape of
him at I think Mustafa's house.
I was like, man, that guy's smart.
I was like, I hear voices like that.
It's like, and he, you know, he had
this voice.
It was like what he was saying was
like, whoa, like, I mean, and I think,
again, it's easy to live in the age
of someone that great and to offer your
critique of what they may be doing or
saying.
But take a step back and think about
the historical contribution of someone like Hamza Yusuf,
a generation of people, a generation, literally a
generation of people who are inspired to learn
about Islam or who inspired to even think
critically, think critically, you know, about Islam or
about anything else.
You know, we were the first I have
this on my desk and I have it
here every day as a reminder.
You know, the first time anyone wrote the
alphabet, the Arabic alphabet for me was Sheikh
Hamza, you know, in 1996.
And I have it here.
I look at it all day, every day
as a reminder.
Like, don't forget where you came from.
This is who taught you Arabic.
And he said, copy this as many times
as you can and by the hands of
our dictionary.
And so here's my copying it on the
60 bus back to my house in Campbell
from his house over off Monroe in Santa
Clara next to my poetry of whatever.
And so this just for the sake of
the microphone.
So we're what we're looking at is the
Arabic alphabet written by Sheikh Hamza written by
Sheikh Hamza on a spiral notebook, right?
And then me copying it.
And so, you know, I mean, I teach
Arabic now and I and I.
So, you know, he's at Isna in a
mega conference, but he's still teaching the convert
how to do all of that.
Fascinating for me.
Well, I mean, maybe you can contextualize that
for us a little bit.
What what was your perception of Sheikh Hamza
and the role that he was playing, not
just in your life at that moment, but
for the community as a whole?
Because because as pervades the saying, I mean,
that's really when he started to become more
prominent in people's awareness.
Right.
Well, I think we knew that.
I mean, by that point, I haven't been
to Isna anywhere.
But what I'm seeing up close and personal
is him beginning to translate works and beginning
to really, you know, what the stuff that
ultimately becomes the kind of core of what
is now the Tunic College and this idea
of literally translating Islam, contextualizing Islam, bringing Islam
here and giving it a proper institutional articulation.
We're seeing the very beginning of that, at
least in terms of his translated works and
the stuff that he begins to write.
And so my context is more having an
up close and personal look at someone who's
obviously mastered the Arabic language beyond and watching
Arabs dumbfounded, literally watching people who are themselves
children of scholars, literally dumbfounded by his command
of the Arabic language and all of its
different sciences.
So I'm looking at him more as like
a really scholar.
And simultaneously, he's my mentor.
He's the person who's, who's, you know, you
know, yeah, I could tell you a story
too, about just really, I remember going to
Sheikh Hamza, again, this is the angry 1990s,
you know, fight the police, F the police,
you know, rage against the machine kid.
And so I'm wearing camel pants at the
class at Ibn Ashur about Maliki Fitr.
And I said to Sheikh Hamza, do you
have any advice to those of us amongst
the community who want to speak truth to
power and want to blah, blah, blah, we
want to, you know, speak, you know, to
the cause of justice, he looked at me
dead in the face, he said, get married.
And I was like, and guess what, I
got married.
Chill out a little bit, you know.
And I mean, I think that there's a
lot of angry young men that it would
do them good to get married and then
see how much of a revolutionary you are
when you have to wake up at two
o'clock in the morning to go buy
diapers, you got to pay rent, right, keep
health insurance for your kids and begin to
do a college, college fund for your children.
And okay, yalla, let's see how much of
a revolutionary you are.
So I don't know if that story kind
of narrates that kind of highlights.
He's our mentor.
He's like, he's, he's agitating very real things
for us, right?
And even on the national scene.
I mean, like, there's a book coming out
in December by Zarina Greenwald, who I would
love to have on the show.
She's a professor at Yale.
She actually spoke at this last convocation that
Zaytuna had.
Her book is called Islam as a Foreign
Country.
And in it, she talks about the crisis
of authority, you know, in the American Muslim
community here.
And, you know, I mean, she's dedicated a
whole chunk of her book just talking about
how people like Imam Zaid Shaker, you know,
Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, how they changed the entire
national discourse for the Muslim community.
And you really see that as a ship.
So I mean, from my vantage point, attending
these large conferences attended by tens of thousands
of people, you know, you see that change.
You see that change happen very, very drastically
in terms of the national dialogue.
So that's a different story.
I mean, I don't want to bring in
that story, but I think that that's a
story that needs to be listened up for
future episodes.
Yeah, exactly.
We'll have to put a pin in that.
Yeah, exactly.
So now this is Zaytuna's at the old,
off of Jackson.
No, this is before that.
So this is 96 Zaytuna started.
Dr. Hisham El Elusi and Sheikh Hamza co
-founded.
It's basically running out of Sheikh Hamza's house.
And then eventually there was a small office
in micro based technologies ran by a man
named Abed Malik and a brother named Mazen
Halabi was one of the first Zaytuna staff
members.
He was my roommate, actually, for four months.
He was my roommate when I first moved
here.
Yeah.
And Mazen was also my roommate.
And he could tell you a story that
I hope he doesn't.
But, you know, Mazen again, these are some
of the unsung heroes, man, that may or
may not make it into the books.
But some of the real critical people, Mazen's
running this little office, working on translations, working
on some of the early publications.
I ended up working in that company as
the sales manager.
So the office that the first Zaytuna, the
building that the first Zaytuna office was ever
in also was a company that I happened
to work for.
But that's like, this is 99, 2000, which
is right around the same time that the
property and Hayward had been purchased.
So this is kind of the early budding
phase of Zaytuna.
In between those two things, I go overseas,
live in Morocco, get married, live in Egypt,
visit Saudi Arabia.
Which makes your story even more interesting because
you marry a Moroccan woman in Morocco.
So talk about, you know, we've already talked
about your own background, but now the sort
of the next chapter becoming even more colorful.
Yeah.
I mean, imagine your children now.
Yeah, exactly.
Your children telling their story.
Well, I mean, yeah.
I mean, honestly, I think the two, if
there was a story I could tell that
I think tells that very long story as
short as possible, it was when my father
and my wife's father met for the first
time three years ago on Thanksgiving.
I've heard you say it.
It's beautiful.
And you know, my father-in-law comes
from a long line of noble scholars and
people who were renowned kind of scholars and
very saintly people within the Muslim tradition in
the old imperial city of Fez in Morocco.
They're distant relatives of the current king of
Morocco.
He was a direct student of Shaykh Ibn
Habib, was one of the great, great scholars,
later scholars in Moroccan Islamic history.
There's a veneration in Muslim tradition and in
the Muslim world for people who are descendants
of the Prophet Muhammad, known as the Sharif.
They're also, yeah, they're also Shorafa, which means
that they have, like other people that I
know, have, you know, a family tree that
kind of traces their lineage back to the
Prophet Muhammad.
So needless to say, here comes this kind
of, this kind of aspiring dervish from, you
know, from Northern California, Indian and Moroccan and
Arabic.
And Shaykh Hamza again sends me to her
father's house just to kind of stay there
for a few days.
And I look up six months later and
I'm engaged and, you know, and her father
was a longtime friend, known Shaykh Hamza, so
I think he was 18 or something like
that.
And Shaykh Hamza very graciously hooks us up
with her father.
We stay there, a friend of mine and
myself stay there, studying Arabic and eventually, yeah,
make a long story short, I marry his
daughter.
So he's like my teacher and my father
-in-law, which makes for, you know, a
really very, very, very loaded and very blessed,
no, really very intense relationship because now like
your Shaykh is your father-in-law.
Which correct me if I'm wrong, I mean,
it's not too uncommon in Muslim tradition, right?
For that to happen?
Not at all.
But it's, I mean, it's part of what
I mean, not to downplay your story.
I mean, in terms of this is part
of a greater narrative.
It's a very different take on in-laws.
You find kind of in some other circles,
you know, where it's like, that's my family.
It's not like it's so, but again, I'm
coming from the background.
I don't even, I don't know who my
ancestors were, because some slave masters stole their
name.
That's the reality.
So you go from that to someone who's
basically nobility.
Trace their lineage person by person.
Quite literally, yeah.
Centuries.
Quite literally, yeah.
And so it sounds absurd.
It's my life, but it sounds completely astonishing.
Long story short, we move home, we get
married.
We live in Egypt.
We live in Saudi Arabia.
We move home from the kind of early
days of when people begin to hear about
Zeytun Institute, 2000, fast forward to 2010 or
whatever it was, 2011.
Our fathers hadn't met yet.
Our mothers had met because my mother went
to Morocco.
Her parents eventually get green cards to come
here.
It's the first Thanksgiving when our entire family,
our kind of bigger family is going to
be all together.
And it's at my house.
And my father-in-law is a very
beautiful man.
And he's a very, he's a very saintly
man.
But he's also a very traditional man.
I mean, he wears like a robe and
a turban all the time.
Like he doesn't go out.
That's how he always dresses.
My father is a 70 year old black
man from Oklahoma.
He is a traditional man in his own
sense, but it's a very different tradition.
Needless to say, they've never met there.
So here's this moment where it's like our
father's meeting for the first time.
I'm nervous as can be.
My father is also handicapped because of a
near death car accident that he got in
some years ago.
So he's kind of coming up to the
door of my house with his walker.
And now comes my father-in-law and
they embrace and they're just both smiling and
saying, I love you and my brother and
you're so beautiful.
And there's like this transitor.
And you know, men, I don't know how
to process this.
I'm like, so I just walk away because
I'm like, this is too heavy.
It was too deep.
Like they had this really kind of deep
fraternal moment.
And I was just like, I walked away.
Before I know it, my father-in-law,
after he gets my dad in the house,
he literally goes bolting up to his room
and he's bawling, like profusely, profusely weeping.
And I'm like, Oh my God, what happened?
He comes down and he said, I'm really
sorry for losing it, but he reminded me
of my father.
And so he, and you know, again, from
this completely different background, and from that moment,
they're just like, they're like peas in a
pod.
I mean, they're just, I mean, obviously they
don't go golfing together or whatever, but they
love one another.
And it's always my brother.
And to just see all of these notions
of like intolerance and classism and racism and
exclusion, you know, exclusivist kind of otherization, just
in a moment, it'd be childish, culturally, religiously.
Then it came time for dinner and we
got these two big old halal turkeys on
the table.
Well, I was going to say, I mean,
what's noting is the context of this quintessentially
American celebration of Thanksgiving.
I mean, With a bunch of black Native
Americans.
Right.
Talking about a commender, right?
We're talking, you know, a holiday not even
shared by our neighbors to the north of
us.
You know, this is quintessentially American.
So, and this is And so here you
got, you know, you got bean pie, sweet
potato pie and apple pie and, you know,
some Moroccan twist on a turkey, these two
big old halal turkeys and the whole family.
They're all my siblings, everyone.
Well, it's, I mean, just from what you're
describing, it's a reinforcement of one kind of
cultural construct, which is the celebration of Thanksgiving,
and then the dismissal of a different kind
of cultural construct, which is, you know, what
you described, the prejudices and preconceptions.
So the really deep moment for me was
it came time to say grace.
And if, you know, like in Christian families
saying grace, especially the big holiday, Thanksgiving, kind
of a big thing.
And in black families, you know, if the
patriarch or the matriarch gets to saying grace
pretty soon, you're talking about the old pets
and the neighbors in the car.
God bless Mrs. Jones.
Mrs. Jones.
So it was awkward moment where, and my
father's asked me to bless the food in
the past, and I just can't really, you
know, Muslim prayers for eating tend to be
pretty straightforward, bismillah, right, you know, bismillah.
And so I've never, and I've also just
not really felt, it didn't feel right to
me to kind of, you know, it's kind
of the elder usually or whatever.
And my father feels important about that.
So he says, can you please ask your
father not to bless the food?
And that's a big deal for a Christian
man from my father's trajectory to even ask
any other man, let alone a Muslim man,
let alone a Muslim man from Morocco, let
alone basically an Arab sheikh, basically, to bless
the food.
And so my father said, well, he's welcome
to, you know, whatever he wants.
So my father blesses the food and was
so deferential in his saying grace that he
didn't even say in Jesus name at the
end of it, which again, people at his
church, if they're listening to this make, I
mean, I mean, but he was just out
of deference.
He didn't want to say, you know, what
he would typically say in Jesus name.
Amen.
And then my father read the fatiha and
that was our Thanksgiving dinner.
And that's basically our experience is like, yeah,
man, you know, the anti-black sentiments that
you find in certain communities, the anti-Muslim
sentiments that you find in others, all of
that stuff, there's challenges, like people are family
and food has a, you know, a powerful
kind of magnetic power to bring us all
together, you know, but when we challenge ourselves
a little bit, you know, and so that
informs a lot of my work is just
that I don't believe, I don't believe the
hype to use a, you know, statement popularized
by the public enemy.
Don't believe the hype.
I don't believe that we can, you know,
if we were to try to ask, answer
Rodney King, yes, we can, I'll get along
if we would just challenge ourselves a little
bit, you know?
So, I mean, I think you mentioned your
work.
I think this presents a good segue to
talk about.
Well, and just to sort of fill in
a little bit of a gap here, because
I think this is an important part of
the story, you're overseas and at what point
does 9-11 happen and what role does
that play, if any?
Well, I mean, I don't think there's anybody
alive in our age that it didn't have
an immediate or, you know, an indirect impact
on.
9-11 happens five days after I become
a father, when my wife is laying in
bed, recuperating from giving birth to our oldest
son, Muhammad.
And again, it's one of those moments where,
you know, it's hard to not weep thinking
back on that morning, because, you know, my
son, interestingly, and not a lot of people
know this, was born five years to the
day, almost to the hour of my shahadah.
So I became Muslim, became a father on
the same day.
So September 6 is always kind of, it's
more important than any other day, frankly, every
year for me.
My, you know, again, 9-11 happens, what
ends up becoming, I think, 7 or 8
a.m. Pacific Standard Time.
Correct.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so it's early in the morning.
I get a call from a buddy.
He says, I think he said they hit
the Pentagon.
I think it was what he said first.
I didn't have a TV.
I go online.
I just remember that picture of Bush's face
and then the image of the plane kind
of crashing into the thing.
And I'm just like, oh, my God, get
a call from my dad.
And he's obviously concerned for our well-being.
Long story short, you know, like a lot
of other families, we're like, I don't know,
how safe is it?
What do you know?
Do you go out?
Do you not go out?
And by the grace of God, I mean,
I think the fact that there was not
more violence after 9-11 is a powerful
testimony to the American people's tolerance.
I mean, if we're fair, if we're fair,
you know, I thought it was going to
be a bloodbath, to be honest with you.
And yeah, there's been a lot of errors
on a lot of different sides after 9
-11.
But I think one of the successes was
people's ability to and, you know, and condolences
to the people who have been lost because
of and again, I'm talking about a local
context.
I'm not talking about a geopolitical critique.
It's a different ball of wax.
That's a whole separate conversation.
Yeah, but I mean, so yeah, how does
it affect?
I mean, well, you know, there's the whole
George Bush, you're either with us or with
them statement and proving that dichotomy false or
not.
And that's not the right way to say
it.
Proving that false, not a dichotomy.
Right.
And say, right.
Actually, Mr. President, we're not with you or
with them in terms of endorsing or supporting
indiscriminate violence.
Right.
Period.
This is not that simple.
What I remember about when President Bush made
that statement was Sheikh Hamza was in the
audience.
Yeah, he was invited there.
And I remember there was a lot of
criticism of that from within the Muslim community.
And I remember feeling like, well, don't we
want that?
Don't we want people representing that, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, and again, you know, I know
Sheikh Hamza not only as a public figure,
but also as someone who's been an immediate
mentor to me and kind of a father
figure.
And I have never seen, and I've been
with him in several countries and dozens of
states and hundreds of situations.
I have never seen anything that would cause
me to question his commitment to truth or
cause me to question his personal uprightness.
And I mean, behind closed doors in a
multitude of situations, performed hajj with him twice,
have been a student for 17 years.
So when he went, to me, it's like,
I know he's not shooting entirely from the
hip.
I mean, inevitably, he's responding like everybody else
is responding to a very, very difficult situation.
But I know he's talking to his teachers.
I know he's getting the advice of his
elders.
And I know that he's seeking divine guidance.
And I know that he's doing his best.
And he may have made some statements like
a lot of people who, you know, one
could unpackage and deconstruct.
But I'll tell you one thing.
He's one of the people who rose to
the occasion while a lot of other people
sat at the sideline.
And, you know, granted, there wasn't, you know,
there wasn't really social media wasn't as big
back then.
And so you didn't have the pundits that
you have now, the people pontificating from behind
their keyboard, like the way you have now.
But had you had that, there would have
just been a lot of people who were
doing nothing more than clicktivism, clicking this and
liking this and reacting to this, reacting to
that.
Clicktivism, you know, where Micah White coined that,
by the way, I believe Micah White coined
it, the famous journalist.
But I don't want to take credit.
He has a really interesting article moving, you
know, beyond clicktivism.
There was a piece in AdBusters.
Anyways, I don't want to.
But, uh, yeah, man.
I mean, um, so I was also hearing,
hearing the details of him being at, I
believe, the Pentagon or the White House when
they had named the, the, the operation in
Iraq, Operation Infinite Justice.
Infinite Justice.
And Sheikh Hamza says to the rabbi, and
I believe another faith leader, I don't remember
who, we can't let him say that.
And neither of them were willing to.
And he said, Mr. President, I'm sorry, but
you can't call it that.
You know, we believe that to be an
attribute of God.
And I think President Bush being the brilliant,
um, you know, scholar, he has said something
like, we don't have theologians down at the
Pentagon or whatever.
He said something, something like that.
I mean, I wasn't there, but to his
credit, I mean, there's some Muslims, there's some
Muslims I would say like, well, it's almost
endorsing the, the operation, but giving it a
better name.
The prophet said the best struggle is to
speak truth in the face of a tyrannical
ruler.
And so I've never had the opportunity to
criticize the president.
I think that's happening inside of the oval
office.
I mean, literally, I think from this, the
version I heard, you know what I mean?
So it's like, would you really say anything?
You want to talk about corridors of power?
So it's like speaking truth to power, quite
literally.
So again, I mean, I believe wholeheartedly that
Sheikh Hamza really did his level best.
And people also didn't see the level of
personal sacrifice, the level of family sacrifice, the
level of, I mean, I know from traveling.
And, and, and, you know, speaking publicly more
than I would like to just your health,
you know, the lack of sleep.
I mean, Sheikh Hamza, Sheikh Hamza has given
his life, man.
And so people who want to critique, they're
welcome to critique, but, you know, I mean,
he rose to the occasion and God, thank
God that he was there as a voice
of reason.
When you had other voices from the Muslim
community who basically put the community's foot in
its mouth on behalf of whoever, you know,
saying this or that.
So, I mean, I really believe Sheikh Hamza
did his level best.
And I don't know that I could have,
I could have done what he did or
sure, sure, surely could have done any better.
So I don't know if I'm answering your
question.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Well, and, and I think to that point,
that, that kind of brings us to, you
know, you've talked about the work you're doing
and it, it seems like the, the role
that this organization serves right now for the
community in, in the aftermath of 9-11,
10 years later, is pretty important in terms
of interfaith outreach and whatnot.
And I was wondering if you could get
into that a little bit, what led to
Talib's founding and what does it represent today?
What do you hope it represents eventually?
Well, I mean, I think it's been kind
of, yeah, I mean, I think the context
has been provided to, and other times I
may not address it this directly, but Tet
-Leaf essentially comes out of Zaytuna Institute's outreach
program.
So from 2002, basically aftermath of 9-11
until 2005, what is now Tet-Leaf was
Zaytuna Institute's outreach program operating under the auspices
of Zaytuna before the birth of Zaytuna College.
Right.
And as Zaytuna Institute begins to kind of
tread the path toward becoming a formal college,
some of the programs that were under the
auspices of Zaytuna were requested to spin off
and to form independent non-profit initiatives.
Tet-Leaf is basically one of those.
While we were operating under the auspices of
Zaytuna, I was the director of that program
and saw literally dozens, probably more accurately, a
couple hundred people embrace Islam through that program
who had either heard about Zaytuna through the
work of Sheikh Hamza or the very esteemed
scholar, Imam Zaid Chakra, who ultimately joins the
team there.
And so imagine anybody nationally or globally, for
that matter, who hears about them and then
wants to inquire more about Islam.
That comes essentially across my desk over the
course of that.
So there was a plethora of people from
a wide array of experiences.
So yeah, a kind of a community, a
micro-community was born within a community almost,
if that makes sense.
We were focusing on youth and focusing on
converts and then also focusing on incarcerated Muslims.
So we're talking circa 2003-2004.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And in that period, I began to go
into the prisons as a volunteer.
When Tet-Leaf was born in 2005, by
that point, I'm a full-time chaplain for
the State of California Department of Corrections, working
as a Muslim chaplain.
And all of that stuff is born out
of the Zaytuna Institute outreach program and basically
is, again, on the coattails of Sheikh Hamza
and Imam Zaid.
So, yeah, in 2005, we are now an
independent organization that's focusing on speaking to the
needs and speaking to the questions of folks
that are interested in learning about Islam from
other faith communities and faith experiences and then
also assisting those people amongst, you know, those
interested that end up embracing Islam, which is,
as you know, a large number of people,
people convert to Islam, you know, some would
say 10, 20, 30, maybe 50,000 people
annually in the U.S. More or less,
in any way, there's a lot of people.
And in any given community, you'll see over
the course of years, several dozen people usually
embrace Islam.
So, yeah, I mean, there's this community born
where you've got people everywhere from directors of
Fortune 500 companies to people coming out of
the prison and everything in between who want
to become Muslim.
And so that's been my work for the
last, you know, last 10 years or so
or 12 years or so.
Tatlif, by the time it comes into kind
of a formal organizational body, attempts to provide
space, provide content, provide companionship that can allow
for a healthy understanding, embrace and realization of
Islam.
And what that means in English is that
we want to make the process of learning
about Islam, conversion to Islam or recommitment to
Islam more sustainable in our context.
I mean, that's what it really means.
And out of that idea, again, another community
is born.
So people who know Tatlif from being in
the community would know it as a place
where you can kind of go and see
a really unique mix of people that come
from historically Muslim families and historically Muslim countries
to people converted to Islam, to non-Muslim
guests.
People really enjoying, I think, a really unique
space for fellowship and learning and what have
you.
We have a branch here in Fremont and
one now in Chicago as well.
If you could speak to just for those
who don't know, like what the word Tatlif
means.
What Tatlif basically means, everything we've talked about,
it means reconciliation.
It means it means bringing hearts together.
It means producing that state that is prevalent
in the absence of war.
It means giving people the ability to manifest
goodwill after themselves haven't been manifested.
It means uniting.
It means reconciling between that or those two
things that appear at first glance to be
irreconcilable opposites, which is the state of human
psyches and human souls.
And a lot of times that we look
at ourselves and think, man, I could never
get along with this cat, but God and
his omnipotent, you know, providential power unites people's
hearts.
And so that's what Tatlif means.
It just means kind of, but it also
another meaning that people don't tend to know
is that Tatlif also means penmanship or authorship,
a writer, an author.
And so the reason that I so appreciate
the word with all its offerings is that
like it means bringing people's hearts together, but
also telling a story.
And that's, I think it's just a beautiful
word.
Telling a narrative, yeah.
Yeah.
People call it Tatlif sometimes, which means feeding
goats.
If you make the guttural A.
Yeah, the guttural A, it means feeding goats,
which may have its own interpretive conversation.
There you go, yeah.
Tatlif just means, yeah, it means bringing hearts
together.
And what would you like this organization to
represent?
The future.
And what is the future?
As corny as that sounds.
But what does that mean?
I mean, well, there are some people for
whom the future is a dark place where
a lot of bad stuff happens and a
lot of people get hurt.
And there's some people investing in that.
And for some people, the future is a
world where the evil has been mitigated, the
forces of darkness have been sidelined, and where
human beings have been given the opportunity to
come to know and come to love one
another.
And you've got to be a dreamer to
believe in the second one.
But I'm a dreamer, as my board are
dreamers and my team here are dreamers.
It's like, we can, again, trying to answer
Rodney King's proverbial question, can we all get
along?
It's like, yeah, Inshallah, God willing, we can.
So that's what I mean by the future.
Simply, kind of on a more immediate level,
it means where my children and your children
and Professor's children and our community's children, they
feel okay about being Muslim as Americans.
Where practicing Islam for them is an American
option.
And I say it that way deliberately, because
there are a lot of other American options.
And a lot of Muslim kids choose other
options.
And a place where our kids are not
living in this socially schizophrenic, dichotomous, confused, Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, multiple modality type experience,
where it's just normal, man.
For better or worse.
However devout they may or may not be,
but they identify as Muslim and hopefully take
that seriously.
And I think that it's a challenge.
It's one thing for me to convert to
Islam.
It's another thing for you to be born
Muslim in a devout family.
For our kids, it's going to mean, it's
going to be, our young people today are
faced with challenges that are simply unprecedented in
human history.
It has never been more unique, if not
more challenging, to just be a normal young
person.
Can you expand on that a little bit?
Well, I mean, my father remembers when the
first television came to his neighborhood.
My daughter knows more about the iPhone than
I do, and she's six.
Do the math.
I mean, the technological advances.
I mean, I think we harp a lot
on social media.
But the reality is that those are vehicles
that a lot of people are using for
good, but maybe as many, if not more
people are using for, you know, maybe less
than virtuous things at times.
And so, just like living it.
And again, when I got out of high
school, they had those big old brick cell
phones.
Yeah, you were really cool if you had
a pager, man.
I mean, you were like, oh gee, if
you had a pager.
And so, look, again, just how quickly things...
And so, we don't even know what does
the future hold in terms of the technological
tools for people to do good or to
do bad, right?
That's what I mean, just like uniquely challenged.
To me, it's not necessarily a dark, cloudy
future, but it's definitely a challenging one.
Yeah, I think, again, what were the things
popular in music when I was in high
school compared to what are the things popular
for kids now in popular music?
Let alone what was popular for my...
Elvis was racy, man.
Ray Charles singing secular music and not singing
church music was racy, man.
I mean, that's a far cry from twerking
or this or that or any other stuff
that kids are having to...
You know, Miley Cyrus has now become a
* symbol.
And that's popular music.
And I'm not trying to pick on Miley
Cyrus, but I'm just saying...
No, really, I mean, I'm not that guy.
I'm not the guy that likes to harp
on popular culture, because kids are doing what
they're dealing with, but I do think that
it's a different world than the one we
grew up in, for sure.
Not to mention, what's the legacy we're leaving
them?
We're leaving them a world where there's so
many theaters of war, you can't even count
them.
A world where climate change has brought this
thing called global warming so imminently upon us
that we don't even...
And people are sort of arguing about whether
or not there's a human component.
You know what I'm saying?
So we're leaving them a world...
We're leaving them Syria.
We're leaving them the south side of Chicago.
And I know I'm beginning to...
The disparity between the rich and the poor.
I'm beginning to paint that first future.
Because guess what, homie, it doesn't...
Right now, if you look out there, it
looks pretty bleak.
So we've got to try to paint that
other world.
It hasn't been written, luckily.
And it's scary, man.
I know you guys are both parents.
I know it keeps you up at night.
And I'll be honest with you, there's people
who lose sleep over money, who lose sleep
over the future of this country, and the
future of this world, and the future of
our children.
Money comes and goes, but it's like, what
world are we leaving behind for our kids?
So I think at least, you've got to
create a space for them to at least
talk about it, you know?
I mean, I'm on the board of the
high school called the Vera Weaves High School,
and there's times when I create space for
conversation with the kids.
And I remember one day we'd shown a
video and asked the kids, what do you
guys think about this video?
And they all expressed themselves and they gave
kind of the right answer.
So this one young man, brilliant young kid,
I said to him, I said, what did
you think about it?
He goes, well, it just made me so
proud to be a Muslim and so thankful
for the mosques in our community.
I said, is that what you really feel?
And he said, no.
And I said, what do you really feel?
He goes, I don't know.
And he just wanted to move it on.
There was a conversation with kids on the
south side of Chicago that's now officially the
murder capital of America as of last weekend.
300 people almost killed this year.
500 plus last year.
13 people shot in one weekend last weekend.
A young man was asked by one of
our leaders in that community, how does this
all make you feel?
And he said, Facebook.
She said, how does it make you feel?
He said, Facebook.
She said, what do you mean?
He said, I just looked on Facebook to
see what other people were feeling.
So it's like, how do I even feel
about the fact that kids my age are
dropping left and right?
It's emotion by proxy.
Which is interesting because one of the things
in the news lately has been this whole
fiasco over the whole Miss America and people
taking to the Twitter sphere.
People tweeting all kinds of bigoted and racist
remarks.
Twitter lets people bypass the filter inside your
head where you're like, is this appropriate?
Twitter just kind of jumps over that sometimes.
I was wondering if you could talk about
that a little bit.
The role of engagement, the role of cultural
engagement for this future generation.
How do they embody their I don't want
to say their Muslimness but their Islam in
a way that's that feels safe for people
who think that a Hindu woman in a
bathing suit is too Muslim.
That's a big conversation because it highlights the
fact that many Muslims are afraid of racializing
and afraid of admitting that the majority of
our community are brown folk at least.
Which means something very real for a culture
that's still seized through the lens of white
supremacy.
If I'm not mistaken, the majority of people
who were victims of hate crimes after 9
-11 were Sikhs.
In fact, just two days ago there was
a professor in New York a Sikh professor
who was beaten called a Samahai terrorist.
Do the math.
It says something about the very deep levels
of ignorance in pockets of pockets It's really
important that we say that.
It's pockets of the greater community but very
very deep levels of ignorance.
But it also says something about the imperative
of people in communities of color to understand
themselves and to speak meaningfully about that, especially
for their children.
I was picked up in a taxi from
SFO, San Francisco airport, coming home.
I live 45 minutes south of the airport
and this kid who picks me up obviously
a South Asian kid, but you never know
I don't want to make assumptions.
Is he Muslim?
Is he Sikh?
Is he Hindu?
By the time we get halfway home, I
basically became his counselor.
I'm walking through stuff with his parents and
life and this and that and by the
time we get over the bridge and we're
in Fremont, 10 minutes from my house or
so, he says he said a name that
I knew he was identifiably Sikh.
I just happen to know I have enough
Sikh friends and community folks I grew up
with to know that name.
But then he wanted to change his first
name.
He's like, I want to change my first
name to such and such.
I said, why do you want to do
this?
He said, I just want to be able
to identify as American.
He's trying to negotiate all this stuff that
a lot of kids from communities of color
are trying.
Especially people who come from Muslim majority countries
or other Middle Eastern or South Asian countries.
So we talked about that a little bit
and he said, My father is a Sikh.
Do you know who Sikhs are?
I said, a little bit.
I'm just trying to let the kid talk.
He said, they wear the turbans.
You heard about the shootings?
This was a couple weeks after the shootings
in Wisconsin.
I think it was.
So I was like, yeah.
He goes, you know why they did that?
I said, because they thought we were Muslim.
He doesn't know I'm Muslim yet.
I'm Witten Cannon.
I'm just Mr. Cannon.
I'm a guy wearing a suit and tie.
He doesn't know who I am.
He looks in the rear view mirror and
goes, Never trust a Muslim.
I was like, I think I'm in trouble.
He goes, do you know what Islam teaches?
I was like, just tell me.
He goes, they teach about this thing called
Jihad.
Do you know what Jihad is?
I was like, tell me.
He says, they teach that in order to
go to paradise you have to kill And
I'm just kind of letting him talk, listening
to this whole thing.
He just threw the Muslims under the bus,
pulled them out and threw them back under.
I'm just listening.
By the time we get about five minutes
from my house, I'm thinking, am I going
to text my wife and ask her to
come outside?
Because she's pretty identified as a Muslim.
How am I going to do this?
This is the same thing I experienced as
a black American who appears to be, by
white standards, lighter skinned.
Hearing the N word left and right going
on.
I know this scenario.
Let's just say I've navigated these waters before.
We pull up to the house.
I said, bro, can I tell you something?
I look over the river and I said,
I'm a Muslim.
He kind of shook.
He goes, what?
I go, I'm a Muslim.
I was like, who told you that stuff?
And we just kind of talked about it.
Point by point, kind of unpackaged and refuted
the fallacy in a lot of what he
was saying.
Although, the point that he said about Sikhs
being attacked because people thought they were Muslims,
there may be some validity to that.
The work of Muslim advocates and their doing
work with communities of color that are allies
of the Muslim cause and some of them
being from the Sikh community, I think is
really important.
They honor two Sikh lawyers who helped with
some of the advocacy that Muslim advocates were
involved in.
Long story short, we're all in it together.
It is a problem.
I think that means that even within specific
micro-communities, in communities of color, there needs
to be dialogue.
In other words, Muslims and Hindus that come
from the same parts of the world need
to talk to one another.
They need to be in communication and they
need to identify where there can be collaborative
efforts.
What are the negotiables and the non-negotiables?
We need to be communities that speak to
one another.
Because if we're not, you know, I mean,
that's the kind of stuff that's going to
happen.
But yeah, to be honest with you, I'm
not up on the Miss America thing.
I didn't read up on it enough to
really speak meaningfully to it.
No, no, but I think you did.
Stupid people said ignorant comments and demonstrated that.
Someone told me something that I think sums
it all up.
Haters gonna hate and potatoes gonna potato.
Whatever that means.
I was going to say, wow, we can
just unpackage that.
So I know we've unpacked a lot and
we've covered a lot but I wanted to
sort of end on a light sort of
note because I know you've talked about your
work with Tatlief and I think that represents
so much of our conversation just tonight, just
on this show.
But your work with your more profit endeavor
which is Udimentary.
I'd love for you to speak about that
because I think that also is informed from
your own experiences and represents your own travels
and what you bring or what makes you
you.
So I'd love for you to talk about
that as well.
Yeah, Udimentary as a company, we started in
2004 and it really just came out of
a passion that myself and the co-owner,
Micah Anderson had for Ud which is a
type of high-end, very rare, very cherished,
prized kind of perfume and incense that grows
primarily in South Asia and Southeast Asia.
It's wood?
Yeah, it's wood that comes from a species
called the Aquilaria trees, the dominant species and
it basically is a tree that gets infected
and the antibody that the tree produces is
what makes the perfume.
So it's only infected trees that have brought
this antibody that makes the perfume which makes
for a very, very rare product the higher
qualities in a beautiful allegory.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
One of the great Imams said you should
be like Ud that even as it burns
it just becomes more perfumed.
In other words that when people mistreat you
that may be our answer to the Samaritans.
Right, right.
And maybe the meaning of that potato?
Sorry.
Yeah, so Ud is the higher qualities of
it are far more expensive than gold and
the kind of most expensive kinds can be
in the upwards of quarter million, half a
million dollars per kilo.
So from that down to five, six bucks
a gram, the wood itself that is essentially
put on a coal and made for this
very kind of tenacious incense is a very
prized and it's mostly popularized in the Middle
East although the Japanese have a very, very
elegant and very celebrated and time tested tradition
with Alu's wood.
So it just came out of a passion
for learning about the incense and about the
oil.
My co-owner lived in Indonesia for the
better part of five or six years and
we both traveled extensively in the region sourcing
the product and we brought it back and
so we just recently opened up an Ud
bar in Fremont and we also kind of
look at the intersectionality between scent and caffeine
and high-end coffee and tea and trying
to again revive that the tradition that like
it's about more than just ordering a latte
at a drive-thru but actually preparing things
well preparing tea well, serving gung fu, oolong,
Chinese style tea and so Udimentary is kind
of about an experience for us.
It's about sitting with people smelling beautiful scents
drinking beautiful beverages and having good company.
It's about the people and about the drink
and about what we call the burn of
kind of so yeah, we've by the grace
of God enjoyed reasonable success and the company's
growing we just recently launched kind of the
two point of our website but that's one
of the passions one of my passions is
like making good coffee, making good tea and
just exploring perfume and what all that means
and it's taken me to some fascinating places
in the world and meeting people in a
very, very expensive but a very, very elegant
subculture kind of all throughout really the world
but taking me to some fascinating places and
meeting some fascinating people and to end with
your slogan which is don't hate fumigate don't
hate fumigate it's a beautiful ending to the
show too so people can find more information
about Tetleaf Collective at the URL for the
website yeah, tetleafcollective.org or the facebook page
which is Tetleaf Collective the twitter handle is
just at tetleaf t-a-l-e-f
o-u-d-i n-e-m-t
-a-r-y excellent, well I hope people
will definitely check those out they asked me,
that wasn't a shameless plug we want to
make sure we get the word out we
want people to seek it out as I
said up top just from a personal level
I was holding out to make our show
fit with your schedule and I'm really glad
that we did that because I was absolutely
enraptured for the past little under an hour
and a half and I think I'm very
confident our listeners will be as well and
I think this makes for a very auspicious
start for what will hopefully be a long
run on this show well I'm partly embarrassed
partly humbled but mostly honored by the invitation
well and Pervez do you have any no
I think you summed it up really well
in terms of what having Osama on the
show meant and really starting it off that
way but yeah thank you for your time
yeah thank you Sadie Osama for your time
and thank you everyone out there for listening,
this was our first episode and we hope
you'll join us for the next and the
next one after that and we hope Sadie
Osama will be able to join us again
for another episode down the line hopefully, thank
you for listening