Yasir Qadhi – If Only We Came Together
AI: Summary ©
The success of the United States-led movement in the Middle East and the success of the United States-led movement in the United States, all contribute to the success of Islamic schools. The speaker discusses the potential risks of internal and external threats, including the loss of identity, and the potential impact of the Patriot Act on the American Muslim community. They emphasize the importance of not being painful and not wanting to be painful, and emphasize the return of Islam to Houston.
AI: Summary ©
I was in Spain earlier this year, and
I was shocked.
There are,
percentage wise,
5 times
the percentage of Muslims in Spain as in
America. Percentagewise.
5 times.
In other words, Spain is like 5%, 6%
Muslim. Right? We are 1 or less than
1%. By the way, America is less than
1% Muslim. Do the math. 370, 000, 000,
7, 000, 000 is like literally, you know,
less than 1%.
Spain, 1.5 if you wanna be max. Spain
has 5 to 6% Muslims. Right?
Can anybody guess
with a 6% Muslim population in the entire
country of Spain?
And if Spain is a secular democracy, Spain
is the land of also freedom and whatnot.
Can anybody guess how many purpose built messages
exist in Spain? Give me an idea. Just
guess.
10, 30, 000.
These were all the good guests.
5.
5.
5
purpose built mosques in all of Spain.
1 of them needed government approval sorry. Government
intervention from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in the
eighties, the Granada Mosque in front of Alhambra.
The rest of the country
with great difficulty,
4 mosques were built here and there, purpose
built. The rest of of the musallas
are basements.
People's houses become Jum'ah,
rented facilities that from the outside looks like
a shop. Then for Jum'ah, it becomes place
of Jum'ah.
Now I asked the the Spanish people hold
on. The Spanish Muslims hold on a sec.
The constitution doesn't forbid building moss. They said
yes. But every time you apply,
the government finds some loophole.
Oh, traffic problem.
Oh, this. Oh, that. And they shut it
down
over and over and over again, and there
is no appeal.
It's not like America.
You can't
take the government to court.
This is in Spain.
Europe is not that different.
Again, Norway,
Sweden.
I did a tour of those lands.
Again, shocking statistics.
Norway and Sweden
are almost
10%
Muslim. Oslo. Oslo, I should say. Sweden's cap
Norway's capital. Oslo is 10%
Muslim.
Stockholm is also close to 10%
Muslim.
A small city down south, Malmo, that I
visited,
they project that within
a decade or 2, it will be 30%
Muslim.
30%
Malmo because a lot of refugees came there.
There's barely
1 purpose built mosque
in Malmo.
I think
2 in in in Stockholm.
You know, 1 or 2 in in in
Oslo.
The rest are all these converted places
and for other factors as well.
Whereas here in America,
every minute
a new project is conceived in some state,
A new Masjid is gonna be built. A
new school for the community.
Every single city,
wherever you travel to, there are projects going
on right now.
It's literally like a cascade of dominoes across
this country.
And not just that, but a major,
major
incentive
perk that we have, an opportunity that we
have is that we are being given
our dreams to conceive on a blank canvas.
Why? Because we are the 1st generation over
here to come of age and to be
able to do this.
If you look at European Islam,
because the first generation were migrant workers,
now the 3rd generation because they came in
the forties and fifties, the 3rd generation
that now has the wealth to construct and
to build,
they are hampered
by their own fathers and grandfathers
about the vision, about the conception,
about the sectarianism,
about the narrow mindedness.
In an average street in
UK, in the Muslim suburbs and areas, there's
probably 3, 4, 5 messages within walking distance.
Each 1 doesn't pray behind the other.
And so when they envision something bigger, it's
only for that specific slither within their strand
of Islam.
Whereas over here,
we come together as diverse people, diverse ethnicity,
diverse backgrounds, and we wanna build the best
Islamic school for our children collectively.
We wanna build a masjid that has gymnasium.
We wanna build that has a community center,
a life center.
We are given a blank slate.
No other country in the world has the
freedoms
and the lack of internal
and external bureaucracy.
Understand this point. There is external bureaucracy, the
government, and there's internal bureaucracy, the elders.
We don't have that.
We have a complete
open,
slate to draw whatever we wanna draw, Envision
what what what everyone envision. The sky is
the proverbial limit.
The opportunities
we have here are second to none.
We are building institutions of higher learning. I
am the dean of the Islamic Seminary of
America. And, of course, I'm biased towards my
seminary, but I dare say and there are
some students here that that's taken our classes.
I know this. I dare say
there is not an institute in the entire
world
that teaches the way that we are teaching.
Integrating
the classical tradition with the modern
academic study of Islam, intertwining
Al Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyyah with the latest
research projects at Harvard Yale and MIT in
Princeton.
I dare say I can't think of any
university that's doing what we what we are
doing at Islamic Center of America.
And again, nobody's stopping us. III swear to
you and I have studied at these places.
If we dare do this in the Middle
East, we would be heretic and banned overnight
by internal
sectarian
policies.
The scholars themselves would have deemed this heresy.
How dare you read a book written by
a non Muslim about the Quran?
So we are producing thought leaders that are
unique
in the entire world. And I say as
somebody who has lived in the Middle East
and lived around the world and traveled around
the world,
it is very likely
that a renaissance
of true genuine modern Islamic thought is gonna
come from this land.
Already as it is,
a slither of American preachers and teachers and
Allah has tested me to be amongst them.
We are listened to by a global audience.
You know, I was personal anecdote. I was
genuinely surprised
a decade ago when Facebook and YouTube and
Twitter when they first had their
analytics,
to see where your followers were from and
everything. Right? This is a decade ago.
And at the time I you know, this
is a decade. It was a long time
ago. Now things have progressed much more. At
the time, my first time I came out,
I just did a survey or a click
where most of my viewers and and followers
from.
This is again 2013,
2014.
And
I was genuinely
shocked to discover, obviously, my largest demographics, obviously,
is America, which totally understood.
My second largest
at the time,
and this is 10 years ago,
was in a country I had never visited
up until that point in time.
Can anybody guess which 1? Just to guess.
Malaysia. Who said Malaysia? How did you guess
Malaysia?
Are you from Malaysia?
So how did you guess Malaysia?
I had never been to Kuala Lumpur.
Now I've been 4 times. I'm actually going
next month to Kuala Lumpur. Now I go
regular. The ones I found I got a
large group of people, I might as well
go and visit them. Right?
I had never been to Malaysia,
and I was shocked.
My largest group is in Malaysia,
the 3rd largest
after Malaysia. Can anybody guess?
No. Not Turkey because
English is an issue as you know. You
know?
Nope. Quantity wise. No.
No. That's in the top 10, but no.
Again, shock to me.
Dhaka, Bangladesh.
And I have yet to visit Dhaka, Bangladesh.
And in that list as well was Karachi,
Pakistan which was shocked to me because I'm
from Karachi but I don't not speaking to
them in Urdu.
And this humbled me.
Like, how come I have millions of people
watching me in these countries I have never
visited?
And so I decided I need to go
visit. What's going on? And when I went
there to Pakistan now I go every 2,
3 years to Pakistan and Indonesia I mean,
Malaysia. I go every single year. Indonesia, I
have been on a private visit, but not,
public 1. The government and the Muftis have
invited me, but I just stalled it for
the time. Inshallah, 1 day I'll go, but
I only went on a private tour. I'm
a scuba diver. So I went to Bali
and I went to the Komodo Islands to
go scuba diving in Indonesia, but, I didn't
go to a public tour yet. So
I went to
Pakistan and, subhanAllah, I spoke to the people
there, like, why are you guys I literally
asked a group of peep why are you
guys listening to me?
You have,
I mean, a dime a dozen.
And they said what I thought they would
say.
The way you interpret and speak about Islam,
it appeals to our intellect. These are all
as they call upper class or whatever you
wanna call them. I mean, just
being don't wanna sound elitist, but there is
a reality that you also have to face.
The educated class,
by and large
I'm just being factual here, they are disconnected
from their own clergy
and they find comfort in the religious rhetoric
coming from the western world.
This is a tangible
reality. Somebody has to do sociological
surveys and I don't know what else. I
mean, somebody's gotta do that. But that is
a reality that when I go to these
lands and I'm speaking in English in Pakistan
and my events are sold out,
thousands of people come
and they're wanting to listen to me in
English. And these are the types of people
that are generally, you know, the
top 10% or 2% even of of those
lands. It's a very interesting phenomenon.
So what does this show? It's not the
talk is not about me today. It's about
American Muslims. What does it show? Our
opportunities.
If
someone like me single handedly, unintentionally
can do this, well, then what if a
bunch of you, the top minds of this
country, were to come together
and to actually plan and to actually envision
how can we influence the rest of the
world? Listen, guys, brutally honest. America's a superpower,
and you being in the superpower
makes you a superpower.
That's just the way the world works.
We are number 1 in this world in
terms of influence and whatever else you wanna
call it. We are the biggest superpower the
world has ever seen in its history.
And therefore,
you being within that superpower
gives you superpower strengths.
It gives you a privilege
that frankly we don't even understand and take
advantage of, and I'm still coming to terms
with this reality.
Our potential is unmatched.
We can lead a global renaissance
of
how we can live in the modern world,
of rethinking through even classical questions like sectarianism.
So our opportunities
are second to none.
Let's move on to threats before we open
the floor for q and a.
Our threats are also many.
And by and large, I don't think they're
unique to America. So here's the point. Our
weaknesses and threats
are universal, whereas our strengths and opportunities
are, by and large, unique to us. That's
the point I wanna stress over and over
again.
Our threats
we have internal threats and external threats.
Internal threats,
existential.
We're
losing
too many
of our next generation. We have a high
attrition rate,
and this is a phenomenon that is of
this generation, not mine.
I grew up in the eighties.
I don't know of a single person in
my batch that left the faith.
For some weird reason, even though we were
so small,
even though all of Houston, the Sunday school
that I attended, my father started, it was
probably 15 kids, 20 kids. Right? For some
weird reason,
Islam and Iman was strong in our hearts.
Whereas now
when the number of people is in the
millions,
our attrition rate is much higher.
And we all know of people who have
left Islam.
That's an existential threat.
Another existential threat
is not the leaving of Islam but the
deformation of Islam
because this is a very difficult question, and
that's 1 of the questions
I'm extremely interested in and I'm very, very
involved in. What does it mean to be
a Muslim in the modern world?
What aspects of the tradition
are
absolutely beyond
change immutable?
And what aspects can be completely thought through
and what aspects can be fine tuned?
That is a very, very difficult question. It
does not have an easy answer. And there's
gonna be a lot of back and forth,
and there is a lot of back and
forth going on here. But that is an
existential threat because
some other faith traditions
have changed so much to adapt to the
circumstance
that there's very little left of the faith,
and they are almost irreconizable
as a separate faith entity. I don't wanna
be too specific but think about it and
get the point.
So we have to be careful about
acquiescing to popular culture too much
because that means we've lost our identity. But
what is that fine line?
This is a question that involves theology. It
involves law. It involves hermeneutics. You know, the
sciences of fiqh and usool and aqeedah, all
of these sciences. And that's
personally, that's 1 of the biggest questions that
troubles me. I go to sleep at night
thinking about specific aspects along these lines here.
And many of my talks, many of my
q and a's, they deal with this reality
if you listen to them. The
reality
of practicing Islam
in the modern Western Hemisphere.
So that is definitely a threat internally.
Externally,
we also have a major threat and we're
seeing that threat right now, and we saw
it. I think I'm speaking to a group
most of you are too young to remember
911.
You might have been born before what not,
but to remember a world pre 9 11
and post 911. I think most of you
are too young for that.
I was in my twenties when 911 happened.
I gave Khudbas and Duroos pre 911.
That is an America long gone.
The America pre 911, it's
the America of dreams.
The the freedoms that we had but also
the naivety because what 911 did for us
as the American Muslim community, and I spoke
about this in other lectures and I was
an adult at the time. I fully remember
and I'm cognizant of that.
911 to us was like a
a punch in the gut.
Literally took our breath away.
Complete surprise, complete shock, and how our government
reacted
and the shutting down of so many institutions,
the deportation of hundreds of scholars,
the jailings that took place as well of
people for the smallest infraction, students who overstayed
their visas
were locked up for years sometimes.
And And then, of course, the horrors of
Guantanamo and all, that's a whole separate category
altogether. But the Patriot Act
and how quickly
Americans were willing to give up their freedoms
out of fear of the other and the
other was us.
I remember vividly clearly
all of these airport securities did not exist
at all. When I would fly back then
you would walk with your family
all the way to the gate
to say goodbye to them and not a
single person stopped and checked you.
And America and Canada, the border, oh my
god.
Students would regularly go without even passports because
nobody cared and nobody checked.
The whole world has radically changed and Americans
are willing to give up their own freedoms
because their governments have created this enemy called
the Muslims and whatnot. And we see this
over and over again. We see this right
now.
Congress has passed a bill
defining redefining
antisemitism
which would include criticism of Israel.
It would include
calls for BDS.
If this bill gets passed in the senate
and the president signs it into law,
we are heading towards European versions of semi
fascist realities.
I am doubtful it will get there, but
this is a threat.
And
while
while
we thank Allah that
whatever happened after 9:11 to the American Muslim
community
it didn't
it didn't it didn't pose an existential threat.
Let us also be realistic and understand
what happened to Japanese Americans is 1 generation
away.
The paranoia
that people have
when they're terrified,
the irrationality
that exists in people who are scared, you
cannot negotiate with them.
And the people that were thrown in internment
camps
post World War 2, they're still alive right
now. This is not generations ago.
Post World War 2 when the Pearl Harbor
event happened, America lost its marbles.
The supreme court ratified the decision to round
up anybody
who had 1 fourth Japanese ancestry.
The police would come. Your neighbors would rat
you out. The police would come, take you
in the middle of the night and throw
you in an open air prison for 3
years. Your children you. Yes. You were fed
like prisoners. You were but you couldn't do
anything. No work. No nothing. You are in
jail.
And the intern
internment camps are still around to see. And
the people that went through it listened to
their interviews. They're still alive in their seventies
now.
The apology only came in the eighties with
Ronald Reagan. Sorry. We messed up. Well, too
late.
Millions of people thrown in. Now I'm not
trying to terrify you because it'll be really
difficult to have internment camps for Muslims because
we're ethnically so different. Right?
But
but it did happen,
and God knows what the future holds if
population loses its realities again already like we
see here.
Again, look at look at the modern context
of how
callous
the broader public
and our own politicians are about the genocide
in Gaza.
How utterly
inhumane.
I mean, if the situation were reversed,
just imagine
just imagine if an Arab land had taken
2, 000, 000 people of a Jewish background,
thrown them in an open air prison for
70 years. Just imagine
if
35, 000 women and children had been bombed
by Arabs to
those people. Just imagine if checkpoints had been
set up. Just imagine
the sheer
depravity taking place.
Could you think anybody would justify it in
this country?
But we see here
the most powerful players,
the most influential,
the owners of social media platforms without mentioning
names here. Right?
The most powerful newspapers,
constantly
the lies against the oppressed people.
They're literally
creating a false image where
the oppressors
become the oppressed. Unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
If they can do that
or a land far away, what do you
think they can do over here?
So without a doubt, there is a threat,
and that threat
means we need to stand up and fight
for our rights
as every minority has done in this land,
as every single faith tradition, as every ethnicity
has done.
And so there are many threats. Not gonna
deny that.
And 1 aspect that I have to mention,
I kind of alluded to it,
in many ways American Muslims are the strongest
out of all Western Muslims, but in 1
way, they are the weakest,
and that is
our percentages.
Every other
western Muslim, western Muslim community, yes, every other
western Muslim community is exponentially more than us.
Canada is
6% Muslim.
Mississauga. I was in Mississauga 2 weekends ago.
Mississauga
is
15%
Muslim. Go think about that. London, UK is
10% Muslim.
Oslo, 10%.
Vienna, Austria, Vienna,
10% Muslim.
Stockholm, roughly 10% Muslim.
France,
Paris,
probably 15%,
if not 20 or 25%.
Statistics are amazing. Their problem is they do
nothing. They're apolitical.
Their problem is they're completely disconnected from the
system. If only they tapped in, they could
change, but that's their problem. Can you imagine
if we had that, but we don't?
Don't be fooled by living in Boston or
Chicago or Houston where we are concentrated.
Yes. In these cities,
But the rest of America, we have 370,
000, 000 people and the most American cities
and municipalities have very small percentages of Muslims.
So put together,
we are
probably 1 point something percent. Very small.
And that is an existential
threat. And what makes it worse, the broader
population thinks we're like 20%
because they've been made to fear us, you
know, like, oh my god. They're everywhere. They're
everywhere. In reality, we're nothing
And this is definitely a major problem. Nonetheless,
I wanna conclude on a positive note and
that is
the tide is changing. I mean, look around
you.
I was at the protest, you know, at
at Harvard and at MIT over here today.
Look around you and see.
The majority of people protesting have nothing to
do with our faith. They've understood this is
a humanitarian
cause. It's a cause that transcends a religion.
It's a cause of oppressor versus oppressed. It's
a cause of blatant genocide.
And in my humble opinion even if
Israel has won the battle they've lost the
war without a doubt.
They've lost the war. Globally, they've lost the
war. We are the only country left that
is blindly supporting them and that's something we
need to think about and why that is
the case and because no European country, even
though they're tacitly following, but no European country
is sticking its neck out for Israel. It's
only our country.
And therefore, once this country changes its mind
and the people have already changed their minds.
It's only a matter of time before it
translates up there.
Once this country officially changes its position,
Israel will not have a leg to stand
on the international community and they're gonna have
to rethink through or some other change has
to take place here. But the future is
indeed bright.
And
I wanna conclude before I open the floor
for q and a by finishing the anecdote
I began with my father coming here in
1960
2 to give the 1st Eid Khutba
with a grand total of how many people
guys?
3 people.
So Allah blessed me to be born and
raised in that city of Houston. I went
to engineering at the University of Houston. I
did work at Dow Chemical for a while.
I by the way, in the early nineties,
you guys are gonna remember this, who don't
even know this probably.
There's a language called Fortran. Have you heard
of that language?
You know Fortran? 2 people in the audience
know Fortran. Okay. So 3 people. Sorry. Okay.
So in the nineties, Fortran was the language
of of engineering.
So I got hired at Dow Chemical,
to
write a computer program to synthesize polymer reactions,
before you you do them in the lab.
So you put in an input about what,
you know, the polymers you're gonna have and
the program is gonna synthesize, you know, the
output. So I wrote, like, 3, 4000, you
know, lines of code. My god. I hate
writing code. I don't know how anybody does
it. But anyway, so I know. I I
feel the pain of those computer programmers. So
I spent an entire summer with not doing
that and that's when I realized
I don't wanna spend the rest of my
life doing this.
I had a spiritual epiphany.
I'm I'm like, sorry. I don't wanna be
painful. Okay. It's like that's when I realized
you can pay me as much as you
want. I have a high anyway, I don't
wanna this personally so it's like
so that's when I decided to go to
Medina. You know? I was like, okay. I
don't wanna do this for the rest of
my life. I wanna do something. And I
was going through a spiritual this was the
nineties. Guys, there was no English speaking Alem
in the western world.
Nobody
that was a true bonafide Alem that spoke
English as a mother language. You know? So
I was a different world in time. I'm
I'm that old guy. So there was nobody
back then. So I'm like, I wanna study
my faith. I don't know what my religion
is. I I I'm completely Jahid and whatnot.
So I, you know, left my degree at
Dow Chemical left my sorry. I left my
job at Dow Chemical and I went to
pursue Islamic studies, spent 10 years over there,
911 happened
and I decided that was another epiphany like
I need to come back, I need to,
you know, preach to my people and build
bridges and whatnot and so I decided to
come back here and I came back to
Houston. I got accepted to Yale. So I
was in Houston for a few months before
starting my my PhD at Yale and, the
Islamic Society of Greater Houston invited me to
give the Khudba for
Eid in
2, 005.
And so they hired the George r Brown
Convention Center
cause that's how they did Eid over there.
And I gave Eid
in Houston and my father was sitting in
front of me and I mentioned in that
Khutba
that
45 years ago, my father came to this
land as 1 of the first Muslims
and he gave the first Eid Khutba
with a grand total of 3 people.
And in his wildest dreams, he could never
have conceived.
In his most grandiose imagination,
he never even thought of the fact that
his own son, born and raised in Houston,
would go and study Islam overseas
and come back trained as a cleric and
a Sheikh and an Alim and give Khutba
as a trained imam
to not 3, but now
30, 000
Muslims in the George r Brown Convention Center.
This is the progress
of 1 generation.
1 generation.
This is what America gives you.
In 1 generation from where to where?
So I ask you now, what do you
think is gonna happen for the next generation?
How much do you think we can rise
and build for the next generation?
That's where I'm asking you to conceive,
to imagine, to
literally, you have a blank slate.
Imagine the most grandiose project that you can.
If this could happen without planning, because it
happened without planning,
what can happen when concerted minds come together
and actually plan?
So be brave,
be ambitious,
and think about how you can contribute to
the ummah. And all of us have different
fields, all of us have different specialties,
all of us have different talents, but our
vision and our goal is 1 and that
is to achieve the pleasure of Allah and
to preserve the legacy, to preserve the the
beautiful deen and religion that we have, and
to make sure not only our progeny
appreciates it, but the broader public around us
is aware of it. They're not scared of
it. They're not demonizing us. There's so many
projects to do. So my advice to all
of you, thank Allah for where you are.
Thank Allah for the opportunities and strengths that
you have and work together to overcome the
weaknesses
and to make sure those threats never materialize.
I wanna conclude on a point I've been
saying for the last year or 2 in
almost every talk of this nature. We are
at a pivotal time in American Islam,
at a pivotal
time, seminal time. Why?
Because
we are the only generation
that is fully in tune with our heritage
and also fully Americanized.
There's only gonna be 1 generation like us.
We are the only generation.
Most of us in this room,
we are comfortable
in our ethnic backgrounds
and we're very comfortable in our American identity.
That was not the case when my father
came here in the sixties. Right? He was
struggling to speak English. Right? He said all
of our parents when they came like this.
That has long gone.
But our children
are gonna have hardly anything of our ethnicity
and heritage. That's also a reality.
We are that 1 generation
that will quite literally decide the future.
So what we do in the next 30
years
is going to dictate
the future of Islam for the next 300
years.
What we do for the next 30,
our vision, our planning, our conception,
our dreaming,
it's literally gonna dictate the future of Islam
in this country and maybe even the western
world and maybe even influence the eastern world,
which it's already doing
for the next few centuries. So Allah has
chosen you to be at a unique time
and unique place.
Stand up to that challenge and make Allah
happy for what you're able to do and
leave a legacy that will make you proud
in this dunya and in
the