Waleed Basyouni – Torch Bearers Series – Honor and Dignity Through Learning History

			How many Laos Laos Salam ala rasulillah ma shoukry here now, this is my torchbearers testimonial. So
when I had taken this class A number of years ago, and I know that everybody before they're like,
Listen, it's not a history class, don't mention that it's a history class, but I want to flip that
idea on its head. So what if it's a history class, even if it was a history class, you know what I
hate when people say that they're not interested in history, or the history is boring, you know why?
Because history is one of the sources of your identity, if you don't know where you've been, how do
you know where you are? How do you know who you are. And that's why, you know, the grandchildren of
		

			the Sahaba is my as the son of them hammer the side and the son of side of Nebula cos he said that
my dad used to teach me the seat of the province of the ladies in him. And he used to tell me that
this is your honor, and the honor of your father's, so don't squander it, don't lose it. We learned
from American history that one of the things that they used to do when they would bring slaves over
when they would bring free men over, but wanted to transform them into being slaves is that they
separated them, they disengage them from their history, so that they could then reshape their
identity, you see, so history has a really, really important effect as to who you are, and who you
		

			see yourself to be in the world. And so when I took torchbearers, one of the things that I benefited
the most from torchbearers even more than the details of the scholars in their lives and the events
that shaped their lives than any of that was just walking out of that class with confidence. Welcome
cloud of that class with dignity and recognizing that the Islam that I inherited, the Islam that I'm
a part of, was able to produce such masters in human sciences, such people who, you know, create a
people like disease and created jurists, like Fatima, some of Fundy and creative people were able to
benefit their communities like Chateau de la de Louis, I remember I had met a young man who was of
		

			Somali ethnicity, or that's where he's originally from. And he mentioned that he was studying his
PhD, he was doing his PhD on African history. I want to ask them why he picked African history. He
said, when he was in high school, and this was when, you know, Somali pirates were all over the
media. He said, one of the kids in my class, he asked me and he said, what has Somalia ever
contributed to humanity? And he said, the question was hurtful. But what was more hurtful was that I
didn't know the answer. And so he made that his field of study, you know, I had asked recently, a
group of students and college Muslim students, I had asked them like, how many of you think that
		

			identity is a problem, like you feel uncomfortable with regards to your Muslim identity, or that you
feel that other people find it difficult to, to, to, to feel comfortable in their in their Islamic
identity, and the majority raised their hand. And so when you learn that, you realize that people
need to know where they came from, people need to feel proud of what Islam has produced. And you
know what, it's kind of difficult looking at the president. But when I look back, I'm able to see
that it's not produced people like him, not disease and faulty mentality a lot down to any moment
for it to be under has an anniversary and luckily, Nima fled and so many others, and I just become
		

			inspired, and I become confident. And that's what I got from torchbearers. When I walked out of that
class, I felt happy and confident and dignified and injected with a whole lot of it is, and so
learning who you are the inheritors of or whose legacy you are coming after. That is an incredible
source of pride. It is an incredible source of dignity. And it is an incredible source of confidence
for a community that is so in need of it, that the Islam that I'm carrying now was the same as
tsunami that propelled them and inshallah to Allah, if I go back to it, and if I trust it, like they
trusted it, it will inshallah to Allah allow me and my community to be able to be Bringers of
		

			goodness in every community and in every land that I'm in.