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    "file": "jonathan_brown/_ 10 Prof Jonathan A_C_ Brown _Slavery and Islam_ _zm7xdPATHoo&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW3SBwkJsAkBhyohjO8%3D_1748693215.opus",
    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Welcome respected listeners, respected viewers who are joining us once again on another amazing fantastic interview here at the Islamic",
      "interview here at the Islamic Literature Society. We bring you some amazing interviews with authors on amazing and interesting topics. Now, the Islamic literature society was founded in 2019 with the aim of promoting fostering and developing a heightened appreciation for authors and literary works of classical and contemporary scholarship. Now we achieve this through a number of different ways. We have book clubs,",
      "And the most interesting and the most direct way of developing this relationship with our books and our respected authors is through these interviews. Alhamdulillah. So today we have a very special guest, and the topic is one that you do not want to miss out. What we have with us today inshallah is the book titled Slavery and Islam, and it is written by Jonathan A.C. Brown who's with us",
      "Jonathan A.C. Brown is a professor of Islamic studies at the Al-Walid Ibn Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and mashallah Doctor has written a number of different books, I have a few of them with me here we've got Misquoting Muhammad which you'll get the author's opinions on as well and also about Hadith, Muhammad's legacy in the medieval",
      "modern world so alhamdulillah there's a number of things there so let us begin by bringing in the sheikh okay doctor assalamu alaikum how are you i'm um good and i'm really happy to see you and meet you in online and i've been invited to be in this podcast masha'allah you look very relaxed today i must say sir",
      "So I always, I mean, I'm usually pretty relaxed except when I get upset about stuff. Okay, good. Which means you're not upset today? Not yet. Not yet? Okay, Good. All right Sheikh let's start off inshaAllah if we can start by a simple question about your journey through Islamic learning. Alright Mashallah you've authored a number of different books so could you tell us how you got to where you are today please?",
      "Sorry, I'm just looking at something going on outside. Okay, it's fine. Sorry, my kid is just wandering around but he's... Yeah, so BismillahirRahmanirRahim. Assalamu alaikum, thanks for inviting me. I apologize you caught me at a weird time on my site. My beard trimmer broke. So I can't stand having like a long beard. It just really itches me. So if it gets longer than maybe week and a half or two weeks",
      "a half or two weeks, I just shave my beard and then grow it back. So that's why I don't have any kind of beard right now. You're a bunch bigger beard than me. Okay. You look pretty good in the back of your book, the picture in the background. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And the Persian is called Tahresh, like short beard, Iranian guy beard. Designer stubble as my friend Asad calls it. Okay so the...",
      "Sorry, this is kind of repeating stuff I've said in other places. But you asked me the question so I'll do my best to answer it. So I mean, I became Muslim when I was in college and university. I was about 19 years old, I think. And I really, I become Muslim really through reading books of Muhammad Assad, The Road to Mecca, his Tafsir of the Quran. So, I came really through maybe like modernist window",
      "Faisal Rahman and things like that. And I, so that was it was actually not until I was in graduate school that I actually someone you know the idea that you could go and meet like Muslim scholars today and you know traditional online study with them like they were previously they just sort of been somebody like",
      "obsolete things of the past. So when I went to Egypt in 2000, 2001 for a year to learn Arabic, I started to attend the Daruss and Azhar, the open Daruss. And then I really started to do that more in 2003, in the summer of 2003.",
      "Yeah, I think so. I can't remember now. Something like that. 2002 or 2003. And then after that, I would go back every summer for at least a month. And in 2006, I went for about eight months and did private studies with very intensive private studies scholars in hadith and fi'aq an-asr, fi'alqan grammar and arudh and things like that",
      "But the, you know that but that was really I mean I never did what you when you did for example. I never didn't went and did like intensive, you Know full curriculum studies so for me. You know my Islamic learning traditional Islamic learning is there's a few things that I have, you",
      "something substantial. I mean, it just, I would say it gave me enough skill to be able to kind of navigate things generally and then also to know when I needed help to understand things. So I think that's the more important thing. So in a lot of ways, I think my work as a scholar in the US has been to try and kind of integrate classical, you know, kind of Islamic learning and Western learning",
      "Why did you pick such a topic? Yeah, well I don't know. I mean most... I guess most Muslims, I'm not sure. I can certainly tell you that when I was in college... Actually I remember very clearly, I mentioned this in the book which is that I remember being at home reading Muhammad Asad's translation of the Quran and coming across, I think it's in Surah An-Nahl",
      "I think or right so and then i can't really probably mixing the order up there but the you know that the quran talks about slave owned who doesn't have any he can't do anything",
      "It's actually just mentioning it's making using a slave and a free person as a parable for some for like a false God that doesn't have any power and then like actual God who has power as far as I understand it, right so But what when I was shocked by the way second like you can't just say so you can mention slavery You know you have to say slavery is wrong And you're after like how can you just talk about it? And not even say that right now. So I remember being kind of concerned confused",
      "confused, but I sort of just moved on. I guess I swept it under the carpet. But I think that's probably the position that a lot of Muslims are in globally, probably. Maybe less so in some parts of the world than others, but maybe globally is they come across these references to slavery and the Quran or the Sunnah of the Prophet or Islamic law or something. And you don't really know what sense to make of it because not only does their religion seem to be allowing",
      "and endorsing this thing that, you know, anybody in the world today would know is a grotesque, horrific evil. But also sometimes it's not even presented as any kind of moral problem. It's just sort of mentioned offhand. So I think a lot of people maybe this was an issue of concern but it's something we come across in our daily lives so it wasn't maybe a huge concern. But I did eventually mean to write about it.",
      "It was like 2014 or 15. Right. And there was the kind of enslavement of ISIS, I mean, Yazidi girls and things so that and this was in the newspaper everywhere. And people, you know, I think this caused a big crisis of faith for a lot of Muslims because not only did they see this being done, but they're also ISIS was like, wait, what are you guys so confused about? Like the Koran talks about this is allowed in the Sharia. That's what the prophet did. So what do you got? What are you objecting to?",
      "for how to respond to this. So that really made me want to write about this, and eventually I wrote a book about it. Yeah, Marshall, you addressed the issue of ISIS through the latter part of your book. In the opening chapter in the introduction, you actually address the moral question, can we actually talk about slavery? In particular, you address yourself when you talk about",
      "I mean, what can we talk about slavery? Like is there such a thing as slavery defined transhistorically or what is the big question that's behind this issue? In the sense that you know, there's a consensus about slavery being wrong and it's an evil in nature. Can we actually talk about it in that perspective? Yeah, I think that well, I",
      "is really the place where this is the clearest, I mean, the strongest manifestation of this phenomenon. But I call it kind of the slavery conundrum, which is that the abolitionist consensus, which sort of global abolitionists consensus, is that slavery is a gross intrinsic evil throughout space and time. So you know, if slavery was wrong today, it was wrong 100 years ago, it's wrong 1,000 years ago or 2,000 year ago.",
      "And that's axiomatic, right? You cannot question that. If you do, I mean, you're a monster. Imagine just going in and being like, well, slavery is not that bad or it was okay back then. I mean you would really be pilloried. The second sort of – I talk about the slavery conundrum as basically being that there are three maxims or three axioms that you can't question but also you can hold them all",
      "can't hold them all at the same time, right? So you can't actually question any of these or they, you can only do it at a great cost. But also you cannot actually hold all these three things at the so the first one is slavery as a gross intrinsic evil across space and time. The second one is that all slavery is slavery. So there's no like good slavery, bad slavery, okay slavery, light slavery, heavy slavery, right. So just imagine going into a meeting",
      "Oh, the slavery in ISIS is not that bad or something. Just imagine saying it's not that and what the reaction would be. Yeah, of course. So you can't make internal distinctions within slavery. Slavery is an absolute intrinsic evil throughout space and time. All slavery, any time the word is used, absolutely intrinsic evil through out space and times. The third axiom is that our pasts have some kind of moral or legal claim on us.",
      "us right so i mean for muslims it's obvious in the sense that we look to the quran asana from moral guidance or spiritual guidance right if you're you know americans would say we look at the constitution of the united states for guidance um you know christians would look to jesus and the new testament uh jews the old testament you know buddhists to buddhist literature hindus to hinder literature people who are philosophers to philosophical",
      "traditions, right? So there's every single religious or every single major religious and every single philosophical tradition that I know of either defended, condoned slavery or thought it was just completely normal until the earliest, the absolute earliest, late 1600s. Okay. So if you're going to say that, you know, slavery is a gross intrinsic evil throughout space",
      "If somebody is defending or involved in or condoning that, they're like a more they're morally compromised person. Right. So they can't imagine somebody coming into public life today and saying, well, I think slavery is OK or something. They would never this person would never be allowed to be in public life. So the same thing for our past. Right? If these people are defending it, then why are we?",
      "get moral or spiritual advice from those people. But the problem is that the entirety of the human heritage prior to at the earliest, the late 1600s was guilty of this. The sort of statue issue is actually a really good case of this where people will come out and say we want to take down the statue of this guy in Bristol",
      "because they were involved in slavery. Like those people are logically, they're totally correct. Logically, they are according to the logic of this slavery conundrum, they 100% correct. Sure. Slavery is a gross and intrinsic evil throughout space and time. It's history's greatest crime, right? No moral person, no person with any moral sense could ever be involved in this or support it. Yeah. Or defend it. So if they did, you absolutely should not have a statue of this person. I mean that's ridiculous.",
      "I mean, that's ridiculous. That's like having a statue of Hitler. Right? So that's a totally logical conclusion. Okay. And then the people who come up and say, well, yeah, but you know, it's more complicated. No, it is not. Then what are you trying to say? Why isn't more complicated? Oh back then it wasn't clear. Wait so back then slavery wasn't evil? Like a smart intelligent person shouldn't have realized it wasn t evil? It s like oh well",
      "It's like, oh well yeah. So they have to start fudging and waffling because the logic of slavery is a gross intrinsic evil throughout space and time all slavery is slavery. The logical conclusion is if somebody's involved in that, they are history. I mean, they should never be turned to for moral authority. They should never celebrated but the problem is as conservative British people would tell you these are our heroes right? These are the people we look to",
      "you know, darkest hour and, uh, you know never surrender and all that stuff. Right? And these are the people we turn to Thomas Jefferson, right? The guy who said all men are created equal endowed with certain inalienable rights life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right. That amazing human being with a brilliant person but who had a slave and had children with her, with his slave concubine and those children were slaves et cetera, et cetera",
      "George Washington, father of the United States of America. By the way, this idea that he somehow hated slavery deep down is utter hooey. There's a book that came out just recently about a year ago. It's a great book called Never Caught. It was about this slave woman named Ona Judge who she fled from the Washingtons when they were in Philadelphia and they spent the rest of their lives hunting or trying to hunt her down. I mean, they never gave up trying to get back,",
      "So they were not some kind of closet abolitionists or something. But I mean, go but go. I live in Washington DC which is named after him. Imagine the sheer number of things you'd have to pull down. How would American identity function? That's the slavery conundrum is that we actually hold positions three positions that none of which you can really question. People do question them",
      "do question them, they say we should take down the statues. But that's very controversial until relatively recently that would have just been laughed out of the room. So this brings me to another question because we're talking about slavery through history as you mentioned. You also discussed in the first chapter of your book the definition of slavery and that chapter goes on quite a bit. I mean it's almost like you struggle in defining slavery",
      "So can we address that topic? Can we come to an agreement on what we are actually talking about? Yeah. So let me just say that first, the reason why these positions or these axiomatic positions exist is because of the nature of how abolitionism was kind of debated and eventually triumphed, right? Which is that when abolitionists were pushing for slaveholders",
      "for the end of slavery, people who are either slaveholders or supportive of slaveholding industries or laws, they'd say things like you're right. Certain terms of slavery are horrific but that's not what we're doing. Our slavery is okay or slavery in India is okay so that was one of the first responses sort of rebuttals",
      "So they had to shut that door and just say that, no, no. This is this is something that if something is slavery, it is inherently evil. It's not discussed. It'S not negotiable. One of the other actually responses of pro-slavery people would be to actually push back on the definition of slavery in essence because what they'd say like in the 1830s you saw this in some very prominent kind of defenses of slavery",
      "say that, well look okay you know look at your industrial workers in New York or Chicago or London. I mean these people are treated horribly they die in these poor houses it's a crime in England it's actually a crime to leave work not do not show up to work you can be put in prison for that so you know but my slaves they're cared for they're fed",
      "They're fed, they're housed. We take care of them when they're sick. I'm not saying that's true. I mean, if you want to talk about who's being treated badly, then your workers are much worse off. So that's why the abolitionists had to focus on the legal institution of slavery.",
      "of not being free or being property. But you can see in this example, kind of one of the tensions which is what is... In one society we can come up with a very like in America United States slavery is status of not been free. Or in Roman law it's a status of now being free and also being property or medieval and early modern European law",
      "European law, it's being property of somebody. So you can think about slavery as not being free, legal status and not being three, the legal status of being property but the other approach is to think about what slavery is like a condition that it's about the way you're treated. And so until kind of 1926 when there was this convention or national convention assigned",
      "Basically, slavery becomes illegal. And then that is gradually ratified and accepted until 19, you know, essentially 1960s when every country had abolished slavery legally at least. Okay. From after that, you get more of a move towards kind of slavery as a condition, right? Because once you say, once there's no longer something called slavery, it's easy. There's no slavery anymore. Okay, fine. It's gone. Finito.",
      "happens if you're treating the person exactly the same way. They're just not technically a slave. So instead of saying slaves are property, it was slaves are treated like property or slaves are people who are paid only subsistence wages and don't have control over their labor. And especially this is a big thing they're coerced so a big definition especially in what's called new abolitionism since the 1990s I guess modern day slavery is the idea that it's coerce labor.",
      "So in any particular society or even in a civilization, you might be able to come up with a very good definition of slavery because you have maybe a clear understanding of freedom. What freedom means? What property means? But the problem is that things like freedom and property are so vague that if you try to think about them trans-historically and globally they stop having any meaning. So if you say what is free? Are you free?",
      "free, Junaid? What can you do? Can you walk outside naked? No, you can't. So you're not free. You can do anything you want except what's illegal. Okay, that's free. But then slaves can also do whatever they want. I mean if a slave is sitting in their room like after work and they are twiddling their thumbs, they can twiddle their thumbs this way or they can",
      "for what the law and their owner says. So freedom and slavery aren't two diametrically opposed things, they're just two different levels of restriction. And where that level is depends on or where the distinction is depends your particular society in your particular time. But you try to think of it when even when some scholars were very skeptical about this but who tried to insist that there's like kind of a minimum rights that all humans agree on",
      "Suzanne Meyers says this in her great essay on definition of slavery. She actually can't, she says surely there's a number of rights that we agree everybody has if they're free but she doesn't say what the rights are because they're not, actually I don't think there are agreed upon rights and you could say well let's say I can't you know a slave owner can like kill their slave with no consequences. First of all most slave systems",
      "for example, you can't just kill your slave. You can't even really hurt them seriously. And that's true for a lot of systems of slavery in the world. But let's say Roman law until around 200-300 AD at least theoretically a father could kill their children his children with no legal consequences. Free children.",
      "children, right? He could kill his, let's say niece. It's called patria potestas, the power of the head of the family. So if you're going to say well slavery is kind of defined by in a situation where someone can just kill you with no consequences that's not gonna help you in the case of Roman law because in Roman law",
      "a free person, to your child. So clearly there is an issue here or there's a problem here of defining slavery so it depends on which lens or which geographical location where you're defining it from so that's obviously a problem. Let's be specific right? It's not necessarily a problem I mean for example religious studies as a field there's no agreed upon definition of religion",
      "But that's not a problem because, you know, here's the problem. I think in a lot of ways slavery and terrorism are kind of conceptual concepts that are useful to compare because there's actually no agreed upon definition of terrorism. Yeah. But like the reason that's a problem is that if you're in religious studies and you say that, you want to write an article about Jedi religion, like no one's going to say you're a bad person for doing that.",
      "Whereas if you get labeled, if you're kind of stamped with the label of does slavery or is terrorist, that's it. You're morally obliterated. That's a moral condemnation. So I think there's a problem when there's concept that you want to use transhistorically throughout space and time to label things, with the effect of labeling things as evil. But you actually don't have a definition for it because what you're really doing is",
      "is things that look like slavery to you or that you want to call slavery, you end up stamping with that. Whereas things that don't look like delivery to you, or that You don't want to cause slavery, uh, don't get that condemnation. So that's why I think it's a problem. So especially in these two topics that you mentioned slavery and terrorism, there's consequences to that. So one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. So does your choice will have consequence in the real world? Um, so that builds",
      "So that builds me to my next question then. Is it then fair to use the word slavery in the Islamic context? I mean, in Arabic there's obviously different words for it, you know, as you've mentioned in your book but is it fair to translate that slavery then because then the Western audience, the Western definition and apply that on Islam and we've just completely started off on a wrong footed. I mean I think that's a complicated question because you",
      "I think you have to think about, to what extent should your answer be really governed by an attempt to control reaction versus in an attempt kind of be accurate? The irony is that Islamic civilization and Western European civilization",
      "civilization are siblings. I mean, they come from Semitic sources and at least they're highly influenced by Greco-Roman tradition. I means a lot of Islamic law on slavery is not from the Quran, it's not even from Sunnah of the Prophet. It's just existing tradition in the Near East in the 700s, 600 or 700s. And some",
      "And some of those things are from like Roman and Near Eastern law. And Muslim scholars, they acknowledge I mean, they didn't acknowledge those origins but they basically realized that this some of these laws were not rooted in their tradition in Islamic scripture. But the bottom line is that legally speaking, you know, Islamic law on slavery is very similar it's in the same conversation as European. You're talking about freedom",
      "you're talking about a binary of free and slave. In other parts of the world, like Southeast Asia there's not two categories. There are many, many categories, many levels of subservience and subordination dependence more like a web one scholar calls it's more like A Web of Dependence, not Two Layers or Hierarchy. But hang on let me just finish. Strictly speaking from Islamic legal and Western legal definitions they're fairly similar. I would say that",
      "I would say that the real issue comes in that the way that slavery is practiced in the Americas, you know, after in the European colonization of the colonization in the Americans was pretty unprecedented in terms of its scale and severity. In world history. And it was also fairly quickly almost everywhere in the America's racialized",
      "is racialized. So it becomes slave status, certain races are slaves or enslavable and certain are not. And so you get kind of a mixture of real brutality, huge scale and racialization, very simplistic uniform racialization that is pretty freaky.",
      "So when we look at, let's say the people who start objecting to slavery even beginning with people like Bartolome de las Casas in the 16th century and then people, let us say enlightenment figures like Condorcet and Diderot and Montesquieu and Voltaire. They are responding really to the Atlantic slave trade.",
      "They're responding to two things. One is the really shocking horror of the Middle Passage, and two, what a lot of them consider to be really stupid justification, the kind of racial justification they saw as laughable. Those things were not really present in a lot",
      "pre-Atlantic slave trade, slave systems. There wasn't this massive scale. There was not this kind of grotesque racial justification and in general I know that is something that is not true always but I would say in general",
      "as brutal as they could be and were often, they often were in the Americas. So I think that's why is it when we... It's not just by the way, that's not to say that slaves in various times and place in world history were not treated absolutely horrifically and as bad if not worse than some awful plantation in Brazil or South Carolina.",
      "we, some of the ways that slaves are treated in the Roman empire is just, it's like mind numbingly horrible. Yeah. But I'd say in general you didn't have the kind of shocking scale and kind of just boldness or brazenness of the Atlantic slave trade. And it's the use of slaves in the Americas was really shocking to people. So that's why I think a lot of the",
      "I think a lot of the kind of abolitionism really picks up steam in the 1700s. It's because what they're looking at is really tough to defend. I mean, it's not like here's this guy who's from another village that we grabbed on a raid and he's part of the family, speaks the same language as us. Eventually we free him after a couple years. He becomes our business partner.",
      "of slavery in world history are not going to be accurately uh they're not going appear accurately in your mind yeah if you start talking about them as slavery i wanted to go um back to the quran or to the sunnah and there are certain concepts certain principles laid out for us with regards to you know slavery or rick",
      "slavery in Islam. Things like al-mukatiba, you talk about that slave getting his own freedom. Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la in the Quran as well when we commit certain sins as expiations kafara for our sins, we are told in first place to free a slave so we can see the mindset what Allah Subhanahu wa ta-Ala is telling us and how we should behave towards slavery. So",
      "the transatlantic slavery that you were discussing, right? Yeah, definitely. I mean, we have to remember that in North America, British colonies in North American there's for a lot of times and a lot the colonies, you could not manumit your own slave, right. This was actually a big debate in places like Virginia about whether or not people should be allowed to free their own slaves. Whereas in Islamic law",
      "law and Islamic society, manumission is encouraged to the point that a lot of legal rules that are otherwise pretty firm you get exceptions to when you get to pre-manumission. The fact that if we have a contract, if I make a mistake and I say something wrong in a contract or I make",
      "I'm angry if I don't mean something that doesn't become legally binding in, in freeing slaves. It's generally legally binding. So if you say, you know, if you're my slave and I say, okay, good job today, you've worked really hard, go get some rest. You're free to go get Some rest by saying you're free boom. I didn't mean you're Free literally. You go do something else right now. Boom. You are free. Oh no, I didn t mean that it doesn't matter. Right?",
      "because of this idea that, the law giver God wants freedom. He looks expectantly towards freedom and this is actually goes back all the way to a very early report of the prophet, that you know, God wants Freedom right? So the Quran and Sunnah I mean,",
      "religious scriptures or legal documents in world history. I can't think of anyone that is as obsessed with emancipation as the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet. It's really like, the idea of tying freeing slaves to expiating sins. The Quran is the first time we see this.",
      "The Quran, you see it numerous times. But where you see a lot is in the Hadiths and that you free a slave when there's an eclipse. You free a slaves if you hit your slave and you cause them to bleed, you should free them. If they want to do a contract where they buy their own freedom on installments as in the Quran,",
      "you know, you're encouraged to marry your slaves for your slave women and then marry them. You're encouraged. I mean, over and over and what's funny, right? Is it's not only in reliable Hadiths but if you look in forged Hadith they're in, I mean probably the longest Hadith I've ever seen in my life is this forged Hadit which is allegedly a sermon that prophet gave which is just pages and pages and it's sometimes at some time in the eight hundreds of the common era",
      "even in the Forge Hadiths, you're told to free slaves. Like in a weird, like freeing slaves becomes a way of like quantifying rewards. So if you do, if you walk to the mosque, every step you take is like freeING a slave. So freeing a slave becomes the way you kind of... The unit by which you measure reward. And so what the point about this is that even if people would say well Muslims maybe they cry on the sunnah",
      "maybe the Quran and Sunnah are about emancipation, but then Muslims betrayed that. What's interesting is somebody was out there making up all these hadiths during the high point of Islamic civilization to free slaves. Even more explicit and stronger admonitions or exhortations to free slave than you'd find in the Quran or the Sunnah, the actual authentic Sunnah.",
      "And, you know, and so it depends. Like, you obviously Islamic civilization is a long time over a long period of space or wide area but in general, it seems like if you were to average everything out probably the average amount of time that somebody was enslaved in Islamic civilizations about seven or eight years and then they'd be manumitted. And so what the irony is that one of the reasons that Muslims",
      "Islamic civilization takes in so many slaves from Eastern Europe, from Turkish steppes, from India, from Sub-Saharan Africa is because they're constantly freeing slaves. So they don't have a reproducing labor pool, right? They're constantly having to buy more slaves to replace the ones they freed. Yeah, so that's interesting.",
      "to look at slavery from an Islam perspective as a solution to the realities of the world. When we look at Islam, when we look At the Quran it's not book of philosophy or just set of instructions It's actually dealing with real life problems So when we Look at the example of alcohol Alcohol is widespread and it was removed Over four phases, it took a long Time to get that out of the system Interest, it wasn't the last instruction In order to be made haram, it Took a long time to get That out of",
      "that out of the system. Likewise when it comes to slavery, slavery was such a huge problem that you know the Quran and the Sunnah did gradually slowly so just kept making it more and more and confining it more but we don't see your final instruction that it's haram but what we do see is this narrowing and narrowing itself down. Is that fair analysis? Yeah I mean that's certainly one approach that that's the approach taken by people like Sayyid Amir Ali and Rashid Ridla",
      "and others um here's my problem with that argument is that it would have been really easy by the way this is one of the same things that like Christians tried to argue this in the 1800s and people who are pro-slavery or just not abolitionists debating abolitionists in the US",
      "why didn't Jesus get rid of slavery? Well, it was too much part of the system. It wasn't possible. So what you're saying, what about Jesus makes you think that like read the New Testament? What about this guy makes you thing that he cares about what people think or what's possible or impossible? I mean they got the guy was crucified right because he didn't care about challenging the system in the Christian view, right?",
      "these opponents of abolitionists said like are you saying why didn't jesus just say look i know it's not possible right now but slavery is absolutely wrong and you should get rid of him he never said that why didn t he say that why did anybody say this why didn bouddha say this? why didn Aristotle say this, why didn St Augustine say this etc. nobody said this so",
      "Islam got rid of things like idolatry. There was no negotiating that was a big part of life in Arabia too. I think the main reason is that slavery wasn't thought about as a moral problem it was basically",
      "It's basically a feature of political and economic life. So most slaves were captives, so the people that are captured in conflicts. And what do you do with a prisoner? You either let them go or you ransom them and then let them",
      "as a slave, like those are your options. So you don't have like a government that has these big prisoners of war camps, you know? You don't want to have that. So it's...you basically if you have prisoners, you essentially distribute them into the society and if people wanna ransom them, then that's fine back to their families and make money or if they wanna free them, that's find but the other thing is to keep them as labor",
      "So that's kind of a political element. The second one is economic, which is that how do human beings... I mean, Aristotle has this brilliant observation and I think it's in his politics where he says that there'll be slavery until looms move themselves. Loom's like a thing for weaving cloth. Until they move themselves, those are going to be slaves,",
      "Prior to the discovery, well, you know, essentially of hydraulic, maybe a little bit of hydraulic power, but then really steam power in the late 1700s, mid to late 1700. And then eventually fossil fuels humans, you want something built or made or done, or you have to get another human or an animal to move it. And when you no longer need humans and animals to do that, then you don't have to worry about that anymore. I mean,",
      "I mean, those things become unnecessary and they're also not efficient. What would you rather have? A car that is run by an internal combustion engine or one of those rickshaws with a guy like the Fred Splintstone car? Or a horse cart with the whole world full of horse poop or whatever feeding your horse and having to put your horse somewhere and your horse getting sick and all this stuff. The point is that",
      "The point is that it's not, slavery was part of the way people understood basic economic existence of human beings. It would be, and this is a very important point. There's no until essentially until the late 1600s as far as I know there's nobody or no society and I don't even think anybody who came out and said",
      "said slavery as an institution should be abolished. Because it wouldn't have been, it would have been sort of nontensical. It would be like saying let's abolish walking or let's any kind of engine. Like it doesn't, it was economically inconceivable.",
      "as well, wouldn't it? So like you mentioned in the book, the topic of labor or physical slavery, economical slavery and so on. I mean we don't call it slavery but it's not far off from- Well, if you want to think about slavery as somebody who is essentially working for free, right? They're working for you for free.",
      "this is another important thing which you will often get confused about when they think, think about slavery in the Americas and I think we know people in the fields working and the sort of very raw like backbreaking labor. But not only is this that's actually not true for the for the America there was also lots of different other kinds of labored slaves did but in world history let's say the Mediterranean world of Rome and Islamic world most slaves are domestic workers",
      "They're in the house. They're taking care of kids. They are cooking, they're doing errands and a lot of times they're skilled workers. They re carpenters, they re rope makers. Someone would buy a slave not to do stuff for them but to go out and be hired to do something and then they're essentially like investment so you they're basically making revenue that they then bring back to you. That's how by the way when slaves are doing this mukhataba when they're buying their own freedom",
      "So they're going out and making money, and they're making extra money for themselves that they then put into buying their own freedom from their master. So Mukantaba only really makes sense when you think about a slave who is actually out there in society earning money. Now the difference is they are not keeping that money for",
      "funneling it mostly to their owner so um i can't remember the original original question but what was the original question yeah kind of kind of tracking okay i think i remember but basically like yeah so the idea is that human society the way that it functions was that there was this need for labor",
      "And that the solution to this was, well, put it this way. You could have a society where everybody worked out in the fields and did stuff. But here's the thing. If you get rich enough, why should you do that when you can pay someone, when you",
      "there are people who are sold by their families. There are people whose sold by the parents, they're abandoned their parents. They're sold by clan leader right? They give themselves in slavery because they're so poor and desperate that you know et cetera, et cetera. So like there's all sorts of people at the bottom of society who have end up in a situation where they are working for somebody else. For the only thing to get in return is essentially",
      "living, you know they're supported to live. They're not paid money for that, they're not payed wages. And doctor do we find in early Islamic history, do we finds movements amongst slaves where they try to fight their owners or run away or they actually formed unions and caused some kind of movement for the freedom? Well yeah so I mean yes I'll answer that question but",
      "But I would first let me say that. You know, the all of civilization, right? The idea that you have a group of people who live together with a surplus of division of labor, surplus food so that people can engage in other activities besides subsistence farming and stuff like that. And eventually you get an elite who do things like write music and write books and start universities",
      "universities and do whatever other people do, right? All of elite culture rests on labor done by others. At certain times in history that labor is done a lot of it by people who are slaves. And at certain times of the history, it's done by people not technically slaves. Now if you want to say that workers",
      "or should we talk about as slaves or not? That's another debate. But the point is that, you know, high culture, elite culture, civilization is built on some people doing work so that other people don't have to do that work. Right, right. And okay, so then let me say another point which is very important,",
      "and just Muslims by essentially consensus in the very early period of Islam. I mean, essentially this time of the Companion. One of the things that they do is that they... They do not allow selling your children to slavery. They do NOT allow enslaving someone for debt which is by the way one of the main ways it again even more than selling someone as a relative or being captured",
      "history in most places is debt. Right. Because you've been indebted to somebody. Debt slavery prohibited Islamic law. It doesn't mean that it doesn't appear sometimes in Islamic civilization, but it's prohibited in the Sharia. You can't give yourself as a slave. You're not allowed to be a slave or a slave of Islam. So the Quran, the Sunnah and the Shariah very quickly closed every door. All the main doors into slavery were closed except for capture.",
      "capture. Well, two things capture in warfare so capturing non-Muslims outside the abode of Islam like you can't go and there's a Jewish and Christian guy living in Cairo. You can't be like oh you're my slave now right they're dhimmi's they can't get enslaved but if you go when you fight a war against this Christian kingdom or whatever then their captives could be enslaved. And then the second thing is people who are born of female slaves",
      "Except unless the father is the owner, then that case, the child is free. The mother will be freed upon his death. The child is not only as free but also legitimate and has the same social status as a child born of a free wife. This is unprecedented in certainly the Near East. I don't know about world history. For example, it's Thomas Jefferson's kids. Sally Hemingway. They were slaves.",
      "slaves they were black and they were slaves based on american law so in it's not if he were a muslim those children would be free and they would be like potentially the next president that would be the equivalent of you know george w bush jr right full-time carrying the carrying the bush name the fact that their mother was a slave woman would have been like only if there was some campaign",
      "or something, they'd say this. We would have no impact on their standing in society. So those are big changes that come with the Quran as some of the Prophet and the Sharia. The other question you asked... I can't remember the question you ask which I said I was going to answer now, I forgot. I was just asking if there were any major movements amongst the slaves? Oh yeah, yeah, Yeah. There were some rebellions. There's some slave rebellion especially",
      "rebellions, especially the big one in the late 9th century is the Zanj rebellion in southern Iraq. It was a big rebellion and it went on for a few decades but this is important to keep in mind. The Zans were not fighting to end slavery they just didn't want to be slaves and",
      "So the people they capture, they made into slaves. Okay. The tables. Same thing with Spartacus. Like you go watch SpartacUS, the movie with Kirk Douglas. He's this one scene where he's like we're going to fight until all the slaves are free. That's not what Spartacuses did. They also took their own slaves. These pre-modern slave rebellions are not abolitionist rebellions. They're not people who were fighting against the idea of slavery. They just don't want to be slaves. Right, right.",
      "So, yeah, they're pretty limited in Islamic civilization. The Zanj Rebellion being maybe the only really big one. There's a few others. One I think is now Nigeria in the early 1800s. But the reason why they don't happen is that unlike the Americas where you'd be happy in Haiti with things like Nat Turner Rebellions in the United States",
      "other examples as well the Bahia rebellion in Brazil in the 1860s I think, I can't remember exactly maybe the 1830s, I don't want to Bahia Rebellion B-H-I-A I think there's a really good article on Yachin about that by the way Dua of the Enslaved it's a wonderful article so",
      "couple of reasons one is that the you don't have like kind of what's called plantation or gang sometimes it's called gang slavery okay we're in the u.s where you have these a lot of slaves working on a plantation with a relatively small number of white owners or overseers okay um and by the way like this i mean i'm not i don't want to engage in pop psychology or something but i've seen this discussed elsewhere i think one of the some of the real reasons for",
      "like American psychosis around guns, around fear, around crime. Same thing you sort of see in South Africa especially in the kind of 1990s literature like books by Coetzee and other things like that is there's this pathological fear of the slaves are going to rebel because there's so many of them",
      "If you don't basically destroy their self-esteem, atomize their families, keep them illiterate, destroy their own self- esteem, religiously convince them that this is supposed to happen to them, terrify them, kill them if they do anything wrong. If you have a total reign of terror over these people the fear is that they are going to rise up and there's a lot of them. They're concentrated. They can talk to each other",
      "And that's, but in Islamic civilization, that's not really the case because people are mostly domestic slaves. A lot of them are in urban centers where they're just like, let's say you're in Baghdad. My jadiyah gonna go talk to your jadiya and I'm going to go talk his jadiiya. Remember also probably it seems like the majority of slaves that were brought into Islamic civilization were females",
      "So they're not being used for domestic work, or sorry, for agricultural labor. I mean, they've been used for a domestic work and it's such a high rate of integration into society because of the emancipation? Or sorry, manumission. In America, one of the reasons why you have a real movement towards abolition in the Americas",
      "is the same reason you have this rebellion, is that there's no hope for these people. If you're Black in the Americas, if you're a slave, you don't have any hope of not being a slave. And if you somehow are freed or you're born free or something, you're permanently... You have a target on your back. You're always an enslavable person.",
      "even if you're free. Someone's just going to grab you and take you, right? And there's no... The only way to live in any sense of security is to end the whole system. Whereas in Islamic civilization that's not the case, right. If you're- There's no hope, yeah. Yeah I mean first of all you're probably gonna get freed in a couple years at which point you can either stay if you become Muslim or you like it there or you can go back to your family wherever you know",
      "wherever you came from or something else. The second reason is that you're not, you're integrated. You're not with a bunch of other people living in a slave compound on a plantation. Whereas if you can get the kind of guns and stuff, you can rebel like you're one or two people in a household that is right next to another household with one or, you know, it's very, it sort of, you are totally dispersed in this society. Sure. Third reason is",
      "If you're freed, you're like a regular person. I mean, you can't tell the difference between that person and a free person on the streets of Baghdad or the streets in Cairo. So you could walk down the street of Cairo and see a guy who looks African. Maybe they are slaves. Maybe there's a slave. Maybe their son is the Sultan with his African slave woman and he's like the second most powerful man in the city. You have no idea.",
      "Your phenotype, your face, the way you look isn't going to control what you're gonna be seen as in this society. So that's why I think there is not really an indigenous move for abolition the way we see it in America because there wasn't really a impetus for it, there wasn' t really a drive for it. There wasn't a need for it",
      "This brings us to nearly the end of this discussion on this book. But before we do that, do you have any conclusion or comments? Are you going to do a part two to this book or are you done with the subject? Well I'd love to do second edition and stuff more material in but paperback has more material. I ram more material into it.",
      "No, I think that was... I tried to make the book really comprehensive. I tried it kind of one-stop shopping that you could get this and there's a few things I didn't discuss. I wish I had discussed the aura of Jadiyah which is really interesting topic. One of my students I hope is gonna do her dissertation on that. The other thing is no yeah so",
      "No, yeah. So I think that's... I'm not going to write another book on that for sure. Maybe an article or something but the- I am writing now this essay for Yaqeen on is Islam anti black? There's a you know obviously the issue of blackness and slavery overlap to some extent in Islamic civilization. Not as much as they do obviously in the West or in the Americas but so it's more about there's overlap there.",
      "that you know like the previous topic, it was kind of brought up by questions I was asked. So people this obviously has been in the news a lot last couple years so I wanted to try to answer some of the questions that i'd been asked and then I have myself on this topic but it's getting so long that I'm wondering if I should just publish it as a short book we'll see maybe I'll publish it in sort of short book",
      "book because it's getting to be quite lengthy. Yeah, that'd be interesting. Doctor, if we put the book to a side just for a second one of the other aims and objectives of the Islamic Literacy Society here will try to encourage people to write books as well and to write articles and so on and so forth So question why did you decide to take or undergo a PhD",
      "you're a professor now what was the goal behind that um well i mean first of all i want to say a lot sometimes people especially muslims go look muslim are hard on themselves muslim's are wonderful people i have to say uh you know even they get in their debates and their arguments and you know especially in the uk this it gets so fierce sometimes you know like",
      "I don't want to mention the names, but they're just like... You see these videos. You're like, guys, it's so intense. But in general, Muslims have really good akhlaq and they really love knowledge. The fact that I'm a nerd. I mean, I'm an egghead. The idea that somebody would want me to talk to me is normal people. Americans don't ever want to talk",
      "Americans don't ever want to talk to me, you know? So I mean the non-Muslims. Right. So my point is that, um, you Muslims are really intellectual, it's an intellectual culture and that means a lot of Muslims they really wanna learn. They really wanna think they wanna live a life with the mind. And sometimes they think that that means that they should kind of do academic degrees in Western universities, you graduate degrees. I think everybody should go to university, but, uh, mm-hmm, and that's not, that's necessarily true. I mean, you can, you",
      "You know, you can live a very advanced life of the mind as and even become an expert in things without going and getting a master's or PhD in a subject. True. So I think that's first of all, you know, don't people shouldn't always just think that they should, you",
      "a very satisfying life of mine. Second, that Western universities are not the place to learn about Islam if you're Muslim. If you want to learn from Muslim scholars, that's it. That's the issue. That is the end of that discussion. If",
      "interested in thinking about Islamic history, Islamic civilization as something that you want to study not as a part of your religion but as a subject of history or something then Western universities are good places to go. But Muslims in the West should not assume that this is not didn't seem to be much",
      "in the US, they somehow think you're supposed to take classes on Islam. I would tell most Muslim students don't take classes with me or with any professors and Islamic service, Islamic studies because they're not going to give you what you want. So if somebody wanted to do a PhD, what value does it add? So somebody who's involved in dawah, somebody is involved in mainstream discussing augmentation",
      "argumentation, presentation, so on and so forth. What would a PhD add to them? Not necessarily anything. I mean, look, a PhD is mostly an exercise in discipline and putting up with BS. It's really about discipline. It doesn't require a lot of intelligence. It",
      "Sister-in-law outside? I don't know. But the, so you know, I don t think it necessarily adds much. I think if you're really interested in a topic, if there's, if you can, if",
      "your mind in ways that you don't expect. And for a lot of Muslims, it's destructive. It's an obstructive process. I think that you should think really hard about it. I... I think most Muslims who go into academia thinking about sort of Islamic stuff, it ends up they get chewed up, chewed into meat and spat out. That's pretty blunt and brutal, guys. No, no, I would say that without",
      "say that without I mean, without a without hesitation. And I look at the people that I went into kind of cohort but I went in to and a lot of them are I don't know what they're I mean they look at me now as an extremist. Oh wow. So you can think about that. I mean I'm I'm from in the academy. I'm an Islamic extremists. Well, that's right. I am like a lunatic",
      "who's borderline not fit for polite company. So what we're saying is that university or higher education in that sense would water you down, melt you away? Yeah, I mean it's like people, an insan you athir bil bi'a. You get kunnu ma'as salihin almaru ma'ana habbil. We know",
      "it's very clear in our religion you are supposed to be around people who are good Muslims if you want to be a certain way go around people like that, if you go around a bunch of people who were X you're gonna end up like X. That's it literally humans are social animal right so you know they think that you're going to go into this environment and it's not going to affect you is naive now if you have I'd say this if Muslims",
      "If you have a good training in Islamic sciences, if you have really strong personality then I think it's something you can do. But otherwise there are a lot of people that they can't deal with it. So I think that that's an important thing to keep in mind but I would say also that no, I mean, I don't think... And I think a lot",
      "if you want to be a professor. Now, obviously in economics or finance or computer there's all these other fields where this doesn't necessarily kind of in the humanities. PhD is it takes a lot of time. It takes a and if you're rich and you don't have to work then you can do that. If you have a wife and kids who are or you have",
      "But otherwise, it's a professional degree. And academia is not exactly teeming with jobs. So someone who says like I want to become a professor and work in a university, you have to know that that is – you're going to have to excel. You're going",
      "My mom was a professor for a long time. But I never intended to, I always thought it was sort of a pathetic job. I don't know like attempts for it or why? No but I always though I was gonna be like a lawyer or something and then I just kept following this track and eventually I realized that being- You've become a professor. Yeah, but I never consciously made that decision. Okay. It's funny because there's nothing else I could do. Like I mean,",
      "other i mean god forbid that we have some kind of social meltdown because i would be completely helpless in any other thing anything better make a great lawyer hopefully i don't know so anyway that's the that's my advice i don' t know if that's advice you were looking for but learning is wonderful reading is wonderful discussing is wonderful but there's all sorts of ways to do this that don't involve um okay involved getting a degree",
      "Stay with us. Don't go away. We'll just conclude the interview, inshallah. So respected listeners, alhamdulillah, we've had a great hour together. Myself and Jonathan, we have gone through this book Slavery and Islam and we've touched on some really sensitive subjects here. Great benefit. I'd just like to take you, show you the website, right? So if you want to find further information on this interview,",
      "uh here we are the islamic literature society that's the home page there's lots of books there and people contribute their reviews to these books you can find this all here on the homepage you've got the about us book reviews are right here journal and you will find this particular video um under the section of videos there's",
      "There's lots of benefit to be taken. There is a special section for membership so you get some exclusive rights, you can join us on that as well. There we go, you see the actual Slavery and Islam there on your screens, masha'Allah five star I must say. Okay, alhamdulillah. So respected viewers like to thank you all very much for joining us on this programme do join us for another upcoming interview on an amazing book",
      "on an amazing book with another author inshallah so don't go too far away leave us your comments under the videos don't forget to like the video as well and hopefully we'll see you all very very soon thank you very much",
      "وقل غير مخلوق كلام مليكنا بذلك دام الأتقياء وأفصحوه"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/2_ Slavery and Islam_ A Conversation with Jonathan_mGMaIkqglcQ&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748688153.opus",
    "text": [
      "In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Peace be upon you all",
      "in terms of just the sheer range of topics that he covers and we'll be discussing inshallah his recent book slavery and islam um and uh just a brief introduction to professor brown who will be well known to a lot of our viewers he's currently the wali bin talal chair of islamic civilization in the school of foreign service at georgetown university",
      "extremely well-traveled scholar and extremely well published scholar who's written on topics from hadith studies to Quranic studies, to early Islamic history, to all sorts of sort of fascinating topics including the controversial which basically covers today's topic. So inshallah the standard format will be I will allow Professor Brown",
      "I know Jonathan Brown for a long time so I'll go ahead and call you Jack if that's all right. So Jack will inshallah be covering this topic for maybe about 10 minutes just giving us an idea of what motivated him to write the book, and in a sense what the main themes of the book are after which i will launch into a discussion",
      "go on for at least half an hour and if anyone has any questions we'll try and cover those questions towards the end of our discussion. Jack has been very kind to suggest that if we find that the discussion is going on over an hour, and there is interest on the part of the viewers, that we could potentially go on a bit longer depending on your circumstances of course Jack, and I understand you have other responsibilities as well",
      "you know please feel free to let me actually before i um sort of uh let you take it and take things over um i do want to emphasize people are free to write in questions they will come up to us as comments and you can also um i would encourage you all to buy the book um and there's a link that's present uh in the either video description on youtube or on the sort",
      "that this is really an extraordinary work, um, that a lot of people should be reading. So please do consider buying it and with that let me ask Jack to go ahead. Bismillah. Thanks a lot for inviting me. By the way everything I say now is actually in the book so if you're interested in more like reading instead of hearing you can find it in the",
      "You know, when I first became Muslim, probably about 19 years old. And at some point early on, I remember I was reading the translation of the Quran and I came across a verse in Surah An-Nahl, verse 16 where God compares, you know,",
      "who God has given like good sustenance to, right? And this is actually a parable of people who call on false gods versus call on the god, right. So false gods are like slaves that can't do anything, right and I was struck...I mean I remember being struck because I was like wait a second you know like you can't just mention slavery like you have to say something about how slavery's wrong like you",
      "about slavery and then it wasn't even saying you know go get a slave or do this with the slave that was it was just mentioning it as a parable like as essentially you know as a figuratively so that I was like well that's kind of I understand but anyway it wasn t a big deal. I think that maybe like a lot of Muslims, you know that the Quran talks about slavery talk about freeing slaves a lot right",
      "um but you know you can it's not really a big issue that comes up a lot for at least for me it wasn't so uh then of course so i went out of my mind but then when the isis thing happened right there was this you know a lot of these newspaper articles came out like in the new york times you know isis and the theology of rape and everything although",
      "that was inaccurate. The reporters, it was basically reprimanded for that. Yeah or just yeah like basically there's stuff that was not well authenticated so anyway you know that became a really big issue. A lot of Muslims were in shock because here are all these guys saying they're following the Quran and Sunnah",
      "and Christians, and other people in Iraq and Syria. And they're saying like, well this is in the Quran, this is an Hadith, it's in Sharia so what's a big deal? Muslims didn't really know how to answer that. Some of the responses were by Muslim scholars like, there's consensus that slavery has been prohibited. It's like okay, so why should people today say something but I'm telling you I'm following the Quran and Sunnah and what's your answer?",
      "you know, what's your answer? That today we decided we're not going to do that. That doesn't really seem like an answer. So it was a really big issue for a lot of Muslims. And I mean, I completely understand. So I was, I really wanted to deal with this topic kind of and try and answer these questions. And",
      "seems to allow something that you consider morally reprehensible. So how do you deal with that? How do you even make sense of your feeling of moral reprehensibility? If I'm Muslim and I'm supposed to follow the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet, and they know best, why is it that I feel so strongly that slavery is wrong? First of all, why do I have that feeling? How",
      "And what does that mean about the kind of truth value of those sources or the ability of those resources to offer guidance? So, that's a huge question. Now, of course, I was writing this book at the same time as this protest took place in Charlottesville, I think it was 2017, about taking down the statue of Thomas Jefferson.",
      "mind that he had children with, Sally Heming. And George Washington had slaves and this whole idea that George Washington was like you know I didn't want to have slaves freed them all. There's a book I recommend reading called Never Caught about Ona Judge who is a slave girl or girl within slave her parents were slaves of the Washington family she ran away when the Washingtons were in Philadelphia",
      "hunting for her. They were always trying to get her back. So this idea, they didn't just say, oh, it's fine. It's good she left. We wanted to free her anyway. No, no, no. Not at all. And when this happened, you know, it was funny because Donald Trump came out and sort of said what I more succinctly than I could brought up the point which is he said okay George Washington is a slave owner. Are you going to take down the statue of George Washington?",
      "Are you going to rename everything in America that's named Washington, which is pretty much everything? And here this was the crux of what I was interested in. Right. Which is that it's what I call a slavery conundrum. So you have three axioms and. You can't really reject any of them. Maybe you can, but we'll talk about that. You Can't really Reject Any Of Them But You Also Can't Hold All Three Of Those Actions At The Same Time",
      "So it's a conundrum. The first axiom is that slavery is an intrinsic and gross evil throughout time. And this is all stuff that now we know. These are fixed points of inquiry. These",
      "thematic, try going into any kind of social setting and saying that slavery was actually okay 200 years ago or something. See what will happen and then we'll talk later. The second maxim is that all slavery is slavery. There's no such thing as good slavery bad slavery. You can't say Thomas Jefferson had slaves but he was a really nice guy so he treated them well. No, there's no",
      "time. Two, all slavery is slavery. Three, our past has some kind of moral or even legal claim over us. So we look to our past for guidance. Maybe we look at our pasts for strict rules. Now here's the problem. If you look at human heritage, so the",
      "Prior to the year 1690, in all of world history, I know of one, two, three people. In all of human history. I don't mean in like the West. I mean everywhere that I know. Three people who said that slavery in and of itself is evil, is a moral evil. Not enslaving the wrong people. Not treating your slaves badly.",
      "your slaves badly i mean that is slavery in and of itself isn't evil can you mention this yeah one is uh gregory of nisa he's a bishop one of the church fathers a bishop from cappadocia he died in 394 i think common era uh the other one is um uh jean boudin he's",
      "1596, if I'm not mistaken. And the third one is a German jurist named A.K. von Repgau who in the...I think he's in the early 1300s, if i'm not mistake and he wrote a book called Saxon Spiegel, The Saxon Mirror which is, I think, one of the earliest books kind of Germanic law books. And he basically repeats Gregory of Nice's arguments with a little bit of adjustment. So that's it!",
      "So that's it. So here's the thing, right? Now look, if people who are saying like we should take down the statue of Thomas Jefferson, people were saying we should to take down this statue of that guy in Bristol, people who're saying we change the name of this building or that building because this guy was involved in the slave trade they're completely rights. They are totally correct. Logically speaking, they are completely correct.",
      "gross and intrinsic evil across space and time all slavery is slavery if you're involved in that if you are involved in the a gross and Intrinsic Evil throughout space and Time something that's so horrific no one can countenance it why would you ever honor that person? Why would you look to that person for guidance? I mean Osama do you take advice from people who think slavery is okay? Do you ask them like, I don't know what I should do in this situation or something. You know, I want to do whatever",
      "do what do i do ethically right you know tell me about god no we would it's ridiculous they're completely correct but here's the problem it means you're going to take at the least at the very least all of human history prior to 1690 into the garbage can that's it and then you know then we",
      "Thomas Jefferson, all these other people. But at the very least, every single philosophical tradition of note that I know, every religion that I knew of, all were either condoned slavery, had no problem with slavery, maybe defended slavery, thought it was totally normal. So what do you do? That's a big predicament. Some people might be willing to pay that cost. Some",
      "heritage before 1700. Why not? If it's evil, it's even get rid of it. But very not a lot of people are willing to pay that cost and certainly people who look to reveal traditions that come from the classical period or whatever, the Axial Age or after they wouldn't usually be willing to play that. So that's that's the main kind of issue I'm wrestling with in the book. Anyway, I'll summarize the book really quickly now.",
      "kind of talk about definition of slavery. And the main point I'm trying to make there is that really when you define slavery, it's a very political action and it's about defining what you think slavery is as opposed to what other people might do. So it's up it's saying who matters? Who suffering matter? Who's suffering doesn't matter now? There is no agreed upon definition of",
      "Right. So there's no agreed upon definition of religion, you know You and I are sort of in religious studies And there's not a great upon definition or religion religious That's not big deal because if you say religion is this or that no one says you're an evil person But here's the problem with things like terrorism and slavery these words that are not not agreed upon in terms of their definition but if you are guilty of those thing as you become kind of you have been cast out of the circle of Discursive",
      "or thinkability, right? Then that's the problem. Right? So when these definitions are both there's a degree of subjectivity, there's problems with subjectivity there but also they can be used as moral cudgels, that becomes really problematic. The second chapter looks at the history of slavery and Islamic law. Third chapters is kind of an overview of slavery in Islamic civilization.",
      "the abolition of slavery in Islam, I give you different approaches Muslims have taken to that. I say what I think the best approach is and then actually after I look at analyze their approaches from the problem of the slavery conundrum and then last chapter deals with kind of puts all this together and looks at the issue of sex concubines basically in Islamic law owners nail owners having sex with female slaves",
      "Right, so very light reading shall we say. Yuzak Malachayen, I mean that's a wonderful summary of actually a very sort of lengthy work which will...I think this may be the longest book you've written? Is that fair to say? I think so yeah. But it certainly rewards spending the time on it and indeed reading your extensive footnotes as well",
      "I think you've covered a lot of fascinating terrain in what you've just said, but I want to emphasize to people that as you put it at the outset this is in the book. But the book has so much more. It's extremely rich. It is extremely well researched. So please do try and get your hands on it to be able to read it. I just wanted to ask a couple of questions. Viewers are already sort of sending in their questions. So inshallah we'll try and",
      "or so. And wa alaikum salam to Samina Awan, who's just given salam us. Why 1690? What were you mentioning before 1690 I'm curious. Oh that's around when this one Quaker tract is anti-slavery Quaker track is written in Pennsylvania. Right and you kind of spoke in passing that you know who's going to discard everything before 1619 maybe some people will and i actually think",
      "think that, you know, the reality is so much of our laws, so much about sort of like society and culture is so deeply embedded in a history that sees itself going back to the ancient Greeks for example or to Magna Carta or what have you. Our institutions couldn't survive that kind of extirpation, so to speak, of history but I think that you present the dilemma",
      "How do you accept moral guidance from a tradition, whether it's religious in my view or irreligious because moral philosophy in the modern world which is largely secular in the academy for example still draws on these kinds of norms that are pre-modern as well even if they're very often critical about them. So how do you deal with that conundrum? One of the things I'm curious to sort of...",
      "I actually read the book about six to eight months ago and I've gone through certain sections in advance of this meeting. But I'm just curious, I can't recall a very detailed treatment of an Islamic theological question that arises in these sorts of contexts so I want to compare it with Sherman Jackson's fascinating book on the problem of black suffering which covers again a very similar moral dilemma",
      "he is a lot more sort of, he doesn't show himself to be very directly implicated in the debate. In the way that you point out in the beginning, you know, you're a white male and you are Muslim and therefore there are two traditions through which you are an inheritor of slave ownership. And he, of course being an African-American is more likely to be at the receiving end of",
      "you know make such a big issue of it and he presents the four well also you know for all we know his ancestors owned slaves too in africa i mean so what's interesting is if you look at i'm not you know i'm happy to admit my more immediate guilt in any number of issues but i mean what's",
      "That we have in the modern period I'm just speaking sort of obviously into theological theory here But these certainties that we have and a shoddy Zim it's like wait. We don't actually have any moral 70s And so I wonder if that's something that you reflect on in the book. I cannot recall that being a particular Yeah, I talk about that um now it's interesting because there's a There's a prominent Muslim scholar in the West whom I have a lot of respect for so I'm not gonna name this person I'll just say that",
      "I'll just say that this person wrote in several of their books that Qadi Abd al-Jabbar, the famous Mu'tazili Shafi scholar died 1025. He says that slavery is morally evil and intricately in itself.",
      "in itself now he never says this in his book so by the way that scholar never gives dictation but i looked through this book and also said it's sharon jackson and he never",
      "Things are you know the relationship of like exactly how things are right and wrong in the world is another issue But the point is that things are writing wrong in and of themselves in the way, right? And there can't be contradiction between that and what God says so god for example Can't say murder somebody because murder is wrong now for ushari you for an usher you could say god could say murder some Because the definition of just is what God said Okay. Now from what Tesla so called the other to bar if your mother's life",
      "If you're a Mu'tazilite, he can't say slavery is wrong. Why? Because the Quran allows it. So he says... In fact, he says the fact that God allows slavery means it has to be Hasan. It has to good. Right. Now what... Muslims scholars never... No pre-modern Muslim scholar that I know of nor could I conceive of them doing this ever said",
      "said that slavery was evil in and of itself right okay remember by the way except for those people i said earlier nobody said this yeah i'm not not just a muslim yeah now why but what what would they say they always though acknowledge it was harmful there's two things one in islamic law and islami theology humans are born free this is not a muslin invention",
      "Muslim scholars were also clear that only God owns our freedom But God can allow certain Situations in which people can lose their freedom, right? They can lose it Let's say if they commit a crime or something like that Right or in the Quran the Sunnah if you are non-muslim outside of the Islamic World and you get captured in a war with Muslims And then Muslim can take you and they can keep you as a slave. I mean",
      "But losing freedom because of a crime is not something which is in the Islamic tradition. Yeah, it's not. Muslims use prisons at various points in history. The point is they take somebody and put someone in prison we would say that has not been free right? Right. And by the way, it is interesting when Muslim scholars talk about this kind of legal theorists or moral and legal theorist talk about",
      "are controlled by the state they're held by the ruler of the government as almost like in lieu of God so just like the Sultan or the government can have you executed if you commit a crime right like they're the ones who hold this right of God they also hold the right of god in terms of freedom so yeah exactly but so when let's say you know Ahmed the Muslim owns",
      "owns a slave in Cairo and 1500 it's not act so I'm at the Muslim owns the right of using that slave the actual freedom and slavery status that person is held by their but that never mean that's why for example the government can say you're mistreating your slave I'm gonna make you free the slave or I'm going to take the slave from you or something like that so there's this oversight based on the same way",
      "like if someone came and said this guy stole from me or this guy murdered my cousin right now so the Muslim scholars never said that slavery was evil but they did say it's unnatural and by a natural I don't mean like it's like incest or something but I means unnatural is its not the natural state of human beings right something has to happen to you if we become a slave sure now but they also said is harmful",
      "It's it has a daughter daughter means harm, right? Why is it harmful? They say this very explicitly you can't do whatever you can make your own decisions. You can't Do whatever you want you don't get to benefit from all the fruits of your labors. You're not a complete legal person So for example in most schools of law slaves can't own property some school of law Slaves can't lead prayers some schools have lost they've you know Couldn't be a witness in court so you're not completely go person",
      "why freeing a slave is good and by the way I don't know of any source scriptural tradition or work of thought that is as obsessed with emancipation as the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet. The Quran, the Sunna of the prophet are obsessed with Emancipation with emancipating slaves So why are they so obsessed because Muslim jurists would say our legal theorist",
      "legal theorists would say slavery is harmful and oh you're but the difference the harm for them did not outweigh the owner's right of the owner right um now someone might say also like wait a second you said that the center obsessed with emancipation well why didn't the quran just",
      "that had slaves which pretty much every society certainly every civilization ever suggested the abolition of slavery until the early modern period until the 17th until really the 1700s and 1800s right why is that I mean that's another issue we can talk about I wonder if anyone ever sort of what other traditions prohibited alcohol for example in",
      "Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, I know prohibition took place in the United States but that's kind of a modern state kind of effort. But it would be an interesting comparative exercise. So the thing is that some people say why the Quran didn't prohibit slavery because it would become impossible. Well, I mean it was difficult to prohibit alcoholism, difficult to prohibited polygamy or sorry to prohibited polytheism. But Islam did that.",
      "In addition, it's possible right that the Quran or the Prophet could have said look We can't prohibit this but this is wrong Right. They don't say that but the point is that I think the reason why and just to make a slight digression But I'll tell you makes sense Which is what one of the things that I get emailed every night we did every about once a week once or twice a week an email from somebody saying I",
      "I can't understand how people pass a loud sleep. Fascinating. You know, and it's always causing them great consternation, anxiety. So, I mean, this is probably because I'm a professor and I think about all this stuff all the time. And you've written a book about it. But what really interests me is not how could they have thought it,",
      "Why is it that I don't think that? Right. So, I mean, if we're looking at kind of humanity, everybody in humanity who's ever lived, get them up on stage. You've got Aristotle, Buddha, the prophet Moses, you know, everybody. And you say, oh, everybody who thinks slavery is evil intrinsically in and of itself go over here. Everyone thinks that slavery is not evil intrinsicaly in and off of itself, go over there. The people would think it's... People are going to be very,",
      "specific time and place in human history. So here's the thing, what is... do those guys not have hearts? I don't understand these earlier people that they just don't... they're like dysfunctional their hearts don't work, their brains don't' work, I don''t get it how can they not feel the way I feel? I think that forced us to ask really what are the... What does our revulsion mean? How do we think about morality right?",
      "It's not a problem, for example, for us to say we think slavery is wrong because slavery is not really an issue today. It becomes a problem when we want to talk transhistorically about all morality being the morality that should apply for everyone throughout history. Can I interject briefly here? This is another point where you're a historian. I was trained as a historian in my undergraduate years",
      "And one of the things that's kind of drilled into you is, don't think anachronistically. Don't bring your own moral universe to bear upon the people you're studying in the past who as Quentin Skinner sort of famously put it witchcraft made sense in medieval Europe or I had the good fortune study with Jeff Stout at Princeton who's a relativist and pragmatist.",
      "beliefs in objectivity and moral truth as well. And so I, you know this is one of the things where I found fascinating, you have these paragraphs um I think towards the introduction where you say something along the lines of this is One of those topics where whoever writes it they feel compelled to say and this is wrong right? Um and it just makes me wonder that actually this is",
      "sacred points which we cannot you know really just disregard and think actually you can be nonchalant about that point um and no you actually have to take a moral position on it otherwise you're not a member of our civilization so to speak and i find that fascinating as well i think that's historically anthropologically interesting as well to be honest well i mean also you could look at that with other topics as well so if you said you know like different notions of truth so there's like the coherence notion",
      "I mean, there's some people who say like truth in the past doesn't exist. Like narratives of the past are just things that make sense to a community right now If you look at these debates usually what someone will then say is well So are you saying the Holocaust didn't happen? And then you're like, well, I mean okay obviously so there's certain I mean I'm not I'm Not making it up That's actually what if you look some of these discussions, that's how the discussion plays out Yeah, so the thing is that are the fixed points",
      "the dogmatic underpinnings, if you will. They are I find interesting. They're usually things that are recent changes. So like if you look at in America, I think probably in Britain too. What are the two things that you just cannot say? You can't support slavery and you cannot support pedophilia.",
      "Right now a bipedal view that we mean like sexual interest in people that we legally today would consider children Under 18s mine. Um, yeah so You know I just saw this thing yesterday about like some listicle about We should stop thinking that these people are great They were actually horrible one of them was Charlie Chaplin because he would have all these sexual relationship with 16 and 17 year old girls Although the age of consent",
      "Time was 16. But the point there, like he is garbage. He's awful so but if you think about these two issues That these are two issues I think I would say they're maybe the two things that you really just they're sort of like Taboo There are two things I have Inverted very recently in human history until very recently human history slavery wise totally normal and uncontroversial",
      "Until even more recently in human history a man having interest in a like a Nubile 14 year old Would be it wouldn't be a debate. There's a great book on this called American child bride by a guy named Styret is his last name, right? I mean there's a major campaign in the US at the moment as far as understand to change the laws because you can still get married Yeah, exactly. That's minor so but the point is that you know",
      "The thing is that, and I always use this example with my students. I say, look, if I told you that a guy was brutally murdered outside of campus a week ago, brutally murdered, they'd be like, oh, that's terrible. But if I said, okay, a guy a week go, he lured in this 10-year-old girl, and then he had sex with her and ran away with her.",
      "And the students are like, oh. I mean, even me saying that right now, I feel kind of disgusting feeling in my stomach, right? So you're like, ugh, that's messed up. Everyone's quiet after that. No one says anything. But if you look at human history, all societies think murder is wrong. All societies. And I think pretty much every society would say that just randomly going up to a person in the middle of the street and bludgeoning him to death is wrong",
      "is wrong. I mean, it's an absolute moral wrong throughout time and space. But in terms of the societies where the second thing would be wrong, a minority of human society in our history even to places don't have some place that they have a problem with them. So why is the thing that is actually much less- Yeah, I think the luring component of it would be... In a lot of pre modern societies",
      "with a conversation with the parents then it's okay or even if you read jane austen and things like that let's say he doesn't work let's her dad agrees yes i mean these things in yemen that people talk about the dead parents agree to it right right okay so but my point is not i think the point still stands which is it's our reaction",
      "to something that is actually much less agreed upon as wrong by our species in history? Why is it less fierce reaction to the thing that actually is agreed upon by our specie in history as an absolute moral? That's what I find. So, we get to think about like... The things where we feel gut revulsion are usually relative recent moral changes. Right? Yeah. So that, I think, is an interesting way",
      "about the relationship between moral avulsion and kind of anachronistic or trans-historical notions in morality. And there's another dimension, I mean like some of this stuff is really dynamite thinking, talking about it but obviously we're engaged in a sort of reflection which is an intellectual exercise here where both respected inshaAllah I hope I am a respected academic where both",
      "Reputable universities reflecting on a question which is you know intellectually significant By the way, this is the same. This is the debate that yeah Same problem that Christian tradition has Jewish tradition have Buddhist tradition has Hindu tradition has no moral natural law thinking has Conti and philosophy has Khan by the way read his stuff on race and slavery while he's writing the categorical imperative",
      "another thing is I mean it's interesting like the you know who I talked to so many people about this issue when I was writing this book and that the convert there's two kind of conversation one common first conversation as people just get completely disgusted and freaked out and they can't deal with it that's the normal response right do you know how I can the people that consistently I have the best discussions",
      "Because I think for a lot of Muslims, they don't want to deal with this and it freaks them out. And they get really uncomfortable. I think African-American Muslims, this is like day one. They have to think about this. Absolutely. Absolutely! This is something that is like...they wrestle with it. Right. And maybe they have to come to terms with it or not right? But the point is it's not something they can kind of put under the carpet. So yeah when I was writing this book in terms of feedback I got on it",
      "American Muslims were by far the most productive discussions.",
      "I'm not sure if you can hear me",
      "his own personal heritage. And I think that's something which, I hope to bring him on as an Islamicate author at some future junction and perhaps in part discuss some of although his own book is on a different theme This is really sort of like there are so many threads in this conversation that could be taken up very fruitfully I wanted to perhaps home in on you know",
      "one element that you kind of mentioned in passing there's a lot of material covered in this book but I was just thinking about sort of the modern condition of what Marxists call wage slavery right so you know there are all sorts of forms that we experience in an uh in a given moment in time in a",
      "and in a sense, a progressive understanding of how history morally progresses, so to speak. We can come to an understanding that potentially actually the way we're living right now may be seen 100-200 years from now as completely morally abhorrent as well. So the forms of employment that we have. And I wonder if you had the chance to sort of explore any of these in your sort of broad reading for this project notions that debt is a form of bondage. In fact,",
      "In fact, of course we had debt bondage historically but the fact that we all are going to university in massive amounts of debt and we're then getting a mortgage so to speak which will again embed us within a system. You have this quote from The Matrix in the text where you're saying that we're all ultimately slaves to the system. And you say that obviously that's different from being owned by someone",
      "would thereby be freed upon there and potentially become extremely influential figures behind the throne as well. So, you know that sort of like multi-layered nature of slavery I wonder if he can comment on it You know how it's difficult for us to really sort of have a uniform understanding of slavery. Yeah, I mean I think that one of the challenges is that slavery is both a metaphor and a legal concept right so",
      "So and sometimes those legal concepts, the metaphor overlap. But a lot of times they don't but they can be kind of invoked right? So there is no since 1926 basically or let's just say 1960 1980 last possible date. There's no legal slavery in the world. There is no slavery in",
      "What is freedom? There's no property. Just somebody has a right over something else Some rights that that's freedom is The ability to do what you want except when you're not allowed to do it You want that's the definition so I mean like these are it makes notes It's meaningless trans historically can I in one yeah on the point of there being no legal slavery Doesn't the 13th amendment leave a kind of space No because people were prisoners in prison",
      "Prisoners in prison. I mean, this is a big debate of 13 movie the 13th right? Is that slavery can continues by another name, right But you're not the people in prison are not safe They're not on they're still free people. They're just in In prison so now there's a great book if you're interested There's it called the slavery by another named by Douglas Blackman which talks about",
      "The way that, especially in the South, you know, mostly black men, 100, 200 thousand black men between 1865 and 1920s or so would basically get arrested for like, oh, you're loitering by the 7-Eleven. You come to come to like, OK, you are guilty of vagrancy. You need to pay a fine of $100 dollars. OK, they're going to prison. Oh, and now, by the way, before even anyone can find you, I'm",
      "find you i'm gonna give you to this company i'm selling you to do this company up in pennsylvania to build railroads you're going to go get worked until you die and then they're going",
      "um a relationship of exploitation, an asymmetrical relationship of dependency or uh of export to exploitation. This is where you get what you know thought it was like modern day slavery or new abolitionism which really starts to get articulated in the late 1990s and it really works along the idea of slavery as being a coercion so it's coerced labor",
      "Coerce labor with essentially no remuneration. Now, the problem here is that what's coercion? Right. If you look at a lot of the major writers on modern day slavery in the 1990s and 2000s and they write about prisoners, they say, look, if you're in a gulag in North Korea, yeah, you might be a slave.",
      "You have work you can do. You're you know, you can you can choose not to work if you don't want to work Then you're not a slave Okay but now think of the whole movie 13 and the whole idea of prison as a you know this sort of carceral slavery is that is Is now much more accepted and a lot of those authors at least one that I'm thinking of is Now it says he's reconsidering the issue what's changed the conditions? I've not",
      "Conditions does not change. It's just about what are we comfortable calling? So that's why this idea of what is the slavery in a lot of ways, this is a political definition. Now here's the thing. What coercion if you're in a federal prison in the United States, federal prison, you have to work. You don't have to but if you don't work, you're going to get what? They're gonna get put into solitary confinement. You're gonna",
      "p.m so okay no food from 5 30 p. m to like 7 a.m right they can deny family visits no family solitary confinement starving you to death that seems like coercion to me especially the un considers solitary confinement to be a form of torture so it really like what is coercion a lot of people would a lot",
      "don't work in prison. And then, by the way, where does these workers in U.S. prisons? They've done work for Victoria's Secret, for other companies, even according to international labor organization definitions of modern day slavery. U.s. prisons are places that have slaves. There's no I mean it just prima facie per se they are there and there are people who were in captivity or being farmed",
      "who are being farmed out to private corporations. Right, right, right. And as you say the film 13th which I guess we'd both recommend it's on Netflix for people to watch illustrates very sort of very powerfully that and has inaugurated this really serious debate along with many of the scholars who were speaking in it they've of course been writing about these themes for a while. But here's the problem so let me interrupt you but the problem is like there's if you can look at cases",
      "cases. There's a case called Celia Dean versus France at the early 2000s, another one called Queen versus Tang from the Australian High Court a couple of years later. And in both your cases are basically people saying I'm a modern day slave. I'm being held in slavery in France and one case in Australia and other case. And then the first case, the I think it's the European Court of Human Rights for not mistaken comes back and basically says, look, this person might be being treated badly, but they're",
      "being treated like property so they're they're kind of going back to this very property-centric understanding of slavery right very legalistic formalistic understanding in the australian high court case they said no if we look at the the coercive relationship we think this is slavery right so you can see even in a one decade or within a few years in the 2000s there's these two still",
      "and pulling against one another. And then it's like, you know, I remember okay what the kind of white nationalist people say. I think this is even in the state curriculum educational curriculum in some states in the US they'll say that actually a lot of white people were slaves too who came to America because they were indentured servants. Right, right. Now by the way there's some crazy stuff like the year 1619 when Africans were first brought to the US to America North American slave same year",
      "Same here about think 100 English children from like the streets of London brought them here a bunt most all of them died But my point is that some people do well these indentured servants were slit Now someone would say and it's a limit. That's very time, right? Service yeah, it goes for through the 1700s I'm not sure exactly where that but no, I mean in terms of like you can go into okay",
      "You can sell your services for you know, to go to the new world. So they'd say someone would say whoa These people are not slaves hmm this African guy is like out, you know Hunting or his village gets raided he gets taken put on a ship sent to Brazil That's a slave right and he's gonna stay there from the rest of his life He's gonna get worked until he dies. Hmm. That's it but these guys These British guys they went and they did they agree to do that They say I will give up certain freedoms of mine",
      "certain freedoms of mine and even you can punish me if I run away, you can brand me. You can chop my hand off. You could kill me right? But in return for my trip to the new world, I'm going to be your servant for 10 years. And then after that, I am gonna get a piece of land. I'm gonna go try and make my living now. So those are very different one is one is unwilling and one's willing. That's a good point. But guess what? According to things like international label organization, other",
      "other walk free, other anti-slavery organizations in the world today. Debt bondage and indentured service is a major type of slavery today. So what you see is, you can think of it as like inflation of the term. The term slavery is inflating, inflating. It's sucking up more and more things underneath it. And in one sense this is good because look if there's some guy who's getting treated badly in another country well we don't want that to happen",
      "is not a metaphor when people talk about modern slavery they're not saying it's like oh you're working my boss is making me work like a slave right there saying no these people are actually slaves just like people 200 years ago were slaves these people were slaves but actually what we're saying when we say that hey wait a second like person American prison is not being treated as badly as a slave in the antebellum South",
      "there's different levels of slavery and that breaks the first, second axiom which is you can't... All slavery is slavery. So people start to get really uncomfortable and this kind of discursive system starts to break down I just wanted to say that there are quite a few questions and I'll be able to turn to them in just a moment if that's alright inshallah but thank you everyone for putting in your questions and we will put them to Professor Brown in just",
      "a moment. I wanted to close with, you know, a reflection on what this all means for Muslims so obviously your writing both as a Western academic and as really a Muslim theologian thinking about serious questions from a Muslim perspective as well and you know I really like the way in which you blend those two traditions of approaching the Islamic tradition",
      "And one of the major challenges, and I kind of hinted at this when I was referring to Ash'arism, that what is the source of our norms? Right. And what you're saying is in the slavery conundrum that slavery is wrong. That's an axiom that we know. Slavery, slavery, slavery is",
      "given by God everything that humans do are completely contingent they in a sense have no moral value whatsoever or you're a mu'tazili and there are other options as well of course if something like slavery has been mentioned neutrally in the Quran or",
      "In other instances it's mentioned as something that is encouraged to bring an end to through freeing of slaves and so on. So you can say there's a sense of discouragement almost, but I think neutrality is quite salient there. The Mu'tazila would seem to suggest actually that's something which we cannot say is evil. And I sort of sent you in a WhatsApp message just before our session",
      "I don't believe it's mentioned in the book at all but in Sahih al-Bukhari where Abu Hurairah says quoting the Prophet that the slave has two rewards and he mentions the rest of the hadith, and then he adds at the end if it weren't for the Hajj and taking care of my mum, I would have loved to die a slave so there is a completely different conception of what it means because for him it's like",
      "you know a slave is getting a double reward, a reward for being obedient to his god and a report to being obedient. To his owner despite all of the other harms that are recognized in this judicial tradition and so in a sense there's this moral sort of like challenge that I would suggest that our modern circumstances puts us into this bind that actually you have to have this sharp strong",
      "same time you have a tradition which if you want to be a part of, you can recognize there's even moments where certain members of the tradition like Abu Hurairah are saying actually there can be a moral good almost involved in being in a state of servitude and he almost says that I wish I was a slave. So yeah, that complexity. I wonder if you just want to comment on that before we go to questions inshaAllah? Yeah, by the way, I'm not saying that Abu Hurayrah",
      "Christianity or something. But I mean, you see a lot in the Christian tradition in the gospel and the letters of writings of Paul and the gospels that Jesus comes in the guise of a slave, right? That the Christian is like to be a slave to their fellow man, not just to God but to their",
      "slaves that's what they that for them is this expression of piety or a way to train themselves in piety I would say that now one thing it's important to remember is that you know usheries don't go around and say like you know hey Osama like you",
      "You're offended by me saying that but God never said don't tell someone to cook the dinner right now and there's no way to wrong No, of course. There's what's called Yeah custom yeah And that's what people like you know when a gazali and others write about this That's where most human morality comes from custom and by the way This is how Islamic law also we'd notice from one of the major five major principles or maxims of Islamic jurisprudence Allah Adam haqqa more on another version",
      "Custom is probative. Custom is dispositive. Custom it's authoritative as long as it doesn't violate the Sharia, obviously But when someone says like you know Like if I went and told my wife hey Where's dinner? And don't forget to clean the dishes and I'm gonna go to that I'm going to go to the she-ship cafe with them with the boys. I'm watch the game. I want the kids put to bed I'm Gonna come in then if I did that I'll tell you where I'd be I'll be outside the next second",
      "The next minute, I'm going to be outside on my butt wondering how I flew that far out of the house in that amount of time. And then I'm gonna get taken to court and my wife's gonna say this guy is a deadbeat dad. I want to be divorced from him. And if there was a Sharia judge there they'd say yeah, this guy's a terrible husband because what determines obligations of husbands and wives is custom. Custom isn't like oh, I don't know what to get Osama for his wedding present. That's not custom.",
      "custom I mean it is but that's like a silly form custom is like these deep senses of right and wrong we have hmm interesting right my custom can change so now that's really important to remember the second thing you were talking about was I forgot now oh about the yeah so the hadith yeah Muslims scholars",
      "Was something that Muslims did for pietistic reasons they wanted reward forgot exactly say sometimes you have these documents of Manumission where they'd say I do this hoping for my word from God, right? One of the things that people that Muslim scholars talk about when they start discussing abolition of slavery is some people think wait a second But then if you're taking away a major good deed from people because they can't free slaves anymore And we would say what the heck are you talking about? What?",
      "what? You crazy? But that was a serious, like for them it was really important. The idea the reward you got from freeing slaves is really important right and and that was",
      "Like or you'd see for example Muslim scholars who would say it would fight they literally die They would die and there's examples of this. I'm down on Jesus was another is a good example Moroccan scholar in the early 1700s There's a command the ruler of Fez Mellis mile orders all people who are like of African descent of slave dissent In Fez and around that to be enslaved For his army Hamdoun, I just saw us writes a fatwa against this he told to shut up He's right another one",
      "one he says if you write another when you're gonna we're gonna execute you he writes another one he knows he executed he gets executed he said this if you do this this is a mockery of the Sharia no one has ever said this in the past is absolutely unacceptable right he went to his death but he come don't just use could care less if a Christian got enslaved okay so what's this guy's problem why doesn't understand",
      "They write and they talk about animal rights as abolition. And they're not saying that as like a metaphor, they're saying look what is the idea that before there was an idea that you could take let's say African people and enslave them? And now that you couldn't enslave white person. How is that any different from saying I can take a cow and put it in a cage and take its milk and kill and eat it but I can't do that to a human right",
      "right they'd say that's just speciesism they say it's speciesism right and someone could say oh come on that's ridiculous but why is it ridiculous 100 you say a hundred years from now if we're you know all these animals are killing destroying the environment anyway it's totally environmentally unsustainable to eat meat this is true right so 100 years from",
      "They didn't understand these animals have rights. So, you know the same way that Our world view makes sense to us The fact that someone in the past doesn't make sense to them doesn't mean it didn't make very good sense to themselves I guess the final point And it's up to you because we should really be taking some questions but I was just thinking about the hadith of Abu Hurairah something",
      "probably said by a companion or something that that god wants freedom so that's why if you say if osama if i'm you're my slave and i say uh you're free osama no i'm just joking you're not free oh i said you're pretty boom that's it yeah no but i was joking if we were making a deal about me buying your car not that car you had before by the way which we won't get into when you put you pick me up with",
      "You know, I'm just joking. I'm not sure that wouldn't be a legal contract because I was never my intention to buy the car Yeah But if I say free you and I mean it's joking or I make a mistake or something boom, that's read why God wants freedom This is what's the other phrase? That's used Who says this again? Oh Allah Allah yesha al-haria Okay. Thank you. I think you can see it in the habit of",
      "Right, right. Okay. I mean that's one of the earliest texts we have yeah in Islamic tradition. Yeah, so Anyway, so that that's a Yeah, that's it. That's a very important point because they're there to seven with and it's agony is one of reason that There's so many slaves brought into Islamic civilization from the steps of Russia from Turkic lands from Europe from Africa from India Is because Muslims are constantly freeing their slaves",
      "slaves right so they're constantly having to replenish the labor supply because you don't have like a reproducing self-reproducing slave population. So this is a point that you made in your and I think we've referred to it briefly already which is that there was a capitalist imperative to get rid of slaves and that's one of the things that actually... There's a big debate about",
      "You're going to understand why this is a big debate. In my opinion, if you're talking to the Dutts-Marie type guys and you start saying or Christopher Hitchens or something starts saying, the West sucks. The West isn't that great. What are they going to say? What's their first thing they're going",
      "People always say what are these like, you know? night not Nigel Farage but the fuzzy and he's other like Winston Winston Churchill is great type people Let's say we ended slavery. We ended slave for the whole world who went around to control the oceans so The idea that Western Europe that with the West doesn't have slaves it's a is like Neil I called the natal miracle of Western",
      "miracle of Western civilization. And you can see this even in French historians like Marc Bloch, who said that the disappearance of slavery in Western Europe is one of the most incredible phenomena in human history. So there's... Of course it actually... I don't know if you can hear me. My camera is like... Can you hear me right now? Yeah, I can hear you. I think your internet... I do not know why that happened but the point is that slavery, enslavement of Europeans within Europe actually goes on a lot longer than people think. Definitely through",
      "definitely through like the 1200s in Scandinavia and then the enslavement of People from like North Africa Muslims in Italy like through the 1800s Of course we know about the slavery in the colonies but my point is that The idea that the West somehow is at this leading, a leading edge",
      "history is very important for like a western self-identification right it's the founding myth of western yeah so this is a big debate because when you come in here's the question very simple fact right something that essentially nobody in human history thought was wrong goes from being fine to being completely",
      "completely, absolutely unacceptably evil essentially within 150 years. And how did that happen? I mean do some people or people in the 1800s are they eating more protein? Are they somehow smarter? Are better...are they smarter than Thomas Aquinas or St Augustine?",
      "or then the Prophet Muhammad, or Buddha, or Moses and all these people? No. So what happens? I mean, the narrative of course very often is about we've liberated ourselves from our infancy so to speak. Look, where is this you know in Renaissance we discovered the Greco-Roman tradition We discovered Roman law which allows... If you look at you know",
      "John Locke or My god name is It gave me right now. He could our laws bar ocean Then that dies in the mid 1600s major early forerunner of human rights discourse international law Hugo Grotius These guys they're just operating with a Roman law tradition where if you there's certain There's legal way to enslave people which as you capture them, okay? Now",
      "Right now. And it's really only in the 1700s, into mid and late 1700s that you start getting like a real of this enlightenment rejection of slavery. Why is that there? It's interesting they're reacting to well, there's a couple reasons, but one of the reasons is their reactions, the Atlantic slave trade, which is horrific. Right. It's not only horrific, but it's racialized too. That it's racially based and justified",
      "and justified. And that doesn't, it really does not sit well with a lot of people like with Voltaire, with these other names are escaping me right now. I can't believe I'm forgetting them. But the, a lot",
      "Is a rediscovery of attrition that had no problem with slavery So what happens? What is it in human Aristotle has a very prophetic line. I think it's in his politics He says that they'll be slaves until looms move themselves, right like that What actually happened when its when did slavery become? The sort of the ball start to roll and then gain momentum and really you hit a tipping point Let's say in the 1800s, right what's going on mid-1800s",
      "the mid-1800s you already have industrialization and it's not a it's no coincidence that abolitionism emerges as is first expressed and then catches on in the two places that had first industrialized and had gained extreme economic prosperity without reliance on slaves britain england and the northern colonies of what became the united states fascinating i mean",
      "Fascinating. I mean, I wonder if there's... So there's a big... Yeah, go ahead.",
      "economic development takes a while to get to those parts of the world in the way that capitalist development take place",
      "It's not about like I need this guy to I need these people to pick cotton in a way where I can make a profit Right They don't need that they but it's how you think about like How do you have your people? You're retinue that you trust King Abdelaziz been served with the founders already Arabia Who is the guy who's guarding him at all times when he's praying he stands behind him with a sword and a rifle at all time",
      "Right. What's his name? It's not his brother, it's not a son, it is a slave. Yeah of course. So there's this is a big difference is its when you have if slavery economic phenomenon and of course it also has social elements as well in the West but I mean the point that it's mainly economic phenomena economic change will change situation if it's mostly a social phenomenon you can have economic change and maybe the social system doesn't change that much",
      "I mean, I'm not trying to like whatever flog my own wares but it's better. I'll just read this from the footnote so then I don't you know make You know make a lot of mistakes and recalling it which okay? There's a brief 390 on the footnotes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah summary of the debate Yeah, Eric Williams landmark book slavery capitalism in slavery 1944 Landon and me. Okay, I talked about the moral awakening narrative the moral Awakening narrative",
      "The moral awakening narrative basically says abolitionism happened when human beings woke up and were like, holy crap, slavery is wrong. That's basically the narrative. He landed a major blow against the moral awakening argument that Anglo-American abolitionism triumphed in ending the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 because of the rise of free trade and industrial production along with the weakening of mercantilism meant",
      "agricultural industries that depended on slavery had entered economic decline by that time. In short, slavery was no longer part of a good business plan. In his 1977 response to this book, Seymour Drescher in a book called Econocide showed that far from being in decline, slave-based agricultural production in the Americas had actually entered its peak profitability in the early 1800s. Ending it was quote, economic suicide",
      "suicide for a major trunk of the British American economy. Moreover, slavery was totally compatible with industrial modes of production. The moral awakening narrative had been right in effect, says Drescher. Dresher and others since have argued that abolition was brought about by a major change in Anglo-American public sentiment regarding slavery, sentiment that ran counter to economic interests. Other scholars have tried to",
      "more than simply the obsolete or incorrect specifics of his decline thesis. It was the notion that in the end, that the end of slavery ultimately hinged on changes in material circumstances not the idea of slavery as immoral driving history. They have offered several proposals for reconciling this economic narrative with Drescher's critique. Thomas Haskell argued that the peak profitability of slavery-based production",
      "changes afoot on the world stage so yeah maybe you know things in the caribbean had entered decline but if you look globally like economics was shifting away from a slavery model to one where you have to have workers who are also consumers things like that i find temporally howard temporarily's education which rely on an attitude most convincing so hem temporally has a great argument which he basically says both arguments are correct",
      "hey, this is a lamb. I don't want to eat lamb chops anymore. If you say that to like Bengali or Pakistani, what do they say? They'll laugh at you, right? What are you talking about? You're crazy. You're a crazy person. Oh, you want me to die of starvation? This is meat. If I get meat, that means I'm actually going to have real chance to develop a brain. So these are luxury. Once you have the luxury to start thinking about moral issues, you start thinking out them and you can start kind of coming to new moral realizations.",
      "Like a more refined morality. So this starts happening in places where they don't need slaves, Northern United States, Great Britain as they start to industrialize and then they start see like wow we're actually doing things like we're inventing water wheels and we're venting into you know steam power and trains the world is changing suddenly the world Is actually your the world that's something you can change progress is happening. You're at the forefront We're getting better were the leaders were morally superior",
      "then you start saying, I can actually express this moral sentiment that I think slavery is wrong. Ask other people to believe that they can get kind of join onto the bandwagon as well. And then economic change starts happening there as well, people don't need slavery in other places as well it catches on and becomes easy to get rid of slavery. They become morally convinced of this so the moral awakening, the beginning is economic change in certain places but then that creates a moral sentiment",
      "It changes and that creates part helps create more economic development. And it's sort of like snowballed into this Like a feedback loop as I said, although just in terms of the language that you used I mean the challenge for from an atomic theological perspective is to describe That as more morally refined partly because we look back at the prophet as a moral example But it is more it is morally refined. I mean think about this so it's not about Good or bad or better or worse? So if you um",
      "um like how often are muslims supposed to bathe according to the son of the prophet like once a week is typical right okay yeah so do you ever talk to anybody who bathes once a no i'm serious like if i meet if i need someone like i'm kind of an asshole so i'll be honest i'm not even that's it so if someone i meet someone meeting man you stink this not only do i don't want to be around that guy that guy is i think he's a bad person",
      "There's something wrong with this person. They're not civilized, right? Right, but there's nothing morally wrong with bathing once a week, right, right Nothing morally wrong it but you but that judgment comes naturally almost It's because we this is because custom creates morality right so our But that doesn't mean I in a not I would rather die than say that I'm a better person the problem Sure, I mean that's part of your theological",
      "or Ali bin Abi Talib. Right, right. But that's what I mean by more refined morality. It's not about being better. It is about having like... All these other issues are taken care of. Where you're going to eat? How you're gonna sleep? Your health is taking care pretty much, right? Now you're worried about these other things. These other things, these Kamaliyat in the language of Maqasid al-Sharia, the Kamaliat, the Tahsiniyat become major issues. So that's why I think",
      "And by the way, I didn't make sense at all is that that's why the you know The best argument in my opinion for abolition and Islamic tradition is when you go back and you look in like a shot to be in his Mofa Mofo cotton things like that. Yeah he says one of the the Not the main aims of this room but one of them to the Sharia is it freeing people emancipating people fascinating? yeah So if we if we are now in a position where we don't need there's no economic need for slavery",
      "Right, we can fulfill that mandate for emancipation by just getting rid of the whole category of slavery and fulfill one of them across of the Sharia This is an entirely Islamically legitimate right argument It's 100% from within this Sharia tradition and someone could say and this is often said you hear this Well, you never would have thought about it hadn't been for Western abolitionists Here's the thing western people would never have thought either Nobody thought about abolitionism until it became economically possible",
      "economically possible right so western people it just happens to be the industrial revolution started in england and then north america west northwest america sorry northeastern north amerika yeah that's just it's not because western people have like some kind of gene where or they read some book that makes them love freedom more than other people right right so i mean yeah this is interesting of course isn't it because you have the kind of more ideological historiography which says",
      "but my impression is currently really well i mean for themselves everybody's treating them for themselves yes but no i mean super freedom loving about like other people yeah my impression that the sort of more serious historiography now recognizes the contingency of you know where the industrial revolution ultimately took place um due to various kinds of accidents of history it has really been wonderful and I feel very guilty sort of hogging all of the time because",
      "of the time because there are a bunch of questions yeah so let me if it's all right i'm going to post them on the screen uh and then we can read them out and then inshallah you can sort of um so actually so here's here's a question from Aisha Sayyid I'm just gonna post it if that's right um it says given that Islam came for the emancipation of all humanity and for liberating uh from all bonds demanding submission only",
      "unanswered dilemma especially for the youth who find this irreconcilable with the benevolent image of our Prophet how can we tackle this and I think you know, this is one of those questions that you have yeah, I get this question a lot. I mean I get a lot of emails like this so look first thing I would say is Yeah, this really hard issue and I would actually I'm trying to turn it around on this person",
      "this person, I would ask people to ask themselves like okay it's not like I'm the outlier we're the outliers. We have to explain why we feel a certain way about this issue and then that gets to this whole issue of changing custom and economics and everything like that and all the stuff that Osama and I just discussed now so",
      "I think it's factually incorrect. It is factually, incorrect to say that having slaves or allowing slavery is irreconcilable with the benevolent image of the prophet. That's not true. That wouldn't be true for a Christian in the year 1600 or Muslim in the 16 hundred or a Buddhist in the",
      "This would not be an issue. Just like, by the way, even people who are trying to find dirt about the prophet's personal life to insult him with, which is essentially all the opponents of Islam. Not until 1905 did any of them say he married Aisha when she was nine years old and that's messed up because they didn't care about that stuff. No one cared about that before. Okay? So the point is what's changed is not... We have to ask ourselves",
      "Why are we looking at the way of world in a certain way? There's nothing wrong with the way We look at the world as I said, there's nothing we you know Ending slavery and freeing slaves and improving people's conditions is no one's gonna debate that. That's good. That' s one of the aims of the Sharia but that doesn't mean that It should be impossible for us to imagine that people in the past didn't have a strong reaction as we do now",
      "Another thing that's really interesting is slavery was a dilemma for Muslims and you can see this in the Sunnah of the Prophet But it wasn't a moral dilemma. It was a theological dilemma And this is very famous hadith, right? So the prophet says it's like Muslim and other books don't owners of slaves Don't say to your slaves Abdi or Emmett II Say will ami or jadiyah teeth. Don't take my slave or my female",
      "ibadullah or were abid, we're all the slaves of God. How do you have a slave who's also the owner of another slave? Who's a rabbi of another slav? So they this idea of there's an anxiety about making sure that the relationship between God and human beings, between the Lord and the slaves are not mixed up with the relationship",
      "There's so there's a tension there That Muslims try to Sort of push down or allied away by saying that this is this relationship is not like a master-slave Relationship it's a it's like a patron Junior relationship, although the person is owned right? Yeah now yeah, so that's I'd say it actually is a dilemma but a theological one",
      "ideological one and when um Yeah, go ahead sir I wonder if I could also mention I mean like there it's a multi-layered tradition You know I think we need to develop historical consciousness To a certain extent because you have this beautiful appendix 1 a slave saint of Basra which I recommend everyone to read It's just you know three pages for this extraordinary anecdote about this kind of a wali of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala who is a slave",
      "and very poignant in many respects. And so, you know there are ways in which... But it's not just that right? This other major scholar in the city two majors scholars they buy the guy and he's like why are you buying me I'm not a very good servant He says I don't serve creatures",
      "no, you don't understand. We want to be your students. We wanna serve you and be your student. Yeah. I mean, because he... And yeah, it's just such a striking story. It's a true story. Not like this fictional novel that I don't wanna ruin for you but it's really poignant, I think. Sometimes I personally think about",
      "you know, there are these historical shifts that have taken place that give us these modern sensibilities that we don't need to deny and say, you know this is wrong and we're going to reject it but that shouldn't also cause us to reject and deny the sort of...the station of the Prophet ﷺ And I think those two things are...you know Honestly, I think it's healthier like, I mean",
      "about the way that the rhetoric, the moral rhetoric is working. And just like UK and America you can see... Like if you say that I mean, if you were involved in a slave trade that you are kind of beyond repair, right? So I'm not sure it's really healthy to have that view of our past where we are so morally certain",
      "morally certain about things and black-and-white about things because I think that it doesn't acknowledge the changes in sentiment. And when you think about it more as like, I'm trying to improve people's lots as best as I can. We are all trying to do that but that doesn't necessarily mean we're better than people in the past or that we have to condemn people in",
      "black and white terms. I think it's actually more, and by the way, it makes it possible to think about your opponents as well. So you're a conservative or Republican or Democrat or Labor stop being evil because they see the world in a certain way and they start being someone who has different views about certain interests or certain priorities. And that's someone you can negotiate with and deal with a lot better. I Think you highlight in the book the reason for this kind of uncompromising moralizing about this question which",
      "Which you know, we recognize and we see all the time but in a sense the abolitionists needed to project that In order to you know persuade everyone look. We just have to stop this now Yeah, because slave owners would say like look you're right. This guy is a bad slave owner He's treated slaves terribly I don't do that You know or we're like look I understand you guys have legitimate concerns So well, you know what? We're gonna do we're gonna make sure these slaves are treated Well, and then were your agree okay so they it was no in order to",
      "In order to kind of make it something non-negotiable, they had to make it non-negotiable. I wanted to switch over to just the remaining questions. Ibn Battuta 7 says, As-salamu alaykum, Shaykh. But... I saw the other questions. And I think a lot of them are already answered. Yes, you've already answered, so I'm just going to at least read them for the sort of hope, so that their voices don't get sort of silenced as it were.",
      "of silenced as it were. Yusuf Ali was saying classical Islamic jurisprudence say anything about turning free people into slaves and you kind of covered that I mean in essence my understanding is, and you can correct me if I'm wrong here the only context in which you can enslave people really in the Islamic tradition was in battle and modern scholars basically said and that was at the discretion",
      "I really found fascinating this point you made that a lot of later scholars said, look we cannot buy and sell slaves anymore from outside because we have no way of knowing whether they're actually legitimate slaves or not. And I mean, this kind of goes in tension with Ehudtela Dana's remark which you commented replenishing slaves from the outside which was in a sense socioeconomic imperative. I wonder if he could briefly maybe comment on that?",
      "comment on that yeah i mean so the thing you're talking about is a relatively i mean it's not it's a minor discussion in the sense that it doesn't have a big impact but what they're saying is if you are not sure that a slave has been legally enslaved should you buy them or not and the overall answer is if",
      "Bottom line is you can because you're gonna assume that like for example, it's on when you go to Yeah all these or whatever people go do. You know where you go? To like the local store, you don't know what maybe this guy stole all the eggplants You're buying right the cucumbers, right? I don't but we go around and we operate as if everybody's getting legally because otherwise we wouldn't be able to buy Yeah, we would be able top rate, right yeah And so basically they're saying the same thing which is it in general just assume that everything is unless you're if you know This person was not",
      "This person was not gotten illegally you can't and by the way here They're not even talking about if they're a Muslim, and they were enslaved. You cannot buy them right? You can't but that debate is specifically about was the humps tax paid because if there Someone went out in a raid into like Central Asian stuff and brought this guy back That person should pay a tax to me ma'am",
      "rules also they say they're muslim the burden of proof is on the person who got them who captured them or something fascinating uh to prove that they're not muslim which is very hard to do and by the way it's all important remember that most slaves probably mostly is probably were brought into islamic civilization not through capture but through buying them from slave merchants who brought them from some other place who got",
      "because you don't know if those people have been legally enslaved but again the rule that kind of wins out is like You just assume that this guy got them legally and if it's according to their crazy customs that they have That's alright for them. Yeah, then you can you can buy yeah I mean the pragmatism of law kind of winds out It makes it make sense legally speaking obviously sort of it. It's kind of like it it grates for modern sensibilities certainly The other sort of questions as you mentioned",
      "as you mentioned, we kind of had a discussion about someone who was asking about abolition in the industrial revolution and the debate that you mentioned between Eric Williams and Seymour Drescher. But there's one last question which is an interesting one here. I would like to understand the wisdom behind Dr Brown locating being Muslim and American as opposing identities in the introductory part of the text. And I didn't feel it was opposing but I'd be interested to... Yeah, it's not opposing. I think maybe what I meant by that is",
      "meant by that is it is that they're two kind of there to I talked about the kind of American slavery conundrum and the Muslim Islamic slavery country. They're similar but not identical, but I mean in the case of you know, I mean so they're which is that as an American you have this issue of the kind",
      "document and you know the guy had children with his slave woman um and then uh but the islamic one is different which is it's you know similar but you know prophet muhammad is not like thomas jefferson i could say you know what forget thomas jepherson you know take a statue down i don't care forget about him i mean you can't if you're a muslim you can' t say that about the prophet so they're similar but there are differences between the two so i think i was more trying to say that they're two different kind of",
      "discussions, each with its own characteristics. Jazakum Allah khairan. This has really been... Thank you so much for your time, I mean an hour and 40 minutes, and I'm also grateful for all the questions that were sent in. I cannot encourage enough people to read this book. Go ahead and purchase it inshallah and have a read of it. I think it's just a tour de force of so many different disciplines, moral philosophy, sort of wider epistemological",
      "wider epistemological questions um i found the discussion on nominalism very interesting you know history that is very wide-ranging and do you mind if i ask how many books you read for this did you uh you have a bibliography which is a select bibliography in in the text but it's long enough and then i actually left out some i didn't they did the argument just books i cited in in",
      "annoying but the um uh yeah i don't know i read a lot of books but i was very driven you know and i did this i was uh you know i don' t know maybe this is the same for everybody but for me like when i write books i become like obsessed you know my wife is like this guy's going crazy he doesn't sleep he doesn''t do anything else so uh i mean it's a very intense it was very intense experience perhaps in closing i can just ask what you're working on currently",
      "Yeah, so it's funny. When I wrote this book, I was like, okay, yeah, I'm writing a book about slavery but no, I never going to write a book on race because that's crazy. Not a million years. And then which is... I actually still would say but then last summer there was this debate in this case called Research Africa Listserv where there's this one thing called Afrocentrism or like Kemet Afrocentricism and you see this. It also kind of goes back",
      "back to this guy and I think his name is Chancellor Williams, a conservative Christian minister in the US in the early 20th century. This idea that Islam has slavery in its DNA, Muslims... And then Arabs hate black... Islam is anti-black, Arabs are enslaved black people, Islam is of colonial presence in Africa, it's not really an indigenous part of Africa. So basically it's all saying",
      "It's all saying Islamic anti-black so I was really someone asked me specific questions about things that had come up in this debate about Hadiths and say can you answer this that and this? So I started looking into it. Okay, look in for a look and I was like You know what? I miss any door in order to answer this I need to answer This period question or to answer is very question to answer the spirit question of it So now I'm writing a book called is Islam anti black and it's uh Actually, it's getting close to being done And it won't be a big book. It'll be a smaller book",
      "MashaAllah, so actually directly connected to this book I was under the impression that you're going to be writing on the notion of siyasa and qanun",
      "sort of wonderful to have you and I look forward to inviting you back before long. Jazakum Allah khairan for everyone who's stuck around for nearly two hours at this point, this has really been enlightening for me and i've benefited a great deal from also the questions that you're asking Professor Browne and I hope you will join us in a week's time and inshallah I'll have another author we're having conversation with inshaAllah",
      "My pleasure. Until then, JazakAllah khairan again Jack and we will be in touch in the near future. Fiy amanillah. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/American Hadith Expert Professor Jonathan Brown Co_Bk4BQJj0w4E&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748685955.opus",
    "text": [
      "Jonathan Brown, American convert to Islam who becomes a hadith expert professor. The light of Islam enters the hearts of anyone whom Allah Ta'ala wills such as Jonathan Andrew Cleveland Brown. The man who was born on August 9th 1977 is a Muslim convert from the United States who is now a Hadith expert Professor.",
      "Professor Jonathan A.C. Brown is a very popular Muslim scholar with research in the field of Hadith and Islamic history. This intellectual, who converted to Islam while still studying at undergraduate level, actively wrote various books and journals, and actively spoke about Islam and civilization in various forums. Brown was the author of Miskuting Muhammad, The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy, Hadith",
      "Muhammad's legacy in the medieval and modern world. Muhammad, a very short introduction, and the canonization of Al-Bukhari and Muslim. He was born into a family that was not very religious. Raised in the Anglican Church of England in America, he grew up not as devout and devout as a Christian. Even so, Brown is one of the American children who believes in the existence of God.",
      "In Georgetown, I took a class that taught about Islam, taught by a Muslim woman. In this class, Brown learned many things about the concept of God. He also discovered that reason and religion should be in harmony. Religion exists to improve the quality of human life, not make it difficult and bring suffering. By the end of the semester, in the summer of 1997, Brown's interest in Islam grew stronger.",
      "He spent a lot of time reading Islamic books and traveling throughout Europe and Morocco. When I returned to school at the start of my second year of college, I became Muslim,\" said Brown, quoted on the LastProphet.info page Wednesday 12-1-1 2022. Brown's decision to convert to Islam is quite unique. He never interacted with a Muslim. He only studied Islam from books.",
      "One of the books that caught Brown's attention was a book about a short biography of the Prophet Muhammad, which is a book series from Oxford University Press. In fact, Brown wrote a book called The Prophet Muhammad. The book tells the story of several Western historians who wrote about Rasulullah. He wants to discuss with anyone through the book.",
      "about the Prophet's life comes from the Hadith. It's just that the book couldn't be published easily. The publisher in America argued that they had to send the book to their publishing office in Pakistan first, to be researched so that there were no narratives that would offend Muslims. But Brown felt strange about it because the book was written by a Muslim and of course",
      "I don't know what they are worried about, said Brown.",
      "He described the Prophet Muhammad as a figure who was good at reading situations and acting in the best way. He is forgiving, gentle, and sometimes firm, patient, and at other times acts quickly. The Prophet had the best character as an example for mankind on earth. Brown's simple answer to Orientalist accusations on Hadith",
      "In his book, Hadith, Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, 2009. Brown said that one of the Orientalists who most sharply voiced doubts about the authenticity of hadith was William Muir, D-1095. For Muir hadiths are not words or records of the actions of the Prophet Muhammad SAW but only a reflection of the ambitions of certain generations of Muslims",
      "of Muslims after the Prophet died. Muir invited European Orientalists to reject at least half of the contents of Sahih Bukhari. Muír also claims that the study of Hadith starting from the Tabi'in generation was completely useless, because it only focused on the Sanad rather than the content of the Hadith text itself.",
      "so they were called hadiths. However, Brown critically assesses the skepticism of 20th century Orientalists. According to Brown, Goldziher was manipulative in his own claims. Therefore it is easy for such orientalist to misinterpret important historical evidence regarding the history of Hadith collection. The blind skepticism",
      "of the prophet muhammad sallalahu for the benefit of their political patrons what is missing from orientalist studies is the differentiation of competent narrators from those who are incompetent even just storytellers the most diligent students of hadith especially the authors of the shahi hain namely imam bukhari and imam muslim of course never accepted incompetent narrators or storytellors",
      "The Prophet Muhammad is an inspirational personality.",
      "personality. Professor Jonathan Andrew Cleveland Brown is a Muslim scholar from the United States who is popular for his research in the field of Hadith and Islamic history. This scholar, who converted to Islam while still studying at undergraduate level, S1, actively wrote various books and journals and actively spoke about Islam and civilization",
      "misquoting Muhammad, the challenges and choices of interpreting the Prophet's legacy. Hadith Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World Muhammad A very short introduction The canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim Bin Changsharia decided to translate one of his interviews with Ahsan Utku for the Thelest Prophet. Regarding the story",
      "in embracing Islam and his views on the Prophet Muhammad, and the Western world's response to Muslims. Can you tell us your story about when you converted to Islam? I grew up in a family that adheres to Anglican Christianity, a branch of the English Church in America, but my family is not very religious. So,",
      "I always believed that. When I entered university in my first year at Georgetown, the name of the university, I took the course Islam and the teacher was a Muslim woman. I was very interested in what he said. I think what he is saying is what I have believed in all my life, the nature of God. The issue of cause and effect, religion should be appropriate for all times, religion strengthens life not makes it difficult",
      "not makes it difficult. At the end of the semester, I really felt like a Muslim. In the summer of 1997, I spent time reading a lot of books about Islam and went to Europe and Morocco. When I returned to campus at the start of the new semester,",
      "think I had ever met a Muslim before taking college at that time. Your books are mostly related to the Prophet Muhammad, and I just found out that you are writing a new book? Yes, this book is part of a series published by Oxford University Press called Very Short Introduction. They only have themes which are presented in VSI form such as,",
      "and I finished it. The manuscript I wrote will be published as a book, and become part of a series of books. Currently, unfortunately the publication of the book has been postponed because they have sent it first to the Pakistan branch of the publishing office to review whether the contents are offensive to Muslims. I want to say to them, I am a Muslim,",
      "nothing in it that attacks Muslims. I did discuss the opinions of Western historians and how they talk about the Prophet, but that was only at the discussion level. I dug up everything related to the life of the Prophet from history books, seerah, and hadith. Why are they still worried? Because the book is considered offensive",
      "problems mean attracting more and more buyers. I don't know what the publisher thinks next. What influenced you the most about the figure of the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam? Perhaps he is a person who is able to do the best in every situation. For me, this is very inspiring. On many occasions, the religious figures we have in the United States always display the same attitude. For example, the figure",
      "However, sometimes you cannot forgive. You can't be like that. Always be kind. Sometimes you have to be gentle and sweet. Sometimes, you have the point and firm. Sometimes,you have to patient and other times you have move quickly. There should not just one rule that apply your life and direct how you act. You must able read situation and do best respond to that situation.",
      "And, the Prophet Muhammad was a figure who knew this and this is something very inspiring. I think that's it. In your opinion, are Muslims today able to apply the Prophet's teachings in their daily lives? Of course! I think Muslims today should think that the Prophet Muhammed is an idealistic and effective figure at the same time. He has a number of principles",
      "of principles that he adheres to. But he also knows how to offer his teachings and how to dialogue with certain people to convince them. He also knows the content, just the way it is conveyed.",
      "This is very useful. I think nowadays when Muslims feel they are very religious, they tend to make a lot of statements about what is haram. To truly follow what was exemplified by the Prophet Sallalla is actually to think about stating what is actually right and good to do. That's what I think is very helpful today. It has to be balanced, right? Yes, to be a complete Muslim, a multi-dimensional figure.",
      "So why, in your opinion, in Europe and America is the figure of the Prophet Muhammad often the target of criticism for some people? First of all, it is a sign that they know nothing about Muhammad. Many people in Europe don't know anything about Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. They only hear that Muslims are terrorists so that Islam is a violent religion.",
      "You talked about previous Western academics who wrote about the figure of the Prophet Muhammad. If we assume that today's generation grew up reading these writings, and then they easily justify bad things, is this situation something normal and ordinary? Yes.",
      "Yes, I think so. Today if you ask someone on the street about Islam, ask them one word that comes to mind about Muhammad PBUH and they will say terrorist, extremist, sword-wielding and violent religion. Generation after generation continues to repeat this myth. What should Muslims do? Do your best to educate everyone. The general public in the West knows nothing.",
      "If you explain to ordinary people interesting things about the Prophet's life, for example how he lived in Mecca for 13 years without violence. Without conflict with the Meccans who suppressed him they will be surprised and amazed. I think in everyday life whether in the form of books or articles on the internet we must try to increase people's attention to the figure of the Prophet Muhammad. You talked about the difficulties faced by Muslims in Europe which are increasing every day",
      "increasing every day, including the attitude of the media. Do the same conditions exist in the United States? The protection of religious freedom rights in the USA is very strong. You are constitutionally protected to be able to practice religious teachings. In the USA it is easy for Muslims to leave the classroom or office for reasons of worship.",
      "wear a head covering dot cap and your boss doesn't like it and fires you, you can sue them for violating the law. So the conditions are easier because your human rights are protected. However due to increasing concerns about terrorism, the government began investigating Muslims for no apparent reason. They conclude that devout Muslims are a threat or that they are a",
      "the USA has the right to disagree with their country's foreign policy, and many do. However, if the person doing it is a Muslim, it is immediately concluded this person has the potential to be radical. Indeed, after 9-11, the Patriot Act, terrorism law in the USA, was passed which gave the government more freedom to hunt down people on national security grounds.",
      "without permission or a direct letter of guidance from the Justice Department is exempt. This is what led to the torture of several Muslims in Guantanamo prison. Information has recently emerged that all Muslim students have had their data received by the CIA. Things happen every now and then. Actually, in the USA things like this are still debated. There are many Americans who agree with this because it violates constitutional values.",
      "values. The government should not be allowed to conduct wiretapping without permission from a court judge. So you should not tap students' recordings, for example. After the Patriot Act, if you went to the library to borrow a book, the government could enter the library and see what you were reading. Today, America can extradite Muslims for interrogation for no apparent reason. Many Americans who are",
      "I also never faced any problems as a Muslim scholar. People in general are actually interested in the opinions expressed by Muslims. What do you see from Turkey as a muslim country? I am very happy. I understand that Muslims in this country are still experiencing a number of difficulties, but i'm still happy because we can walk and pray whenever I want. The food is also delicious.",
      "I wish I knew Turkish. I want to learn more. Religiously, Turkey is a complicated country. I really respect the Turkish people. But again, this is a very complicated country.\" What is your view about the difficulty of uniting the Islamic world? Yes, the gap to unity is still very large. One problem is that people are only interested in personal gain and fail to unite as a group.",
      "They think that if they don't agree with someone on an issue, then they can't work together. I don't want to be with them. I do not want to stay in the same room. I dont want to work together, etc. But that is stupidity because you cannot possibly agree 100% with anyone. But you should see opportunities to collaborate and build relationships, not distance yourself.",
      "leading these Muslim countries? For example, should these countries unite under the coordination of an Islamic conference for example. That makes sense. I think politically Muslims all over the world have common problems that they are concerned about as well as issues around lifestyle and I think they should be able to lobby as one large group. An example is if a country such as France stipulates",
      "stipulates that women cannot wear the hijab at university, Muslim countries can carry out a boycott or make a statement. As an American I do not approve of this move by the French government. I don't think any American would agree that a person should not be allowed to practice their religion freely. If you want to wear religious attributes, this is your right. I think it's one thing they can do and the other thing should have a stronger impact politically for foreign policy.",
      "foreign policy. For example, if a country wants to invade a Muslim country then no Muslim country will support it. Other Muslim countries then made policies not to allow invaders to use their air or land space for their military purposes. That's right! It won't even carry out commercial and military cooperation with the invading country. Please know that is better for America. Most Americans today would say",
      "today would say that invading Iraq was a very bad idea. And if Muslim countries had prevented America from invading Iran by refusing to cooperate or accept America's offer, it would have saved America a lot of trouble. Billions of dollars and lives would have been saved. Because when someone gives you advice and advises you not to do something, that's good for you."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/American Hadith Expert Professor Jonathan Brown Co_CuKoxVRz9fw&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW3SBwkJsAkBhyohjO8%3D_1748673985.opus",
    "text": [
      "Jonathan Brown, American convert to Islam who becomes a hadith expert professor. The light of Islam enters the hearts of anyone whom Allah Ta'ala wills such as Jonathan Andrew Cleveland Brown. The man who was born on August 9th 1977 is a Muslim convert from the United States who is now a Hadith expert Professor.",
      "Professor Jonathan A.C. Brown is a very popular Muslim scholar with research in the field of Hadith and Islamic history. This intellectual, who converted to Islam while still studying at undergraduate level, actively wrote various books and journals, and actively spoke about Islam and civilization in various forums. Brown was the author of Miskuting Muhammad, The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy, Hadith",
      "Muhammad's legacy in the medieval and modern world. Muhammad, a very short introduction, and the canonization of Al-Bukhari and Muslim. He was born into a family that was not very religious. Raised in the Anglican Church of England in America, he grew up not as devout and devout as a Christian. Even so, Brown is one of the American children who believes in the existence of God.",
      "In Georgetown, I took a class that taught about Islam, taught by a Muslim woman. In this class, Brown learned many things about the concept of God. He also discovered that reason and religion should be in harmony. Religion exists to improve the quality of human life, not make it difficult and bring suffering. By the end of the semester, in the summer of 1997, Brown's interest in Islam grew stronger.",
      "He spent a lot of time reading Islamic books and traveling throughout Europe and Morocco. When I returned to school at the start of my second year of college, I became Muslim,\" said Brown, quoted on the LastProphet.info page Wednesday 12-1-Wand 2022. Brown's decision to convert to Islam is quite unique. He never interacted with a Muslim. He only studied Islam from books.",
      "One of the books that caught Brown's attention was a book about a short biography of the Prophet Muhammad, which is a book series from Oxford University Press. In fact, Brown wrote a book called The Prophet Muhammad. The book tells the story of several Western historians who wrote about Rasulullah. He wants to discuss with anyone through the book.",
      "The only thing about the Prophet's life comes from the Hadith. It's just that the book couldn't be published easily. The publisher in America argued that they had to send the book to their publishing office in Pakistan first, to be researched so there were no narratives that would offend Muslims. But Brown felt strange about it because the book was written by a Muslim and of course it will not offend Muslims",
      "I don't know what they are worried about, said Brown.",
      "He described the Prophet Muhammad as a figure who was good at reading situations and acting in the best way. He is forgiving, gentle, and sometimes firm, patient, and at other times acts quickly. The Prophet had the best character as an example for mankind on earth. Brown's simple answer to Orientalist accusations on Hadith",
      "In his book, Hadith, Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, 2009. Brown said that one of the Orientalists who most sharply voiced doubts about the authenticity of hadith was William Muir, D-1095. For Muir hadiths are not words or records of the actions of the Prophet Muhammad SAW but only a reflection of the ambitions of certain generations of Muslims",
      "of Muslims after the Prophet died. Muir invited European Orientalists to reject at least half of the contents of Sahih Bukhari. Muír also claims that the study of Hadith starting from the Tabi'in generation was completely useless, because it only focused on the Sanad rather than the content of the Hadith text itself.",
      "of the prophet muhammad sallalahu for the benefit of their political patrons what is missing from orientalist studies is the differentiation of competent narrators from those who are incompetent even just storytellers the most diligent students of hadith especially the authors of the shahi hain namely imam bukhari and imam muslim of course never accepted incompetent narrators or storytellors",
      "The Prophet Muhammad is an inspirational personality.",
      "personality. Professor Jonathan Andrew Cleveland Brown is a Muslim scholar from the United States who is popular for his research in the field of Hadith and Islamic history. This scholar, who converted to Islam while still studying at undergraduate level, S1, actively wrote various books and journals and actively spoke about Islam and civilization",
      "misquoting Muhammad, the challenges and choices of interpreting the Prophet's legacy. Hadith. Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World. Muhammad. A very short introduction. The canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim. Binchang Sharia decided to translate one of his interviews with Asen Utku for the Thelest Prophet. Regarding the story",
      "in embracing Islam and his views on the Prophet Muhammad, and the Western world's response to Muslims. Can you tell us your story about when you converted to Islam? I grew up in a family that adheres to Anglican Christianity, a branch of the English Church in America, but my family is not very religious. So, I didn't grow up in",
      "I always believed that. When I entered university in my first year at Georgetown, the name of the university, I took the course Islam and the teacher was a Muslim woman. I was very interested in what he said. I think what he is saying is what I have believed in all my life, the nature of God. The issue of cause and effect, religion should be appropriate for all times, religion strengthens life not makes it difficult.",
      "not makes it difficult. At the end of the semester, I really felt like a Muslim. In the summer of 1997, I spent time reading a lot of books about Islam and went to Europe and Morocco. When I returned to campus at the start of the new semester,",
      "think I had ever met a Muslim before taking college at that time. Your books are mostly related to the Prophet Muhammad, and I just found out that you are writing a new book? Yes, this book is part of a series published by Oxford University Press called Very Short Introduction. They only have themes which are presented in VSI form such as,",
      "and I finished it. The manuscript I wrote will be published as a book, and become part of a series of books. Currently, unfortunately the publication of the book has been postponed because they have sent it first to the Pakistan branch of the publishing office to review whether the contents are offensive to Muslims. I want to say to them, I am a Muslim,",
      "nothing in it that attacks Muslims. I did discuss the opinions of Western historians and how they talk about The Prophet, but that was only at the discussion level. I dug up everything related to the life of The Prophet from history books, sirah, and hadith. Why are they still worried? Because the book is considered offensive to the prophet. Usually causes a lot",
      "problems mean attracting more and more buyers. I don't know what the publisher thinks next. What influenced you the most about the figure of the Prophet Muhammad? Perhaps he is a person who was able to do the best in every situation. For me, this is very inspiring. On many occasions, the religious figures we have in the United States always display the same attitude. For example, the figure",
      "However, sometimes you cannot forgive. You can't be like that. Always be kind. Sometimes you have to be gentle and sweet. Sometimes it's not enough. Sometimes there should not be just one rule that you apply to your life and direct how you act. You must be able to read the situation and do your best to respond to that situation.",
      "that situation. And, the Prophet Muhammad was a figure who knew this and this is something very inspiring. I think that's it. In your opinion, are Muslims today able to apply the Prophet's teachings in their daily lives? Of course! I think Muslims today should think that the Prophet Muhammed is an idealistic",
      "of principles that he adheres to. But he also knows how to offer his teachings and how to dialogue with certain people to convince them. He also knows the content, just the way it is conveyed.",
      "This is very useful. I think nowadays when Muslims feel they are very religious, they tend to make a lot of statements about what is haram. To truly follow what was exemplified by the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam is actually to think about stating what is actually right and good to do. That's what I think is very helpful today. It has to be balanced, right? Yes, to be a complete Muslim, a multi-dimensional figure.",
      "So why, in your opinion, in Europe and America is the figure of the Prophet Muhammad often the target of criticism for some people? First of all, it is a sign that they know nothing about Muhammad. Many people in Europe & America don't know anything about Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. They only hear that Muslims are terrorists so that Islam is a violent religion.",
      "long history of conflict between Western and Muslim countries, but today's satirical depiction of the Prophet, which has a face of hatred, can only be understood as a product of political conflict. You talked about previous Western academics who wrote about the figure of the prophet Muhammad. If we assume that today's generation grew up reading these writings, and then they easily justify bad things, is this situation something normal and ordinary? Yes.",
      "Yes, I think so. Today if you ask someone on the street about Islam, ask them one word that comes to mind about Muhammad PBUH and they will say terrorist, extremist, sword-wielding and violent religion. Generation after generation continues to repeat this myth. What should Muslims do? Do your best to educate everyone. The general public in the West knows nothing.",
      "If you explain to ordinary people interesting things about the Prophet's life, for example how he lived in Mecca for 13 years without violence. Without conflict with the Meccans who suppressed him they will be surprised and amazed. I think in everyday life whether in the form of books or articles on the internet we must try to increase people's attention to the figure of the Prophet Muhammad. You talked about the difficulties faced by Muslims in Europe",
      "increasing every day, including the attitude of the media. Do the same conditions exist in the United States? The protection of religious freedom rights in the USA is very strong. You are constitutionally protected to be able to practice religious teachings. In the USA it is easy for Muslims to leave the classroom or office for reasons of worship.",
      "wear a head covering dot cap and your boss doesn't like it and fires you, you can sue them for violating the law. So the conditions are easier because your human rights are protected. However due to increasing concerns about terrorism, the government began investigating Muslims for no apparent reason. They conclude that devout Muslims are a threat or that they are a",
      "in the USA has the right to disagree with their country's foreign policy, and many do. However, if the person doing it is a Muslim, it is immediately concluded this person has the potential to be radical. Indeed, after 9-11, the Patriot Act, terrorism law in the US was passed which gave the government more freedom to hunt down people on national security grounds. Wiretapping without permission",
      "without permission or a direct letter of guidance from the Justice Department is exempt. This is what led to the torture of several Muslims in Guantanamo prison. Information has recently emerged that all Muslim students have had their data received by the CIA. Things happen every now and then. Actually, in the USA things like this are still debated. There are many Americans who agree with this because it violates constitutional values.",
      "values. The government should not be allowed to conduct wiretapping without permission from a court judge. So you should not tap students' recordings, for example. After the Patriot Act, if you went to the library to borrow a book, the government could enter the library and see what you were reading. Today, America can extradite Muslims for interrogation for no apparent reason. Many Americans who are not Muslims also criticize this because they",
      "I also never faced any problems as a Muslim scholar. People in general are actually interested in the opinions expressed by Muslims. What do you see from Turkey as a muslim country?",
      "I wish I knew Turkish. I want to learn more. Religiously, Turkey is a complicated country. I really respect the Turkish people. But again, this is a very complicated country.\" What is your view about the difficulty of uniting the Islamic world? Yes, the gap to unity is still very large. One problem is that people are only interested in personal gain and fail to unite as a group.",
      "They think that if they don't agree with someone on an issue, then they can't work together. I don't want to be with them. I do not want to stay in the same room. I dont want to work together, etc. But that is stupidity because you cannot possibly agree 100% with anyone. But you should see opportunities to collaborate and build relationships, not distance yourself.",
      "leading these Muslim countries? For example, should these countries unite under the coordination of an Islamic conference for example. That makes sense. I think politically Muslims all over the world have common problems that they are concerned about as well as issues around lifestyle and I think they should be able to lobby as one large group. An example is if a country such as France stipulates",
      "stipulates that women cannot wear the hijab at university, Muslim countries can carry out a boycott or make a statement. As an American I do not approve of this move by the French government. I don't think any American would agree that a person should not be allowed to practice their religion freely. If you want to wear religious attributes, this is your right. I think it's one thing they can do and the other thing should have a stronger impact politically for foreign policy.",
      "foreign policy. For example, if a country wants to invade a Muslim country then no Muslim country will support it. Other Muslim countries then made policies not to allow invaders to use their air or land space for their military purposes. That's right! It won't even carry out commercial and military cooperation with the invading country. Please know that is better for America.",
      "Americans today would say that invading Iraq was a very bad idea. And if Muslim countries had prevented America from invading iraq by refusing to cooperate or accept America's offer, it would have saved America a lot of trouble. Billions of dollars and lives would have been saved. Because when someone gives you advice and advises you not to do something, that's good for you."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/American Hadith Expert Professor Jonathan Brown Co_WESRAGlOwoM&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748668630.opus",
    "text": [
      "Jonathan Brown grew up in a secular American home. Religion was not a big part of his life, he was a curious and intelligent young man drawn to knowledge and exploration. He had a thirst for understanding the world around him. Little did he know that his path would lead him to a profound spiritual awakening. Jonathan's journey began at Georgetown University. He enrolled in a class on Islamic Civilization. This class sparked an unexpected interest within him. The history and teachings of Islam",
      "The teachings of Islam resonated with him. He felt a pull towards this unfamiliar faith, it was a feeling he couldn't ignore.",
      "and the depth of its literature captivated him. The more he learned, the more he realized how much he didn't know. Each book he read, each lecture he attended only deepened his thirst for knowledge. His curiosity grew with each passing day. He found himself constantly pondering over the teachings and the historical events that shaped the Islamic world. He felt compelled to delve deeper into this faith that had captivated his mind.",
      "and the people of the Islamic civilization. Jonathan's professor, a renowned scholar of Islam noticed his students' interest. He saw the spark in Jonathan's eyes and recognized the potential for a deeper understanding. He encouraged Jonathan to explore the faith further. He suggested various books documentaries and even online courses that could provide more insights. He suggest that Jonathan travel to Muslim majority countries. Experiencing the culture firsthand he believed would offer",
      "would offer a perspective that books and lectures could not. The professor believed that experiencing Islam first-hand would be invaluable. Walking through the streets, visiting the mosques and engaging with the local people would provide a deeper understanding. Jonathan took his professor's advice to heart. He began planning his journey meticulously researching the best places to visit and the most significant historical sites. He decided to embark on a journey of discovery. This was not just",
      "In his quest for knowledge and understanding, he would travel to Europe and Morocco. These places with their rich Islamic heritage were perfect for his exploration. His goal was to immerse himself in Islamic culture and meet Muslim scholars. He wanted to hear their stories, understand their perspectives and learn from their experiences. This trip would prove to be a turning point in his life. It was a journey that would not only broaden his horizons but also transform his understanding of the world.",
      "Jonathan's travels took him first to Europe. He visited historic libraries and mosques, he met with Islamic scholars and learned about their perspectives. He was struck by the intellectual depth and spiritual richness of Islam. He began to see the world through a new lens. From Europe, Jonathan ventured to Morocco. He",
      "markets and serene mosques. He engaged in deep conversations with local scholars. Jonathan's experiences in Morocco left an indelible mark on him. He was deeply moved by the hospitality and generosity of the Moroccan people, he was inspired by their deep faith and commitment to their values. In Morocco, Jonathan had the opportunity to interact with Muslims from all walks",
      "life and Jonathan found himself immersed in the rich culture and traditions of the Moroccan people. He met scholars who shared their deep knowledge of Islamic teachings, students who were eager to learn and discuss, shopkeepers who welcomed him with open arms and families who invited him into their homes offering him a glimpse into their daily lives and traditions. He was touched by their kindness,",
      "The hospitality he experienced was unlike anything he had ever known, and their strong sense of community. He attended community events where he saw firsthand the unity and support that bound the people together. He began to see Islam not just as a religion but as a way of life that permeated every aspect of their existence.",
      "The traditions, the rituals and the cultural practices all intertwine to create a unique and beautiful tapestry of faith and community. One particular encounter had a profound impact on Jonathan. It was a moment that would stay with him forever. He met an elderly scholar in a mosque in Marrakesh. The scholar's presence was calming and his words were filled with wisdom and insight.",
      "Jonathan felt a deep sense of peace wash over him. It was as if the scholar's words were unlocking something within him, something he had been searching for. It is during this encounter that Jonathan began to seriously consider converting to Islam. The teachings resonated with him on a profound level and he felt a connection to the faith that he had never experienced before. Jonathan returned from his travels a changed man.",
      "an indelible mark on his soul. He was no longer the sceptical young student who had first stepped into that Islamic civilisation class. His journey had transformed him, opening his eyes to new perspectives and possibilities. He had found something in Islam that resonated deeply within him. The teachings, the sense of community and the spiritual depth all spoke to him in a way that nothing else",
      "and a sense of direction in his life. The prayers, the rituals, and the sense of belonging all contributed to a newfound sense of peace and fulfillment, and a sensse of belonging. Jonathan had discovered a community that welcomed him with open arms and a faith that provided him with a deeper understanding of himself and the world around him. Section 5 Embracing the Prophet's Path Back in the United States,",
      "Islam with great dedication and curiosity. He was particularly drawn to the life and teachings of Prophet Muhammad, finding them to be a source of immense wisdom and guidance. He found the prophet's story to be deeply inspiring, a beacon of light in his quest for spiritual truth. He admired the prophet compassion humility an unwavering commitment to justice qualities that resonated deeply with his own values. Jonathan was moved by",
      "peace, equality and social justice, seeing in it a blueprint for a better world. He saw in Islam a faith that addressed the needs of both the individual and the community offering a balanced approach to life. He was convinced that Islam held the key to a more just and compassionate world – a world where everyone could live in harmony. After much reflection and prayer Jonathan made the decision to embrace Islam feeling",
      "a mosque in Washington, D.C., surrounded by a few close friends and members of the community. It was a moment of profound joy and spiritual fulfillment for him—a culmination of his long and thoughtful journey. He had finally found the path that he was meant to be on—a path that brought him closer to his true self and to the divine. Section 6 Finding His Place In Islam Jonathan's conversion to Islam marked",
      "the beginning of a new chapter in his life. He immersed himself in Islamic studies. He learned Arabic so he could read the Quran in its original language. He studied Islamic law, philosophy and history. He was particularly drawn to the study of Hadith. Hadith are the collected sayings and traditions of Prophet Muhammad. They provide guidance on how Muslims should live their lives. Jonathan believed that understanding hadith was essential",
      "led him to pursue a PhD, he wanted to dedicate his life to scholarship and to sharing his knowledge of Islam with others. He believed that education was key to breaking down stereotypes and promoting understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims. Section 7 Defending the Tradition Jonathan's academic work focused on defending the authenticity of Hadith. Some Western scholars had questioned",
      "of Hadith. They argued that hadith were not a reliable source of information about the Prophet's life. Jonathan challenged these claims. He argued that Western scholars had misunderstood the methods used by Muslim scholars to preserve and transmit hadith. He demonstrated that hadeth were a reliable",
      "He became a sought-after speaker at universities and conferences around the world. Section 8 A Bridge Between Worlds Jonathan saw himself as a bridge between the Muslim world and the West. He believed that it was important for Muslims and non-Muslims to understand each other. He used his scholarship to promote dialogue and understanding between different cultures and faiths.",
      "and discrimination against Muslims. He spoke out against the demonisation of Islam in the media, he advocated for the rights of Muslims in the United States and around the world. Jonathan's work was not without its challenges. He faced criticism from both Muslims and non-Muslims. Some Muslims questioned his interpretations of Islamic teachings, some non-muslims accused him of being an apologist for Islam. Section 9 A Legacy Of Understanding",
      "understanding. Despite these challenges, Jonathan remained committed to his work. He believed that it was more important than ever to promote understanding and respect between Muslims and non-Muslims. He continued to write, teach and speak out against injustice until his passing. Jonathan Brown's journey from skepticism to faith is an inspiration to us all. His story reminds us that the pursuit of knowledge can lead to unexpected places. It highlights",
      "cultural understanding. Jonathan Brown left behind a legacy of scholarship, compassion and unwavering commitment to justice. His work continues to inspire people around the world to learn more about Islam and to build bridges of understanding between different cultures. Jonathan brown sees a problem Muslims divided scattered weakened he observes the fragmentation within the community a fragmentation that has grown over time this division is not just",
      "issue, it is a significant barrier to progress and unity. We are a faith of over a billion yet we struggle to find common ground. Despite our vast numbers the unity that should be our strength often eludes us. We gather in large numbers for prayers festivals and community events but the underlying divisions remain. We bicker over interpretations cultural nuances and political ideologies these debates while sometimes healthy",
      "The differences in our cultural practices and political views should enrich our community, but instead they often become points of contention. This division, Brown argues, prevents us from achieving our true potential. When we are divided, our efforts are diluted. We miss out on the collective strength that comes from working together towards common goals. Our potential to make a significant impact on the world is hindered. It hinders our ability to address the challenges facing our communities",
      "justice to economic development, our divided state makes it difficult to tackle these issues effectively. The talents and resources within our community are vast but they are not being utilised to their fullest potential. It's time for a change. The dawn of a new era is upon us and with it comes the opportunity to redefine our path. We must rise above our differences and come together as one. The time has come to embrace unity and work towards",
      "a plea for unity and understanding. He speaks with passion and conviction, urging us to see beyond our individual perspectives. His words are a reminder that our strength lies in our unity, not in our divisions. He challenges us to look beyond our differences and recognise the shared values that bind us. Our faith, our compassion, our desire for peace and justice – these are the values that unite us. By focusing on what we have in common,",
      "It's a message that resonates deeply in a world rife with conflict and division. In these times of global unrest, Brown's call for unity is more relevant than ever. It is a beacon of hope, a reminder that together we can overcome any challenge. We must answer this call not just for ourselves but for the generations to come. The future of our community depends on the actions we take today.",
      "better world for our children and grandchildren. It is our responsibility to pave the way for a brighter, more united future. We magnify the small stuff – Sunni or Shia, Barelvi or Diobandi. These labels become walls. They create divisions where there should be unity fostering misunderstandings and conflicts. These Labels while significant in their own contexts often overshadow",
      "We forget our shared heritage, the Quran and the Prophet's teachings. The Quran a divine revelation is a common thread that binds us all. The teachings of the prophet Muhammad peace be upon him offer guidance that transcends these divisions reminding us of the core principles of Islam. These differences often rooted in history and interpretation pale compared to the vast common ground we share. Our history is rich with examples of collaboration and mutual respect among scholars of different schools of thought",
      "The intellectual legacy of Islamic civilization is a testament to the strength that comes from unity. We are united by our faith, our values and our aspirations. When we come together in prayer, we stand shoulder-to-shoulder symbolizing our unity and equality before God. Our community gatherings and acts of solidarity reflect our shared commitment to these values. We believe in one God, the importance of justice and the pursuit of righteousness. Justice is a cornerstone of our faith.",
      "of our faith, guiding our actions and interactions. It is through justice that we can create a fair and equitable society and the pursuit of knowledge. Knowledge is highly valued in Islam seen as a means to understand the world and improve it. Our tradition of scholarship and learning is a source of pride and a unifying factor. We strive for a world free from oppression where everyone can live with dignity and respect.",
      "those in need. Acts of charity and community service are expressions of this commitment, where peace and compassion prevail. We are encouraged to engage in dialogue and build bridges with others fostering understanding and harmony. Compassion is at the heart of our interactions guiding us to treat others with kindness and empathy. These shared principles should be the foundation for a united Muslim world by focusing on what unites us rather than what divides",
      "more cohesive community. Our diversity should be a source of strength, not division as we work together towards common goals and a brighter future for all. How do we bridge this divide? Dialogue is key. We need open and honest conversations, spaces where different perspectives can be shared and understood. Education is crucial. Let's teach our children about the richness",
      "for different interpretations. Collaboration is essential. Let's work together on issues that affect us all, from poverty and injustice to climate change and Islamophobia. By focusing on our shared challenges we can build bridges of understanding and create a more just and equitable world for everyone. History offers glimmers of hope. Remember the Mughal Empire's golden age? Art and science flourished,",
      "intellectual vibrancy of Baghdad's house of wisdom. Scholars from across the world gathered, translating texts pushing the boundaries of knowledge. These examples show us what is possible when Muslims unite. We can achieve great things when we embrace our diversity, celebrate our shared heritage and work together towards a common goal.",
      "stand united, a powerful voice on the global stage advocating for peace justice and human rights. A United Muslim world could challenge Islamophobia combat extremism and promote understanding and tolerance we could pool our resources to tackle poverty disease and illiteracy we could become a beacon of hope inspiring others to build a more just and compassionate world this is the potential of a united muslim umar",
      "Jonathan Brown's journey of understanding.",
      "to champion unity and challenge injustice. Section 7, From Faith to Action, Embracing Truth, Justice and Compassion. Brown's message is clear. Faith without action is meaningless. We can't just talk about unity. We have to live it. We must challenge injustice wherever we see it, whether in our own communities or on the global stage. Let's fight for the rights of the oppressed, speak out against Islamophobia and work towards a world where everyone has the opportunity to reach their full potential.",
      "potential. This is how we embody the true spirit of Islam.",
      "and understanding. Knowledge is the key to breaking down barriers, and building a more inclusive and harmonious world. Section 9 A Call To Action Building a Brighter Future Together In a world that often feels divided it's more important than ever to come together and work towards a common goal. This chapter is a rallying cry for unity – a reminder that we are stronger together than we are apart. Jonathan Brown's vision",
      "is a call to action. He believes that by uniting our efforts, we can overcome the challenges that face us. His message is clear. We must rise above our differences and embrace our shared humanity. It's a challenge to rise above your differences, embrace our human and work together to create a better future. It won't be easy. There will be obstacles and setbacks but the journey is worth it. By coming together we can achieve things that we could never accomplish alone. Building unity takes time",
      "time, effort and a willingness to listen and learn from each other. It requires patience and understanding as well as a commitment to open an honest communication. We must be willing to put in the work, to reach out to those who are different from us and to find common ground but the rewards are immeasurable. When we come together we create a sense of community and belonging, we build relationships that are based on mutual respect",
      "and support each other through our struggles. A united Muslim world can be a powerful force for good, promoting peace, justice and understanding. By working together we can address the issues that affect our communities and make a positive impact on the world. We can be beacon of hope and model what is possible when we come together in unity. Let's answer Brown's call and work together to make this vision a reality. Let us commit to building a brighter future not just for ourselves but for future generations.",
      "Let's take action, not just in words but in deeds. Let's be the change we want to see in the world. The time for action is now. We cannot afford to wait. The challenges we face are urgent and the need for unity is greater than ever. Let us come together, rise above our"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Book Launch with Professor Jonathan A_C_ Brown_ Is_ORUmlVZJChM&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW3SBwkJsAkBhyohjO8%3D_1748675552.opus",
    "text": [
      "Diolch am ddod heddiw. Fy enw i yw Talha Asaf, fi'n myfyrwyr PhD yn Ysgol Medi ac Ystry a chynhyrchwyd podcast o Ysbrydolaeth Abertawe sydd wedi cael ei rannu dros arllawiaeth IHRC Bookshop ac mae canlyniadau'n gallu cael disgwyl 15% ar IHRP Bookshop gyda'r cod disgwyllt AHP15",
      "Mae'n fy ngwlad gwych cael Mr Brown gyda ni. Dydw i ddim yn credu ei fod angen unrhyw gyflwyniad. I wneud hyder, mae popeth yr ydym yn sgwrsio amdanynt heddiw yn ein llaw o ran cyfrifol ac nid yw'n bosibl gweld y llaw hwnnw o IHRC neu P21.",
      "Oh my god. Yes, I do remember that! It's a good thing you have a copy of the book here as I knew you would. So we get flavor. Yeah let's see... Assalamu alaikum everybody. I should say hi first. Thanks for inviting me. Thank you for taking the time to",
      "taking the time to read the book or at least highlight strategically within the book so that it looks like you've read the entire book. It's always an honor to have anybody want to hear what I have to say, or be interested in my work. I mean that, it's really an honor. And the older I get, the more I appreciate it and also the worse I feel.",
      "egotistical having people listed to me. So I will do my best to be useful to you and apparently, I'm supposed to read part of my book so let me just look up something really quickly because I want to find the page number based on this We did tell him just to make sure that he was going to do this. Yeah, he did tell me",
      "And I, um... But to be fair, I have been on the road. You have what? Yes. Yeah so, uh, okay. So this is a... Maybe like, I read three pages or four pages or is that too much? A page would be enough. A page?! That's not-that's nothing! It's not a coherent box. One chapter. Okay you know what, I'm gonna read whatever I want!",
      "And if you don't, I'll do my best. The part that I'm going to read is for me the most academically interesting thing that I came across. So I found this really fascinating. I think a lot of people will find it interesting as well. And of course it's in the middle of the book so stuff has already been discussed. If you have questions about it we can talk.",
      "metaphor, and metaphor shaping reality. This seems really onanistic but we have already seen how the metaphor of darkness and light came to inform early Christian thinking on Africa. Blackness as a metaphor however has a much more expansive history. Race and how language of color is used to make it maybe social constructs, but humans are still part of nature. This seem so influenced in nearly universal ways",
      "or artificially tan all year round. It is certainly true that in associating lighter skin tone with higher socioeconomic status, we are centering the global north. The impact of exposure to sun is much less visible among darker-skinned populations. But even in Africa south of the Sahara, we find evidence of darkness acting as the metaphoric indicator of the lowest rungs of society. In such cases, the darkness associated",
      "of dirt and unfriendliness, not of more sun or melanin. It is not surprising that languages seem to have a near universal association with black dark with bad, and often also of white light with good. This is true even in Africa south of the Sahara. Language-specific studies have found associations of brightness or white with moral or positive valence while darkness and black are associated",
      "However, this metaphoric association does not necessarily govern how a society thinks about phenotype and value, let alone race. Color descriptors like black or white can and often do work as part of the social construct of race to include and exclude, to empower and disempower.",
      "descriptors may also simply work to describe someone's features with no relation on their status. We must note a crucial point here. In some societies, the language of color can do both jobs depending on context. While color is central for some systems of race like in the United States it is less important to others like in The Arabian Gulf which defined racial hierarchy of power inside or outside by means other than phenotype",
      "and phenotype, such as descent, lineage, and or citizenship. But color can still play a role. Even in societies in which race is not primarily indicated by color, color can sometimes be used as a proxy for racial status. But in this case, color is indeterminate and secondary. In other words, though color may be invoked, some other factor like lineage or citizenship is primary and all important. Moreover, this is the part I find really interesting.",
      "in which the Black African phenotype predominates, the word black is often used to describe the skin tone of the vast majority of the population. It carries no negative connotation. Yet that same word for black, in those same languages, is also used to register malice or negativity in phrases like black-hearted. But this negativity associated with",
      "over into the literal description of the skin tone of the population speaking those languages. See Appendix 2, there's a whole appendix on it. This equanimity around black as a descriptor breaks down noticeably in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa where darkness and blackness either real or perceived are bound up in racial categories",
      "many African languages. What we might deem metaphorical anti-blackness exists alongside a neutral view of blackness as a physical descriptor without one influencing the other. But in some cases in world history, metaphoric anti-Blackness can actually shape how physical features are described. It can bend the way language is used to talk about physical description even when all the people in question look the same. In other words,",
      "Sorry, in other words even when the metaphor of black equals bad is explicitly transformed into a literal description of someone's physical color it can still have nothing to do with their actual appearance. Here comes the weird part. Literary evidence from medieval Scandinavia often depicts slaves as black or dark in complexion. The Rigstula poem which has been dated between the 9th and 13th century",
      "tells of the mythic origin of Scandinavia's social classes. The first nobles were fair-haired and bright colored, the first farmers were ruddy but the first slaves were black, svartan, they're black haired or black skinned But in reality these slaves were not literally black They were not even darker than their owners Slaves in medieval Scandinavia were either from the indigenous population i.e other Scandinavians",
      "from Scotland or Ireland, Saxon, Germanic, or Slavic. None of these groups could be described as darker than the average Dane, let alone as black. Indeed, Scandinavian literary evidence just as often makes a point that one cannot tell a slave by their looks. We also see this in medieval English literary depictions of the Welsh as the near other, subject to enslavement.",
      "of Anglo-Saxon riddles references to the quote dark haired Welsh slave and the quote swarthy, swearta Welsh in contrast to light haired or blonde English. How can we make sense of describing slaves who are the same colour as their owners and all of them amongst the palest humans around as black? First we must recall the widespread link between the desirability of light and basic economics. I'm almost done",
      "The archetypal slave in the Rit Sula centers not on blackness of skin or hair, but on dirtiness and an ugliness stemming from a life of manual toil. On quote rough hands and quote sunburned arms. Slaves are dark because they're constantly in the sun and dirt and do not have the luxury of comeliness. Second, race is a construct that takes something people make up, different social categories for humans,",
      "of biological reality. Ruth Terrace notes that the Scandinavian slave's ugliness and unhealthiness was not literal even though it claimed to be a physical description, it was a foil to contrast the subhumanity of the slave with the human normality of the ruddy and healthy free folk. The physical description of the slaves as black and ugly, as foreign quote, was part of the social construction that made the slave an other. It was otherness, not the color, that was important.\"",
      "Thank you, Professor. I know maybe that was a long reading but it's a coherent section. I think everyone here appreciated that. Your book has lots of anecdotes in it, great anecdotes. Historic as well as personal. One that stood out is when the Saudi student wanted to join Black Students Association. The like part? I can't believe you're bringing this up.",
      "A sut roedd pawb yn cremio'r ystafell hwnnw gyda'i gilydd ac wedyn dywedodd ei fod ei mam yn gwneud hynny. Rwyf eisiau rhannu anegdyd o fy hun i ddarparu sut gall rhai pobl fod yn cynhyrchol wrth ystyried trawsglaithau o ran neges ariannol o fewn Cymru, yn enwedig Nen-Gremiaid. Felly 4 neu 5 mlynedd yn ôl – ac rydw i'n ceisio cadw hyn yn gyflym –",
      "yn ysgolion ddicolonial. Dyma cyn Covid, ac mae'n cael ei sefydlu gan y gwirioneddol dyn Cymru o rhan eithaf anodd i'r wlad hwnnw, Luton. Felly roedd hi'n mynd trwy Frans Fanon's Wretched of the Earth a chyflogi un sbryder arall am bob cwestiwn. Ar yr achosion honno, roedd yn cyfrifol iawn",
      "ac roedd yn amser. Felly ar y cyd, fe wnaeth hi gyfarfod rhywun o'r gwledydd nid-wsnewid, rhywle o'n rhaglen Cymru. Ac ar yr adeg honno, rwy wedi clywed llyfr Amos Sezer a pan ddylai ei gael i ofyn yn unigol, fe dweudais wrth fynd at fyddoedd gobl yn neges ac adnoddau mewn Africa, fel mae Sezer yn dweuddio bod ynghyd â'r allydd a'r naziaid",
      "ac mae'r Narsiaid yn ddwy ffordd o un coen. Allwn ni hefyd dweud bod yr Ewropeaidd a'r Cymreigion Islemi yn ddydd ffordds o'r un coin pan fyddai'n dod i meysydd Cymru? Ac yna, y gwirioneddol gwerthus o dynol muslim, fe wnaeth hi sgwrsio drosodd at eich clywedur ac roedd wedi cael ei sensu gan siarad ac roedde i'n cymryd hynny yn ôl. Ac yno roedd gennych chi'r plant yn y cynulleidfaoedd,",
      "Mae'n strategaeth Hizb ut-tahrir, os ydych chi'n gwybod beth mae hynny. Ac fe dweudon nhw, na, nid yw llifogydd fel hwn yn unigol mewn Islam, nifer o blanau llawer yn unigolyn ac roedd gennym llyfrgellau yn Cymru hefyd. Felly wedyn roedd cysylltiad arall gyda chylch, cysylchiad gwledig a dywedodd hi, wyt ti am pam nad ydyw i'n ateb gwestiwn brothaidd yn fy mhen?",
      "Yn un diwrnod, y gofynydd roedd yn teimlo bod eisiau i mi ddysgu hynny. Roedd yn rhoi ei safbwyntiau am sut mae Moslewyr Arif wedi cael eu cymryd mewn gwirionedd ar gyfer chwarae sylweddol ac ati. Ac yna, dros wythnos, fe wnes hi ddigwydd popeth o'r negesion ffurio fel,",
      "Roedd hynny'n ddiddorol iawn i mi. Rwyf am rannu hyn i'r cyflwyniad, a chyfeirio at eich bod chi wedi teimlo fod y cwntex ar gyfer ysgrifennu hwn? Mae llawer o ffrindiau yn y llyfr, mae llaith o ffilmiau eraill ar yr adroddiad honno.",
      "I just wanted to set that context and get a sense of your motivation, what gaps you felt you were filling in writing this.",
      "Islamicate and Europeans, two sides of the same coin. I think her mistake was not allowing a discussion that could have dealt with that. And I mean, not that there's any... People can be wrong. Maybe I'm wrong but I think this idea that Muslims or Arabs are like colonial rapacious slaving force in Africa just like Europeans, I think it is completely inaccurate",
      "I don't think it's historically accurate, I think it is a political talking point used especially in the United States and various anti-Muslim groups in countries like Nigeria and stuff like that. Nigerian politics. But I have a whole chapter on this in the book and we can set that aside as a point of discussion because I think its very important",
      "Muslims feel like they sort of have to flagellate themselves and talk about how horrible Muslims are. Well, first of all look, racism is a huge problem in most of the world, right? Anti-black racism is an issue in a lot of Muslim world. That's a fact that needs to be dealt with. Okay, this has been acknowledged and it needs to dealt with but we have to put that aside in order to look at these other issues.",
      "at these other issues. The second point is, when we talk about this, what about the hundreds of millions of Muslims who live in Africa south of Zahra? I mean, that's like treating them like they're not part of the Muslim world and the only Muslims that are worth considering are the Arab Muslims who were allegedly colonizing in slavery. So I think",
      "Unfortunately, part of this discourse is that it completely denies the existence of hundreds and millions of black African Muslims. You know who have strong traditions of scholarship and piety and go to work and go home and kiss their kids and all this stuff that right Muslims do, right? Okay Let's put that aside That's another important issue Now getting to why I wrote this book",
      "Let's address the elephant in the room. I'm not black, you may have noticed this. Okay? Alright. I didn't get up one day and be like, I want to write a book about Islam and Blackness. In fact somebody after wrote my previous book, Slavery and Islam, available where books are sold. After I wrote that book someone said oh are you going to write about Islamic racism?",
      "I'm not like suicidal, you know? But then what happened was the summer of 2020, prime COVID time. There I was at home enjoying my life sitting in the garden taking my kids out to look at squirrels collecting nuts or whatever they do and I get emails. I start getting all these emails because there's apparently an academic Lister called Research Africa. I'm on the Research Africa list. Not that there is anything wrong with it.",
      "I'd love to be on it. I just don't happen to be okay, so there was a huge debate blowing up on the research Africa Lister about A parent I didn't know this but apparently at the time It's an actual academic position like there's professors in America who teach classes on this idea That Islam is Islam is at its scriptural foundation in the Quran in the Sunnah of the Prophet Islam is anti black So this one professor",
      "I won't mention his name, he's Nigerian. He teaches at Vanderbilt University. Nigerian Christian. He was arguing with these people on this list sort of saying Islam is an anti-black religion. So I'm getting... and he's saying look at this Hadid, look at the Quranic verse, look this Maliki Thiklapenia, look chhchhh And so I'm geting these emails from people saying How do you deal with this Hadith? How do we deal with it? What about this Hadit? And I was like what is all this stuff? I mean I hadn't seen this maybe tangentially I heard about it but I was",
      "Okay, I'll respond and I didn't respond. I just like was too busy taking my kids out to look at the squirrel collecting nuts So eventually December rolls around And I feel December 2020 I say to myself You know what you see when you know these questions? I really gotta respond I don't want any of them so I started to do research about this hadith This Quranic verse so I start looking at one thing looking another thing Bigger bigger bigger bigger in order to answer one question",
      "And Aaron answer this question you can look at the context or understand this contact and looking history so within a few months I was like oh my god is it book So that's that book came out of ants answering questions sent to me. I didn't go out and Ask these questions, and I looked at the books that have written on this general issue of Islam blackness right an anti-blackness a Lot of very good books that will believe so very good how do you become these book very good?",
      "and all of them. And I was trying to fill the gaps that their books hadn't addressed, and build context that their book hadn't gotten into. So that's what my book is about. It's more comprehensive conceptually and more detailed in terms of the various issues that come up than the existing books on the topic. And i would say those people were happy that I was doing this. They supported me in writing this book.",
      "I feel there's something wrong there where just as an academic you feel that you can't write about certain topics.",
      "I wrote this book because people asked me questions and I couldn't find the answers to the questions in existing literature, so I found the answers question myself. And I'm a scholar of Islamic intellectual history and I produced an answer. The answer is here if people want to read it they can, if they don't want to, they don' have to. It's a free country, at least the US is.",
      "the transatlantic slave trade and the guarding of the circle. That gets into the other... this gets... do you want to ask about the issue of Arabs as slavers or...? I mean, we're going to go on till 7.30 and... So ask whatever you want. I will be quiet. We are here to listen to you. Do you want cover like... I feel that your book covers some main topics right? Language, history, law",
      "Llywodraeth, a ddysgu hefyd. Rwy'n meddwl bod yna lawer o ffotograffiau am anadraddoedd.",
      "I just want to know, when you were covering the pre-existing literature of racism or different definitions of racism and so on was there anything in particular that spilled out for you?",
      "But you know if you're a grad student and you're in like a seminar, you have to do a literature review. Like you actually have to sit and read...like it's not inconceivable that a human being given a couple of months of free time can actually get a general command of a subject area right? I certainly am NOT qualified to give my opinion on this topic but you can sort say these are the different schools of thought. One other thing that I found really interesting about debates around racism",
      "around race and racism is the extent to which a lot of the agonistic kind of discourse today, and pain and accusations are really people talking past each other because there's sort of two general schools of thinking about racism. One is to say that racism is when you kind of...",
      "it's about what you feel, it's your belief. You sort of believe that somebody is not as good as you because of their race and you have negative feelings towards them So it's sort of this... so it's intention, it' s about acting on that And of course like if that was the general kind of discourse around racism for a long time And there's the second school of thought you might call kind of substantive or maybe effective school of racism which is to say that",
      "is to say that it's not about intent, it's no about what you believe. It's about the results. So if you're in a society where let's say South Asians or black and brown people are consistently less well-off financially, consistently targeted more by the police, consistently not allowed into certain sectors of the economy, that is a racist system because in its effect",
      "its effect discriminates against certain people, based on race. And you could be in that system and you could love dates with them. You could love Afro-Caribbean people. They could be your best friends and you can say why would I ever think this person is bad? But because you're part of that system, and functioning within it, you are racist. Because anybody in that",
      "So racism is the result. And so when these two schools of thought meet each other, you end up with all... People get really upset because someone will say for example, America's an extremely racist country. That can't be denied from the substantive school of thought, substantive racism school of though. Just look at the statistics about crime, housing, health,",
      "And it's just black Americans are going to be treated differently than let's say white America. Now someone from the other more traditional school thought of thinking about racism is maybe like the popular way that people think about it, if you say we're a racist society or I'm a racist person what you're saying is I think black people are bad or I think Black people are not as good as white people and that's not true.",
      "I mean, someone could argue that as Muslims",
      "Mae'n ddrwg iawn i ni yma. Mae problemau gyda defnyddio'r enwad neuologi, fel bod yr adnodd racism yn llai o 100 mlynedd yn gynharach ac wedi cael ei ddefnyddiau yn y cyfnod oedd y Gnaudion yn ystod y flwyddyn. Felly, wrth siarad mewn cymdeithas Sharia a'r disgwrs honno, gall rhywun dweud, wel, mae defnyddiol nad ydych chi'n defnydedig at hyn o dderbyniadau",
      "Mae'n dechrau bod yn ddiffidio ei hun. Hefyd, fel y byddai rhywun wedi cyfrifo'r term sylafofobiaeth, mae'n eich cynnal i mewn i systemau ethig a fyddwch chi'n cael... rydych chi fel brattiswr o Gymhwysoedd yn treulio eich hun ar yr adeg. Felly, gallai rhywdun dweud, wel, dyma mwy o gyferion perennol, iaith, gwirionedd, llawrnau, pethau hynny. Os ein bod ni'n cadw atynt i'r rhain, rydyn ni'r mynd i wneud llawer gwell. Mae pawb yn cael hawdd i'w diogelu,",
      "i ddim yn cael ei haro. Os ydym ni'n cadw at hynny fel Mosleidd, byddem yn fwy o leiaf ac yn cynnal y math rydyn ni allai gael eu darparu fel termau bach. Ie. Ac felly gallai rhai bobl dweud, wel... Gallai rai pobl dweuddio bod rhagorol ar racismdegol mewn gwirionedd. O ran, os ydych chi'n gweld nad yw dau cymunedau yr unig, gan roi metricus, o ran pethau mae'r cymuneddion yn eu gwneud,",
      "efallai y bydd yn gwneud senniol bod chi'n disgwylio ar gyfer rhyw fath o ddiddordeb mawr. Gall rhai bobl gwybod, pan fydd yn dod at Fuslimion yn yr adrannau hwn, nad ydych yn dweud mai pobl Cymru ddim angen cymryd rhan i Fusliamiaid yn yr ariann yma. Mae gennynt holl math o gymhlethaf fel pobl ac imigraith. Maen nhw bob amser yn cael eu cymhlethu o ran sex ac enghreifft. Ac oherwydd y metrigoedd hynny, mae'n well na pherson Gweddill sy'n gweld y cymdeithasau mwyaf,",
      "become leaders or blacks or British Muslims? I don't know how you respond to that.",
      "and we want to break out of this framework, whatever. A lot of times that's just an excuse for not addressing racism. So sometimes people use these bigger arguments as excuses for not address the fact that racism is a real problem. And by racism here I mean discrimination against people based on how they look or where they're from. Their background or their phenotype.",
      "irrational, as being irrational. That's a conflation of. Yeah but you know what? Humans are... There's a lot of different types of irrationality and that's a specific type of rationality I think needs its own name. The second thing is there's this concept, and again this is not... I'm not an expert in this. I just knew enough to write an instruction to it right? But there's a concept called new racism or cultural",
      "or cultural racism. I'm sure some of you have studied this, or know about it, right? This is basically... the term kind of emerges from British scholars in the 1980s and this is probably an example of the best. I have nothing against black people, I just don't like hip-hop culture. That's new racism, that's called a race. But look if the idea is if there was a black guy like, guys remember Fresh Prince of Bel Air",
      "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and their... What was the guy who was his friend? Carlton. No, no I don't mean Jazzy. Yeah good for you for knowing the idea of Jazzy but Carlton So the idea is if like Carlton's walking down this street I should actually be totally fine with that. I should be like oh I'm definitely not crossing the street because that guy isn't wearing hip hop clothing right? I'm saying it's not a black person it's like the culture they're part of",
      "culture they're part of. But here's the thing, no one really gets out of that right? I mean it's like trying to be a good Muslim in Britain, there's nothing you can do. Like you can be like I'm gonna join Prevent, I'm going to sell t-shirts for Prevent. I'm gunna report on all these other people etc etc and you know what I'm still going to get into trouble at the airport right? Because you'll never actually be allowed out",
      "I don't want to say that we're not actually racist against this group, it's just their culture we don't like or something. But actually, we don' allow people... We are very selective in who we allow to exit this group that we discriminate against And the worst part is, we dont treat these people as individuals When you give us an example of who should lead a Muslim community How about we assess people as individual? That's what the majority does So if your white British person Or white American person",
      "you get judged based on your, like... are you a good leader or not? Are you a great politician or not. So the new racism part of it is that you don't and this is how Muslim can be erased and all these other things can be erase because these are all groups that are not actually allowed by the majority, by the group in power to be assessed as individuals.",
      "start talking about people as groups and not thinking about them as individuals, that's an indication that these cultural racist ideas are driving us. That's my amateur opinion. I mean in this regard on this issue, I'm not expert. I'm just giving my own thoughts of someone who has read a lot on the subject. There is more to be said on that. We've got a few hours tomorrow together because obviously I sense a lot of people here want",
      "I want to come to the topic of history. You, here in your chapter six you say something quite interesting. Cicero remarked that the purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present which is a term he took for... He didn't say that! He supposedly said that! I mean he's written it... I said he supposedly, I don't think accurately said that. Okay but this involves",
      "Mae hyn yn cynnal, mae'r pwysigrwydd wedi dod i mewn. I bobl ifanc, mae Postman yn ei ddangos, yna Neil Postman, bod yn bresennol at y pryd maen nhw'n ceisio eu cymryd arnynt eu hunain. Felly mae addysg bob amser yn gynulleidfa emotiw ac o ran sut mae genedlaethu'n ifanc a hefyd am gymunedau, beth wnaethaent ei ddarllen iddynt ofal y byth?",
      "yn ymwneud â phosibl. Yn mynd ymlaen, beth sydd gennych chi o ran sut y dynion a'r hanes sydd ar gael? Ac hefyd o ran ysgolion Cymru ac Anglifoedd Cymreigiaid, yn enwedig yng Nghymru ac America. Beth fyddant yn ei feddwl eu bod nhw'n dysgu'u plant",
      "or their after school to the supplementary schools.",
      "of American society, which is a deeply, deeply, deep racist society. If you do some kind of operation on my brain, you're gonna find racism baked into every neuron in my brain cell. Becoming Muslim was the beginning for me",
      "escaping from this kind of thing. You'll hear this from a lot of Muslims, including black Muslims in America. They'll talk about becoming Muslim begins to cure these sicknesses in you. But I'm like a recovering person. When I was writing this book",
      "I really, you know, kind of was...I'm more like classically liberal. I don't believe in people's freedom to make choices. I dont' believe that they should be told what to do and the government should have minimal role in shaping our lives. It's like religion and family should be doing this etc., etc. So I read a fascinating dissertation written by a British, black British scholar, I think of Caribbean descent",
      "in the US, it's a fascinating dissertation called The Duty to Miscegenate. Do you guys know what miscegenates means? Okay, miscegeinate means racial mixing. Racial mixing right? It's a term that is actually coined by supporters of segregation in the time of Abraham Lincoln. People who were like really opposed to Abraham Lincoln and slavery and potential of black Americans to become citizens and stuff like that. So miscegeneration is like racial mixes basically.",
      "So he has a dissertation called The Duty to Miscegenate. And I picked it up and started reading it, and I was really like, ugh, I can't believe this. This guy...I know what he's going to tell you. He's gonna be one of these woke guys who is telling you that the government is going to come and some kind of socialist program society and make everyone blend together so everybody is equal or whatever.",
      "He's gonna make us misogyny. I read the dissertation, and I was reading it, and... And I started to really agree with his arguments. Like by the end of it, I said this- His argument in the end is It has not been good enough in America or Britain To remove the barriers to racial mixing, to remove the barrier. These groups still stay apart and black women for example are still",
      "are still considered to be the least attractive as marriage partners. They're sexually exploited, but not married. This hasn't been cured by all of the removal laws against black and white marrying in the United States. It hasn't cured it! These groups are still... The only way is they have to have a duty to seek one another's society. That if you're in the position of power in this society like whites in America",
      "America, you have the duty to seek the society of the discriminated against group. And that really for me struck a chord like this idea of that Muslims have a duty to see the society other Muslims. Like for example in where I live in McLean Virginia which is a very nice part of the country, Alhamdulillah right?",
      "The mosque in McLean Islamic Centre, uh... In McLeans let's just say you don't really see black people. You might see like a Kenyan diplomat or you see the son of some Zambian corporation or something like that. Theirs are there. But you don' t see black Americans. The McLeane Islamic Centre There is Rich Stacey's, there is Rich Aram's, maybe there is a Somali cab driver who is in the area",
      "You don't see black American Muslims. They live in other places, other mosques. This is just some idea which is that this McLean Islamic Center has a duty to go and seek the society of, let's say, Masjid Muhammad in Washington DC. And they should go and partner with his mosque, do events with his Mosque, share budget with his mosques so these people are forced to mingle",
      "In terms of education, let's say...",
      "Look, we all know the stories of like Bilal and we all saw the message And we all that the Prophet's not racist and Islam is against racism We all know this stuff. That's not good enough because if you're a... If you're just like a typical Arab family, typical Desi family and your daughter comes and says I want to marry this Senegalese guy or this Caribbean guy What are your parents going to say?",
      "I don't think the parents are going to accept it.",
      "Education is not good enough. People need to be socialised into mixing with one another until they're not foreign to one another.",
      "learn about maybe the caliphs, maybe that's all dark. But you know what? The problem... I feel like I'm being mean to you. Go ahead. I just don't think that's going to help in my personal opinion because we're all, a lot of us, we all know people who are really educated in Islamic history and they still have racial prejudices. So what I mean by it's less about combating",
      "ymddygiadau, ond o ran... sut i gyfathrebu hanes African Cymru i'r cwricwl gynraddon islam? Felly dwi'n credu bod hynny'n gwestiwn anhygoel. I mi, mae'n sgyrsus, mae pobl yn... Oherwydd eich bod am fwyaf o tokiniaeth. Y penderfyniad yw fod gennych gymlyniad yn Islannu mewn Africa fel arfer.",
      "For me, I don't want to...this is going to sound really arrogant. I never had this problem and some people who are vocal about the importance of Muslims in Africa and Islamic Africa getting attention they're like you don't have this problem for some reason. I grew up in Senegal when I was a kid so for me",
      "The first place I went as a Muslim, when I became Muslim the first place that I actually went and was around Muslims not going to Jumaat at Georgetown University and eating dinner and eating salad with no dressing or whatever people have. So the first places where I went were in a mosque praying with Senegal, with Zahar Senegal and Kowloch and other places like that.",
      "The name of the Muslim is Senegal. That's just because of an accident in my life. For me, when I wrote Mizkuri Muhammad, the whole book is organized around Shaul Wali Allah, the person who Shaul will be loved, this Delhi scholar. So I've always thought that what's so fascinating about Islamic history",
      "East Asia, Africa, South of Sahara. These are Muslim places with great Muslim scholars whose stories are amazing. That's always been more interesting for me than the kind of Arab-centric or Mideast centric or whatever standard narrative about Islam. So I think that... For me it doesn't make sense",
      "I would say to like, I don't want to be late at this point.",
      "pan fyddwch yn siarad am ddau persbrydol o sut i'w dysgu, sef, er enghraifft, mewn lleoliad anglifo arbennig yng Nghymru a Brytaniau, gan fod yna gyda chynnyrch un sydd eithaf ond yn sôn Cymreig. Sut byddwch chi'n gweld cyfrifiad? Yn amlwg, dechreuwch â'r Sirach ac wedi dechrau â'n Caledon. Sut fyddech chi am gymysgedd... Er enghrofiad, os gofynnwn ni am yr adeg 12-13,",
      "the word is great you could read uh that's great right but you can also start with like the phrase poetry about the prophet written by sheikh but that could be like the beginning and then you could be uh you know like um starting you know uh",
      "What is it? Amal, what is it I'm forgetting the name. Qanuz al-Amal. Qanz al-Amal, yeah. So you could start people's introduction to various Islamic sciences could come through a West African figure or Southeast Asian figure. We've got 10 minutes left before we open up to questions. Coming back to the example that you gave,",
      "ffyniad sy'n ddiddorol pan mae'r gwbl Gwleidydd Cymru yn dod â'i heintiau potensial o Zenegau, y reacsiwn rhieni. Rwy'n hoff i ddod at yr hyn am law, achos dyna'r mater arall rydych chi'n ei ofynnwyd yma. Rydych yn gofyn llaw gweithredu, a chyfarwyddwch am hanes ymlaen mewn byd islam ac y tansiwn hwn",
      "y math hwn o ddiddordeb neu gwerthoedd. Rwy'n hoffi siarad am ein sefyllfa nawr yn yr Unedig neu mewn yr UD, o ran y tensiwn honno o sut dylai pethau fod a sut mae pethiau wirioneddol. Dylai ni fod yn unigol ond rydyn ni'n gwybod bod rhagorion ac rydym ni wedi cael y ffyrdd cyfalu anodd o gwrthferthu rhagoriadau",
      "yw'r ddynion oedd yn cael eu cymryd i'w deall. Ac mae'n amlwg bod yr impuls, y math mwy o impuls sydd mewn sgrifton, ei fod yn unigol. Felly sut wyt ti'n gweld y gwaith cyflawni hwnnw'n digwydd yn y DU a'r US? Ie felly... Gallai fod wedi cael ei gyhoeddi ond gallai fod llawer o bethau eraill. Sut amser rydyn ni? Byddaf yn dweud 10 munud ac fe fyddwn i'n ceisio cofi hynny yn 10 munudd.",
      "So one of the things that was brought up, it gets brought up a lot when people talk about Islam being anti-black is they'll bring specific Maliki fic opinions from the Muqtasir al-Akhdari and from I think Jamia Saghif. And you'll see there's specifically scholars tend to be from what's today Algeria or maybe Fez where they'll say things like",
      "like one of the valid reasons to annul a marriage is if, let's say, the bride or groom turns out to be black. Forget about what black means in this, it just says they're not black right? Or you'll see something like Muslim men shouldn't look at Muslim women they are not related to unless they're old or black because",
      "That you're like, oh, that's pretty bad. This is uh, you know, oh yeah, no, that was pretty bad, you can't really so Those are some of the issues I want to deal with and I deal with them in the book Let me talk about how Muslim scholars have addressed this The first thing is First I'll talk about the second instance where someone says don't look at",
      "Black women are not attractive.",
      "There are black women who are really attractive right we're more attractive than a young woman or an on block them So these kind of statements are not accurate and themselves, and I Want to make this point great you were going to find Muslim scholars in all parts of the Muslim world Who say stuff that is really offensive and wrong like it's actually wrong It's offensive to your moral sensibilities And by the way You might be totally correct to be offense to be offended with what they say might be",
      "What they say might be really awful. But you will always find, I think just empirically in my experience, You will always more senior Muslim scholars telling them that is wrong. And they'll tell them that it's wrong for the same reason you feel it's right. Now I think that's very important to remember. Don't judge... don't always judge your tradition when someone cherry picks a bad opinion.",
      "Judge the tradition by other people who come and correct it. Which they do, they always do. Going back to that first point about blackness being a valid reason to annul marriage You see this discussion across time diachronically in Maliki law let's say We'll pick a place Fez from 1500s to 1900s Back and forth on this issue",
      "Why? Why is there a back and forth? Didn't the Prophet say that, you know, the black has no virtue over the red. The white has no virtues over the black. Didn't he say Arabs have no virtue of non-Arabs except by their deeds? Don't we know that the most noble in the Quran, the most",
      "Don't we know that the Prophet said, if someone comes to you to propose marriage to your daughter and you like their religion and character, you should marry your daughter to them. Otherwise there will be great fitna in the land. Don't know all these things? Don't We know all the stories that show us very clearly that the Quran and the sunnah of the Prophet is against discriminating people based on their physical appearance or tribe or whatever? So how can there be a debate about this?",
      "Because one of the main root maxims in the Sharia, is one of five main Kawa'd al-Kubra, is Al-'Ada Muhakkima. Custom convention is dispositive. All things being equal, custom is going to carry the day. What is a husband's obligation to his wife? What is the wife's obligation as husband? Do I have to do the dishes or does my wife have to",
      "Who's gonna change the diaper? What's the diaper changing balance, right? If we have a... in the market if I buy this book from you and there's like a page mixed up in here Do I get my money back or not? These type of things are all going to be based on custom in a society This is stated in the Sharia, right The Quran and As-Sunnah make it clear that we're supposed to defer to custom on many Many of its contact points of the shariah are actually based on customs",
      "Right? So think about this, you know I got married to someone who went to the same university as me Who has a postgraduate degree. Who is used to the... You know she likes the same restaurants I like She doesn't expect me to take her to St. Barts every spring break right? She doesn' t expect me have a Bentley",
      "socio-economic, educational group status as me because otherwise I'd be divorced. Right? One of us would be like this isn't working so it's understandable also that in marriage custom is going to determine a lot of what makes an acceptable match or not or what makes a good match. When do you tell your friend oh yeah you definitely should beat him. Oh yeah you gotta drop her. You do that based on your shared expectations",
      "in your class, and your community about what marriage is supposed to be. That's fine as Muslims. Okay. Now the problem is, what happens if one of those aspects of culture is that black people are lower status than other people? Now you have kind of a... now you have a dilemma because on the one hand we're supposed to respect culture and especially at issues like marriage, on the other hand we aren't supposed to",
      "Malik, for example the founder of the Maliki school of law does not consider blackness to be a valid cause for annulment. He does not considered it In his school a huge chunk a huge tradition of maliki scholars in North Africa mind you North Africa don't sorry do consider black us to be valid they break with their own enough why because they say we're following custom and by the way They'll they say to their opponents. They say hey listen you mr.. Idealistic",
      "Mr. Idealistic, you just quoted all those hadiths to me. Why don't you marry your daughter to a black guy? And then suddenly the guys think, well, maybe I don't know. So they say, don't tell us that this isn't our custom. But as I said before, you'll come across this opinion. But you will also come across the opinion of more senior Maliki scholars from North Africa,",
      "from Andalusia saying this is unacceptable. It doesn't matter how socially controversial this is, the sunnah of the Prophet, the clear indications in the Quran, the position of our imam in the Maliki school of law supersede our deference to custom. So you can see in the maliki school itself there's like this tension over deferring to custom versus upholding these values",
      "Before we get to questions, I need just a quick thing of anticipated projects and",
      "and what not, current things. If you can tell us. I'm working out a lot. My aim is to get abs. Trying to get ab's. Okay cool. Anything book-wise or education wise? Yeah actually I had a book that was like four fifths done before the slavery book and before the gladness book it's called Islamic Law and Justice. The Justice and Islamic Law",
      "The Ulama Legal Reform in Madalam Courts. It's about the history of madalam courts and Islamic civilization, which is long story short, it's about how Muslim scholars theoretically and practically deal with instances in which their fiqh and their expectations of justice don't match up. That book hopefully I'll finish up now and publish maybe within a year or so.",
      "on Monday with IHRC, Karima Foundation from High Wicca and SOAS Islamic Society. That's I think 6.30ish or that's on the IHLC website so if someone who couldn't come here they can go to that and obviously Professor Brown will be there. And Habib Akande and Mustafa Briggs. And Mustafa Briggz will also be there and then we'll have an event with Mustafa Bruggs on his Beyond Bilal books at the IHSC bookshop",
      "ar ddiweddaw 15, 6.30. Yn ôl, mae yna adroddiadau ar wefan IHLC. Dyma sut rydyn ni'n mynd i gael cwestiynau. Rwyf wedi delio fy ngwyliau cymdeithasol gyda chi ond rwy'n gwybod bod gennych ffordd o wneud rhywbeth sy'n eich gwrych. Dwi ddim yn gwyli penderfynu 10 pound am ddigwydd yma i'ch hyderach chi achos rydych chi wedi dweud wrthym nad ydych yn gwneud yr hyn yma mewn America. Ond rwyf yn teimlo bod pawb yma yn eithaf cyhoeddus. Mewn unrhyw le, rydw i'n golygu pob cwestiwn neu coment",
      "And then if you've got a rebuttal, just wait until... Yeah. You can berate me but just be quick. So we'll go by hands I guess. I like to think people have questions. Don't embarrass us because we've gone on to 820. That guy's got a question. Yes, go ahead sir.",
      "He married a black woman and had kids.",
      "that his mother was a black African slave woman and he was Europeans, he freaked out Europeans. It's really interesting. So they were terrified of Mawadiyah Ismaili who is very powerful, for a long time he was like the really powerful early Sultan of the Alawid dynasty, the current dynasty that ruled Morocco.",
      "There were still Europeans who would get captured by pirates operating off the coast of Morocco and Algeria. And these, you see British and Americans writing about Mawla Ismail, the reason they say he's like so savage and fearful is because he's mixed, he's a mixed race right? He's this white Arab who has been mixed with savage African blood",
      "That's why he took an animal right? This is really what they're saying Muslim authors never talk about this because from Muslim author perspective. He's just Another Moroccan guy. He doesn't know the rocking guy and there's so many Moroccan ulama And rulers whose mothers are black African like Abdul Rahman Al-Kittani Rahimahullah who just died The great scholar of Fez son of Abdel Hayyad Kattani died 1963 the great you know half of it also",
      "Hafidh al-Asr, Hadith scholar of the age from Fez. Abd al-Humayn al-Qahtani was his son from African slave women and no one knows these things. It's a good example of like European early modern European thinking about race versus Muslim thinking about races where if you're a person who is noble or respected if your mother is black African it doesn't matter",
      "What's your opinion on the history of Mors?",
      "I mean, I know enough to teach about it in my Islamic world class for like 10 minutes. But I don't know enough offer any kind of qualified opinion. You'd have to ask when...I don't if Bila Al-Wair already came or he already did a presentation? Or is he going to or anything? I have no idea. But anyway, are there other scholars like Sherman Jackson or someone who could answer this better than me?",
      "We've got a good audience today, I don't think we'll have to borrow a correspondent in the room. Well, we'll see! What are your other questions? Yes, the young lady here. Hi, my question is related specifically to Sudan where you're from. So a few years ago I did a piece on colorism. The thing about Sudan just to give you guys context is that we have very different shades of color and because pink color is so important",
      "We don't just use white and black, so we use a whole scale of blue and green and yellow and red. And we've got a system, we have systematic prejudice against different colours. When I was doing the piece, we interviewed a couple of researchers and the main reason that they were talking about in regards to why this exists as a phenomenon is that it has to do with mostly the Arab influence",
      "influence because in Sudan there's an identity crisis of whether you identify as Africans or Arabs and the whole thing about what they said particularly is that to become a better Arab or Muslim then you sort of want to associate with light skinned people whereas the more you look African, the more dark-skinned you are",
      "identity of a Muslim or how a Muslim should look like. And the other thing was, of course, colonialism because when you were colonized for a long time by the British there was sort of like a systematic preference towards... so the British would prefer to surround themselves with skin people and they came in positions of I wouldn't say power but they would educate them. Yeah, yeah, preferential treatment, yeah.",
      "I mean, no they don't have merits. They're not...they have no merit.",
      "in the sense that they don't appear randomly. You talked about Islam coming from the north with Arabs, right? You could add what I discussed earlier about this... In a lot of parts of the world especially where there's a lot variation in skin color, that darker skin is considered more associated with manual work and lower class",
      "about the fact of colonialism and the British preference, the same thing with the British preferences in India. Get the population there and colorism in India so these are all you can bring these all as causes but they not none of them have any merits they're illegitimate right? So there's nothing like you can I mean I wouldn't defend any of them I mean so but I think it's also important that we don't always",
      "It's called Tariq Bilal al-Sudan",
      "16th century Forgetting this you know what? Look it up in the index. I'm really good any index always put the death date sad Sadie Sadie should be under s sad Come on Okay, guys 1655 for me 1655 okay",
      "indexing people, if I lose my jaw on the index. He is Tariq Sudan he's from Timbuktu, he's a leading Timbuktus family. Timbuku in that time right is divided into blacks and whites literally Vidan Sudan blacks and ones okay the whites are people who are of Arab descent Berber descent or maybe even Fulani",
      "And you'd be like, wait, Fulani and Fulano people? They're like black. This has nothing to do with skin color! It's weird right because they're called blacks and whites. Whites are people who are especially associated with...because the Arabs and the Berbers are pastoral. They're nomads, they're traders or merchants. The Fulane are also pastorals so they get lumped in with the whites. Then the blacks are groups that are agricultural",
      "agricultural, Langara, Hausa, other groups like that. Malinke communities But what's one thing that would not actually tell you which group is which if you're walking down the street? What they look like because you could be Berber but your mother and your mom's mom and your dad's mom",
      "African than you know an African guy on the street, you know what someone from one gara or another ethnic group so when we see these Title of these names don't always we don't only want to assume that they actually Mean what race means to us about skin color even when it's black and white second example from Timbuktu And this is in the history of Saudi in the system of Sudan of the Pilates Sudan Timbuku very famous scholar one of his ancestors",
      "One of his ancestors, actually not one of his ancestor, one of relatives Mufti of the city named Ibn Aqit. He moves from the area further like the Messina region another part of the Niger River area to Timbuktu",
      "He was in where he goes before you surrounded by Fulani and didn't want his kids. He's Berber He didn't wanted to marry for one I Can't live here my kids are gonna marry two lines. I gotta move so he moves to Timbuktu And everyone's like people read that say they're like this guy's racist using anti-black races look at this But then what happens one of his students very respected scholar named on Musa Lee. He is Arab. He straight up Arab",
      "He's straight up Arab. Right? He himself is Arab. He comes and says to Ibn al-Fitr, I want to marry your daughter. Ibn Al-Fitri says birds of a feather flock together. You know? No. We married Sanhadja Berbers. Where are Sanhadjah Berbers? We married sanhadja berbers. The Arab is lighter skinned probably he had no idea",
      "So it's a video, it's an explainer.",
      "Yeah, my wife works for us. Oh we'll find it, that sounds really good. We're looking for it. Yes, the guy in the back room.",
      "I just want to get your thoughts on this. A lot of hidden anti-black sentiment, especially amongst the people who are from South Africa and brown people are frustrated as Indians. And everything comes from the Islamic community, from schooling to economic opportunities. You see a lot of mosques being built",
      "Where are you from in South Africa? No way! I missed South Africa. I gotta go back. Those were good times, for me at least.",
      "You know, like first of all obviously the anti-black racism and all the tensions around that in South Africa are enormous and very difficult to combat. And then of course even in the south asian community you have let's say the Gujarati kind of elite or higher status Gujaratis people maybe looking down on the lower status Urdu speaking",
      "You discussed the concept of racism and whether it was imported from the West or we had something similar in our tradition.",
      "I remember a term in Arabic, shu'ubiyya. It was used a lot in the third or second hijri sanchi What do you think of that term? Is it similar to racism?",
      "debate about whether race or racism is something that emerges like in the late middle ages, or if it goes back to you know earlier than that. And without getting into...you know to get into the details of this would be tiresome. You can read it and some read it in my book if you're interested but in",
      "but you can in some ways like You could just put that aside and say listen do people Judge other people by Their descent or where they come from or their body or their origin Yes, they do. And like they do that Way before the first European got on a boat and was like hey I bet I can kick some butt like that before it before that ever happened",
      "Whether or not that ever happens, people were doing this in China and Japan and all sorts of other places. Whether or no we want to call it race, whether or not we want racism, that's something we can debate. So there are other examples like do you talk about the way Arabs talked about Persians in the third century? Or the way Persians talked about Arabs in the 3rd century?",
      "How about the word Shur'biyyah?",
      "saying we are, our tradition, our Persian tradition has a lot to offer and is valuable or we're actually better than Arabs and you guys are bunch of lizard eaters. So those are the two different like...and they write poetry in books and then some Arabs or even other Persians respond and say actually the Prophet was an Arab so he can't say this but by",
      "to like the ten hundreds of the common era, it doesn't really matter anymore because by that time the leading political and scholarly groups are all Persian and Turkish anyway so it doesn' t matter who's Arab or not Arab. I mean think about today what does it mean to be Arab? Syria, Iraq, there may be... Who knows where they're from? They're Turkish, they're Persian, God knows from where but Arab is about speaking Arabic and being a citizen of this country",
      "My interest is in the first to tenth century around the Qiyan and the Shay'a al-Mahdiya, and it's been exciting. So whilst I was doing my research today, of course a lot of people have heard about Ghani",
      "ac mae'n cael ei ysgrifennu fel llyfr go iawn, lle byddant yn cyfeirio'r dynion fel ffermwyr gwl. Mae wedi bod yn arbennig o beth sy'n canolbwyntio ar hynny, fel os oes rhywbeth anodd yn digwydd o amgylch hyn ond doedd dim llyfrau oeddiadau, gan gyfarfodydd neu gynharach, na chweinidog i fynd â nhw i'w darllen,",
      "forms under their verses. Have you come across anything in your research that refers to that?",
      "I don't know the answers to that question, but there is a very interesting article about Ziryab.",
      "whether he was black or not because there's a lot of discussions around this that people, when people say that they mean different things by it and stuff. So I think there's like a lot complexity about saying that one of these things... Because his main thing is he's a musician right? There's a discussion around what it means to say they're black and what that would mean at the time so that might be a useful place to look if you haven't already seen this",
      "Can I ask you something? There's been a lot of questions about the history. I want to come back to this book in particular, and also other books that you have written,",
      "In a sense, we are discussing this sitting in London. We're all to some extent or another Western Muslims if you like. What audience or what discourse do you see these books being part of? Who are you writing for when you're writing these books? Is it Westerners and their views on Islam? Is is Muslims in the West who have to deal with these issues",
      "How do you understand the discourse in which you contribute?",
      "Not necessarily, who has no background on the topic but who's engaged. Who wants to learn Whether they're American or British or not or from Saudi Arabia I think it's the same in my mind. I also write for someone who might be interested in these topics like for example The Slavery Book is very different. I think The SLavery Book would be interesting to anybody",
      "but that's my own opinion. This I wrote for people, for Muslims who are interested in this topic and also for academics who are interest in this topics. So that's, I think different books have different audiences, but generally I think like everything I write because I'm a professor and an academic if I write something that doesn't it's not up to snuff academically I'm gonna get, it's going to torpedo my reputation or something",
      "Everything in my... that's why this book, you know it's like the slavery book I mean It's about one fifth or one fourth even footnote So there is a huge amount of notes But the body of the book I try to make accessible to even non-expert reader And anybody who... I guess I have in mind anybody who wants to learn about this but I write as a Muslim Again I think my arguments are also applied to non-Muslims",
      "Are these the topics that you find being discussed in Muslim societies as well?",
      "Or is it very often a reaction to Westernist social-local people?",
      "There's sort of the existence of these discussions in other places is a cause for raising that discussion in Tunisia or Egypt or Turkey or wherever, right? But it's definitely a big issue amongst Muslims in the US. So that's why I mean that's when we kind of the global English Anglophone Muslim community",
      "I'm not saying they came up with it, but the notion that you shouldn't just be not racist, but you have to be an anti-racist and put an act after it. You mention in your book how you've got the intentionless and substantive approach, I guess, and that causes a lot of misunderstanding in trying to define what is or isn't racism. How is it that we as Muslims can engage within this discourse whilst understanding",
      "whilst understanding the maxims of actions are by different intentions, but at the same time that we should aim to bring justice regardless of?",
      "that it's not about like what, you know. It's not abut what I think or whether I am racist or not right? So we have to make active, all of us have to be active efforts to rectify these structural inequities and you know we have different, each of us has different capacities to do this because of what our jobs are, who we know or things like that but like I think",
      "You have to be willing to act beyond what you feel and believe. And just realize that you have a duty to contribute to dismantling this system. Because it's not a good system. The stuff I think about in my life, the thoughts I've had......I'm deeply ashamed of. Like, deeply, deeply ashamed.",
      "I could tell you stuff, but my wife would kill me. If I tell you all the horrible stuff that I think... And it's not- I think I'm a good person. I'm not a bad person. You know? But this stuff is baked into me. Baked into Americans and probably baked into British people too like white English people or whatever. And then you have to uh.. That's not good man. It's not, it's no good that people grow up like this.",
      "This embarrassment we have to spare our children this embarrassment They don't that they don't we don't want them to think like you have to actively because if you just are yourself You're gonna recreate someone like you. You have to like make Actively try and show your children that there's not you need to show them another vision of the world It's not the one that I grew up with That's just my two cents. I don't know yes",
      "I mi,'r peth mwyaf ddiddorol rydych chi wedi ei ddweud heddiw oedd y cwestiwn roeddech yn siarad am y mosg yng Nghymru ac sut mae ganddo boblogaeth i wneud rhaglen gyda mosgau yng Nghonig. Yn yr Unedig rydyn ni wedi cael... Mae'r Fuslims wedi bod yma am bryd a wedi cynydd at busnes mewn rhai achosion, a sbort, a chyfieithiad economaidd, a phobl eraill.",
      "Mae wedi bod llawer o ddysgu gwaith a phobl wedi gweithio'n fwyaf am yr hyn y maen nhw wedi ei wneud. Ond ble byddai'r pethau bach yn eu cymryd, y peth oedd y rhan fawr o'r bobl hynny nawr yn rhoi chyngor i helpu eraill? Ydynt yn cael gwneud hynna ar achos eu bod yn cymorthu eu plant i fynd i'r parc i weld sgwrnau cuddio nus neu... Beth mor bwysig...",
      "Mae'n bwysig iawn, y gwirioneddol. Rwyf wedi cael ffodus dda o bobl yn helpu fi ar hyd i ac edrych yn ôl mae pob peth wedi bod wedi ei wneud mewn ffordd anfformaidd. Efallai fy mod i wedi gwybod rhywun a byddent wedi helpu mi neu weithiau gallaf adael help gan rywun ac maen nhw'n hapus i mi ond a ydym ni am striwturau fformal o ran lle rydyn ni nawr?",
      "I wish I were like a wise person who could offer an answer. I mean, I'm just another guy... You know, I am like a Muslim guy who has... On this day, I mean I'm not qualified. I have my own thoughts on this you know? But I would say it's really important It's really, it's very important because look at the UK so much but in the US like it's messed up. Stuff is messed up man. So I grew up like very well educated. My parents",
      "My parents did Peace Corps in Chad, and I grew up in Senegal. My dad was in the Civil Rights Movement. He got beaten up and put in a hospital by Ku Klux Klan people. And I grew around zero black people. Zero! The only American black people I met were like the people you buy food with bagged groceries at the supermarket. The first time I really interacted with black Americans was when I became Muslim.",
      "And even after being Muslim, and having in-laws who were affected by war on terror, and being suspicious of the justice system in America, all this stuff. It wasn't until like I don't know what 10th or 11th video of a random black guy getting shot for no reason running away from the cop, and the cops shoot him a bunch of times in the back. He's just running on a field of grass and they kill him.",
      "It was only like after I don't know how many videos, and I was like whoa that's messed up. But before that if you asked me Did police shoot these people for no reason? I would be like no no of course not the police don't do that kind of stuff Like this is you know Undeniable in the US This is like people get shot all the time killed all the times beaten all the Time they do a serious problem and it's uh really high priority",
      "And if you believe in standing up for justice and your Muslim I think it's important. That's a very high priority. I don't know the situation in the UK, I just don't like what the details are. I imagine there might be some similar stuff but I don' t know enough about it. Yes guy in the back.",
      "Christian scholar who was pointing out various beliefs in the Torah. And that, and the book itself came as an answer to those questions. I was curious what were the main points being raised? Was there anything that was particularly problematic for you to be able to answer? Do you feel like you can give a full account of all those questions?",
      "And I don't think his argument is very good. I mean, I would... I'm hesitant and I don' want to review his points because then I would have to offer a rebuttal for all of those points and I wouldn't have enough time to do that because that's... So I mean I'm not trying to get out of answering your question it just I don''t feel like it would be responsible for me to mention his arguments and then not rebut the arguments. Unfortunately you'll have to read the book",
      "We're gonna have ten more minutes and then",
      "misogyniaeth o fewn y traddodiad hefyd a'r math o enghreifftiau mae pobl yn ei dderbyn. Ac mae wedi bod rhai gwaith yn fwy diweddar hefy, hyd yn oed rwy'n meddwl bod Mariam Katz wedi llwyddo llyfr Gweinidogion yn gweithio y flwyddyn diwethaf sydd yn cyflwyno rai o'r materion leol yn benodol ac sut mae Islam yn deall pethau i'w wneud gyda chymdeithas o ddiffyniadau gwahanol ac mae llawer o'ch enghraifftau rydych chi wedi eu rhoi hefyr yn hytrach o ran peths, yn enwedig dau fenyw gobl. Ond yn aml iawn o feysydd y gymuned, efallai fod rhywbeth o'u hwrdd i'rmchwil",
      "things are part of the tradition and it's easier to kind of brush it under the carpet perhaps than acknowledge and try and reconcile these difficult things that great scholars did say. So yeah, so what has been the reception to the book? Yeah, so academic reviews take a long time. I mean they usually like a year or more to come out.",
      "the people I had read the book from external reviewers thought it was good but I don't know what people will say in their reads. A lot of people have sent me messages that said, I liked your book thank you. I did get a solid amount of pushback for this book",
      "I don't know how to respond to that.",
      "book and then no one has to worry. But that was the only criticism, but it wasn't...it's not like criti- I don't know how to respond to it because there is nothing you can say, like you can just say um...you know. I don' t even know how do respond. They think I shouldn't write the book. Okay well I did write the",
      "Perhaps the answer is that it's about Islam and blackness in Europe.",
      "Related to that, as who is qualified to do what?",
      "to do what? Can I ask about your experience as a Western academic on Islam who has become a Muslim. How is that taken among Western academia on Islam, Islamic studies... No you have to ask, I mean I'd love to give you my answer but I mean my answer doesn't matter. I can say look, I got tenure, I became a full professor",
      "After writing like a slavery book, you know and after being very vocally Muslim open the most long So I mean I think that the quality in Academy. I think the quality of your work is very important and I don't know if it transcends all prejudices but The academics tend to be pretty do they try to be very objective when they're judging equality and scholarship And I got something I'm proud of I'm out of my field that",
      "that it does that in general. Obviously there are sometimes failures or lapses, but I would say that it's interesting when I was in grad school... So I started grad school like five days after 9-11, it was September 15th 2001 and I became Muslim when I 19 in 1997 and I spent all of college and a lot of grad school really afraid",
      "I was very embarrassed by it. I thought I was a weirdo. I Thought people would think that I was biased or weird or stupid And It wasn't until I went to Egypt and started to study in the Azhar with scholars there, and I met people These people are so much more knowledgeable than all these professors in America teaching us on something as a desert",
      "I was like this is being Muslim means you're a great scholar being being Muslim in the tradition of excellence in scholarship, it's a tradition of Ehsan and I was Like this is what I want to be like And when I would go back to my grad school after these You know two months in Egypt or six months in egypt or whatever. I would just be like running I mean, I don't have to run home but I'd be like like running laps around people Memorizing things memorizing Quran memorizing all these things",
      "all these things, you know memorizing book sections of books and stuff like the scholars that I wanted to be like. And um...I realized being a Muslim is not a liability it's an asset. Like I was proud to be Muslim and I wanted other people to see what I had seen and to share that with people. With Muslims, with non-Muslims. So that really changed my perspective and made me much more open and much more proud",
      "But it's ironic because as you went into the 2010s, I would venture to say that prior to let's just say 2015. I'm just putting that out there as an approximate date. Islamic studies or Near Eastern Studies or Islamic history or study of Islam and religious studies was dominated by non-Muslims. A Muslim would be a rarity. Practicing Muslim, extreme rarity!",
      "Conservative practicing Muslims. By the way, in American academia I'm borderline Attila the Hun conservative. Like, I am so conservative that I should be excluded from all discussions. That's how I view it amongst Muslims in the US academy. Which I think these people need to get out more. That is what I say. But by the time you get to like maybe the late 20 teens",
      "I don't know if there's statistics on this, but I would venture to say that the majority of professors in the sort of Islamic studies-ish fields are probably Muslim now. People who went into Islamic Studies and related fields after 9-11, they finished their PhDs, they've graduated... But, uh, the irony is, I don' think I faced a lot of discrimination as a Muslim when I started out. I think if you're a Muslim who's like me and is conservative",
      "conservative by conservative I mean non-progressive Do you guys know what progressive Muslim is right? So if you're not progressive You are definitely going to get discriminated against and you're gonna be discriminated again by other Muslims Other Muslims are going to say publicly, and they said this publicly about me We will not cite his books. We will assign his books in our classes",
      "Think about that. That is insulting. I find that insulting as a scholar, that you would... I cite people who I hate. I cite People who I despise if they write good work or if they just have a book on that topic You have to cite it. You have look at it. So my point is that the irony is that I think that now Islamic studies is actually dominated by Muslims",
      "by Muslims, but it's dominated by the Muslims that were produced by the kind of organic preventive sort of response of the institutions of American government and civil society after 9-11 that produce good Muslims. Ironically these Muslims are often times politically very radical in a sense that now I could go out on my class and just start saying...I can say the most pro Palestinian stuff now nothing is going to happen because",
      "Now, a lot of academics are very radical politically but religiously they're extremely progressive and very hostile to normative kind of orthodox-ish Muslims. So that's the irony is it now I would probably be discriminated against And I tell young Muslims if you're like practicing Muslim, if youre not progressive or whatever Don't say this don't be open about it keep quiet don't get any arguments",
      "don't get any arguments because you will not get a job. You'll be discriminated against by other Muslims. Is that perhaps an element of race in that you're the insider in America as opposed to somebody who's all Muslim? A lot of people I'm talking about are white too. There are white Muslims who are professors, so it's white on white crime. We need to wrap up this. Good text wrap-up.",
      "We need to wrap up. What is the question? That's the question you want me to ask? I can't possibly answer this. There's a YouTube video, I'm probably doing really good job of answering it very serious and no jokes Google Jonathan Brown why he became Muslim or something for fun. Okay so you've been a wonderful audience we're actually anticipating problems with voice security but thank you Mr Gray audience",
      "Mae'r rheolwr o'r Bookshop i Arddangos ymlaen yn cael rhai geiriau i'w rhannu.",
      "in British history. In this room we've got someone who have been thrown into prison because of their support for Palestine and the list goes on. There are so many people that know each other, or have known each other who have campaigned for people who have be in prison. And the Islamic Human Rights Commission luckily was set up in 1997 and whilst it was set-up 9-11 happened and 7-7 happened and everything that happened. The plight of prisoners has often",
      "Mae llawer o ddynion yn eithaf atal ymgyrchu â nhw gan yr angheniad bod ganddo'n cael ei tanio drwy gyfathrebu ac wedi cael eu troi i'r pen draw. Ac mae hynny wedi digwydd am lawer o amser. Rydw i'n gwybod bod llawn broed a chanon sydd wedi ymgeisio ar broedau a chenon, wedi dod i ben mewn pen draw achos maent wedi siarad rhywbeth sydd yn cael iddynt fyw allan o'r cyfran. Yn hytrach na ni wedi gwneud yr holl waith rydyn ni wedin ni wedu ei wneud, bob blwyddyn, trwy bob mis, heb angen, mae chaflin ddiddordeb ddweud wrthym",
      "out to me and says, brother we need X item for Muslim prisoners. This item for Muslims prisoners. There's sisters who are requesting hijab because their families abandoned them and they can't afford to buy a hijab. I've been inside prison cells and have seen brothers walk around with torn clothes because they've been completely ostracized from the family members.",
      "a roedd yn dod allan. Roedd eisiau rhyw fath o gefnogaeth gyda llyfrau, cymdeithas, cael ar y system gwerthfawrog ac ati, ac ato. Felly roeddem wedi'i cefnogi. Ac yna, am ychydig wythnosau nesaf, roeddwn i'n mynd allan i'r sefyllfa ac fe wnes i fyny eto ag un bag plastig. Yn amlwg, mae'n gallu cael bag plastig er mwyn gadael gan adeiladau o'r brisynol. Ond fe dweudodd hi, rhaid i mi ddod allan o'i prisyn. Mae'n dweuddio, ie. Fe dwewed, beth syddai'n digwydd? Rwyf wedi helpu chi diwrnodion yn ôl. Beth sydd wedi digwydd?\"",
      "He goes, in these winter months I have no family that would take me in because of what I've done and I was hungry. I was cold and what I did was I went up to a police officer and spat on his face so that he can take me back to prison. And he said brother Wallahi this broke my heart. He goes Wallahi if no one takes care of me",
      "so that I don't have to starve, be out in the cold and being neglected because in prison I can pray five times a day. I get my food on time and even said I can watch EastEnders The plight of Muslim prisoners in Britain is horrendous Muslims are thrown into a prison cell with an inmate who has a Nazi swastika tattooed onto his head",
      "would bet who's going to win the fight tonight. Literally, God will do that. Who will win the fact tonight? And people have died in prison. Muslims have died In prison. The Muslim population is around 17% approximately 5% of the population but 17% of prisoners are Muslims. Only in December I went into Falcom Prison and",
      "I went to a couple of brothers after the Jummah khutbah and the light in his eyes was gone. He just had given up on his life. I said, what brings you here? He goes, I did fraud. I say how long are you serving in prison for? He says, I was supposed to get suspended sentence. I ended up getting 12 months. So I tried to comfort him. And I said when are you coming out? I'm coming out in March.",
      "I said, no Aki. Because no one's going to give me a job. I had done my A levels. I was at the university place. What am I gonna do now? And I was thinking you know what? No one really reaches out to these brothers and sisters and gives them some hope beyond prison because they're Imam. You know we respect him. He is talking about forgiveness and repentance and you know for tomorrow starts today and do this and do that and get close to Allah. This is what we do.",
      "We supply prisoners with books that allow them to get through solitary confinement. Because they've told us that as they have survived solitary confinement because of the books that we've given them. So anyway, I was speaking to this brother and he said, He said, I've got no hope. I don't know what to do. I said, are you crazy? Are you crazy?! I said I know a brother who I worked with who served 20 years in prison for murder. Twenty years! But he came out sorted his life out",
      "He is a manager of homeless shelter the largest on the shelter in the country because really I say yeah You know might not be a lawyer. It might not Be a doctor some professions you might have able to do but you can't have a future Because you know come out in March getting touched with me and I'll sort it out And what I'm saying brothers and sisters, is that we need? Amongst all the projects that we do at IHRC and you can go to our website and figure out you know what we do But one area of work I'm so passionate about",
      "I'm so passionate about because I've been around brothers and sisters who have been inside the prison, outside of prison guilty or not guilty whatever it may be. Our job is to make them a better person close to Allah etc etc but please support our Prison campaign We have for month of Ramadan we give him a present pack. He has sweets, he has dust bees, prayer mats One brother said to me this is like ancient..I mean I am from Bangladesh",
      "He said, I go to when I go back to my cell. I have to defecate in a frickin bucket! In a bucket! When was the last time you've heard of someone defecating in a bucket? He said can you please give us thick prayer mats because our concrete floor is so cold That's the only thing that we can put feet on when we pray So that when we're praying it doesn't hurt our head",
      "I can go on forever. And I don't want to go for forever. Because later, I want you to spend some time with a professor here.",
      "You have to break that fear barrier. You can't let that system win, right? You have just make a statement. Just to make a Statement to yourself and other people that you're gonna send money to this. It's your right to do it Like these people they can get mail They can get money and stuff. You have do this to make it point. My zakat always goes to prison or Ramadan funds and things like this I really urge you to do this. If the very important thing you feel",
      "Mae'r addysg ddim yn rhoi cymaint o hyder i ni, yn enwedig yng Nghymru. Felly mae'n bwysicaf bod y rhan sydd yma yw cael nhw'n ymddygiad â phobl, a chael iddyn nhw feddwl am yr hyn sydd wedi digwydd yn y byd. Yn amlwg mae'r holocaust ond hefyd mae llawer iawn o genesiaid eraill hefy ac er mwyn atal genesiannau gan ddigwydd, mae angen dysgu amdanynt. Fodd bynnag mae IHRC yn cynnal gwrtaith poedraethol hir ar gyfer 11-18 blwyddyn",
      "Mae'r amgylchedd yn dod i fyny, rwy'n credu ei fod ar 26 Ffebruari ond gallwch chi ddarganfod mwy ar ein llinellau cymdeithasol. Y ffordd haws i gysylltu â ni neu at leiaf gael gwybod am yr ymateb hwn o gyffrediniaeth yw cysylltio â GMD ar ihsc.org. Un o'r prifoedd yw trwd i Bosnia felly sicr, os gwelwch y geiriau... Cynhyrchu bwyd! Rwy'i hystyried. Iawn, cael eich plant yn ymgysylltiad. Diolch.",
      "Thank you, everyone. Good question."
    ]
  },
  {
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    "text": [
      "So it's going to be written about and I'm just kind of give a summary of what the paper says. If you're curious about it, then you want to read more, you will have a chance to read",
      "tough about working with Yefim is that they're really organized and so they have a schedule for everything. And I said, I want this to come out now! Why isn't it out now? And then Ali says, I sent you the schedule two months ago. I said okay sorry about that. Okay so I am...I wasn't born Muslim. I'm a convert to Islam. I became Muslim when i was 19. You know what's weird? A lot of people become Muslim when they're 19. Interesting interesting",
      "It's... you haven't heard about this? Oh, Google it and you'll find stuff. Okay so, um, and what's uh, you know if you live in a society where everyone has the same religion, you now like let's say you live Saudi Arabia okay pretty much everybody is Muslim there. You don't really have to think that much about people who belong to other religions or why people belong to certain religions.",
      "But if you're a convert, then it's an intimate part of your life that never goes away. That you used to have another religion or no religion and then you made a choice to accept another religion. So then you have to ask yourself what is the nature of this choice? And when is this choice right?",
      "Christianity and becomes a Buddhist. And they also make that same decision, how do I evaluate is that decision a correct decision or not? And then if you me personally as a scholar is, I think ultimately proof can only come through direct experience. We can sit around talk about reason and evidence and things like that but you have debates with your spouses and reasoning evidence doesn't",
      "make a big difference. So people, you know human beings ultimately reason is based on certain conceptions of reason reasons based on sort of definitions if you change those definitions and say let's change those conceptions the argument doesn't work as well or it doesn't at all anymore so for example Imam Al Ghazali he writes in his deliverance from error that he had a massive crisis of faith when he was young man as the rector of the Nizamiya Majdrasa in Baghdad",
      "Extremely successful, but still young and had this huge crisis of faith where he actually doubted everything. He lost his faith in God How was this fixed? How is this crisis fix it wasn't like he read a really good book that explained You know why God exists no he says god cast light into my heart God cast light unto my heart So for this is just my opinion we can now doesn't mean there's lots of good evidence to believe in God There's lots have good evidence being Muslim",
      "But I think in the end, evidence is ultimately deep down has to be a blessing from God that he puts certainty in your heart. And through my life as a Muslim, whenever I feel weak or full of doubt or afraid or lazy or all the other different forces that act on us all the time to pull us away from our creator,",
      "I've had those moments of truth where you feel the Truth in your heart. Those are those moments that define for me what it means What is true in the world and that's what I go back to over and over again? And so the problem with that is That it's the ultimate type of proof, but it's also totally subjective Right. So if I say I had this experience Well then you can go read in for example Paul's Saint Paul, you know the author of the",
      "the good part of the New Testament, right? He converted to Christianity from Judaism because he had an experience like this. And what's the difference between someone having an experience of truth if they're Christian and someone having a experience of true that Islam is a true religion? The nature of this evidence you can't compare it. You can't say okay put your experience on the table and let's see which one is better shaped or something like that. No these are subjective experiences how do we judge them? Why am I talking about this? Because",
      "Because these are the kind of questions for me that always come up when I think about people's state who are not Muslim. The way that religions work socially, historically is it's like a tribe. So your tribe is good and your tribe gonna go to heaven and everyone else's tribe is bad and they're all going to hell. That's how essentially it works. And so there's this interesting...",
      "It's something we come across every day. We don't have a name for it, but I found a great name for moralistic therapeutic deism Moralistic therapeutic Dea ism. It's a very long term long title MTD Maybe that's a better way doesn't stand for anything dirty does it mtd okay at moralistic there beauty ISM? it says good people are going to go to heaven and",
      "and he wants you to be a good person, that's the purpose of religion. It's supposed to make you feel comfortable, it's supposed make you a good persona, if you're a good persoan then you can go to heaven. We come across this all the time in American life right? As long as it makes you happy, that great. Religion is just about being a good persons. How many times do we hear this on a weekly basis or monthly basis? So that's opposite of tribal notion of religion or is it maybe it's just a different definition of tribe so now the tribe isn't being religious or not",
      "being religious or not, it's being our kind of religious in America now which is a sort general bland religion which doesn't want to draw the lines of Muslim or Christian or Jew. So how do we as Muslims make sense of what religions means in its true nature? What is the true nature of religion? What's the true natural guidance? And what is the",
      "accept guidance as we understand it in our tradition this is a huge question and by the way as a lot of you probably know this is one of the questions that weighs heavily on the minds of muslims in the united states especially young muslim right who go to school and their friend you know billy or tommy or susie or jenny who are not muslim they the kid doesn't see any reason why this person's fate should be any different than their own fate and if you try and tell them well you know",
      "nice person well what's the difference i mean it seems like they just weren't born in a muslim family and of course we know this from the hadith of the prophet who tells us that all human beings are born according to god's nature that he did god gave us the fitra which is tawhid belief in islam belief in one god and then it's our families who make us christians or jewish or zoroastrian",
      "So this is a big question. I'm going to try and answer it. And I'm gonna give you three different options. It's like a menu, right? I just was in Japan. It was great. And they always give you an option like Japanese food, Western food. The western food always has tons of pork so do the Japanese food. So the point... I made me three options. I want to give you the evidence for them and I'll give you criticisms of them.",
      "I'm not advocating either one, I'm just giving you the option. Then I'll tell you how I would deal with this issue. Okay, but before that, a couple of introductory points. One, when we talk about being Muslim in Islam, there are two aspects of that. One is what's called the shari'i, iman shari', which is legal faith, external faith. That is your label as a Muslim almost like on your ID.",
      "That means you fall into the Muslim category. And if you live in a Muslim country or in, let's say, a pre-modern Muslim state, that's really important because it means that, for example, you're going to get buried in a Islam graveyard, you are going to dress a certain way, you have certain rights, you've certain obligations. Someone who is Christian, for an example can drink alcohol, they can have pigs. Muslims can't do that. By the way this still exists today in Malaysia where there is a parallel legal system. It's illegal for Muslims to drink alcohol",
      "But non-Muslims can drink alcohol. So I could be sitting with Ali in Kuala Lumpur, and I could, God forbid, get a beer, and he would get arrested for it because they just wouldn't think I'm Muslim. Anyway. So the point is that this has a real legal implication. If you're a Muslim man, you can marry a Muslim woman. If",
      "legal if you're muslim at the base of cats if you don't muslim you don' t have to pay as a cat so this has nothing to do with internal nature of someone's soul or what their faith is in the afterlife you could have someone who's got muslim on their id and it's going to be buried in a muslim graveyard and you know can marry a muslin woman all these things and inside they are satan worshiper who doesn't believe in anything and you knows he's a horrible awful person and could be going to hell for eternity",
      "a lot of times people get this thing oh uh you said christians are kufar christians or unbelievers and that's that's mean you're judging them that's intolerant but it's not intolerance in fact we don't even have to judge at all this is simply a matter of legal category they are not muslims and the word for not muslam in islamic legal history they don't say Muslimin they say non-believers",
      "So that's one way of thinking about faith. This is very important because a lot of the way we interact with people, in fact most of the ways we interact other human beings, is through these legal categories. By the way just like in America you know you can have a neighbor who's a nice guy or a neighbor was not nice guy but still you're gonna have kind of you know help them shovel their snow or something like that when it snows and maybe you can borrow something from them so the second way is faith as your actual",
      "actual internal faith your inner faith that's called ilmanul fitri your internal faith and that only god knows we can't know that we cannot see into each other's souls i can't you can't tell if i'm really deep down a muslim or not now you know we can only go by external signs so the it's very important to remember the external type of fate is the uh the one we deal with in our dealing with other people",
      "God has not forbidden you from dealing nicely and justly with those people who do not fight you in your religion or drive you from your homes. Indeed, God loves those who are just. So God wants us to deal justly and kindly with non-Muslims provided they don't fight us in our religion or try and drive us from our homes. And the Prophet says another hadith in Mu'ajamah Tabarani that Muslims have obligations for their neighbors.",
      "They have to congratulate them if something good happens, console them when something bad happens. Give them money if they need it, give them food if they needed it. Lend them the money. You have to offer them food. If they can smell your food you have to offered them food and you can't build your house up such that it blocks the wind in a nice view from them. So these are obligations you have for your neighbors regardless of whether they're Muslim or not.",
      "A second point of introduction that's important, which is that when we're talking about people who are the fate of non-Muslims after death or in the afterlife. We are only talking about Muslims or non-muslims who actually know about Islam because major principle in Islamic theology is that you are not responsible for what you had no control over and this is a principal or concept of Ahl al Fatrah",
      "You, O people of the book Our messenger has come to you To make clear our signs to you After a time of weakness in prophecy What does that mean?",
      "when the messages of earlier prophets have either gone out completely and become extinct, or they've become diluted or misconstrued to the point that they're not accurate anymore. So the general position of Muslim theologians is that if somebody either doesn't know about Islam at all",
      "by God for not being Muslim. This is extremely important because not only does it mean that, let's say an Inca guy living in 900 and was that when the Incas were? I should know this. Theoretically later. Somebody look that up for me. Ali? Okay. Yes? Okay good. There's no prophets who went to Inca land at that time",
      "in that time because there's no prophet after muhammad and lord knows what message had been sent earlier and was not preserved this person has no way to know about islam islam was still in the non-americas so uh this person is not going to be judged by god and punished for not being muslim similarly you can't it's if",
      "not leaving their housing hoarder in rural Indiana, and you only know about the world what you watch on Fox News. You are not going to become Muslim because you're gonna think that Muslims are terrorists they're horrible, they're awful, they repressive, they sexist etc., etc. They smelly dirty and there violence. Why would you ever? You never become Muslim. You will never even think about it.",
      "So these people are all what's called Ahl al-Fatra. They are people who live in a time of vitiated or weakened prophecy, and what's going to happen to them? God is going to judge them on the Day of Judgment based on standards that we do not know. God is just. He will judge them, but they're not going to be condemned or punished for not having embraced the message of Islam because there's no way they could have known about it or they didn't know about it accurately. Okay.",
      "Okay. So here, I'm going to talk from this point on in this lecture, I'll only be talking about people who have heard about Islam in a reliable way. In a reliable that's someway accurate. Okay so what are the options? Menu option item, menu option number one. Islam is the only path. This is actually the position of every Islamic traditional",
      "Islamic traditional school of theology, that Islam is the only true religion. What evidence for that? Well, for example, the Quran says whoever wants.. Whoever seeks a religion other than Islam",
      "it will not be accepted from them and they will be amongst the losers on the day of judgment. Or, religion in God's eyes is Islam. So this is pretty clear. And there's lots of other hadiths that we could get into as well but that's the main, this is the position of orthodox Muslims whether you're Sunni or Shia or Ibadi or anything, this",
      "What's the problem with this? I mean, why is this problematic for people that say Muslims living in America? It's the same thing I told you earlier which is wait a second. My sister who's not Muslim she's a really nice person and I mean she's gonna be roasted in hellfire for eternity just because she didn't make the same choice I made.",
      "It doesn't seem to be, it doesn't seems like I can condemn her as a human being just because she hasn't made the same choice that I have. Seems like this is, we all feel this or lots of us feel this in our heart when you deal with non-Muslim friends or non-muslim family. Okay, the second position is I call it moral theism. Ali, can you hand me my coffee? Thank you. Actually water would be better. Coffee's not, thanks a lot.",
      "Thanks a lot. I appreciate it. Second position, moral theism. Is that water? But I already have coffee. Okay. Thank you. No, yeah, it's good barakah for me. So second option, moral this is... You often hear this verse cited",
      "Those people who believe, and the Jews, and Christians, and Sabaeans. Those who believe in God on the last day and do good deeds they will receive their reward from God no fear need they have neither shall they grieve.",
      "There's two versions that say very similar things. And of course there are some hadiths, for example a hadith in Jami' al-Tirmidhi, thanks very much Ali now I have like a lot of choices. You can have it back thank you. So for example in Jame' al Tirmidh the Prophet says whoever says there is no God but God enters heaven, enters the garden,",
      "and enters heaven. So there's other hadiths that seem to go along the same lines, and this is of course a very comforting position because what it says is, it basically says if you believe in God and are a good person, they're going to go to heaven. Which is sort of very close to this morally therapeutic deism I talked about earlier.",
      "But there's problems with this. First of all, nobody really held this position until the 20th century. So Muslim scholars and only very few Muslim scholars, and only Muslim scholars who are really working outside of what we consider traditional Islamic theology. People who are liberation theologians like Farid Asaq from South Africa or people who are more modernists like Fazl Rahman,",
      "1988, University of Chicago professor by the way. This was the arguments they made. Other people like Rashid Ridha, the great kind of Lebanese Syrian scholar who died in 1935, he tried to make a similar argument but you can see why they're feeling the need to do this especially someone like Farida Saq who is working at that time 1980s and 90s against apartheid in South Africa and is there alongside Christians and Jews",
      "these other people and Hindus working against injustice, it wants to think about religion and God as a force for freedom not a force of division and judgment. So its understandable. What are the problems with this argument? The problem is that these verses, the ones I read in that Hadith that I cited they are conditioned on their speaking to people of the book who are being approached about Islam",
      "Okay, so there's two different situations. One is let's say you're the Prophet Muhammad and you're in Medina And there's a Jewish guy and a Jewish lady and you say let me tell you about this religion of Islam I'm gonna give you I'm going to read verse of the Quran to you. I'm explain it to you and then Your religion by the way originally came from God and I know you're a pious person You're believing person you believe in the the the religion of Moses and of Abraham",
      "you respect the Sabbath, but I'm a new prophet. I'm the last prophet in this series and I'm bringing the final version of this religion. And I'm asking you to accept it. So those verses I read and that Hadith I stated, they're all prior to this choice that the person makes. If the person embraces Islam, that's wonderful. But if they say, you know what? I don't think so. That person has literally told the Prophet of God",
      "God to his face that they don't believe him. Either he's a liar, or he's crazy, or I don't know misguided or something like that but that is the ultimate kufr. That's not Jonathan Brown I don' t believe in Islam because Jonathan Brown tried to explain it to you. This is telling the prophet of God himself that you don't belive in his religion. So these statements about other communities",
      "Jews and Christians, those who believe and do good deeds. No fear need they have, neither shall they grieve. This is premised on... This is describing their condition before they're given the choice to be Muslim or not. Okay. There's another, by the way, another interesting option, right? Which is that just because you're a Muslim doesn't mean you're not going to go to hell. I mean, so if you're",
      "serial womanizer, alcoholic homeless person murderer that you're technically Muslim. You might eventually go to heaven but you're going to get a lot of punishment for that. A lot of punishments. Of course God can forgive anybody he wants. The prophet's intercession is extremely important and all these things. But the point is just because your Muslim doesn't mean you just go into heaven and never suffer anything. Lots of Muslims will suffer in the fire",
      "fire before their crimes or sins are burnt off them well isn't this couldn't this also be true for for anonymous right isn't there that maybe maybe these these statements of these condemnations of other religions these criticisms of uh improper belief in christianity or in judaism that you see in the quran maybe this means that people are going to suffer but ultimately they will um",
      "it's taken up by of that person you always think about when you think about mercy and softness ibn taimiya right ibn taymiyyah the famous damascus scholar died in 1328 he argues that a hellfire will one day extinguish be extinguished why because god's mercy overwhelms his anger this is something you find in the quran and reliable hadiths",
      "mercy overcomes his anger in the hadith so if god's if god is absolutely merciful and that mercy is greater than his anger then by definition eventually that anger is going to be overcome by the mercy and the punishment of hellfire want so this is a division of ibn taimiya and one of his students ibn kayyam probably held",
      "really limited to these few people until the modern period when some other Muslim scholars also embraced that position. Okay, option number three. This is something you... I don't know if maybe... Has anyone ever read the Study Quran? The Study Quran is a very good HarperCollins study. It's an excellent project. I blurbed it on the back and then I discovered that Muslims are apparently",
      "who read those blurbs because the people who, a lot of people involved in this Study Quran project were what's called perennialists. They belong to school called Perennialism. I don't think that really affects the Study Quran because I think it's a great book and very useful but some Muslims criticize it because a lot the editors were Muslims who have this perennialist position which I'll explain to you right now. What Perennialisms says is that all religions",
      "celestial revelation, a revelation from God. Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, right? That they are all true. That they're all true because there's only one truth and therefore there can't be more than one truth, right, all things that go back to God in the end have to eventually go back",
      "They don't really have a lot of evidence for this from the Quran, except some verses that say all matters return unto God. But in general, this is not something that you find clearly stated in the Quran or the Hadiths anywhere and it's not something any Muslim scholar that I know of ever upheld until the modern period. Sometimes they say that Ibn Arabi had this position but I don't think that's accurate.",
      "What the perennialist position says is that the criticism of the Koran levels against Judaism or Christianity, or let's say idolatry are not criticisms of the original form of Judaism or Christianity but are criticisms of kind of corrupted and deviant forms of those religions which is the mainstream of those religion. But at the core of those religious there is truth",
      "following that original core, they are actually following the one true religion of God, Islam in a sense. Again, the problem with this is there's not really any evidence for it in the scriptures to which we look for evidence in things we say about our religion, the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet. Second, and this is something I only thought about when I was writing",
      "If you're telling me that the criticisms of the Quran levels against other religions are really only about the mainstream of those religions, not their true authentic core. Then you haven't solved the problem because my neighbor isn't a true authentic Christian perennialist he's just a guy who celebrates Christmas and goes to church every couple weeks. So you haven' t solved the problems of what is going to happen to all these non-Muslims around me because they are following the mainstream versions of these religions",
      "you yourself perennialists have critics have said the quran is condemning okay does this make sense again i thought about that i woke up really early this morning because i was in japan and i'm seriously jet lagged so i don't know if my thinking is 100 sound what do you think you think yeah he's okay okay good um",
      "approach which is Islam as the only true religion to a kind of moral theism, which is if you believe in God and do good deeds or your you'll be saved. You will be okay in the end. The problem here is that the evidence we have for this is premised on that person accepting the message of Islam. And finally the parentalist position which is it's really interesting but",
      "from those sources of evidence that we actually consider authoritative in our religion. And so if I can't find it in the Quran or the Sunnah of the Prophet in any explicit way, by what right am I going to make this claim and have this belief as a Muslim? Okay, so when I say I'm gonna give you my approach now, this isn't like I invented this. This is not Jonathan Brown came up with his approach.",
      "the tradition of Islamic scholarship, which is this. I'd say actually this is the orthodox Muslim position. So you can think about it as like the other half of that orthodox position i gave you at the in the beginning. The first part is Islam is the only true religion but now take this as the second half ofthat sentence so uh the principle of Islamic scholars is you don't judge people's fates you do not judge the fate of individuals",
      "individuals. There's a great verse of poetry, I don't actually know where it came from but I've heard it from a lot of scholars. وَلَا تَحْكَمَنَا لَعْهَدًا بِالْجَنَّةِ وَلاَ بِى النَّارِ إِذَا رَدَّ السُّنَّى Do not rule, do not cast judgment on anybody that they're going to go to heaven or hell if you want to follow the sunnah of the Prophet. The sunnah",
      "I didn't even drink the water in the end. Where he says, It is not for anybody. Nobody should judge or declare what God is going to say about his creation",
      "And it's not for anybody to say, this person is going to go to heaven and this person will go to hell. So when we say Islam is the only true religion or Christianity and Judaism are not true religions like Islam these are statements about paths you can think of a methodology or belief system but it's no statement about individuals who follow those beliefs because only God knows the fate of people",
      "the second introductory point i made which is that the external marker of christian jew muslim are markers that allow us to interact with each other in a kind of a vahery outward way what actually is in our hearts is known only to god so the you know ahmed muslim might internally be a kafir and you know anthony the christian",
      "and does tremendous good deeds, and will go to heaven. And we have no way of knowing that. All we know is their external condition that for Muslims at least has some ramifications, right? It has to do with whether you can marry the person, whether you inherit from them, bequeathed to them where they're going to be buried, things like that. Okay. So the first really important point for this second half",
      "is that you don't judge individuals, you only judge religions. This is my wife's advice. She just says, Don't get personal. Deal with issues. She's right about this. Okay. The second important point is the mercy of God. I've touched upon this a bit earlier, which is the Mercy of God is overwhelming. It encompasses all things, as the Quran says.",
      "He prescribed mercy for himself. His mercy overwhelms his anger. The Quran, every chapter of the Quran except chapter 9 as we all know begins with Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Rahim. The mercy of God is beyond our capacity to understand. And you know I'm not a super sensitive guy but not like very cuddly",
      "As I became a parent, when I became aparent, I started to understand what it is to have mercy and love for things even though they don't treat you well or listen to you or urinate on you and things like that. So when you have a child, you start to feel this sense of what it means to have",
      "more powerful than that. To the extent that people who despise God and hate God are still given blessings by him, just constantly. Their very life, the fact they're alive is a blessing that they've received and that they continue to receive as long as they're",
      "and just to hold the child, feel a child against her body again. And the prophet says to his companions, God's mercy for His creation is more than this. This is basically a taste of God's grace. A taste of mercy for his creation. So this woman's love for his child and mercy for her child is just a feeble shadowy representation of God' s mercy and love for His",
      "there's also another a wonderful hadith in son of abu daoud which talks about the prophet tells about these two jews back in the days before islam and the days of the kingdom of israel they're these two Jews one of them is a really you know he's like uh you know, he'd probably be like toxic bachelor or something like that. You know he is hard partying bad social life right? And this other Jew is really pious and he tells his sinning friend",
      "friend you know you're gonna go to hell i'm pretty sure of it there's no way god can can forgive you you're going to go to help and the story is i don't know if it's a true story or if it like meant to be a lesson that the prophet is telling so the story",
      "Because God says in this story, you have no right to put boundaries on my mercy. So remember that. I mean we condemn behavior. We condemn actions. We do not condemn people to hell.",
      "uh existence that he has said repeatedly in the quran and the sunnah is unencompassable and unlimited namely his mercy there's also and this is my my my last point it's a very interesting book edited by a guy named muhammad hassan khalil who's a professor at michigan state",
      "And in it is an essay by TJ Winter, Abul Hakim Ra. It's a very interesting essay and he has a fascinating idea I thought this was really maybe a novel contribution which is the shifa'ah of the Prophet, the intercession of the prophet so we know from very reliable hadiths that the prophet will intercede on behalf of his followers especially the people who have committed grave sins",
      "the grave sins in the muslim community and so one of the ways on the day of judgment that even a muslim can escape the punishment of the sins they've committed is to receive either just god's mercy directly or to have the prophet intercede on their behalf now inside bukhari there's a fascinating hadith where the prophet says that one of these things that this thing that distinguishes him from all",
      "their intercession is only for their community whereas his intercession",
      "he says, in his discussion of this hadith, he says it is possible that the prophet could extend his shafa'ah, his intercession to non-Muslims because they're part of humanity and in theory his shifa'ah his intercessions can go for to any person whether they are Muslim or not. So that was a very interesting kind of novel contribution to this discussion so the last point I want end on",
      "Look at the size of those that writing is very clear been working on that for a while haven't you so the Last point this is the fundamental point that Muslims. I think most of should keep in mind is As the Quran says in numerous places several places lace allah with Allah min al-abid God does not wrong any of his servants god does not run any human being and This is this is for me what I always remember in my heart whenever",
      "Whenever I meet a really nice Buddhist or a really Christian, Hindu or anything like that. I always remember God is not going to wrong this person. And while I can say I think their religion is deviant or serious flaws in it and though I can't say because they are not Muslim and I am there are some differences between us right?",
      "They can't go to Mecca. I can go to mecca just like when you go to Salt Lake City You can't into the Mormon Tabernacle if you're not mormon right um There are certain outward differences between us But cannot tell this per I cannot say and know in my heart do not know this person's fate and I that God will not wrong them in any way, and is the thing that you know",
      "the thing that, you know, for me kind of helps me make sense of this question. What is the fate of non-Muslim? Is it they will not be wronged. And whatever injustice you think there is in how we talk about claims of truth and religious truth, none of that matters when God passes judgment on people because he will pass judgment",
      "injustice and he will not wrong anybody even you know a mustard's grain worth jazakum allahu khair",
      "Dr. Brownlee talked about the category of people that didn't get to, weren't exposed to the sincere message of Islam How do we differentiate between someone who's ignorant and someone who genuinely does not know Islam or get to know that, know Islam in their life? And what are the boundaries surrounding like is there a benchmark they have to reach of going out of their way to learn about Islam",
      "manifestations of religion that are the thing we interact with. But if we're going to say, okay well I want to think about this, and that's an interesting question, what do you have, what is like due diligence? What is a due diligence you have to do to learn about Islam properly? First of all they have to hear about it in a reliable way. They have to",
      "exposition of Islam ever given by any human being but it has to be accurate right so if someone comes and says Islam is a terrorist religion that teaches you to be violent and oppressive and that's all you ever hear about Islam then you're not not only are you not going to be held accountable by God for not being Muslim but you're probably not gonna be held account why God for even not researching it further because if someone come to me and says you know hey do you want to join this Satan worship cult and I say no thanks I'm not gonna think",
      "you know let me hear your full pitch right no one's going to listen to that right there's a some modern scholars Rashid Rida in the early 20th century was the first person to propose this more recently Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi proposes as well which is that people have to hear about Islam in a way that's not just accurate but also compelling in the sense that",
      "that if I say, someone says well what's this Islam thing I just heard about? And I say well Islam is a religion founded by a guy named Mohammed in the seventh century and there's five pillars. And these pillars say ABC. That's all accurate right but the guys whoever hears this is probably not going to say you know that's interesting I want to hear more, I want learn more about this. Right it's almost like they've read it on like a medical form or something. It's completely uncompelling anyway. So Rashid Ridla and Yusuf Al-Khawaradawi proposes",
      "that in order to really be held accountable by God for not embracing Islam, it has to have been presented to you in such a way that it would be compelling to someone if they heard this. And therefore your rejection of it isn't sort of you're deciding not to go with something that's really uninteresting, but it has the manifestation of kufr which is a rejection of truth. So in order reject truth first you have to see truth know that's true and then you reject it",
      "rejected it can't just be you know I rejected about something i heard that doesn't really interest me even though its technically accurate um that's interesting proposal you know why people can kind of evaluated at whether they think that's a good argument or not but as I said it's kind of an academic discussion because it doesn't affect how we actually interact with people because still technically not Muslim and so that's how we would interact with them",
      "Second category of the question revolves around, a lot of Congress in the room, they're talking about how can we talk about salvation in terms of Da'wah to their family and close friends? How can we not look intolerant? How could we use this concept of Salvation Islam to help them love Islam and look into it?",
      "you know, soft and tolerant with my family. I never told them... It was kind of the opposite of a sort of fire-and-brimstone approach. And no one in my family ever became Muslim. Then my friend who became Muslim he was, you know... You have to say La ilaha illallah Muhammad Rasulullah. I do not want you to burn in hellfire for eternity. Right? And his parents' grandmother became Muslim and his mom became Muslim",
      "Muslim. So I don't know what to say, like maybe that's just their personality but I don t know what the right answer is if you ask me judging how do I think based on what I know about American society and people react I think my approach is better but maybe I'm totally wrong about that so I think I don' t know how to answer the question except to say that you have",
      "you think that they're going to be open to um and uh beyond that i don't know what advice i could give i wish i had you know maybe there's people in the room who are you know there was this one guy i heard about my friend told me about him once he used to he lived in new york as a bengali guy bangladeshi guy he would walk around the subways of new yorg and he would go and stick his hand into people's shirts i assume men and say i bring you the message of islam god loves you",
      "So I think it really depends on what tools you have. In this case, this guy had apparently the magic touch literally and You know, I didn't have that Third category of questions we have is revolving around our own salvation as Muslims growing up in Muslim families How can we measure it and know that we will be saved if we feel we just got lucky",
      "Again, you don't have a golden ticket to paradise. Nobody has a golden tickets paradise. If you're even if you let's say you're a Muslim who has the minimum like you believe in God deep down",
      "God deep down, okay? But you are just... You're like, I'm... Let's say Muslims, I meet these people a lot. They go to college and they're like time to cut loose. After I graduate, I'll become a good Muslim again but for the next four years, I mean, I don't know if you commit lots and lots of sins, there is no guarantee in any way that you're going to not suffer for those sins even if",
      "Even if you're Muslim, right? So You know it's like saying, you know I have to sit through a bunch of boring meetings for the next eight hours Eventually the meetings are gonna end but that doesn't stop the fact. I'm a suffer mightily for the X8 hours during these boring meetings I mean your you just because eventually Because you have a grain of faith in your heart and the the Prophet says is very clearly numerous hadiths and Sahih Bukhari inside Muslim that people who have a Grain of faith their heart will eventually enter got the garden",
      "enter the garden they will eventually uh enter paradise if you just have a green mustard seed grain worth of faith in your heart but that doesn't mean that you're not going to suffer tremendously before then so uh that's i think the way to think about it what i would say that and i'm not trying to criticize people who ask this question i think it's a it represents a very common mindset which is that we especially when you're you know let's say",
      "told you know you're a muslim these other people are not muslims and you don't necessarily know what that means um is it this isn't a tribe right this isn's a club where you're member and then everything is great for you and all the people who aren't members everything's bad for them you're still going to be judged based on your belief and your and your deeds"
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    "text": [
      "What does Muhammad mean when he says, if anyone leaves his Islamic religion, kill him? He clearly means that if anyone wants to leave Islam, he's free to go. Miracle of reinterpretation!",
      "Three they have to be fit. How do you talk to me fit into a system as I said before? They're just pieces of information and As the with the example of let's say following around the president of the United States for a month or two months You're gonna get a lot of material, and if you don't know When he's speaking about one thing versus another thing when he's thinking about something general when he says my buddy Specific when he was being sarcastic when he is joking you are going to come across come away with a lot erroneous",
      "erroneous understandings or perceptions of what he's saying, or she's saying. So hadiths are pieces of data and it's a very big mistake. The biggest mistake Muslims make is to just listen to hadith and think that that's all there is to say about a particular issue. It's almost never all there to say on a particular issues. It'a piece of data that fits into a bigger system and that's the job of Muslim scholars.",
      "job of Muslim scholars throughout history. Of course, they also calculate prayer times and do niqahs and things like that but most the job of a Muslim scholar is to try and figure out what God wants from us using this material. A great example of this is a hadith, it's a Sahih Hadith in Sahih Bukhari and other books where the Prophet says",
      "What does that mean? The Prophet says,",
      "Islam might deem right or just. So this hadith seems to say pretty clearly, and you've probably seen this cited on some Islamophobic website or on Fox News or something, it seems to the Prophet saying I'm been commanded to fight people until everybody becomes Muslim. That's basically what it says. But remember these are just pieces of data. It is Sahih Hadith.",
      "I've never seen anyone question the reliability of this hadith. But we know it, we know we can't just take it on its face. Why? Because the Quran in Surah At-Tawbah, Surah number 9 tells us that those people from among the people of the book Muslims can fight them until they become Muslim or until they agree to pay the jizya. They don't have to become Muslim and by the way",
      "Muslims by the late 600s, early 700s included everybody they met as people of the book. That includes Hindus, that includes Buddhists, that include Zoroastrians. They treated them all in this way. If Muslims conquered them, they paid jizya and they can continue to practice their religion freely. So we know this hadith has to be modified at least in a sense it doesn't apply to people of",
      "What else? We know from the Prophet's precedent, that he didn't force people of the book to convert. When the Muslims conquered the city of Khyber, with a Jewish town of KHYBER in the Hejaz, the Jewish population there was allowed to remain and practice Judaism. They just paid tax to the Muslims. The Muslims conquered",
      "They practiced their religion freely and their priests and bishops were not bothered at all. They just weren't allowed to do riba, they weren't allow to do interest but they lived under Muslim protection, they paid tax so we know from the prophet's precedent this isn't the case. And then finally, we look at other narrations of hadith for example in Sunan al-Nasa'i there is one version",
      "Umirtu Anu Qatil Al Mushrikeen Hatayi Kul La Ilaha Illallah",
      "retain their religion under Muslim rule was the polytheists of Arabia. This is very clear, it doesn't mean polytheist, it means the mushrikeen of the central Arabian peninsula. They were not allowed to retain their idolatry. They either became Muslim or they were fought. This doesn't apply to other polytheism let's say if you think that Hinduism is polytheistic because Muslims treated Hindus like people in a book",
      "from their first encounter with them in 711 when Muslims conquered Sindh. They treated them like people of the book. So it only applies to Mushrikin and Central Arabia. That's the only group that this hadith actually applies to. We know that from the Quran, we know that for most of the precedent of the Prophet, and we know about other narrations of this hadit."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Deep Dive into Faith _ Dr Jonathan Brown _ Sahil A_eHz_gf4fcsk&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748654463.opus",
    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. I welcome to today's podcast. This is a space where we explore the profound questions",
      "profound questions that begin to form in our minds as we grow. Questions about who we are, our purpose and what truly defines us. I'm your host Rahul and as a Muslim I believe these questions are deeply connected to both our spiritual journey and our intellectual growth. Today I am blessed to have two amazing guests with me who will help us explore these topics from different perspectives. First",
      "Mr Jonathan Brown, a lecturer from Dundee University whose expertise in education and philosophy. And he will add an enriching perspective to our conversation. Mr Jonathan, thank you for being with us today. Thank you. And next we have Mr Sahil Deen, an educational psychologist and a speaker whose work often revolves around the nature of identity and purpose. Mr Sahal, jazakallah khair for joining us. Thank",
      "So today we'll discuss three core questions that often arise during the teenage years. A time of immense change and reflection. These questions are like, who am I? What is my real identity or what is my purpose? So we'll approach these questions from religious, philosophical and psychological perspectives. I'll serve as your guide but most of this conversation will be driven by our distinguished guests.",
      "So, to begin with our first segment. Our first question is who am I? This question lies at the heart of our understanding of ourselves. So Mr Sarho how would you approach this question of Who Am I? Hmmmm... This is as deep as philosophy can go. Okay, Who am I?. Okay so I hope you understand the word philosophy and you know the difference between philosophy and psychology because philosophy gets towards psychology",
      "It's not the other way around. So who am I? The question of philosophy, not psychology. It's going to pay a lot of inroads into your psychology. You're going to make you behave that you're going understand the meaning of who you are. So a short answer right now so then we can begin this whole conversation. That you are a unit of a very big system. If you don't understand the big system, you won't understand who you",
      "and understand the inner voices, he has the same wishes no matter what kind of religion. He's got to take over and try and drive towards a certain goal, you know, the mutual definition of good, the neutral definition of evil, trying to be a part of that battle and win it every single time. For that, you need to get those capabilities and learn knowledge structures",
      "and seeing whether you can actually drive your self-esteem of how much knowledge or how much skill they have. And am I even being a part of that bear fight, the big fight? So who you are is just a unit of a system. Understand the system and you'll know who you're. Thank you very much. Mr Jonathan coming from your perspective, how would you approach this question of Who Am I? Yeah, I love that answer. I thought it was a lovely answer.",
      "So Rahel, the question again was who am I? Is that right? Goodness. There's so many ways we can answer that. I think for me personally and it's lovely to be able to speak as myself as well as a lecturer, I think you know we are children of God and I think that pattern that you were talking about part of that pattern, that tapestry is like taking on that likeness and participating in that. So that would be a perspective that I would have. We're also",
      "we are is like that expression of you know what is within us and then what's without us. And for me I'm doing a PhD at the moment which is like a really long essay right it's a lot of studying. And it's around well-being, what I'm investigating and one of the key things I'm finding in my research is that our wellbeing is really based on relationship and its relationship between us as subjects as individuals and then reality you could call it the world as it is and we have to find these harmonious ways",
      "ways of being right so for example if i just kept eating as much junk food as i would want that's not going to be a harmonious way of being because the way the world is made if i live that way it's going to make me ill right it's gonna put an extra weight i'm gonna have health conditions so i have to find in myself a way to have the best relationship with reality reality would be a big word you know where'd i be more comfortable saying might",
      "who are part of this pattern, this tapestry. And I think we're on a journey of trying to establish that relationship and then I suppose a big part with that identity is what is that thing we're having a relationship with? And I maybe a lot of what we'll speak about is as we move through our lives there's lots of things that are put up in front of us as this is the thing you should have a relationship",
      "big philosophical question, what is the good life? So it's a good life of life if you have a relationship with lots of money. Is the good for life we have a relationships with lots success? Is that when you get lots of good grades at school, is it when you're really popular? Does that make sense? And so we have these things where our relationship with. So I think we are people who were made for relationship. I think that who we are as a person comes about as a product of those relationships and a really important question for me is okay",
      "is okay then so what's the best thing that we can have a relationship with? That's very nice. So really oh does it pass? Sink it in. Okay cool, that's good yeah so as Muslims we also think of this question and the context or fitrah so our natural disposition",
      "You need to explain fitra. I'm not a Muslim so we're afraid of that concept. It's a natural disposition, universal disposition of every human child that was going to be born or was born. There is a common disposition that a human child is going to behave according to that element of the basic disposition of good, trying to achieve good understanding why it is",
      "you know, what bad is, when evil is why not to do or commit evil? Your natural basic disposition of the human mind. Okay. That's fitrah. And that's fitra and then what was the question with it? So how would you align with what you're saying? With fitra? Oh okay so well we've got an education psychologist here. That jargon is called morality. You're sitting on that disposition right? Yeah. And it's so common in every human being. Yes. It has to teach morality too.",
      "to any religion or creed, a culture. They all have it. Ethic emerges, yes. It's from that. To and fro, good and evil in the end going on but to naturally be repulsed by ego and to naturally get attracted towards good is the fitla. Oh so it's like a navigation thing? Yeah, yeah. Interesting. So I guess what I'm thinking of then this is a new concept",
      "this is a new concept for me but what i'm thinking of as we have an education in the the the daughter yes the literal words is that god likely uh every child is born the image of god yes that image you've got is the filter ah okay that like genesis yeah oh okay okay well actually interesting exactly matthews as well and also the quran the same word oh isn't it really yeah",
      "The image of God. Yeah, well so then I think, so here's an interesting one for you. Well, I was actually just speaking to your mum about this. We talk about having a purpose or aim in our life, right? And when we look at the word for sin in the Bible, we can have in our culture nowadays, we think of sin as a wagging finger. Like all those naughty things you shouldn't do, okay? And we just think it's a set of rules but when it was originally written,",
      "from archery and it actually was about aim so it meant to miss the mark, to aim poorly. And so I think when we think about sin like that then there's things that when we aim for them, when we aimed poorly they don't do well by us. So for example I would often joke you know what cryptocurrency is? Like Bitcoin and everything. So I joked with my wife that I could make an aim for my life being a crypto billionaire and I could take all of our money and I",
      "at in my life but there's other things that in our lives when we aim for them it pulls us together right I wonder if that's like this concept then but at my university like your mum did folk will give up her career and they'll come into a new career and make a new aim, they'll have something else they're making their goal because they think pursuing this thing is going to pull us together. And so I think that for me then is this idea of its looking at what is the best",
      "can aim at so when we're aiming for it that likeness that that likenness to god that image bearing that we have is continually and progressively coming forward you mentioned the yin yang it's actually a symbol i really like so we've got those two phases i don't know order in chaos or spirit and law but the line that goes down the middle the taoists call that the divine path of the heroic path right",
      "to be constantly sensing between what's needed here. Do I need to give like grace and flexibility? Do I have more structure rules in my life? And I think as we follow that, that takes us on this journey of self where hopefully we're becoming more like the image I think that we were set to bear. That was quite a wondery answer. I'm not sure if that answered your question. No, that's fine. Yeah. So now we are going to move onto our next segment.",
      "But it's called, what is my real purpose? So that's a question that as a Muslim I know that Allah says in the Quran, I do not create the jinn and mankind except to worship me. So Mr Sahoo how does psychology guide us in aligning our purpose with this higher calling?",
      "Understand the word prophet. Do you understand the word profit? Yeah. What is it? Messenger. No, no, no. See, break it down. What does a prophecy mean? The story of a prophet. No that's not right. A prophecy is an event in the future and you can tell right now. It's called a prophecy. Something that you can",
      "prophet yeah okay in the dictionary now you will see from the old testament okay the new testament and look around you see a list of prophets and see understand okay i'm trying to build up the very reason for purpose first so that you can understand how important this word is you can't just take your cash away okay you're 14 now come in in",
      "years ago you're 12 13 14 you need to really ground yourself into a purpose because the absolute difference between good people and bad people right now in the world has ever been is that the good people understood over purpose so there are only two kinds of human beings will find one bit to pick greater purpose and one aimlessly you know wandering around the planet living day-to-day or usually year or event",
      "and that changes the morality and everything. Sometimes they're really good, but they are not tied or anchored to a purpose so you cannot rely on their good. That's how important the word purpose is. So that's why I started with the word prophet. There are two kinds of prophets and both of them do the same thing. They prophesize in the future. Some of those prophets",
      "Almighty himself guides them literally tells them what's going to happen in the future so you open the dota you find all the prophecies of what's gonna happen okay you'll find the new testament it was through the book of revelation all about what's been happening here and see right this warring character mind the end still these prophets are talking about the problems at the end and they're just trying to solve it right now",
      "had an end yeah and they know the ending telling everybody in the end way at in time okay it's gonna happen thousands of years now if not hundreds and every prophet is trying to tell them this is a bigger problem and your purpose is to make sure that problem doesn't happen okay purpose and they try and build you know parenting models making you know knowledge go through every woman and man so",
      "not let that thing happen. There are good prophecies as well, okay? So they're trying to make sure that they do happen and this evil is about to happen. They make sure it's done. Kids are prepared. Women are prepared, girls are prepared boys are prepared now that one kind of prophets you know from Adam alayhi salam from Adam to Muhammad bin Abdul Rasulullah all these prophets did the exact same thing foretelling the future foretell everything",
      "telling everything and reverse engineering a certain message so that thing wouldn't happen or it can get delayed as much as we, you know everybody can muster up to delay that event. And there are other prophecies as well those are not guided by God but they guide by the Fitra okay? They're not sent by God, you all stand by God right? We keep because of God right",
      "or the Torah, or the Gagarin. They go to their own disposition and they try solve those problems as well. Be it Aristotle, be it Socrates, be It Hume, Descartes, be Imanuil Kant, all of those philosophers. They start pondering over what is going on and then trying come up with a solution to a problem that they're actually yelling about in their books. From a person's problem to a group's problem. From local problem to global problem.",
      "You'll find out. They're doing the exact same thing. They write in a problem statement, they try to solve it. Now there are a lot of fancy words. A lot of people don't read their books but like literally they're doing job of AA, AA prophet which is not sent by God for this very purpose. In other words when you look at these people you'll find that every human being was sent with the same purpose. Some of them are guided directly",
      "and given books. Some of them, Duna Gaya books. They got it directly through their fitrah. Okay? And these gods and prophets are the fastest, quickest, most optimal help that we can get. Okay. So this story had a start. A middle, ending in N. Okay, every book written by God or every book not written by god by those prophets, we're just named also has an end",
      "Okay, now it take up X times NASA but they're talking about an end and meteor was gonna come in And this most probably going to come in someday right? And it's gonna end so let's just go to Mars terraform planets trying you know everyone's talking about the end As soon as you use or end all of a sudden The word purpose comes to play that if there is no end there is not purpose okay, if there isn't",
      "there is no purpose. Make sure you write that down somewhere. Now, every prophet is talking about the end regardless of whether he's directly guided by God or guided by his fitrah. Hence God, right? Sorry. So, you need to see whether you're part of the problem or you're a part of it. You're part",
      "solution is and how to become a part of that solution yeah you see what i'm saying you really do oh can i can i ride on your your age to understand the depth or what i am saying so you see the tears of every prophet stand by god well how deeper they felt the pain of every human being because they could see all those human beings god not just give them visions it took",
      "journeys to see hell and heaven, to see human beings going through whatever they are gonna go through. The end. That's the day of judgment right? So that day of judgement is the end, the ultimate end. So the Torah starts with that, Bible starts with it, and the Koran starts with this. If you're not gonna stop in the end then you're never gonna understand your purpose. Because if one movie or some story is never gonna end then there is no point of having any kind of purpose. I could be good in my own definition",
      "definition i could be bad in your definition and still feel good my own definition it's called moral relativism okay whoever does not have that visioning of the end in mind as soon as you leave the day judgment out when you take out the judgment on the equation all of a sudden the definition morality is relative so you could feel good and be good in your own books or hear of",
      "get away with that because you know what both of these parties don't believe in the end so if you have an end very high resolution and understanding what's going to happen there you're gonna reverse engineer a purpose of your own time why were you born at this time what kind of problems are gonna add to the actual problem in the",
      "All of this becomes part and parcel of your actual purpose. Because from Adam to you, from Adam till the last boy is going to be born right before the day of judgment has the exact same purpose. There are no two different purposes. The ultimate purpose is the same. For you mini-my kids, Adam Islam's firstborn till Adam Islam his lastborn will have the same purpose because there is a purpose of why he came here. And he was sent here to save all humanity",
      "the ultimate end okay we call that ultimate and the calamity is hell yeah okay and people are not gonna make it our 999 to the ratio of one in every 1000. okay same thing with mandatory same thing in talmud same thingin the gospel same thing as a quran most of them are not going to make it so you got to save as many as we can to add to that ratio 1 to 1 health understand",
      "understand it yeah yeah big job yeah that's the purpose thank you very much and so mr jonathan yes how do philosophers and educators approach the concept of purpose and do you see parallels between the views and the religious perspective yes i think so and i think that was a really good answer about the ultimate question i think",
      "relativism. People are trying to decide what is the highest good? Where do we get our meaning from? Where did we get purpose from? Maybe another way to think about it is, and again your mum and I were just speaking about this, we're all looking for something to worship. And people are choosing different things that they're going to have as their highest good in their life that they think is gonna give their life purpose. So for some people that might be being popular or for some",
      "but they think this is the thing that when I devote myself to it, it's going to give me purpose in life. Do you remember earlier where we were talking about sin could be aiming at the wrong thing? If there are some of the things that we can aim at that would make our lives go poorly and they can be things that will pull us together, that could be something that's the best thing to aim at, that would be the right thing to be on the highest place. So when we aim at",
      "whether you're a philosopher or an educator, it's people trying to decide what deserves to be at the very top of the pile. What's the thing that if we organize everything... You could think about like this having a flow chart. Have you ever seen these charts you get in magazines sometimes and it says like, what kind of superhero are you? Are you like this or are you like that? And you've got these branching diagrams. Well, we've got things and we have to decide which is the most important thing.",
      "the top that cascades down and that helps us find our purpose. So I think in education, in philosophy, I'm reading a lot of philosophy right now, I am thinking about wellbeing and people are trying to decide what belongs up there. And I think at the moment what we're having in our world is people seeming to think they can just decide and then the world will fit around their ideas. Let me give you an example. There's",
      "the time where my university is and i would love to go to that bookshop okay and i'd walk around the bookshop and take pictures of all the books I was going to buy for cheaper on Amazon. Now, I can't live in a world where there's bookshops if I don't buy my books there yeah so I have to make a sacrifice I have pay for slightly more expensive books in order for there to be a book shop there",
      "we need to be thinking about what is the contribution that we need make or that we can make in order to keep the world blossoming, moving forward. So for example people might say I think that I can live this way and the world will keep working but if I say I just go to book shops but buy books cheaply on Amazon, the world won't work that way. The book shops will just stop existing so what we've kind of lost within our",
      "I think within ourself is that there is a relationship between us in the world and we can't see to the world World you're going to be this way. I can eat whatever food I want and my body will still be healthy I can do whatever I want with My money and things will so so be what will work and be fair That I can whatever we want with my body, and my will still healthy don't think that's how the world work And I think kind of fallen out of relationship with",
      "with God, with that which is higher. Here's another way to think about it. You know the environmental crisis that we have at the moment right? So there's like lots of pollution and things like that in the world. Well it's wonderful you could think because I teach science at university so you can think everything that's in the work you can kind of put into two groups. You can have natural things that you'd find if you went for a walk, natural things in the word and then you can have synthetic things and those are things that we can make as people with our brains. And it's",
      "that we can make these materials. But what we've learned from this crisis, like plastic for example, it's great that we could make plastic. We can wrap things in it, we can hold things in there, we could like make tents out of it, it was wonderful but we can't make it to any extent than we want. If we just make all the things that we want and don't pay attention to the world, we end up with pollution. That's what I literally called, pollution. It damages the environment that we're trying to live in",
      "to see this pollution that we're having is because we've fallen out of relationship with the world. And so I think in our lives at the moment, what's happening is I think we're falling out of a relationship with that which is higher God and I think our purpose in some big way is to try and have that relationship right? With God there was a story book I read a few years ago and it was based in Scotland. It was called The Dragante Series I think. And you know stories have kind of magical elements",
      "And the magical element in this was that your actions either sucked the magic that was in the world out of the world and sort of sped along there, the end of things or your actions put magic back into the world. And help sustain it and make a good place to be. And I think that's I think, that's a big answer for what our purpose is. We need to live in such a way",
      "is higher because I think when we do that, we're contributing to the world. We're helping... Goodness, how would I explain it? We're, we'll help God's work which is creating and cultivating. That's one of the things we learn about God in the book of Genesis. He's a creator and a cultivator and we're made in Him as His image so I think that's part of what we can do. So I think to answer your question, I think philosophy,",
      "to decide what goes in the highest place i think at the moment culture has decided whatever i feel inside is in the highest place but i think things like the environmental crisis show us that there needs to be a relief that there is a relationship and actually we need to be in the lower more humble position and we say okay world what are you like and i'll conform to you and i think it's our purpose",
      "So, moving on to our third and final segment. It's a question that may seem simple but there is a lot into it. This question is what is courage? Mr Sahil how would you define courage? What do you think courage is? I'm assuming that hopefully I know what courage is.",
      "So let's go deep inside the system. There is a certain sector of energy inside your brain, it makes the whole body go into this mode. So there's like this courage mode and then there's this fright mode. Now the courage mode has a lot more fright than the fright mode, that's the trick",
      "And a lot of people miss out on the fact that you know, they think that courage means no fear. Courage actually has a lot more fear. Okay. All my fear that your regular fright motor won't even have that trace of it. So first understand what courage is. Courages to understand your fear, know where it's coming from and know what is really damaging you. That's the actual courage.",
      "Now that could be fighting a guy in the street or confronting your father or mother and not doing the right thing when they're not doing it. And you have to have enough courage to confront them, or go walk up to your school principal and tell him that I don't believe in their policy. It's not for the vision of the whole system of education, right? One day you'll have to make the movements and make the change. So both of them come from the same part of the body.",
      "there's an organ for it. So you see those tentacles on the cockroach? You know what they're for? They sense danger. Obviously, the cockroaches does a lot more than just says danger but that's primarily the function of the tentacle. We have those tenticles too. Literally the same tentacles. The two tentacles inside our brain are called amygdalas. They sense",
      "as much as they can sense danger, if you understand that you're training to pay the price for confronting that danger, that toll that you want to pay, you need to pay. That's all it is called courage. Then I am going to pay that toll. Be my life. If it comes down to that, be my life because if I don't do it, the price that you'll have to pay for living with debt",
      "luggage that you know, wake up every night thinking that if I had done it, done the right thing. You feel so less of a man and human being not doing the right things. That is way more. Okay? That cancer is going to take a lot more toll. It's gonna ruin not just your life but your dependents, your friends and family because",
      "Because you're going to crack your mind. It's going to break your personality and, you know, lose your confidence in life and become a follower of any and every given system. You're not going to be able to stand tall in front of yourself. And whoever cannot stand tall from the mirror, he ruins everybody's esteem especially his kids'. So at any given chance think about it. The first chance you get when you move out this room",
      "of doing the right thing, you can do the math on the price and you make yourself able to pay that price. That capability to become able to play that price has courage. And trust me a lot of times it's going to ask as your literal life as the price. Like literally. So if you're willing to pay their price",
      "pay their price most of the times that's not gonna be the price you're going to do a lot better than most of human beings because they don't train themselves to pay that price so be saving somebody's life or somebody's reputation, somebody's property or holding up the law somewhere stopping",
      "that math, you know what's the price I'm willing to pay. And the more price you're willing to paid, the courageous you are, the more courageous you were. So it's by the end of day whoever has done the math better and has prepared himself to be at the ultimate price is a guy who can be the most courageous. Everyone's gonna get under him. It is such an attractive trait in human beings that we all think about it 14 year old men who are everyone",
      "Everyone needs God to put this demand of courage inside everybody. So as human beings, we all need the God atop to be the most courageous. Actually, most of the time you find out that most of people who are not on top or only in the bottom or under a guy because of the fact they don't have enough courage. He followed through on his morals and decisions, they couldn't.",
      "And we all need, we all lead our leaders to be able to pay the price given any chance they're ever going to get. If they are going to stop or hesitate for even a second, we strip them of their leadership. That is such a crystal clear litmus test of a human being whether he's developed or not as leader and you need to be a leader",
      "as a man walking on the street, you need to be in a position to put your life at stake for any and every human being. In any and ever situation where anything is going to be at stake, you're the first man on the ball. First man! So there are gonna be a lot of people who will be thinking about it, they've done the maths but they'll hesitate or second that one guy's",
      "Be the first drop of the rain. And if everybody follows, it's not going to amount to the courage of that one God who was the first child of the ring. Okay? So you need me to be courageous. If your little sister is in danger and you don't need me just keep scaring, start calling the police, you know whatever. You need me jump. That's so deep. It's so real. You'll need me",
      "to save her from the bus. Okay? Or any kind of trouble, even though I'm not related to you. You need every human being to save your sister and your little ones, right? The courage is a natural demand. It's not luxury. You're not a human being if you don't have courage. But most of the people will never have it because they do the math wrong. They try and save themselves at the price of everybody else's. Like literally they can let people die in front of them and save their one life and thousands of lives and they won't do anything",
      "they won't do anything. See the kind of math human beings do? See how powerful this selfishness is? Understand how powerful that is. No, no, understand it. Think of your sister. Imagine her being in trouble. Your sister is six, seven? Think about it. I mean, there's no doubt that you love her, right? Now think of her being",
      "sacrifices for her. Yeah? Yeah. So weird, isn't it? People who are not even related by blood they have to give up their lives or people strangers total strangers jump to save somebody even though they don't know how soon but they just can't see the other person grow. You know what I'm saying? How come we absolutely love",
      "and their sacrifice from random strangers. How come? Think about it, okay? Spend the rest of your life thinking about it that you demand total strangers to jump in the water, the deep side of the pool to save your sister. Okay? That is the bond between all human beings.",
      "even for animals, you know that right? Even for animals they're supposed to do that. A human being is a way higher commodity so understand what courage is and why courage is. And who is courageous? These are the three things. Oh wow! I know, it's like the ultimate price that we all have gallows",
      "we have gals in our hands you know passing wallets about total strangers not even being human beings disqualified by us human beings you didn't jump for my sister or anybody else's kid why didn't you jump you know this is so natural it's built into every little cell of my body and yours wow that's great so",
      "Mr Jonathan, how would you define courage? Yeah well I love that idea about sacrifice. It's interesting, I've been thinking about where in culture we're apprenticed to sacrifice like where do we learn to see the small things that we can do there's an idea that practice makes perfect right what we often say that practice",
      "things that we know about neuroscience which is like the science of our brains, is that the things that practice the more we practice them. You could think about little pathways getting made in our brain and those becomes more established and more firm so what that means is the things we practice are the things you become right? And so I think for us a call to courage is a call",
      "be able to sacrifice and do something heroic like rescue your sister but you know one of the places i think that comes from is small sacrifices daily it's like building a muscle so let's give you an example for my family okay i would say this to my one of my sons all the time who remain nameless but he knows which one he is okay when he furnishes his bit of toast and he leaves his plate on the table and he doesn't go and put it in the dishwasher do",
      "waiting for someone else to sacrifice their time to clean the dish see what I mean and I say my son if you want to be able to be courageous to offer big sacrifices later you actually need to value the small things that you can do now so be a person that looks for the small difference that you",
      "of the pattern that we're part of is that were cultivators and creators that were made to care for it into tains and to look after so that things grow and flourish i was out for a walk the other day and i was praying uh and i'm just praying about this and that different thing so they walked past some rubbish on my street and i saw it and i thought i don't want to touch that and i kept walking walking and i felt god see to me if you won't pick up and make it better who will pick it up and",
      "And you know, I was 10 meters away before I eventually thought I'm going to turn around and pick that up. But at that point there was someone walking behind me and now I thought this person is going to think I'm weird because I walked 10 meters past the crisp packet that clearly wasn't mine and then walked back and picked it up.",
      "split it into two parts, response ability. Our ability to choose our response and that's something we all have an ability to chose our response so the other place I think courage comes from is thinking. So my son when I say to him buddy you're just giving this job to someone else you could pay the price and get this job done why are you not doing it? It's often because he's not thinking and that part of what we need",
      "cultivate courage is we need to have habits in our lives where we think about the kind of people that we want to be. So one of them is some interesting studies about people live up to their values when they remember them. So you've got to think, why in different faith traditions do we have things that we wear or look at or do every day? It's like reminding of herself who I want to",
      "life is that she reminds me of who I want to be because actually she's got she's very good at being the same person so we're talking about courage there's another important word we can talk about in this integrity right and integrity comes from well you know for in high school maths we've got whole numbers they're called integers and then we've what fractional numbers on the decimal numbers and those are numbers that have been broken into parts so you've",
      "into parts. And integrity comes from that, it's when it's a whole thing so it's you as a person are one thing in your life. So whether you're by yourself and you see a bit of rubbish and think I'm going to pick that up or when you're with other people and maybe feel like you should, you do the right thing, you pay the cost and I think that's like training where you learn to be courageous, where you develop the muscles to be",
      "what is it that you've practiced so much, that you're ready to do automatically. And I used to say to some of my primary five girls, they would all start falling out with each other in primary five and six. And i would tell them about practice how if you practice your Spanish you would get good at Spanish and if you practise your piano you'd get good a piano. And then see if you practised saying horrible things to each other on the playground and giving each other horrible looks, the thing's that you really get good",
      "So you need to think about what we're practicing. So I think part of courage is being prepared to do the small things because the small thing get you ready to do big things. I think it's about remembering and having things in your life, so it's not just like social media or TikTok or whatever you are looking at but you're looking at these things that remind you this call to be the kind of person that you want to be and it's all about responsibility. It's remembering that you have the ability",
      "response and I think when you bundle those three things together it creates like a practice that helps you grow in courage like a Muslim. That's great. So, that was our last segment so that was a very profound conversation You know what he just said? It's mandatory thing in Islam right? Yeah. You're walking down the street the Prophet says instead the pathway has rights upon you to clean it.",
      "It's like a man, if you're not doing it, you'll be punished for letting go of the responsibility in making somebody else pick your slack. Because there are no coincidences in Islam. If you saw something and you were given an opportunity to rise yourself up in character, right? This is an opportunity. It's not any random haphazard event that just happened. So cleaning Scotland from wherever you go,",
      "That's the job of a Muslim. You need to understand, the one symbol of Prophet that everybody knew him for, whenever he passed, the place got cleaner. The place got better. It's not some asan you're doing. It is part and parcel of why you are sent on this planet. You were sent on a dirty planet to clean it.",
      "to make it better. If you pass through that and it becomes worse than what it was, you are the problem then. And if it doesn't get better than what you were, then you're a way bigger problem because you let people justify it through a pattern of practice which he said. Okay? Because his children are subconsciously going to do whatever they see him doing consciously. So your people who are going to follow you are naturally going to justify that, you know what?",
      "you know what there is reason not to pick up the this is like or somebody else yeah and you can be that change in your school that's the incredible do you know if i can say one last thing there's a video and um it's do you notice you know this the music another musical the movie the greatest showman have you seen that it's got huge admin in it right well there's uh there's",
      "that they need to do, to get the money to make the movie. So we've been given a little bit of money to sort of come up with songs and to come up the story but they're going to have this one performance where the people who are gonna write the check are going to decide do we think this is good or do we it's not? So there's a lot that's riding on this one performace. It needs to be really good okay? And there's lady and she's the main singer and she speaking to the camera",
      "She's never done anything like this before. And she keeps getting this invitation, you know, come out from behind your music stand and just really sing. Just really go into it, okay? Now, I watch this a couple of times probably every month and it would stir me and I'd always think why does it stir me so much? And eventually I realised, okay, because what happens is she starts singing. She's very nervous, very nervous. You know what a backing singer is? It's someone in the background. There's one guy",
      "and he has one sentence that he sings by himself. Do you know what he does? While she's singing, he gets his feet up on the chair and when it's his turn to sing his one sentence, he stands up and he sings it with all he's got. And it's like you feel something ignited. And this one guy had one tiny sentence to do but I think that whole movie got made because of that guy.",
      "that guy because when he stood up and did his one small thing to the best of his ability inspired everybody else and everybody else did their best. And so I think when you're in your school or in your house or out and about in your life, we should look down on these small things that we can do because like you're saying, you're slowly making the world better and other people see that and thank goodness. I would like to be a kind of person who makes things better. I like",
      "And I think it's a wonderful, a wonderful thing to offer. That's great. Think about it. You in school, think about people around you in school. Think of adding their colors around you and they're going through you to people's bodies and you're sinking them into your colors. Think",
      "a strong enough effect on people. Right now, there's some colors coming out for you and going inside me the way you look at me, the way your inner. Imagine if you're doing something, look at the intensity man, experience the intensity of the flavor. So if you do something, you pick it up or clean it up in school yard. All of a sudden everyone is cool becomes a better human being because that's called a proof of concept. You not just seeding their concept in,",
      "making them do it and they'll be doing it first, they'll being doing in hiding privacy. And then they start to muster up the courage to do in public. You know you just didn't for them. Okay? So you need to break the shyness of people doing the right thing. Yeah. And somebody who's the first man who does it breaks the shams all of a sudden people want to say you know that's the least we have to do now. The standards go off. All right so if you're not the first",
      "much damage that you stop them for becoming the first man of the wall as well. Okay? Because then we have one, you give him one more excuse not to do good. So it's a double-edged sword. If you're not gonna do good, you actually do bad. Okay so take initiative make sure you are at initiative. Make sure you ARE the first drafter and make sure YOU'RE the first to draw the rein. If",
      "timid and you needed him to show courage. Do not blame. If you're not the first to draw the rein every single time, you have no right to blame anyone else for not doing the right thing. Okay? It's not just an honor. It's a basic need. Awesome. I'm going to meet you next. Maybe never. So I'm trying to do whatever I can now. And because of you, I'm telling you, every 14-year-old",
      "is replicating this thought process. Whoever's going to watch this video, it is that beautiful. They're all single organism around the planet. Whatever you make starts, you know, it's like a guitar string. You pluck here, notes are playing there. Okay? Yeah. So I want to thank both of you for joining us today and giving us sensational answers",
      "to these questions. So I hope these answers will be a starting point for people to create their own journeys and, you know, carry on. They're already in the journey, paving the journey. Paving it, you knows, grounding themselves stronger. Okay? Making sure they understand that whatever they do in Skawon, I feel the effect directly every day in Pakistan. Now, literally,",
      "No, literally. That's how it works. I've got two more questions to ask the Wathius. So first, what are some practical ways that teens can build resilience and discover their purpose? So Mr Sahu could you answer that please from your perspective? Purpose and... Okay listen. Purpose",
      "Purpose, if you do not have the purpose or a strong enough purpose it is never gonna let you build resilience. Resilience is anchored into some sort of an objective that you wanna achieve and you can get some resilience because of your force of habit or the kind of culture you're coming from but it is not going to come to a level where",
      "come to the best of yourself. So every single cell has a certain potential, all these cells combined for a certain objective. Okay? So in a man's journey and human life cycle you need to have a very strong anchor. And let's just say if you were training for this Scottish marathon, if there is such a thing okay, you will have to work out for a",
      "You go through a lot of trouble from zero to getting to a good marathon runner. Focus on what I'm saying, okay? So you have to spend a couple of hours a day and you see a lot people doing it four hours a week like maybe I want to come in the top ten or make the first draft 5% or whatever but then all of sudden news breaks out that you know what this is the Olympics that you're supposed to be trained for. All of a sudden",
      "objective the purpose changes and the number of hours from 2 becomes 24 you have diet routine changes whatever even casually eat but now economic a single mistake how you have to look at every single type of protein going into you because they'll be testing you for it in all standards change okay so your number of ours will become them little weeks number once before the Olympics if you are bigger",
      "you into a higher level of resilience. And if you do not have a big enough purpose, your body is designed against resilience. Every human being would rather be a bomb. It is our purposes that are driving us out of the home and then out of our homes to do whatever we can to get enough back home so that we can deliver. So if you have a bigger purpose let's just say take over the world",
      "the world take over not just the road understand go up to the universe and make people understand what's going on in the you know in the universe all of a sudden your demands or resilience are through the roof so if you do not take up your school right now you do",
      "You know, you gotta top every subject. Ace every subject in school. I have capped your resilience. Okay? But if I tell you that you are inventing new things in that book of physics, you got to realize another equation of mathematics. That school, that country, that planet all of a sudden you've surpassed it but you gotta work a million times harder now.",
      "and better things, meet different kind of teachers. You gotta go with the Nobel winners. You got to go meet the Fields Medal's winners. So understand how do I get come up in a new question right? So all of a sudden you're gonna have the same kind of toll to pay, same kind toll body level or mind level but you'll have a totally different standard to actually aim for. And people within your realm will not even understand",
      "much. So the purpose is anchoring, the level of resilience, the demand for resilience, all this stuff. If you don't have a purpose... I don't know who came up with this question but somehow ironically they're coupled purpose and resilience most of the time. I have to use the word purpose when I'm asking how to build resilience in a child because if there's no purpose, there is no resilience. Human body is designed against it. We have",
      "literally don't want to work. The natural need of a human being is to not work. Okay, it's good for us but we're not designed for it. We came from heaven directly. In heaven, it is not heaven if you have to work, right? The very definition of heaven is that I didn't have to do anything. So since we are the sons of Adam, sons of Allah, we are from a planet or system of planets where we cannot",
      "we cannot work that progeny is against the resilience this either test we better be humble and start working every single day in every single angle to earn a dialogue where we not have to work for a single day okay this is the whole the whole loop so anti-up buddy their work okay yeah",
      "How would you answer that question? Which was about purpose and resilience. Yeah. Good, well I think that was a very comprehensive answer so I'm going to try and take it from a different tag. So I think for purpose sometimes when I'm working with children in schools when they're thinking of purpose they're",
      "And I think for a lot of children, that can be a really hard question because you don't know yet. Because you're still a child. I used to think it was like being asked to decide the haircut I was going to have for the rest of my life when I was 14. It's a terrible thought. Probably would have had a haircut, would regret it, right? So I think in terms of purpose, instead of thinking of profession, I would think of person. So don't think about what the profession you want to have. Think about the person you want",
      "many jobs. So for example, can you make a purpose for yourself that you won't walk past later on the street? And just practice setting a target for yourself, a purpose of yourself and achieving it. For example, Can you set a purpose to yourself that will always wipe down the table after dinner or that you'll always empty the dishwasher when you know in the dishwasher door opens because the dishwashers finished washing the dishes right? And my boys sometimes we'll walk past",
      "so it closes again as if they haven't seen it. So, they can set a small purpose for themselves. I'm going to make it my purpose that if I notice that this washer is finished cleaning, I'm gonna empty and put away because you know what then happens? You get better at aiming at things. You get bigger making a purpose and then achieving it.",
      "contribute to the world and then practice setting for yourself little goals and achieving them. That's a great way to grow your character in terms of resilience, there's a lot you can say about that. So some really practical things first I think for young people it's important that they know that they're not their thoughts so thoughts are just ideas that are happening in their head right? And so i think a way that we can help our resilience on a very practical level is that",
      "Okay, so here's an example. Let's imagine this is me. In fact I need somebody to get your phone. So this is my students at university and they have to go into schools and they've got to give lessons okay? And sometimes the lessons don't go very well. So my students have a thought, your phones the thought, and the thought is oh my goodness that went terribly maybe you'll never make it as a teacher. Now if they're looking out from the thought if they are just accepting the thoughts true if they just look at the thought",
      "feel really tired. They're probably going to feel really low. They'll probably not going to very excited or motivated. Their brains will literally get dumber. It won't be very creative, they want to think of ideas of making the lesson better so if they look from the thought chances are they're gonna get worse as a teacher but here's what they can do instead of looking from the though they can look at the thought you can just look at this and the thought is oh my goodness that didn't go really well maybe I won't",
      "do I believe this thought? And they might think, well no. Because I've seen my teacher and she did a few bad lessons and actually I can tell you what went wrong and I could fix it tomorrow. Do you see? So sometimes a really practical thing that we can do to help our resilience on a practical level instead of looking from the thought learn to notice oh my goodness I'm just thinking the thought. So you can look at the thought what do I think about this thought is this thought helpful is it true is it accurate so that's a really that's",
      "resilience. I think another thing about resilience is that it's interesting, I have a slightly different perspective and actually in some ways there's a concept that's come that's beyond resilience now and it's called anti-fragility right? So this is an interesting concept so if I broke my arm and I had a stookey on you know like a big plaster when it first came on it would fit my arm right but after six weeks",
      "just Stookie go from like fitting tight around my bicep to then not fitting after six weeks, do you know? You get old. Well, no, not in six weeks but what happens is called atrophy. What happens is my biceps that I work out now so it's big and strong for six weeks it's not used and so it literally wastes away. It wastes okay? So we have got systems in our body that aren't resilient because resilient just means like it can endure damage. So for example your case,",
      "Your phone is fragile. If I dropped your phone, it would break. It's fragile. You put a plastic case on it. The plastic case is resilient. That means it... I won't do it hard. That can stand up against bad treatment. But does your phone benefit from the bad treatment? Does it get better in any way because it gets bumped and bashed? No. But listen, my arms, my muscles, when I work them, they don't just endure the challenge. They actually benefit from them. They grow. My brain.",
      "My brain, if I work it hard my brain actually benefits from that and it grows. My bones get denser and thicker, my cardiovascular system even my immune system so my body is not actually resilient it's actually anti-fragile. My body as a person benefits from appropriate challenge. So this is something to think about when we're talking about resilience is actually we are strong right there's",
      "And sometimes we think, I don't want to do this. I can't do this but when we find ourselves engaging and doing it, we develop muscles and abilities we didn't know we had. So that's one thing and the other thing is resilience sometimes can be an unhelpful idea because there's some things that we shouldn't endure. There's some",
      "just to be resilient and hunker down and endure that. Sometimes you need to just say, that's not right. That's not okay. I shouldn't have to endure this. It should be challenged. So I think in terms of purpose then to kind of pull that together, there was a great answer about the big purpose. I think on a really small level, sometimes for children of your age or young people of your edge, purpose can go to profession. That can be a difficult question. So instead of thinking profession, think person",
      "micro purposes because then you get better at setting and achieving purposes. And in terms of resilience, I've got those two ideas for you. The first is thoughts are just ideas that are happening in your head so instead of looking from the thought look at the thought and then remember that actually resilience is something we were made for, we benefit from all the systems in our body benefit from appropriate challenge but some challenges are not appropriate and sometimes you're actually need to say",
      "this or be resilient in this something that you can say that's not okay. That's great. Sorry for banging your spoon. It's free. So our next question is what are some of the biggest challenges facing Gen Z and how can we overcome them? So Mr Sal would you like to give your answer for that? Hmm Gen Z",
      "You know what Gen Z is? Yeah. What's a Gen Z? Like someone who was born in 2010 or 19. What does that mean? I was doing it. So... See, every hundred years there is an opportunity. Every hundred years. And I'll tell you why it took 100 years. Because of every lifespan of human beings that was 78, 80. Okay.",
      "Okay, give and take. Every hundred years there's a single generation that's going to achieve a certain age they're gonna have their career at their epitome. And like right now the 60 year olds right now they are the people who are actually calling the shots in every country, every business you know so on and so forth social systems run by these old folks. So they were teenagers some",
      "some time, right? In time. In 1940s and 50s and 60s. These are the people who came...who really coming about. Whatever the world is going through is either being controlled by them or whatever's happening is done by them. So Gen Z right now is going to be effective in let's just say 2050. They'll be at the peak of their whatever power",
      "power being possibly cheap because old folks right now, they've died out. And Gen Z's generation prior to them will be handing over the world to them. You see that point in time now? Yeah. But what I want to say right now imagine the planet Earth in the hand of Gen Z, the 60 year old Gen Z. They were 16 sometime, right? Yes. So when you say what are the problems that Gen Z is taking on right now",
      "You need to understand that they do not know what's gonna happen in 2060. The unpredictability of this planet and the opportunity, and the threat or in other words, they're not prophesizing the future in a way that is going to enable them to develop right now. So much so that they've actually made it a",
      "and honor, it's like honor among teens right? That if they can make it fast and quick and find the finest shortcut, it'll be recognized as some sort of an achievement. Even though the one thing that will never be able to stop is time. And there are going to be 60 in sometime. And you need to understand what is that issue I'm actually trying to address.",
      "address so if you are a bum right now you're lazy you're not accustomed to books which Gen Z cannot because you're too kind of so used to YouTube you do not open the books usually is this shorter shortcut giving me making you use two shortcuts to get knowledge and knowledge is the one thing you cannot expedite there's no crash course for wisdom in what wisdom is yeah what it was doing know",
      "is okay what is wisdom knowledge no it's not knowledge see knowledge can lead to intelligence and i can be intelligent and not avoid at the same time a guy can be intelligence and not wise but i cannot be why they're not intelligent you see how big wisdom is just a big asset and wisdom can only be achieved if you grant do the grunt work yourself",
      "You understand me? And YouTube is stopping you from great works. To read every page and flip, read the book by page, page by page go through teachers, understand to experience do the work yourself okay. You need to understand that. YouTube it might give you higher intelligence in a field but it'll make you uh it'll not let you be wise in the things around their field",
      "field. So Gen Z probably, God forbid, will be the dumbest generation. Dumbest because that's the opposite of wise, right? They'll be the most inept people to run countries, run businesses, run societies and run the bigger systems which connect everybody together. Okay?",
      "So you need to understand, right now we are going to pass the baton and you're gonna throw it away because you're going to have to watch that Netflix series. And I'll be like yeah gave you a Baton of the Planet man! And you'd be like, yeah yeah yeah just took about hours man don't worry the mussel is still burning don't work. It's not about how much you know you can do with the batons. The baton is for okay?",
      "then something, the whole world is dependent on your performance. Be like yeah you know what? I come first my 10 little players of dopamine come first. I gotta satisfy and I'm gonna do it my way and I need a shortcut and you are going to come up with a shortcut of getting that baton from this point to that point but that's the exact opposite of why we came up with the baton. It has to go to everybody. Everyone's got",
      "see what the whole game is. And right now, Gen Z's going through QuickBooks and crypto. It's going to quick accesses, hence an audiobooks, hence you know... You know what dopamine is? No really. Yeah, that's... You gotta read it up okay. So the dilated dopamine receptors are making you more hungry for attention or hungry for",
      "more hungry for recognition, more entitlements. Hence making you arrogant. Hence makes you lazy. Hence make you selfish. The more dopamine you require the more selfish you become. So you need your entitlement. You need a mister in caps written by your name. Okay? Yeah. Uh-huh. You get that? Yeah! So... The more I'm gonna give you knowledge the less you would want it.",
      "want it that's dopamine yeah okay that's the curse of dopamine otherwise the natural cycle is the more you give me knowledge the more thirsty i should become but dopamine does the exact opposite okay it gets you satisfied too soon okay so that's what gen z boys your age we're gonna go through",
      "No, no. I mean it. You got to go old school. You've got to read books in 20 years from now. There'll come a time. I promise you this right now. Walla walla. That there'll be two boys competing for the same sort of position. One is going to come through the books. One of them are going to have a chance and help to compete with that kind of muscle, the mind because he'll be going through the book. He'll have met enough teachers. He would have put enough downtime",
      "put enough downtime on the street, at the work, on the cubicles, inside environments. You've been looking all those videos and documentaries. Like I know everything about it. And yeah you might know everything but you do not know how any of this actually comes together. Okay? And that's where you will lose. Every YouTuber is gonna lose with every book reader. Any given fight!",
      "Okay? Any given fight. And every book reader is going to lose it. Everyone who's actually done it on his own in any given fight Imagine that So from people who used to do it became just people who read about it and then now people who watch about it Okay, but you know how he said it's a shortcut YouTube's a short cut for people who don't read books But see what see if they try we want the tried to read books",
      "understand as well as YouTube. What's the difference between YouTube giving you knowledge? Like, what if YouTube explains it better than the books? Okay. Have you ever seen a movie which was made on a book? Yeah. Give me a name. Wonder. I wouldn't know that. Give my name out loud. Harry Potter? Yeah! Have you seen Harry Potter? No. You haven't seen Harry potter in movies? No. Whoa okay. Oh okay. It's not everything.",
      "Okay, well okay. Let me try and... Lord of the Rings. Lord of The Rings, yes! Have you seen a movie? What kind of movies have you been watching man? Okay now listen. If you read Harry Potter and you see this movie, you would want to kill the director. Okay? That's what YouTube was doing to actual knowledge. Once you read the book and then you see a movie. Obviously there are reasons why they can't put everything in the movie right because it's gonna be a long movie, no one is going to watch it",
      "watch it and you know they just try to get the best out of it. But they lose every single thing which is what the book is standing on, what the writer was thinking okay? Of course they call in the writer and they make a movie and the writers are like that's the best you can do with the kind of bucks that you have so you need to understand if you read a book and you will understand that if you eat a book",
      "So, don't be a YouTuber. Be a reader. Okay? Every invention that you're using in your home right now was invented by book readers. The quality of science has gone down. Quality of literature has gone up. It's gone down because people have stopped doing it. Okay. I'm trying to come up with shortcuts now. Every single thing",
      "is going down because we have given up on that effort. Okay? That's what Gen Z is, you know, aiming for. Least effort, most output. Okay. Oh. Yeah. It's not good to find shortcuts. It' s not good. Okay and certainly not an honor. Okay so",
      "So how would you answer that question? Yeah, I like the answer. So what do I think is the main challenge that Gen Z faced? Okay, I think there's two. Okay, and I think we're going to talk about relationship and we're gonna talk about sacrifice. So do you know what dialogue is? Yeah. It's got two people talking. What's a monologue from one person's talking?",
      "instead of dialogue they monologue so instead I've been engaged in a conversation with something else they're just speaking to themselves so let me give you an example and a lot of this comes to what do they think is true or where are they getting truth from okay now there was a time when I did a lot weightlifting and it was quite big okay not that time to support all those muscles I had eat a lot food, a ridiculous amount of food. You need",
      "food than that. Okay? Now here's the crazy thing, even when I was eating this ridiculous amount of food do you know what communication I would still get from myself to myself? I'm hungry. Now later on I was like getting into running and I was trimming down and I",
      "fitness plan that said I only need to eat this much food and this is all I need to have optimum performance. And I would get this communication here, this good advice, and then I would communicate from myself to myself was I wanted to eat more. And it made me think how reliable",
      "that I get from myself to myself. That's just monologuing, that's just me speaking to myself, I think Jay and Zee one of the problems they have is they get communication from themselves to themselves and instead of looking at that and thinking what is it about this? What is maybe some good advice? What are some people I could speak to? What was wisdom that I could receive as they take this information that they get from themselves whether those are feelings or thoughts or ideas",
      "I think they can get themselves in all sort of bother about that we need to be careful sometimes about the communication that we get from ourselves to ourselves now alongside that then comes this idea of sacrifice have you seen did you watch Netflix yeah do like any of the sports documentaries depends on which one I love them and as it doesn't depend on the sport I just love all the sports ones so there's one that's a golf one called Phil Swain have you see that so I don't like golf but there's a",
      "competition which lasts three days and you edit it down to seven minutes that's the best seven minutes of TV you can watch I was loving it now let's imagine after watching this I decide I'm gonna be a golf player and so I say to you I've decided I'm going to sacrifice to become a golf play I want to do a golf professional you're like wow that's incredible what we decided to do and I said well I'm taking it seriously but I do five hours every evening",
      "what is it you're planning to do for five hours? I'm going to eat chips. I'm gonna watch my favorite golf competitions on the TV and then I'm gona get better.\" Now, you're smiling because you're thinking that's not gonna work, right? That's not the sacrifice that's required. That's where your noticing there's a sacrifice that would be required for you to become a great golf player and it's not one that you're offering. But I would say to you,",
      "how I want the world to work. I want it so that I'm going to eat food and watch my favourite golf programs on YouTube, and for me to come better.\" And so I think the two problems that JNZ are wrestling with or two problems not the two problem but two problems they're wrestling with is they're confused around the communication they get from themselves to themselves and they end up just speaking to that instead of dialoguing and with wisdom,",
      "one problem and i think another problem is they're not prepared to offer the appropriate sacrifice because to offer their appropriate sacrifice requires humility all appropriate sacrifices offered in humility because it's not saying this is a sacrifice that I want to give sitting on the sofa eating chips watching golf but it's the one that's required and I'm prepared to yield to kneel and to offer and so I think there's these two things are getting",
      "of my voice and my feelings and my insight and the place that that has. And then actually, the ability to participate in a functional way with the world where they offer the kind of sacrifices it does make what moves them forward and makes the world better. So I think those would be the two things that I think J&Z could get help with. We do get insight from within ourselves. We have a voice within us that can speak truth but we also just have a lot of garbage in there.",
      "And I think we need to get better at offering appropriate sacrifice, but that requires humility. Thank you very much. You too, thank you. Okay, so to our listeners, just remember that these questions are not just intellectual exercises. They are invitations to grow, seek and connect. So thank you for joining us and I'll see you next time. As-salamu alaykum",
      "Assalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuhu. Waalaikumsalam."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dissecting Apologetics _ Jonathan AC Brown on Wome_X-34BR-_qjw&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748690442.opus",
    "text": [
      "Hello ladies and gentlemen, my name is Abbas Atala Eddin. Today's topic is important, and it's important because it hasn't been discussed enough in my opinion, at least not with any definitive accuracy. And it's especially important given how violence against women is being increasingly reported, which is a good thing. The reporting is increasing, but",
      "But it's also occurring a lot. It's bringing attention to the fact that it's occurring every single day and it's gotten to a point where I'm not sure if you've heard, there's been a very graphic video going around the internet lately about violence, well not violence, the murder of a 17-year-old woman in Iran. And I won't talk too much about that right now but I just want to emphasize",
      "seriousness of it. And with that comes a trigger warning, I suppose. I'm not going to show anything violent or graphic on screen but it is important to keep in mind that some of these issues might distress you especially if you're a woman who has had some experience with this or not so just wanted to make that clear. So a few days ago I had a live stream about the verse 434",
      "and the topic of the stream was correct me so I posed my interpretation which isn't really mine but the majority interpretation of that verse and I wanted people to come on the live stream and tell me why they think differently and um I had a back and forth with a few people",
      "I have heard about this man before. If you don't know, he's a convert to Islam who has some sort of degree in Islamic studies and he's been preaching Islam for a while now. And i heard his name a lot and people keep saying you should listen to what he has to say about slavery or about violence against women and things like that. And I wanted to give it a fair shot so after the last stream I actually listened",
      "Immediately. It was a seven minute video and that's the one I'm going to begin with today. And just sitting through that video, I was scratching my head at how I was supposed to find answers there. Okay so, I'm gonna tell you how this stream is going to be structured today. I'm gong to start with an introduction with some clarifications and disclaimers about what this is and why I am doing this. I am going to pose one real world issue not the murder that I was talking about earlier",
      "earlier, but an even wider scale issue. I'm going to show you the videos and the supporting or negating hadiths as I talk about the videos at the end. I am gonna show you some more hadith that are relevant and I'll show you an interesting admission by Jonathan that just baffles me to be honest if time permits there might be some Q&A. I might take some comments here in there.",
      "comment. I will bookmark it if I can get to it, so don't worry, I might still get to",
      "pretending that all of these issues that stem from this precedent aren't actually stemming from this precedence. So, all we're getting out of these apologetics is PR for Islam. This is not real Islam. That's not a real Muslim. The reason why there's a lot of violence in a lot Muslim communities is because of culture, because of outside factors and we just leave it at that. No one ever fixes anything",
      "refuting Islamophobes, as they would put it, as They should be putting effort into actually changing the sources that actually give these bad interpretations. As they would call them bad interpretation So I want them to focus their attention elsewhere and I want to present a case that It's not my opinion. It's the majority interpretation of these scholars that people keep ignoring So this is why I'm doing this and one important reason",
      "this has to be highlighted is, aside from the fact that it sets precedent and empowers abusers, if people start believing apologists against their own judgment, against their ability to understand Arabic or whatever language they're receiving it in, if they see the evidence right in front of their eyes that says this verse is violent but then the apologist says it isn't and they take that, they lose trust",
      "They don't trust their understanding of the language anymore because they're always told, you're misunderstanding even though it's right there in your face. So then they become drones, samayana wa ata'ana, and that could go in either way. Whatever they get from whatever shaykh or whatever apologist, that's what they're running with. And that's a problem. I want people to think critically about their beliefs, whatever those beliefs may be.",
      "You know, you see that one of them is from a website that has ties to a Saudi sheikh or something. Before you say that's a Saudi shaykh, it doesn't represent Islam. I urge you to dig deeper. Look at the source of that, the hadith that they quote because their opinions aren't coming from thin air and I'm not even digging deep to find the sources that I'll show you today. Unfortunately, that's the first page of Google is full of those. And it's not like I just found those and ran with them.",
      "points from actual reputable sources and I couldn't find any. All I was finding was websites like Yaqeen Institute just putting out a bunch of nonsense without actually backing it up with anything. So, just know that I tried to be as unbiased as I could be. And this is coming from my research back as a Muslim as well.",
      "more thing. If you do think that it's not real Islam, your first concern should be what about the people who do think this is real Islam? What about the women who are harmed because of this misunderstanding? That's what your focus should be on. If just jump from listening to me to going this is not real and leave it at that, you're forgetting the victims. Whether or not it is real I urge you to focus on the victims",
      "Yes. And when it comes to da'wah people or preachers or apologists, part of what they're doing is inviting people into Islam. So this is why I'm very harsh on them. This is why take apart their every word. It's because they're selling you a product except it's for the rest of your life. They should tell you exactly what's in it because by the time that someone converts or commits more to Islam or whatever it may be down the line,",
      "to be able to get out of it or to be seen any other way and it's going to cause them harm. So this is to get them to be honest about what they're advertising. Alright, if I do make any jokes, I'm really trying not to but it's gonna be to diffuse the tension that I'm feeling inside. So, to begin with... In the beginning of my journey as Alaa-ud-Din when I was first new on Twitter",
      "And someone tagged Jonathan Brown's Twitter account, and they were telling me this guy has all the refutations and so on. And Jonathan Brown blocked me. I put that in the thumbnail, but yeah, right now I had deactivated Twitter so I can show you again. But he blocked me when I had basically no following. So I find that interesting. I don't think he was threatened or anything. He was probably thinking what a nuisance. I",
      "Can I call you John? Well, I guess you're not here. So I'm going to call you john Another disclaimer i'm playing the videos at 10 faster just you know to get through a little faster so let's begin with the first one uh, The first one is about Verse 434 that's how we interact each other in language But when you have a text like the quran that is is the audio okay everybody it's like is it matching my volume Always read through the sunnah of the prophet",
      "Let's listen again. That's how we interact with each other in language. But when you have a text like the Quran that is always read through the sunnah of the Prophet, you have to look at what the sunna of the prophet is telling you to understand the intended meaning of the text. And in that case... So let's begin here. So if you have texts like the Qur'an and to interpret it, you need to look into the sunnah of the Prophets to understand",
      "words, meaning that the author isn't good at expressing the words or they're not good at literature. If I give you a book and I say you have to read the commentary that was not recorded for hundreds of years and didn't reach all the same parts of the world as the Quran and aren't written by me to begin with, that's a bad book. So from the get-go we're talking about he's saying you have",
      "know what the words mean. You have to know the intended meaning through the life of the prophet, but let's just give in to that. Let's listen. The intended meaning of God's words is not necessarily the one that's closest to the evident meaning. It is the one best supported by the evidence. The Intended Meaning of God s Words is not Necessarily the Closest One to Obvious Meaning. Is God bad at words?",
      "of the sunnah of the Prophet, our understanding of the overall teachings of Islam. This is what tells us the intended meaning of the Qur'an. So I understand that context is important and I will definitely comment on it. I'll let him give the context before I comment on It but I just want to highlight how he's simply saying The obvious meaning is not the actual meaning. So again, I want to Highlight the author's deficiency here. You should have the obvious meaning of a text",
      "meaning of a text be the meaning especially when it comes to something so important let's get back to it and so when you read that verse that i mentioned the verse 434 the quote wife beating verse when you reed that you don't read it through what comes to your mind first you read it what comes here right after you understand the son of the prophet and the sunnah of the",
      "The Prophet never struck anybody with his hand",
      "Obviously people are going to say there's no authority on Islam, you know. There is not one big organization but this is one of the biggest organizations and here is what he says in English.",
      "and from going astray and breaking apart the family. Besides, this topic has regulations and conditions, and this allowance can be avoided if using it will cause harm.\" I want to highlight this part which is basically a soft backpedaling. This can be avoid if it causes harm. When does beating your wife to any degree not cause harm? That's just a cop-out by saying well Allah says or I say don't do it if it's harmful",
      "If it's harmful, so in the cases where it does cause harm, you can wash Islam's hands of this blood. So let's get to the first video here. So he was saying, Jonathan was saying that Aisha said, And I have the hadith here. I'm going to have all the sources in the descriptions. There's plenty of links today. It's going to be a whole book.",
      "look at that for a second. Let's go back.",
      "Qurtubi says when he was explaining this verse, al-dharb fi hadhi alayya huwa dharbal adab al ghair mubrah. Non-excruciating to discipline. It doesn't break a bone and it's like a push, al lakza. It's like or something similar. So now we understand daraba and lakaza are synonymous. And then al lahda is synonymous with lakazah. So there are many explanations of that. And that's the hadith where Muhammad pushes Aisha on the chest",
      "Aisha on the chest or you know pushes her on the chess so they say and she says, and it hurt me. She uses the word lahda and the explanations like now what we hear says it's um like a lakza or wakza like a poke or a push. So now we've established that these words are synonymous here's another explanation it says",
      "hit or stricken on the chest, and she said it hurt me. That is synonymous with beating. But then she has a hadith where she says he never hit anybody. And here's what I want to point out. When there are two contradictory hadiths or anything contradictory in Islam, it's just as valid to take one as the other. I mean obviously you can point to other precedents and then make a case for",
      "Everything within the system of Islam or apologists, let me say without dismissing either them as completely false. So is it really a stretch to think that this girl who was groomed into this marriage from a young age was actually Was convinced by Muhammad that no I didn't beat you This this is all to teach you this pain wasn't it wasn't actually a beating and then she goes and she says he never beat anybody",
      "one thing, but I want to point out that this whole tangent that he took us on, and I forgot to point that out is a tangent. That's irrelevant to the verse because he's saying Muhammad never beat anybody. Therefore the verse doesn't mean to beat or something like that. Let's let's hear him out. He never struck anybody with his hand except not a man, not a woman, not",
      "First, this verse is revealed that I read to you about Adribuhanna. The context in which it's revealed according to Hadith and Sunan Tirmidhi and other books is that a woman comes to the Prophet and complains about her husband striking her. And the Prophet says, Do not strike the female servants of God. Okay. And then Omar comes to",
      "the version of the hadith, I want to remind you of how casually these are dismissed. So a hadith would have multiple versions, all of them sahih, all",
      "The women in Medina are overcoming their husbands.",
      "But, so Muhammad said that. And then when Umar came to the messenger and said women have become emboldened towards their husbands. What's the word that this apologist used? The women in Medina are not... They're very... Yes, Sutter. Overcoming their husbands? Forcing their personalities? Like the women in Mecca.",
      "What does any of that mean? So let's go back to it. Emboldened towards their husbands because they're not being beaten anymore, because Muhammad said don't beat God's servants or whatever. All right. So women have become emboldened toward their husbands. He, the prophet gave permission to beat them with that verse. So you see the sequence here? You see the sequences? This apologist is saying Muhammad preached not to beat the wives or the women",
      "or the women, but then Umar complained that the men are complaining. So then the verse was revealed as if Allah suddenly remembered to reveal the verse. So this first quote doesn't absolve Muhammad of anything. If anything it shows how spineless he was to go back on his word and Allah to go on his world-word and reveal this verse. Let's continue the hadith. Then many women came round to the family of the messenger complaining against their husbands.",
      "gone around Muhammad's family complaining as their husbands, they are not the best among you. Oh thank you Muhammad how strong and what a defender of women what a white knight in shining armor what is this? Those are not that great though let's go back to it",
      "that if your wife is having nushuz, first you admonish her. She does not desist. Then you cease sleeping with her. He doesn't explain what nushu's is. Sleeping with her, she still continues. Then the verse says you strike her. It does say strike because as somebody had pointed out in the last call they were under the impression because they don't speak Arabic this Muslim was under the",
      "which means beat them. That could be multiple, but let's get back to it. But what does the Prophet say about this? He said, أُولَٰئِكَ لَيْسَ أُوْلَٓاءِكُمْ خِيَارَكُوا Those people who strike their wives are not the best of you. In another version of the hadith in the مُستَدْرِكِ فِي الْحَاكمِ اللَّيْتِ بُورِهِ He says, خِیَارِكٌ لَن تَدِّبُوا The best of your wife will not strike your wives. So because I keep hearing this part of the Hadith as an apologetic point, Muhammad is such a defender of women that he said the best if you won't beat women. Is that really a condemnation?",
      "condemnation i mean the people who aren't the best of them they could still go to heaven right if you're a muslim and you're not the best but you know you're doing all right and you beat your wife it's halal so how does muhammad soft condemnation of if you want to be the best don't beat your life uh how does it negate god's verse allegedly god's vers saying you could beat your",
      "Before we get to that, let me show you some of the explanations of this verse. So here's this explanation. I highlighted some words and it took me hours to do this digging. This beating they're explaining is to instruct and teach the woman. And it should be the last resort as they say in here's the verse.",
      "hadith that we're going to talk about later in this video, that they were created from a rib, a crooked rib. We're going talk about the Hadith later on. So here it says it's a duty on the husband to be patient and kind and all that and not to rush to beat them right? You first you start by giving them advice and pointing them and let's just focus",
      "mentalizing language that is used here. We don't hear about the man being given advice and taught what he's doing wrong, and so on. This is basically giving license to men to direct their wives however they want within whatever Islamic limits they want to pretend are fair. Why is she the child who needs to be directed? Oh right, that's because she is married a",
      "photo that I'm going to show you later. So let's get that out of the way, to pretend that whether it was a violent beating or not a violent meeting to teach your wife something is infantilizing to begin with and here it says yeah beat them in non-excruciating pain and we're gonna...non excruciate beating and we were gonna talk about that because if",
      "if he's bad-mannered, things get worse. Matters get worse and if the beating was happening for every reason or another you know not reserved for special occasions then then things are going to get worse wow how what a deterrent that is! And then it says here the husband has to be patient and well mannered",
      "and then it would be a light non-excruciating beating. And we're gonna talk about that. So here's another explanation, this is about the hadith that we were just talking about. When Muhammad said don't beat the women and they stopped, this explanation says because the Sahaba radiyaAllahu anhum were of first class like the first generation, they are the favorite generation,",
      "and then they stopped beating their women. They can't go two sentences without praising these men who just in the next part of the hadith when he allowed the beating, the women started being beaten a lot more and they started complaining. So which is it? Which is it were they the best men ever or were they angry Arab desert men who would beat their wives? I don't understand. And then it says here",
      "and women are lacking in intelligence, and intelligence,",
      "And then the Prophet said, don't overbeat them. But if there's a reason to beat them, then there is no issue. I think the analogy here is giving every man on earth, every married man, a gun and saying, hey, don t use it except if it s necessary. If they get angry and they use it you say well I told him not to use unless it s",
      "Have you seen, or PlayStation or whatever, have you seen how angry they get? Call of Duty, FIFA, whatever the hell game. Have you see how violent men get? Have you seeing how they start wars? And how mighty irresponsible of this God to give this license to lightly or otherwise beat the women and then just wash his hands and the religion's hands from all the blood when the men overuse it according to how Muslims put it. It baffles me",
      "baffles me. And here's an explanation, again links are going to be in the description. Here it says don't beat them a beating so hard that they complain. That they complain and the explanation of this not excruciating beating is don't hit the face, don't break a bone, don t...and I'll show you",
      "saying to the like just not to the point that they complain so you can abuse them and if there's this culture of abuse that's normalized that your husband can do that and it's nobody's business except in the family, you can't complain. They will complain once it gets really bad but up until that point it's all right. I noticed a comment here and i'm just gonna pin it.",
      "you're truly not looking at the sources that i'm bringing all right let's go back to uh the hadith that jonathan here is going to quote let one of you none of you strike his wife like he'd strike a slave and then go and sleep with her at the end of the day",
      "at the end of the day. And in his final sermon, before we get to that, let's look at this hadith. Let's look a this hadath. Muhammad said he made mention of women and said some of you beat your wives as if they were slaves and then lie with them at the other day. There are other versions where he says don't do that. What I want to highlight here is it's weird how these hadiths are compiled",
      "of it. And then he admonished them against laughing at others passing wins. He said, like, why are you laughing at farts? I don't understand the relevance of that, but it is there. So here's what I want to point out in no explanation, not even Jonathan here points out that the Muhammad said, don't beat slaves. It was just an accepted fact. Don't beat them like you'd be a slave. And in some explanations, like I'll show here, they give other examples. Muhammad could have used",
      "None of that. He said, don't beat them like you beat a slave. So the very obvious meaning here is slaves can be like, you can beat slaves very hard and there's no hard condemnation here. Don't be the wife that hard. I'm out of words. And here it is in Arabic. Like a slave is beaten. It doesn't say like a slave was beaten but he was condemned or a slave shouldn't",
      "That is reserved for slaves. And in other versions, darbal fahl al-fahl huwa al-ba'ir. So in some definitions that's like a horse and some definitions, that's a camel the way that people beat camels to make them go. Somehow I was just saying they'll beat them that hard. And what irks me here? I keep seeing repetitive gaslighting attempts in all of these explanations every single one of them says",
      "that Muhammad or Allah or whatever preaches good khuluq, patience and kindness between the married couple and so on and so forth. This is a verse. And then at the same time they say beat her lightly or whatever not lightly just not as hard as a slave. How do you reconcile these two things? Well the answer is in that culture in that backwards culture backwards compared to how we are today it was normalized that there was a level of beating that was accepted I suppose",
      "accepted, I suppose. And you can still have what the author would think is mawadda and rahmah, mercy and compatibility and compassion and all that. You could still have that with a little bit of beating. And it could have been the case that women saw no other way. So yeah. And here it says in al-mu'ashara tazeedu minal mawaddah so that could mean either intercourse or relations",
      "if the separation between the couple or abandonment becomes long, or if the woman is keeping herself away from her husband or busy because she's employed or something like that. The man's manners get worse. This is in this explanation on a website Khaled Al-Sabt I think that's a Kuwaiti shaykh",
      "And again, I urge you to think. Don't just think this man is wearing a shemagh or whatever it is that people in the Gulf wear. Therefore he's in a different part of the world. Therefore this is not real Islam. Think about how this is the norm in the Middle East. Like no one protests like people try to protest but this is normal and it's always been normal. Think",
      "And then they look up this and they say, well, Muhammad said beat them but not as hard as a slave. And then we have a Muslim, a very annoying person here saying no one in their right mind hits a woman now. Go tell that to all the men in the Middle East right now and outside the Middle",
      "Is there anything that Jonathan said That I'm misrepresenting here so far? His final khutbah What is one of the things The Prophet says He says Fear God as concerns your wives Because you have taken them As a trust from God They're in your trust And he says Only if they do commit What's called What he says is An egregious You know, inappropriate behavior Egregious",
      "But the verse says, those who you fear their disobedience. And the fact that they're dragging me into these pointless arguments about how much did the woman overstep her boundaries is a problem. The fact that I have to start nitpicking but the Quran actually like the bar is way lower in the Quran why are we talking about that bar at all? They always frame it",
      "everything to hurt her man and hurt her family deserves a light beating. They're bringing the extremes close together. No, the bar is very low if you fear her disobedience and it's left vague up to interpretation of the Shaykh, of the person whatever. If you fear his disobedience then you beat her. And here he's saying if she does an egregious act what a lie this is! And we'll look at the hadith in a minute.",
      "strike them, but what only strikes them? Darbit ghayr mubarrih. In a way that leaves no mark. That causes no harm. Let me remind you of... Those are two different things. Leaves no mark, causes no arm, are not equivalent in any way. So how many times have you been in a fight as a child and you just didn't have marks? Like you guys slapped each other up and no long-term marks. Does that mean it's fine?",
      "fine? Does that mean there was no harm caused, does that mean it's not humiliating?\" So when they say non-excruciating beating or غير مبرح, listen to what that means. Let's concede even though Allah didn't have the presence of mind to write it in the verse ضربا غير المبرح. Let's concede that that is what Allah meant and we have to figure it out elsewhere. What does that entail? And all the definitions say don't break a bone, don't hit the face. That's how low the bar is?",
      "So that's the sunnah of the Prophet. What a great sunnah. Through which we read this verse, and through which every Islamic school of thought would read this Verse. That is a lie but okay. Which is why in the various schools of law... Let's talk about the final sermon first before we get to that. Here's part of that final sermon",
      "What it says is their private parts, their vaginas are halal to you as their husbands. The fact that it's just kind of like their property. You have the right to intercourse with them. They must not bring into your house anyone whom you dislike. And let me remind people this doesn't mean they shouldn't bring a strange man into the house. I mean yeah",
      "But as I will show later, it means anyone he doesn't like, including some madhabs think, including her mom and her dad. But the majority interpretation for anything else is even if it's her sister or her brother, if he says no, don't bring them in. And if you bring him in, he should beat you. I will",
      "severely. That's what this apologist is saying so far. And this is an article from a website called Marduwa.com and I just wanted to show you some of what was said here. So, this section is called Haqqun Nisaa the rights of women. It starts with it, the rights",
      "to preserve her husband's house. So she doesn't let any human, even if it was one of her family or mahram, mahran like her brother, I guess her nephew, anything like that, someone she cannot marry, there cannot be any sexual relations between them in any world. He can tell her not to bring any of those people in. It is her right, look at how this is phrased,",
      "It's her right in return to that, to preserving the house. That her husband would allow her, would permit her to have her parents visit. You see the language that these people use? The way that they twist the words. They always say, المرأة مكرمة في الإسلام.",
      "woman is, her place is preserved in Islam. Her value is preserved, all that stuff. And then they twist the words like that. Her right is that the husband would let her have her parents over if she preserves the house in the other way. And if that doesn't work, then beat her. Beat her in a disciplining way. Again, infantilizing as hell. And",
      "And the woman's rights, right? And it starts, It's talking about how Muhammad is talking to the man saying you come to your field. You plow it however you want. That's the beginning of talking about women's rights again and feed her if you ate and cover her if she doesn't eat.",
      "provide for her the basic ass necessities and not beat her face. And her rights begin with him having his right to have her in whatever way he wants. Is my commentary even necessary? I don't believe that... I can't believe all I'm doing today is literally reading. Is it that difficult for people to think about this? Is it the difficulty of accessing this information? I dunno.",
      "an explanation again from the same article about what is this non-excruciating beating. Don't split the head, don't break a bone and again it is for I keep seeing these words repeated it is disciplining, it's for teaching. And her rights are food, drink clothing and this is important. I'm going to talk about this later on if she forfeits some of her rights without pressure then that's fine",
      "I'll give you an example of how she can forfeit her rights and no pressure.",
      "sender this is the image that was on that article not the girls, the women and in the context of what we're just talking about it's the women it's not the girl why is it a little girl in a hijab looking up to a man in this infantilizing position? Not to mention the fact that I don't know if she's six years old then that's halal according to Muhammad. It boils my blood just preparing for this stream",
      "took a toll on me. And if someone wants to come out here and say this website is not Islam, this website from Allah, fine. But where did this mentality come from? How is it so prevalent? And why does nobody care? Why is it that people only care when they leave Islam? Why do people only want to defend Islam? Is it because they don't want to confront the ugliness of this?",
      "they genuinely believe. I don't think Muslims are bad people, that's what I want to repeat here. Muslims are not bad people. They don't want to be beating their wives but they genuinely do believe this stuff because of everything else, all the other pressure tactics in religion or if they don't believe this, if they fall for the apologetics then they want to believe that Islam is not this ugly. Again continuing that well I guess I put in the wrong screenshot so you're going to miss out",
      "You're going to miss out on a little bit, but that's fine. This is also going to be in the comments. Let's go back to Jonathan.",
      "The opinion of Abu Hanifa, the opinion of Abū Yusuf, the opinions of Muhammad bin Ḥasan al-Shibani, the opinon of Zuffar ibn Hudhayl. Of all these opinions. So Fiqh is very complicated but across the different Madhhabs there's a same theme over and over again You can only strike your wife lightly in a way that causes no harm? Yeah we've talking about what that means",
      "for the dia, reliable for compensating her for injuries. And according to every school except the Hanafi school, a judge, if a wife goes to a judge and says my husband's beating me and there's... Before we go further, I will comment on that. But the way that he says every madhhab, every school of thought except the Hanafi school and he just moves on. Tell us what's in the Hannafi school. Is there a non-zero number of people following",
      "are under that, subjugated to that law don't matter? Why is it that as long as the majority is according to him, the majority of them is fine, which fine with a huge asterisk then forget about that one madhhab. Are those people who follow that madhhb going to hell because they misunderstood Islam? If not then who's gonna pay for all this harm? Someone could say well those women are gonna get compensated extra in heaven but does",
      "once you've gotten everything you want in heaven and what about those people who aren't going to go to heaven that's all presuming that this this paradigm exists what about the people who are harmed did not are not not gonna go into heaven it's such a bizarre system but let's see what he has to say about this this is your evidence that the husband's beating her or the husband confesses the judge can do what's called tafriq he can end the marriage legally and the wife will get to keep her mahar",
      "and the marriage is over. So that's the huge flex here, is that in three of the four madhabs, if the woman is beaten and the husband confesses to it or if it leaves a mark, there's a lot of factors here. And if the judge rules in her favor, he will separate them. How merciful! I found very interesting in my research that if you look at Sharia court information about Sharia courts, whether it's in Iran",
      "Iran in the 900s or Andalusia and the 900's, or Syria on the 1300s. Or you know, Jenny and Molly in the 1900s are Zanzibar in the 19 hundreds, or Yemen in the mid 20s into Egypt in the 1920s. You always see the same thing. husband or wife goes to the court says my husband is beating me if there's evidence that he's beating her like physically How could there be evidence if she's locked",
      "Like, what if he locks her in till the bruises are gone? What if there's no bruises? Are you not listening to yourself, man? If there's witnesses, if the husband confesses. If the husband confesses, wow, we're hinging on the morality of a man who is beating his wife. Judge would end the marriage. If she keeps her dowry, she gets maintenance. If The Woman Wants. I don't know if he realizes how damning that is.",
      "how damning that is. So a woman who's subjected to her husband's mercy, who is under his mercy because he pays for everything and that's literally emphasized in the verse 434 it says you have rights over them, you are dominant over them your caretakers over them because of what you spent on them so the woman is infantilized she doesn't have a source of income and now if she wants to separate from him after",
      "what is she going to do without him? So now the abused woman might have to stay because even with the judge being there and everything, what is he going to be able to do about her husband? And the way that society looks down on divorced women. He doesn't realize the issues that he's just skirting over.",
      "woman has some of her teeth knocked out by her husband and the judge says you have to pay, husband, you have your wife three gold coins because this is the dia for teeth. Okay let's talk about that for a second so I wasn't able to dig out this case from the 1700s um i'm not saying it doesn't exist it could be in something that wasn't digitized or whatever here's what I found interesting so in this case the husband beat her to",
      "That's how Islam values it. And he doesn't say, was the husband jailed? Was the husband beaten for that beating? Were they separated? None of that is mentioned in his example right here but I'd like to know does the husband face any consequences aside from monetary consequences? So rich man, does he just keep spending money every time he beats one of his wives? Is that how you value women by how much money",
      "for a tooth. What happens after that? Like she can't put back her teeth. I mean, today we might have that option for fake teeth or something like that but the fact that we're even discussing any of this it's insane. The examples that he thinks are saving face for Islam and what I don't understand is how all the comments for the majority of the comments are just like Mashallah Shaykh you're such an amazing speaker",
      "or the haters of Islam now have nothing to say, where are the critical thinkers? They're scared. They're afraid to comment because of what people do to them. So it's very interesting because in the tradition of American law and British law, it's only in the late 19th century that a husband can ever have to pay any money to his wife. Before then married women",
      "to marry women aren't allowed to own property and they so their whole shtick here is money right women are entitled to some money like they always say in Islam a woman's right is her own money but what is her only money in this kind of system she's not really allowed to work right or in most cases she wouldn't be allowed to",
      "gives her for the house or maybe some for her and he doesn't get to touch her money but what money she gets the mar that they hold against her uh if she wants a divorce she has she has to give it back unless there's a good reason like she gets hell beaten out of her all the time what is he trying to justify here by saying that other countries haven't caught up to this progress until not that long ago according to him and now we're way past that so what is with this what aboutism",
      "And there's something called in law, tort immunity where the husband is actually immune from any case that his wife brings against him if he harmed her. It's impossible for him to be liable financially to her. But in Islamic tradition since the very beginning, since the life of the Prophet, part of the Sharia was that just because you're married to somebody doesn't mean that if you injure them, you don't have to pay for it. You can't be held accountable before the law. You are always held accountable.",
      "if you harm anybody, you're held accountable. Doesn't matter if they're your wife or your husband. So that last part, if you arm anybody are held accountable took me on a little bit of attention that I won't take you on right now but I found out that the idea, the compensation that you pay for killing someone in Islam for a non-Muslim under Muslim rule is half of that of a Muslim and if they don't pay their jizya, their extortion tax then there's nothing there to be paid",
      "It's such a backwards system that is so behind the times. All he can think about is money, they paid money for her teeth. He doesn't say what justice was paid. Did the husband suffer? Did the Husband go to jail? In the barbaric system that's pretty old now did the husband get lashed for beating his wife? She gets a few gold coins, that's fantastic! At a time where she couldn't even replace her teeth...",
      "This is why I think that this man is not only, like honestly, I got this question earlier from Oswa saying, so are you saying that these apologists actually lie to fool people or intentionally manipulating, etc.? Usually I say, I'm not sure. Because a lot of them genuinely believe this stuff. They actually believe the Prophet is a great man, therefore I'm going to try to find confirmation bias that he is. But this guy was quoting the same hadith I'm looking at with his apparent knowledge of Islam.",
      "knowledge of Islam, which is more than mine and intentionally misquoting it. Like you'd have to be an idiot or a liar, one of the two. If you truly understand Arabic, if you have background knowledge and you see in the hadith that Muhammad said don't beat the wives or don't meet the women and then Allah revealed the verse, that's not a defense of the verse in any way. So this is why I think he is dishonest",
      "One last hadith before we move to the next thing. And I'll get to some of the comments and super chats, by the way. Thank you. I just can't interrupt the flow. And here it is. So remember earlier, we're talking about how there's no issue if a woman gives up some of her rights voluntarily? Here's one example that is cited often. Sauda is one of the Prophet's wives. She's an older woman.",
      "she was unattractive, but it's pretty implied. It's pretty clear that she's old and tall and not very, you know, not really attractive. Sauda gave up her night to Aisha. And there's multiple explanations here, and I'll go through them. So the prophet had to give each one of his wives one night of the week or in succession. And he has always said that if",
      "to them. And that includes, you know, spending a night with each of them. But, you don't have to be fair to the concubines in any way except like the bare minimum of don't let them starve or something. So Sauda gave up her night to Aisha. Why did she do that voluntarily? Why did",
      "what's it called, Sahih Muslim. They both have this hadith. Sawda bint Zam'a, she gave her knight to Aisha and people were starting to ask why? So the first reason is because after the Prophet divorced her, she wanted to go back to him so she did that. That is a weak hadith, it is false. The second one, the Prophet was about to divorce her but then some scholars say that like al-Mawardi",
      "but it's not in the hadith. So let's put that aside. Number three and four are verified. She thought he was going to divorce her, so she gave up her night to Aisha. So she would remain one of his wives in this life and his wife in the afterlife because they actually believe that this is such a great thing to be one of the Prophet's wives in the Afterlife. It's a higher-up position than just a regular woman in the after life. So the Prophet accepted giving up her nights so he could be with Aisha",
      "Aisha. This is confirmed by many hadiths, and this is the last one. She kind of wanted to do him a favor. It was kind of a gift. She knew that he loved Aisha because the prophet never stopped talking about how much he loves Aisha more than any other person in the world and things like that, and that's the reason why she gave him her night as a gift, and it's pretty messed up when you think about it. So the prophet preaches that you have to be fair to all your wives.",
      "all your wives. But there he goes all the time boasting about how he's so in love with this, the youngest, shiniest new little thing in front of all of his wives, in front everybody to the point that this poor woman felt like afraid that he was going to divorce her or she felt so inferior",
      "How is that man? I mean, if he's the perfect man, he would have heard this from her and he'd be like, no, honey. No, like, I'm sorry that you feel that way. I do love you somehow. I love all of you equally. And and I'm not going to I'm",
      "There's explanations saying it wasn't because she was too old that this happened. But in other explanations say, well, she was to old and that's why it happened but that's not even the focus here. She wanted to stay like in his harem basically. That's not what esmotehi means but in his protection, like in the afterlife. And there is honor and preference in that. So I'm not sure if that's about the social hierarchy during",
      "during the time of the prophet, which absolutely did apply. It would be shameful to be divorced from the perfect man, from the leader of this tribe, from The most perfect man of all time. How dare you complain or want a divorce or get divorced? That's humiliating! And in the afterlife it is such a great position to be one of his wives in the after life. You see the amount of brainwashing that this poor woman had to go through?",
      "prophet to the point that she thought to herself, I'm inferior to his other wife. He should be with her and the Prophet accepted and he would spend two nights at Aisha's place. Here's what really irked me in this article it says the benefits of this hadith like what did we learn from this hadit? Tell me what did",
      "or compromising. It's allowed to make peace or compromise. What is she really, what did she do wrong? That's not what the point of this is. She aged? She's not attractive enough? And yeah, thanks for reminding me and after he dies they're not allowed to remarry the Prophet's wives. That was put in the Quran. Imagine God creating the infinite like since the beginning",
      "before time, he wrote this Quran. This is his ultimate plan. I'm going to have evolution take however many years. I am going to a lot of these prophets that their messages are going to be corrupted. I will write in the end a verse that his wives cannot be remarried and that men should respect his wives. How? Let's get back to it. If a woman feels",
      "their husband is separating from her if he's not into her as much and she's scared, she's worried or scared that he is going to leave her. It's okay to give some of her rights up or some of the money or clothing or the demand that he spends with her, the time that he",
      "And Lajnah Ali, there's no issue on his part either. Wow! I'm truly baffled. And this is again, this is not a fringe opinion. Look it up. This is... If you don't speak Arabic, you would have no idea that this is what Islam is. For the majority of Muslim women, this",
      "that's separated from Islam, this is what they have to work with. And then this is the second thing that we learned from this hadith. This is evidence of how complete her mind is, how sane she is, and how mature she is. This has evidence that she is mature like what a great example of a woman is what their saying. This",
      "And she gave up some of her right to remain one of the ummahat al-mumineen, the mothers of the believers. No pressure at all. You see how when apologists say Aisha could have divorced Muhammad when she was old enough or rejected him, how could she, a child, reject the leader of the tribe that it's such an honor to be with in this life and the afterlife?",
      "If you don't see that the pressure from all of this, the pressure that if you genuinely believe that this man is magic, you know, if he's from God, that pressure is astronomical. I can't imagine what these women were thinking in their heads. Even Aisha has hadiths where she talks about, you have been more harmed since you allowed beating or I haven't seen women suffer as much as Muslim women or I see your God rushing to fulfill your desires.",
      "She had moments where she sort of broke free. And then there were moments where you realized she was totally under the spell. She was boasting that he loves her more than anyone. She felt special. That's an abuse tactic. Even if Muhammad was so nice to her, you don't realize that this woman, Aisha for example, she was raised for this. And his other wife just accepted her position. It's sad.",
      "Here's the third thing that we learned. If a wife gave up her day or night, then that's okay. The husband can accept that and he can actually have sex with the... I don't want to finish that. Number four, if the husband has four wives, right? Then they can do that.",
      "say if you have multiple wives, you have to be fair with them. What part of this dynamic is fair? And at the end of the day they have that gull that these scholars have the audacity to say but no pressure though. Here's another hadith before I get to some comments and then the next video. This hadith says a man should not be asked why he beat his wife. There are multiple versions",
      "whether it's weak or not. But here is a Hassan version, that's not weak and more damning than that is how correct the hadith are or how verified it is I'll talk about the explanation of it too. So...",
      "is the name, let's see. Whatever it is, I can't read it in Arabic. Sorry, in English. Yeah, Al-Ash'ath. Learn from me something that I heard from the Messenger of Allah. Can it be more damning? A man should not be asked why he beats his wife. And do not go to sleep until you have prayed the witr. And I forgot the third thing. These are the men who are transmitting our hadiths. So it irked me not only",
      "let's say it is a weak hadith for a second, then why do the scholars bother to find the benefits of the hadith? They say it has been verified. It is weak but here's what we learn from it. So the fact that it's weak is not because this is such a far-fetched thing to be said. No, it's just it happened to be not verified to the fullest extent. So here's the benefit here. The man should not",
      "The man should not be asked why he beat his wife, you know, by other people, outsiders. Because the reason could be something embarrassing or like something private for either of them. And that is left to the husband because he is ordered, مأمور بتأدي بزوجته, to discipline his wife. You know how Sheikh Al-Azhar was saying it's not an order? Well, you do have an order",
      "the sanctity of your house and whatever that means. And that's part of it. It's open to interpretation by men. And the second point is you have to keep the secrets that are between the couple. And this is a symptom of an overarching problem in Muslim communities, this secrecy, not just about the abuse of women but the mistakes",
      "don't want to be commenting on this because I didn't actually watch the horrendous so-called debate between Ali Dawah and the Prophet. But, I've seen a lot of commentary by Muslims. Some of them are saying hey this was embarrassing, this had nothing to do with the debate you didn't really do anybody any favors we hate AP but still that was bad. And there's a lot more Muslim saying you should be advising them privately. There's the sentiment stemming from Hadith i believe",
      "the scandals of your fellow brother or sister. You should be advising them privately. But what does that look like? If a man's beating his wife over the limit that Islam allows, you're supposed to go and talk to him privately. Brother, don't beat your wife till she's green in the arm. These are private matters. These matters have to do with their family, the honor of the family. You're not supposed to talk about it. So whether this hadith is weak or hasan,",
      "that we learned from it. Not we, but people who follow this religion and not all of them thankfully. This is a teachable moment here. Let's get to the... I'll read a few super chats and then I'll get to next video. And there are more hadiths at the end. So thank you SecularSekai for the super chat. Super sticker, I appreciate that. Algebra says",
      "Algebra says, thank you as well. Surah made up. Oh, you who believed cultivated prayers, believed women are plowing fields, treated them so or among Allah's most faithful slaves. You know what? In English, who knows this could have been a real verse. Looking forward to you. Thank you, Secular Sakai again. Looking for it to you in secular spirit collaborating more any plans to do more videos with Infinite Nudra later this year. I do have a video of secular spirit on Saturday",
      "please check it out. I'll advertise it and InfoNoodle, yeah our schedules are just not aligning but hopefully if they do we will do something and yeah that's something I want to comment on so there's this narrative that Islam came in and stopped a certain domestic violence and that's the point of all these hadiths. I don't think it's necessary for me to comment",
      "hadith. It's a narration by a scholar about how the Arabs were in the old days, and it goes against this narrative that the Arabs used to bury their daughters alive and all that stuff. This idea that people were savages up until Islam came and fixed it all up. And if that is true for a second, let's presume that it's true. Now what? We're past that point. I've given",
      "the industry of automobiles is the Ford Model T. It wasn't one of the first cars ever to be built, but it was one of those cars to be assembled in a more affordable way on the assembly line and it changed the history of automotive history forever. But would you drive a Ford Model today? This old clunky inefficient dangerous slow car? No! Was it better than walking back then",
      "walking back then? Arguably, yeah. Depending on the trip. Is it relevant now? No, we're way past that. So good for you, you know, for driving a crappy car a long time ago. It's time that we move on. So that defense of it improved things, which is again dubious and we can't even verify that, it's not really defensive how it is lagging behind now. That is my opinion on that. Now let me put the next video",
      "the next video. The next video is called, it's called mistreatment of women in Islam or violence against women and let's see what he has to say. And my last point, this is a very important point. People in the West love to talk about the problem of Islam,",
      "Muslims are violent towards women. And you know why? Look at their Quran. Their Quran is the reason. Is that Isha time? Okay. He had to just check, Isha, is it time to go pray? I don't know if that's like virtue signaling or not, or he's actually that adherent to religion to the point that he can't finish his religious lecture. Just let it be. Does anybody know a reason",
      "Does anybody know a reason why this is not true? Anybody know a reasons why the Quran is not the source of... Let's hear what he said again. Okay....violent towards women, Muslims. They say Muslims treat women badly. Muslims are violent towards women and you know why look at their Quran. Their Quran is the reason. The Quran is",
      "Does anybody know a reason why this is not true? Tell us. Because other people also treat women badly. Are you serious? Because other People treat women Badly. That's whataboutism To a T The Quran is not the source because Other people do it too We'll hear him out more Violence against women Is a human problem Do you know which country in the world rates the worst In terms of violence against women In the whole world",
      "in the whole world? Not India, not Saudi Arabia. El Salvador. Do you know how many Muslims there are in El Salvador? Not very many. Okay, let me save you the trouble for a second. I'm going to include some sources in the comments but I want to read this little bit from one of these sources. This is from The UN Women.",
      "violence in the Middle East region is shaped by discrimination against women and the presence of attitudes that perpetuate negative gender stereotypes, like what I've been talking about for the past hour. Like women are infants and they need to be disciplined. For example, in Morocco, 60% of men consider that wives should tolerate the violence to keep the family together. And that's Morocco. That's a country that's so close to Europe where there's a lot of tourists",
      "60% of men think women should tolerate a bit of beating. And the number goes up to 90% in Egypt, what a shame. Remember what I showed you earlier about Shaykh al-Azhar? This? Well some people are protesting and they're saying no we want to start enacting laws against that. And people objected because it's against religious rights. When having a law against violence is against your religious right,",
      "religion are you following? What do you say about your own religion? How do you expect people not to accuse your religion of violence when you're the one defending it against anti-violence rules? It's really sad. When it comes to Palestine, the number of men who agreed with the previous statement remains high at 63%, while in Lebanon it goes down",
      "26% only? Because it's a lot more liberal, it's less adherent to Islam for the most part. There are a lot of people who aren't Muslim as well. Don't you see that there is a correlation there? Legislation often fails to comprehensively address all forms of violence against women and enforcement mechanisms are frequently inadequate.",
      "rape is not a thing in Islam. The only reason a woman can refuse to sleep with her husband is if she's sick, if she on her period because that is filth according to Islam. If the husband forces himself then some apologists say well Allah says don't harm them but there isn't an actual precedent for husband being punished or at least for the majority it's not a crime so of course there's going",
      "You give men a loaded gun and then you wonder why there's more violence. So it's disgusting that this man... Latin America! It's disgusting. That now he's talking about Latin America, they beat their women too. If he... Let me address this. And I'm sorry today, I'm irked so I'm letting these comments get to me somehow. Nice, you found a little country where the problem is worse therefore you have no problem now.",
      "no problem now. Wait, am I misreading this? Yeah. Sorry, you're talking about the apologist. Yeah, he found a country where the problem is worse. Forget Egypt with 100 million population in there. Not all of them are Muslims. Not only 90% of men in Egypt think that a woman has to bear some amount of beating.",
      "give you a bigger trigger warning because this is going to be just a tweet, a censored tweet about the violent thing that happened recently in Iran. So turn your head away now. Heartbreaking. Today in Iran, this man is holding his 17-year-old wife's head after beheading her. She had fled to Turkey to be safe but was forced back. This happens very often. It's not",
      "They would be chased by their brother, by their father, by the husband, by whoever. In Iran a father who beheaded his 14 year old daughter got 8 years prison but a woman who removed her hijab got 24 years. And this is a man posing there's a video he's walking with the head of his 17 year old ex-wife Now does Islam say Behead your wife? No. No Islam doesn't say Behead your wife Does Islam say Beat your wife Yeah But not harshly",
      "Don't leave a mark. And if you leave a Mark, you could pay for it in money. How disgusting is this? Don't you see how it's a first step? There is a lot of violence against women everywhere in the world, but it's not being made better because of Islam. It's not combating the culture that we keep scapegoating every time they say it's culture. It' s not religion. Where did this culture come from? So if this region had issues with women right 1400 years ago, Islam came and legitimized those issues or",
      "or if it meant to combat them, what has it been doing for 1400 years? Why is Islam such an utter failure at resolving these issues? Even if it's not the cause, for a second let's presume it's no catalyst here. Why has Islam done nothing? Why are the people who are saving these women outsiders? Why ex-Muslims speak up for their rights? When Muslim men and women talk about this they're chastised.",
      "Why? It irks me because people think that I do this to vilify Muslims in any way. No, the victims are Muslims. Some of them can't stand up for themselves. Some don't know they need to stand up. Some are so deluded by whatever version of Islam they're following or not even following that they would forget about all those people who suffer through it and then go fight the wrong people.",
      "This girl was married off at 12 years old. And to say that, for example, is not Islamic when the Prophet married his wife at six. This sets a precedent for abuse when there's this power dynamic where the man is supposed to teach his wife. He's supposed to discipline his wife he's dominant over her and she is so much younger and he can beat her to some extent but we trust him not to go overboard.",
      "This is just ABC. It's going to keep happening. It doesn't mean that every Muslim is going to beat his wife. It does not mean it's in every single case, but it will happen in larger numbers as long as we have the same baseline of abuse that is normal. Now I don't know what I wanted to say. Let us go back to… I am going to try and skip over some of what he says because he keeps talking about countries.",
      "is the worst region in terms of violence against women. Here's one more thing. One of those websites, I didn't screenshot that part but the violence against woman in the Middle East is underreported. Anyone with half a brain would realize it's under reported. When they try to report what happens? They're either punished for that or ignored or not put on the sheets and numbers. Why do we pretend like they are not underreporter",
      "they're not underreported. What is this race to the bottom going to achieve when he says, look at this place has more violence? What has your religion done to separate itself, this region from the rest? Why isn't the violence against women in Muslim areas 0% or close to it? Why is it the case that it's high up there even when underre ported, it's way high up There It's pathetic. It's pathethic when they go to these lows of at least it's not this country",
      "I didn't, and this goes to show how I think misleading public discussion in America is and the West is because I didn' even know about dowry killings until like 2012. I didn''t even know they existed.",
      "people's attention to work towards that. And I'm sure there are advocates against that, trying to raise attention and awareness. What does bringing that up have to do? So his whole point here—and I cannot bear to listen to him any longer—his whole point is we are unfairly being targeted as Muslims. There's other violence but people only pay attention to us. There is an element of truth to that. There s an element",
      "are under larger scrutiny and often unfairly characterized. But to say that, therefore, we don't actually have violence issues that are on a bigger scale than most countries? To make yourself the victim here? Let's see what else he has. Family says it was a kitchen accident and the police don't investigate it. Yeah, he's talking about India, how these numbers are underreported because the family lies and then the police",
      "police don't investigate it. Don't you see, you absolute moron that that's what happens in the Middle East? This is a huge problem. No one in America even knows about this because what are people in America always talking about honor killings Muslims or the ones Muslims are the ones who are killed. So if his point from this video is to say people focus on Muslims too much fine sure but what value have you added here he made no commentary on what the steps are to reduce that he made",
      "about how all he did was just give excuses for why you can lightly beat your wife in some cases. You are the enabler. You're the reason this keeps happening, especially when you put on a Caucasian face to this violence, to this ugliness. Muslims always love pointing out this apologist because it's evidence, it's confirmation that look even a white person, a westerner can join Islam. This means that Islam is objectively true. He's their poster boy",
      "boy for this kind of stuff. And I'm so amped up right now because I cannot believe that it's effective, it's working. What do you know about violence in the Middle East? Why are you making things worse and pretending like you're the victim? There's more dowry, usually according to statistics... It's not a race to the bottom. Who gets off the hook? We in America get off the",
      "about violence against women in our own you don't talk about violence Against Women in America have you been asleep on societies and I was just when I was in the UK last weekend or maybe two weeks ago I can't remember what it was there was uh I was on the tube the underground train and uh the guy next to me is reading this big full page headline says Muslim convert beheads granny in garden as a oh wow turns out it wasn't a muslim right okay wow",
      "case it wasn't a Muslim, but there are examples from just the past year of this happening. Or acid being thrown at women in Europe or in other places, not even in the Middle East, including the Middle Eastern, like the example that I just showed of a man parading ahead. So what does your anecdote of oh they got it wrong that one time it wasn t a convert, what does that have to do with anything? There are more than enough precedents of that actually",
      "last year, three women have been beheaded. Nobody talked about it. Nobody cared. What kind of neighborhood do you live in? Because this is important when it's terrorism, when it' No no no I now highly doubt that what kind of neighbourhood does he live in where three women are beheaded and it doesn't make the news? You see, this is why I call him dishonest and a liar. I find that extremely hard to believe especially given all the lies that he's already woven right in front of our eyes using the sources that we just read.",
      "neighborhood do you live in what country is that in the u.s i presume that's where he is if it's in the middle east then no that's that doesn't help this point muslims being violent then people pay attention but when it's our when it'S OUR OWN SOCIETY PEOPLE DON'T THINK ABOUT AND WHEN MUSLIMS WHEN WE ALLOW OURSELVES TO SIMPLY BE THE WHEN we allow ourselves to be the center of conversation we say oh you know please you know let me defend islam against your accusation",
      "You did a crappy job of that, defending Islam. You are the reason this keeps happening. I mean him and the people who straight up just say this is what you need to be doing. All he's doing is drawing attention away from them and enabling the soft beating of women.",
      "problems need to be addressed by the Muslim community. We need to address those issues. Then why aren't you doing that? But how would you be the one preaching that we need to at the same time enabling the mechanisms that cause these issues to happen? Sure, you don't say go absolutely kill the person or beat her till whatever but you just enabled the first step to that. Way to make yourself a victim. It can't be an excuse",
      "don't also address the issues that they have.",
      "But this is the same guy who in the same lecture, in the sam breath was telling us about how you should... You're allowed to beat a woman. You see that hypocrisy? You see why it bothers me? I don't know how people are supposed to look at Muslims. Like you're straight up an example of a liar. Absolutely disgusting. Let's go to the next video. There's a couple more videos and",
      "videos and then I'll talk about the hadiths at the end. It's something I want to comment on. You cannot mock Islam without attracting fascists who hate Muslims, it's inevitable. So here's what I have to say about that. Since day one, I've made it very clear how I feel about Muslims, how I'm not vilifying them, how i say they are better than Islam. Islam is holding",
      "Me just simply pointing out what this guy is doing. Like, was there any mockery today in what I said? Was there anything unjustifiable in what i said today me literally reading the sources from Islam That is enough for someone who is a fascist or hates Muslims or whatever you want to call it that's enough ammunition for them but whose fault is that Is it my fault that I'm literally reading Islam? Is it the fault of the Muslim who has no idea what the hell is going on not necessarily is it the",
      "Is it the fault of anyone who advertises Islam without knowing what it is? Yeah. Is it a fault of someone who advertizes it, knowing what is but lies? Yes. I mean, I feel for the progressives out there who are trying to reform Islam, but are they really, really reforming Islam? None of the people who have spoken about here actually doing that. Shabir Ali, for example, he's pretty progressive, but has he said anything except at the end of each video? We need to re-examine this in our context today and blah, blah, nothing happens.",
      "So I don't understand how people accuse me of enabling people who hate Muslims when the source of this, one of the many, like sometimes it's just unjustified. People just hate Brown people for example. I understand that and I'm one of them. Like you don't realize that I'd be profiled with Muslims in every way. I don t have a label on me that says Amix Muslim don't come pick on me, pick on this guy. So it's in my best interest to look out for my people so",
      "doing this because I dislike them, but I will not simply let it all slip and let people be victimized by this just because there might be someone who would take a sound bite from my video quoting Islam and use it against Muslims. That's not my fault. Go look at what Islam is saying.\" So this is the narrative that they try to use to silence critics. And maybe on an individual level or maybe in institutional level,",
      "violence against Muslims. What uptick am I causing? The amount of harm that I cause inadvertently, by not even causing, but just quoting Islam pales in comparison to the amount of people who reach out to me and say hey this has been helpful, I'm a Muslim, I've had questions, I felt insane for awhile, I can't believe that this is actually what it says and so on. It's not my fault that that's what Islam is.",
      "You can't really blame me for that. What university is he teaching in? Can anyone report this guy to the authorities? That's what people don't realize, that this is not an extreme opinion. This is as soft as they come. This why I feel insane sometimes, it's an open air prison. No one realizes the insanity of what some people out there believe. Noone realizes the insanity of what all preachers preach.",
      "Now, let's go to the next video by also this guy and a guest appearance by our favorite pedophilia apologist. I'll get to that in a second. All right, so... This is a hadith about a woman is like a crooked rib. So let me show you the hadith first for the...",
      "It's a very long hadith, but it's damning. So let's go through it. In this hadith—I don't know if you're able to see it. I mean, it's going to be in the comments anyway. You should give charity and ask much forgiveness and so on. Okay, here we go. A wise lady among them said, Why is it, Messenger of Allah, that our folk is in bulk in hell? Women are the majority of hell, is what Muhammad said before. Upon this, the Prophet observed,",
      "this, the Prophet observed, you curse too much and are ungrateful to your spouses. The reason why you're the majority in hell is because you curse Too much and you're ungrateful to your husbands, the husbands who feed you and clothe you, you know how dare you? I have seen none lacking In common sense and failing in religion And robbing the wisdom of the wise besides you women. That's what Muhammad is saying Upon this the woman remarked What is wrong with our common sense",
      "he said, your lack of common sense can be well judged from the fact that the evidence of two women is equal to one man. That the testimony of two woman in Sharia court is equal for one man and the apologetics for that are just bizarre. And Muhammad uses that as proof that women are lacking in intelligence. That is the proof of the lack of",
      "lack of common sense. And you spend some nights and days in which you do not offer prayer, and in the month of Ramadan, you do observe fast. That is a failing in religion. Let me clarify. When women are on their period, the period is considered najasa, filth. And they're not allowed to pray because God thinks it's icky or some shit. And we're told by apologists that it's mercy because they're PMSing. It's hard for them.",
      "And here it is used against them. You're lacking in religion because you don't pray as much as men, because you're forced not to pray by what God said or because of physical pain. If that's the case, if that's reasoning and that's why you are lacking and that we will talk down to you. He justifies using his own words. I don't know why maybe I'm getting the wrong version of the hadith. I'm sorry.",
      "have missed the hadith that he is quoting about um about the rib so i'll just let him read it and yet we still are obsessed with these with our own because of our the worldview from which we come we're obsessed with reading these studies through this kind of what sometimes people call a hermeneutic of suspicion we look at these hadiths as were suspicious of them these are let me comment on that",
      "Do you mean skepticism? Because I think skepticism is important. You know how people keep touting Islam and science go together? Well, the scientific methods means that you need to doubt everything and prove it. So approaching hadith with skepticism, trying to ponder both sides of the narrative is not a bad thing. That is the just thing to do. If it is absolutely defensible, if it is the truth, then there's nothing to fear with",
      "that you would want that approach because it would prove empirically, even if you look at it with skepticism there's no way to make it a bad thing. But it is full of suspicious things so it's not a bad think people look at with skepticism.",
      "sexist. But why is it that we jump to that conclusion? We should actually just look at the meaning of the Hadith first, because... and the reason I thought about this was because before I got married I was reading this Manor from Mars Women from Vizsness book that everyone was telling me I had to read. And what was it saying? It was saying don't try to solve your wife's problems for her, don't expect her to be like you, you have to accept her as she is, don' t expect her",
      "she's going to do things that don't make sense. You have to accept that this is because men are from Mars and women are from Venus, right? And then I realized when I read this hadith, this is exactly the same message. Here it's talking to men. It's saying, men, and I guarantee you if you get all the men in this conference in one room they'll all start talking about how I wish my wife were more reasonable. Why doesn't she just think like I do? Why doesn' t she just see it this way and that way? If men sit around like this all the time, they're gonna be miserable and they're",
      "never going to get your spouse to be exactly like you. You're never going",
      "I'll play this and then I'll show you what our favorite pedophilia apologist says, and then i'll show the hadith.",
      "But when you see on discussion lists or when Muslims get together Or when there's a conference and some speaker comes and talks about hadith There's always someone who gets up in the audience and says, but brother what about So you notice that he said yes Javed Al-Ghamdi does interpret it that way Just keep that in mind Hadith of the crooked rib and isn't this sexist Why is it that we always jump on that bandwagon? Why don't we stop and say maybe The Prophet actually has teachings Has wisdom to offer us",
      "And maybe it's actually talking to men in this case and telling men that they have to change the way that they look at their marriages and their relationships. So why do we jump on the bandwagon of saying that it's sexist? Could it be because for the past hour and a half, I've been talking about your lectures where you were being blatantly sexist even in the softest version of it? Could",
      "Treat women nicely for a woman. No, it doesn't say treat women nicely. Okay. It's kind of... It's not that direct but let's just leave it at that. Treat women nice for a man. Treat woman nicely for the rib is its upper portion so if you should try to straighten it, it will break but if you leave it as it is, it'll remain crooked so treat women",
      "Let's first take the interpretation that he gave us. Why is Muhammad using this language of analogies and metaphors? Because that was his time, those are simplistic people or that's how they spoke about things. They would exaggerate everything.",
      "gave up all her money and didn't eat for a week. All that stuff, all these analogies and metaphors is just an outdated way of talking. If he were from Allah wouldn't he know that an analogy is lacking? Like for him to say women are like aside from the fact that analogy can be understood so many ways by people who mean well",
      "rib, don't try to straighten her. What about the man? Like why is it always talking men do this to women, men discipline your women, teach the women, the women are obedient. Why even if that is the interpretation you're going to take and what I care more than what did Muhammad actually mean because I genuinely don't think he's a prophet from God. I care about the lie that's gonna come up in a second here so let me show",
      "So let me show you what Omar Sulaiman says. Let me pull up his video in a second. I have a video about Omar Suleiman's whole lecture about Aisha and he had such a creepy smile just throughout the whole lecture, smiling as he is talking about Aishah being married off that young and so on. He keeps up that energy here.",
      "Deal kindly with your wives. Now, if you listen to that, you say, well, what does that exactly mean? Right? Not a single sharaf, not a single explanation of this hadith is that the woman is inherently deficient as opposed... Not a simple explanation is that she's bent, that she is crooked and it goes to the general idea",
      "Not a single explanation. None of what I cited so far and in so many videos saying the Prophet himself saying, lacking in intelligence and faith. None that exists according to this liar.",
      "of the hadith and what the prophet was saying. What was the prophet saying? Either he was being literal, either see this is the problem we don't even know what the guy meant like did he mean literally they're created from a rib which again we're going to go back to evolution and creationism and then Muslims say well he created her from a rip but it was also evolution because it's metaphysical either or truth doesn't take either or",
      "How is he just so complacent saying, oh either he meant it literally magic or... And saying that the woman was created from the rib. Okay? Not the most crooked part but that she was created form the rib and he simply went on to explain what the most bent part of the rib was. Or the Prophet was using... So let's take that first interpretation. This is why I find them hard to trust in any degree.",
      "It could have been that he was talking literally she was created from a rib, and then he was just talking about what the bent part of the rib is. Like it's some biology lesson for no reason. He's like God created woman from a ribs and the rib has a curved part. The fact that he would entertain this as an interpretation and throw it out there as an apologetic interpretation? Don't focus on the bad one.",
      "What is that? What kind of man speaks like that? Like if we suspend our belief that God could have created Eve from a rib, why would Muhammad say that and then say, And by the way, this is the anatomy of a rib. How do you trust this man?",
      "to be. Except, except this guy gave a lecture that was an hour long about how Muhammad married Aisha at six. Muhammad groomed her, raised her and he was talking about all the signs of grooming without realizing that it's grooming. He's saying don't mold your wife but Muhammad molded Aisha. The way that he was saying Aisha would teach everybody she knew the most about Islam because Muhammad taught her about Islam all",
      "When Aisha thought he brought up this disgusting man with that disgusting smile, brought up the so-called fact that Aisha though Muhammad was such a handsome man in defense of her not having been a young child. He was saying she was six and then nine. And one of the defenses is how could she have been abused if she found him so handsome? This is that man!",
      "It means don't mold your wife. That's what I'm saying. Sometimes it might not even be that they're intentionally dishonest. I don't know about this guy. It's that in their mind, the definitions are absolutely broken. Treat women kindly but you can beat them but don't leave a mark. At the same time, both things are true. In their mind don't mould your wife but marry her young that's fine. Absolutely broken. Because there is an impatience",
      "And Imam An-Nawiyah, rahimallah In the explanation of the hadith He says the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was addressing The impatience that men had with their wives In trying to make them exactly as they wanted them to be You are supposed to act like this You're supposed to do this You'e supposed to doing that Addressing all of their habits Addressing everything We're not talking about haraam And addressing things that are forbidden And growing together and pleasing Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala And distancing ourselves from all that That is considered disobedience to Allah Listen to this part again",
      "So here he's saying, don't mold the women or like the men are impatient. They wanted to mold the woman exactly how they want with their habits and everything. But simultaneously Muhammad is berating them for gossiping,",
      "ungrateful, as he put it. The woman is always the villain and simultaneously he's saying except unless there's something haram then you can discipline them, right? Like that's different. You can bend her in that case. What are the things that are haram? Disobeying Allah but there's also nishuz disobeying the husband. It is seen as an extension sometimes like you're disobelying Allah by not obeying the sanctity of your marriage which is obeying your husband. You see how there's these insidious ends these back doors these technicalities",
      "technicalities. So all he's saying here is lip service, nothing. But the idea of trying to mold your wife into exactly what you want her to be, right? So the Prophet ﷺ is saying, look, you're not going to get the perfect woman, alright? Just like you're",
      "he said, so leave it bent and that is better for you. Otherwise if you break it, it is divorce.\" So the Prophet was saying breaking it is a divorce. The Prophet was like saying look everyone is going to have certain traits that you don't like and you don' t agree with but this is part of who she is and just like you have your issues, she has her issues right? Some scholars they said that the woman's nature is more complex than the man's nature and that's not to buy into this concept that women are crazy human beings",
      "What concept? The concept that your Prophet was citing, that women are emotional or lacking in intelligence. Is that what you're talking about?",
      "gaps here. You're not going to be able... That's what you got from all that. All right, putting all of that aside, remember what he said? There's not a single shara'ah which means explanation. There is not a simple explanation that said anything degrading about the hadith. Aside from everything else that I've cited that wasn't about the Hadith. He's a freaking liar like right there! I don't know if he doesn't understand Arabic. Am i more of a scholar than these people? I'm not. I'm just some guy. So is he not able to read",
      "Here's one explanation in English from Islam QA. The meaning is that she will inevitably have some crookedness or shortcomings in her character, hence it was narrated in another hadith, Sahihain. I have not seen any lacking in rational ability and failing in religion but robbing the wisdom of the wise besides you women. That's the hadith that I read earlier. That' why I had the link here. Muhammad himself they're using Muhammad's words to give you that sharh that you said never existed you two-faced liar",
      "two-faced liar, you smiley pedophilia apologist. Yeah, women are complicated. What does that mean? We can't understand them therefore there's something else. And then here's from bin Bazil his website it says here and I can see how that would be even twisted so this means",
      "that is a deficiency in her, that God mandated on her, and that God created her with. It's not her fault. You see how infantilizing that is? Oh you're broken but it's not your fault. God created you from a rib. And I can see an apologist who wants to twist this and translate it into English and say, God says women are not responsible for the way men treat them or something like that.",
      "If you want to say, this sheikh I don't like or this sheik doesn't represent Islam or this shaykh is Saudi or this shykheh is Kuwaiti. Those are real women who live under those rulings. Those were real women so care about them. So get out there and do something. And here's more...and it's very indicative of the mentality. Like everything I'm reading here that's the opinion of a knowledgeable man let alone the average stupid man. It is indicative of",
      "openly, and even before the internet these are just openly available is the problem. Please feel our suffering. It says here she has to admit that you see after the previous sentence God created her with a deficiency it's not her fault but she has",
      "the Prophet is telling the truth and he said these things about her, then the Prophet must be right. Even a good man, who's a good pious Muslim who thinks his wife is just as important as him will have to believe this. And when he sees the smallest crack, you know, when he see the smallest deficiency from her, he's gonna think well of course that's what Muhammad warned me about. This is how you turn good people into bad people with dogma. Here's from Khalid As-Saleh",
      "Here's from Khalid al-Sabt. It says, So here he's saying this analogy and this is the problem with analogies. This crookedness is the tongue, the crooked tongue which means she talks back, she gossips that kind of thing.",
      "that women have, you know, their tongues are going to be crooked and you have to be patient with them before you beat them. That's only as a last resort. Not a single sharh says Omar Suleiman. Not one explanation. Not just one. This guy couldn't Google at all. And again I remind you, I am not digging up dirt. This is not me going and searching for these interpretations. This",
      "that usually are in English, usually are not relying on any original sources. I wish it was different but it isn't. I get the impression you don't like Shaykh Omar. Yeah, I have my reasons. Here's Islam Way and all of these websites have nothing to do with Islam by the way. All these websites with Islam in the name, nothing to",
      "their thinking, in all of their matters. They're lacking. Because I mean they were created from a rib. They are going to be less. That is the problem with using analogies and God would know that if I can see that then God would see that in the future you know the future that's gonna happen he would have known to tell Muhammad don't use dumb analogies. The world is going to",
      "We're going to be at specifics. We're gonna have decimal points that make differences and this guy's talking about ribs? As they say, I'm really amped up for this one. I'm sorry I don't usually lose my cool like that but I don' know how else to react honestly. Let me share the next video. So this is the last video",
      "This is the last video that I'm going to talk about today. And it is about women in hell. Let me show you the verse first, I suppose. The verse first. Okay. One second while I pull that up. All right. So like I said, this took me a while because every time I would start researching, I would get annoyed and I would have to stop. Oh, this is annoying.",
      "Now I cannot share the screen for some reason. I don't know what is happening today. I think this is Allah's will. Give me a second, please hang on. And hopefully we're back. Let's see if that works. No, that doesn't work. Okay, I'm sorry.",
      "Okay, I'm sorry everybody. Give me a second. Let me play the video in the meantime. Okay, here is the video.",
      "Is an opinion of Abu Hurairah. It's not a prophetic Hadith, it is the opinion of Abu Huraira and A group of Muslims in Medina this after the death of the Prophet alayhis salam a group of muslims in medina are debating Whether or not there's more women or men in heaven And Abu hurairah says they come to him and they ask him what his opinion is and he thinks and he says There's more Women in Heaven Why because the prophet said that this group of people who enter heaven? Each man will have two wives therefore",
      "Therefore, there's more women than men in heaven. And then you see... Wait, but there are other hadiths where the Prophet says that women are the smallest number of people in heaven and men are the greater number. This is very interesting. What does a great scholar like Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani who was probably the most famous medieval Hadith scholar he's from Cairo Let's go back for a second here's the Hadith",
      "Let's see. Oh, womenfolk, you should give charity and ask much forgiveness for I saw you in bulk amongst the dwellers of hell. A wise lady asked... Did I not already read that? Yeah, that's the hadith I already read. That he doesn't cite the whole thing. Okay, here is another dishonesty point right here. This is the hadithe that I read about how why are the majority of women in hell? Because they're lacking intelligence and religion. Why? Because God made them that way.",
      "be more submissive to God and your husbands by extension because you're guilty. It's the concept of that sin and guilt, that they say there is no original sin in Islam except this. And this dishonest lying apologist doesn't quote the rest of the hadith. He just says oh there are some hadiths about women being the majority in hell how could that be? Read the rest",
      "Why is that the case? Ask your own prophet. Why are you trying to figure it out? Ask their own prophet Let's continue Hold up, so the opinion of a scholar who died in... when was it?",
      "He died in 1449. I'm assuming that's AD or whatever, so what year? That's like 600 years ago or 700 years ago? So not back then, all right.",
      "women are the majority of mankind Ibn Hajar says",
      "and his interpretation is he misunderstood because if women are the majority on in like on earth therefore they can be the majority in hell as well what men are the minority of mankind ibn hajr says if women or the majority of mankind then even if you have exactly half of all men going to hell and exactly half about men going into heaven and exactly how far we've been going to helen exactly half while women go into heaven you still have more women in both heaven and hell",
      "heaven and hell. And so this is, he says, this is my explanation for these hadiths. But this guy 700 years ago didn't know that the difference between men and women in populations isn't that big? Not at all. They're almost a 50-50 split. Are they really trying to argue technicalities when Muhammad literally said, this",
      "because they knew they were dealing with the realm of the unseen. Of course, they're very flexible because the conclusion is fixed. The conclusion is that Islam is true. The solution is that nothing here's a problem. Let's try to bend it as if it's not a rib and make it work. For me, it was a rib because when you try to",
      "bend it, it will shatter. But for him I guess it's a bone with not enough calcium? I don't know. Afterlife which none of us can ever possibly understand. So because these things we cannot verify is that's the logic in Islam. Anything you cannot verify which is all these huge claims, you have to be flexible and accept it. That's why they would always use the famous saying of the companion ibn Abbas",
      "There's nothing in this world that's in the next world except names. The only thing we know in common is names We can't possibly understand the details or the exact nature of the afterlife So you're selling me air This is like people who sell timeshares Except they're overselling the timesharage and then telling you the time share is metaphysical, and it's better than even thought But why is this important because? This is the kind of things that Muslims become obsessed to it when they find these hadiths How dare Muslims question",
      "As I said, most of them actually believe that there are more women in heaven. Let me remind you right here. Right here. What were they interested in? They were interested in the wisdom that the second part of all these hadiths... No one ever talks about the second parts of the hadith. Right where the Prophet says to the women he's talking to, he's trying to give them lessons to help them improve their lives.",
      "Once you notice the abuse of language here, the victim-blaming language. It's always like this in Islam. No women! This is for your own good. Muhammad meant to say something good by telling you that you're going to be the majority in hell. Let's hear what he's gonna say. We read the same hadith together. So he says, you know... Okay I take it back. He does quote the hadith so he's not dishonest in that sense but let's see how he explains it",
      "Again, the victim blaming. So all the women in this area somehow they're all such ungrateful wives and therefore Muhammad is threatening them with eternal hell",
      "and it's for their own good because they're such ungrateful women. Somehow, it's the fault of all the women in that region. For some reason, the women there are naggy and stuff. Don't you realize that this is just stereotyping women in general? Is the genetic makeup of the women making them more naggy? Is it that the men were actually more awful than usual? Because the bare minimum is what Islam says. You have to feed them and clothe them. And if they have to give up some of that right, then no pressure.",
      "no pressure and this is a very interesting phrase i think maybe people in the room have heard the phrase before right it's possible there's very good advice that prophet is giving these women i mean do i need to do anything except play his video this is great advice he says so let me saying be grateful when you're when you have a good husband where is this um okay so there's a lot of fear-mongering",
      "you know, kiss God's behind and so on. Where is this kind of talking down to men? The only thing I see is be fair to your women, treat them kindly hit them lightly not to the point that they would complain or leave a mark or break a bone or tooth where is this like talking down",
      "And then in other hadiths, he gives advice to men. And yet we still are obsessed with these... Where? Because of the worldview from which we come, we're obsessed with reading these hadith through this kind of what sometimes people call a hermeneutic of suspicion. So why is it that people are now focusing on these hadits that are causing harm to women? Could it be because women are disadvantaged in those societies?",
      "When God talks down to men, which he doesn't cite what examples and says, hey do better. Who cares? Because it's not used to infantilize men. It's not use to oppress them or beat them or behead them. Except if its disbelievers or some other group that is a whole other topic. That's why you genius, you person how did these people have degrees? How did you sit through lectures and think and do assignments and couldn't come up with this novel thought",
      "reason why people are focusing on this is because women are disadvantaged and it matters. The words matter more when the women are being punched down, you know? It's that simple but in the apologist's mind, that part of the mind is just dead. What does that verse say? Can't remember. They deaf, mute, and blind. And he was saying earlier that there are more women in heaven",
      "heaven is it because the the like the the heavenly maidens count as women because this person thinks that if there's more women in hell there have to be less women in heaven whereas if women are the majority of mankind then even if you have exactly how you still have more women",
      "Yeah, so that's the problem here is that this is hilarious. What a fantastic Arabic accent he has. MashaAllah even better than yours. Highly doubt that but I don't know how the accent is relevant if his comprehension is dog crap. Yeah, people will try anything like they will forget about everything I said and focus on my accent which I'm pretty sure",
      "of Muslims actually listening right now. Not to flex, but I don't understand how they pull this card of language when most of them don't even speak Arabic to begin with. All right, now I will show you a couple of hadiths. We are done with listening to this man. I'll show you couple of Hadiths so here we go one second... So you hear",
      "people used to bury their daughters and things were just so bad, and Islam came and fixed everything up. Okay, so how come this is also simultaneously true? I'll have the source in description but it's talking about being fair to women and giving them mahr, right? And it says let's see So in the days of Jahiliyyah which is ignorance as",
      "Arabs did not give their daughters or women mahr, the dowry. The only money that they would have. But simultaneously do not forget that the Prophet's first wife was a merchant. She was rich and they used to take the money if the daughter was being married, they would take the mone. So they would say to someone who has a daughter, congratulations to you because this girl, you are going to take her mahr. You are going",
      "and you're going to add them to yours, and you are going to be richer. So if that's the case then why would they bury their daughters alive? If all they have to do is keep them alive for a few years, six or however many, marry them off to a guy who's gonna pay them. If that's truly the case, they paint this other, this opposition as an inhumane monster right like the kuffar are the disbelievers are bad orphans",
      "like in Surah Al-Ma'un, they're just awful people. They're misers. Every description. And the people before Islam, they were just so backwards. They used to bury their daughters alive as if they're not human, as if those people in mass were all just like the hated women to the point that they would bury their own offspring. Even if they were sexist against women, even if they",
      "claiming that. And simultaneously, they would congratulate each other for having a daughter because it's good money. How? And here's the point. I read this somewhere. So if you're listening to me and you're the one who wrote this comment, you know what credit goes to you. Someone had this thought, and I'm so glad people are out there having critical thoughts that I haven't had. This is exactly what I'm looking for. Yasir Qadhi and so many other apologists",
      "thing? How come none of Quraysh called him out on it? If it was such a bad thing, how come nobody called him and they were looking for anything to call him out upon?\" I had never thought of that angle before. If those people were burying their own daughters do you think they would morally object to Muhammad marrying a child? So how is he using that or any of those apologists using it including Omar Suleiman our favorite smiling PDF file apologist?",
      "If they were okay with burying daughters alive, humans, why would they criticize Muhammad for marrying a child which in his worldview was old enough? It's crazy how they warp our minds from a young age to the point I didn't have that thought.",
      "To whoever thought of that, kudos to you. All right let me show you some hadiths so in this hadith Aisha was beaten by Abu Bakr the Sahabi Abu Bakar and there's multiple sources for that. Let's read it real quick.",
      "Although that hit was very painful. And here she uses the word Lekaz wa wakaz. Leks waks, no sorry. Let's see. They're saying it's similar to the word lekza or lakaza or wakaza. Those are the words used when Muhammad hit her on the chest and then they say that wasn't a beating. Here she says very obviously it was painful he beat me",
      "as when Muhammad didn't beat her. You see the lies? Don't trust any scholar of Islam. They're just all apologists, I would say. I mean, do your due diligence is my opinion because obviously they're all just full of it. Here is the next one. Abu Bakr slapped Aisha and Omar slapped Hafsa. All right, where's the relevant part?",
      "Let's see. Yeah. And Abu Bakr, may Allah be pleased with him. You see how much ass kissing they put in the same hadith about him slapping a woman? Abu Bakir, may allah be pleased of them then got up and went to Aisha and slapped her on the neck. They said not the face I suppose technically that's not the",
      "spineless man when you think about it. So his wives were out there, like Aisha was out there being slapped around and Sauda one time Omar said Sauda was out their using the washroom and Omar said I can see you and that's he kind of some narration say that that is what motivated the Prophet to finally tell his wife to cover up or Allah to reveal it but this disrespect, the humiliation he couldn't even have a spine to tell people leave his house",
      "He had to get Allah to say it for him, this character. You know, Allah saying please don't linger in the Prophet's house and here we see they're being disrespected and nothing. He slapped her on the neck and Umar stood up before Hafsa and slapped her saying you ask Allah's Messenger which he does not possess. They said by Allah we do not ask Allahs messenger for anything he does now possess. You see how there is so abuse that they are like oh no no no we're sorry. And then he withdrew from them",
      "for a month or for 29 days and then the verse was revealed to him, say to thy wives for a mighty reward. Okay I didn't continue reading it, I didn t have time but I don't care at the moment. Part of me thought okay let's read the context and then I thought to myself why the hell would the context matter? These men beat these two women right there. No context would justify that especially when we're sold this narrative that Muhammad never",
      "but his friends would beat his wife. What the hell? There's a hadith here that I did not verify, Ibn Ishaq page 496. I have not yet verified this myself so I will not talk about it. There's hadith that I showed earlier about Omar justifying beating his wife, justifying using the Prophet's words and this hadith I've quoted before shows you the Prophet priorities",
      "So, Rifa'a, a man called Rifa', divorced his wife whereupon Abdurrahman blah blah blah married her. Aisha said that the lady came wearing a green veil and complained to her that her husband... And she showed her a green spot on her skin caused by beading. It was the habit of ladies it was the habits of ladies to support each other. I don't know why that's relevant to mention. It is like she was siding with women because they're women you know? Women be women.",
      "And they're mentioning it as if it's a bad thing. But that aside, it was the habit of ladies to support each other. So when Muhammad came, Aisha said, I have not seen any women suffering as much as the believing women. Are we reading the same text? This is Aisha, his favorite person, you know, the Umm al-Mu'mineen, mother of the believers, just said women have been suffering more because of Islam.",
      "said don't beat them and then they started being bold with their husbands. So the Prophet said, beat them! And then they start suffering more. Here it is, right? Said plain and simple in Arabic and English. So she said look her skin is greener than her clothes. And what irked me very much so this is under the book of dress, the chapter of green clothes. I've read in apologetics that the point of this hadith",
      "to wear green clothes and I've made noises that are so vulgar to make in Arabic. And I can't do them right now, it's just like what the hell? That's what the scholars took from this. And again if it's not indicative of the religion itself, it is indicative of mentality of the scholars ever since that time. If Allah entrusted Islam with those people then where is Allahs wisdom?",
      "hundreds of years that people misunderstood this to mean the wisdom here is that a woman can wear green let's continue the hadith so she complained right it doesn't say what the prophet said or did seems like nothing when abdul rahman heard that his wife had gone to the prophet he came with his two sons from another wife she said by allah i have done no wrong to him but he is impotent and is as useless",
      "his peepee don't work, something like that. And Abdurrahman said by Allah she has told a lie I am very strong and can satisfy her but she is disobedient and wants to go back to her ex-husband Rif'a. So let's understand the situation so far. She's saying he's impotent and she wants to use that as a reason to divorce from him. And there's some context here which is allegedly",
      "Therefore, she could be lying that her husband is impotent. Or he just isn't able to do it anymore. Whatever it may be, the fact that this is all linked to the beating is bizarre. He says she has told a lie. I'm very strong. I sleep with women. I am good at that. If that is your intention then know that it is unlawful for you to remarry Rifa unless Abdurrahman has sexual intercourse with you. So that's some weird bizarre system in Islam which I spoke about",
      "about in a previous video by Shabir Ali on women. If a man divorces his wife like with three, like three times of saying I divorce you it's final and she has to sleep with the next husband to be able to be divorced and go back to the previous one otherwise she's not allowed to. It's a bizarre messed up system. Like if we want to talk about the rights of women why is she the one who has to be violated? Let's go back",
      "Well, keep in mind if you're lying and you just want to go back to your ex, which is not even an option for her to just call it off. Like a man can call off the marriage at any point. She has to lie and say he can't have intercourse. Therefore, can I please legally separate from him? And he says, even if you do, you can't sleep with your ex. You can't marry your ex unless you sleep with",
      "up a point what if the husband says no or doesn't want to or can't but whatever and so muhammad said you would have to sleep with your husband and um then mohamed saw the two boys of abdul rahman and asked him are these your two sons and other men said yes the prophet said to the woman you claim what you claim that he's impotent but by allah these two boys resemble him as a crow resembles a crow um two things about that first of all why did he ask if they were his",
      "that they resemble him, if that's truly that obvious. And secondly, what the hell does that mean? The woman comes to complain that she was beaten. Let's revisit this. She comes to",
      "Now go back to your husband who beats you green. That left a mark. Where's the whole beat her lightly thing? There's layers of lies here, and with each layer they're disproving their own religion. Even if we concede the beating lightly part, she was beaten, there's nothing being said about them. This is a teaching moment. Don't beat your wife till it's green. No, the teaching moment is that a woman can wear green. What the hell?",
      "because I feel like I'm talking into, like shouting into the wind. The fact that this is in plain English and plain Arabic and I am the outsider here who has to hide his face because he's stating the obvious. It's bizarre but I'm not the victim as much as the women are the victims here. And I feel bad for the women. I've spoken to women personally who justify this, who say well in some cases it's justified or like",
      "justified or like, yeah the woman is different from men. We are more emotional but it's yet the men who are beating, the men were starting wars, the man who are throwing their PlayStation controllers at their TV, who're waking the wife up in the middle of the night because they lost a video game. But somehow those poor women have convinced themselves that they're wrong because Allah says so. It's really frustrating and",
      "One last thing before you go. This is the cherry on top. It just shows how obvious Jonathan Brown's cognitive dissonance is. He had another video, a lecture about like the whole 72 virgins topic and he was deflecting. He was talking about oh the number 72 that's a weak hadith and he never talks about how the concept itself is the problem but the audio is awful and I'm so sick of that man at this point",
      "you to watch this video with me. It's a part of the video, it's not very long or anything. And then see if you can notice the cognitive dissonance—the very blatant cognitive dissenance here. If it works… Allah is working against me today.",
      "Come on. You could do this. I chose that randomly and that was it, I just... By Allah, shaitan is not helping me today. And then I took a class on Islam for my second theology requirement, I choose that... Oh come on man. Don't do this to me. You know what? Fine. I will make this work.",
      "make this work. Because this is very important what he says here, it just highlights perfectly why people cannot be trusted. It's not happening today. Let me read a couple of comments in the meantime. So to be honest, Apostle Adalide didn't have that rule of only returning to her previous husband if she first sleeps with someone else",
      "sleeps with someone else is only based on that one random hadith and it's possible that this is just... Okay, still waiting. I'm not sure. Yeah, I have reduced the video's resolution but it's still not working well. I don't know what it is. He ought to crawl made because Muhammad thought he was being very clever with a lie. No, I don' think that is the source of that rule because of this one incident",
      "one incident. There were other precedents. Let's see. You know what? I'm so adamant on having this video that I'm just going to keep taking comments while I figure this out. I'll download it first. Okay, next comment. Yeah, Armin usually downloads... I did that for most of them but this one I thought wasn't that necessary so I will do that as we speak. Yeah. Anyone else have anything to say? Let's",
      "Damn, Aladdin hasn't read any of my posts. There we go. I guess that counts sort of. Okay, there we go now it should be working so in the meantime let me just vamp vamp vamp yeah sorry i've been frustrated today i just don't know how to deal with this without frustration Dr Brown you were not born a Muslim how did you become one?",
      "This is the video. Let me find that timestamp a second here.",
      "and that was it. I just was so interested, and so he chose that class randomly. Just this seemed to me to be the religion that I had always believed in, and that is it. So it seemed to have some things that the religion of your youth was lacking, something that would soothe that existential angst that you were referring to? I mean, again, it's kind of hard",
      "you were raised your whole life eating bad chili or something, and then you went to a really good Chinese restaurant. You know, you're like, oh, Chinese food is what I want to eat for the rest of my life. Well, I mean, yeah, but you could also have liked good chili if you hadn't been eating bad chile. So, I think that it's hard for me to say this because I am Muslim and I believe my religion is true faith, but I recognize that it would have simply been",
      "luck or whatever fate that I didn't find that nourishment in my own tradition because I think had I been around different people, or different influences that would have been very easy. I think I easily could've found the same soothing or the same answers that I found as a Muslim. You notice what he just said? So he chose Islam randomly like his Islam lecture randomly and that's what led him to adopting Islam at some point",
      "Had I come across this, like the answers that would have soothed my curiosity or my existential, well, the other person put it as like existential angst or whatever it is, that gap that you had to fill. He said if I had found it somewhere else, I would have been that other religion and he said it himself. This is hard for me to admit because I'm a Muslim. I think there's a continuation of this. Excuse me.",
      "Okay, I don't remember if this is relevant. But the point is he recognizes that had luck been differently—I think he said luck or fate. Matter of contingency or luck or whatever fate that… Luck or fate? How do those people not realize it right in front of their face? So he got lucky by coming across Islam and had he been unlucky",
      "And had he been unlucky by coming across these concepts in another religion, in another environment, he would have stuck to that. That's exactly what I'm saying is at the core of this nonsensical test of life. He recognizes it yet at the same time he knows it's difficult to reconcile and then he just pushes it aside. I guess it's just as easy as what he does with all the apologetics about the wife beating. So he got lucky. And what does fate have to do with this?",
      "I don't know, pre-wrote that this is going to be his fate. That he's gonna come across Islam. What about the people who this wasn't their fate? You see how this like gaping hole in their rationality is filled with indoctrination right there? I don' t know how he got to that point given that he wasn't born a Muslim. I don''t know. I'm more familiar with how it goes from birth. Interesting okay so someone brought my attention",
      "I had forgotten about this verse. I'm not sure as Bab al-Nuzul whether it was revealed before or after this incident of Sauda giving up her night for Aisha, but this verse kind of legitimizes it. It says, So if a woman fears from her husband contempt or evasion, it uses the word nishuz right here.",
      "or backstabbing, or literal violence, or all the stuff that they put in these extreme cases. It's just contempt or evasion. If you fear her contempt, you can beat her. If she fears his evasion, there is no sin upon them if they make terms of settlement between them. If he's going to leave her, then they settle. She begs him basically and settlement is best. Present in souls is stinginess",
      "is stingness. I don't know what the hell that means. Okay, but if you do good and fear Allah then indeed Allah is ever with what you do acquainted. So this either...I don't if this was revealed before? I think this was after what Saudah did. Muhammad was like, This is a fantastic idea! You know what write that down. Write that down Jamie pull that up, pull that out. That's not a verse. And now he legitimized it as in",
      "her, if she feels like she's lacking beauty compared to the new wife. Give up something so he doesn't divorce you and you're not on the street on your butt with nobody to marry you. So this is women's rights in Islam everybody I think this is a great place to wrap up and I just want to reiterate I know that Muslims are better than Islam. I know thankfully if all Muslims were strictly following Islam, if they",
      "obedient to Allah in every way, we'd be in trouble. Just like if all Christians followed everything in Christianity and so on. So I think they are better than that, especially when they're not following that well. But the problem is there's this tribalism, this sense of us versus them, the sense of the enemy is out to get Islam, the enemy of Islam is out",
      "maliciously against someone like me calling this out. And I understand where that's stemming from, I just hope that they focus their energy and attention on helping the victims, on getting to these issues at their core, on removing them from their books. But how do you remove this from the Qur'an? I don't even know. I don t even know, I really don't have an answer for that. So I think I'm doing my part by calling it out, I m doing my",
      "another call-in live stream where I have women call in and talk, whether they are Muslim or ex-Muslim women, talk about their experiences with this. About how it's not just about bad culture or a bad parent or things like that. Even in my previous live stream there was a Muslim woman who called in and she told me about her, not necessarily doubts but her objections to a lot of these things. And somehow she is still able to",
      "within the framework of Islam, and I don't blame her for that. But at least she's honest about those things. She's honest with herself about how this shouldn't fly. I shouldn't be beaten lightly or not lightly, whatever any of these apologetics are. So I'm happy to see that, and always happy to hear from Muslims who do see reason in this. So yeah, there can be positive out of this but just please think",
      "You're told by these apologists who are lying to your face, straight up lying to her face as we just saw. The guy who claims that three people were beheaded in the last year in his neighborhood, the most violent neighborhood of all of North America or wherever he is absolute lies. So you know think I want to say think critically and think for yourself but I thought I would take a couple of comments first because I haven't been paying attention to the comments and then I'm going to end it there",
      "to end it there. So, thank you. Nesso Gaster says, hey Aladdin thanks for the awesome stream I know it's an uncomfortable topic to delve super deep into I learned a bit today. I'm glad you did. Yeah, I need a long break after this. Muslims are people just like us I have Muslim friends who keep their faith to themselves when comes to stressful situations they avoid but never justified",
      "I'm always happy to see that. And I recognize the conflict that some Muslims have, I've been through it myself and that's why I don't go in real life and pester Muslims about this. The people who do come and interact with my videos they chose to be here. They might come across a thumbnail but they can turn it down press not interested so i'm not doing this to antagonize anybody but we do need the space to talk about this and if someone feels like",
      "feels like they're in that position of questioning or, as others have put it, they find this to be a space where they can have these discussions then they're more than welcome. But I don't want to disturb the people who are somehow making sense of it while not being harmful or violent. Then keep doing what you're doing. Robert... Hey Robert! It's from the last stream. Will you do a livestream on Shabir Ali's new concubiner series? Is it even done?",
      "I saw one pop up today where Shabby Ali is talking about concubines. I didn't watch it. I don't know, I'm kind of bored with Shabiyyali at this point. It's just low-hanging fruit. The guy doesn't back up any of his points with anything. It s boring at this time and I hope that enough videos of mine demonstrate the vagueness and emptiness of his material. So I don t think so. I ve got a lot",
      "I hope you all tune in for my next video. Hopefully, I will announce it soon. It's about a miracle and it's not about the scientific miracles. It is an Islamic miracle with an asterisk so I'm just going to leave it there. I am going to premiere the video. I have a trailer for the video that tells you what it's about. You can watch that once I put it up.",
      "you get to watch it with me and you're going to be in the comments just like now. I will be in comments, I won't be on the screen live. The video will be. And then once it's done we would go to a livestream where you can ask me in the comment or call in and not ask me necessarily but comment on the video. Argue if you want to as in disagree with something. If you'd like to give me your thoughts, ask more questions that way it'll be more interactive and I hope that sequence of events will work out so",
      "So stay tuned for that. Are you next in line to debate Ali Dawa? No, no, no. I've never done the debate thing and if I were to ever debate someone it would have to be a worthy topic like what are we even trying to debate here? Is Islam true? I don't care to debate that kind of thing because it has to be proven first and it wouldn't be Ali Dowa because all I need to do is just stand there and watch him make a fool out of himself and I don' think he would do well in front of my sass",
      "of my sass. And I remember there was this YouTuber who's like obsessed with me at this point, and he heard me say i'm going to exercise my sas to roast him, and said that's a gay word! This is evidence that Apostle Adin is gay! So I just keep saying the word sass now. Do not waste your time with so-called debates. I agree. Let's see Zagros says",
      "I got some strong arguments as to why people shouldn't delude themselves with their own interpretation and accept consensus. See, here's the thing. I just think that it's... I cannot do everything. And if I start to try to change everybody, it's never going to work. I think that as long as people find some kind of equilibrium, like even if they're deluding themselves, not everyone has the luxury of time and energy.",
      "energy. People sometimes have stuff going on in their lives, they don't even have the time to look into this, that the money... Maybe they don t have access to internet unfettered access because people are watching them and they get in trouble if they start asking too many questions. Whatever it may be there are situations where the person is not too harmful to themselves or others. They genuinely believe Muhammad was a great man and he never said hit women and they re not gonna hit women. You know what? You do you I can t change everybody s mind and that's",
      "what I'm setting out to do. But if someone is trying to paint this beautiful image of Muhammad while preaching Islam, that's when I say wait a second because people don't know what they're signing up for and also you're erasing history and also your silencing the voices of people suffering today. That's what I care more about and the ex-Muslims were meant to have made to feel crazy for this. Sista X says thank you for bringing so many things to light.",
      "I let Dean, we appreciate all of your work immensely. Thank you. I appreciate the compliments and the encouragement. It really does help. Don't be sorry. It's very frustrating. Yeah, it is. I think you might agree with me if you heard my arguments. Yeah. We are due to talk at some point. So looking forward to that. Maybe you'll get to explain your point of view to me then. Let's see.",
      "talk okay let me just you know put this out there Ali Dawah is like just to put it lightly despicable and pathetic and I don't say this because he's promoting Islam like I didn't call Jonathan Brown the guy who blocked me despicable empathetic I call him a liar because he is where he seems to be but Ali is more despicable sympathetic because he acts like a child and all of his following are just childish",
      "debate. I didn't even watch it because of how he sounds, that guy his voice, his shrill voice and his dumb repetition of insults is just... Just listen to how Ayat talks and listen how he talks. Listen to how any ex-Muslim content creator um talks in general and listen to him talk. He says nothing. He's repeating crying all the time. He was obsessed with uh Infidel Noodle for example made 16 TikToks about her without ever addressing anything",
      "He spoke about, you know, about women. He's such a pathetic, sad man that that's his whole relevance. I mean, I get that told to me all the time, but I know my value. I know that I'm actually trying to do something here. I've done something valuable. I still have value outside of this. His whole brand is just shouting at people and saying he's proud of Sharia executing apostates. And he would have that, you",
      "the law of the land. I don't just, don't respect that kind of person. I look down on him. He is so pathetic to me. So when people ask me like are you going to debate him? I'm like about what? What is there to debate here? Why I shouldn't be executed? Like he's never made a case for anything eloquently enough to be debated to begin with. So I just wanted to air my thoughts",
      "about this whole hush-hush culture in Islam of you should advise him quietly. Don't make this a scandal because he's our brother, because haram, it's backbiting, all that stuff. I hate that. Because then people are pressured into conforming and just being complacent about that kind of thing. There are Muslims who want to call him out but then they feel like it's haram to talk so publicly about a brother who means well, that kind",
      "that kind of thing. And what's funny is, that guy his whole charade, his whole insults of AP in that one debate or so-called debate he justified it by saying I can't remember if it was Abu Bakr or someone else, one of the Sahaba He told a polytheist to go suck on his goddesses down there and it was justification that yeah you can talk rude to people who are enemies of Islam and so on",
      "from Islam. And that's the problem. There's so much justification for anything in Islam, like one side or the other. And what's funny is there were supporters of him saying, yeah, he's right. There is precedent for this. You should be acting like a child because that other person is not worth your time. So can I really blame that kind of person? This is what I think and I know this is off topic. I'm sorry to be tainting this stream with an important topic about this but I just need",
      "video about this. In a sense, I feel sorry for him because he's this simplistic, very simple person who was molded into what he is today in a sense. He's so gullible and simple and maybe he has a lot of deficiencies that make him unlikable. So he clings on to this sense of identity,",
      "behavior and he sees it working so he keeps doing it again. And I normally wouldn't talk down to someone and be like, oh they're so stupid but this person is causing real world harm so I don't mind saying and belittling him and saying this is a stupid person who to some extent I feel like isn't even in control of his pathetic behavior. Like this is what happens when dogma preys on vulnerable dumb people",
      "just become that they're victims. They cause others to be victims, they cause more harm, they train the amount of teenagers and older and younger on a lot of apps who are just so zealous, who take this sentiment that he feeds them and they echo it on and on and again. I've dealt with this enough every single day people repeat the things that he say",
      "just that we should feel sorry for him. Someone has to do something about it and by someone I mean Muslims, should call them out. They shouldn't feel this shame that the Prophet said you know do it in private no publicly say this is not us we want nothing to do with this this is pathetic so i'm glad that some Muslims have been doing that already it's embarrassing he deleted like 200 plus comments it seems from his video like very obviously people actually took screenshots of that",
      "gain traction and keep going the way that they do. Part of me can't even, I don't want to start naming people but other apologists that I've spoken to or dawa people or whatever, to varying degrees of knowledge, they have platforms that are stupidly huge like one of them 500,000 followers I believe or maybe it was 300 on some other app. How does a person so vulgar and uneducated",
      "short-sighted get to that big of a following? How am I struggling to reach people's minds, yet he has unfettered access? What else is it but the religion or religion in general? It's this Trojan horse. You can fill it with something and then sneak it in. And I don't think that all of these men are doing it because they're evil or because",
      "They truly, they're just, they think they're doing the right thing. And that's what breaks my heart is I can't even hate them per se. But they get to a point like Ali Dawa where yeah, that person is despicable. We just need to call it as it is. That person is absolutely despicable and the fact that he has a platform not just that he hasn't been cancelled by some platform, that he",
      "is sad. So that's how I feel about Ali Dawa. I don't have much of a favorable opinion of a lot of the other apologists, but he's really down there. Yeah, I don' t have a grape opinion of him. I had to put a pun in there. Thank you Music Guy! I really appreciate this. Give it up for our mods people, Music Guy and Amber. I really",
      "Yeah, so those are my thoughts on Ali Dawood. Do you have any questions before I close this topic for a while? I am curious what you guys... Yeah, that was a weird drama. So I saw that Sajid stood up against Ali Dawod's... I don't even watch Sajids stuff to be honest but I saw the clip. There was a little clip. I wonder if I can find it while I vamp here of Muslim saying publicly like in one of those speakers corner type things",
      "that they're against Ali Dawa. And yeah, I found the video. I wanna show you how low the bar is that some people were impressed and I don't blame them like some people where this was posted or at least he said this let's look at it together and now I'll tell you my commentary. Let me just prepare the video to do. Let see the comments here. Is there anything in the comments?",
      "Talk with Pine Creek. Who is Pine Creek? Can you give me a little overview of who that person is? There we go. Yeah, so this video was posted somewhere and I found interesting how the good perspective from that Muslim was still pretty horrid. Come on. I think Allah's working against me today.",
      "me today. Or my computer is just not up to par. One more thing not to regret. Okay, let me... One more things do not regret losing your cool. Do be soft. Stand up where necessary. Sometimes I lose my cool and it's justified. I have to admit to that. Yeah. And sometimes I feel bad about it because I feel like they use the smallest slip-up to vilify us.",
      "I've never lost my cool and said, you know, Muslims are so-and-so. But it was more like, yeah, I lose my cool about anything. And they say, look at how ex-Muslims are so emotional when religion has always been about emotions. Has that ever crossed your mind? How that line have you left Islam for emotional reasons? You're in Islam for",
      "I'm downloading the video so we get to finally watch it because, yeah, the stream yard gods are against me today. Someone's saying MythVisions Derek is cool. Yeah, I do like Derek and I did have a stream with him. I want to have more someday but I don't have that much to add to his type of content to be honest. All right, here's the video.",
      "So yeah, this is the part where Sajid talks about Ali Dawah. But this is one that I'm interested in. So this was another condemnation. Okay let's listen to this.",
      "Okay, you know Apostle Prophet he's khabeeth. I don't know how to translate khabeet one for one but it's yeah like an evil disgusting dirty person. But brother when you want a few debates especially if openly for the whole world there is a way to do it. He is Ado al-Rahman which he is the khabeath. This is the stereotype of angry Arab Muslim man why are you doing that? This doesn't look good for any of us.",
      "He is the enemy of Ar-Rahman, God. And Ar-rahman means the merciful which is so ironic when people use the word merciful to describe Allah. He's the enemy Of Allah but... May Allah guide him or break his back? Either or",
      "The lying, yeah all that stuff.",
      "He's a Muslim brother, like I said, Dajjal. Because they want to say he is a good kuffar, no!",
      "Embarrassment. He said do mubahala, then he said I tricked you because you're kafir but the worst thing is that he's a kafir and he says I don't care, I will do mabahala to show you that this is what he's doing.",
      "Because he knows to mock Allah and His Messenger. And you tell him to move out of there? Look how he's mocking, doing like this!",
      "half precedent in Islam. Yeah, may Allah break his back and I don't understand what this prayer so may Allah either guide him or break his",
      "just to get some of this steam off. Thank you everyone for attending today, I appreciate you being here. Oh PSF thank you! I haven't seen you around in a while. His mentality is just as bad as Elidawa's in a sense. Anyhow yeah thanks everybody for tuning in. I urge you to please listen to the things that you receive from scholars or otherwise do your own research as well and if",
      "you so many times to your face, like Jonathan Brown. Then please distrust them. I will talk about Jonathan's justifications of slavery as well. I don't think I'm going to read his book. It's too much effort. I have other books on my mind right now. But everybody keeps saying, Jonathan Brown, Jonathan brown. So now we've dealt with the whole women's thing hopefully. I do not think we need to discuss the Aisha thing. I've already taken it from Omar Suleiman and other people.",
      "But I'm probably going to focus on a bunch of other live stream formats. Like, I have a bunch ideas here. For example, I want to have a stream called Teach Me. So I had one called Correct Me where I present an idea. I present my interpretation which I think is the mainstream interpretation and I say why do you believe otherwise? Change my mind kind of but not in a debating way more like tell them present",
      "Here's your chance to put on a case for your interpretation. So I have that for like, correct me, but I want teach me. So i'm going to talk to not Muslims in that case who'd be Christians if you're here in the comments keep that in mind. You would come in and tell me like explain to me either specific concepts or Christianity in general we'll figure that out and other religions as well because I am kind of like a blank canvas to you",
      "know that much about your religion and that was kind of intentional because you know i'll just wait and see what you tell me uh so that would be um teach me kind of stream uh i also want to do more call-ins with again the why do you believe with believers more collins with ex-muslims who want to either vent or talk about a specific topic maybe some q a but as like a call in format",
      "post something and let people put in comments to be read in a live stream if they cannot call themselves, and they want to still contribute or have something they said you know be read. Yeah what else? And I'm thinking about doing short videos so i have a lot of ideas that haven't been yet refined to the point of making it a 20-minute video and there isn't enough time for that. So I'm",
      "Here's an initial idea for you to investigate. Think about this contradictory concept. For example, here's just a very simple example that came to mind. If Aisha was an adult woman or in the sanity of mind at the age of six or seven to decide whether she would marry the Prophet or not or to consent or even at the",
      "brothers in bed at around the age of seven and then beating them at, uh, at the age 11 or was it the other way round? I can't remember. But there's a Hadith like that. Or would she here's the question that really puzzled me what Aisha bin or someone like her in that situation, which he be stoned for adultery if a nine-year-old girl or a 10 year old girl was lured into Zina with a man and they were witnesses and all that, the weird conditions and whatever, or she confessed to it because how impressionable is",
      "how impressionable as a child, they will confess to that kind of thing. Would she be culpable to the point of being stoned to death? Because that's a contradiction here. We say that she's an adult but can you really imagine that visual? So that's that's gory topic but an ugly one. But I have other thoughts that are kind of like here's a contradictions do your research about that so I'm thinking about doing those kind of shorts. Yeah that's about it thank you everyone again for the comments and",
      "comments and for being here. I cannot believe Alidawa has 696,000 subs. And here I am hopefully making more of a meaningful contribution than all of the shouting that he does to his 700,000 viewers plus. That's incredible. Yeah. Take care everybody. And as always please think critically and think for yourself. Bye-bye."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Abbasid Podcast EP028 _ On_-7g2bF_ZCcQ&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748672205.opus",
    "text": [
      "Hello and welcome to episode 28 of the Abbasid History Podcast, an audio platform to examine pre-modern Islamic Islamicate history and a global medieval past. We are sponsored by IHRC Bookshop. Listeners get a 15% discount",
      "15% discount on all purchases. Visit IHRCbookshop at shop.ihrc.org and use discount code AHP15 at checkout. Terms and conditions apply, contact IHRC Bookshop for details. We are also sponsored by Turath Publishing. Buy now an introduction to Sahih al-Bukhari by Mustafa al-Azami. Listeners get a 15%",
      "and use discount code POD15 at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Contact Turat Publishing for details. I'm your host, Al-Hassan, a PhD student at the School of Oriental African Studies in London. Now on to the show. Considered by Sunni Muslims as the second most authentic book after the Qur'an, Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari's collection of the Prophet's sayings and traditions or hadith holds an esteemed station in Sunni scholasticism.",
      "scholasticism. To discuss with me the life, works and legacy of Al-Bukhari is Dr Jonathan Brown. Dr Brown is the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University's PhD title and first book was The Canonization of Al Bukhara al Muslim, the Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon. Welcome Dr Brown.",
      "As a scholar. Well, first of all, I'm a big fan. So I'm really honored to be on and it's nice to meet you know talk to you in person You're doing this interview like 15 years too late. I wrote this book so long ago I've had to go back and reread sections of there's nothing worse than like Realizing you're not gonna be able to give a good presentation of something that you actually wrote but I've also been Translating Sahin Bukhari with like a commentary",
      "like a commentary and I'm about, about halfway through the book. And so in some ways my contact with Muhammad Ismail Bukhari is more intimate now than it ever was, but also, but it's more like with his actual book then with, you know, that the study I did from many years ago, but all anyway, so I'll do my best to answer your questions in some way that I feel like his political content social context has no impact on him.",
      "on him? I mean, I know a lot of...I think a lot people who've experienced engaging with Islamic thought know this which is that in a lot ways these people sort of almost like disembodied brains that float around through time and space. They interact with this life of the mind and this kind of diachronic republic of letters where they're commenting on someone 100 years before them and another 1,000 miles away",
      "them than what's going on around them. I mean, in some ways you'd read Sahih Bukhari or almost any other book and I'd say maybe most books written by Muslim scholars, you wouldn't actually know what their context is at all from the book. For example, the Fatawa al-Hindiya or the Fatawah al-Amgiri. You read this and you might not...you wouldn't even know it was written in India. In some ways, Sahih",
      "And in a lot of ways, I think Bukhari was more contextually embedded than other authors. But in some ways he's not at all contextually imbedded. So when we think about context and the kind of Western history, we think political concept or what was so-and-so ruler doing or are not doing? That stuff I don't think mattered to Bukhar at all. I think it had very little influence on his work. I",
      "his work was the very specific theological and legal debates going on with other Muslim scholars at the time. And Sahih Bukhari, it's like reading a I mean, I don't want to insult the book by saying this, but it's almost like reading or really snarky, like hipster movie reviewer something like where you know there's all these illusions to something that just happened in some other movie review or who the guy doesn't like who may have said",
      "get referred to by their name. So if you were reading that movie review in exactly that month, in exactly the year, you would know oh my God he just went there, he just said this, he said that right? But even a year or ten years removed from that what is going on here? What is he talking about? Why is he writing this? Sahih Bukhari is a book and also his other books to a lesser extent it's like incredible inside baseball",
      "ball or inside cricket or something for UK people. He's engaging in all these different debates that he never talks about explicitly, or very rarely talked about explicitly. And it's only the kind of generation of commentators after him who sort of try to delve into this and figure out what is he talking about here? Why does he say this? Why is he saying that? But the book is still very elliptical, very cryptic. So that's why I mean,",
      "Textual embedding is a much more theological and legal debate. You know, the kind of two biggest things are starting with the least less significant one is the debate between the Ahl al-Sunnah wal Jama'ah. So Bukhari in some of his books talks about the Ahla Sunnah. His student, Tirmidhi, in his Sunan uses the phrase, I think it's the earliest use of the phrase that anyone knows of. Tirmidi uses the",
      "that Bukhari identifies with, the kind of initial core of what the Ahl al-Hadith later matures into and splits into the Shafi'i school of law and the Hanbali school. And so there's a debate between them and what they would call the people of opinion or rational argumentation in law. This is associated with Kufa and of course with Abu Hanifa. So this",
      "This is the one group that his school of thought, his network of peers is opposed to and is always debating. And you see this in his Sahih. He very politely refers to Abu Hanifa as a certain person. I don't think he ever says Abu Hanifah's name exactly. But in another one of his books, it's a refutation of the Hanafi position on not raising your hands",
      "and bowing to raise your hands in prayer. He has a whole book against that, and he talks about, I mean, in very severe language about a person. I'll read you because it's really shocking. He says the rebuttal of him, this person, him who rejected raising the hands to the head before bowing in prayer and misleads the non-Arabs, the ajam on this issue, turning his back on the sunnah of the prophet and those who have followed him",
      "followed him. He says that this person, which is Abu Hanifa, did it quote out of the constructive rancor of his heart breaking with the practice of the messenger of God disparaging what he transmitted out of arrogance and enmity for the people of the sunnah for heretical innovation religion has tarnished his flesh bones and mind and made him revel in the non-Arabs deluded celebration",
      "Masha'Allah, very polite person. Rahimahullah. But this, he could not constrain himself here. He had to, he couldn't contain himself. He gave his opinion. That's a debate over whether you raise your hands or not in prayer. And if you, those of you listening think how can that be a serious debate? That's such a silly thing. Well, two things. One, Muslims take how you pray, how you worship God very, very, seriously and they're extremely conservative about this because this is how God and the Prophet taught them to pray",
      "them to pray and second it's not really about that particular issue it's about what it means for your view on the sources of law so for someone like bukhari although hanafis would would disagree with this i think they have a point i don't think that okhara should have been so hostile towards us but they they bukhare would see this as an indication that you reject hadiths from the prophet as the most authoritative way to know what his sunnah is",
      "What his sunnah is, what his precedent is. So that's one thing. The first big debate is kind of against the Kufan school of law basically becomes the Hanafis and the second big debate",
      "who are very pious Muslims, but they believe more in a kind of a rational God, in a God that can be understood rationally and that theology and beliefs about God have to be reasoned and accessible to reason. So they would believe in free will because at least more Teslites would because how can God punish you for something",
      "They would believe, for example, that God is just, that he's constrained by reason and justice. They believe in the ability of reason to understand right and wrong in the world independent of revelation. The Jahmis, what would be called Jahmis, although they don't refer to themselves like this,",
      "against what the sort of nascent Sunni community, they, the Jahmis are really people like Bishr al-Murisi, Ibn Abi Juwad. These people really led this effort. They were even arguably even more rationalist but ironically in a sense that some of them didn't apparently didn't believe in free will at all. Like they almost had a mechanistic view of creation that like God was so rational right or so you know",
      "that we can't even think of choice in the world. The world has to run mechanistically. What happens is this sort of Muslim rationalist camp gets very close to the Abbasid caliphs during the reign of al-Ma'mun, and toward the end of his reign he institutes this policy of basically bringing in Muslim scholars and asking them to say that the Qur'an",
      "continued under his successor al-Mu'tasim and then under his successors al-Wa'fiq. And it seems like also some of the, they also forced other positions on scholars like denying what's called ru'ya tul baari so denying that you would see God on the day of judgment. And from a Muslim rationalist perspective that makes sense because the idea... You can't think about God as something that can be seen as being in a body, as being visible. Like God has to be completely",
      "cannot be talked about in an anthropomorphic way at all. And whereas the Sunnis said, you know, well there's all these hadiths where the prophet talks about on the day of judgment you'll see God like you're looking up at the full moon or you'll appear before God without any barrier between you and him. So of course we have to remember why they're doing this it's not just that they're trying to be jerks although they were jerks in this case working with the man",
      "the poor Sunni scholars, you know, they're engaged in a lot of debates with other religious and philosophical traditions in the Near East, especially Christians. And if the Quran talks about Jesus as, that Jesus is a word from his Lord. And it's not just eternal. And so a Christian would say, I told you, look, we look at Gospel of John beginning is there was the word",
      "and the word was God, and the Word is with God. So we agree with you. Jesus is the eternal Word of God. The Mu'tazila it seems like said no, no, the words of God are not eternal they're created. The Quran is created. It seems that might be why they were so intent on promoting this position but for the Sunnis especially the teacher of Bukhari Ahmed ibn Hanbal",
      "alarming for two reasons. One, because they didn't believe that humans should engage in kind of speculative theology to begin with so you shouldn't be thinking about like oh what's the nature of God's speech? You know what's is it created or not created or what you know? They said no no you just God tells you uh what he wants you to know and you just say we hear and we obey. Human brains are not capable",
      "The second reason is it seems like this also really threatened the Koran's social place. There's this one very interesting episode where this early Hanafi Mu'tazilite scholar, Ibn Abban in the early 800s he's a judge and there's a case between a Muslim and a Jewish person and the judge asks the Muslim to swear by these words in the Korans",
      "Jewish litigant says, you know, I don't accept this oath because he's just swearing by this created thing. You guys think the Quran is created? So it was almost like this threatening the Quran's place. And also as Abul Hasan al-Ashri talks about in his works, he says, about a century later, he that this is really similar to saying that the Quran has called it bashar, right? It's just the word of a person. It is too close",
      "sensibilities. So they really opposed this. So those were the big issues that influenced Bukhari's life intellectually, and also influenced his life practically speaking because he at various points in his life is driven from places because someone doesn't like his particular view on something like this, on these issues of the nature of God's speech. So it",
      "to collect hadith, including to the Levant and Egypt, and died in 870 Common Era in his country of birth. Give our listeners an overview of his life before we look at his works and legacy. Yeah, so Bukhari is kind of going along that same theme of how weird and elusive context can be when you're looking",
      "is from Bukhara, but he's really not from there. I mean, he spends almost his entire life on the road studying and teaching and writing. So Bukharah is only a place where he grows up and goes there at the end of his life. That's it pretty much. He's from a wealthy family, one of his great-great grandfather converted to Islam. He was almost certainly Zoroastrian before that.",
      "According to al-Istakhri, writing about a century later, they were speaking Sogdian, which is an Iranian language but not Persian. Bukhari's student Muslim bin al-Hajjaj from Nishapur, he would be speaking Persian. But when Bukharis mom was yelling at him and telling him to eat his porridge or whatever she was probably yelling at them in Sogdiyan. In one narration of Sahih Bukhairi there",
      "There is a thing where he actually uses a Persian word. It's extremely rare. I mean, when I say context is elusive to these people, I mean these are people who are either speaking Persian or language close to it like Sogdian and that's what language they yell at their kids in. And then when they stub their toe and curse and stuff, they curse in Sogdian. But their whole life intellectually is in Arabic",
      "else in the world besides Arabic language. And very, very rarely do you see them ever break into or even acknowledge Persian or any other language. So this really interesting place in one point is saying Bukhari and one generation of Sahi Bukharis he says use the word Ham like also or like in Persian Ham on this like this and that but otherwise you just don't have any of",
      "So he grows up in Bukhara. He does hajj at 16. So he's studying, obviously, he learns Arabic. He learns with the local scholars of Bukharah. His family is a wealthy landowning family. Dehkan is what they're called, Persian for kind of landowners. And he, according to his secretary later on in life, he supported himself by rental income from property his family owned and he would get about 500 dirhams a month",
      "500 silver coins a month. And I think that would be about, you know, according to what I know, about, I don't know, a live chicken was three dirhams. So you can calculate how many live chickens you can buy a month with that. I mean, he could live comfortably, right? But so he basically was able to study and do whatever he wanted in his life",
      "Also, he rented out shops in Nishapur and he had like a shop that he rented up. That's how he made his money. So he travels first throughout one of Transoxiana and Khorasan region, the major cities of Khorusan, Balkh, Marv, Nishpur. Then he goes to Northern Iran to Ray, the great commercial sort of entrepot of Ray where there's modern day Tehran, where there is kind of a network of very influential Hadith scholars,",
      "Abou Hazm al-Razi, Ibn Wara. He of course goes to Baghdad, the navel of the world, the center of the",
      "Ibn Hanbal, he studies with Yahya ibn Ma'in, another major hadith critic in Baghdad. He goes to Wasit, Kufa, Basra in southern Iraq. In Basra, he studied with the famous hadith scholar Ali ibn al-Madini who was one of the scholars who caved in in the inquisition. I would have caved too. First day in there, I would've said where do I sign? But these guys were really tough.",
      "But Ali Medini, he's one of the people who caved in. But Bukhari had immense respect for him. He said, I never considered myself small except before Ali Emel Al-Medin. This guy is a great Hadith scholar. He went to Mecca, obviously, for Hajj. He studied with al-Humaydi there, also Medina. He",
      "So he spends about five years toward the end of his life in Nishapur. And that's where he teaches one of the people who become one of his most influential students, Muslim Ibn al-Hajjaj in Nisapuri.",
      "the famous Sunan as well. So then Nishapur, there's a one, there is a really big Hadith scholar in Nishpura named Muhammad ibn Yahya al-Dhahli and he's older than Bukhari. He dies around the same time but he's much older than Bakar so he actually managed to study with some people that Bukhar was not able to meet like Abd al-Razaq Sanani in Yemen and it seems like because when you have a figure like Bukkari",
      "have to look back at the earliest sources to figure out what's his history before you get a lot of stories spun around him. And it seems like something happens between Duhli and Bukhari, and it seems that Duhili does not have a hard time dealing with people being",
      "and he turns again against and drives out Muslim as well, or at least doesn't drive him out but kind of alienates him from a lot of people in Mishapur. Later on the story is that Dhul-Hali didn't like Bukhari's position on the nature of the Quran. And I should say this very quickly so Bukhar had a very reasonable position which is that the Quran is",
      "God, which is exactly what Sunni should say. But someone said, okay, well, when you recite the Quran or when you write the Quran, what about the sound that comes out of your mouth or the ink on the paper? And Bukhari said, well those are created because human actions are created. This was another Sunni position, which Is that a god creates people's actions so when I lift my hand up no God is creating that action right So this seemed completely reasonable right obviously when I say, you know Bismillah",
      "you know, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Rahim. Alhamdulillahi Rabbil alameen. Like that, the actual sound coming out of my mouth, the vibrations in the air are created or when I write that with a pen, the ink and the paper it's created. There was a kind of extremist extreme part, extreme faction of the Ahl al-Hadith. George Moctese calls them the ultra conservatives. I like the term uber Sunnis. Uber Sunnis is like they had like a rock band or something, nice tattoos. I don't know. They were extremely",
      "extremely hard. So their position would end up being rejected. So Bukhari was actually, if you go back and look in books of Aqidah in the 900s, Bukharis were completely correct. This is exactly what everyone always says that the Quran is eternal but when I recite it in the world that is a created sound. They said no, no, just saying that even the sound or",
      "Bukhari interestingly wrote a book rebutting them and in it he says you don't understand the position of Ahmed ibn Hanbal He's write this book within 15 years of the death of Ahmed Ibn Hanball And he says, you know, I studied with Ahmed I mean humble. I can tell you you don' t understand his dick click med heavy the exact exactness of his position on this and he's basically saying you don''t understand what you're talking about You're attributing all these opinions to Ahmed ibin hanbal and that he would say this that the other and he didn't say This what I'm saying is correct. But anyway, he's driven from",
      "Anyway, he's driven from Nishapur by Duhli. Later on it's because Duhlil doesn't like his position on the wording of the Quran, created wording in the Quran but it seems like their earlier version is that Duhhili said when I went to Mecca I saw Bukhari and he was hanging out with a guy who believed in free will and that was unacceptable so then he goes to Bukharah back to his native you know his hometown",
      "emir of the Tahir dynasty, a guy named Khalid bin Ahmed I think his name is. He has at his court he kind of has a coterie of Sunni Hadeeth scholars whom he's cultivating. By this time the mihna is over right so the mihma doesn't affect Bukhari. The mihnah is uh kind of over by that by this time and so uh and and Sunni scholars are sort of in ascendance the the caliphs",
      "Sunni scholars and patronize them and enjoy their support. So this Tahir-e-Amir in Bukhara has a bunch of scholars that he's kind of patronizing and helping them write their books and things, and he asked Bukhar to give private reading of his works to the Tahir e-Amirs' sons, so his own sons. And Bukha says, I don't do that kind of thing. I'm not going to give your kids special treatment. And",
      "really moving thing that's attributed to him where he says you know uh he's on the road you know traveling around khorasan he says the earth has become too narrow for me and he sort of almost like there's no place for him anymore and he is on the",
      "You can go visit his grave today. He dies in 256 or 870 of the common year, around 60 years old. Al-Bukhari is best known for his Sahih collection. Before we look at that in detail, describe to us his other works. Yeah, so Bukhara actually wrote a number of works and a lot of them have survived. Unlike a lot",
      "scholars, like for example Muslim very few of his works have survived. So Bukhari when he's in Mecca and Medina his first writings are about collecting the sayings of companions of the Prophet and then he starts writing a book called the Tariq al-Kabir which is a collection that ends up being about 12,300 entries it's a biographical dictionary of Hadith transmitters",
      "It's kind of placing them in the network of Hadid transmission, who met who, who narrated to who, when did someone live? What was their name? Maybe some information about them. Maybe a rating about whether they're reliable or not. And actually this is the book that Bukhari is originally known for. So it's really only until let's say before the kind of nine twenties or nine thirties.",
      "He's only known for his Tariq al-Kabir, the first kind of written response to him by Ibn Abi Hatim al-Razi died 938. I think he wrote a kind of rebuttal or criticism of the TariQ al-Kapir. That's the first book that gets talked about.",
      "He also wrote a few other, he wrote a lot of things about the Quran.",
      "he wrote a small book of weak Hadith transmitters. So those are the works he's known for. Yeah, okay. So Sahih Bukhari is an incredible book. I mean it's a kind of book where you look at it and you just say oof that's the reaction I have with it. Oof, I don't know this book is too much. It's just a mammoth accomplishment. First of all it's huge.",
      "I mean, it's a good 1.5 times bigger than the next biggest Hadith collection of the six books. I mean it's just – it's really big book and its comprehensive in its scope. It's basically the gospel according to Bukhari. It is the world and Islam according to the Bukharis. Everything in it. I meant everything. So it has got of course everything about Islamic law.",
      "It's got extensive discussions of Islamic theology, which by the way you don't find in a lot of other books. Let's say the six books. You don't found a lot theological discussions. It has history. It had sections on how you transmit Hadiths. It as sections essentially on hermeneutics legal and theological hermoneutics. It's comprehensive. So the book is not actually a Hadith collection",
      "a hadith collection, unlike let's say the collection of At-Tirmidhi or Musnad Ahmed ibn Hanbal or Sahih Muslim. It's basically Bukhari's opinion on all these issues I just talked about and the evidence he gives are the hadiths. So the book is his opinions on all",
      "His subchapter titles, sometimes little mini essays where he's basically very elliptically, sometimes clearly, sometimes not clearly giving you a discussion on a certain topic where he is going to promote his position and criticize others. And then the hadiths in the subchapter, in the Bab, those are the actual evidence. So that is the Sahih. I mean it is an incredibly... It's all inspiring book.",
      "book. I will say this about this, it's awe-inspiring and anybody who doesn't think that, I don't care if you think this stuff is all made up or if you thought Bokhari was deluded. If you look at this book and you are not incredibly impressed then you haven't really looked at it, then you're just reading a page or something. But I don t think it s possible for someone to look at the book and not be dumbstruck by the intricacy. He will narrate oftentimes mostly",
      "mostly multiple versions of a hadith in the book at different points in the books to make different points and The number of narrations he includes is Amazing. I mean, he will sometimes have exactly the same hadith with exactly the change transmission But just changed the teacher that he hears it from directly like he's just trying to show you the Breadth of his narrations that he has the committee as commando. I means really incredible",
      "I should also say that this is the first book of its kind in the sense that it was the first",
      "was that only included Sahih Hadiths. So if you look, let's say the Musnad of Ahmed bin Hanbal, Bukhari's teacher, it has lots of hadiths in there that have unreliable change of transmission. Now they might be in there because they're the best thing the author could find on that topic. They might be",
      "introduction. We only know about what he intended from reports attributed to him and then from actually reading the book itself. But Bukhari and Muslim are the first people who write books where they say that, they don't say this, but in effect what they're saying is we don't care if a certain hadith is important in law. We don't",
      "an isnad, a chain of transmission that we think meets our standards of authenticity is not going in the book. So the interesting thing about let's say Sahih Bukhari Muslim is that if you're looking for a lot of important hadiths about law just basic hadith about Islamic law, you will not find them in Bukharian Muslims books. They are not in there because those, a lot",
      "It just means that their reliability doesn't come from single chains of transmission. So these are the first books to do that, and this actually is a big controversy. And I think we might talk about that later when we talk about the reception of the books. There has been continued doubts cast on how authentic are the traditions recorded in al-Bukhari's Sahih. What are broader considerations and premises that should be borne in mind?",
      "in mind when trying to reconcile these views and where should listeners go next to learn more about al-Bukhari and his work? Yeah, well I mean I think the first thing which I think is very interesting that the first responses to Sahih Bukhara and to Sahi Muslim are negative they're from other Hadith scholars other Sunni scholars especially that network of clan of scholars in Ray",
      "Abu Zuhra al-Razi, Abu Hatim al-Raizi, Ibn Warah. They are not happy with these books. But they're not for the reasons you might think. They're upset about two things. They say one no one's done this before and these are conservative people. They don't do things that no one has done before. Just the idea let's say of criticizing Hadith transmitters they had to really make arguments that this was a legitimate activity",
      "And it wasn't like backbiting and slander. So they're very conservative about, you know, they don't just start writing a new type of book because, you",
      "oh, you want to use this hadith in an argument against me. But I just looked at this book of Sahih Hadiths and this hadithe is not in there. So I don't think you all really think this hadither is reliable. So they were concerned that Bukhari and Muslims books were going to give the impression that if a hadith was not in their books, it was not sahih. And so, in fact, Muslim Bukharis, it's attributed to him by in the work of Ibn Adi about 100 years later.",
      "a hundred years later that he said there are lots of hadiths that are sahih that are not in my book i didn't put everything that i think is sahih and they're in my books i just put the hadits that i",
      "are that they have come to consensus on as sahih so they're really forced to defend themselves against this accusation and it's really only maybe half a century after their deaths that the sunni scholars really embrace their books and see them as incredible accomplishments that need to be studied and modeled and kind of role and become role models for later books well i mean there's two things that i should talk about one is",
      "One is the criticism of Bukhari and Muslim by Muslim scholars, which starts early and doesn't stop. Right? And the second one is how we, quote unquote, we would say what's authentic and not. Those are two different issues. As I said, when we talk about kind of criticism of Baharian Muslims books or let's just talk about Bukharis book, right? The first thing to know is that Muslim scholars have always criticized these books.",
      "They not only are they criticized early on, but they're criticized by people who admire the books. For example, Ismaili, who died in 381 or 991 of the Common Era. I'm just at the top of my head. He's a Hadith scholar from Georgian kind of south eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. And he has you know, he's an early scholar of Bukhari's works. You know,",
      "God, don't humiliate me on the day of judgment by kind of punishing my father for his unbelief and for his idolatry. And Ismaili says this can't really be reliable because Abraham knew that God was going to punish his father for polytheism. And he knows that the father deserves this. And it's not possible for him to consider this as an insult or humiliation. So there's a couple",
      "will sort of push back against things that he thinks are theologically problematic in Sahih Bukhari, although Ismaili is a Sunni, right? Just like Bukhar. He's just a little bit more maybe rationalist about theological matters. There's a lot more criticism by the way of hadiths and in Sahi Muslim but in his Kitab al-Maudu'at, this book of Forge Hadith Ibn Al-Jawzi who dies 1201 of the common era has one",
      "there and two hadiths from Sahih Bukhari. And Ibn Hazm died 1064. He has a little treatise on, there's two hadits from Bukharis and two Hadiths are Muslims that he thinks cannot be accepted. The one in Bukhairi is the narration of Shurik of the prophets going to have having the maraj, the miraculous trip to heaven when he was a child. He doesn't say this contradicts what we know about",
      "And there's two in Sahih Muslim, I think. One is about Muawiyah saying when he converts to Islam, one of the conditions is that the prophet has to marry his daughter Umm Habibah. But the prophet had already been married to her like for years. And the second one is yeah, I",
      "Adam in paradise. Adam was 60 arms tall, like 60 cubits tall. And this is mentioned by Ibn Khayyam al-Jawziyah. He died at 1351 in his Manar al-Munif on Forge Hadiths. And it's Ibn Hajar al-'Askalani discusses it. He doesn't say it's forged, but he just says, I don't know how to resolve this problem because it says Adam was60 arms tall. Then humans have been shrinking ever since then. But he says, you go and",
      "building is like the houses of ad and thamud that are carved into the rock of wadi al qura in the hejaz. And the doors are the same size as our doors, so it doesn't make sense that they're shrinking. But he just says I don't know, I've not found anything that resolves this but he doesn't have given an opinion about whether it's reliable or not. You'll find a lot of Sunni scholars would say that hadith is an example of a forged hadith. The Hanafis are although eventually they acknowledge",
      "and write lots of commentaries on Sahih Bukhari, especially in India. You know, any scholar worth their salt in the 1700s, 1600s, 1700s is going to write a commentary on either Sahih or Muslim. But they you'll still see, for example, one scholar, Ibn Abil Wafa al-Qurashi who dies in about 1375. He's from Cairo. He has this section in one of his books where he just goes off on Bukharian Muslims. He says these books, they get way too much praise",
      "And Bukhari, you know, has this hadith of the one I just mentioned about the trip to Jerusalem. A Muslim has this Hadith about God created the earth on a Saturday when Saturday is the seventh day of the week and the Quran says that God created Earth in six days. And then he tells a story which is also actually comes from an earlier Hanafi scholar named As-Sarraqsi, the famous jurist and legal theoretician died around 1096 of the Common Era. In As-sarrax's Mubsut",
      "is Mubsut, he has a story where Bukhari allegedly is in Bukharah and he's asked about this question about people who drink milk from the same goat. And he says if you drink milk form the same goate you become a milk sibling with the other person that drank milk from that goat which is a ridiculous opinion okay? And all the Abu Hafs al Kabir the great Hanafi scholar of the city says this is ridiculous and Bukhaari kind of gets driven out of town. This story is not true",
      "Hanafi scholars like Abdelhaïd Leknaoui, who died in 1887, the great Hanafi scholar from Lucknow. He says that this story is made up. But you see it repeated in some Hanafi sources. I think not only are they kind of maybe trying to get back a little bit against Bukhari, who had disagreed so vehemently with the founder of the Hanafi school on law, but also",
      "there should be this division of labor between the Hadith scholars and the jurists. And that Hadith scholar's job is to basically process and authenticate Hadiths, but then not to get involved in giving legal opinions or trying to figure out how to interpret those Hadith. And you see this attributed to Abu Hanifa and other early scholars that, you know, the Hadath scholars are the pharmacists and the jurisps are the doctors. The pharmacists just make",
      "to prescribe it and how to use it. So I think that's also trying to make this point, which you see often in the polemics between kind of more juristically inclined people and more maybe hadith-inclined people all the way up until Salafi versus Madhavi debates today. It's really important to keep in mind that these scholars all criticized Sahih Bukhari, but they're talking about one or two or three hadiths in Sahih",
      "of the books. Now, a scholar named Dara Kutni, a great Hadith scholar from Baghdad who died in 995 of the common era. He wrote a book where he criticized about 217 Hadiths. 78 of them were from Bukhari and 36 of them are extremely arcane detailed criticisms of specifics in the chains of transmission. They have nothing to do with the contents of the Hadith.",
      "contents of the hadiths. And mostly they don't even affect the reliability of general hadith on that topic. Like it'll be like Bukhari gives three narrations and one of his narrations is missing a person in the isnad that should be there. That doesn't affect anything because, I mean, there's still two other narrations in the book. They're very sort of very, very almost nitpicky hadith criticism. But when we talk about even kind of criticizing",
      "and saying that meaning can't be accepted. Muslim scholars do that, but it's a very small number of hadiths in the books. And it's not controversial to do that until the early modern period, and really until the 19th and 20th centuries. Because at that point, criticizing Bukhari Muslims who are seen as sort of like the exemplars of the Sunni hadith science",
      "is seen as a way, a means or presents a danger of delegitimizing Islamic tradition as a whole. And I remember a scholar saying this when I was in grad school, Muslim scholar told me this. He said, you know, if you reject Abu Huraira as a transmitter, you reject Sahih Bukhari. You reject Saheh Bukharia, you",
      "narrations in Sahih Bukhari, maybe if I'm not mistaken. So you could have Sahih and just take out the narration of Abu Hurairah if you wanted. Certainly the Sharia is not based on Sahih. No school of law or theology started by their founder picking up Sahih, and saying okay well let's figure out what the Shari'a is. What the scholar meant when they said that is the methodology that Bukhar represents,",
      "an authentic representation of the sunnah, the prophet. If you can't do that, you lose your religion. And this, by the way, is something that was said in debates between the Mu'tazilites and the Sunnis even going back to the late 700s. One debate by this guy Omar bin Habib in the Abbasid court is a Sunni scholar who dies on 204 or 820 of the common era. He's debating with some Mu'tizilites",
      "court of the caliph and there the mohazalites are criticizing the narrations from abu hurayra saying abu hara is not reliable and omar bin habib says if you don't trust the companions of the prophet you don t have a link to the prophet. You do not have a way of transmitting the sharia from the prophet if you can't trust their companions now the difference between let's say the juristic school or let's just say the hanafis in this case and the early sunnis",
      "one wanted to lose the Sharia, but someone like the Ahl al-Ra'i would say we believe that the Sunnah of the Prophet is transmitted through hadiths that are consistent, reasonable fit into a system of analogy and legal reasoning. That's how you know the Sunna of the prophet whereas the early Ahl as-Sunni they said no, no this legal reasoning you're talking about should not have a primary role in",
      "role in preserving and understanding the sunnah. Basically, you go back, you collect all the hadiths you can, and then you put these pieces together, and that composite image is going to give you the best image, the best understanding of the sunna of the Prophet. So they weren't really diametrically opposed to one another. They just had differing visions about the best way to preserve and understand the sunnia. But the point that that scholar was making",
      "jurist or hadith scholar, that Sahih Bukhari by the modern period comes to represent that ability, that success, that Muslim success in preserving the Sunnah of the Prophet. And if you challenge him and the consensus around him as the acme of the hadith critical process, that you endanger the entire tradition. So you kind",
      "a consensus about what the prophet said and did, even a core of things that he said and",
      "So that's why in the modern period, Bukhari and Muslim become such beyond criticism. The criticism of them is sort of seen as semi-heretical. So I think that when we talk about criticism of Bukharian Muslim, I think on the one hand there's the question of kind of Muslims – the idea that Muslims are engaged in this constant process of reevaluation and study. And that never stops. Like Imam al-Shafi'i said, no book is complete except the Book of God.",
      "accept the book of God. You know, no book is free of error and no book in immune to criticism but the issue around criticizing Bukhari Muslim or Sahih Bukhar especially in a modern period is sensitive because Bukkari becomes like a symbol of Islamic tradition and criticizing it is seen as an attack on the integrity of that tradition especially because it's understood",
      "premises outside epistemologies, whether it's kind of a Western influenced Islamic modernism or a kind of Western Orientalist criticism. So that's why in the modern period there's a lot more sensitivity about criticizing Sahih Bukhari than there was 400 years ago. Now one of the questions was what does Dr. Brown think about Hadiths and Sahih",
      "I mean, I don't want to put down the person who asked the question. But I think it's like the question is, the way it's conceived is based on false premises. First of all, there are all sorts of things in Bukhari.",
      "different narrations of the same event. So he'll include three different narration of, let's say, the Prophet,, giving his speech telling Muslims what to do when they arrive in Mecca for their Hajj should they leave this state of pilgrimage after they do the Umrah until Hajj starts again or not? Or what exactly did he say to them? Like there are different narratons. They all have the same general idea but he says",
      "He says the wording is different. So those things can't all be true. The prophet said one of those things or he didn't. Now, by true, you mean are these different narrations representing kind of different aspects or different manifestations of a certain event that happened? Certain moment in life of the prophet and that that moment is true again, I think really depends on your premises.",
      "that they had a problem with a report of the prophet that describes his miraculous journey to Jerusalem occurring when he was a child. That is a fair criticism, right? Because we know that from many other reports that are agreed upon with consensus that the Isra' al-Malraj happened when the prophet was an adult after he's a prophet. So if you have a report that says something else then there has to be some kind of misunderstanding",
      "Maybe there's an error in one of the transmitters said. And by the way, I mean if you read Fath al-Bari ibn Hajar Al Asqalani or any other hadith commentary, there are, I'm just going to guess probably 20 or 30 instances in Sahih Bukhari where Ibn Hajr who is a devoted Sunni scholar right? Who was not radical, who was not maverick in anyway. He'll say this narration",
      "this narration is mistaken. There's a mistake in this narration. There has to be an error, maybe one of the transmitters got confused because it says something that we know is not reliable. In every instance that I know of in Sahih Bukhari, that is a one narration of several narrations. So the Sahih has many narrations about the Asra and Miraj, and one of them has this problem",
      "There are other things where it's maybe expanding the circle of criticism outward. Someone says, I have a problem with this hadith. For example, the age of Aisha when she gets married. The prophet consummated his marriage to Aisha",
      "in it about Aisha saying she was nine years old when the prophet consummated his marriage to her. Again, what are our premises? I understand that this hadith makes people uncomfortable because we live in a time and in societies where we consider nine-year-olds to be children who were not sexual beings and that it's sort of morally",
      "relationship, even a consensual one with someone who's nine years old. And by the way, people would say that a nine-year-old couldn't consent to begin with because they're not an adult. But those are our premises. But does have nothing to do with the rest of human history, right? So we know from the Quran that the enemies of the prophet looked at his sex life for ways to undermine his claims",
      "The Koran then talks about the true nature of adoption.",
      "It's one of the main ways that enemies of Islam, critics of Islam polemics against Islam attack the prophet's legitimacy. None of them talk about the age of Aisha until the year 1905 is the first instance where you see a book say hey the prophet married this girl who was really young. Why? Because nobody cared about that before because people in the United States were marrying 12-year-olds and 10-year olds and 13-year",
      "like Georgia was, like, 10 years old. So and even in the UK. So what are our premises? Like, for example, there's another hadith. Ibn Taymiyyah criticizes Bukhari's book for this too. He says there's a hadith where the prophet marries Maymuna, the aunt of Ibn Abbas, when he's muhrim, when she's in a state of pilgrimage. This is problematic. And there's, you know, Muslim scholars discuss this stuff. I don't want to get into the details. But, you",
      "to this criticism or not. But things like that, things where you're talking about when the Isra and the Maraj happened, these are criticisms that were the premises come from within the Islamic tradition. Like the criticism in Sahih Muslim of the Hadith that says that God created the turba, the dirt on Saturday. Well, the Quran says God created",
      "Quran. And it's agreed upon by Sunni Hadith scholars, you go back to any book of Hadith criticism till the 10 hundreds of the common era as far back as the 10 hundredths, you'll see the rule is always the same. If hadith contradicts the Quran if it contradicts established sunnah, but contradicts first principles of reason, if it contributes consensus, it can't be something that Prophet said. Now, of course, you have to be willing to look at ways to reconcile this right? So someone could say, Oh, the Quran says that dead animals are prohibited",
      "but the Prophet allowed people to eat a dead whale that was on the beach Look, it's contradicting the Quran. No, it is not contradicting in the Quran It's specifying the Quran by saying that the Qur'an's commandment about dead animals has to do with land animals not animals in the sea But my point is that the idea that you reject a hadith because it contradicts the Quran unambiguously This is not controversial all Muslims agree with this as far as I know",
      "But one, how quick are you to do this? Are you willing to think about ways that you can reconcile this hadith with the Quran or with other aspects of the sunnah or with reason? A lot of modern criticism of the hadith tradition or Sahih Bukhari is based on a unwillingness to grant any charity at all to attributions to the Prophet. And it just dismisses them out of hand because they don't immediately accord",
      "with your tastes or your predilections of the world. And then it becomes even more problematic when the premises that you're using to judge, or the criteria, the criterion of probity that you are using to Judge the reliability of Hadith is not based in any way in the Islamic tradition at all. So when someone comes and says,",
      "on changes in human society that have happened in the last hundred years. And no one is saying, like, I don't know any Muslim scholars who think that someone has to marry their nine-year-old daughter or something. In fact, it's entirely legitimate, entirely legitimate and has been done in many Muslim countries with complete compliance with the Sharia that a government can say we're going to restrict marriage age and say that you were not going to register marriages with people until let's say they are 18 or 16. This is fine. This",
      "that are permissible for the musliha or the benefit of the Muslim community. That's completely fine, but to then go back in time and say that because of our changes in economics and society we're going to say that something attributed to the Prophet could never have happened when no one said that even the Prophet's biggest enemies no one ever brought this up for 1400 years either 1300 years that is a criticism I think that kind of anachronism",
      "is, first of all, it's from a scholarly perspective, it' s absurd because there's no way that any historian worth their salt would say that we're going to decide what story is probable or improbable in the past based on what our values are today. And from more of a sort of confessional perspective,",
      "what you think happened in the life of your prophet based on changes every couple of years to what people think is appropriate in our time and place. I think the question of criticizing Hadith, as I say Bukhari, is really any of that discussion should start with what are people's premises? What are the basis for the criticisms they're making? So that would be my answer. You are the author of Misquoting Muhammad, The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy.",
      "slavery and Islam, and other works. What are the current projects that listeners can anticipate? Okay, well I've been working on one book for a couple years now maybe five or six years. It's mostly done but I can never get around to finishing it. It is called The Justice in Islamic Law History of Madhalim Courts and Legal Reform which is really kind of a book about what do Muslims",
      "Muslims do when they feel there's a conflict between or kind of a mismatch between their bodies of law and the expectations of justice. So that's how do Muslims handle it institutionally, how they handle it theoretically? That book is mostly done but I just can't get around to finishing it because other stuff keeps coming up. The slavery book I wrote because of the ISIS thing and I'm now almost done with",
      "discussion around Islam and racism, and especially anti-blackness. And I am looking at kind of Islamic law and scripture and how one answers this question. Short answer, Islam is not anti- black. That's the short answer. But you get to read the book for more details on it. Dr. Brown, thank you for being a guest on Abbasid History Podcast."
    ]
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    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - A Late-19th_Early-20th-Cen_DzfDIcNh3vE&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748686115.opus",
    "text": [
      "You guys can see this, right? Okay. So there's a, it's not just like an initial image. There's nothing to do with my talk, but this is from a kind of a manual produced around 1300 in the city of Mardin which is today in Southeast Turkey and it says book of some guy who wrote a book about engineering marvels",
      "you know he was designing for some sultan who whoever would want to make it and what it is is it's a uh closet and every eight times an hour this um paper mache slave woman would come out jadia would come up and give you like a glass of wine i thought that's interesting just because um you can imagine this is what somebody is trying to make a papier-mache version of a elite palace slave woman in the you know 13th century in south north northern syria",
      "northern Syria. And this is the, you know, the picture that they would paint which I thought was interesting to think about. Okay so the talk about like two topics which I found interesting and I think as I said there's a lot of potential I think to study off people interested in the kind of intersection of race and slavery in Islamic civilization.",
      "this in an article he and i talked about it before about um uh slave saints or saints who are slaves right and this has uh there's i think um you know a fertile ground to study this in the modern in modern western north northwest africa probably maybe elsewhere as well but there's also a lot to look for",
      "Amr Iqbal Syedłychshera, it got me onto this was actually this book here which I can use a prop because i'm like to see this small book. This is a book as called Hylia and Auliya the ornament of saints by a scholar from Isfahan named Abinu Emel Isfahani who died in 1038 of the common era big hadith scholar and kind of Sufi devotee",
      "And it's basically just massive biography of saints.",
      "history about the idea of like, the inner caliphate that there's kind of the outward temporal rulers but they're not really the rulers of the world. That the real rulers of this world, the real holders of the Caliphate are the saints and so this is an interesting idea about saying that these are actually... The section is devoted almost entirely to either Black African Saints or slave saints or both right which is very interesting and if the section is worthy of study it's just so rich with lots",
      "everything from you know a guy who's talking about how he's wandering through like egypt in the 900s and he comes across this woman actually no he's actually goes to east africa to kind of the land of what they would call the zange and his angie sees this woman um kind of singing poetry and he says like zang language and he's just like so impressed with her he thinks she's basically some",
      "One story that really caught my mind, and I actually translated this story in the appendix of my book, Slavery in Islam, is a story of this slave saint in Basra in the 700s who the city's going through a drought. And all the scholars and Sufis and the pious leaders of the city are out praying for rain and nothing works.",
      "him like kind of black Ethiopian guy with skinny legs. And he's sort of a short and has a pot belly. And He sees him just do this very quiet private prayer to God. And then the second he finishes, the rain just starts pouring down. So he realizes this guy is the real saint of the city. And so follows him finds out he's a slave who's being held in this kind of a slave entrepot by a slave dealer. And goes with his friends and they buy him the next day",
      "him the next day. And this lady is kind of confused about why you're buying me. So no, we want, we buy you because we want to serve you. We want you to teach us and drama ensues, you know, kind of pious story, pietistic story. And in the end, the very quickly, the guy dies, the Saint dies while he's praying. And they turn his body over and then they see that the blackness had disappeared from his face and his face was like",
      "although you have this like subversion of social hierarchy, uh, you still have the, um, the kind of idea that blackness if face is something that, you know, is disappears as someone because their piety is revealed. But it's interesting. And I want you to think about this idea of like his face becoming like the moon, because it doesn't say his face became white or somebody says his face came like a moon, which is an interesting concept. So there was, uh...I found also in another book by a scholar called Ibn al-Jawzi. You may, you all may know Ibn Al-Jawsiy",
      "Al-Jawzy because he died in 1201 of the common era. He wrote a book on the virtues of blacks and Ethiopians, Tanwira al-Khabash, in which it's probably the most comprehensive of these books on the kind of Africans and Ethiopian. So that has been translated into English as well. And he actually includes that same story I just mentioned but interestingly cuts off the last line about",
      "his face, the blackness is appearing in his face becoming like the moon. Although he gets that story from this book, he actually somehow that line gets removed. Okay. So he has a number of stories as well that are actually very similar. And these are just for those of you who were interested in reading it, but basically of early Muslim scholars and saints in the 700s and 800s who go into a variety of circumstances there in Mecca or they're in Medina and they come across,",
      "can get the rain to fall and then some black slave comes out and prays privately. And then they real, then the rain starts coming in and they realize that this person's like the real state. And there's sort of like, then they kind of go and try to study with them. So this actually apparently became a trope. I mean maybe these events actually happened or it becomes like a literary trope is sort of unclear but it's very interesting. And I think a lot of potential to study this. Of course",
      "of course the a really famous instance of this is actually in the masnabi of uh the famous uh jilal deen rumi who died in 1273 um and he this is acutally a translation by arbery into english you can see this story of this kind of black slave who goes out and he's on a caravan he goes out into the desert he counters kind of basically manifestation of the prophet muhammad and it says they just have here that",
      "So again, you have this idea of blackness is appearing as the person that kind of, as their piety and their attainment of sainthood in a way is manifested. But again, it's not just about the face,",
      "not becoming white or like Caucasian or something, but actually becoming like the moon. And I think it's important to discuss why that is for a number of reasons. I think that the new, the moon is associated with the Prophet Muhammad and the Prophet Mohammed is often kind of personified as the moon beauty of the moon his face is like the Moon. The second reason is that, and this I think gets into kind of Sufi cosmology",
      "is which has its origins in kind of essentially kind of Near Eastern Neoplatonism where the moon is the lowest level of this had the heavenly sphere. So we live in the sublunary realm, the moon like the kind of liminal body that is the last body of the unchanging realm of the spheres before you get into the kind",
      "the world of corruption and change that we live in. So, the idea of kind of transcending going from this earthly life to moving up towards attainment of closeness to God and annihilation in God and unity with God and things like that is here metaphorically described as becoming like the moon. And then if you think about the personalities you're dealing with in these stories right there they're",
      "They're the earthy, dark-colored slave. Dark like Adam, like the original human being. Adam in Arabic probably means originally dark colored or black. And so you go from kind of a human loneliness to transcendence in that imagery. So I think that's an important reason why you have this description of the moon. It's not just like the blackness disappears. But you do have some instances where",
      "where it doesn't talk about the moon, but I think are very interesting as well. This again is also from Helya Teraulia of Abu Naiman al-Isbahani and I think it's in the biography of Dhu al-Nun al-Misri who was a very interesting saint. He dies in 861 of the Common Era. You can see here, I just highlighted it. So Dhu an-Nu'l-Masri his dad is actually Nubian so he himself is sort of like sometimes talked about",
      "as being African, but it's not. I mean, other times he's not described as such, but without a doubt has this link to Nubia and you have this very interesting story where Abunaym al-Isbahani report has this report that Dhu'l-Numithri said to us basically I was like out in the kind of wasteland and I saw a black person",
      "his color turned whites. Every time he mentioned God, his color turn whites. So that's like a very interesting story. It almost have instantaneous effect of this piety demonstrating itself. I think again, I didn't want to...I mentioned some of these stories in my book Islam and Blackness but i think there is a huge amount of material that can be worked on",
      "that can be worked on as like a literary, you know, sub genre of saints biographies. And again I'm happy to help anybody who's interested in pursuing this. The second thing I want to talk about which is very short thing but I think also has a lot of potential is the notion of smell and sense associated with slavery and especially blackness or black African kind of racialization",
      "as Black African. I think Andrew Kettle had a book called The Smell of Slavery, which came out maybe a few years ago, kind of looking at 18th and 19th century, the way that sense of smell and stuff became associated with racial backgrounds and slavery in the Atlantic world. So I think there's potentially",
      "to find and work on in this pre-modern Islamic tradition. And almost certainly also in the early modern, modern Islamic tradition as well. But this is one, this is an alleged Hadith. I mean, it's attribution to the Prophet Muhammad. I don't think it's authentic. It appears for the first time at first and pretty much only time in this collection of al-Hakamun al-Nasaburi who is a scholar from Khorasan who dies in 1014 of the common era.",
      "actually very unusual to have a hadith appear only that late. It's usually considered a sign of forgery, at least among Muslim scholars. And this is a story I'll read to you. A black man came to the prophet and said, O messenger of God, indeed I am a black man putrid-smelling with an ugly face and no money. If I were to fight against these folks, these kind of enemies of Islam until I were killed, where would I be? He replied in",
      "the prophet, alayhi salam, went up to his body and said, God has whitened your face, sweetened your smell, and given you great wealth. And he said to him and to others, I've seen his wife among the black eyed, the dark eyed beauties, probably black is not a good term to throw in here because it just confuses things, but dark eyED heavenly beauties who are by the way, in the way they're described in kind of Hadith reports and other reports, exegetical reports very white colored. So their skin is so white that it's almost translucent",
      "translucent. But so his wife is one of these dark eyed beauties, taking off his woolen cloak and sliding her body between the cloak and his body. So you see this story of I think it's interesting to me pursue this idea of like putrid smell being associated not necessarily with slaves because this guy is not a slave. We have no evidence that he is. But the idea of kind of smells being associated",
      "that's something that also can be pursued. I don't want to take more time because I don t really have a lot more to say anyway, but these were just two subjects I thought were potentially useful if people wanted to continue looking into them. Thanks very much."
    ]
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    "text": [
      "Croeso. Diolch am ddod heddiw. Fy enw i yw Talha Asaf, fi'n myfyrwyr PhD a mydd yn hanesydd o podcast Ysgogodau Abysidiaeth sy'n cael ei rannu dros arllawr gan IHRC Bookshop ac mae canlyniadau 15% allan ar IHRP Bookshop gyda codi arall AHP15",
      "Mae'n fy ngwlad gwych cael Mr Brown gyda ni. Dwi ddim yn credu ei fod angen cyflwyniad arall. I wneud hynny, unrhyw beth rydyn ni'n sgwrsio amdano yw ein gwleidyddion bersonol a does dim angen i ni ofalu'r gwleiddiau o HRC neu P21.",
      "Who started with the reading? Oh my god. Remember who said it was the first one to read? Yes, I do remember that! It's a good thing you have a copy of the book here as I knew you would. So we get flavor. Yeah let's see... First, assalamu alaikum everybody. I should say hi first. Go ahead. Thanks for inviting me.",
      "taking the time to read the book or at least highlight strategically within the book so that it looks like you've read the entire book. It's always an honour to have anybody want to hear what I have to say, or be interested in my work. I mean that, it's really an honour. And the older I get, the more I appreciate it and also the worse I feel.",
      "egotistical having people visit the meet so I will do my best to be useful to you and apparently I'm supposed to read part of my book so let me just look up something really quickly because i'm going to find a page number based on this we need 10 just to make that he was gonna deal with yeah he did tell me I can",
      "But to be fair, I have been on the road. You get a lot of kisses. Yeah so okay This is a Maybe like I read like three pages or four pages or is that too much? A page? That's not...that's nothing! It's not like coherent thoughts. One press please. Okay you know what I'm gonna read whatever I want",
      "And if you don't, I'll do my best. The part I'm going to read is for me the most academically interesting thing that I came across. I found this really fascinating. I think a lot of people will find it interesting as well. And of course it's in the middle of the book so stuff has already been discussed. If you have questions about it we can talk.",
      "metaphor, and metaphor shaping reality. This seems really onanistic but we have already seen how the metaphor of darkness in life came to inform early Christian thinking on Africa. Blackness as a metaphor however has a much more expansive history. Race and how language of color is used to make it maybe social constructs, but humans are still part of nature. This seem so influenced nearly universal ways",
      "sun or artificially tan all year round. It is certainly true that in associating lighter skin tone with higher socioeconomic status, we are centering the global north – the impact of exposure to sun is much less visible among darker-skinned populations. But even in Africa south of the Sahara, we find evidence of darkness acting as a metaphoric indicator of the lowest rungs of society. In such cases,",
      "of dirt and unfriendliness, not of more sun or melanin. It is not surprising that languages seem to have a near universal association of black dark with bad, and often also of white light with good. This is true even in Africa south of the Sahara. Language-specific studies have found associations of brightness or white with moral or positive valence while darkness and black are associated",
      "However, this metaphoric association does not necessarily govern how a society thinks about phenotype and value, let alone race. Color descriptors like black or white can and often do work as part of the social construct of race to include and exclude, to empower and disempower.",
      "color descriptors may also simply work to describe someone's features with no relation on their status. We must note a crucial point here. In some societies, the language of color can do both jobs depending on context. While color is central for some systems of race like in the United States it is less important to others like in Arabian Gulf which define racial hierarchy of power inside or outside by means other than phenotype",
      "and phenotype, such as descent, lineage, or citizenship. But color can still play a role. Even in societies where race is not primarily indicated by color, color can sometimes be used as a proxy for racial status but in this case color is indeterminate and secondary. In other words, though color may be invoked, some other factor like lineage or citizenship is primary and all-important. Moreover, the metaphoric",
      "The metaphoric meaning of black dark equals bad and white light equals good are often used in ways that are totally unrelated to people's actual appearance. The metaphor of black equals bad may appear nearly ubiquitously in world languages, but it often does not apply consistently within a language. Describing someone's appearance as quote black often has no negative connotation. In many languages from Africa south to Sahara spoken by populations",
      "in which the black African phenotype predominates, the word black is often used to describe the skin tone of the vast majority of the population. It carries no negative connotation. Yet that same word for black, in those same languages, is also used to register malice or negativity in phrases like black-hearted. But this negativity associated with",
      "over into the literal description of the skin tone of the population speaking those languages. See Appendix 2, there's a whole appendix on it. This equanimity around black as a descriptor breaks down noticeably in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa where darkness and blackness either real or perceived are bound up in racial categories of power and acquire status denotation. So,",
      "many African languages. What we might deem metaphorical anti-blackness exists alongside a neutral view of blackness as a physical descriptor without one influencing the other, but in some cases in world history, metaphoric anti- blackness can actually shape how physical features are described. It can bend the way language is used to talk about physical description even when all the people in question look the same. In other words,",
      "Sorry, in other words even when the metaphor of black equals bad is explicitly transformed into a literal description of someone's physical color it can still have nothing to do with their actual appearance. Here comes a weird part. Literary evidence from medieval Scandinavia often depicts slaves thrall and Scandinavian as black or dark in complexion The Rigstula poem which has been dated to between the 9th and 13th century",
      "tells of the mythic origin of Scandinavia's social classes. The first nobles were fair-haired and bright colored, the first farmers were ruddy but the first slaves were black, svartan, they're black haired or black skinned But in reality these slaves were not literally black They were not even darker than their owners Slaves in medieval Scandinavia were either from the indigenous population i.e other Scandinavians",
      "from Scotland or Ireland, Saxon, Germanic or Slavic. None of these groups could be described as darker than the average Dane let alone as black. Indeed Scandinavian literary evidence just as often makes the point that one cannot tell a slave by their looks. We also see this in medieval English literary depictions of the Welsh as the near other subject to enslavement.",
      "book of Anglo-Saxon riddles references to the quote dark haired Welsh slave and the quote swarthy, swerta Welsh in contrast to light haired or blonde English. How can we make sense of describing slaves who are the same colour as their owners and all of them amongst the palest humans around as black? First you must recall the widespread link between the desirability of light and basic economics. I'm almost done",
      "an ear of biological reality. Ruth Terris notes that the Scandinavian slave's ugliness and unhealthiness was not literal, even though it claimed to be a physical description. It was a foil to contrast the subhumanity of the slave with the human normality of the ruddy and healthy free folk. The physical description of the slaves as black and ugly, as foreign quote, was part of the social construction that made the slave an other. It wasn't otherness, not the color that was important.\"",
      "Thank you, Christopher. I know maybe that was a long reading but it's a coherent section. I think everyone here appreciated that. Your book has lots of anecdotes in it, great anecdotes. Historic as well as personal. One that stood out is when the Saudi student wanted to join Black Students Association.",
      "ac sut roedd pawb yn credu ym mhobrwyd hwnnw, a wedyn dywedodd ei fod ei mam yn ffermio. Rwy'n hoffi rhannu anegdyd o fy hun i ddarparu sut gall rhai pobl fod yn cynnyddol wrth ymchwil am llywiau neges ar gyfer Mosleidiaid, yn enwedig Nen-Blesneg. Felly 4 neu 5 blynedd yn ôl – ac rwy'naf yn ceisio bod hyn yn gyflym –",
      "yn ysgolion llyfrau de-colonial. Dyma'r cyflwyniad cyn Covid, ac mae wedi ei sefydlu gan ddyn Ddaeusydd Cymru o rhan eithaf anodd i'r wlad honno, Luton. Felly roedd hi'n mynd drwy Francys a Phanon ar y rhwydwaith, ac fe wnaeth hi gyfarfod ar un siaradwr ar bob cwestiwn.",
      "ac roedd yn ddewis o amser. Felly ar y cyfnod hon, fe wnaeth hi gyflwyno unrhyw ffrindiau nid-Mosneidd, rhywle o'r Cymru. Ac ar yr adeg hwnnw, rydw i wedi darllen llyfr Amos Sezer a pan oedd yn cwestiynau a chyflawniadau, fe gafais i ofyn, wrth ymchwil â llyfrau gwbl yn Nghobl a chreswmliaid yn Africa, fel mae Sezer yn ei ddweud,",
      "ac mae'r Nazis yn ddwy ffordd o un coin. Allwn ni hefyd dweud bod yr Ewropeaidd a'r Cymreigion Islemi sydd ganddynt y cwain cymaint ar hynny, pan fyddai'n mynd i fod yn rhan o ran cyrffau Cymru? Ac wedyn y gwirioneddol gwneuthredwr muslim, ei bach, fe wnaeth hi sgwrsio mewn i'r ear y siaradwr ac roedd yn cael ei sensu gan siarado, ac roedde i'n rhyfeddu iddo. Ac wedi cael plantiau yn y cynulleidfaoedd.",
      "Mae'n strategaeth hizb ut-tahrif, os ydych chi'n gwybod beth mae hynny. Ac fe dweudon nhw, na, nid yw llyfrgell yn fel hyn, ac ontylogaidd mewn Islam, nôl gwbl yn fach yn tebyg a chynhyrchu llyfrau hefyd. Felly wedyn roedd yna ferch arall yno, berch, a oedd hi'n dweuddio â mi, pam rydych yn ateb cwestiwn brothau?",
      "Yn ystod hyn, fe wnaeth yr aelod dweud wrthi'r ffordd y mae'r Arwain yn cynrychioli'u persbectifiaethau am sut mae'n rhan o'r cymorth ar gyfer ysgolion. Ac wedyn, drwy gwrdd â chyfrifiad, roedd y sefydliadwr yn anfon y cwestiynau sylweddol iawn fel,",
      "Roedd hynny'n ddiddorol i mi. Rwyf eisiau rhannu hwn i'r cyflwyniad, a chael ymddiriedaeth am yr hyn rydych chi wedi ei feddwl o ran y cyd-destun ar gyfer ysgrifennu pethau. Mae rhai llai o ffyrdd yn y bwyd ar y topig.",
      "I just wanted to set that context and get a sense of your motivation, what gaps you felt you were filling in writing this.",
      "Islamicate and Europeans two sides of the same coin. I think her mistake was not allowing a discussion that could have dealt with that, and I mean not that there's any you know people can be wrong maybe I'm wrong but I think that this idea that you know Muslims or Arabs or whatever are just like a colonial rapacious slaving force in Africa just like Europeans. This is completely inaccurate",
      "I don't think it's historically accurate, I think it is a political talking point used especially in the United States and various anti-Muslim groups in countries like Nigeria and stuff like that. Nigerian politics. But I have a whole chapter on this in the book and we can set that aside as a point of discussion because I think its very important",
      "a lot of times Muslims feel like they sort of have to flagellate themselves and talk about how horrible Muslims are. Well, first of all look, racism is a huge problem in most of the world, right? Anti-black racism is an issue in a lot Muslim world. That's a fact that needs to be dealt with. Okay, this has been acknowledged and it needs to dealt with but we have to put that aside",
      "Look at these others. The second point is, when we talk about this, what about the hundreds of millions of Muslims who live in Africa south of Zahra? That's like treating them like they're not part of the Muslim world and the only Muslims that are worth considering are the Arab Muslims who were allegedly colonizing in slavery.",
      "Unfortunately, part of this discourse is that it completely denies the existence of hundreds and millions of black African Muslims. You know who have strong traditions of scholarship and piety and go to work and go home and kiss their kids and all the stuff that right Muslims do, right? Okay Let's put that aside That's another important issue Now getting to why I wrote this book",
      "Let's address the elephant in the room. I'm not black, you may have noticed this. Okay? Alright...I didn't uh like I didn't get up one day and be like, I want to write a book about Islam and Blackness In fact somebody after they wrote my previous book, Slavery and Islam, available where books are sold After I wrote that book someone said oh are you going to write about Islam racism?",
      "I'm not like suicidal, you know? But then what happened was in the summer of 2020, prime COVID time, there I was at home enjoying my life sitting in the garden taking my kids out to look at squirrels collecting nuts or whatever they do. And I get emails. I start getting all these emails because apparently there's an academic Lister called Research Africa.",
      "I'd love to be on it. I just don't happen to be okay, so there was a huge debate blowing up on the research Africa Lister about A parent I didn't know this but apparently at the time It's an actual academic position like there's professors in America who teach classes on this idea That Islam is Islam is added scriptural foundation in the Quran in the son of the Prophet Islam is anti-black So this one professor",
      "I won't mention his name, he's Nigerian. He teaches at Vanderbilt University. Nigerian Christian. He was arguing with these people on this list sort of saying Islam is an anti-black religion. So I'm getting... and he's saying look at this Hadith, look at the Quranic verse, look a Maliki Thick Opinion, look chchchch And so I'm geting these emails from people saying How do you deal with this Hadit? How do we deal with it? How to work with this? And I was like what is all this stuff? I mean I hadn't seen this maybe tangentially I heard about it but I was",
      "Okay, I'll respond and I didn't respond. I just like was too busy taking my kids out to look at the squirrel collecting nuts So eventually December rolls around and I feel December 2020 I say to myself You know what? These people email me these questions. I really gotta respond So I started to do research about this hadith, this Quranic verse so I started looking at one thing looking another thing Bigger bigger bigger bigger in order to answer one question",
      "You have to look at the context. So, within a few months I was like oh my god this is a book. That book came out of answering questions sent to me. I didn't go out and ask these questions. And I looked at the books that had been written on this general issue of Islam and blackness right? A lot of very good books.",
      "He actually went to Salswith May as well.",
      "All of them. And I was trying to fill the gaps that their books hadn't addressed and build context that their book hadn't gotten into. So, that's what my book is. It's more comprehensive conceptually and more detailed in terms of the various issues that come up than the existing books on the topic. And i would say those people were happy that I was doing this. They supported me in writing this book.",
      "I feel there's something wrong there where just as an academic you feel that you can't write about certain topics.",
      "I wrote this book because people asked me questions and I couldn't find the answers to the questions in existing literature, so I found the answers by myself. And I'm a scholar of Islamic intellectual history and I produced an answer. The answer is here if people want to read it they can, if they don't want to, they don' have to. It's free country at least in US.",
      "transatlantic slave trade and the guarding of the so-called... That gets into the other, this gets, do you want to ask about the issue of Arabs as slavers? I mean we're going to go on till 7.30 and So ask whatever you want, I will be quiet. We are here to listen to you. Do you want cover like, I feel your book covers sort of main topics right? Language, history, law",
      "Llywodraeth, a ddysgu hefyd. Rydym ni i gyd wedi siarad am ffrindiau. Un o'r pethau gorau ynghylch llyfr Slaveryn ac y bwrdd cynnydd Hadith yw sut rydych chi'n mynd yn ôl at leoliadau sylfaenol. Ac rwy'n credu mai un o'u bennodau gorai yma, mae'n cael ei fodlonio fel fotocopi gan lawer o graddedigion,",
      "I just want to know, when you were covering the pre-existing literature of racism or the different definitions of racism and so on was there anything in particular that stood out for you?",
      "But you know if you're a grad student and you're in like a seminar, you have to do a literature review. You actually have to sit and read... It's not inconceivable that a human being given a couple of months of free time can actually get a general command of a subject area right? I certainly am NOT qualified to give my opinion on this topic but you can sort say these are the different schools of thought One other thing that I found really interesting about debates around race",
      "around race and racism is the extent to which a lot of the agonistic kind of discourse today, and pain and accusations are really people talking past each other because there's sort of two general schools of thinking about racism. One is to say that racism is when you kind of...",
      "it's about what you feel, it's your belief. You believe that somebody is not as good as you because of their race and you have negative feelings towards them So it's sort of this... so it's intention, it' s about acting on that And of course like if that was the general discourse around racism for a long time The second school of thought you might call kind of substantive or maybe affective school of racism which is to say",
      "is to say that it's not about intent, it's no about what you believe. It's about the results. So if you're in a society where let's say South Asian or black and brown people are consistently less well off financially, consistently targeted more by the police, consistently not allowed into certain sectors of the economy that are under rape, that is a racist system because in its effect",
      "its effect discriminates against certain people, based on race. And you could be in that system and you could love Desi's, you could like Afro-Caribbean people, and they can be your best friend and you can say why would I ever think this person is bad? But because you're part of that system, and functioning within it, you're racist. Because anybody in that",
      "So racism is the result. And so when these two schools of thought meet each other, you end up with all... People get really upset because someone will say for example, America is an extremely racist country. That can't be denied from the substantive school of thought, substantive racism school of though. Just look at the statistics about crime, housing, health,",
      "And it's just black Americans are going to be treated differently than let's say white America. Now someone from the other kind of more traditional school thought about thinking about racism is maybe like the popular way that people think about it, is if you say we're a racist society or I'm a racist person what they're saying is I think black people are bad or I think Black people are not as good as white people and that's not true.",
      "I mean, someone could argue that",
      "Mae'n ddrwg iawn i ni yma. Mae problemau gyda defnyddio'r enwion neologaidd, fel bod yr adnodd racism yn llai o 100 mlynedd yn ôl, a gafodd ei ddefnyddiau yn y bôn am y Nazïsmi. Felly, wrth siarad â'r cyfranogydd sy'n ymwneud ag is-shariau, gall rhywun dweud, wel, mae defnyddiolio'ch adnodyniadau hyn yn eithaf helpus",
      "Mae'n dechrau ei ddiffidio. Yr un peth y byddai rhywun yn credu'r term sylfaeniaeth, mae'n eich cynnal i mewn i systemau ethig ac yn diweddarach chi fel arfer o Fwsg yn lliur eich hun yn yr adeg. Felly, gallai rhywyun dweud, wel, dyma mwy o gyfraithsbrydion perennol, gwirionedd, angen gydlyniad, y math hynny. Os ein bod ni'n dal ato â nhw, rydyn ni'na'n mynd i wneud llawer gwell. Mae pawb yn cael hawdd i'r safon,",
      "i ddim yn cael ei haro. Os ydym ni'n cadw at hynny fel Mosleidd, byddwn ni'r lle gwell ac yn cynnal y termau peiriannau. Felly gallai rhai bobl dweud, wel... Gallai fod yn fath o racism esgylweddol mewn gwirionedd. Os wyt ti'n gweld bod cymunedau sy'n nodi'n yr unig, gan roi metricus arall,",
      "efallai y bydd yn gwneud sens bod chi'n disgwylio ar gyfer rhyw fath o ddilyniad mawr. Gall rhai bobl gwybod, pan fydd yn dod at Fuslims yn yr adrannau hwn, nad ydych am wneud hynny i bobl Cymru. Mae'r cymhlethadau sydd gennym ni fel pobl, fel imigraithi, yn cael eu cynrychioli mewn faterion o ran sex ac enghreifft. Ac os ydynt wedi rhoi'r metrigiau hynna, mae'n well iddo fod unwaith un person Gweddill a chyfarwydd â'r gymdeithasau agored,",
      "become leaders or blacks or British Muslims? I don't know how you respond to that.",
      "and we want to break out of this framework, whatever. A lot of times that's just an excuse for not addressing racism. So sometimes people use these bigger arguments as excuses for not address the fact that racism is a real problem. And by racism here I mean discrimination against people based on how they look or where they're from. Their background or their phenotype.",
      "What's irrational? What's being irrational? That's a conflation of my stuff.",
      "or cultural racism. I'm sure some of you have studied this, or know about it, right? This is basically... the term kind of emerges from British scholars in the 1980s and this is probably an example of the best. I have nothing against black people, I just don't like hip-hop culture. That's new racism, that's cultural racism but look if there's a black guy like, do you guys remember Fresh Prince of Bel Air",
      "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and what was the guy who was his friend? Carlton. No, no I don't mean Jazzy. Yeah good for you for knowing Jazzy, but Carlton So the idea is if like Carlton's walking down this street I should actually be totally fine with that I should be like oh I'm definitely not crossing the street because that guy isn't wearing hip hop clothing right I'm saying it's not a background, it's just the culture they're part of",
      "culture they're part of. But here's the thing, no one really gets out of that right? I mean it's like trying to be a good Muslim in Britain, there's nothing you can do. Like you can be like I'm gonna join Prevent, I'm going to sell t-shirts for Prevent. I'm gunna report on all these other people etc etc and you know what I'm still going to get into trouble at the airport right? Because you'll never actually be allowed out",
      "I don't want to say that we're not actually racist against this group, it's just their culture we don't like or something. But actually, we don' allow people... We are very selective in who we allow to exit this group that we discriminate against And the worst part is, we dont treat these people like individuals When you give an example about who should lead a Muslim community How about we assess people as individuals? That's what the majority does So if your white race person Or white American person",
      "You get judged based on, you're like... are you a good leader or not? Are you a great politician or not. So the new racism part of it is that you don't and this is how Muslims can be erased and all these other things can be erase because these are all groups that are not actually allowed by the majority, by the group in power to be assessed as individuals.",
      "start talking about people as groups and not thinking about them as individuals, that's an indication that these cultural racist ideas are driving us. That's my amateur opinion. I mean in this regard on this issue, I'm not expert. I'm just giving my own thoughts of someone who'd read a lot on the subject. There is more to be said than that. We've got few hours tomorrow together because obviously I sense a lot of people here want",
      "bydd yn rhoi llawer o amser arnyn nhw. Rwyf eisiau dod at hanes y tropig, mae'r llyfr hwnnw yn eich chephlau 6 yn ddiddorol iawn. Mae hyn yn ei adroddiadau bod pwrpas addysg yw gallu ffyrddio myfyrwyr gan yr angen i chi wneud cymryd rhan o'r pryd sydd wedi cael ei wneutio. Roedd hi ddim yn dweud hynny. Mae'n debyg ei fod wedi ei ddweud. Dwi'n meddwl mai rydych chi wedi'i ddarllen... Roeddwn i'n dweudd ei fod yn debygu nad wyf yn credu ei fod hefyd wedi seiliedig ar hyn.",
      "Mae hyn yn cynnal ironi sy'n anodd i bobl ifanc, mae Neil Postman yn ei ddarparu. Mae'r cyfarfodydd wedyn yn ceisio eu cymryd ychydig ar eu hunain. Felly mae addysg yn bwnc emotiwol o ran sut mae gan beirniadau'n dysgu'n ifanc ac hefyd am gymunedau, beth maen nhw'n gweithio ar y byth?",
      "yn ymwneud â phosibl, a'r ddewis oedd yn ei gynnal. Yn mynd i'r dyfodol, beth sydd gennych chi o ran sut y byddai llyfrgellau'n goruchwylio? Ac hefyd o ran y diaspurau Cymru, yng Nghymru ac yn bennaf yng Nid-America. Beth fyddant yn ei ddysgu iddynt eu plant",
      "or their after school, to the supplementary schools.",
      "of American society, which is a deeply, deeply, deep racist society. If you do some kind of operation on my brain, you're gonna find racism baked into every neuron in my brain cell. Becoming Muslim was the beginning for me",
      "escaping from this kind of thing. You'll hear this stuff from a lot of Muslims, including black Muslims in America right? They'll talk about like becoming Muslim is begins to cure these sicknesses in you. But I mean I'm like a recovering person. So when I was writing this book",
      "I really, you know, kind of was...I'm more like classical liberal. I don't believe in people's freedom to make choices. I dont' believe that they should be told what to do and the government should have minimal role in shaping our lives. It's like religion and family should be doing this etc., etc. So I read a fascinating dissertation written by a British, black British scholar, I think of Caribbean descent",
      "in the US, it's a fascinating digitation called The Duty to Miscegenate. Do you guys know what miscegenates means? Okay, miscegeinate means racial mixing. Racial mixing right? It's a term that is actually coined by supporters of segregation in the time of Abraham Lincoln. People who were like really opposed to Abraham Lincoln and end slavery and potential of black Americans to become citizens and stuff like that. So miscegeneration is like racial mixes basically.",
      "So he had a dissertation called The Duty to Miscegenate. And I picked it up and started reading it, and I was really like, ugh, I can't believe this. This guy...I know what he's going to tell you. He's gonna be one of these woke guys who is telling you that the government is going to come and some kind of socialist program over society and make everyone blend together so everybody is equal or whatever.",
      "He's gonna make us contagionate. So I read the citation, and I started to really agree with his arguments. Like by the end of it, I said this... His argument in the end is It has not been good enough in America or Britain To remove the barriers to racial mixing, to remove the barrier. These groups still stay apart and black women for example are still",
      "are still considered to be the least attractive as marriage partners. They're sexually exploited but not married, right? So they're... This hasn't been cured by all the removal of laws against black and white marrying in the United States. It hasn't cured it! These groups are still... The only way is that they have to have a duty to seek one another's society. That if you're in the position of power in this society like whites in America",
      "America, you have the duty to seek the society of the discriminated against group. And that really for me struck a chord like this idea of that Muslims have a duty to see the society other Muslims like for example in where I live in McLean Virginia which is a very nice part of the country Alhamdulillah right and",
      "Mosque in McLean Islamic Center, that just... In McLeans let's say you don't really see black people. You might see like a Kenyan diplomat or you see the son of some Zambian corporation or something like that. Theirs people are there but you don'y see black Americans. The McLeanes Islamic Center there is rich daisies, there is Rich Arabs, maybe there is a Somali cab driver who lives in an area",
      "You don't see black American Muslims. They live in other places, other mosques. This is just some deep idea which is that this McLean Islamic Center has a duty to go and seek the society of let's say Masjid Muhammad in Washington DC And they should go and partner with his mosque, do events with his Mosque, share budget with his mosques So these people are forced to mingle",
      "Look, we all know the stories of Bilal and we all saw the message. And we all that the Prophet is not racist and Islam's against racism. We all know this stuff. That's not good enough because if you're a typical Arab family, typical Desi family......and your daughter comes and says I want to marry this Senegalese guy or this Caribbean guy... What are your parents going to say?",
      "What are the parents going to say? They're gonna be like, I mean some of them might be okay with it. That's fine but a lot of them are gonna be no and they're in there but he's an amazing guy He's a great Muslim. He speaks Urdu You know you go to South Africa and you go like to them like Soweto mosque and the Imam is a Zulu guy who speaks Urdi So he goes through Darul Ulum so my point is like you can have a guy who's like Hafez everything and he speaks Urdo etc etc But I don't think the parents are gonna accept it",
      "Education is not good enough. People need to be socialised into mixing with one another, so they're not foreign to one another.",
      "Maybe we learn about the Karyat, maybe that's all dark. But you know, the problem... I feel like I'm being mean to you. Go ahead. So I don't think that's going to help in my personal opinion because look, we're all, a lot of us, we all know people who are really educated in Islamic history and they still have racial prejudices.",
      "ymddygiadau rhaid i chi ddatblygu hanes Africaen Cymru yn yr adnodd islami mwyaf. Felly, mae hynny'n gwestiwn ddiddorol. Mae'n sgyrsai bod pobl... Nid oedden nhw am ffwrdd â tokinism. Yr anghenion yw fod gennych gymhleth islamu mewn Africa fel arfer.",
      "I mean, for me... This is going to sound really arrogant. I never had these problems and some people who are vocal about the importance of Muslims in Africa and Islamic Africa getting attention they're like you don't have this problem for some reason. For me, I grew up in Senegal when I was a kid",
      "The first place I went as a Muslim, when I became Muslim the first place that I actually went and was around Muslims not going to Jumaat at Georgetown University and eating salads with no dressing or whatever people have. So the first where I went in a mosque praying was Senegal, Zahar, Senegal and Kowloch and other places like that.",
      "The Muslim is Senegal. That's just because of an accident in my life. For me, when I wrote the Biskwari Muhammad, the whole book is organized around Shaul Wali Allah, the person of Shaul wali Allah. This Delhi scholar right? So I've always thought that what's so fascinating about Islamic history is how these like India, Southeast Asia,",
      "East Asia, Africa, South of Sahara. These are Muslim places with great Muslim scholars whose stories are amazing. That's always been more interesting for me than the kind of Arab-centric or Mideast-centric, or whatever standard narrative about Islam. So I think that... For me it doesn't make sense",
      "I would say to like, I don't want to be late at this point so I'm going to get into some other issues but",
      "pan fyddwch yn siarad am ddau persbethiad o sut i'w dysgu, fel hanes Islef. Os byddai, er enghraifft, mewn sefyllfa anglophone arbennig yng Nghymru a Brytaniau, gan fod yna gyda chynnyrch un cwmpas sy'n siarado Saesneg, beth fyddech chi'n ei wneud? Beth fyddai'r cyfrifiad, wrth gwrs, wedi dechrau â'r Sira ac wedi ddechrau ag Y Caledon, betha fydd eich modd i'i gymryd... Er enghreifft os gofynnwn ni am yr 12-13 o blynedd",
      "the word is great, you could read Dala'l al-Khairat. But you can also start with like the praise poetry about the Prophet written by Sheikh Hamdi Bamba that could be like a beginning and then you could be you know like starting you know Allahumma Sayyidina Muhammad Mishkat Al Masafiha of Tiberias or these four butakeh",
      "What is it? Amal, what is it again? Qanuz al-Amal. Qanzul Amal yeah. So you could start the people's like introduction to various Islamic sciences could come through West African figure or South Asian figure, Southeast Asian figure. We've got 10 minutes left before we open up to questions. I want to coming back to exactly gave the very sort of",
      "ffyniad sy'n ddiddorol pan mae'r gwbl Gwleidydd Cymru yn dod â'i ffansiaeth potensial o Senegal, y reacsiwn rhieni. Rwy'n hoff i ddod at yr hyn am law, achos dyna'r mater arall rydych chi'n ei gysylltu gyda ni yma. Rydych yn cysylltiedig â llaw casglu, a chyfarwyddwyd hefyd am hanes llaw mewn byd islam ac y tensiwn hwn",
      "y math hwn o ddiddordeb neu gwerthoedd. Rwyf am siarad am ein sefyllfa nawr yn yr Unedig neu'n y DU, o ran y tansiwn honno o sut mae pethau arfer fod a sut mae bethau mewn gwirionedd. Rydyn ni arfer bod yn unigol ond rydyn nhw'n gwybod bod rhagorion ac rydym yn cael y act cyfforddi anodd hysbysebu rhaglorion",
      "yw'r rhwyf o gyfeiriadau sydd wedi cael eu harchwilio gan ddynion meddygol. Ac mae hyn yn amlwg yn yr arfer, ac mae'n fwy mewn yr arfordiroedd sy'n bodoli mewn sgrifton a byddai'r holl un yn eithaf cyffredinol. Felly sut wyt ti'n gweld y gwaith cymysgedig honno'n digwydd yn y DU a'r US? Ie felly... Gallai fod yn rhaid i ni ei adael ond gallai fod llawer o bethau eraill. Sut amser rydym ni wedi'u cael? Byddaf yn dweud 10 munud, mi fyddwn i'n ceisio gofalu hynny bob 10 munudd.",
      "So one of the things that was brought up, it gets brought up a lot when people talk about Islam being anti-black. It will bring specific Maliki fic opinions from the Muqtasir al-Akhdari and from I think Jamia Saghif And they'll take what you'll see there's specifically scholars tend to be from what's today Algeria maybe Fez where they'll say things like",
      "One of the valid reasons to annul a marriage is if, let's say, the bride or groom turns out to be black. Forget about what black means in this, it just says, turns out they're black. Or you'll see something like Muslim men shouldn't look at Muslim women they are not related to unless they're old or black because they're not attractive.",
      "That you're like, oh like that's pretty bad. This is uh, you know, oh yeah, no, that's free back. You know, he can't really so That those are some of the issues I want to deal with ideal them in the book Let me talk about the how Muslim scholars have addressed this The first thing is and all first I'll talk about be the second second instance where someone says they don't look at",
      "Look at, basically saying that black women are not attractive. Yes some Muslim scholars say that, some Maliki scholars but much more senior Maliki Scholars like Sheikh Ahmed Zarouq, like Sheikh Darudiyya in Egypt they will say okay that's your opinion writing in Algiers",
      "There are black women who are really attractive right we're more attractive than a young woman or an on block them So these kind of statements are not accurate in and of themselves, and I Want to make this point great you were going to find Muslim scholars in all parts of the Muslim world who say stuff that is really offensive and wrong like it's actually wrong It's offensive to your moral sensibilities And by the way You might be totally correct to be offense to be offended like what they say might be",
      "What they say might be really awful. But you will always find, I think just empirically in my experience, You will always more senior Muslim scholars telling them that is wrong. And they'll tell them that it's wrong for the same reason you feel it's right. Now I think that's very important to remember. Don't judge... don't always judge your tradition when someone cherry picks a bad opinion.",
      "Judge the tradition by other people who come and correct it. Which they do, they always do. Going back to that first point about blackness being a valid reason to annul marriage You see this discussion across time diachronically in Maliki law let's say We'll pick a place Fez from 1500s to 1900s",
      "Why? Why is there a back and forth? Didn't the Prophet say that, you know, the black has no virtue over the red. The white has no virtues over the black, right? Didn' t the Prophet said Arabs have no virtue of non-Arabs and non-arabs have no virtues except by their deeds? Don't we know that the most noble in the Quran, the most",
      "Don't we know that the Prophet said, if someone comes to you to propose marriage to your daughter and you like their religion and character, you should marry your daughter to them. Otherwise there will be great fitna in the land. Don't know all these things? Don't really know all the stories that show us very clearly that the Quran and the sunnah of the Prophet is against discriminating people based on their physical appearance or tribe or whatever? So how can there be a debate about this?",
      "Because one of the main maxims in the Sharia, is one of five main huwaad al-kubra, is custom convention is dispositive. All things being equal, custom is going to carry the day. What is a husband's obligation to his wife? What is the wife's obligation as husband? Do I have to do the dishes or does my wife have to all the dishes?",
      "to do all the dishes who's gonna change that with me or what's the diaper changing balance right if we have a in the market If I buy this book from you and there's like a page mixed up in here Do I get my money back or not these type of things are all going to be based on custom in a society? This is stated in the Sharia, right The Quran is something they get clear that were supposed to defer to custom on many Many of the contact points at the shariah are actually based on cuspid",
      "Right? So think about this, you know I got married to someone who went to the same university as me Who has a postgraduate degree. Who is used to the... You know she likes the same restaurants I like She doesn't expect me to take her to St. Mark's every spring break right? She doesn' t expect me have a Bentley",
      "socioeconomic, educational group status as me because otherwise I'd be divorced right? One of us would be like this isn't working. So it's understandable also that in marriage custom is going to determine a lot of what makes an acceptable match or not or what makes a good match. When do you tell your friend oh yeah you definitely should beat him, oh yeah, you gotta drop her. You do that based on your shared expectations",
      "in your class and your community about what marriage is supposed to be. That's fine as Muslims, okay? Now the problem is, what happens if one of those aspects of culture is that black people are lower status than other people? Now you have kind of a... now you have a dilemma because on the one hand we're supposed to respect culture and especially on issues like marriage, on the other hand we aren't supposed to",
      "Malik for example the founder of the maliki school of law does not consider blackness to be a valid cause For an element. He does not considered it In his school a huge chunk a huge tradition of malachi scholars in North Africa mind you, North Africa Don't sorry do consider black us to be valid they break with their own enough why because they say we're following custom and by the way They'll say to their opponents. They say hey listen you mr.. Idealistic",
      "Mr. Idealistic, you just quoted all those hadiths to me. Why don't you marry your daughter to a black guy? And then suddenly the guys think, well, maybe I don't know. So they say, don't tell us that this isn't our custom. But as I said before, you'll come across this opinion. But you will also come across the opinion of more senior Maliki scholars from North Africa,",
      "from Andalusia saying this is unacceptable. It doesn't matter how socially controversial this is, the sunnah of the Prophet, the clear indications in the Quran, the position of our imam in the Maliki school of law supersede our deference to custom. So you can see in the maliki school itself there's like this tension over deferring to custom versus upholding these values",
      "And as I said before, the leading scholars, the leadng voices will be the voices saying it's not okay to discriminate. The Quran and the Prophet are too clear on this to make it something where you can indulge your cultural prejudices. That was pretty good. Before we get questions, just a quick thing of anticipated projects",
      "projects and what not, current things. You can tell us. I'm working out a lot. My aim is to get abs. Trying to get ab's. Okay cool. Anything book wise or education wise? Yeah actually I had a book that was like four fifths done before the slavery book and before the blackness book it's called Islamic Law and Justice. The Justice in Islamic Law",
      "The Ulama Legal Reform in Madalam Courts. It's about the history of madalam courts and Islamic civilization, which is long story short about how Muslim scholars theoretically and practically deal with instances in which their fiqh and their expectations of justice don't match up. That book hopefully I will finish up now and publish maybe within a year or so. All right, four questions, few announcements. There's an event on Monday",
      "ar ddiwrnod. Mae'r Cofiwn IHRC, y Gweinidog Carima o Llanfraith, a'r Cymdeithas Islannig Soesnau, sydd ar wefan yr IHRP. Os nad allai rhywun fynd yma, gallant mynd i'r adran honno ac yn amlwg bydd Prysor Brown yn y fan hynny. Ac Abib Akande a Mustafa Briggs. Ac mae Mustafa Brigs hefyd yn y panfa hwn. Ac fe fydd ganddyn nhw digwyddiad â Mustafa Brugs ar ei llyfrau rhag-Bilal ar y Sgrifennol IHRC",
      "ar ddiweddaw 15, 6.30. Yn ôl, mae yna adroddiadau ar wefan iTRC. Dyma sut rydyn ni'n cael cwestiynau. Rwyf wedi mynd ar gyfer cymdeithasau cymreidio. Rydw i wedi deletho fy nghyfrif cymweiniad cymraeg ond rwy'n gwybod bod gennych ffordd o wneud rhywbeth sy'n gwirioneddol yn iryngu pobl. Dwi ddim yn gwych am chi ei roi £10 i ddod yma i mi eich hannog, achos rydych chi wedi dweud wrthym nad ydych yn gwneud hynny mewn America. Ond rwyf yn teimlo bod pawb yma yn byw yn eithaf swyddus. Mewn unrhyw fes, rydw ni'r gorau i bob cwestiwn neu coment yma.",
      "And then if you've got a rebuttal, just wait until... Yeah. You can berate me but just be quick. So we'll go by hands I guess. I like to think people have questions. Don't embarrass us because we've gone on to 820. Yes, go ahead sir.",
      "that his mother was a black African slave woman and he was European, he freaked out Europeans. It's really interesting. So they were terrified of Maulvi Esmeralda, the very powerful, who had been in for a long time, he was like a really powerful early Sultan of the Alawite dynasty, the current dynasty that ruled Morocco.",
      "There were still Europeans who would get captured by pirates operating off the coast of Morocco and Algeria. And these, you see British and Americans writing about Mawad Ismail, the reason they say he's so savage and fearful is because he's mixed, he's a mixed race. He's like this white Arab who has been mixed with savage African blood",
      "That's why he's like an animal, right? This is really what they're saying. Muslim authors never talk about this because from a Muslim author's perspective He's just another Moroccan guy. He's another Moroccany guy and there are so many Moroccan ulama and rulers whose mothers are black African Like Abdurrahman al-Kittani who just died The great scholar of Feds son of Abd Alhayy al-Kitthani died in 1963 the great you know Hafidh al-Awsar",
      "Hafidh al-Asr, a Hadith scholar of the age from Fez. Abd al-Humayn al-Qadani was his son from an African slave woman and no one knows who he's thinking. It's a good example of like European early modern European thinking about race versus Muslim thinking about raise where if you're a person who is noble or respected if your mother is black African it doesn't matter",
      "What's your opinion on the issue of Jurali and African-American Muslims?",
      "I mean, I know enough to teach about it in my Islamic world class for like 10 minutes. But I don't know enough offer any kind of qualified opinion. You'd have to ask when...I don't if... Without where he already came or did he give a presentation? Or is he going to or anything? I have no idea. But anyway, are there other scholars like Sherman Jackson or someone who could answer this better than me?",
      "I think we've got a good audience today. I don't have to worry about responding in the room. Well, we'll see. What are other questions? Yes, the young lady here. Hi. Yeah, so my question is related specifically to Sudan where you're from. So a few years ago I did a piece on colorism. What? Colorism. The thing about Sudan just to give you guys context is that we have very different shades of color and because pink color",
      "We don't just use white and black, so we use a whole scale of blue and green and yellow and red. And we've got a system, we have systematic prejudice against different colours. When I was doing the piece, we interviewed a couple of researchers and the main reason that they were talking about in regards to why this exists as a phenomenon is that it has to do with mostly the Arab influence",
      "influence because in Sudan there's an identity crisis of whether you identify as Africans or Arabs and the whole thing about what they said particularly is that to become a better Arab or Muslim then you sort of want to associate with light skinned people whereas the more you look African, the more dark-skinned you are",
      "identity of a Muslim or how a Muslim should look like and the other thing was of course colonialism because when you were colonized for a long time by the British there was sort of like a systematic preference towards so the British would deal with prefer to surround themselves with like skin people and they've been in positions of I wouldn't say power but they would educate yeah preferential treatment yeah exactly and so even after",
      "I mean, no they don't have merits. They're not...they have no merit",
      "in the sense that they don't appear randomly. You talked about Islam coming from the north with Arabs, right? We talked about... you could add what I discussed earlier about this in a lot of parts of the world especially where there's a lot variation in skin color that darker skin is considered more associated with manual work and lower class",
      "about the fact of colonialism and the British preference, the same thing with the British preferences in India. With the population there and colorism in India so these are all you could bring these all as causes but they not none of them have any merits they're illegitimate right? So there's nothing like you can I mean I wouldn't defend any of them I mean so uh but i think it's also important that we don't always",
      "good at indexing people. If I lose my jaw, am I indensed? He is Tarikh Sudan. He's from Timbuktu. He was in the leading Timbuktus family. Timbuku in that time right is divided into blacks and whites literally bidon Sudan blacks and ones okay the whites are people who are of Arab descent Berber descent or maybe even Fulani",
      "And you'd be like, wait, Fulani and Afolani people? They're like black. This has nothing to do with skin color! It's weird right because they are called blacks and whites Whites are people who are especially associated with...because the Arabs and Berbers are pastoral They're nomads, they're traders, merchants The Fulanis are also pastorals so they get lumped in with the whites Then the Blacks are groups that are agricultural",
      "that are agricultural. Langara, Hausa, other groups like that, Malinke communities. But what's one thing that would not actually tell you which group is which if you're walking down the street? What they look like. Because you could be Berber but your mother and your mom's mom and your dad's mom",
      "African than you know an African guy on the street, you know what someone from one gara or another ethnic group so when we see these Title of these names don't always we don't only want to assume that they actually Mean what race means to us about skin color even when it's black and white second example from Timbuktu And this is in the history of Saudi and history of Sudan of the Pilates with a Timbuku very famous scholar one of his ancestors",
      "One of his ancestors, actually not one of his, one of relatives Mufti of the city named Ibn Aqit. Ibn Al-Aqit has a... he moves from the Mesina region to Timbuktu",
      "He was in where he was before you surrounded by Fulani and didn't want his kids. He's Berber. He didn't one is kids to marry for one My kids are gonna marry for lies I gotta move so he moves to Timbuktu And everyone's like people read that say they're like this guy's racist. He used the anti black races look at this But then what happens one of his students very respected scholar named on most only he's Arab. He straight-up Arab",
      "He's straight up Arab. Right? He himself is Arab. He comes and says to Ibn al-Fitr, I want to marry your daughter. Ibn Al-Fitri says birds of a feather flock together. You know? We married Sanhadja Berbers. Where are Sanhadjah Berbers? We marry Sanhadjar Berbers The Arab is lighter skinned probably he had no idea",
      "He has more of this Islamic pedigree you're talking about. But Ibn Akhid doesn't want his daughter marrying him. He's not anti-black racist, he just...he doesn't like people who aren't Berbers for his daughter! He wants another Sinhaja Berber for his daughters. So we always have to remember not to jump to conclusions when we come across things that seem to us to be instances of racism.",
      "Yeah, my wife works for us. Oh we'll find it, that sounds really good. We'll look for it. Yes, the guy in the back room.",
      "I just want to get your thoughts on this. There's a lot of hidden anti-black sentiment, especially amongst the Jewish people in South Africa and brown people that are frustrated as Indians. And from everything comes... From the Islamic community, from schooling to economic opportunities, you see a lot mosques being built",
      "Where are you from in South Africa? No way! I miss South Africa. I gotta go back. Those were good times, for me at least. Yeah it's hard to see...",
      "You know, like first of all obviously the anti-black racism and all that tensions around that in South Africa are enormous and very difficult to combat. And then of course even in the south asian community you have let's say the Gujarati kind of elite or higher status Gujarat people maybe looking down on the lower status Urdu speaking",
      "uh, people. So you really have like a big stew of prejudices and classism and racism and stuff. Um yeah I don't know how to...I mean a guy who I respect a lot for dealing with this is Farid Asaq. He's very passionate about this issue but I don' t know, I wish I could offer you some insight",
      "You discussed the concept of racism and whether it was imported from the West or we had something similar in our tradition.",
      "I remember a term in Arabic, shu'wiyya. It was used a lot in the third or second Hijri century. What do you think of that term? Is it similar to racism?",
      "debate about whether race or racism is something that emerges like in the late middle ages, or if it goes back to you know earlier than that. And um without getting into...you know to get into the details of this would be tiresome. You can read it and some read it in my book if you're interested but uh in some ways it's kind of I don't want to say it's unproductive",
      "but you can in some ways like You could just put that aside and say listen do people Judge other people by Their descent or where they come from or their body or their origin Yes, they do. And like they do that Way before the first European got on a boat and was like hey I bet I can kick some butt like that before it before that ever happens",
      "Whether that ever happens, people were doing this in China and Japan and all sorts of other places. Whether or not we want to call it race, whether or not racism, that's something we can debate. So there are other examples like do you talk about the way Arabs talked about Persians in the third century? Or the way Persians talked about Arabs in the 3rd century?",
      "How about the word Shurubiyyah?",
      "saying we are, our tradition, our Persian tradition has a lot to offer and is valuable or we're actually better than Arabs and you guys are bunch of lizard eaters. So those are the two different like... And they write poetry in books and then some Arabs or even other Persians respond and say actually the Prophet was an Arab so he can't say this but by",
      "to like the ten hundreds of the common era, it doesn't really matter anymore because by that time the leading political and scholarly groups are all Persian and Turkish anyway so it doesn' t matter who's Arab or not Arab. I mean think about today what does it mean to be Arab? Syria, Iraq, there may be...who knows where they're from? They're Turkish, they're Persian, God knows from where but Arab is about speaking Arabic and being a citizen of this country",
      "My interest is in the first to tenth century around the Khyent and the Cheirion of Enniyet, and singing Sleizelman. So whilst I was doing my research, I came across a lot of new people like Ted Arverney",
      "Mae'n ymwneud â rhywbeth sydd wedi cael ei arbennig yn benodol fel bod rhywfaint o bethau gwahanol yn digwydd o amgylch hynny. Ond doeddwn i ddim yn gallu dod o hyd i unrhyw llythyrfa, gan gydag eithaf cyntedonol neu gyntaf, na chymharach yn fy marn i, a dywedodd am yr ffordd y byddai gennym ni lawer o fenywod Cymraeg",
      "forms under their verses. Have you come across anything in your research that refers to that at all?",
      "I don't think they have anything on Iraq. They have stuff on ethnic makeup of these Qiyan in Andalusia, I think. But... Okay, I don' know the answer to that question but there is a very interesting article about Ziryab. So Ziryaba is this 9th century",
      "whether he was black or not because there's a lot of discussions around this that people, when people say that they mean different things by it and stuff. I think there is a lot complexity about saying that one of these things... Because his main thing is being a musician right? There's a discussion around what it means to say they're black and like what would that mean at the time so that might be useful place to look if you haven't already seen this",
      "Can I ask you something? There's been a lot of questions about the history. I want to come back to this book in particular, and also other books that you have written,",
      "In a sense, we are discussing this sitting in London. We're all to some extent or another Western Muslims if you like. What audience or what discourse do you see these books being part of? Who are you writing for when you're writing these books? Is it Westerners and their views on Islam? Is is it Muslims in the West who have to deal with these issues",
      "I don't know if any of your books have ever been translated into Muslim languages or the languages of the Muslim world. How do you understand the discourse in which you are communicating?",
      "Not necessarily... who has no background on the topic, but who's engaged. Who wants to learn. Whether they're American or British or not, or from Saudi Arabia I think it's the same in my mind. I also write for someone who might be interested in these topics like for example the slavery book is very different.",
      "But that's my own opinion. This I wrote for people, for Muslims who are interested in this topic and also for academics who are interest in this topics. So that's, I think different books have different audiences but generally I think like everything I write because I'm a professor and an academic if I write something that doesn't it's not up to snuff academically I'm gonna get, it's going to torpedo my reputation or something",
      "So everything in my... that's why this book, you know it's like the slavery book I mean it's about one fifth or one fourth even footnotes. So it's a huge amount of notes but the body of the book I try to make accessible to even non-expert reader and anybody who... I guess I have in mind anybody who wants to learn about this but I write as a Muslim again I think my arguments are also applied to non Muslims",
      "Are these the topics of this discussion?",
      "Or is it very often a reaction to Western discourse?",
      "There's sort of the existence of these discussions in other places is a cause for raising that discussion in Tunisia or Egypt or Turkey or wherever, right? But it's definitely a big issue amongst Muslims in the US. So that's why I mean that's where we kind of the global English Anglophone Muslim community",
      "So, in the last few years we've had a lot of social campaigns like BNM for example and they brought around the notion",
      "Mae'n dweud nad yw hynny wedi dod i fynd, ond mae'r neges bod yn rhaid i chi fod yn anty-racist ac nid yn racist. Fe wnaethoch chi ei adroddi mewn eich llyfr a chynrychioli sut rydych chi wedi cael yr amserus a'r prosiect sylfaenol. Ac roedd hynna'n achosi llawer o anghymdeithasolwg wrth geisio gweld beth yw ac beth na'r rhaglenni. Sut gallwn ni fel Cymru ymgynghori yn ystod y dysgwrs honno?",
      "whilst understanding the maxims of actions are by different tensions, but at the same time that you should aim to bring justice regardless of it.",
      "that it's not about like what, you know. It's not abut what I think or whether I am racist or not right? So we have to make active, all of us have to be active efforts to rectify these structural inequities and you know we have different, each of us has different capacities to do this because of what our jobs are, who we know or things like that but like I think",
      "I just have to be willing to act beyond what you feel and what you believe. And just realize that like, you have a duty to contribute to dismantling this system because it's not a good system. The stuff I think about in my life, the thoughts I've had are deeply ashamed of. Like, deeply, deeply ashamed",
      "I could tell you stuff, but my wife would kill me. If I tell you like all the horrible stuff that I think and it's not...I'm a good person. I'm not bad person You know? But this stuff is baked into to me Baked into Americans and probably baked in the British people too like white English people or whatever And then you have to uh, that's not good. It's not it's good that people grow up like this and you know what we have to try and spare this",
      "Professor Brown, thank you. Fascinating talk.",
      "I mi, y peth mwyaf ddiddorol rydych chi wedi ei ddweud heddiw oedd yr hyn rydym yn siarad am y mosg yng Nghymru ac sut mae'r rhan bwysig i gael cwrdd â Mosg Ysbwng yng Nghobl. Yn y DU, mae'n rhaid i'r Fuslimau fod wedi bod yma am ryw hamser, a chyflawni ar busnesau, sport, gwyddoniaeth economaidd a phethau eraill.",
      "Mae wedi bod llawer o waith anodd i'r ddyluniadau. Mae pobl wedi gweithio yn fwyaf ar yr hyn y maen nhw wedi ei wneud. Ond ble byddai'ch cyfeiriad yn ymwneud â pethau sy'n bwysig i'w rannu llaw er mwyn helpu eraill? Ydynt am wneidio hynny wrth eu hynny, gan roi'r plant i'u parcio i weld sgwrnau a chyflawni nus? Beth mor bwydol...",
      "Mae'n bwysig iawn, ydy'r hyn sydd gen i. Rwyf wedi cael cyfle da o bobl yn helpu fi ar hyd y ffordd ac yn edrych yn ôl mae pob peth wedi bod wedi ei wneud mewn fforddi. Felly efallai fy mod i wedi gwybod rhywun a byddent wedi gweld fy ngymeriad a maen nhw wedi helpu mi neu weithiau gallaf ddeall help gan rywun ac maen ni wedi eu bodoli i mi ond a allem ni fod â striwturau fformal o ran lle rydyn ni nawr?",
      "I wish I were like a wise person who could offer an answer. I mean, I'm just another guy. You know? I'm not qualified. I have my own thoughts on this. But I would say it's really important. It's really... I don't know about the UK so much but in the US stuff is messed up man. So I grew up very well educated. My parents",
      "My parents did Peace Corps in Chad, and I grew up in Senegal. And my dad was in the Civil Rights Movement. He got beaten up and put in a hospital by Ku Klux Klan people. And I grew around zero black people. Zero! The only American black people I met were like the people you bag your groceries at the supermarket. The first time I really interacted with black Americans was when I became Muslim.",
      "And, you know... and even after being Muslim, and after like having in-laws who were affected by war on terror and being suspicious of the justice system in America all this stuff It wasn't until I don't know what 10th or 11th video of a random black guy getting shot for no reason running away from the cop and the cop shoots him a bunch of times in the back he's just running on a field of grass and they kill him",
      "It was only like after I don't know how many videos. I was like, oh that's messed up before that if you asked me Did police shoot these people for no reason? I would be like no no of course not the police don't do that kind of stuff This is you know Undeniable in the US this is like people get shot all the time killed all the times beaten all the Time they did a serious problem and it's a it's really high priority",
      "And if you believe in standing up for justice and you're Muslim, I think it's important. That's a very high priority. I don't know the situation in the UK. I just don't like what the details are. I imagine there might be some similar stuff but I don' t know enough about it. Yes, guy in the back.",
      "Christian scholar who was pointing out those, Hadiths and etc. And the book itself came as an answer to those questions I was curious what were the main points that were being raised? Was there anything that was particularly problematic for you to be able to answer? Do you feel like you can give a full account of all those questions?",
      "And I don't think his argument is very good. I mean, I would... I'm hesitant and I don' want to review his points because then I'd have to offer a rebuttal for all of those points and I wouldn't have enough time to do that. So I'm not trying to get out of answering your question it's just I don''t feel like it would be responsible for me to mention his arguments and then not rebut the arguments. Unfortunately you'll have to read the book",
      "We're gonna have ten more minutes and then",
      "Thank you very much for the talk, Professor Brown. I'm curious to know what the reception of the book has been both within the academy and perhaps within the Muslim community as well because a lot of the examples that you've been giving are actually...",
      "yn y traddodiad hefyd, a'r math o enghreifftiau mae pobl yn eu cymryd. Ac mae wedi bod rhai gwaith yn fwy diweddar hefy, hyd yn oed, dwi'n meddwl, yn llwyr i Marian Catt sydd wedi cael ei gyhoeddus mewn llyfr, Wives and Work, yr wythnos diwethaf, ac mae hi'n cyflwynu rai o'r materion leol yn benodol, a sut mae Islam yn deall pethau â chweilio, o wahanol paradignau. A llawer o'ch enghraifftau rydych chi wedi eu rhoi hefyn, yn hytrach na peths, yn enwedig dau gwleidydd gobl. Ond yn aml iawn, o fewn y gymuned, efallai fod rhywbeth yn anabod",
      "things are part of the tradition and it's easier to kind of brush it under the carpet perhaps than acknowledge and try and reconcile these difficult things that great scholars did say. So what has been the reception to the book? Academic reviews take a long time, they usually take like a year or more to come out. I don't know so I don' t know what their...I",
      "the people I had read the book from external reviewers thought it was good but I don't know what people will say in their reviews. A lot of people have sent me messages that, I like your book thank you. I did get a solid amount of pushback for this book",
      "I don't know how to respond to that.",
      "book and then no one has to worry. But that was the only criticism, but it wasn't...it's not like crit- I don't know how to respond to it because there is nothing you can say. Like you can just say um...you know. I don' even know how do response. They think I shouldn't write the book. Okay well I did write the",
      "Perhaps the answer is that it's about Islam and blackness in Europe.",
      "Related to that, as who is qualified to do what?",
      "to do what? Can I ask about your experience as a Western academic on Islam, which become a Muslim. How is that taken among Western academia on Islam?",
      "After writing the slavery book, and after being very vocal in Muslim, I think that in an academy the quality of your work is very important. And I don't know if it transcends all prejudices but academics tend to be pretty... they try to be very objective when judging the quality scholarship.",
      "that it does that in general. Obviously there are sometimes failures or lapses, but I would say that it's interesting when I was in grad school... So I started grad school like five days after 9-11, which is September 15th 2001 and I became Muslim when I 19 in 1997 and I spent all of college and a lot of grad school really afraid",
      "I was very embarrassed by it. I thought I was a weirdo. I Thought people would think that I was biased or weird or stupid And It wasn't until I went to Egypt and started to study in the Azhar with scholars there, and I met people These people are so much more knowledgeable than all these professors in America teaching Islam",
      "Being Muslim means you're a great scholar. Being Muslim is a tradition of excellence in scholarship, it's the tradition of Ihsan And I was like this is what I want to be like and when I would go back to my grad school after these two months in Egypt or six months in egypt or whatever I would just be running laps around people",
      "all these things, you know memorizing book sections of books and stuff like the scholars that I wanted to be like. And um...I realized being a Muslim is not a liability it's an asset. Like I was proud to be Muslim and I wanted other people to see what I had seen and to share that with people. With Muslims, with non-Muslims. So that really changed my perspective and made me much more open and much more proud",
      "But it's ironic because as you went into the 2010s, I would venture to say that prior to let's just say 2015. I'm just putting that out there as an approximate date. Islamic studies or Near Eastern Studies or Islamic history or study of Islam and religious studies was dominated by non-Muslims. A Muslim would be a rarity. Practicing Muslim, extreme rarity!",
      "I'm so conservative that I should be excluded from all discussions. That's how I view it amongst Muslims in the US academy, which I think these people need to get out more. By the time you get to maybe the late 20-teens,",
      "I don't know if there's physics on this, but I would venture to say that the majority of professors in the sort of Islamic studies-ish fields are probably Muslim now. People who went into Islamic Studies and related fields after 9-11, they finished their PhDs, they've graduated... But, uh, the irony is, I don' think I faced a lot of discrimination as a Muslim when I started out. I think if you're a Muslim who's like me and is conservative",
      "conservative, but I consider what I mean non-progressive. Do you guys know what progressive Muslim is? Right so if you're not progressive You are definitely going to get discriminated against and you're gonna be discriminated by other Muslims Other Muslims are going to say publicly and they said this publicly about me We will not cite his books we will not assign his books in our classes",
      "Think about that. That is...that is insulting I find that insulting as a scholar, that you would have- I cite people who I hate. I cite People who I despise if they write good work or if they just have a book on that topic You have to cite it. You have look at it So my point is that the irony is that I think that Now Islamic studies is actually dominated by Muslims",
      "by Muslims, but it's dominated by the Muslims that were produced by the kind of organic preventive sort of response of the institutions of American government and civil society after 9-11 that produce good Muslims. Ironically these Muslims are often times politically very radical in a sense that now I could go out on my class and just start saying...I can say the most pro Palestinian stuff now nothing is going to happen because",
      "Now, a lot of academics are very radical politically but religiously they're extremely progressive and very hostile to normative kind of orthodox-ish Muslims. So that's the irony is it now I would probably be discriminated against And I tell young Muslims if you're like practicing Muslim, if you not progressive or whatever Don't say this don't be open about it keep quiet don't get any arguments",
      "don't get any arguments, because you will not get a job. You'll be discriminated against by other Muslims. Is that perhaps an element of race in that you're the insider in America as opposed to somebody who's full of the same? A lot of people I'm talking about are white too. There are white Muslims who are professors so it's white on white crime. We need to wrap up this context wrap-up.",
      "Mae'r rheolwr o ysgog y llyfrgell i'w rannu eich cwestiynau.",
      "in British history. In this room we've got someone who have been thrown into prison because of their support for Palestine and the list goes on. There are so many people that know each other, or have known each other who have campaigned for people who have",
      "Mae llawer o ddynion yn eithaf atal i ymgyrchu â nhw gan y pwynt bod ganddo'n cael ei tanio dros gyfathrebu a'u troi i'r pen draw. Ac mae hynny wedi digwydd am lawer o amser. Rydw i'n gwybod bod llawn broed a chanon sydd wedi ymgeisio ar broedau ac unigolion wedi dod i ben mewn pen draw oherwydd maen nhw wedi siarad rhywbeth sydd yn cael eu cyflwyno allan o'r cyfran. Yn hytrach na ni, rydym wedi gwneud yr holl waith rydyn ni wedi ei wneud, bob blwyddyn, trwy bob mis, heb fy nghychmygu,",
      "and reaches out to me and says, brother we need X- for Muslim prisoners. This item for Muslim prisoner. There's sisters who are requesting hijab because their families abandoned them and they can't afford to buy a hijab I've been inside prison cells and have seen brothers walk around with torn clothes because they've been completely ostracized from the family members.",
      "a ddod allan. Roedd eisiau rhyw fath o gefnogaeth gyda llyfrau, lleoliadau, cael yn y system cyfrifol ac ati, ac ato. Felly roeddem wedi'i cefnogi. Yna, am ychydig wythnosau ar ôl i fynd i'r sefyllfa, fe wnes i mewn eto â bagiau plastig. Mewn gwirionedd, mae bagiau plastic yn cael eu gadael gan fy mharwylion. Dwi'n meddwl, a dywedodd hynny, ond rhaid iddo ddioddi allan o'r prision? Mae'n mynd... Ie. Dweud, beth sydd wedi digwydd? Rwy'n helpio chi diwrnod o flwyddyn yn ôl. Beth sydd gennych chi wedi bod yn ei wneud?",
      "so that I don't have to starve, be out in the cold and being neglected because in prison I can pray five times a day. I get my food on time and even said I can watch EastEnders The plight of Muslim prisoners in Britain is horrendous Muslims are thrown into a prison cell with an inmate who has a Nazi's plastic tattooed onto his head",
      "would bet who is going to win the fight tonight. Literally, guards will do that. Who will win the fights tonight? And people have died in prison. Muslims have died In prison. The Muslim population is around 17% approximately 5% of the population but 17% of prisoners are Muslims Only here in December I went into Falco Prison and",
      "a chyfarwyddwyd â chwech o frwydr ar ôl y ddynion cymraeg. Ac fe wnaeth yr awyr yn ei glas i ffwrdd, roedd e'n rhoi llaw ar ei bywyd. Fe ddywedais, beth sy'n ei gynnig? A dywedodd, rwy wedi gwneud cwrdd. Dwi'n dweud, pa amser mae'n gwasgaru mewn prifysgol? Roedd yn debyg fy mod i'n cael mynediadau'n drosglwyddo ac mi wnes i ddiweddar 12 mis. Felly, rydym yn ceisio ei gyffroi. A dyma wrthym, pan fyddai'n dod allan? Rwy'n mynd allan yn Mawrth. Dywwn, betha fyddwch chi'n bwriadu ei wneud?",
      "I don't know Aki, because no one's going to give me a job. I had done my A-levels, I had the university place, what am I gonna do now? And I was thinking you know what, no one really reaches out to these brothers and sisters and gives them some hope beyond prison. Because they're Imam, we respect him he is talking about forgiveness and repentance and for tomorrow starts today and do this and do that and get close to Allah. This is what we do.",
      "We supply prisoners with books that allow them to get through solitary confinement because they as they've told us that as They have survived solitary confinement Because of the books that we've given them So you know I was speaking to his brother and he said, he said I got no hope. I don't know what to do. I say are you crazy? Are you crazy I said I know a brother who I worked with who served 20 years in prison for murder 20 years But he came out",
      "He is a manager of homeless shelter the largest from the shelter in the country because really I See here, you know might not be a lawyer. It might have been a doctor some professions You might not able to do but you can't have a future because you know come out in March get in touch with me and I'll sort you out And what I'm saying brothers and sisters is that we need? And most all the projects that we do at ihr skin you can go to our website and figure out you know what we do But one area of work",
      "I'm so passionate about because I've been around brothers and sisters who have been inside the prison, outside of prison guilty or not guilty whatever it may be. Our job is to make them a better person close to Allah etc etc but please support our prison campaign we have for month of Ramadan we give him a present pack you know he has sweets, dust bees, prayer mats one brother said to me this is like ancient, I mean I'm from Bangladesh",
      "He said, I go to when I go back to my cell. I have to defecate in a frickin bucket In the bucket When do you wonder was the last time you've heard of someone definitely getting in a bucket? he said but can you please give us stick prayer mats because our concrete floor is so cold we have that's the only thing that we can put feet on when we pray So that when we're praying it doesn't hit it doesn' hurt our head",
      "I can go on forever. And I don't want to go on for forever. Because later, I want you to spend some time with a professor here.",
      "You have to break that fear barrier. You can't let that system win, right? You have just make a statement. Just to make the statement to yourself and other people that you're going to send money to this. It's your right to do it. These people they can get mail. They can get money and stuff. You have do this to make a point. My account always goes to printing Ramadan funds and things like this. I really urge you to do this.",
      "Mae'r addysg ddim yn rhoi cymaint o hyder i ni, yn enwedig yng Nghymru. Felly mae'n bwriadol iddynt gael eu cynrychioli a meddwl am yr hyn sydd wedi digwydd yn y byd. Yn amlwg mae'r holocwrs, ond hefyd mae llawer iawn o genesiaid eraill. I leihau bod genesiau yn digwydd, rhaid dysgu amdanynt. Fy Ngharfaeth Cymraeg hefyddiaeth poedro hwn ar gyfer 11-18 mlynedd o blant",
      "Mae'r amgylchedd yn dod i fyny, rwy'n credu yw 26 Ffebrwyr ond gallech chi ddarganfod mwy ar ein llinellau cymdeithasol. Y ffordd bynnag o gysylltu â ni neu atleisio gyda chymhariaeth hyder hwn yw cysylltio â GMD a IHRC. Un o'r prifoedd yw trin i Bosnia felly sicr, os gwelwch yr adroddiad... Cynhyrchu bwyd!",
      "Thank you, everyone. Good question."
    ]
  },
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    "text": [
      "Maybe Dr. Vizian is late or not coming because last time I was on a panel with him, it was a little controversial He was sitting there like",
      "sitting there like, oi yoi yoi. It was about intra... So he was talking about Muslim relations with other communities and I was supposed to talk about intramuslim disagreements. How can you not have controversy when you're talking about that? So of course some people in the audience were upset and poor Dr. Benzian was sitting there, what have I got myself into sitting next to this guy? Although I maintain",
      "I maintain that everything I said was quite reasonable. I'm not going to talk about that so much today, but you know this stuff is controversial when you talk about important issues. Important issues are always controversial issues. Correct? Alright. So... First of all, I would recommend not to toot my own horn and promote my work",
      "I would recommend, I wrote on the Imman Wire blog for Medina Institute. I wrote two things that might be useful. One is called Guidelines for Muslim Political Engagement and the second one is on this issue of kind of sexual assault accusations",
      "Do you believe the accuser or do you stand up for the right of the accused to have a presumption of innocence? How do you balance those two? And so I wrote this too, which I think are very helpful and involve some of the issues that we're talking about when we talk about Muslims dealing with conservative groups or liberal groups. Where should Muslims ally themselves? The third thing I would say is that I wrote an article on Institute called Islam and LGBTQ Issues",
      "revised and that's you can find these things if you just go on the Clean Institute website or you go on Eman wire website And you'll find these I think they're very helpful, okay so one of the Kind of very glaring and obvious realities of our world in the United States and maybe also North America and maybe a certain I think a global issue is extreme polarization",
      "extreme polarization between kind of you could call it right and left, or call it open and closed. Assalamu alaikum, aren't you my kid's Arabic teacher? Great, how is everything going? Excellent. I just want to be sure not like going crazy okay. So between OPSO right and kind of right and",
      "closed, people who are open to a world of immigration, open to the world of globalization. Whereas people want to close or pull up the drawbridge against immigrants, against foreign influence to retreat in kind of this nativist idea of what their country or their nation really should be in the United States between Republicans and Democrats. So we have time of extreme polarization. And this is something that is discussed frequently so it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody",
      "surprise anybody. And you see it in things like partisanship, hyper-partisanship and American political life culture wars right between liberals and progressive progressive vision of the future versus a conservative vision of The Future. Uh, and this is completely dominant in our lives. I mean into the extent that, you know, Republicans can't break with Republican ranks on an issue maybe that they're not even",
      "even so confident in, like let's say tax reform. Or just try and go and not fall into one of these two camps on any one issue and you'll find yourself feeling a lot of pressure from both sides. But this is actually precisely I think a great moment for Muslims in the United States. A moment of leadership because what is the Muslim community?",
      "جَعْنَاكُمْ أُمَّةً وَسَطًى لِتَكُونُوا شَهَدًا",
      "is the golden mean. So virtue, being a virtuous let's say virtuous person is to be courageous which means you're not cowardly but you're",
      "but also moderate in the sense of being virtuous. But it's always hard to be virtuous, it is always hard tread the mean, it's easy to be an extremist. And that we sense this today more perhaps than any other time at least I can remember, I just turned 40, that I can remeber in my life. It's harder to be moderate and virtuous in this time then any other times I can meamber. But this is precisely the contribution that Muslims have to offer.",
      "And, you know, let's say five or six years ago if I said this is a time for Muslims to lead in the United States everyone would have said ha-ha-ha and I would actually looked at myself and said you idiot. What are you talking about? Nobody listens to Muslims but think about it right? This is maybe the one time that I can think of that there is actually an openness to listen to Muslims and it might not be a sincere openness",
      "But it's an openness nonetheless, right? So everybody who hates Donald Trump which is pretty much like 60 to 7% of the American population. Everybody who dislikes Donald Trump or doesn't agree with Donald Trump's agenda is eager to go and get all those people that Donald Trump hates and his supporters hate and put them on stage next to them whether it's a Latina woman or a Muslim woman in hijab I mean I've never seen so many instances",
      "are actually being given a role in positions of responsibility in public political life. I mean, if you'd asked me like five or six years ago would a hijab wearing Palestinian American woman who's pro-BDS be allowed within 200 yards of any political event in this country? I would have said absolutely not. That's inconceivable to me!",
      "There are, you know, someone like Linda Sarsour. May God bless her and aid her, right? Is precisely that. And this is in great part because there is such the people who dislike the conservative agenda or vision for this country are eager to bring enemies of that agenda perceived enemies of their agenda up on stage and into political life so this is actually a time when Muslims have a chance to participate in agenda setting",
      "agenda setting. So in this environment of extreme polarization, what is the role of Muslims as this moderate middle nation? What can be their contribution to leadership in American life? I would say that it is to show a middle path between this conservative and progressive vision.",
      "writ large in this country, right? Our people are essentially... It's essentially a vision that doesn't accept a non-white Christian identity for the United States. So in the conservative vision, the United State is a Christian country that's run by white mostly men, right and other people are welcome minorities are welcome whether they're racial minorities or religious minorities",
      "they're welcome, but they are minorities. They have to know their place. They're not in charge. They don't make the decisions. White men make the decision. White Christian men make decisions. So that's one vision. It can't really handle real diversity. The other vision is a kind of progressive liberal vision that embraces diversity, but has a very hard time accepting",
      "conservatives within the groups that are accepted in that diversity. Right? So this is sometimes it's called intolerant tolerance, so we can be tolerant but that means everybody has to accept everything everybody does and you've probably experienced as Muslims right where you know you are accepted as a minority but you kind of have to accept everybody else too not just",
      "You have to accept that they have the right to exist, you have to except that they've got the right work with you and things like that. But you actually have to morally affirm their lifestyles as well. You have a morally affirmed their lifestyle as well And you see this for example brought up on the issue of these like for example gay wedding cake cases. Where people are being asked who don't agree with certain lifestyle",
      "certain lifestyle, they're being asked to essentially morally affirm those lifestyles. So the problem with the conservative vision is it doesn't really accept minorities and diversity. The problem with a liberal vision is that it doesn' t really accept conservatism, religious conservatisms as one of the groups that can exist in that mosaic. And what Muslims have to offer is we are a conservative community but a",
      "of community that embraces diversity and that can accept and fight for the rights of other people, even though their lifestyles and their exercise of those rights are things that we find in our religion to be unacceptable. And if you're interested in this issue I wrote an article on called How Much Can Muslims Stomach? Also on the Man Wire blog.",
      "Islamic civilization, Muslims based on the Quranic and Sunnah mandate for the protection of other religions. Muslims allowed a degree of religious pluralism and moral pluralism in their society that was never nothing even came close to approaching it in Western Civilization including the United States today. Muslims are loud and protected the rights of other people to practice their religions in a way that would make them modern Americans like you know blush they would never be able to handle this",
      "Including Muslims allowing people to engage in marital practices and religious practices that were completely anathema to Islam. But Muslims, because they had a commitment, they knew they had the Quranic commitment to upholding the rights of people who are not Muslim but living under Muslim rule to practice their religion, they protected people in practicing those lifestyles. So what do we have to watch out for?",
      "right so the natural home now in the United States for Muslims is with a kind of liberal or progressive vision of the future because that's a vision of The Future that sees the United states as a multi-racial, multi-religious mosaic in which everybody respects and protects the rights of other people to freedom of speech, to freedom",
      "unites everybody is their commitment to this common framework of rights. So that's the kind of progressive and liberal vision of the future of the United States, which is also a very Islamic vision because that's precisely the vision that let's say Muslim states like the Ottoman Empire had where there are lots of different religious communities living together with completely different beliefs and what holds them together is a commitment to that system.",
      "But we have to be careful in this situation because there are major pitfalls. And the first major pitfall is that, this progressive vision, we ingest or imbibe this progressive visions to the point that we drop our moral and religious beliefs. So think about this. Imagine you're in a social justice",
      "a social justice alliance with a number of other groups, you know Christian groups Jewish groups atheist groups etc. Etc and You ask them that they affirm the truth of Islam and The moral integrity of Islam as a condition of you working with them Has anyone ever done this? I don't ever I mean it's kind of a ridiculous demand right?",
      "The truth of my religion in order for me to hang out with them. That's ridiculous No one would ask this but actually, this is what has sometimes been asked of Muslims when working with other groups that We actually affirm the righteousness the moral righteousness of their lifestyles Now that's not a fair demand First of all It's not necessary because you don't have to recognize",
      "in order to defend their right to freedom of speech, freedom of religious practice or their right physical security. You don't have to affirm the correctness of what they're doing just as they don't need to affirm our religion in order for them to defend our rights as Muslims. So we have to be very careful that we don't give into these demands that we change our religious beliefs",
      "that are kind of progressive alliances for protection of rights and diversity. And part of doing that is, I think to be really try and be smarter about how we discuss these things. So for example as I just said if someone starts pressuring you let's just take like an LGBTQ issue right so someone says let's say someone comes up to me and says you know Professor Brown I'm really glad",
      "you know, it bothers me that you as a Muslim can't affirm that let's say homosexual lifestyle is not sinful. I would say why do you care what I think is sinful? You don't believe in my religion okay? You think maybe all religions are stupid, I don't know, let's potentially. So why do your care what my religious belief is? Why do you if I approve of the way you live or not?",
      "I know it. You can probably go and say, oh look at his wife she has a hijab on and he's making his kids learn this Koran thing and they're really old fashioned and you know it's great that here in the United States we want to protect them against discrimination, we wanna protect their rights but we don't obviously agree with the way they are living. So why would someone ask me to affirm the moral correctness of what they're doing when",
      "wouldn't ask that of them and when it would be kind of an absurd request. Second, just a second example of I see five minutes. The second type of being smarter about this I want to bring up is these things students ask me a lot. They'll say for example Professor Brown we are, we've partnered with this LGBT group on the university campus to fight against Islamophobia. Excellent, excellent right? But they",
      "They want us to participate in the gay pride parade. What do we do? Now, why is this an issue? Maybe some of you have seen gay pride parades. There's some things, aspects of gay pride not 100% comfortable for Muslims. I don't wanna go into details but let's just say a lot of stuff that Muslim might not feel okay being seen as supports in terms of dress and conduct and things like that",
      "But the Muslim students asking me this, they always feel like they're locked into this because they say you know we've partnered with these groups. They protect us against Islamophobia. They are asking us to participate in this parade and protect their rights and we don't really know how to say no because it seems like we're being reciprocal and not consistent. And we're going to be accused of hypocrisy and they might have a point. To which my response is supporting someone's rights doesn't mean that you support their",
      "rights in every form and in every shape. So for example, imagine this hypothetical. Imagine I want to have a pro-Muslim rights rally and I get niqab guys with huge beards and women with complete niqabs on and we've got Palestinian flags, we've Got the Allahu Akbar flag and everyone's chanting and beating drums",
      "like really almost media caricatures of Muslims. And I say to my allies, come on, join in the parade. They're gonna say you know what? I support your rights and everything but I don't feel so comfortable with this situation because there's not every manifestation of a community's identity or their lifestyle is 100% comfortable for other allies that support that community's rights",
      "supporting civic manifestations of those rights. So someone, in this case what I advise Muslim students to do is say we'd be happy to appear in front of a media or press conference. We'll be happy sign anything supporting your rights. We'd be able to advocate for your rights with other government or university administration but in terms of this particular event these",
      "these things we're not comfortable with. So this kind of, I think just being smarter about how we deal with other groups is really important and not feeling that allying with somebody means agreeing with everything they do and not feel like allying means you are approving of everything they",
      "much of the West, much of world is suffering and seeing unprecedented levels of polarization between conservative liberal left right open close etc. And this is a time for the Muslim community to lead as a middle nation, a nation that is moderate, that can show a path forward between these two poles but that means both affirming the rights of other people to be different from us",
      "right to our religious belief, even if it means disapproving of the way that some of these other groups live. And there is no contradiction in that and we need to point that out because that's going to be something that has already been an issue of controversy will continue to be a larger issue of Controversy. Jazakum Allah Khair"
    ]
  },
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    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Engaging with the Sunna_5gn_QpZbZAk&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748665360.opus",
    "text": [
      "Thank you for inviting me. Some of you have seen before, most of you haven't, which is good. So the topic",
      "which is fine. I mean, it's people you know, communities know what they need but what it does mean is that it's you know so when we talk about how deep the people generally want to know one thing and what that means is that I feel like I recycle material a lot",
      "introducing new examples and trying to come up with at least a new joke or something like that but there is if any of you have ever been in my class before or seen stuff online then there might be some overlap with what we've seen and i apologize for that it's just uh it's inevitable unless you know going to talk about different issues the same issue there's going to be a person who's going",
      "So, big questions. These are the big questions people... these are the questions that in some ways drive all of Islamic intellectual history. Well, the main question that's not up here that drives Islamic intellectual and Islamic thought is I don't know if anyone guessed Hint! It's a question that when the Prophet was alive",
      "So it's easy when the prophet is alive, it takes how long you can ask him and then that issue is over. When he's not alive anymore or in an earthly realm, then you have a problem. What do you do? And answering this question has driven all of Islam into the history. And the ways Muslims have answered it have led to different schools of thought, different methods, different approaches. All headed for the same end.",
      "Within that question, there's two fundamental sub-questions. Or underneath it, there are two fundamental questions. If you want to know what God wants from you then it seems like a reasonable thing to do would be to turn to that record of God's speech to the human community, the last recorded speech to human community speech that is intact and try and mine it for information. And if it's something that is clearly answered in the",
      "If it's something that is clearly answered in the Quran, then you don't have to worry anymore. If it is something that has been alluded to or seems to fit under something discussed on the Quran or seems analogous with what was discussed on Quran, than you can try and get an answer there. But Muslims very quickly after death of the prophet understood something very well. And in this they were more intelligent than most other interpreters",
      "most other interpretive traditions, at least until the 20th century. Because they understood that you can't read scripture in a vacuum. You can't be scripture in an vacuum. And the reason for that is that words even if their God's words once they become embedded in human language expressed in language and then written down there are no longer alive. They",
      "They can't answer questions. You read them, they won't teach you. If you don't think I'm trying to say the Quran doesn't teach us anything, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the Quran does correct us when we misunderstand it. So in order for scripture to be engaged with there has to be a living tradition alongside that scripture of teaching",
      "body of knowledge that will help people understand what the scripture wants and what it means in new situations. And you see this same structure in Christianity, Judaism, Chinese Buddhism, American law, Islam which is a primary written scripture and an oral scripture that comes along with it through which that scripture has to be accessed if its going to be access correctly.",
      "Sunnah of the Prophet. The Sunnah would be authoritative precedent to the prophet, a very good translation would be that the Sunnah is an infallible application of the Book of God. The sunnah explains the Quran to us, adds to the Quran,",
      "the sunnah elucidates the quran and it's important to know that every muslim school of thought every muslin sect has believes that you cannot read the qur'an on its own",
      "Sunnis, don't they care about the sunnah of the Shiite? No. Everybody believes that the Koran has to be read through the sunna of the prophet. They just disagree on what the sunnah is. And here's where you get to your question of who succeeds the prophet? Who carries on the prophet's authority? The answer to that question will give you Sunni, Shiite, Ismaili, Qarajay, etc., etc. That's a whole other class on history of Islamic interpretive tradition or politics.",
      "or politics, but it's pretty easy to understand. If you think about it as being who inherits the proper authority? Either religious authority or political authority. Interestingly, the only time that I know of we can really be sure... There are some accusations in this in the 8th century and 9th century. The only time we really know for certain is in the late 19th century in South Asia,",
      "and a group emerge that says, no the sunnah of the prophet was only for the Arabs at the time of the Prophet. And it is not binding on anyone after that. And that group is called the Ahle Koran. The people of the Quran or some people call them the Koran-only movement. And the problem with that approach is that it's impossible.",
      "You can't read the Qur'an and get out of it what you think you're getting out of the Qur-an without some contextualizing material. First of all, reading the Qurr'an without context sometimes you don't know what it's talking about. Until you could say well, the parts that we don't understand because we don''t know",
      "say in this prayer, because none of that's found in the Qur'an. And yet all Muslims agree that there is five daily prayers and they're done a certain way. Any group that historically has denied that duty has ceased to be more conservative. So if you only stick to the Qur-an, you will not know probably the most well known aspect",
      "There has to be something about prayer. And we have to know about prayer, therefore there has to something about the time of prayer through which it adds to it that explains it. In addition you would have for example a Quran saying",
      "and as an exemplary punishment for what they've done. By the way, if you're interested in Purdue punishments I wrote a very good article about this on the opean.org websites which I recommend reading. You would think that the punishment for theft is having your hand cut off. And you wouldn't have the two page list of requirements",
      "And that punishment can actually be carried out. To the extent that it's actually, unless you want to get your hand cut off because for some reason you wanna have your hand got off, it's impossible to actually punish a thief with that punishment. So what is the proper relationship between the Quran and the Sura? We know we have these two sources we need to rely on",
      "What is the proper relationship between them two? So you might have, for example in the... The Quran talks about that you, right. Take the testimony of two upstanding witnesses from amongst you. Two outstanding people from amongst and your witnesses or something.",
      "But there's stories, reports of the prophet said that if a prophet ruled on cases let's say involving contracts and property he would rule by...he might accept one witness and then the oath of the plaintiff. So instead of the point is coming and bringing two witnesses, the plaintiffs comes gives his or her both and then there's one witness.",
      "they say this is the Quran that's modifying, giving exemption to Quranic ruling. The Quranic rule is general. This is showing on property issues or contract issues you can use a one instead of two. The Hanafi school of law says no, this report is not reliable enough to overcome this Quranic mandate. So similarly in",
      "In the Hanukkah schools of law, before you pray, you have to make the intention of praying. Or before you do wudu, you need to make an intention of doing wudus. In the Hanafi school, you don't have to do that. Now those three schools of laws say in the Malaviniyat, deeds are determined by intentions.",
      "But the Hanafi say, okay that's a great hadith but it's not strong enough to overcome the fact that the Quran doesn't make that an obligation for us. So you can see here there is this tension The Sunnah and the Quran work together they compliment each other they explain each other especially the Sunnah explains the Quran",
      "the other versus one superseding another. Another great example, the Dajjal, the Antichrist, the Mehdi, the messianic figure who will return at the end of time and tag team like to defeat the Dajaal along with Jesus. This is not mentioned in the Quran. It's not mentioned explicitly or even implicitly as far as I know.",
      "But all Muslims, except for a very small group in the early Asana period, some Malteserites believe in these, or at least theoretically believe in this tenets of faith. So here you have an example of beliefs about the unseen being taken from the sunnah",
      "And added to the list that are given to us in the Quran. And by the way, why did someone really want tazalites? Well, tazalaite's a Muslim rationalist. Doesn't mean everyone else is irrational. By rationalists I mean they think that truth and the nature of God can be accessed through human reason. Whereas... That's you know, a lot of other people would say You can't know everything about the nature or God through human reasoning Some of that only God could tell you. Because God was simply too great for us to comprehend",
      "Some early Montezalites said, Islam requires us to believe in things especially about God and the unseen. We have to have certainty. Bring your definitive proof if you are amongst the truthful. Earlier religions were criticized for going along with some rumor or idea",
      "wind that somebody has in making it part of their religion. So, in order to avoid that if something's not in the Qur'an transmitted by certainty generation after generation to us from a divine source then we shouldn't believe tenets about the unseen. You can see in this disagreement between this early Maltese group and what became the vast majority of Muslims afterwards also disagreement over whether or not",
      "whether or not the Sunnah can give us information about theology. I want to be very clear, because it's amazing and I know this from my students in my sometimes in their papers they cite me from class and inevitably they say what the heck is this? How did this person get this idea? But you know so I always worry that I have to be really clear otherwise we're going to go on. Jonathan Brown said that. Not saying, I'm saying the vast majority of Muslims",
      "that there is a Dajjal, these things come from the Sunnah. That's completely fine because of the material trend in the Sunnaism is strong enough to substantiate beliefs. The early Montezalites, some early Montazilites said no it's not the case. There you go, if I can be myself clear. Okay so that's the first big issue. What are the role of the Sunnat and understanding Islam? And as I said, the only person,",
      "The only school of thought that says you don't need to swim at all is this Quran-only movement, which emerged in the late 19th century. Particularly in South Asia. Although you have some examples from Turkey and the Arab world but the typical Quran-only person you'll meet is a desi uncle at a dinner party. You will meet a desis uncle. Inevitably with a Quran- ony person. And that's fine.",
      "The world is full of many diverse phenomena, so I'm not going to be grateful for that. What is the proper... That second question that kind of branches off from that is if we need to know the sunnah how do you know what the sunna is? How do we know what this one is and what is the role of hadith in knowing what the Sunnah is? This is a big question. If the first question kind of gives",
      "Islamic thought, the second question gives you a massive range of diversity which continues until today. Now just to be clear, hadith is a report about something that Prophet said did or something was done in his presence and to which he did not object or to which she did object mind you so something the prophet said I mean the",
      "did or something that was done in his presence. Why does it matter if something is done in its presence? Let's say he didn't object to it. He would give his opinion that this is wrong, he would not allow something to occur around him that was wrong without noting his dislike.",
      "There's a, even... This is what I've come up with. I think it's pretty good. I'm not casting a shadow on this, am I? Okay. What? Oh, okay. So these are four different ways of thinking about the sunnah. They are all accurate. What I mean is they're all correct.",
      "But none of them on its own is sufficient. And you will find all of these in every Muslim school of law and theology, but some of them would be more pronounced in some schools than others. Is that clear? These are all correct, but none of the insufficient on its common. They're all correct ways of understanding. So no, but not of them are correct or sufficient on their own.",
      "One way to think about the sunnah of the prophet, again, the sunna is the prophet's authoritative precedent. Is the explanation of the Qur'an given by an infallible figure and then passed on. One way you can think about a sunna that it's just a bunch of hadiths that you take reports about what the Prophet said and did",
      "Now, there's a couple problems. Which is one, you might not put the pieces of the puzzle together correctly and we'll go through examples of that. But just a basic one, think about this. This is an example that Dr. Sherman Jackson uses in his book called The Puzzle.",
      "So, every day I come home and I give my wife a flower.",
      "That is an authentic hadith. That is a correct hadith",
      "Maybe that day I forgot. Who knows? That's a good example of, you can have a hadith that misrepresents the sunnah. Now it doesn't totally disrepresent it because let's say not only am I a good husband but I'm the perfect husband. I'm in the platonic form of the perfect",
      "What would it mean if one day I came home without a flower? Anyone think? Yes. Yeah, it is really good to have a flower but you don't have to have flowers. Because otherwise I would pick one off the side of the road even if the flower shop was closed or something like that. So even something that doesn't represent...that is an exception to the rule can still be instructive about",
      "about the sunnah of the prophet, because it tells us if the Prophet didn't pray Tarawiyah, it's because he wants to know. In fact we know this is actually why he didn't prayer Tarawih in the mosque, because he didn' want it. Muslims would think it was an obligation for them. Okay so that's one way you can go out and I've also identified two problems with it. One is that you're gonna put the pieces",
      "Pieces of the puzzle are sometimes not representative of the puzzles, but rather exceptions. The second way to think about the sunnah is that it's a tradition of problem solving. It's a traditional problem solving And here it's useful to think who are the companions of the Prophet who transmit the most hadiths",
      "The first two most hadiths are Abu Hurairah, Ibn Omar, Anas bin Malik, Aisha. Am I something wrong with me that I can't hold my finger? Okay, I guess I have a problem. And then Ibn al-Bas. Ibn Al-Bass. Abu Hurayrah converted around the time of Khaybar and knew the Prophet for 2 to 3 years.",
      "Ibn Omar was probably, I think around 18 when the Prophet died. Anas bin Malik was his servant from the time he was like 11 or so 10 or 11 until about 20. He was a servant to this household. Aisha was his wife but she was only I think about 18 or 19 when he died. Ibn al-Bask was either 9 or 14 years old when the prophet died. Either 9 or",
      "What's common with these group of people? They're very young. And, with the exception of Ibn Abbas and Aisha... sorry, Anas bin Malik and Aishah they have extremely limited exposure to the Prophet especially Abu Huraira has extremely limited expoasure to the prophet How does Abu Hurayra transmit 468 hadiths in Sahih Bukhari or around 5200-5300 in Sunni tradition overall",
      "tradition overall. It's ridiculous, correct? No it's not ridiculous because he very...Abu Hurayrah very rarely says I heard the Prophet say something. He says the Prophet said. Because he hears it from other companions, because he became obsessed with going around and collecting everybody else's recollections of the Prophet. Who is not in that list of the top five transmitters? Abu Bakr. Yeah, Abu Bakar who",
      "Abu Bakr? Who else? Omar? Who Else? Uthman? Who Else? Ali? Who elses? Pretty much every senior companion of the Prophet. No one is in that list of people. Because that's not how they transmitted some of the prophets from our history. And here, I remember when my mother died. God rest her soul. She died 2010.",
      "I could probably think of five or six things that she said. But, I'm like a copy of my mom. The way I solve problems, the way I cook, the ways I deal with hardship, the things I am interested in reading, how I stand, how i smile, whatever. When you spend a lot of time with somebody",
      "And that's how the senior companions dealt with the treasure and stone of the prophet. That's why what you find much more than their hadiths is their legal rulings, because they were just trying to make it clear to them that this was not a sin.",
      "Or just walking embodiments of the sunat and kapha. Of course they disagree with each other, because the second you go from a point of unity into plurality we'll get to disagreement, that's fine. It's the younger companions who didn't really know him very well like me with my grandparents I mean I had this big box of stone I just got from my grandparents, my great-grandparents. Just sort of going rummaging through this looking at pictures, looking at wallets",
      "You have this, people you knew a little bit and you want to know more. You get this fascination with collecting stuff about this. I think that's a very good example for thinking about why you see the companions of the Prophet break down the way they did on how they transmit the sunnah. So the sunna as a tradition of problem solving. How do Muslims deal with questions? You can imagine the Caliph Omar 15 years after the death of the Prophets sitting there",
      "And then the senior successors, the next generation who spent a lot of time around the most learned companions become imprinted as well.",
      "and the next generation, and that tradition of problem solving just carries on. So that's another way to think even with some of the problems. It's like this moving... Especially in the early period, the first couple generations it was extremely strong, hadn't been diluted or vitiated yet but even after that it's this tradition handed down generation to generation of learning how to think about religious issues, learning how Muslims think from the previous generation,",
      "of the previous generation. And this you really see in the Hanukki school of law. Again, these are... This is in every school of all but it's especially pronounced in the hanuki school of war. Okay third, you can think about the sunnah of the prophet as a tradition, a traditional communal practice and if the best example of this I don't need to probably tell you is prayer",
      "I learned how to pray from a book because I converted to Islam, virtually knowing almost no Muslims. But I'm guessing that everyone else who didn't convert to Islam in the audience recently did probably learn to pray form their parents or someone like that and that's how Muslims generally know to pray is from their families. And sure they might be corrected later on,",
      "basic practice would come from a tradition that is carried on generation to generation. And this is especially pronounced in the Maliki school of law, where the practice of the people of Medina, the massively transmitted practice of people of medina, is authoritative for the Malik school of laws. It's a major source of authority. And just by the way, to give you an example",
      "people can treat them differently. So there is a hadith, it's considered to be reliable, it called the Hadith of Khiyat al-Majlis, Choice in a Sitting and what it says is that, the Prophet said that two people engage in a transaction or contract they have the right to rescind or basically back out of that contract or sale until they basically part ways",
      "until they part ways. Now in Hanukkah school, what that means is when you verbally agree or when you shake hands on the deal. Linguistically, you've parted ways with them. Parting ways here means that the deal was done. That's what they said. What's their argument? Here you can see it's an aspect of this idea",
      "and you have a tradition of, which is that there's sort of logic. You look logically at how things are working, and what they say is when you have contracts unless there's something wrong, unless it was like a defect in the good, you can't just back out after that. And one of the reasons they think that is well, what's another contract?",
      "I think the Muslims do a lot. Marriage is a contract! So imagine, let's say you treat this concept of parting ways as actually physically hard ways. On its face, this indeed sounds like two parties who are engaging in a transaction they have the right to rescind the transaction until they part company. So let's see, Mamzi and I agree that Mamzi has got this great jacket, I really like it,",
      "deal on my wallet, I say hey Ramzi I'll give you $3 for the jacket. He says it's great, it's a deal. But we still have three hours of class to go so he said by the time at the end of the class he decided that he really likes the jacket and he says no thanks. That would be what that hadith seems to say. What Hanafis would say is no, no that's not the case. The second we make the deal, it' s it. That's it. The deals done. Unless of course there's a problem with his jacket or something like that. Now think about this why would they think that? Okay let's have another Amante Yuzi Ramzi",
      "I'm not going to use Ramzi as an example, or myself in this case. But let's imagine you have party A, man A and man B come to a week-long retreat, and at one point they agree that their kids should get married. The kids get married, who knows what happens? And before the end of their week- long retreat, the husband says, eh, I'm no longer interested anymore. And we haven't parted company yet!",
      "So that's the fear. The fear is there are all sorts of contracts which are actually extremely important and have a lot of consequences, and you don't want to have that contract be liable just to one or subject to just one party deciding they don't wanna be involved anymore just because the two haven't parted company yet physically. The Maliki school also says the same thing as the Hanakees.",
      "It doesn't mean physically part of the company. It means until the party agrees, till the deal is done. Then you can rescind the deal that once the deal's agreed on it's it unless there's some problem with the goods. What's their argument? We know that's the right way to understand this and we know it's not actually equal physically parted company because that's they way the people of Medina understood it. The Malikis say the people",
      "understanding of how contracts are done gives us the correct understanding of Hadeeth. In the Shafi'i and Hanbali schools, they say a deal can be rescinded until the two parties part company like the original example I gave with Imam Zia Nain whose nice jacket was shot off. It's worth more than $50. Now what are some problems with the Hanafi way?",
      "as interpretive tradition or traditional problem solving. Well, the problem is that sometimes people can carry on this method of thinking about issues and they start getting more and more removed from strict rules. So someone could say",
      "Yeah, pork. So we're not supposed to eat pork but I feel like the reason why we're supposed to use pork is that pigs were just really unclean back then and now pigs are super healthy so that's what we can eat. There are lots of examples in the Sunnah of the Prophet and Islamic law where Muslims did abandon earlier rulings because those earlier rulins were clearly made for a certain reason",
      "when the reason ceased to exist, the ruling ceased to exists. But how do we know that pork is one of those or it is not one of these by the way? So the point is if you just kind of riffing based on your own inherent understanding about things as a Muslim without being fenced in by at least some very clear rules",
      "to the prophet himself, you're unchained. You'll drift off like someone at sea. You won't even realize how far you've moved because there's no marker to show you how far we've moved. The same thing with this idea of sunnah as a living tradition of a community. I always liked the example of my grandmother's apple pie recipe",
      "apple pie recipe or something. Everybody thinks that they have this tradition that goes back to their grandmother, whatever and in reality you know your mom pulled it out of the New York Times 20 years ago or something like that which is that people think there are traditions that go back in time but tradition is often times just an invention of the present to create meaning in the past or to create a past meaning for the present",
      "for the present. And there's lots of examples, I'm sure you can think of, I don't want to go into them, of instances where people will claim that a certain tradition goes back to Tiber and Memorial. In reality it's changed a tremendous amount. And this is precisely the argument that's used against the Maliki school by its opponents.",
      "They'll say, you guys are talking about this tradition of people in Medina. But the people in the Medina themselves disagree on these things. So where is the strength and tradition you're claiming? And it works for things like prayer. You know, just a really fundamental building blocks. But then you get into other details more minute details of Muslim life and belief. And you're going to see that tradition is just not strong enough to keep understanding intact.",
      "And by the way, even Muslim prayer. Muslims are more than any other religious group I know of so conservative about the way they worship that you have in effect negligible differences between Muslims in Morocco, Indonesia, Sunni Shiite really negligible difference in how they conduct their prayers But there are differences Now either those differences go back to an initial diversity",
      "in the practice of the Prophet, so sometimes he had his arm down and sometimes he has arms like this. Or you see that even things that are practiced by a whole community generation after generation can start to diverge as people spread out in space and time. Finally, the last example, and this is sort of like the second example but it's a little bit more logical, is that to think of the sunnah as a set of very clear maxims, some very clear rules",
      "ethical rules, moral rules, rules about how you understand God and his nature. And this is very clearly shown in the More Testament school. The example I have in my head is not a good one.",
      "Yeah, okay. So let's take an example. What was your name again? Faison. Faison, so Faison...",
      "I pick up Faison, because I'm not only too strong but also a horrible tumbler. And I hurl him at what's your name? Nathan. I hurled him at Nathan thus causing Nathan significant shoulder injury. Is Faison liable for that injury? Is he responsible for compensating Nathan for the injury? Why not? Faison did that didn't he?",
      "Another question. Let's say Faison goes crazy, he's actually god forbid completely insane. He's off his meds and he trashes Nathan's car. Is Faison criminally responsible? Maybe he has to pay for the damages to Nathan's Car but are we going to put him in prison for that? No.",
      "No. He was not in his right mind. In the first case, he was not even control of himself, period. I mean, he would actually be throwing somebody. The second one, he's not in right mind... The idea that you're not criminally responsible, you're committing a sin in God's eyes and you're going to be punished",
      "for some wrong done to the community by Muslims. This comes from the Sunnah of the Prophet, and it's a basic principle. It's a Basic Principle. You can see how that is going to spread throughout all areas of the law. And, by the way, theology because you're also talking about what God is gonna blame you for or not blame you. It'a a basic principal.",
      "When Aisha, when she hears that Ibn Omar has said that the Prophet said that a dead person is punished for the grieving of their family upon them. The dead person's family grieving for them.",
      "was paying their, in their will they said listen I want people to think that I was really loved so maybe bring some extra professional mourners and really make a scene. This is actually not uncommon even today you have professional mourner's in the Middle East like Egypt but that's what the prophet was talking about.",
      "Because we know that the Prophet himself grieved for his child, his dead children. He grieved and he cried for them. And Aisha says this can't be taken as a general rule because it violates the Quranic principle of No bearer of burdens will bear the burden of another. That comes from the Quran not the Sunnah but it's a great example how you could think about there being really clear rules",
      "that come out of the Prophet's Sunnah. And these rules sort of play a very high level role in how Muslims understand their laws and their doings. Okay, that's the first section. Does anyone have any questions about this? Well, first of all, there's always food or well, there is some food.",
      "It's not, they're not entrees but they are certainly sort of snacks and there probably some kind of drinks. So I guess maybe you can ask questions and then we will take about two or three minutes for questions and people can go drink and eat for ten minutes and then reconvene at 715. So any questions?",
      "There's no such thing as stupid questions, just stupid people. I didn't make that joke though. I might have stole it from somebody else but I can't do it. No questions? Yeah okay go in Richard McCollough. Yes Amina.",
      "I read somewhere once that they said something about atheists, that if someone were to die in a state of atheism, that they could still have a chance at salvation because they were doing it in a logical way. They were trying to get to the true meaning of life.",
      "of Islamic rationalism that emerges in the mid 700s, becomes extremely powerful in Baghdad and Basra in the early 800s. Then it goes into steep decline in the late 800s but it survives on its own among Sunnis until the 1100s in Central Asia. It becomes the school of theology for Shiites. And it actually has a huge influence on Sunnism. So actually Sunnim is sort of half",
      "half Montezulites. If you can read any of my books, well not this one, these two will talk about that. I didn't put these here by the way. In fact, I was thinking about taking it down because they're so egotistical but anyway. Actually and this is where there's always an idea like why are Muslims more rationalists? Rationalist philosophers, they're always good",
      "You can always imagine Esquire magazine having something about these people. Then they gave them some rationalists, like drinking wine or selling flowers and stuff like that. Actually, rationalism is sometimes very dangerous. Remember Hitler was really rational. James Bond villains are always really rational, that's the thing. They're so rational that they're insane, that they are psychotic. So in what I would say it's the majority position of",
      "especially in the late 700s, early 800s is that people have the capacity to know God. To know the truth just by reason and everybody has this. You as a human being it's like you have eyes, you can see things. I mean the exception of someone who's got a physical deficiency something that's physically wrong with their body so they can't see. Like someone whose gotten hit on the head with a shovel and can't think right. But every human being",
      "Because you haven't actually reached that belief through understanding it. You're just a parent, and it's not real. In addition, so they can consider the masses to be Kuffar if they didn't engage in nadir. Nadir is rational investigation. Second, and this is in the majority school of theology in Sunni Islam, both Ash'ari and Ahl al-Hadith, some of these schools.",
      "the Seventh-day School of Theology. If you don't, if you live on a desert island or something and you just never hear about religion, you are not going to be judged for not being a monotheist or not being Muslim. God will judge you based on God's wisdom and justice on the Day of Judgment. If your living in the mountains of Peru in the year 13 or 1491 or something, and there is no surviving prophecy where you are",
      "and there's no contact of Muslim with Islam, you're not going to be judged for not being Muslim because you have no idea. You have no access to intact revelation. Now in the Hanifi Maturidi school of theology which is closer to Mu'tazilism than the other majority schools in the theology, God will not hold it against you that you're",
      "But he will judge you if you're not a monotheist, because they believe that it is within the rational faculty of human beings to come to the belief in monotheism without any outside aid. And by the way there's Quranic basis for that which is what? He was an important monotheists you might say. Abraham.",
      "sees that they vanish, and he says rationally I know that my... this is not exactly what he said. He paraphrased it. I know God cannot be like this therefore these can't be God. God must be the thing that creates these things. So you see here rationalism is not always this relaxed cocktail party atmosphere way of thinking about religion. Sometimes it can be extremely demanding",
      "demanding because it says that every human being in theory possesses the faculty to come to conclusion and you, the rationalist have come to. Good question Amina. And then someone else with a question in the back. Amina or Aminah? Actually Amina I think we'll just call you Amina",
      "yeah I mean I can give examples",
      "The Yad Vah that's coming to my mind is actually from the Quran. But it's the same thing, I just... We'll have to think about it for longer. But the verse that talks about your slaves or your children when they come to see you in the Auraat al-Taraaf. I can't remember the exact verse but it talks about coming in and there's supposed to be a knock on the door",
      "These are the time, morning, noon, nap time and then night time. They don't just barge into your room or house without knocking at these specific times because you're going to be undressed or something like that. This basically ceases to be practiced fairly early on even during the time of some of the companions",
      "One of the explanations that the companions did is that this was because people started to use locks. They were now living in all these settled areas in the Near East and they weren't living in tents or rudimentary houses, so they had locks. So this is just...the ruling was not applicable. I'm trying to think of another example.",
      "That's the one that came to my mind. This one would be a little, you know, not off topic but it might touch with a much larger issue that is the question of American Muslims especially. Slavery? No, the hadith about Umayyad al-Muqatir al-Nasr Oh I'm going to talk about that one. Yes since you brought up slavery.",
      "That's not going to be something I can answer in five minutes. But actually, there is a thing coming out on Le Femme. I have a three-part essay on slavery coming up. The first part is the most interesting part which is about the problem of slavery. I'll give you a hint. Slavery doesn't mean anything. There's actually no such thing as slavery.",
      "I don't mean like today, there's actually no such thing as slavery period. What I mean is if you try and come up with a definition for slavery that... Any definition you come up will not apply to some things you think are slavery and it'll apply lots of things you don't think are slavey And if you tried to come up the definition that would apply to everything all different people have called slavery across space and time You wouldn't be able to come",
      "would be so vague it'd be like people exploiting other people which of course means nothing. So basically, it doesn't really exist as a human phenomenon. There's extreme exploitation of people but if you want to talk about extreme exploitation just talk about it. If you try and define it precisely you won't be able to call the definition that covers everything",
      "And also that other people think is slavery. Does that answer the question? I mean, sort of. No it doesn't answer the questions. It gives you hints. So if you're interested in that, it's very well written and fairly accessible discussion which should come out soon.",
      "We'll resume the live stream after the break."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - European_ American Muslims_EiFX0mxRBAY&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748689488.opus",
    "text": [
      "You are listening to Le Breakdown. This is Yasser Louati speaking. This podcast is offered to you by the CJL, Committee for Justice and Liberties. We are an independent human rights and civil liberties organization thanks to our donors. If you too would like to support our investigative reporting, political education and mobilization work,",
      "down this is your host Yasser Louati coming to you straight from the Paris Southside Bollieu thanks again for joining us on this new episode and welcome our new listeners and viewers. Again, this episode will cover racism and social justice in the west in this case we're going to speak yet again about what's happening in France but also what's happened in the US. We'll see what it means to be Muslim in the West",
      "where things are different. And of course, there will be difference because of different histories and political traditions in order to further speak of what's happening in America and also have some kind of a look over the events in France and what they could mean for Muslim minorities in the West. To address these issues and maybe see the points of again divergence or not I welcome Jonathan Brown who is a professor",
      "Islamic Civilization at the University of Georgetown. He also happens to speak French and Arabic, which also gives him really the capacity to have an American look over French events but also to accept criticism from French speakers like myself. Jonathan Brown welcome to you! Well thanks for inviting me although I guess I kind of invited myself on the show because i sent so much fan mail that eventually you had to uh...",
      "And because you mentioned it, actually, you were on the radar for quite a long time since I guess summer of 2020. And I was following like especially your various books on Islamic civilization and was like this guy needs to come and maybe speak of whatever's happening in the US, especially back then we had the Black Lives Matter marches",
      "throughout Europe, the UK France and the Netherlands. So finally you made it here so really I'm really happy to have you and uh to start the conversation i'm going to ask you a simple question and I know you've been following the events in France taking a look at what's happening under a so-called liberal president like Emmanuel Macron who is pushing two bills that will be the landmark accomplishments if I can say of the last year of his presidency",
      "of his presidency the comprehensive security bill which would strengthen these straight the state's uh coercive powers loosening checks and balances whatever what was left of them and of course the anti-separatism bill which is solely targeting muslim communities from Washington where you are how do we how do these events or how do you relate to these events yeah I mean",
      "So I think that in general, and this is something you're aware of. It's one of the things that I really like about your podcast and the resources you give us that you help explain this to a worldwide audience especially Anglophone audience but in some ways there's this real disconnect between maybe... In this case it's correct to say Anglo-Saxon perspective on religion",
      "on religion and government or religion society, government society in a more kind of maybe continental European especially French perspective on things like public order secularism notion of public space. But really, you know, a debate about identity right? I think what's the scary part about all this is how",
      "I guess how little in the end it is about things like terrorism and national security, and things like that. And how much it is identity. The reason that's scary is because none of us want a situation where somebody goes and shoots people. None of us would want that to happen. If I knew someone who was going to go shoot somebody, I'd call the police. If you just knew someone was gonna go shoot",
      "If someone said to you, we have certain measures that are going to keep people safe effectively and also take into consideration civil liberties and all this stuff. I mean, that's not super controversial but what's interesting about both in the US and in France is that these gestures, these movements, these attempts to target Muslims very publicly",
      "very publicly target them, right? They don't follow really... Like in the US this stuff didn't start really until like Donald Trump didn't come along till 2015, 2016. 9-11 happened 20 years ago, 15 years before that, right. So it's not about some responding to some clear and present danger of a terrorist threat",
      "it's about responding to a perception in the population that Muslims are a threat to identity, right? So people's identity is under threat. The notion of belonging is under threats. The making sense of the world they live in is under threatened and then Muslims become the scapegoat for that, right. They become the other that everybody can gang up on and use to like engage in negative integration sort of create",
      "create, how do you solve this price of identity? You pick someone that you're not and then that defines who you are. So watching this in Europe is frightening a little bit less so in the UK but still in the uk it's still present and especially since I think the migrant crisis was that in 2015 when the wave of migrants came from or was that... Not even before 2011",
      "before that was 2011 2012 and 13. yeah but i mean that like that one summer when there was a huge wave in the picture of that kid who was dead on the beach and oh that was after that year that was later on yeah so you know like it's crazy to look at these europe especially eu countries and see that like it seems like the thing that under from 2010",
      "ended up defining the Republican Party or kind of conservatism in the US was anti-Muslim, right? So Islamophobia becomes a thing that allows the conservative, the Republican party and their right to have a cohesive identity. And now it's like seeing that on a whole continent, right. It's like the whole content of Europe is they don't agree politically, they don' t agree in terms of types of government, they're not agree in",
      "or tight they want the EU to be, but the one thing they can agree on is that they're not Muslims. And Muslims don't really have a place in Europe and if that's going to define kind of what Europe is... That's just my perspective I could be wrong about this, but what's terrifying about that is because you're not just dealing with some okay there's a terrorist threat how do we solve this? It's like you're facing",
      "like a psychological mess. You're facing, like, a psychological meltdown on a continent-wide level and how can you possibly expect to negotiate that? I mean it's just so intimidating and terrifying and at that point people don't care what they sacrifice or what sort of hypocrisy they engage in. They'll say you have to wear a mask and you can't wearing a cap.",
      "what the heck this is ridiculous you know things like that there's just it just have to make this statement about muslims are not welcome i mean which was i mean like the niqabah the full face bill example i mean that's the uh a typical example of how uh a law was passed just to further you know steer islamophobia and make it even more mainstream first when france passed the ban",
      "It happened in the midst of this global financial meltdown. So it's not like France's priorities were, you know, this chronic capitalism that led to a global collapse and questioning of how our economies function and how they are pegged to global finance. No, the debate in France was first Nicolas Sarkozy back then the conservative president set up the national platform",
      "or national identity and in the meantime we had the controversies about the full face veil. The full-face veil was is actually a not even an isolated event it's like almost non-existent as they were you know pushing for this measure that you know Muslim women wearing the full-faced veal are you know ISIS promoters and there are no al Qaeda activists in disguise etc domestic intelligence publishes",
      "We estimate the number of women who wear it to 367 women out of a population of over 60 million. So that shows that an extremely isolated, if not non-existent event was actually turned into a national controversy that rallied the left and the right. And when the law was about to be passed they couldn't mention we are banning it because",
      "of Islam, which we deem to be extremist. They passed it for security reasons because constitutionally wise, it couldn't have passed so they had to frame it like well in the public space for security reason, we need to see your face and where I salute French Muslims is that as the pandemic went out of control in early 2020 and the masks became mandatory",
      "they refrained from saying, hey oh haven't you prohibited covering up your face in public and now you're asking us to do the same thing. But again it shows you how small events that are most negligible are used to further promote Islamophobia. My other question Jonathan is when 9-11 hit in the US, you know you and I were in college i guess",
      "And the reaction that the US government had towards American Muslims was different from the reaction we saw in France after the January 2015 and November 2015 attacks. Where do you see the difference? And where do you similarities in terms of framing the enemy within,",
      "Patriot Act in the US and the state of emergency in France? Yeah, I mean, I think that before answering that, I was just thinking about this while you were talking. We discussed this earlier, it's a book by Aaron Konani, The Muslims Are Coming, which is a terrific book if people haven't read it or there are some short essays he wrote based on",
      "wrote kind of based on that. I think the book came out in 2015 or so, but his book is really makes an excellent point which is that in the United States, which is a country which has a very robust freedom of religion protection. I mean, I'm grateful for that. There's a really strong constitutional protection of freedom of religious and freedom of speech. But what was clear was that",
      "you know, whether you're talking about the kind of right wing or left-wing conservative liberal in the United States. The only, you know conservatives were against Muslims in general liberals work again okay with Muslims but the Muslims have to be depoliticized right so no matter what even the people who like you, you have to de-politicize right? You can't be a real citizen and I think you mentioned this uh i think it was in your podcast last week or something",
      "or something, you know that to exist as citizens right? What do Muslims want? We want to exist. As citizens we want to exists as three-dimensional citizens by the way I'm Muslim in case anyone's listening and cares right? I'm muslim so you know like what do i want? I want to be able to go out and say I like this, I don't like that, I advocate this, i advocate that, i think this,Ii think that right? You know I want it to go on like any other American has a right to go",
      "And that's all I want, right? But Muslims have to be depoliticized. So they can't express political opinions unless they're saying something that's so kind of innocuous and such a bromide that it might as well not be said. So I think the similarity between France and the US is in both cases, Muslims have",
      "I get the sense that Muslims' very existence is political. So in America, if you have a hijab on or Muslim guy with a beard, or you're going to the mosque five times a day, this can be really understood as free practice of religion or free exercise of religion and no one's gonna have a problem with it. Not the worst Islamophobes",
      "Islamophobes. Even kind of Islamophobs will be like, look okay these people have a right to do this except by the way if they there's this new line which kind of emerged during the Trump administration um it's probably gone into hibernation now but this idea that islam is not a religion that it doesn't deserve protection or freedom of religions... By the way you should get Asma Adin uh to come on your show and talk about this her book But When Islam Is Not A Religion very good book. We'd love to have her. Yeah so my point",
      "in America, the religious person, the woman with a hijab, the guy with a beard. That could be like the Amish guy with the beard or the Jewish guy with kippah or the nun. These are all just religious persons and that person is going to be protected as a religious person. Persona religiosa they're gonna get protected. But the second thing political right? In America when you talk about politics it's really about Israel-Palestine",
      "Palestine. That's really the, that's the you know criticizing American foreign policy sure but especially Israel-Palestine is like the red line that you don't cross in order to be a good Muslim you have to either never talk about that or do you have",
      "I'll bring it back later. Go ahead. So the, I think that the important thing to keep in mind is that you know, both United States and France, the kind of aim of the government, the aim of this system of establishment is to create depoliticized Muslims. It's a deep as deep politicize Muslims by force and to create deep politicized Muslims by structuring education and media and civil society right? In the difference between",
      "between France and the US is that in France, the Muslim existence itself is political. Whereas in the US, the most of existence is not political it's a religious expression but political expression is political okay I think that's an important distinction but the reason I think if you think about that you can see what happened after 9-11 is... And by the way we can have a whole show criticizing George W Bush and everything like",
      "which Donald Trump never did, and which was a really important thing that he did after 9-11. Like maybe one or two days after the attack, he went to the Islamic Center on Massachusetts Avenue in downtown DC, and he gave a press conference. He said... He stood there with a bunch of Muslims. He says Islam is religion of peace. Muslims are not our enemy. I mean, and so he was obviously the president, the head of the Republican Party, and evangelical Christian leader of evangelical Christians",
      "And what that did is in a way, a lot of ways that kept a cap on Islamophobia for eight years. Kept the cap on it in terms of public discourse right so in terms Of what you saw in movies, what do you saw media? What would be how political discourse function, how social discourse functioned There was not like a The really bad Islamophobia in America didn't come until",
      "didn't come until after George W. Bush left, until around 2010. Now what happened during his time is the American organs of government especially justice system cracked down severely on Muslim organizations. I mean who knows how many thousands and thousands of Muslims were just deported? We don't even know who they are or what their cases are,",
      "visas or studying or something, they are just gone. But in terms of the number of Muslim, some of the major Muslim organizations were either shut down, put under investigation, but under threat of investigation. The, the, some",
      "you know, hammer coming down or just make it evidently clear. Muslim organizations cannot breathe freely right? If there is even a one molecule of disagreement with US government policy, if there was even a molecule of 1 cent of money that goes towards anything that could be in any way be suspect in anyway the one case to hold on foundation case, the biggest charity, Muslim charity in the US Holy Land Foundation was shut down",
      "was shut down. Its founders and directors were put in prison from between 60, I think 60-70 years in prison for giving money to an organization in Gaza that the US government also gave money to so the same Zakat committees in Gaza, that the United Nations used to give money to people in Gaza. The Kholan Foundation with money was given to those organizations. What did the US Government say? They said oh but you",
      "Hold on for a second. You knew these were linked to Hamas? I mean, just imagine that. Imagine that you're... So Muslims can't even give money to the same organizations that everyone else is giving money to because someone can come around and say, oh, but we think you knew that there's something about this organization that's linked to Hama. Actually, Jonathan, it went beyond organizations because, for example, when there were revelations about the NYPD surveilling Muslim communities,",
      "you know people estimate that it began at least as early as 2002 so it actually went beyond the holy land foundation and how the network of muslim charities was targeted by the bush administration. The other thing though is that don't you think that George W Bush made his speech after 9 11 in a mosque in Washington because back then Islamophobia wasn't really such",
      "such a mainstream ideology because if we compare with trump foreign policy american foreign policy especially towards palestine didn't really change even it got worse under trump but under bush don't you think he refrained from acting like you know donald trump because in 2002 you know the there were still some how can i say some limits that you know any respectable politician wouldn't cross yeah i mean",
      "Yeah, I mean, the problem with this is sort of like a chicken and egg problem. Where did he kind of restrain himself on Islam Muslims because Islamophobia wasn't really a thing yet? Or was Islamophobia will be really not a thing it because he was restraining himself? And we have to go back to the late 1990s remember, and this is gonna shock some of your listeners maybe but Muslims in the United States got George W.",
      "got george w bush elected no joke actually muslims in florida voted for george davey bush i was in america back then jonathan i was",
      "with you like i saw it with my very eyes that people from the muslim communities campaign for him now this is a sore topic for a lot of reasons but one of them is that you know you know a lot african-american muslims will say you know what do you mean muslim was worth for bush because africano-americans weren't but let's like you know that's a whole another discussion right but i mean the fact of the matter",
      "in his faith initiative organizations. Even before 9-11 during his time in the White House, he had a lot of Muslim leaders involved and things. So I think that if there hadn't been a 9-1, the story of the Bush administration... By the way, I wanna make clear, I'm not some closet Bush fan here or something. If someone else could disagree with me and say that I'm wrong but I mean, I've given you my assessment right?",
      "been a 9-11 that this Bush's his legacy in terms of not just Muslims the United States but kind of religious people of faith and religious, the role of religious, people in civil society would be very different right so Muslims will be really part of that and not something excluded from that or something suspect. So I think that we have to keep in mind that Bush came into office and his sort of default setting was actually to try and reach out",
      "reach out and build bridges with Muslim communities in the United States as a, basically looking at Muslims as Republicans. So like Ronald Reagan allegedly, legend has it he said this about Hispanics that they were, they're Republicans, they just don't know it yet right so their you know their this is the stereotype I think a lot of this has been questioned lately but religious family values hard working conservative these people are republicans right?",
      "the Bush administration was Muslims are Republicans and family values, conservative religious. And so a lot of them, a lot immigrant Muslims small business owners relatively economically successful these have Republican written all over them. So- But as I listened learned because what you're saying right now is open or raise the question wasn't it? Or isn't it a trap for Muslims to vote",
      "Muslims to vote for a candidate based solely on two factors, religious morals and fiscal reasons. Because, for example, conservatives in France they would come to the local mosque, wear the mask and see we are not like those leftists etc., traditional values etc. They get the Muslim vote locally and at the national level they throw the very community that voted for them under the bus saying there is a problem with radical Islam",
      "radical Islam and communitarism that Muslims are self excluding themselves or from their self-excluding from the rest of society. Isn't it a trap to just vote for a candidate based on those two reasons? I, well, it depends. I mean if you know, if you say that's, I mean maybe in the U S sorry, it may be in France but I think, you know if you go again, go back to imagine, you're in the year 2000 9 11 hasn't happened yet",
      "And, you know, if you're a Muslim in the United States again African American Muslims have diverse concerns but a lot of their concerns would probably be the same concerns of African-American non-Muslims right and Probably not going to feel a lot affinity for the Republican Party or feel that they are interests are protected or advanced by the Republican party. But if you think about a lot",
      "um they'd look at the republican party and say you know what's what's the rip what's",
      "difference between them on Israel-Palestine, you know maybe that started a little bit in the last couple of years but I mean go back before 2010 or 2011 or 2012 and you couldn't fit a razor blade between the two parties on that issue. So you know what's there's that's a non-issue, that's awash in both cases so i think that the bigger point is trying to make is that from",
      "during the Bush era, 2000-2008 Muslim institutions were under a lot of threat from law enforcement to depoliticize them. As you said, Muslim communities under surveillance to depoliticize rights or the idea that you go into the mosque, you can't just say what you think. You can't talk about a political issue like another person, you be a citizen but that's all true. But in terms of kind of political rhetoric",
      "you didn't see the kind of Islamophobia that you saw after 2010. Then what happened after Bush leaves office in 2008, then almost as soon as Obama won the election, you saw the emergence of this Tea Party, essentially white nationalism and what became clear during a lot of these tea party rallies especially 2008-2009-2010 is that Islamophobia",
      "Islamophobia, fear of Muslims. This idea of radical Islamic terrorism which Trump would talk about all the time this became a major motivating factor, a major rallying call on the Republican party basically and that when the Republican Party came back in the 2010 interim elections right so every two years at congressional elections they won a huge number",
      "on the back of this Tea Party wave, this Tea party fervor. And if you looked at what's the thread that binds together this Tea Part and a kind of Republican Party energy at that time was Islamophobia. It binds together foreign policy hawks fiscal conservatives cultural conservatives evangelical Christians right? So the thing that all of these people can agree on is they don't like Muslims. They want, they don' t want Muslims around. They see Muslims as a threat",
      "Muslims as a threat. And so that is really, that year with the 2010 elections, that Republicans realized that Islamophobia, the Muslim issue was something that you could really use to motivate voters and get them to come to the polls. And from that point on Obama had to contend with that right? By the way, that's also when you start seeing this burgeoning of this idea that Obama is a Muslim. Yes. That starts to come in like it was present",
      "It was present even before that, but I mean this really starts to take off. And then you saw this with Donald Trump and what's... Donald Trump got elected for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons is he would say the things that all these conservative Americans which is probably more than half the country, I don't know exactly",
      "was saying the things that they thought but that other politicians wouldn't say. Both he would say this about things like transgender issues, he would see it about immigration and he would stay at about Muslims. Remember when the San Bernardino attack happened? There's two a couple that shot there all those people in San Bernardina California. That's when Donald Trump came out and said he said he wants the Muslim ban you know he said wanted to Muslim aid for the idea of a Muslim registry registering Muslims in the US",
      "So it's really during 2010 through 2016 that you see the peak of public Islamophobia in the US. Because Obama didn't have the authority, because he wasn't a conservative to tamp it down and Republican leaders realized",
      "that this was their key back into office. So they weren't going to restrict it. Trump rides that into the Oval Office and then repeatedly, it's a major theme of his presidency during the four years of his Presidency. Now the last thing I'll say and then I'll shut up because you're probably like borderline comatose from me talking but if you do the... From like the beginning, remember one of",
      "the first thing that happened in the Trump administration was the Muslim ban. And all these people went to airports, regular Americans went to airport support Muslims. I remember my wife who wears a job was like walking down in the Metro stations when one comes up and she says, I just want you to know you're welcome here. My wife obviously was born in the United States so but the point is that- Thank you. The point of people are... There's also the women's March which happened at the same time as inauguration",
      "the organizers was Linda Sarsour, hijab wearing Palestinian Muslim woman. As Trump came into office, the response by this very strong huge portion of the American population that did not like Trump... The way to show you didn't like Trump was hug a Muslim, was to come out against his Islamophobia. In some ways,",
      "people who benefited most from Trump being in office were his own cronies and then American Muslims. You know, they really... because American Muslims received a degree of sympathy and concern that had never been publicly expressed before at that time. You spoke about the attempts to depoliticize Muslims and that they are welcome as long as they don't get involved in social activism or social justice issues etc., let alone criticize",
      "criticize America and her policies. The one thing I saw that struck me is that oftentimes you would see the political establishment mobilize the religious establishment to do that work of depoliticization, making sure that the way Islam is taught in the mosque and even in families",
      "constrained or restricted to faith or cultural activities. You pray, you fast, help the poor go to Mecca etc and oftentimes you see that many Islamic institutions be it in America or France and they will come to France where they are extremely problematic and they're responsible for the rise of Islamophobia. You will see that these Islamic organizations willingly or not are doing that job of making sure that Muslims only view themselves as believers",
      "believers and that everything that falls outside of the realm of faith is just like either to be disregarded or even to, uh, to be rejected in the case of France. For example, you know, people spoke about keep speaking of the anti-separatism bill, which I remind our audience is literally about cracking down on any form of organizing by Muslims that would allow the government to violate the famous law,",
      "that separates politics and religion you know it's a sacred and saint law in France, that now the government asks to violate when it comes to Muslims. That would allow the government to get involved in Muslim charities he spoke about coup d'etat in charities because I think intelligence are not that stupid they know what's happening there is a generational clash emerging in communities between those who are born in France who view themselves in France and don't feel like",
      "feel like they owe something to the establishment and the immigrant Muslims who are still ruling those mosques and Islamic charities, behave like they need to keep a low profile. Behave like you are very grateful and never dare to criticize whether they are coming from the left or the right. And Macron said we need to be able to intervene in charities if those Muslim leaders",
      "are overthrown through elections. Now, among in the aftermath or following the anti-separatism bill Emmanuel Macron called for a charter of Imams that would regulate the public discourse of Imam's unheard of especially since the proclamation of the republic now in that charter it's about prohibiting Imams from speaking about",
      "speaking about state Islamophobia or calling out France's military presence abroad, bringing foreign conflicts into France or to French public debate. That means don't speak about Palestine and on top of it, to further normalize the limits imposed by the government onto religious leaders. But the problem is",
      "Emmanuel Macron just asked for a charter. Some Muslim leaders doubled down and they came up, the first multiple organizations got together to come up with a charter that accepted the idea is already beyond me this is a secular country the government has no business in meddling clerical affairs and they should not have accepted it some of them did again I learned that one of them one of the leaders had applied for French citizenship so he feared for his own",
      "for his own interests. The other one, he feared the deportation because he wasn't a French citizen so that tells you what the problem people, French Muslims are facing here but that group was as they were drafting a charter from Macron, the Grand Mosque of Paris goes around them and offers the most radical version of the Charter and the one being used today by",
      "as a benchmark. You sign it, you are not a separatist, you don't sign it. You are a separattist and therefore you should be kept from receiving public funding. And if you can even be threatened by a shutdown. How do we see this data happening in America? Because the Obama years weren't exactly years of full freedom",
      "and meddling in the clerical affairs was indeed happening on a regular basis. What's your take on that? Yeah, there's a really good article. I'm trying to remember it's a 2012 Stanford Law Review. I think it's called Creating Establishment Islam. I have to... I was just trying to find them on my computer but it wasn't coming up. I can send it to you later. It's a great article. Okay so the difference here between United States",
      "The difference here between the United States and France is that, yeah it's essentially the opposite in that the United states government cannot establish any religious denomination. It can't give any... There's two interpretations one is you know it can't get any funding or support or official recognition to a religious group",
      "funding support or recognition to one religious group and not another one. So either way, doing something like getting involved in shaping Muslim religious life through mosques or imams and things like that would be unacceptable for the US government to do. But of course, that's exactly what the US Government did just through indirect means.",
      "you know, and in a lot of ways like this is, you could think about the United States as like a body. And it's almost like a biological reaction to 9-11 right? So if you feel there's a threat, if certain kinds of Muslims are seen as threats, if politicized Muslims are threats then there's all these organs of American life that can be mobilized against that that are not actually government media, civil society, philanthropy",
      "Philanthropy, universities, social pressure. So what happens after 9-11 is who's going to get the grant? If you propose a grant showing that Islam is actually a religion of peace and Muslims should never ever touch any kind of weapons or you have a proposal which says I'm gonna show that Muslims are justified in fighting when they're attacked",
      "when they're attacked, which is going to get the funding from whatever grant giving organization. So who's gonna be the person who's invited on CNN? The person who is sort of pushing back against things that are politically questionable, who's trying to assert their right as a citizen to have a political opinion or the person whose gonna say, oh yeah Muslims are awful like look at these Muslims, they're bad, they bad Muslim need to do we should apologize more. Who are the people who are gonna be favored in public life?",
      "And so the various kind of organs of US civil, of US society, of us establishment even apart from the government and of course the government through its funding things like education, media, things like that. Yeah CVE is a perfect example right? So with the all CBE is like the sort of final blossoming of this which really gets developed during the Obama era",
      "of how do we use law enforcement and government encouragement to monitor Muslims, and make sure that they're depoliticized. And so by that time you've created a cadre of Muslims who are actually now trained to participate in this, who see financial benefit from this. So yeah I think the difference is what in France can be done very directly through",
      "very directly through government involvement and the united states has to be done indirectly through kind of government and establishment uh control or elasia yeah we see today that muslims are more ever more involved in social justice issues and at the same time we see that there is a normalization",
      "Muslims getting involved, but by far never enough because there has been a tradition of keeping the mosques as places of you know pacification or neutralization. I will use the 2005 uprisings in France October 27th Ziad and Buna two youngsters in the Paris suburbs, the northern suburbs, I live on the south side they were like running away from the police and",
      "and they hide in an electrical transformer, and they get electrocuted and die. And the police officers knew what was happening, did not keep them from hiding there. Even one in the radio call says that's it, they're dead. 27th October, there are tensions of course people start...",
      "that event becomes a point of convergence for many and it crystallizes all of the ember that has been brewing for decades in the in the volume what we call the hood by the third and fourth of october november which means like barely two weeks later the uh the uprising becomes a national event we have uprisings",
      "support from religious institutions, not in terms of imams banding with the youngsters in the streets and throwing tear gas back at the police. No I'm saying in terms explaining you know and expressing to a national audience the ills of the communities that come to their mosques but the third and the fourth event becomes nationwide and people pinpoint it to the tear gassing of a mosque as",
      "the flashpoint that's when things turned into a full blown rebellion. A famous, one of the main Islamic institutions back then the UOIF Union des Organisations Islamiques de France of the French union of Islamic organizations today rebranded French Muslims. The issue of fatwa or legal opinion saying that burning cars is illegal",
      "is unlawful. And people were extremely upset because they were like, first you weren't there to call out the injustices we are rising up against. You weren't in there to support the family of Ziad and Buna. You were in there, to support them ask that got tear gassed. And here you are making this statement that nobody is calling for and getting involved into this social uprising. The problem is again",
      "Again, pundits from the right who call these they are not social uprising. They're ethnic riots and these Muslims are inherently enemies of the Republic etc., it is the Muslims against the French Republic. And I remember even the coverage of Fox News was beyond ludicrous. And people said because you got involved by speaking of this in religious terms and calling out these events,",
      "You, in effect, turned a social uprising to an ethnic right because people said, look, even the mosque, even though the Islamic Federation is involved. When I look back at what's happening in the US, you see more and more religious organizations getting involved in the BLM marches and speaking up against, speaking, excuse me, in favor of social justice and demanding equal rights for all. But there are still some resistance.",
      "some resistance right there is still some resistance by many who would call out blm the same way you have organizations you know calling out you know activism in the ball even myself in the course of my work and i keep saying that the first uh roadblock when you when you march against islamophobia my apologies the first road block your face",
      "sure that all this activism is shut down. Do you think this is due to a poor political education of some Muslim leaders? The absence of a theology of liberation or that there was inherently a contradiction within Islamic currents, some of them are conservative and tend",
      "especially among the newer generations, are embracing these struggles for social justice? Yeah. Well, you know it's interesting this is probably like maybe the key issue that Muslim communities are dealing with. It's really in the United States and I imagine elsewhere as well because the questions you asked",
      "is a knot that brings together all the threads, or really you know all the thread of various anxieties and questions that Muslims have about their own identity, about their place in the societies they live in. The article is Samuel Raskoff's RASCOFF Establishing an Official Islamic Law and Strategy",
      "The Laws and Strategy of Counter-Radicalization, which is in Sanford Law Review in I think 2012. Yeah, I sent you the PDF of it. Thank you. Well first of all, I think we have to pause to appreciate the massive change that occurs with what you're describing in terms of kind of the rise of BLM and social justice activism",
      "United States and elsewhere. So you go from not just Muslims, so Muslims are depoliticized after 9-11. You said it right? You can't go into a mosque in 2010 and criticize the US government. You can get up on a hutba say something negative about the US Government. I mean, just the idea of it is terrifying to think about being in that position",
      "You're being surveilled. There's probably people in the mosque who are FBI moles, right? They're gonna say we really should start looking into this brown guy. What else is he saying? Let's pay a visit to his house next thing and that's terrifying. Okay. Now let's recognize something else as well which is that in the United States in general",
      "actively to go out in public, in the media and say something like US law enforcement organizations are intentionally shooting people innocent people. This would be unspeakable on American television. It should be inadmissible in American public life. Groups like the Black Panthers which are now being lionized in film",
      "I think appropriately, either of those guys are really impressive. But if you came out and said something positive about the Black Panthers in whatever year 2000-2010, it's like you're praising terrorists basically right? So that's an American life in general. What happens with the shooting of Michael Brown,",
      "was in 2014, right? And then the kind of viral spread of other videos of one Black man after another being shot by police officers. Increasingly I mean you can make an excuse for one, you can making an excuse or two that use it three four five six. I mean is out more and more outrageous situations. Guy running away from a police officer",
      "officer across a field, shoots him in the back for no reason. You see this over and over suddenly you start realizing wait a second, this idea that Americans had that... We don't have political prisoners here. We don' t have police officers who shoot people here. That's in other countries. That is like we saw this on the news there are some other country where they do this it's not in United States. The United States is a country of justice. Yeah maybe things go wrong every once in a while but",
      "Police officer would intentionally shoot a civilian for no reason. That's unacceptable, unconceivable, inconceivable. So suddenly the inconcevable becomes conceivable. The inconceitable becomes conceivable. And if you go from let's say 2000, mid 2014, 2015, 2016, you get to Trump election. So certainly not only is it now conceivable to think about law enforcement as a source of injustice",
      "of injustice that needs to be called out. But the head of your government is now somebody that 60% of the population thinks is a grotesque kind of monster, this sort of narcissistic, immoral awful human being who's now going to use the government to pursue whatever sick agenda he has. So the ideas that had been previously unthinkable or unspeakable",
      "or unspeakable on the kind of extreme left of the American political spectrum were suddenly brought within the realm of reality, of being speakable and thinkable because of the shock of the election of Donald Trump and things like Black Lives Matter. Enough for the population I think had been shocked by this, not the whole population obviously. So my point is that when you think about this idea, this theme we've talked about Muslims being depoliticized",
      "Now, because society as a whole is being politicized and able to speak in political ways on parts of the extreme left spectrum that had previously been unthinkable. Muslims are now able to talk critically about US foreign policy, critically about the US government, critically by the justice system not because there's been some recognition",
      "victims because there's been some recognition that there are victims overall, right? That now Muslims become one voice among other critics of this system. Okay so I think this is really...I don't know maybe it's just my opinion but this is important because through no action of their own, right, so Muslims weren't the ones out in the streets marching at BLM protests. Muslims weren t you know through no",
      "no action of their own, an environment had been created in which Muslims could be political people for the first time in at least 16 years if not earlier. But here's a problem, right? Which is that from 2001 to 2016 or let's just use those dates,",
      "Muslims had been trying to convince Muslim organizations, Muslim individuals, Muslim institutions, mosques, imams right have been sitting there trying to convice the US government, US law enforcement agencies that they were not a threat. That they were good citizens, they were well behaved, that they would just like everybody else right and suddenly There's all these people in society who are going out and doing protests and criticizing the government and calling out law enforcement for being unjust and oppressive",
      "unjust and oppressive, etc. Muslims are now on the opposite side of that equation. What you've seen I think since about 2015 until today is a graph...I would say this is just my anecdotal impression but a gradual move at first some Muslim imams, some activists, some young Muslims",
      "young Muslims started to speak out in support of things like Black Lives Matter, wanting to start adopting the vocabulary and the ideas of social justice activism. A lot of mosque leadership and a lot of institutional leadership pushed back against that because yeah you know a lot Muslim organizations in the U.S are people who benefit from the United States, they're wealthy immigrant Muslim communities in the suburbs or doing well for themselves. They're part of the establishment right? They don't want to rock the boat",
      "They don't want to rock the boat. Or they're people who, again, they've spent 15 years having it had been beaten in their heads that they cannot be political. It's not easy to suddenly transform into a political creature especially when you're afraid like yeah maybe these activists aren't going to get targeted but who's to say your mosque isn't gonna get targeted by the FBI if you come out and support of BLM or something? And finally the third thing",
      "as a kind of final threat is that um, a lot of Muslims you know who are conservative people right in the sort of vocabulary of-of kind of culture and society right they're conservative people in terms of their values, in terms or their understanding of gender sexuality family life and everything like that. They're religious people um they look at a lot these activists and they say wait a second you know",
      "Paul Pierson, You know all these people are all marching but I don't agree with a lot of what they seem to stand for in terms of cultural social religious ideas. Paul Piperson, And then i'm over here you know i've got these down more conservative people who are condemning these protests, I kind of feel like more more in common with these conservative folks. Paul pierson, So there's a it is also a strong strain in American political Muslim community.",
      "the American Muslim community that doesn't want to participate or support social justice movements because they consider certain social ideas, kind of whatever you wanna call it atheistic anarchistic ideas in those movements to be antithetical to Islam and to what Muslims believe. So I think these are all issues",
      "you know, Muslim leadership whether mosque imams or organizations have had to deal with when they're as they've tried to figure out how to position themselves vis-a-vis the sort of social justice movement. The broader social justice Movement now some Imams came out right away very supportive, you know people like Omar Suleiman who I work with a lot. I have a lot of respect for him someone who's been done a really good job of making very clear what he believes is a Muslim but also making it very clear that Muslims need",
      "on the front line against things like unjust imprisonment, police violence, things like that. Helping out people who were detained, helping out immigrants or families that are being separated on the border. So other people like Linda Sarsour were much more involved in like... More kind of ensconced and embedded in things like the Women's March which a lot of Muslims had problems with because",
      "march wouldn't let people who are pro-life speak, right? So this is a big issue in the United States. The issue of abortion I don't know if people care about this in France or not but I mean the thing that the women's march was very pro life sorry pro choice and a lot of Muslims didn't feel comfortable with that so some Muslim organizations especially ones that came out of more like kind of Muslim brotherhood background",
      "There is, just so you know there's no actual Muslim Brotherhood organization in the United States. I think in the mid-1990s it disbanded itself but there are organizations that have come from that Muslim Brotherhip background they were maybe the first ones to join in and adopt a lot of the rhetoric and language of social justice movement",
      "But I think there is increasing pressure to do so because a lot of young Muslims, if you're a Muslim teenager right now, let's say you're 15, 16, 17 years old. Trump came into power when you were 11, 12. Your teenage years were spent being called evil by conservatives and being welcomed and celebrated by progressives. And seeing people like Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib members",
      "you know members of congress who are very vocally Muslim but also very vocaly progressive and those young Muslims are going to come out and expect their mosque leadership to share their feelings about that a Muslim is someone who should be progressive. And there's a lot, there's contradictions involved in that as well and I think those are the issues Muslims are dealing with now. But that contradiction is actually maybe",
      "Fadi Bardawil, Ph.D.: Further apply pressure to see the rise of a Muslim theology of liberation that would set the framework for what it means to struggle for social justice as a Muslim and I'm going to just comment on one thing you said then bring you back to our liberals embraced Muslims in reaction to Trump.",
      "I'm going to give you an example. You can sometimes find the political support from an atheist, an anarchist who is a staunch advocate of justice, who does not care whether you believe or not with him that domination is domination and should be fought. I was speaking from my own experience by the way. And you could also have a stauch religious figure who's going to side with the government when it cracks down on Muslims. One of the biggest problems we know French Muslims even in the US",
      "U.S., for that matter, Muslim communities have faced is that many of the Imams turn to become informants willingly or not but they end up working against the very interests of their communities yet they oppose us as protectors of the saint Muslim identity and that Islam should be upheld and I'm working for the community etc while at the same time you may",
      "justice and against injustice they are there uh i'm going to come back i'm coming to come Jonathan to what you said about Haga Muslim which became a tendency under Trump and as a rejection to his policies we all saw what happened in the at the DFW airport or the O'Hare Airport and you know JFK etc hundreds of people like you were standing with you know muslim travelers now it was good",
      "to stand with muslims and that was also a statement that you reject uh trump even when i would travel to the us you know people i work with you know in my day-to-day job that i would go and meet over there yes sir by the way you know how they i'm sympathetic blah blah etc and i'm kind of i don't like speaking about those things anyways but but this to me may look suspicious because my question jonathan is",
      "How sustainable is that support of liberals towards Muslims? So now that Joe Biden is elected, if Muslims now start criticizing Joe Biden for his policies towards Muslims in general in the US, Muslims in the rest of the Muslim world, Palestine, Kashmir, et cetera. Is that support really sustainable coming from liberals or they will be told listen we supported you",
      "supported you but now this is part of my language a white to white conversation in which you have no place uh to express your opinion yeah so i mean i think that there's two we have to think about this kind of on two registers and by the way i have to go in about 10 minutes because i have",
      "centrist figure. So when you, you probably noticed this if you follow news in the United States during the Democratic primaries to pick the Democratic nominee, you know, Bernie Sanders was doing very well, right? And he's seen as this progressive further left than Joe Biden candidate and a lot of Muslims.",
      "Muslim community in the United States, there were a lot of harsh words between Muslims supporting Bernie and Muslims supporting Biden. Obviously, Biden won but here's the thing. It's not just about... Muslims can criticize Biden because everybody can criticize",
      "of the Democratic Party and even sort of outside the Democratic party on the left, that is very critical of Joe Biden for any number of things. Whether foreign policy, you know he bombed someplace in Iraq recently I can't remember or you know. You know Muslims we're not even talking about Muslims right? So there's all these so Muslim voices can be amongst those voices. So if let's say let's just imagine that Biden",
      "delivered some message to Benjamin Netanyahu or the Israeli government about how American government stands in eternal support of Israel, or something like that. I think there'd be a lot of criticism of him. Maybe not a lot in the sense of the grand scope of American political life but you'd see a lot",
      "of this in the media that you would never have seen 10 years ago criticizing him for that and a Muslim could be amongst those people. And so, the point is that space has been opened and Muslims can occupy that space. So if you think about criticizing Muslims being citizens politically now I think that that is going to be very hard to reverse. So a Muslim coming out and criticizing law enforcement,",
      "communities and Muslim coming out in criticizing racism, Muslim coming on criticizing prison. You name it right politically domestically or foreign policy of Muslims are citizens now and I don't see that changing at least anytime soon however social issues is another question right where",
      "I haven't been following this, but there's this thing called the Equality Bill which is being proposed in the US Congress that would basically say that essentially federal law will say that there just can be no discrimination in any way on issues of gender. Including things like transgender and things like that. Obviously a lot of Republicans are against this",
      "And imagine that a Muslim were to come out and say, critical of let's say the kind of progressive social agenda around things like LGBT issues in the Democratic Party. Or one of some cabinet secretary I can't remember or undersecretary who was just approved by the Congress as transgender right? So let's you were to not support something to that effect.",
      "There would be no protection for that Muslim on the left half of the American political spectrum. Not from centrists like Joe Biden, not from progressives like Bernie Sanders, right? Nobody... The only people who would protect you would be conservatives. So here's the issue, right. Politically Muslims are protected on the Left",
      "on the left. Socially, Muslims are protected on the right. How do you exist in both those spaces at the same time? I mean is that possible? So what you see is Muslims if they want to talk about politics by that I mean everything aside from social issues",
      "feel at home in the kind of progressive or even centrist democratic party. But then they can't talk about social issues, where they have to just say we agree with you and you see that from a lot of Muslims now if Muslims want to talk and take a strong stance on social issues like LGBT gender family stuff like that. They are simply not going to be welcome in the Democratic Party either it's centrist or progressive wings.",
      "So that's a big conundrum, major conundum right now. Jonathan Browne thank you very much for your opinions on the show I take it that this will only be the first of many because as our listeners and viewers have noticed we barely scratched the surface. I hope that you will be back probably with another speaker soon Ramadan is coming so Ramadan Mubarak to all Muslims around the world",
      "I remind our listeners and viewers that you are a professor of Islamic civilization at the University of Georgetown. You formerly headed The Bridge Initiative, you published a series of books that I'm going to give here misquoting Muhammad, The Challenge And Choices Of Interpreting The Prophet's Legacy At One World Publications. Muhammad A Very Short Introduction, The Canonization Of Al-Bukhari And Muslim And Islam And Slavery",
      "and slavery among others jonathan thanks again my pleasure and uh it's probably just started ramadan right now i mean you probably just had uh maghrib so on madonna water thank you and to you too as well my regards for your family as uh for you dear listeners and viewers thanks again for joining us this episode is over if you think this podcast deserves",
      "julietlima.oscar-novembergolf donation whatever the amount we can still use that to remain fully independent and make this project a sustainable one as for me this was yasser luati speaking to you from the paris south side of banlieue the struggle continues"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Evidentiary Maxims in Hadi_k59Q2VyTHSI&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748650119.opus",
    "text": [
      "Salam alaikum everyone. Today we have the well-known scholar in Islamic studies and Hadith studies, Professor Dr Jonathan Browne. And today he will speak about the topic Evidentiary Maxims in Hadith, Schism, Interpretation and more.",
      "to welcome you in Tübingen personally. And now, you can begin. Okay. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Thank you for inviting me. I'm very honored to be included among the list of scholars who are presenting in your seminar. It's a very impressive group. So it's very flattering for me. So originally, I was supposed to present about current issues and Hadith studies or something but that was only because",
      "only because I did not reply to the email asking me what my title was, because I was too disorganized. So I figured the organizers just added that title in because they had no idea what else to do. And I could have talked about something like this, but I think it would not be that interesting or it would be kind of maybe too interesting who knows, but i figured i'm gonna This is my chance to I was like you know there's actually a project I was working on for a long time and i'm going",
      "audience will appreciate it. So this is something that I was looking at, maybe I'm working on since I was in grad school which was a long time ago now and it's about a maxim qaeda you could say qaeda usuliyya or yeah probably qaeda like an interpretive or evidentiary maxim",
      "The person or the party that is affirming something supersedes, or is presumed to supersede, the one denying it. So the superseder... Sorry, the affirmation supersedes denial, basically, if we could think about that. I'm just going to use the Arabic because it's easier than English, I think.",
      "amount of NAFI. And this is something I noticed when I was doing my dissertation or when I grad school, and I just kind of kept a track of this anytime I came across it. And I could probably do one of those shameless searches for this and find a lot more material, but this just represents what I've come across on my own, which I think is also interesting because it's not just the instances in which you have that exact wording used, but also in which",
      "of that wording, or also just the concept itself instead of necessarily any literal deployment of that maxim. So anyway, I thought this would be an interesting thing to go over and see how it's used. This maxim actually appears very early on in Islamic intellectual history. We have evidence of it very early",
      "in his Kitab al-Tamiz, a small book part of which has survived on his kind of discussion of the methodology of Hadith criticism. He says that",
      "But he says essentially is that a narration or someone making a claim about material that other narrations or other transmitters don't have, is like a witness who has recalled something or remembers somebody that other witnesses have forgotten. So it's interesting in this case you have this idea that somebody affirming something or adding it is like someone bearing testimony and remembers something that somebody else has not forgotten.",
      "or sorry, has forgotten, or I did not remember. Imam al-Tahawi, the famous Hanifi Hadith scholar who died 321 about 932 of the common era, he uses it in his Sharh Mushkil Al-Athar, a massive text dealing with interpretation of hadith and reconciliation of different hadith evidence. He used it to argue that one narration of a hadith with an additional clause",
      "narration that lacks that clause and he says the thing that is adding is better than a thing that",
      "Abu Sulaiman Hamd al-Khattabi who died in 998 of the common year. He was from Bost today, that's I think Lashkar Gah in Afghanistan. It's a fascinating scholar. Maybe someone has already studied this but his works are one of the places you see maybe the most common or frequent deployment of Al-Qua'id and Fiqhiya wa al-Usuliyyah in Islamic history as far as I know. His books are just full of these.",
      "is also a theologian known for not liking kalam. He wrote a big multi-volume book condemning kalam and also the earliest hadith commentary we have, for example, on Sunan Abu Dawud and Sahih Bukhari are by al-Khattabi. And he says on the issue of raising your hands in prayer so when you do your prayers Allahu Akbar or something like that and then when you go to bow Allahu Akbar you come up with your hands like this if you're a Hanafi you don't do that or Maliki you go down this and you come",
      "this and you come up without raising your hands but if you're a shafi or a humbly people like this move like that um so there's lots of hadiths that say both right they're both thoughts of these that can be marshaled for both positions um says is alif bat awlamin so the hadits that affirm that the prophet raised his hands in prayer are supersede trump those that deny that he or say that he didn't do that",
      "didn't do that this uh maxim especially as it comes i think it'd be interesting to see where it comes out of because unless i could be wrong about this but it seems to me that it originates amongst hadith scholars or in the early ahlus and then of course spreads much more widely",
      "which means the addition made by the trustworthy party or a trustworthy transmitter. And this is the idea that if you have, let's say 10 narrations of a Hadith and one of them says, nine of them say X and one on them says X plus Y, if the narration that says X Plus Y is narrated by reliable transmitter, you should take that edition even though actually it's the minority position.",
      "This is maybe not the position of early Muslim hadith scholars, but it becomes accepted as a general or mainstream position by the time you get to the ten hundreds of the common era. Or for example, it's not just about like the text of a hadith, it could also be the normative force of the hadith. So if you have let's say 10 narrations of a report and nine of them attributed to Umar bin al-Khattab so it's his ruling",
      "attributes it to the Prophet Muhammad, according to the principle of ziyadu tika, you would take the version that's attributed to the prophet Muhammad if it's transmitted by a reliable transmitter even if it is only one out of ten narrations. Especially in the early period and amongst hadith scholars, you'll see this notion of al-muthbid muqaddama lanafi a lot of times invoked along with or in association with this idea of",
      "this idea of ziyadat al-thiqa, the acceptability of the trustworthy transmitter. Anybody have any questions so far? I mean, if anyone has any questions, they can raise their hand or if I haven't been clear about something, please let me know. Okay. By the way, this can be very consequential. This ziyada thika issue is not just an academic eggheady thing that",
      "famous hadith of Umm Waraka, the hadith in which the Prophet ﷺ tells the companion a woman named Umm Warika to lead her household in prayer. Almost all every single narration of this hadith except one says that the Prophet says lead your household in pray. Darha in prayer like darha or household and",
      "And scholars across the board who say da'at includes men and women. Only one narration, which appears rather late in the Sunan of a Da'at al-Qutni, famous Shafi Hadith scholar from Baghdad who died 385-995 of the Common Era, in the sunan of the Da'ar al-Qu'tni has a version that says lead the women of her household in prayer. So it's general I mean, it's not agreed upon in all the meditatives but it's",
      "controversial that a woman would lead other women in prayer. It is more controversial that",
      "By the way, this is why in the Hanbali school, for example, women can lead men in prayer in things like Tarawih prayer and things like that. Because they actually take the predominant evidence on this issue from the Hadiths. So anyway, that's a point where you actually see this impact of legal ruling. Okay, so I'll give you some examples of how this maxim is used",
      "is used in law, especially debates around hadith and law. This might be kind of boring but this is a German university so we're serious about these things. Not that it's boring but that this is the place to get into the weeds. For example, the great Mufassir and Maliki scholar Al-Qurtubi died at 1273",
      "73 of the common era he says um that he uses this principle to argue that the reports are the prophet they said i'm wiping over his leather socks which are in any case more numerous than those denying it or that its abrogate abrogated supersede those that he didn't so the reports that the prophet did uh wipe over",
      "based on this principle. The famous Hanbali scholar of Damascus, Ibn Qadama, who died in 620-1223 of the Common Era, he cites this maxim or he refers to it, alludes to it as a piece of evidence that the hadiths going against the Hanbalid ruling on qasamah are not definitive or should not carry the day. So qasama is the issue when you have someone",
      "died and you have been, someone seems to have been murdered. And you don't know either. You don't have enough evidence to prove someone guilty. You do not have the required, you do not Have evidence that meets the evidentiary standard or you do Not have any idea who did it in this case? There is a debate about, you know, The people, the people in the neighborhood where the area where he was found, the person dead versus founded they swear an oath that they didn't do it Or does the person's family come and swear an Oath that the other person these people in",
      "do it? Or when they swear the oath, are they then, do they then have to pay the dia, the blood money for the person, compensation payment? Or does the judge or the government pay the via? If I'm not mistaken, maybe somebody can look this up while I'm talking and tell me if I'm wrong because I don't want to be wrong and mislead you. But as far as I know,",
      "them like 40 of them take the oath that they did not do it and then uh the government pays the dia i think to the person's family maybe somebody can look that up and tell me if i'm wrong and correct me if I'm incorrect and give me the right answer so what he says is all the evidence going against the Hanbali position should not be taken because of the principle that",
      "A person who uses this maxim a lot, is al-Hafidh ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, the great Hadith scholar of Cairo. Although originally his family was from Gaza. He died in 852, 1449. I have an ongoing strong friendship across time with al-Haftab ibn Hijr al-Askalani because I'm translating Sahih Bukhari. Somebody asked me how that's going. It's going well.",
      "It's going well. That's all I can say. It's doing well, but I've read now maybe like half of Fath al-Bari and he uses this, mashallah, he uses Maxim a great deal. So for example the hadith that the Prophet did not raise his hands in prayer supersedes those",
      "in prayer because al-muthbit mukaddim ala annafi. Narrations affirm that the Prophet recited parts of the Qur'an during the noon and afternoon prayer, so in the Asr and Dhuhr prayer you say silently you recite stories of the Quran or parts of The Qur'aan we all know that right? But there's narrations from Ibn Abbas radiAllahu ta'ala anhuma that he did not know if the Prophet did this or even that he thinks the Prophet",
      "from the Quran in these duhr and asr prayers. But narrations affirming that the Prophet recited parts of the Quran during the afternoon prayer supersede those that he didn't because al-muthbit mukaddim ala nafi reports that the prophet did pray two rak'ah after the afternoon prior, it's a hadith inside Bukhari, supersedes Muawiyah's report that he did not pray two raqas after the",
      "I remember after when I first became Muslim, I just thought you prayed two rakahs after everything. So I remember I was praying two rakas after Asr prayer and my friend Muhammad Noor, Rahimahu Allah, great guy came up to me and said what are you doing brother? You are not supposed to pray this. Very nice guy. But then the Prophet did pray two rakat after the afternoon prayer but he did it in his house not in the mosque. Correct me if I'm wrong. Okay.",
      "There's another example, but it's really involved and I don't want to explain that. So these are just several of many examples in which ibn Hajar al-Hafidh ibn Hadj al-Athqalani invokes the principle of مُثْبِد مُقَادِّم على النَّافِي in his discussion. Anybody find anything about Qasama? Handling position on Qasma? We got 56 people in the audience. Come on, somebody out there has a computer and they can Google.",
      "i um sheikh muhammad i think he would be a good person to do this assuming and i know he has internet access because he's on this call okay i'm just saying anyway if uh famous moroccan hadith scholar resident in cairo died in 1960. famous brought the oldest of the humari brothers",
      "uses this argument for the permissibility of combining prayers so you can combine the prayer without any danger or without travel. So, you're not traveling there's no rain you're in danger you can still combine them as long as you don't make it a habit he says why what's his evidence for this because",
      "which says the prophet combined his prayers when without no rain, no danger. Has in fact been acted on. He says, he says nobody's acted on this Hadith. You know it's narrated but nobody ever acted on it so it's not really taken as evidence. He said no, some people did act on it namely some Maliki scholars. Okay is this Nabil has wow this is somebody",
      "This is somebody, how am I supposed to read this while I'm giving a presentation people? You're supposed to speak out. Just say the answer. Were you right or were you wrong? I'm just going to wait for someone to speak. Otherwise I'm going to keep going. Okay. So he says that the fact that some people have acted on this hadith in the Maliki school",
      "school means that it can be, it is evidence right? It's a position that can be taken because the if-bat, the affirmation of the people acting on it supersedes Imam al-Tirmidhi's denial that people had acted on it. Okay now it's interesting right this hadith it doesn't just appear in sorry this principle isn't just used in the context of hadith and law but also in discussions of usul",
      "and even in the application of law in courts. For example, Abu Ishaq al-Sharazi, Sheikh Abu Isahaq al Sharazi, the great Shafi jurist and legal theorist of Baghdad, he died 476, 1083. He invokes this maxim on matters of evidence, on matters epistemology and evidence in Usul. I think that's... I can't remember which book that's in of his. Maybe his Luma. I'm not sure.",
      "And there's also the famous legal anthropologist, Lawrence Rosen in his book, Anthropology of Law. He talks about in his two decades of observing court activity in the court in Qadi Court in the rural area of Safrou in Morocco. He says that this he gives evidence or he gives a report of a judge invoking this maxim in a property dispute.",
      "dispute, where it shows that this principle, that al-muthbit muqaddim al-nafi, shows that all things being equal, a claim of harm supersedes a denial of harm. So if someone makes a claim that they're being harmed and the party denies that they are being harmed, the claim supersedes. That's very interesting by the way. I wonder if anyone can think of a problem with this? Anyone think of an objection to this?",
      "do they have like a cricket sound effect sure i just need if you can just repeat the last time yeah so in the property dispute it is uh in a court in sephirah and morocco in probably 1970s the the uh a woman says that she her property had been harmed and the other party denies it and then he says that in we take the principle of that the affirmation supersedes the denial",
      "Okay, I'll tell you. This occurred to me right now which is that the person making the claim is required to provide direct evidence. The person against whom the claim",
      "we don't know enough, we have to go look more into the details of the case to see but off the top of my head I can't recall what they are. Sorry. Is this in regard to the itself because maybe that reason is the other maybe there was another qaeda i'm not sure",
      "So when it comes to... It's similar, yeah. It's familiar, right? Man hafidha hujjatun ala man lam yahzad is even more famous. So it's similar. I think they're linked conceptually. It about ilm, but here it's something else maybe it's like huqooq or something. I'm not sure. The claim being made. Okay then there are a number of examples from theology, theological disputes. Imam An-Nawawi,",
      "1277 of the common era he uses this evidence to show that the debate over whether the prophet when he went on the israeli mirage did he actually see god with his eyes or not and there's a number of reports and companion opinions like most famously uh the opinion of ibn abbas that uh he did see the prophet and then of course there was an opinion of aisha",
      "isn't not speaking truly, not speaking accurately. And what he says, and now he says is that the mutbid muqaddim al-anafi on this issue, right? So if you have contrasting evidence then one, the affirmation of seeing God supersedes the denial that you did not see God. And again, this is invoked as well by Imam al-Bayjuri, Burhan ad-Din al-Bayjuri the famous Shaykh al-Azhar who died in 1860 of the common era also on the issue of the Prophet seeing God",
      "on the miraculous journey to the heavens. Ibn Hajar al-Haskalani again invokes it on the issue of whether the Prophet saw the jinn, or not. So there's a famous debate you have Hadith ibn Mas'ud Abd al-Ibn Masaud in Sahih Muslim that the Prophet met the jinned so one night he actually",
      "encounters jinn and he recites Quran to them, some Quran to him. And that then Ibn Mas'ud and the other companions who are with the Prophet, they actually, the next day, the Prophet shows them the traces of the athar, the traces or the jinn, and says don't use bones to wipe yourself if you go to the bathroom like pieces of bone because the jhin eat them so you don't want to ruin the jinh food basically",
      "Now there's another narration of the report from Ibn Mas'ud, which is in Musnad of Ahmed ibn Hanbal, which not considered reliable generally. In which the companions themselves also see the jinn and they say that they look like men from Zut. Men who are... I think the word is maybe Indians or a type of Indian people from India.",
      "The main reliable report of Ibn Mas'ud is that the Prophet saw the jinn. But then, Ibn Abbas's report in Sahih Muslim, Ibran al-Abbas gives his story about what happened. He says the Prophet did not see the jins and he did not recite any Qur'an to them. So what Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani says is that in this case again",
      "that affirm the Prophet saw the jinn are Trump, those reports say he did not see the jann. You also have examples of it being used in actual discussions of hadith critical methodology, the actual methodology of hadit criticism and narration criticism. The famous, well, he's not so famous. He's pretty famous. Hadith scholar Medjideen ibn al-Athir who died 606 1210. He is the brother of the historian Ibn Al-Ahthir",
      "of al-Kamil fi tarikh is his brother. He wrote a book called Jami' al-Asul Fi Hadith al Rasool, I think it's the book he wrote in a short section on Jarh al Ta'deel, on criticism of transmitters that he addended to this book. He discusses says that if you have a competing jar and ta'deal so one kind of criticism of a narrator and one defense of that narrator, the jar, the criticism supersedes the defense sorry",
      "Sorry. Because it is, quote, awareness of additional description. Ittila' ala ziyadat wasf. Awareness of additional Description. I.e., in other words, information that the critic Of the person has that the defender Does not have. This is interesting because it's linked To the principle in Al-Jarh Muqaddama ala ta'dil. If the Jarh is fixed, the reason is explained.",
      "But here it doesn't say, he doesn't bring this up. He just says that the criticism supersedes the defense because it implies or seems to rely on awareness of additional information that the defender did not have. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani in his discussion of whether the successor Mujahid, Mujahed bin Jabir died 105 Hijri if I'm not mistaken. Did he hear from Aisha directly?",
      "Aisha directly? Did he hear and study and learn from Aisha, directly or not? Abu Hatim al-Razi died 270 Hijri says that he did not. But Ali ibn Al-Madini who died 234 I think 234 Hijri Ali ib'n Madinah says Mujahid did hear from Aishah so Mujahad heard from Aisah because",
      "Ibn Hajar al-Haytami, not the Ibn Haqqani. The famous Shafi jurist originally from Egypt settled in Mecca died 975 1565 I think 974 or 1565 around that time he died one year earlier than Sulaiman the Magnificent I remember that so he says on the issue of did Al Hasan Al Basri",
      "Did he hear hadiths and learn from Ali ibn Abi Talib? This is a hotly debated topic with lots of people bringing evidence on both sides. Ibn Hajar Haytham, he says Al-Hasan did hear from Ali in part because al-Muthbit Muqaddim ala al-Nafi says this in his Fatawa al-Hadithiyya. Okay, now the problem with maxims or qawwa'id",
      "they only give you an incomplete picture, right? So somebody could say, the ends justify the means. But then there's another principle which is the ends don't justify the mean so which one do you take or sometimes these maxims if you just took them and didn't take any other evidence you would end up with a kind of ridiculous conclusion. Of course Muslim scholars are aware of this so it's important to remember that in every instance",
      "In every instance that I, every example that I gave here so far in the talk. This Maxim was invoked as one argument, one piece of evidence among many pieces of evidence. So debates about which hadith narrations are more reliable, about which opinions are more liable, about majority opinion, minority opinion, et cetera, et Cetera. So there's lots of evidence being invoked. This maxim is being invoke only as part of a larger arguments",
      "And sometimes Muslim scholars give us clear evidence that they're aware of its limitations. So, for example, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani says a scholar who loved this principle if anybody loves the principle of مُقَدَّم على النَّافِي it's Ibn Hijr al-Askalani. If Donald Trump were speaking he says nobody likes this principle more than Ibn Haja al-Askalani if I were Donald Trump giving this presentation. He says on the debate about when the first revelation occurred when did the Prophet or Laysa SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam first receive revelation and in what circumstances?",
      "circumstances. He says, المثبت مقدم على النافي إلا إن صحب الناف دليل نفيه فيقدم والله أعلم So the affirmation supersedes the negation unless the negating party they have their evidence if they bring evidence to the table we're presuming that this is evidence that all thinking is being equal",
      "thinking is being equal, the superseder is going to trump the denier. But if the denyer has evidence and the supersedeer doesn't, sorry, and this superseder, the deniers has evidence on the affirmer doesn't then the deni or wins right? So this isn't a maxim that's invoked in totally denuded of any other consideration of evidence. If the deniar as superior evidence said the firmer than the denir ones similarly imagine",
      "Similarly, Majdeen ibn al-Athiyar in his deployment of that maxim in the example I gave above, he adds this important addition. He says, except if the affirmation can be manifestly disproven. So for example, if someone says so and so killed a person, and then you see that person alive and well.",
      "And Zayd said, Muhammad didn't kill this person. Except then you see Muhammad walking around, you know Muhammad's not dead. So unless there is a miracle, but miraculous violations of the normal course of nature aren't admissible as evidence in legal discussions.",
      "denying that he was killed wins in this case okay thank you very much if you guys have any questions i'm happy to order you want to discuss this i'm having to let me see what you guys wrote about the um it was 50 people professor brown not 40 and hanbali school for kusama",
      "but no one just what's the ruling on the the humbly ruling on kasama is it that the the judge pays or who pays to look this up now thank you professor Jonathan brown for this interesting presentation and uh um maxims of",
      "in Hadith criticism and this interpretation. And now we will come to the questions if we have any questions in the room or online, we can begin now. Okay so I can start with no worries",
      "Thank you very much and sorry for coming late. So if I understood everything well, I have two questions. The first one, I mean, I missed the beginning but is this maxim...I mean what would be the origin of this maxim? Is it thick? It seems, you know, the Kawa'ite normally",
      "it's topic but to my knowledge this is especially a topic in trick i mean there's an instrument uh in the um finding of norms so what does he the origin or headed in our dream in in the science of hadith and then as you explained it was applied",
      "I mean, you showed also in the domain of questions of Al-Qaeda and etc. But it seems to me to be a principle of normative criticism or normative interpretation above all. Is this right? That's my first question. And then the second question which I found interesting is that what does this say about",
      "of transmission and tradition in the sense that um take for example this concept of reality and as you explained that it became accepted at the time you know there was a sort of consensual use of this acceptance and this doesn't just say that",
      "as something which is growing your tradition is something which which uh it's not the you know the um transmission of a fixed corpus but of something which",
      "enough in the sense that um this bad does it have something to do with the fact that in the islamic epistemology i mean certitudes if the foundation of knowledge you know if you contrast this as you know with modern conceptions the catholic right you know doubt of the foundation",
      "different form so this um thought that came up while listening to you thank you very much yeah i think um i mean it's hard to know uh based on what i've seen and i could be totally wrong about this but uh based upon what i have seen it seems to originate in hadith scholarship like kind of literally about additional either additions to chains of transmission additions to the text of hadith",
      "or information about a transmitter. And then it seems to become, uh, to kind of proliferate from Hadith scholarship into other domains. That's my impression. I could be wrong. So I'm not, if someone else finds that to the contrary, I'm happy to admit there, to admit that. You know, I think the interesting thing about this certainly in the context of Hadith",
      "is it actually kind of goes against the general methodology of certainly early Hadith scholars, maybe the first 300 years where they really were their main means of measurements measuring or ascertaining reliability was about Ishtihar like something being widely transmitted versus something being narrowly with only limited transmission.",
      "transmission. So, and this is by the way you know it's not my opinion uh this was brought up by many hadith scholars already people like al-Khatib al-Baghdadi and others discussed this and then other figures in the Mamluk period as well discussed this I actually wrote an article about this topic which probably no one ever read called Critical Rigor and Juridical Utility I think it's in Islamic Law and Society so they pointed out",
      "it out. This Ziyadah-Fiqh principle kind of goes against what early Hadith scholars thought, which is that if you have 10 reports saying X and only one report saying X plus Y, why would you take the X plus y report? That goes against how we think about evidence. On the other hand, this material was supposed to be used. So I think",
      "and what it suggests about, what it kind of elucidates about Islamic history or intellectual history is that it's a tradition that is there to provide things for people. It's not something that exists in a vacuum. It supposed to give people answers and it's supposed to get people answers for any possible question they have. And it's suppose to give you answers that are useful, right? So if you have a Hadith that gives you another an additional piece of information, that's tempting to take. If you have hadith that provides an explanation when others",
      "or a little bit maybe ambiguous, you're going to be very attracted to taking that additional information. And in fact, al-Bukhari does this in his Sahih actually is one of the instances in the Sahih where Bukhara himself gives his kind of opinion on how hadiths are criticized or more than criticize how they're used. He says,",
      "Zakat. It's chapter on Zakat, and because if you have one version narration of Hadith that gives additional information to the other, then you're going to take that, and it's going to provide explanation for the other. Now we have to remember, of course, in the case of Bukhari Sahih, it's sort of not the best laboratory for this because everything for him is reliable, but the question would be if you a very reliable Hadith, and then another version that's",
      "you take that because you run the risk of allowing not so reliable information to alter your understanding of reliable information. But, um, so we don't know what Bukhari would say about that situation, but I think the primary maybe factor that is behind why this principle is so widely used and why such use is so common is that Muslim scholars had to give people answers and this allowed them to expand the corpus of useful material or, you know,",
      "or productive material, so to speak. Okay, Siraj, you have a question? Yes, thank you very much, Professor Brown. My question, I think you touched on some aspects of it when you compared the utility of the qaida in hadith versus in legal issues and also in theology.",
      "And so my question is pertaining to that. To what extent does the qaeda have the same level of applicability in theological matters as it does in perhaps legal or legal matters that are in the hadith, for example? Because each... It's not so dissimilar I think, speaking as a lawyer now, it's not dissimiler from the idea of the burden of proof that is used in courts. The fact that",
      "the person that's making an accusation or the prosecution would have to prove something beyond all reasonable doubt, whereas the accused person can stay silent and doesn't have to disprove anything really until the evidence of the person accusing them is considered to be sound or at least a persuasive strength. And so when we talk about al-Muthbit does that mean",
      "Does that mean something which is just a strong claim or is it something which has proven already? So I think this gets... I was just looking. Unfortunately, the index of my edition is not alphabetical but if you would actually find this maxim in other books,",
      "I don't recall it really being something you find in books of Qawai'id, like what's Ashba and Nadair books. It's almost below the radar. It is sort too... I don t want to say too mundane. It s almost too practical, something that they invoke without... It is assumed. Yeah, there's too basic a level of acceptance to make it into these higher levels but I mean, I don",
      "likes to search shamila things what can do this while we're talking they can see if it comes up in like a shabba when the light of a siyuti but i think your question is really good because if i'm not mistaken it does it does actually create a problem for example the general principle in islamic claims about you know uh obligation or liability or anything responsibility is that the person making a claim about",
      "change to the status quo does not have to provide evidence you know absent that absent uh the other party providing evidence right so whereas what this this um maxim says exactly opposite right the person who supersedes all things being equal uh so i i it's uh it's a really good question i don't know the answer it it's actually you know um maybe another angle that could be taken on",
      "scholars see these things as in opposition or counterweight to one another, how they dealt with that. In terms of where it's used, I mean, it seems to be used in theological debates as in law, as commonly as in legal debates. Thank you. Do we have any other questions?",
      "shocked no one has questions the idea or um because you raised your hand at the beginning yes i just responded to that question from dr jordan for this uh last presentation about",
      "وقال له ذلك الحديث الذي تحدث عنه يا دكتور جرنتان؟ نعم",
      "the additions of fiqh in general by muhadithin and what was later the mainstream of usuriyyin and fuqaha because wat al-bukhari and al-Bazzar and many others they say it will be accepted if he is hafidh. So, the condition is if it's sound or not. Wallahu a'alam. So they were not accepted if it is like Muslim said in his Muqaddima or if they see it from the source of waham or mukharifa as you said",
      "x plus y or something it's not necessarily even to accept it in general to make it absolute accepted but later after special khatib ghadadi he mostly took the opinions of usuri and then it was spread more widely still there will be some hufadh like ibrahim and others from the late scholars even if they have that they will not accept every ziyadah of fiqh they will see about the stage the level the time if it's from whose yujbah haditha",
      "فهم يقبلون عادة زيادة ثقة مطلقة من التابع",
      "I don't know. I'm not sure if that's, uh, I would have to look into that. And then someone said, um, asked Maxon how it would be perceived in relationship to sorry, Idraj. Idraj is when the words of a narrator get infused with the prophet's words. Well, that's interesting. Um, for Ibn Hajar he would say that, uh-I know this because he says it all the time-that you can't make a claim about Idraj unless you have evidence so",
      "So you can't say that the prophet, this is actually not the words of the prophet. This is the words to someone else unless that requires evidence. That actually kind of goes against like again we would be against this principle right so in theory if you had a deep it said X plus Y that would be and then another Hadith says X well must be more cut about nappy so X plus y would win but then you could say well the Y is narrators",
      "the narrator's speech, and this is a draj. In which case Ibn Hajar would say well, I don't know actually maybe it would actually fit together because for him they would have the same result because he would say if you're going to make that claim you have to provide evidence. The default assumption is that the text of the hadith is the words of the prophet unless you can provide evidence otherwise. Someone else held their hand up I think.",
      "We have two questions online from Naeem Hassan and then from Muhammad Safiq. Just to elaborate on brother Muhammad's point, I think Imam An-Nawawi frequently uses this Ziyad al-Thiqa principle in his Sharaf Sahih Muslim. I think quite a few of the scholars",
      "scholars later on the hadith genre they have said that this is not a mutlaq and principle so you know you just can't accept just because somebody's bringing additional information whether it's a matan or isnadan um my question is mainly relating to the ifbat versus nafi um is it something can we find anything related",
      "especially the Iraqi genre, when they are bringing up some unprecedented interpretation of the Quran. How were the scholar dealing with this interpretation considering for it is bad versus nafi principle? Yeah I don't know anything about that. That's a good question. I mean we could go and look in maybe like Mahmoud Maturidi's Tafsir of the Qur'an and see if there's stuff in there or",
      "I'm not sure that would be an interesting thing to look at. Okay, yeah, thank you for your presentation. That was really useful and beneficial. So I think my question to you is like the article that you cited that you wrote.",
      "debates at least in like the arabophone literature about versus collides and I think Dr snowboard this article even was translated into English recently in one of the new uh one of The New Companions or something like that um and so you know you've got this kind of one side of the debate that wants to say something like actually the earlier period didn't really have collides it's all and",
      "on them um and then i think there are others i personally see myself in this camp that sees it no there are but it's just subtle and it's nuanced so we kind of have to talk about it based upon some of the stuff you had written i would have thought maybe you would have leaned a little bit too that there really aren't collides um but it seems to me from this presentation that your description of the early period is that there are collide it's",
      "hadiths like al-muda'i, al-yamin al-mudai. So these are maxims that are actually hadith but again they're not... you always have circumstances matter so al-bayina al- muda'i does not wa yamina alman ankar if the person who is the defendant also brings bayinah then they win right? But",
      "But if the, you know, like if you have, for example, if the person making a claim, the plaintiff has bayonet and the defendant swears an oath, the person wins. The plaintiff wins, right? So bayonets beats an oath. So it's not just like, oh, you",
      "It's just that there's always going to be a, the defendant is always going enjoy. The burden of proof is always gonna be on the person making the claim no matter what and it all things being equal if things are equal, the person, making the claims will lose things being equals but like you could have you know it can go up like many levels so you always look at the circumstances same thing with the evidence we some of the cases we discussed I would say that",
      "there's always maxims, but there's also always evidence is always taken into consideration. And I think maybe what happens in some instances is that a person trying to make an argument will use a maxim sort of rhetorically or strategically to win their argument and then we don't see the respondent because we know we don t see the person responding to their book necessarily unless we happen to have a response. But",
      "it doesn't work in this case because of these circumstances. So I think like, by the way, I mean, it's normal that you're not going to find a lot of maxims in the first 200 years or even let's say first 150 years of Islamic history, because, you know, like technical, like in any science, technical terms, legal maxims, things like their maxims are always going to come",
      "They're always going to come in later periods of development. They're not the things that people come up with when they first start kind of practicing a science or practicing some kind of activity. They come in, later on, a period of formalization and that's not some kind discovery that orientalists make and then Muslims feel insecure or something like that. This is something that Muslim scholars 1,000 years ago would happily have acknowledged which is that any of these maxims,",
      "be later formulations? Sorry, if you don't mind just a follow-up, just to clarify. So I think I intended more the qawa'id for like naqad itself. So whether it's ziyadat al-thiqa or its wasl and irsal or any of the ones that you mentioned within the talk which we mentioned quite a few they're all connected. So one thing is to say that the qawwa'ids are... It seems to me that some contemporary hadith scholars want to say something like there really aren't",
      "there really aren't quwa'id. It's qara'in. And then it seems that there are another group that want to say, there are quwa'd. And so I just was wondering kind of what your- I think they're definitely quwa'm because people cite them even scholars like Imam Muslim or someone who is definitely one of the early scholars would invoke these if not in so many words certainly and conceptually invoke them",
      "conceptually invoke them but they are always going to be subject to adjustment by the by circumstances so they're not always good they're never going to categorical they're always going gonna be things that or only work until they don't work exactly um we have another two questions in the chat the first question is about",
      "um there is any relation between this um yeah it does i mean i gave the example of how it's invoked by majdine even alathir discusses it and then you know generally this idea that uh josh mcadam criticism would supersede or trump um you know",
      "approval of somebody or defense of somebody's character. So yeah, definitely it has a manifestation in the science of transmitter criticism. Can I just ask something because I have the same question? Because I had always on mind you know, adapt excuse me and you know the notion of adapt",
      "you know that I mean there are many conditions for Jah as far as i know. So, I was a little bit surprised that this maxim is applied to Jah in the sense because as far",
      "quite careful with uh except maybe some yeah but there they were but they are also you know remember that i mean the hustle the deep the presumption for human beings is the fizzle you know except if you're in the hanafi school i think it's like the first couple of generations or assumed to be acceptable but i mean a general presumption is that people are not good people you know that so that's why and that's",
      "makes a chain of transmission unreliable because if they were unknown and anonymous, you could assume... For example, if it's an unknown narrator and you want to know if they're free or a slave, the presumption is they're three. Because that's the default presumption for human beings. But the default assumption for character is fiscal, is that you're like a dirtbag or something. You're not good person. This is a good approach generally for people trying to sell you things in my opinion as well.",
      "As far as I know, it's quite common to say, you can see there are details here. Which is that criticism supersedes or trumps positive evaluation provided the criticism is reliable like you actually some you can trace",
      "person who says it. It's not just some random person on the street saying it. And then also, what's the reason for this criticism? But if you have that, then that's going to beat an approval. That's quite common. The notion of Thabit is quite strong. I mean, Thabits... No, but it's not... No. It isn't like it's true about the person. If I say Taysir is a dirtbag. No offense, Taysira. Right?",
      "be bad here isn't is tyson actually a dirt bag the question is did jonathan browne actually say that tayser's a dirtbag if you have if you had my book transmitted from me by it you know transmitters and it's been you know properly studied by the person as they look i johnathan brown's book here i've been snagged to the author of the book and he said taysere's a dirty bag boss that's and i say he's a",
      "my cheese all the time without my permission. This is not true, by the way. Tessier's a very kind and clean person. But if now you have it's Thabit back to me, and I gave you my reasons, I explained exactly what the problem is, why I'm criticizing him, what the nature of his problem is. That's Thaibet's Mufassirah Sabab. Not necessarily... I could be wrong.",
      "but that's the issue is if you have somebody else saying no taysir is a wonderful guy my criticism is going to uh beat his other person's other person approval okay we uh we haven't answered question from um yeah assalamu alaikum um okay so thank you doctor for all of this",
      "explanation and I think maybe we have to go back to the reason behind this maximum because it's because of the ziyadat al-ilm so there is ziyada fil ilm. The original case is, there is negative negatives like bara asliya or nafi so it's the original case but when there is something",
      "um what we call it that there is a jab or there is something there is an act for example or if there is yet in another way so this this is why there is uh there is it proceed then but of course it's a claim of ziava inc a claim",
      "additional knowledge. And that's why it's not clear that it should, I mean, if we knew this information were correct, there probably wouldn't be a debate but because the debate often is whether or not you accept this information and then the answer to accept additional information, you accept affirmation over denial, then that's actually to respond to the question of whether this knowledge is in fact... Exactly.",
      "Exactly. And yes, sorry. So the word, what does it mean? Right. We don't talk about any information. We are talking about something. Mostly it is right. Right. Because it's so I think they are accurate in their explanation for this Qaeda, for this maxim. It's Ziyadatul Aalimin.",
      "They didn't say another thing. They said, and it is a specific word, right? I'm not sure. I'd have to think about it more to be able to answer your question specifically. It's hard for me to answer definitively in this kind of like giving Q&A and a talk. It' very complicated for me.",
      "And yeah, I think this is you have a situation in which people are making claims about knowledge or facts and then saying that the claim itself makes the claim acceptable. But the point is that we don't know if the claim is feasible. So it sort of strikes me as being an element of circular reasoning here, which I think is not my discovery. I think Muslim scholars in the past would happily acknowledge that this was a problem. Yeah, thank you.",
      "Thank you. We have another question from Moez Muhammad. Can you please unmute yourself? Oh, sorry. Did any of the early Mu'tazila scholars discuss this maxim? I haven't seen anybody but again, I should go and if I got my act together fast enough, I would have gone and done some kind of a shameless search of this",
      "this maxim more broadly but as i said this is really only what i came across in my own reading over the past 23 no no it can't be 20 years 15 years let's say 15 years so um i don't know it'll be interesting to see if they if they use this in their books that would be an interesting question okay we have another question from name hassan",
      "Assalamu alaikum, Dr. Brown. I'm trying to understand where does this principle fit in the contemporary historical critical methodology? Because I'm just trying to think it compared with the biblical studies as you know there's synoptic gospels when they compare with the gospel of John, when gospel of john is bringing some new information in the light of historical critical method they don't accept it so where does the contemporary scholarship western scholarship would view that kind of principle",
      "kind of principle? Yeah, I mean it's interesting. Of course you know Western scholars are not like computer programs right? They also are influenced by their own biases so I think that the general as far as I know the general methodology methodological starting point would be",
      "if you have let's say different manuscripts the manuscript with additional material is probably suspicious right because people the idea is someone would add in additional material to explain something whereas they wouldn't take out additional material right so yes if you",
      "just A is the correct original version, someone else added in B. This is the example of their principle of I think lexico-difficulior, right? The more difficult reading. So the thing that makes the least sense is probably the original version because why would you change something into something that doesn't make sense? You would change it into something",
      "of or against the muqaddim al-nafi but also you know people are uh you can see this often with western scholars in their study of early islamic history which is they also want answers so if they find a source that you know is um maybe not not promoting like a sunni orthodoxy",
      "it's acceptable because uh you know sunnis are the only people who are like the the you know i don't know whatever religious oppressive and religious i don' t know what we would be called but uh like um so if they find something that is uh you now giving some information that goes against this sort of sunni orthodoxy version of history even if that provides much more information than other sources they'd probably be inclined to take it",
      "So in this case, they would take additional material even though it's you know, it's they would Take them with bit more. In this case but that's you Know I think that you really have to look at these how they be how scholars acted in specific situations?",
      "their own cultures and biases, so they tend to act differently. And maybe not be totally consistent all the time in how they apply their methodologies. I have a question. It's according to the question of Diyat al-Sikha in Hadith criticism. The question is, how can we deal nowadays with this Diyah al-Tisqa and the different hadith variants if",
      "we discussed this problem from two points of view. The first point of view is hadith authenticity, if this addition of fiqh can be ascribed to the Prophet or not and then another aspect is how we can deal with this addition in hadith exegesis or interpretation because there's a big debate between hadith scholars about acceptance of their",
      "yeah well i mean i'm not qualified to uh to say which camp is correct so i mean as you said there's a disagreement about like maybe sort of menhagen or on this question um and that's about um maybe the thibout",
      "of a certain, let's say version of Hadith over another the kind of reliability of it. But the second part of your question I think is actually much more... I don't know what you mean. Well, I think it's more interesting. It's I think all maybe influential and more subtle which is that you will regularly see scholars",
      "they're early scholars, later scholars are very critical, very lax, which is they'll regularly take narrations that have additional information in their interpretation of the Hadith. Which as you point... I mean, we've discussed it's somewhat problematic if you have a version of Hadith that is not very reliable and provides explanatory material but that explanation itself might",
      "And if you rely on that explanation, you take into account, you will be going down the wrong path. It'd be no different than you taking a Hadith that was not reliable, right? Which is a question for which I have no answer. I don't have an answer for that.",
      "your understanding of one hadith to be influenced by a hadith of equally strong reliability, right? But that's often not the case. And yeah, I don't have an answer for that. A student asked me about this once as well and I said, I'm not going to give anything useful.",
      "give anything useful. There is a comment from Ziyad, you can explain what you wrote in Arabic here for others? Yeah what I'm going to say is it could be more accurate if we differentiate between the Nukkad al-Hadeeth scholars not about",
      "in early periods like Tirmidhi, Ibn Jalil they were a bit... They have some ease and they are called to be buntasahir. But you can find some later Muhallithi like Dara Khutni and later Ibn Rajab al-Dhahabi ibn Abdul Hadi Shams Muhammad Abdul Hadi and others. They were more going with the old and looking more about the Ilha Al Hadith and this what it was mentioned by many Huffadh that it was rare between the Huffad by themselves.",
      "to differentiate between or who was more affected with the usuli manahij and the mutakhir fukha who will not go seek directly in the ilal and qara'in and to see the deep because what's real is and this is not for everyone because what you say this is it's easy to people to know about history with their not that wide knowledge but to know the differences between this is accepted even this is he made a mistake here uh",
      "كانت الأمر غير مناسبة هذا علم دائما واضح لذا يمكن أن نقوم بإخباره بينهم كثيرا قد تكون أكثر منافسة لأن في الثلاثيين العامات سوف يجعلونها عالية جدا ونستطيع القول أنهم في قواعدهم خاطئة لانهم أيضا يتبعون القواعد الأولى ولكن عن التطبيق العملي",
      "without who know this condition about it's only the high professional who are following the early so that was my point only to make it a bit more uh accurate to say about it it's not about the time as it's much about following the grand scholars in their opinions and their",
      "their uh decisions do we have any very lucid thank you okay if we don't have any questions um we would like to thank you once more professor brown for this interesting topic and the answering of the questions",
      "questions and uh we wish to have you soon in tubing again in person inshallah um i would love that thank you very much you guys for inviting me and everybody for coming in three questions before we close",
      "I just want to appreciate your efforts, you guys. This is Rashida Gaghani from Nigeria, from Gombe State University. I received your invitation and I decided to join the session. I found it very interesting. Keep it up. Thank you very much. Thank You. Bye everybody. Salam.",
      "um where is he i can't see him again ah yeah okay okay anyway so and thank you for uh everybody attending so next week there won't be a session because we will be in london at the bryce conference but the week afterwards we will begin our series thank you very much for attending and have a nice evening"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Hadith_ What orientalists _bIkwJNDL5v0&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW3SBwkJsAkBhyohjO8%3D_1748663864.opus",
    "text": [
      "One of the things you see in Islamic modernists or progressive Muslims is, let's just say a significantly reduced level of humility. A certainty about their moral or scientific view of the world and not being willing to say like, maybe God and the prophet know better than us on something",
      "than us on something. That's, I think what's really an issue. So in some ways these debates although they might be about Abu Huraira or whether we believe hadiths or not that's not really what the debate is. The debate is how willing are we to subordinate what people around us are saying are the certainties? The moral certainties, the political",
      "How willing are we saying these are more powerful than the message of God and his prophet? That's what we're saying. That's the debate, right? Or are we that if we're going to be Muslim it can only be an Islam that is really defined by let's say progressive sensibilities. Dr. Jonathan Brown, Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullah and welcome to The Thinking Muslim Podcast. Waalaikumsassalam warahmatoAllahi wabarakatuh Well, it's great to have you with us.",
      "Dr. Brown, Muslims around the world hold with immense respect the hadith of the Messenger. These are his recorded words, his actions and his silence on an issue. Today, Dr.Brown I want to explore some in some depth the hadif its formulation how we know they actually reflect the traditions of the Prophet, it's value in comparison to the Quran, a sunnah as a source of sharia",
      "some, maybe the Orientalists and the Modernists who propose arguments against adopting the hadith as a source of Sharia. Now let's start with a definition of what the Hadith are. How would you define the Hadif and its value from an Islamic standpoint? Okay, BismillahirRahmanirRahim. So it's a big topic but I'm happy to... You know this is The Thinking Muslim Podcast so we have some time. We do have time.",
      "We do have time. You've got to talk in two and a half hours' time together. Yeah, and I have nothing else to do in a minute. I'll talk until you collapse. It'll collapse. I'm supposed to bring him some kind of adrenaline shots or something. So hadiths are... This question is actually the sub-question of an initial question, but I'll answer the sub question first, so the second question. Hadiths",
      "the Prophet, peace be upon him, said or did, or things that were done in his presence and to which he did not object. So the idea is if something were done on his presence, he doesn't object to it, it means that it's allowed to do. For example, certain kinds of birth control, which I won't get into because audiences tend to be a bit squeamish,",
      "Muslim scholars are always very happy to talk about even the most intimate bodily things, but certain types of birth control were mentioned, were being done in his time. And he never said do this, it's okay, but he never objected to it. So then we know that this is permissible, right?",
      "parts. It consists of the text of the Hadith, which is called the Metin. And then there's the chain of transmission by which the Hadeth arrived at some collector or maybe multiple collectors who write this down and put it in a compilation. I mean technically hadiths have their isnad, their chain of",
      "narrate hadiths via contiguous isnas back to the Prophet. The shortest ones would be probably like 15-20 changes, transmitters back to Prophet. By all through extremely long lived people. So we're being very selective about that right? Some people who are extremely long-lived. Now, the question of what is Hadith is actually a lot of times people mean by that is",
      "the sunnah of the prophet, so the sunna of the Prophet. Sunnah in pre-Islamic Arabia is just the way of the people. So there's like pre-islamic verses of poetry that talk about you know, liku liqom and sunnatuhah wa imamuhah right? So every tribe, every people has their own sunnah and their own Imam, their own leader. So it's like the way if you think",
      "The sunnah is the way of the Prophet. Right. The actual kind of technical definitions for sunnah, you could find, for example, the famous Indian scholar Shah Wali Allah who died in 1762, common era, he says... He talks about the sunnah as the infallible application of the Book of God. So it's the Quran. The sunna is the Quran applied by an infallable interpreter, namely the Messenger of God.",
      "Another way to think about the sunnah, which is also correct, right? Is to say that it's the normative precedent of the Prophet Muhammad. So why do I say normative present a normative meaning that it has kind of moral force It has authority over us person. It commands us Because there's other aspects of the prophets precedent that are not normative for example You know you're Muslim. I'm Muslim but you're wearing",
      "basically what originated as an Ottoman hunting jacket. This is what the sport coat is. Can you believe that? This is like, you know, in your Worcester and Jeeves, this is the stuff they wear when they're biking and going hunting. This was their sports clothing when they were playing cricket. Now this is formal clothing. What gives it away? What makes this an Ottoman huntin' jacket? This what we are both wearing. Really? It's this actual design, a jacket that we wear, originated in the 1700s as an ottoman hunting jacket, as far as I know.",
      "And then you're wearing this like cotton thing. Yes, a shirt. With buttons, right? Yes. And then, you've got these things on your eyes which I dig is sort of Buddy Holly style, right. Malcolm X. Yeah, Malcolm X, okay. Scratch the Buddy Hollies. So that maybe it so then and then but...and I'm Muslim. Yes. Yet neither of us are wearing what the Prophet used to wear. What did the Prophet use to wear do you know?",
      "It depends who you speak to, I think. But I don't know. We don't even know. There is an answer. Regular Muslim wouldn't even have the answer because it was decided very early on in the Muslim community during the time of the Companions of the Prophet that dress is not normative. So as long as our awras are covered and as long we're dressed like... For example, technically, I could do this podcast with no shirt on.",
      "I could do this podcast topless and my outer would be covered. But that would be just disgraceful. Plus everyone in the audience would feel bad about themselves. That's a pretty good joke. So then, the point is it was decided very early on in the Muslim community that as long as you're within the kind of outer limits of what the Sharia rules are... First of all, we're not wearing silk. Men can't wear silk, right?",
      "Other than that, our dress—we don't follow how the Prophet dressed. It's interesting. You can see in some of the early Muslim Sunni theological texts you'll have we believe in angels, we believe messengers, we belief in fate, and then they say we believe the permissibility of wearing pants. Why is that in a theological text? Because that's actually an important statement about your epistemology",
      "epistemology, like about how you derive your norms and the law in your faith. Which is to say wearing pants and wearing clothes that the Prophet did not wear—he didn't wear pants—is acceptable. His dress is not normative for us. Now if you and I decided to imitate the prophet of God—the Quran says the prophet is a swatun hasana, right? He's",
      "We're going to dress exactly like the prophet. We're gonna sleep on our right sides facing the Kaaba, we're gonna break our fasts on dates and water, we are going to follow the Prophet's life in as many ways as we can including dressing like him then you know God would in theory reward us because we're emulating the Prophet. We could do that but it is not required. It is not even necessarily recommended. Okay so the Sunnah is the normative precedent of the Messenger of God",
      "messenger of God. Now, one of the central issues, one essential kind of engines driving Islamic intellectual tradition is the relationship between the Qur'an and the Sunnah. This always surprises students when I tell them this but it actually shouldn't surprise students and it wouldn't surprise Muslim scholars including",
      "It would not surprise them. But I ask my students, I say what is more powerful? The Qur'an or the Sunnah of the Prophet? What do you think? Well one of my questions is do we regard both to be of equal precedence, equal power? But sure you're answering... You're asking a question. Right. You have to answer the question. Well I'm going to go with we regard them to be equal, of equal weight.",
      "equal weight. Okay, that's a safe answer. Yes. I've actually never heard someone give that answer. You're very cautious. That's good. That is good. Yeah, it's you in Britain. We are cautious people. Normally, you ask them what they say, well obviously the Quran. Especially if maybe they're on the liberal side not there's anything wrong with that right? They definitely say the Quran, don't deal with these hadiths. But when you go back and again look at",
      "In the earliest texts we have in Islamic tradition, you see figures like Azuhri. He died 124 Hijri 742 Common Era. Yahya ibn Abi Kathir, I think he died 127 Hijri. Allahumma salli wa sallim Muhammad al-Awza'i who died about 773 Common Era Abdurrahman al-Awwaza'i a great scholar who died in Beirut. You can see his grave in Beirood if you go today.",
      "You'll see this quote, which is the book, the Quran did not come to rule over the Sunnah. The Sunnah came to rule Over the Quran. Okay? And you also see sayings like this, the Sunna, sorry, the Qur'an needs the Sunnah more than the Sunnan needs the Qur-an.",
      "I tell this to students, they're like, oh, what is this? They're throwing their papers up in the air. Like, what are you talking about? I say, students relax. Look, there's no debate ontologically from the perspective of being. The Quran is obviously prior to and superior to the Sunnah of the Prophet. The Sunnah",
      "even if it's an inspired human being, he's still a human being. If it weren't for the Quran, if it weren t for the revelation there would be no prophecy. Prophecy is a product of God intervening in history. So if it wasn t for that divine intervention you don t have prophecy. The Quran is ontologically prior to and superior to the Sunnah of the Prophet. But",
      "But hermeneutically, right? Hermeneutics is the kind of study of interpretation, the study of understanding. HermeneUTICALLY, the sunnah of the Prophet is more powerful than the Qur'an. Right. And this is actually interesting because I don't like to dump on Western scholarship but in the 20th century a group of western literary scholars realized that",
      "that the real power in a text lies not in the author but in the interpreter. Muslims understood this at the very beginning of Islamic tradition, which is the interpreter has the power. Imagine this. You're out on the street here and there's a window and there may be something beautiful inside here. Let's say this is England so there's",
      "It's Christmas time. There's Christmas trees and you're outside. It's like very Dickensian. You're looking in, you've got the gloves with no fingers on them. Got the weird hat. And you're looking it and the window is distorted. So what are you seeing? What controls what you're seeing? You don't even actually know what's inside. You only know what coming through the window. If the window distorts what you see or changes what it is or gives a whole new image that's what you'll see. The window is holding the power",
      "holding the power, that the lens through which you see is actually controlling the whole process. So in a system where you interpret an interpretive tradition like let's say the American legal tradition what does the meaning of the Constitution for example? It doesn't matter what the Constitution says I mean you don't even need to read the Constitution because what matters is the interpretation of the Supreme Court and it doesn't",
      "They define what that means. So in an interpretive system, you think of it like an onion. The core of the onion is, of course, the heart of the union. But it's the outer layers through which we perceive that core. So Muslim scholars and all Muslim scholars agreed with this Sunni, Shia, even Ismaili for example, scholars think this. All of them have always read",
      "read the Qur'an through the Sunnah of the Prophet. You read the Quran through the sunnah of The Prophet, right? The Sunnah Of The Prophet explains the Qur-an so the Qur An tells us to pray. The Qur An doesn't say how to pray, the Qur an doesn't explicitly say when to pray,the Qur An doesnt tell us what to do if we make a mistake in our prayer, the Qu'ran doesn't tell us or to do you know on its Friday Prayer, Jummah Prayer... So these things all are explained in the Sunna of The Prophet",
      "The sunnah of the Prophet adds to the Quran. So like my kids, the other day they were saying I don't know why they're like can we eat lion meat? Like we want it there. I think I don' t know what we said. We were looking at something and it was a guy who just travels and eats weird foods in places and he's like went some country and he is like they got this lion meat hamburger and my kids are like oh I want the lion meat",
      "Some Muslim scholars say you can, but anyway. In general, why? The Quran doesn't say don't eat lion meat. Right? The Qur'an says blood is prohibited, carrion is prohibited pork is prohibited. But animals with canines are prohibited too. Carnivores because the Prophet and Yab, right? So anything that has canines also prohibited. Yes. Adds to the Qur'ans. Very importantly, the Sunnah specifies the Qur-an.",
      "the Quran. Specifies it, restricts it. And this is where I find... Again, I don't want to... Nothing but love for all my Muslim brothers and sisters. But sometimes people will come and say, Yahi, you know, I do not want to deal with Hadiths. Do not tell me the Sunnah of the Prophet. Oh look, I just follow the Quran.\" I would be like, oh really? So, let us say I steal this pen from... Is this a pen? This is extremely heavy. It is a stylus.",
      "Like it's a computer pen. Okay, so let's say I steal this computer pen Let's pretend it's A regular pen, okay? From this table Yeah Quranically What's the punishment For me? The punishment is That I get my hand Chopped off, right? Asariku wasariku Tufaktu idihima Right? I get My hand chopped off For stealing this Let's not This stylus These things can be Kind of expensive Let's Pretend this Is just some Cheap pen You get in a hotel According to the Quran alone I get",
      "The sunnah of the Prophet restricts it. So from the Prophet, we know for example that the item has to be above a certain value. Below a certain volume you're not going to get your hand chopped off, you have to return the item, you get yelled at, you got smacked bunch of times with a paddle, you are put in prison whatever the punishments that we've decided on are. Okay then let's say... We're here in the studio",
      "we're here in the studio. Let's say this is like an extremely expensive computer stylus, right? So this is $1,000. That's above the limit. I steal it. We know from the Sunnah of the Prophet, from the Hadith in the Prophet and Sunnah Abu Dawud and other collections that the item has to be in what's called a herz. Herz means a secure location. So you left it out on",
      "I get dragged into court. You're going to say, this guy stole my stylus. I'm going to get smacked or put in prison or whatever the punishment that is just determined in what's called tazir punishment. Right. But I'm not going to be able to do it. So it has to mean secure location. But let's say you have this like kind of locked drawer here. You put the stylus in there. Yeah. But i'm really intent on getting this thing so I come in no one's here a little mask on everything. Jimmy opened",
      "the drawer and I take the stylus. Yeah. I get caught taking me into the court, you know, they perp walk me into a room in the court. You're there. It's like look now okay definitely he's going to get his hand chopped off right? No because from the companion this is important I'm going to",
      "would do this. They would say, are you sure you stole this? Did you think this was yours? Yes, I thought it was mine. I don't have to give any evidence. I just say yes, I'm going to get punished again. I get smacked a bunch of times with a reed. I",
      "In fact, in Islamic law, in theory and in practice, the only way to get your hand chopped off if you steal something is if you say like I want my hand to be chopped off. Otherwise it almost never happens. And this is not Jonathan Brown giving some rosy version of Islamic law or something. You can find non-Muslim scholars writing about this, like Rude Peters in his book on Islamic criminal law. He says it's essentially impossible to get",
      "that to happen. So then people, this is a little bit of a detour, but people ask me well why does the Quran have this rule then? For the same reason that do you know okay we're I love this we're in Britain I can use this example here okay yes in Britain in the year 1800 do you how many death penalty offenses there were? Over 200 death penalty offences things like stealing someone's shoe buckles",
      "buckles, stealing firewood, going to like someone's pond and taking fish out of their pond. Death penalty offenses. Okay. Were people actually put to death for these? No. I would imagine no. No. What happens? Here's a question. When was the Metropolitan Police Force, when was the first police force in England founded? See, you're gonna, you know better than I do. I should stop asking you these questions. They're just gonna go, you",
      "Actually, I know you know the answer to this, but you're playing along. That's good. You're playing a lot. Okay so 1830. By the end of the 19th century, by 1900 how many death penalty offenses are there in Britain? Four. Wow. So you go from 200 to four in a century. What changes? Police force is founded, railways, modern bureaucracies salaried administrations",
      "you know, administration. Essentially modernization occurs. It's very common in pre-modern legal systems to have extremely severe punishments but then not actually have those punishments carried out. Why? There's no police force. There's like inspector who comes and says I'm going to do it again. Well, well, well every year right there's nobody who comes there's no one's gonna come to your house and investigate something. Yes. There is no guy walking around with likes twirling his baton. Yeah. Okay.",
      "There's no investigative policing. There's not preventative policing, and that's in the cities. Then forget about going outside of the cities—there's nothing! So what the law does is it can only just strike fear into people's hearts, tell people this is really serious. But then they don't actually want people getting killed for stealing firewood, right? Yeah. But the idea is you kind of scare the population into this. And if someone actually gets caught there's always...and",
      "the same thing in the British legal system, in the assizes, which is they would always find a way out for the suspect or the convict. So the same things in the Islamic legal tradition because the Prophet says,",
      "than to err in severity. So this is, everything I've told you is from the sunnah of the Prophet both in the form of hadiths and in the format of the companions' practice and then the legal tradition after them. So the sunna explains the Quran, it adds to the Quran it restricts the Quran. Now someone might say, I mean, fine Professor Brown but like, the Quran says",
      "you know, it's تِبْيَانٌ لِكُلِّ شَيْءٍ The Qur'an says this is a clarification of all things. Yes. The Qur-an says مَا فَرَّطْنَا مِنَ الْكِتَابِ مِمْنِ الشَّيْئِ I think is the verse, if I'm not mistaken. So we have not, God says, we have omitted anything from this book. Professor Brown, you just told me all this stuff that's not in the Qur'aan. Yeah. So the Qur-ans need to be contradicting itself. The answer to this is, and this gets to your kind of original question,",
      "authorizes the sunnah. So in that sense, is the sunna revelation from Allah? The sunna is a type of revelation. So it depends, right? So if you say technically speaking, the Quran is kalamullah. So the wording and the content, the meaning and the wording",
      "The wording is prophetic, it's from a human being. But the Quran says for example that we sent down the Kitab al-Kitaba wal-Hikmah, the book and the wisdom. The Quran says what is it? We sent down to you Muhammad the remembrance, the saying",
      "saying that you might clarify to people what was revealed to them. So the Quran is saying, we gave you, Muhammad, wisdom, teaching, knowledge with which you can clarify this message. So it's as if I say for example to like let's say I tell my older kid, I say hey, I tell the younger kid listen, I'm leaving, I am going upstairs",
      "I'm going upstairs, whatever. I'm gonna go listen to a podcast and clean the bathroom or something. I don't want anybody disturbed. You know, you listen to your older brother. Now when that older brother tells him to do something he's actually... And the younger kid listens to him which in theory he's gonna do but actually not gonna do, right? He's actually obeying me so that his... I've deputized. I've sort of authorized the older kid. Right. So it's the same thing. Yes.",
      "It's interesting because there is a hadith in Sunnah of Abu Dawud which is actually not a super reliable hadith, I don't think. But it represents this idea pretty well. Which is that the Prophet says, إِنِّي أُوتِيتُ الْكِتَابُ وَمِثْلِهُ مَعْهُ I was given the book and its likes with it. So I was giving the book along with it And also you see Muslim scholars refer to the Prophet as صاحب الوحيين",
      "the kind of holder of two revelations, the revelation of the Qur'an and the revelation to the Sunnah of the Prophet. Can I keep talking? Yes you can please. Okay because I mean... Well I have got a question. We often in common language we use the word sunna to mean the prayer, the tu-raqa after Maghrib for example or the tu raqa before Fajr or something like this right? So we have got sunna as",
      "as a source of sharia, which you're describing the hadith as a sources shariah and then we've got sunnah as a rule of action or as a hukam shar'i I suppose right? Are they... what's the connection between the two? This is in a way this is just kind of coincidental synonyms. You know what is it homophones or what does that carry the word yeah so you know it's obviously more helpful",
      "So there's what's called the Ahkam al-Taklifiyah, which are like the normative grades. Yes. So Wajib required Sunnah or Mandub, which is recommended. Mubah permissible, Makruh disliked, Haram forbidden. Right? Yes.",
      "being sunnah or sunna mu'akkadah, like verified sunnah. Or less verified sunna. The things that are not required or maybe not epistemologically as strong as other types of rulings but have this name. But for our purposes it's a distraction. So just to clarify you can for example get so if we call it mandub let's use that term an action that is mandub can actually come from Quran? Yeah. Okay.",
      "It can come from the Quran. It can comes from khiyas, from an analogical reasoning. It comes from lots of things. In fact that's kind of in the Hanafi school what defines what is called sunnah mu'akkadah or wajib as opposed to fard. Wajib and fard are both requirements but it's where they come from in like this epistemological back something that's Qur'anic is fard, something that is from the Sunnah is wajid right?",
      "On that, do the Hanafis then regard the wajib? I know it's a distraction from the original but just for my understanding, do they regard the Wajib to be of a lesser obligation to that of the Fardh? As far as I understand it and you know I'm talking to...I'm in Britain and I probably have like five different Mawlana walking around outside who could potentially answer this. But yes as far as i understand it, and you can always make a little correction note in here if you want which is",
      "I think they're equally binding. They're equally normative. It's a question of what underlies that normativity in terms of the source. Okay, now you said something which I think is an important point to move on to, which is you said we have the sunnah, the hadith, so you're kind of treating them as synonymous. Yes. But they're not synonymous, okay? They're not",
      "about the sunnah. Remember, the sunna is a normative precedent of the Prophet Muhammad. The sunna' is the lens through which we read and understand the Qur'an. One way to know about the Sunnah is reports about things the Prophet said, things he did, and things that were done in his presence to which he did not object. That's hadith. That one way to",
      "I think it's totally correct, but I'm not channeling some earlier Muslims. The Jonathan Browns list, okay? You can call it as such. There's... you could think of like four different ways of knowing what the Sunnah of the Prophet is. Okay. So the first one is Hadiths. Right. Now each of these ways is legitimate. In fact every school of law, every school theology and Islamic tradition uses all of these for. One of the ways- one of the reasons you see let's say the Maliki School differ from the Hanabi",
      "which one they emphasize more, or which one lean on in a particular circumstance versus another source. They're all legitimate. They are used by every school of law and theology. Each of these ways knowing about the sunnah has its strengths and each has its drawbacks. So one way is hadiths. Okay I want to know what the Sunnah of the Prophet was. So I go and collect as many reports as I can, and let's assume that they are all authentic right? Yes.",
      "Now, what do I have to do? I have figure out how they relate to one another. What if he says... For example you find an authentic hadith where the Muslims say that we used to during time of the Prophet do wudu after we ate cooked food. Do you ever do waduh after you eat cooked food? No. Okay, you don't but this is a sound hadith. Why aren't you following the Sunnah of the prophet? Because it's then explained",
      "Then the Prophet changed this and would eat food, cooked food, so we knew that we didn't have to do this anymore. So that's what's called naskh or abrogation. This hadith is mansukh, it's abrogated. But you have to figure out, okay, here's this hadith, here' s this hadit, you have put them together. Sometimes the Prophet will say, alayhi salamu alaykum, I used to tell you to do ths but now I'll do this. Okay, that's easy. Then sometimes you might have something that the Prophet says",
      "That's general for everybody, or maybe it's specific for a certain person. You have to figure out how these relate to one another. The Prophet, peace be upon him, oftentimes like any leader of a big community or politician, he doesn't go out and speak like a lawyer. He doesn't say regarding point 3A stipulating everyone would fall asleep.",
      "hyperbolic language, a grand language. Especially pre-Islamic Arabia is a culture of hyperbole. These pre-Iranian poets are not saying I'm pretty generous, decently generous. It's like I slaughtered all the camels in my tribe to feed the guests who came. Even today one could argue that Arab culture is a little bit hyperbolaic. You go to an Arab person's house they don't say please eat. No, I think you should eat some food. They say no,",
      "They say like, no, I will not accept you leaving without eating all the food. Okay. I'm married to Arab by the way so just to make it clear. Yes. So sometimes you have hadiths for example like the Prophet will say",
      "Sahih Hadith, where the prophet says, you know, may God fight the Jews. It was prohibited them to eat the fat of animals, certain animals, but then they melted the fat to oil and they sold the oil and then they took the money. Right? So he's being critical of this like legal ruse. Now I'm going to say, oh my God, look at this. May God fight",
      "I knew the Muslims had this problem. But you have to understand how Arabic language, you know, this phrase... And this is not Jonathan Brown trying to do some kind or gentler version of Islam. This is pre-modern Muslim scholars are all right about this. They say, what does may God fight somebody? This is just... This is... I disapprove of this. It's like, this is something I disapprove of. Right? He's not punishing anybody for doing this.",
      "He's just saying, I disapprove of this. So they have to take the language and the culture of how people speak at the time into consideration, fitting all these things together. Yeah. So the strength of this approach of using Hadiths to know the son of the Prophet, is that you have a lot of details. It's a really fine-grained picture. But the challenge is, how do you fit these puzzle pieces together? Why do you have different schools of law in theology and Islam?",
      "fit the pieces together differently. Second way of knowing the son of the prophet is legal interpretation, right? So Muslims got like the companions of the Prophet, the companions to the Prophet. Yeah, they Especially the senior ones for example there's very few hadiths narrated from like Omar Compared to other or like Ali or Uthman. There's not many Hadiths from them Most of the hadith come from younger companions Ibn Abbas, Ibn Umar, Anas bin Majid",
      "Omar, Anas bin Malik, Aisha, Abu Huraira. People who knew the Prophet only for a relatively limited time. For them they're going around and collecting all these reports from other companions. They want to hear... For example you very rarely hear Abu Hurayrah say I heard the Prophet say. He says the Prophet said something. He's getting it from another companion. Right? He's going and collecting this from other people and writing down in notebooks as material. The senior companions don't quote that the Prophet very much",
      "very much, alayhi salam. Because the sunnah for them is something that was imprinted on their personalities. It's like when you... Let's say you're a doctor or something. So you apprentice with another doctor and you might not remember things this doctor said but you kind of follow them around and they just sort of... You kind of model yourself after them and their way of doing things sort of imprints itself on you in your conduct. That's the way the senior companions preserve the sunna",
      "teach their senior students, and they teach their seniors students, all the way up to the present day. So the sunnah of the Prophet is a way of thinking, a way for problem solving. You see this as a very important way of preserving the sunna. What's the strength? You really get kind of like a spirit of the law. How do you deal with things in new situations when you come across people wearing pants instead of thobes or robes? What's",
      "You start to kind of maybe get too far out in your reasoning. The third way of knowing the son or the prophet, very important practice of a pious community. Okay. How do Muslims act? So you probably learn to pray... You didn't learn to play by reading Hadiths. You probably learned to pray from your parents and like going into the mosque and you see how other people pray. And how do you know how to act in a mosque? How do you that you're not supposed to walk right in front of somebody? When I became Muslim no one ever told me",
      "No one ever told me, like don't walk in front of somebody when you're praying. You just see people doing this and you kind of absorb this just from communal practice. Yes. The very important way of preserving the sunnah of the Prophet. Finally, the last way is clear maxims and rules like the Prophet saying So the person making a claim has to provide evidence. The person whose the claim is made upon",
      "is made upon, if the person making a claim doesn't have any evidence, the person whose claim is being made on just says I swear I didn't do this or whatever. So if I say for example you broke my stereo, you broke car, right? You owe me money or something. I can't just say it. I have to provide evidence. If I don't provide evidence, you're innocent so you could think of this as like innocent until proven guilty, right, or not liable until proven liable. Yes. It happens to be a hadith but this is a very clear maxim that ends up",
      "that ends up governing lots of Islamic law. So these are four ways of knowing the Sunnah, they're all valid, they reall important and different schools would draw on them in different ways. Let's talk about the hadith collections. Commonly we know that in Sunni tradition there are six books of hadith collection. Imam Bukhari was alive some 200 years after the Messenger. In between",
      "the first 200 years. Did we have any scholars that did equal work, that put together collections of hadith like these Imams of the Six Books? Or was that the first attempt to build these collections? And I suppose my secondary question is why? Why did Imam Bukhari or Muslim or Abu Dawud see it necessary",
      "to these collections of Sahih, collections of books? Okay. So a lot of questions there. Many questions, yes. Okay. Okay, so the first thing to remember is it's very hard to... So there's no written tradition in Western Northern Arabia. Right. There are alphabets. There's an alphabet in Yemen. They write temple inscriptions",
      "South Arabian languages, stuff like that. But there's no Herodotus' history being written in Yemen or in the Hejaz. Even what becomes the Arabic alphabet is actually developed and finalized to write the Quran. So there's not even really a complete alphabet. People don't write stuff down. Or they very simplistic stuff down, like shopping lists.",
      "I have a, you know, I'm giving you five bags of grain. You're giving me three bags of dates, and write this down in very simple writing. There's no written tradition or literary tradition. So as I said, the writing of Quran is like this unprecedented act in northern and western Arabia. It's something that Muslims develop an alphabet to do.",
      "alphabet to do. One of the reasons they didn't write down stuff is that it's not very easy writing material. I mean, now we have paper. It's cheap. It doesn't enter the Muslim world until around 790, the common era from China. So before that were in the Roman world. Romans don't write stuff down either for daily stuff. They write on wax tablets and all this stuff they put in stone.",
      "chip stuff into stone easily. There's papyrus. Papyrus is very expensive. It's only grown in Egypt. Right. There is parchment, which is treated animal skin. This is developed in Bergama, in Turkey as an alternative to papyruses. It also very expensive I mean you know how many animal skins are gonna buy? So this is a very expensive material. You can't just sort of write down random stuff on it so there are",
      "are companions of the Prophet who know how to write. Most of these were either previously Jews in Medina, or they were polytheist Arabs like Zayd ibn Thabit, who went into the Jewish schools in Medinah. He knows how to",
      "whether it's a Quranic verses or early just collections of things they hear the Prophet say, alayhi salam. They're writing on really simplistic stuff. They are writing on pottery pieces. They write on camel shoulder bones. They writing on palm scratching onto sticks, the outside of sticks, parchment. It is very expensive and cumbersome.",
      "Some of the companions of the Prophet, like Abu Huraira, like Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-'As, start to collect some of these early written sources about hadiths. We're not talking about the Quran anymore. We are just writing down hadith. And these are put down into things that are called sahifah. Sahifah basically means pages.",
      "And this might be papyrus. It might be parchment. It's scratched into, I don't know if you see like palm trees and if they're not manicured, they kind of grow these like sheaths that come out of them that are really fibrous and thin. You rip them off and you cut them into sections so you can scratch stuff into it, right? So that kind of thing. It was very cumbersome. Now what you see is these are called sahipas and they're passed down usually in a family",
      "So the Sahifah of Amr bin Shu'ayb, for example, comes from his great-his grandfather, from his grandfather, From Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-'As, the companion to the Prophet. The son of Amar ibn Al-'As. Yeah. Or there are other sahifa's as well that are famous. Wahab ibn Munabbah, sorry Hammam ibn Munebbih who died in 732 Common Era gets one from writes down a bunch of hadiths from Abu Huraira",
      "That's a famous sahifa. Now, these are passed on to the families and then they're copied by students who want to get this material because so now we've gone from like the companions of the Prophet, the last companion of the prophet, the final one who dies is Anas ibn Malik who dies in 93 Hijri in Basra. So 93 Hijris is like I don't know 1 713 I'm just guessing right around that time. The successors",
      "Among the successors, there are people like Zuhri, Saeed bin Abi Uruba who start to... They're collecting hadith orally. That's how people were transmitting a lot of this stuff. For example, if I ask you did you go to that talk by Jonathan Brown? Did he say anything interesting in the talk? Yeah, he said somebody said he looked like Harrison Ford today which actually happened and the person was not homeless asking for money it was actually an intelligent person",
      "actually an intelligent person. So I was really complicated, although they didn't say what age Harrison Ford they're talking about. So it might be like very old Harrison Ford. Anyway, so the point is that you could say that. I mean, you're not going to write this down, but if suddenly everyone becomes obsessed with Jonathan Brown and what he says, you could",
      "people who met the companions of the Prophet, they start to write down, collect and write down this material, gather existing written material into notebooks. Sometimes these are papyrus scrolls or parchment. And then the next generation, so I mentioned a scholar, Muhammad ibn Shihab al-Zuhri, died in 748 of the Common Era. His... No, 742 of the",
      "I'm sorry, 742. So his student, one of his students is Malik ibn Anas, big scholar in Medina. So Malik b. Anas meets people who are successors to the companions of the Prophet so that he meets people from the second generation of the Muslims, a lot of people from third generation, all the great scholars of Medina and he's starting to also write down what are they saying? What are the hadiths they're transmitting? What do the rulings of Omar bin al-Khattab?",
      "What are the rulings of Ibn Abbas? Writing all this stuff down. And then starting to organize it. And now you have the first actual book, an example. In the time of Malik, so the mid-to-late 700s, books like the Muwatta of Maliki, books likes the Muwatta of... Same title. It means The Well-Trodden Path of Ibb al-Majishun, right? Ibn Abi Dhib or something. Or the Jamia of...",
      "Jamia of Ma'ma bin Rashid, dad of 153 Hijri. So there's actually a manuscript, partial manuscript in I think it's in Spain dated in 974 of the common era so that was when that copy was written of the collection. Jamia means like just collection of Ma'Ma bin Rashed who comes from Basra originally he goes to Yemen",
      "Yemen, settles in Yemen. So his compilation that was transmitted from him by his student Abd al-Razaq al-Sana'ani. Abd al Razaq Al-Sanahani from Sana'a died in 211 H. I'm just going to say 817 or the common era. 820 maybe, I can't remember exactly of the common Era. So Malik's generation kind of a mid 700s you have",
      "700s, you have people either just collecting everything they've heard in terms of hadiths, companion rulings. What big successor scholars are saying? Just putting it all together. Malik ibn Anas in his Muwatta is actually trying to say, okay here's the material on prayer, here's a material on fasting, here' s the material in zakat, here''s the material buying and selling things, here ''s the materials on inheritance, here is the material divorce. And then specific sub questions what do you do when you make a mistake in prayer? What can you buy",
      "types of sales you're not allowed to do. And he'll put the, what are the Quranic verses? What are the Hadiths that I know? What is the companion rulings? Let me try and figure this out. What is ruling I come out with? So those were some of the earliest books. Those books contain Hadith but they're not Hadith books. They're like transcripts of all the kind of normative material these scholars are bringing together to try and answer questions. The next generation... This is Imam Bukhari's generation. No. Now Malik ibn Anas dies",
      "Malik ibn Anas dies 179 Hijri, 795 of the common era. Malik just lives in Medina. He doesn't go anywhere. He goes to Hajj. Abu Hanifa and Kufa lives in Kufah. He's a Hindu. He lives in Huj. That's it, right? So they don't... But remember, if you're a... Let's say you're... Where do your ancestors come from? India. Okay. So let's say your ancestors originally, let's",
      "They're hanging out in Sindh. One day, these Arab guys show up. Which happened, right? 7-11. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And year 7- 11 they showed up and said hey we are Muslims. You guys are pretty cool. I like your clothing you seem to know what's going on. I want to become Muslim. What is Islam? They don't say hey go to the bookstore get a book on Islam. They don' t say go to internet. You know look Islam is what they know it is if they happen to remember certain hadiths of the Prophet",
      "the Prophet, if they happen to know certain ruling, if like certain companions settled in northeastern Iran, right? The companions who went into Iran, who went onto Iraq. They're the ones... It's their understanding of Islam that they're bringing. So the companions who settle in Syria are different than the companion who settled in Basra or different from the companions that will in Kufa, different from a companion who settles in Yemen, right, or in Egypt. Each of them has their own recollections of the Prophet's tradition, of the prophet's words and his deeds. They each applying this tradition of problem solving in different ways.",
      "is by the mid-700s to late 700s, very localized pockets of Islamic knowledge. Kufa is very different from Basra. They're very different than Damascus, very different form Medina. It's a tradition... The generation after Malik, so people living in the late 700 early 800s, Imam al-Shafi'i as a good example who start traveling around between all these places and they're not only collecting hadiths",
      "collecting hadiths from all these places. So they're getting the hadith from Basra, the hadits from Kufa, the Hadith from Khorasan, the Hadeeth from Egypt. What else? This is a minute test here. I mentioned a date earlier something that happened in 790 around 790 something very important involving technology Is it a development of an alternative to paper? Paper! Yes. Right? Oh from China. Exactly",
      "China. Exactly. Yes. So now suddenly you can, you're not like God, you don't have this like expensive scroll man. You know what? Like sometimes you have like a one piece of paper and just write like every tiny little corner. You're not scrolling like every single thing you can fit onto a piece of papyrus that's really expensive or parchment. You can just buy cheap paper and you can write down as much stuff as you want. So suddenly people can write it. Let's say I hear the same Hadith from five different teachers instead",
      "from one teacher, I can write down all five chains of transmission. No big deal. So the next generation, people living in the early 800s, late 700s, early 800S, start writing what's called musnadz. Musnad is a collection of hadith really just focusing on the words of the Prophet, no companion opinions, no successor opinion, no my opinion, right? With full change of transmission back to the Prophet",
      "But these aren't organized topically. Right. So remember the books like the Muwatta, I said he's writing... Here's a chapter on prayer, subchapter on what time you do the prayers, when to do the duhr prayer, when do you do asr prayer. Musnad is arranged by the isnad. This is completely useless if you want... Let's say you go and you pick up a musnad. You're like, I wanna know what time I should pray. Yes. It could be anywhere in this book. Yeah.",
      "But let's say I want to know all the hadiths narrated by ibn al-Bas. Oh, that's very easy. Yes. Why would someone organize a book like this? Because this is also the time late 700s where you have the emergence really of science of what becomes Hadith criticism based on the Isnad how it's organized So these are books for people who are now like professional hadith scholars late 700 yes",
      "A couple decades later. The earliest Musnad, by the way we know of is a Basra scholar named Abu Dawud Atayalasi who died... How many had he? Ah geez you know I should know the answer to this not that many i'm thinking maybe a couple of thousand yeah uh he died at 204 Hijri 820 of the common era his mustads actually survived it's published",
      "It's published, right? We have it. I think it's a couple of volumes. It's not very big. Now... This is great. By the way, the most famous Musnad would be the Musnad of Ahmed ibn Hanbal who died in 241 H. 855 A.D., the Common Era. And this is about 27,000 hadiths. Right. And anywhere from one-fourth to one-third",
      "to one-third of these are repetitions. So it's very common to find, let's say in the Musnad of Ahmed ibn Hanbal like 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 versions of the same hadith. Now next generation this is almost in generations like literally like the students of people so Ibn Hanbaal's students are saying okay this is interesting but",
      "These Muslims are not useful. So what they do is they take those topically arranged, that topically-arranged book idea and the idea of books that are just focused on hadiths with full isnas back to the Prophet, and they put them together. And that's what's called Sunan books, Sunan. The first Sunan book we know was by a guy named Sa'id bin Mansur. He died I think in 227 H. About 840 of the Common Era. That book has survived",
      "book has survived in part. And then a couple of other really famous ones, a guy named Tirmidhi, Abu Dawud, Ibn Majah, Nasa'i. We know these are authors of four of the famous six books. Again, they have books that are based on topic but also with fuller snags back to the Prophet. Now, and it's funny because sometimes you'll go to the mosque and it'll be like something on the bathroom. Don't do something in the bathroom and it will be like",
      "bathroom and it'll be like, Hadith from Sunnah of Ibn Majah. Yes. Hadiths from Sunna of Tirmidhi. Those books have lots of unreliable hadith in them. For example, Tirmidi's book he says lots of times this hadith is weak. Why is it in his book? Yeah. Because his book is not... It's not, I'm going to tell you the sunnah of the Prophet. His book is, I am gonna give you what are the different hadith that are used",
      "used in debates on these legal issues. So some of them will be things that he thinks are actually not reliable, that are used by his opponents, for example. This hadith is weak chain of transmission. You have to be careful when you look at these books. It's not like this is all reliable according to those authors. Sunnab ibn Majah has, according to scholars like a Vihabi, famous Damascus scholar who died in 1348 of the common era,",
      "of the common era. He says like a quarter of Ibn Majah's book is unreliable. So you have to be careful, but why would let's say, why would Ibn Madjah have hadith that's unreliably? He's not doing this like these are all the hadiths that are being used in debates because Ibn Magis his approach is more look, I have two really strong hadith. Maybe one says",
      "like ABC. The other one says CBD. So I know ABC is strong from the Prophet. I know CBD is strong but look, I have this other version that's not very strong as now, but it says ABCD. So put this in. We know the material is reliable, but now you have a one very handy version. So the content might be reliable,",
      "is not. Now, two scholars from that period, one of them from Bukhara and then his student from Nishapur in Iran, northeastern Iran, they have a different approach. They say, look... And one of the Muslim, bin Hajjaj of Nishpura who dies 268-75 of the Common Era he says, look we have this science of deet criticism we've developed",
      "why are we doing this thing where we put an unreliable version of something in? I don't care if it's useful. We're not sure the Prophet said this. We can't put it in here. The whole purpose of our science of Hadith criticism is to preserve the words of the Prophet of God, so that's what our job is. So he says, This book is just Hadith with sound change and transmission back to the Prophet. He's teacher",
      "teacher, Bukhari did the same thing in his Sahih which is even bigger than Muslim Sahih. And so these two are like they stand out and that they only have hadiths that according to the Sunni science of Hadith Criticism can be accurately traced back to the Prophet of God reliably according to Sunni scholars. So why did... There is an argument by some orientalists that I picked up",
      "that I picked up, Goldsager and Schacht. I'm sure I'm not pronouncing their names right. But they argued that the scholarship that came out of the second and third century reflected the cultural, political, and sectarian order of the time. And so these scholars who were compiling the hadith were prejudiced because in some senses they were appealing to the rulers.",
      "omitted some hadith. These scholars are getting tortured. I mean, that's kind of... I understand your point, but even Hambo literally gets tortured by the Abbasid government for not having a certain political opinion or a certain theological opinion. Bukhari dies literally on the road in exile after he's gotten kicked out of two different cities. In one city by the ruler",
      "I guess everybody is affected by their context, but definitely they're not trying to please any politicians or rulers. Now, okay, so what Goldsher and Schacht in general kind of Western scholarship argues",
      "First of all, we have to understand the background of this. So what happens—and if you're interested in this, you can read a whole chapter on this in my book on Hadith—but what happens, let's just put it roughly from the 1300s to the 1800s, is that scholars in Western Europe, Christian scholars in Eastern Europe gradually figure out that a lot of stuff they thought was true about, let us say, the classical tradition and the biblical tradition is not actually true.",
      "is not actually true, right? So there wasn't actually some guy named Homer who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Bible wasn't—the first five books of the Bible were not written down by Moses, right. There's not just four gospels telling the story of Jesus. There are a lot of other gospels that these texts went through changes, stuff got added to them, etc., etc.,",
      "come out of, like Jesus didn't come out and say here's a list of Christian doctrine that everyone agrees on. And then that was handed down generally. The church developed and shaped doctrine this developed over the centuries for various political and social and cultural reasons etc., etc.. So what they think is okay religion changes over time Scripture is never authentic right? Scripture is always being altered or invented or something like that",
      "And what religions are is basically what they're shaped to be by later generations. So, they just assume this is true for everybody. Really? I mean, and they literally say this. Like, they say we're going to go to India and we're gonna like bring the light of our scholarship to them and teach them you know, what their tradition- We're gonna go study their scripture. We're going figure out what the actual Vedas are and what the Upanishads are and What the original form of Hinduism was and how it changed over time. They were going tell people that they're gonna be enlightened, right?",
      "got to be enlightened, right? So they have just assumptions about how human beings work, which they think apply to everybody in the world at all times. So one of those assumptions is that certainly from Islam, it's not a true religion, right, so they think maybe this Muhammad guy was pretty—maybe he was like, you know, he was a good leader,",
      "Maybe he's crazy. Maybe he just like Machiavelli and has some community building project or something, but it's definitely not a prophet. So in that case, anytime we see him saying for example there come a time when X thing will happen. There will come a you'll see black banners coming from the east so join this army because this is the army of the rightly guided one right? They'll say oh well",
      "They'll say, oh, well this is obviously made up. And you can see, look, the Abbasid caliphs when they do their revolution in the late 740's early 750's of the common era what color are their clothing? Black. What color are there flags? Black So this is probably made up by the Abassids so they're like hey guys we need to get some... Like some politician getting the dominant comings of the day or whatever",
      "to go and get some material out there. We want some good PR. So they get these guys to go forge these hadiths. And by the way, Muslim scholars very quickly understood there was a huge problem of forged hadith. As you get from the time of the companions into the time",
      "three civil wars, huge wars. Okay? Internally. It expands from like Western, basically Arabia to Morocco to India and Central Asia. And so not only do you have three civil Wars that are over theological political issues. Yes. You've got all these Christians, you've got Jews, you're got Zoroastrians, you got Buddhists, you have Aramaic speakers, Greek speakers, New Eocoptics speakers, everything",
      "Everything. All these people are now under your control and they're becoming Muslim, and they all like hey I have an idea, my culture's kind of interesting, well what about this? And everyone is first of all forging hadiths, second of all they're just getting confused. They get confused about is this something the Prophet said or is it something that someone else said? There's intentional forgery, there's accidental confusion, and Muslims' cars are inundated by this. So very quickly they realize this is a serious issue",
      "issue. And they start trying to figure out ways to sort out what's the authentic words of the prophet from mistakes or forgeries. And how did they do that? Okay, well first let me just... I want to we'll talk about that in a second but let me finish the example of the kind of orientalist approach right? Oh yes. So this is just an example of",
      "Western scholars to other possibilities, right? So they assume that if you see a Hadith that says black banners are going to come from the East, join them because there's the army, the rightly guided one. They say, oh, this was made up by the Abbasids. Okay, here's the thing. In the 1640s, I think it's the 1650s, one of the founders of the Quaker movement, a guy named John Naylor,",
      "John Naylor. He goes to Bristol, I think Bristol, and he does so riding on a donkey, and his followers are singing like Hosanna, Hosanna for him. Why is he doing this? Jesus in the New Testament enters Jerusalem riding on",
      "In the Old Testament, there's prophecies about this. Your Messiah will come to Jerusalem riding on a donkey, people putting palm fronds in front of him and saying Hosanna, Hosanna. Okay. So what happens? According to like the Orientalist view of the world, John Naylor's people, like these early Quakers are like, we got to get some good material out there. Okay, so they would go back, insert this story",
      "insert the story in the Old Testament, and then to match what he's doing. Of course that's ridiculous because the New Testament has already been around for thousands of years. Similarly they would say Jesus' followers were like we got to get some good material out there so they put this in the Or how about this? There's an Old Testament prophecy about someone entering Jerusalem riding on a donkey putting people putting palm fronds in front of them saying Hosanna, Hosanna",
      "Hosanna. Then Jesus, in the biblical tradition—I'm not talking about Islamic Jesus, right? Biblical tradition acts out that prophecy. John Naylor in the 1600s acts out this prophecy, right. So which came first, chicken or the egg, right, is it that the Abbasids had this material circulated, or is it",
      "Taylor, I mean they didn't have to pick black. Why did they pick? Were they like early goths or something? They picked black after their banner colors in part to actually act out the scripture, this prophecy. So the perspective one has and your assumptions really color what your conclusions are.",
      "I think critique of the Western scholarly tradition. Yes. Okay, now as I mentioned before Muslim scholars Sunni Hadith scholars will happily admit and always admitted there's an enormous amount of forged hadiths right one famous scholar One of the most famous scholars of hadith ever a guy named Shaba ibn al-Hajjaj who died around 773 is from Basra He said three fourths of the hadith that have come across are forged three quarters",
      "This is a huge problem. That's why they developed these methods of Hadith criticism, okay? Now you might say, you know, okay but I was reading Sunan of Abu Dawud and there was a Hadith in there that seemed really... For example, there's this Hadith on Sunan Of Abu Dawood. Abu Dawoud of Sajjistan, he died 275 Hijri 889 of the common era, big scholar from Basra student of Ahmed bin Hanbal important scholar",
      "In his Sunan, he writes a letter to the people of Mecca. He says about his Sunna this book if you have the Quran in my book This is all you need. This is what you need to understand your religion So he feels his Sunnah is really an accurate reflection of the sunnah of the Prophet Yes But there's hadith and Sunnah of Abu Dawud It says let nobody travel by ocean except if they're doing Hajj or Umrah or fighting in the path of God underneath the Ocean is a fire",
      "is a fire, underneath the fire is another ocean. And you might let's say you're a geologist, you're like this doesn't make any sense what do you mean underneath the ocean is a Fire and if the fire's in other Ocean? What? Yes. This hadith that certainly that part of the Hadith Muslim scholars like a great scholar from the 1400s Ibn al-Mulaqin he said from Cairo he says",
      "of this. This is unreliable. So why did he put it into his book? Good question. We don't know the answer to that. Sometimes Abu Dawud has a hadith in his book, and he points out there's a flaw in this chain of transmission. Maybe he thinks that it's backed up enough by communal practice or maybe it's not like a really important issue. That's why he has it in here. But we don't",
      "they're always engaged in soft criticism. They'll say, look, this is... We found him... This is unreliable. Right. Another reason, by the way you say why did he put it in there? One of the things we know about Sunni Hadith scholarship... We know this because they say it. They tell us this explicitly. As far back as we can trace Sunni hadith scholarship, we have this principle. They say if we come across hadiths that deal with like halal and haram, that deal",
      "like prayer, fasting, buying and selling, marriage, divorce law, stuff like that. We're very strict about the change of transmission. We are very strict in our criticism. If we come across stuff about manners... You know what? If you do this deed, you're going to get this reward on the afterlife. Like doing a dua, they say we're lax. تساهلنا. We are lax in our criticisms of the change or transmission. Why would they say this?",
      "Why would they say this? For them, the second things are not core issues of their religion. There's stuff you already know. For example, in... Let's say... You know, let's say in Sunnah of Abu... Okay. Here's a...",
      "Here's a good example. It's going to be a little bit vulgar. It is not my fault. I'm ready. You see this in the Sunnah of ibn Majah. The Prophet says, there are 72 types of riba. The least severe type is the equivalent of having sex with your mother.",
      "The least severe type is equivalent of having sex with your mother. I have a question, when I told you that were you like whoa? I've heard it before but when I first had it I was yes. Yeah you're like whoa and I was in the Jummah once and I had like a checking account or something I don't know I get like 2% interest a year I was like oh maybe I should not do this. So this Hadith is unreliable. It's criticized by so many Muslim scholars pre-modern Muslim scholars",
      "and Muslim scholars, way before modernity in Britain and America and all this stuff. One of the things they criticize... First of all, the change of transmissions are all unreliable. The second thing is Ibn al-Jawzi, a famous scholar from Baghdad, died in 1200 of the Common Era. He says, This hadith يفسد موازين مقادير العمال It ruins, it destroys your capacity for balancing moral acts.",
      "If you think that getting one penny of interest on a million dollars is the same as doing something that every society in the world thinks is disgusting, you're not going to be able to do moral calculation. You're not gonna be able way moral actions. You are going to kind of be morally disabled in a way. This is his criticism. I think that's a very good criticism but why would this book, why would the Sadiq be in there?",
      "Remember what they said, their principle. If it's something to do with the virtues or punishment, you do this act, you're going to get this punishment. You do this action, you are going to be rewarded. They say relax when he says that. We already know riba is haram. We know ribas haram from the Quran. Yes. We knew ribas were from the hadith. That's already established. This hadith isn't adding anything new. For Ibn Majah, what it's doing is scaring your pants off. Like this is really gonna make you not do riba.",
      "do riba. We know you're not supposed to do it. This is going to be in a... Maybe the Prophet said it. Maybe like 20% he said it, yeah? It's useful. That's what Muslim is objecting to. One of the things that I think chiefly what Muslims and Bukhari are objected to. They don't care how useful this material is. They disagree with that policy of strictness with things dealing with law, laxity with stuff dealing",
      "kind of other stuff. They disagree with that. You have to be strict with everything. That's why they're... And you can read this in the introduction of Muslim Sahih. This is what he says. This thing he's hammering on. So back to the criteria then, what criteria do they lay out to determine whether a hadith is sahih or not? What do they have to establish in the hadith and its chain? Okay so first of all we have to remember that there are multiple ways you could decide",
      "decide if you think the Prophet, alayhi salam, actually said something. Right. Okay. So if I say to you there's a hadith... Here's a Hadith and this is actually an alleged Hadith it's a forged Hadith but i'm going to tell you just so the viewers slash listeners know this don't get confused okay? Yes. The first thing God created was a horse. Was the horse. The horse sweated",
      "and then God created himself from the sweat. What do you think? Do you think the prophet said this or not? It sounds very strange. Yeah, it sounds very... There's a couple of problems here, right? Yes. So first of all, I don't know. Is God created? The Quran talks about, like, لم يلد ولم يولد, right? God is the creator. He's not created.",
      "So this hadith kind of contradicts the Quran, right? The idea that God is created from horse sweat. Yes. This is problematic. Yes Okay so one thing we do is we say look We have the foundation of our religion in the Qur'an has very important ideas in it and this hadit is just We literally there's no human way No conceivable way to reconcile this with the Qurans. So this is if contradicts to grant would there be any flaws in the isn't odd in the chain of narration There is no chain of transmission for the city",
      "transmission for the Sadiq. It's not even a chain, it's just something floating around and some idiot was saying in Baghdad in like 700 or something like that. Well, Baghdad wasn't founded in 700. 70. So second problem. You seem like you're pretty scientifically inclined guy. My appearance is very deceptive. I thought you have glasses. Those are kind of the NASA",
      "The NASA glasses. Yeah. And Malcolm X glasses. Okay, yes. So is there anything else problematic maybe logically with this hadith? God created the horse, the horse sweated, then he created himself from the sweat. Well, I mean, the point you made, Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala is not created. Okay? So that's... Allah creates a horse and then from the horse Allah is created. That doesn't...",
      "created. That doesn't logically flow, right? The effect is preceding the cause. Yes. It's illogical. So it violates a kind of first principle of reason which is that you can't have the effect precede the cause Okay. Yes so in our critique of this hadith we used two tools. We said it contradicts the Quran, it contradict just fundamental premise of reason. And you can see this for example",
      "For example, in Abu Hanifa's book, Al-Alam wa al-Muta'allam, a very early text where he says if you... A hadith that says that any hadith it says that an action makes you non-Muslim. Like let's say I go to this fancy whiskey shop across the street I saw and just buy a big thing of whiskey and start chugging it. Then I'm just being a bad Muslim right? But I'm still Muslim",
      "Muslim. It's general Sunni principle, right? Actions don't make you not Muslim. You're just committing sins. You are just being a sinful Muslim. So he says if you see a hadith that says there is an action that makes you non-Muslim the Prophet couldn't have said it because now this is something that isn't in the Quran but it is in Abu Hanifa's understanding of the sunnah and teachings of the Prophet. So we say",
      "see a hadith that says not X or opposite of X, it can't be something the Prophet said. So it's not just that we're saying so a hadit contradicts the Quran, it contradicts established sunnah of the Prophet, it contradicts first principles of reason, it cannot be something that the Prophet has said because the Prophet is not going to say something illogical or something impossible. Fine. Here's the problem. That's an approach",
      "an approach to Hadith criticism that all Muslim scholars agree with. You can go back to the early Muslim rationalists, the Mu'tazilites. They were big on this. You could go back their opponents, the early Sunnis like Ibn Hanbal. They might not say this but they also agree with it. If you go and look in early Sunni books of Hadith Criticism where they're actually laying out the rules that are written in like the ten hundreds, they'll say any hadith contradicts the Quran",
      "contradicts the Quran, contradicts established sunnah of the Prophet. It contradicts reason. It can't be something the Prophet said. Right. Okay. So that's one approach. Everybody agrees with it but here's the problem. It's very hard in practice. Very hard in",
      "I think it might be in the Musnad of Ahmed ibn Haml, but I can't be sure. It's an early hadith, but it's not in a main collection. The Prophet said, I was shown God in the shape of an amrad. Amrad is a beardless youth. A young beautiful boy. The prophet said,",
      "Right? This is interesting. So early Muslim rationalists, like the Moitazalites, said this is ridiculous. This can't be something the Prophet said. Why? The Quran says, There's nothing like unto God. He's the one who perceives you. You don't perceive. You have basar, perception of God. Okay?",
      "Okay? Let alone, he's like a beardless youth. I mean maybe you see light or something. Whatever but this is absurd. It clearly contradicts the Quran. Yes. Some early Sunnis it's not that they agree with the idea of the Sadiq. But what they really don't like is people",
      "people superpowering their reason. Right? So what they say is, you know, Mu'tazilites, early Muslim rationalists, you don't know the nature of God. You don't like the unseen realm of the ghayb. And what does the Quran say about earlier communities? They go astray when they start to speculate",
      "go away from revelation and start to invent their own forms. They start to do theology and speculation and all these things. So we need to stick to the Sunnah of the Prophet. We don't know the nature of God. We only know what the Quran tells us. If the Prophet tells us this, we really don't have... We're not in a position to say this contradicts the Quran because he's the one explaining the Quran to us. So if he says this,",
      "to kind of dissent or whatever. Yes, yeah. Now the other Sunni scholars very senior senior Sunni Scholars like a Dhabi say this hadith is ridiculous. Of course it's ridiculous first of all the chain and transmission is not that strong second of all you know exactly what we said before you can't see this contradicts the Quran.",
      "Some Sunni scholars like Mulla Ali Qari, he's a famous scholar from Mecca. Originally, he was from Herat. He died in 1610 of the... No, 1606, sorry, Common Era. He says maybe the Prophet saw it in a dream. And you can see whatever in a Dream. The other day I had a dream and I saw a giant hamburger walking around or something. That doesn't mean... So whatever, I'm not responsible for this. It's a dream",
      "You can see there's a lot of dissent. Some scholars are trying to figure out ways to accept it, some scholars are clearly saying no, it's unacceptable. But why are they trying to do that when the isnad is unreliable? Let's use a different example that may be more helpful in this regard. There's a hadith considered reliable chain of transmission which says that",
      "is that God, sometime late at night, God descends from the highest heavens to hear the prayers of those people who are still awake in prayer. Okay? Those early Muslim rationalists, the Montezalites, they reject this just out of hand. Why? I don't care how strong the chain of transmission is. Why? If God's moving",
      "he moves from here to here. What does that mean about God? It means He's in a body. Also, where is He moving around? Is He in creation? Is the outside like some void or something? If you're moving around it means you're in space, you're time, you are in a Body and this all contradicts how we conceptualize God based on Quranic teachings. They just say we reject this.",
      "their Sunni opponents, people like Ibn Hanbal al-Bukhari would say no. The Prophet said this. What right do you have to dissent? Also they'll say the Quran in Surah Al-Fajr it says",
      "God on the Day of Judgment will come saf and safa. They'll come rank and rank, right? They'll say no, this is allegorical. It's like the power of God is coming. Okay it's allegorically why don't you make this hadith allegorica too? We're not saying that God is actually dropping down. In fact Sunni theologians would say",
      "the mercy of God that's coming down. It's almost like the metaphor of a parent kind of leaning over their child to hear what they're saying. So we're not saying God, which is metaphorical, right? Yes. So when we say God's eyes are on us, we don't literally think God has eyes like human eyes. It just means God's aware of what we're doing. Right. So they're",
      "If a hadith, alleged hadith contradicts the Quran, contradicts established sunnah of the Prophet, contradict first principles of reason. It can't be something that Prophet said. The difference between let's say Muslim rationalists like the Mu'azzalites and Sunni is not in it they disagree with the rules, it's how much kind of charity they're willing to potentially give a Hadith before they say this can't",
      "So someone like Mulla Ali Qari with the hadith of the beardless youth, he's willing to give out a lot of charity. He said maybe it was a dream. The Habib, also Sunni, is not so willing. Yes. Right? Sometimes... Okay, so let me get back to your question, right? This is why Sunni scholars focus on the Isnad. If you have the Quran,",
      "the Quran, and if you understand the Quran through the sunnah of the Prophet, it's very hard to know the difference between contradiction and explanation. Okay? So if I say, you know, the Prophet said... For example, the Quran says that metha, carrion, meat of a dead animal is prohibited for you. You find a dead",
      "Companions of the Prophet, peace be upon him, find a whale, a dead whale washed up on the beach of the Red Sea and they eat some of the meat. And then they tell the Prophet later about this, peace Be Upon Him, and he doesn't say anything. He doesn't have a problem. And in fact, he says, the ocean is pure and its dead are pure. So you can use the ocean water to do what we'll do. It's fine. And you can eat a dead fish from, or whatever. You can eat",
      "You could say that Hadith contradicts the Quran because the Quran says you don't eat carrion. But this Hadith is explaining that that rule is applying to land animals, not to sea animals. So it's very hard to know the difference between contradiction and explanation. Second, we don't know the unseen. God and the Prophet know",
      "For example, if the Prophet says, alayhi salatu wasalam, says that on the Day of Judgment we're going to see God like you see the full moon. This is a hadith, very famous hadith in Sahih Bukhari and other books. Mu'tazilites would say, this isn't possible. Again, God is in a body, it goes against our theology as we understand it as Muslims. Early Sunnis say, no, wait a second, listen,",
      "wait a second, listen. Day of Judgment is a different universe. Like nothing we know is... It's a different creation. We have no... How are we going to... You're going to sit around and we're going say us human beings are just going around trying to milk camels and get enough food to eat and raise our kids and stuff like that. We don't even know what's going on in the world around us. We're going",
      "God's knowledge. If God and the prophet tell us something, we don't have a right to object. Of course then some Sunni scholars, probably the majority would say okay yes it's not maybe you're not actually seeing God creates an image in your mind or something so they reconcile it. So the second thing is the prophet is telling us about things. We don't",
      "All right. So if there are serious constraints on our ability to kind of examine the contents of these hadiths, what do we do? Well, we're going to look at the chain of transmission. So what do they do? They say, first of all, if somebody comes and tells you something, you know, the Prophet said this, the first thing they do is they have to provide a chain of",
      "famous scholar Abdullah ibn al-Mubarak said, إِسْنَاد is part of the religion. If it weren't for the إِصْنَّاد, whoever wants could say whatever they wanted. So if I come to you and say, I just heard... Someone comes to you",
      "Anything that we don't perceive or experience ourselves comes to us through some kind of chain of transmission. Hearing, seeing a report, seeing an interview, hearing a story from secondhand, thirdhand, right? So everything that's not perceived by us, by our senses, comes through some sort of intermediary chain of transmissions. Yeah. So first of all you have to have a chain of transition. Second of all the chain of transformation has to be reliable so if somebody says",
      "So if somebody says, you know, hey, I heard that tomorrow all the flights out of Heathrow are canceled. I mean, I'm traveling tomorrow, inshallah. So I'll be like, who told you that? I mean think about it. Even common sense. Who told you this? Some guy on the street. Oh, some guy on a street tells you that. Okay well, that's really interesting. Maybe I'll go check. This is actually interesting because imagine somebody",
      "somebody tells you, some guy just told me that. Would you ignore it or would you actually go online and look up he took? I would do that. I'd be like maybe that guy knows what he's talking about. I would check. Let me ask you this question. Let's say somebody comes up to you and says did you know that chocolate ice cream is bad for your health? And then you say who told you that? Some guy on the street. Would",
      "Some things are important to us, some things are not important to Us. Remember what the early Sunni scholars said? There's certain things we're really strict on, there's certain thing were not strict on. So let's say it's an important thing, the Heathrow Airport thing. But let's says there is no internet, this was before the internet. What do you do? You go and find out... Well first of all, you'd say, some idiot told you this but you go ask your other friend, did you hear this? Yeah actually Muhammad my friend",
      "Ahmed, my friend Ahmed told me this. Ahmed, eh? So you go and you find out what are other things Ahmed said. This is the same Ahmed who told me that he told you once that human beings are actually capable of memorizing or that human being like if they eat chewing gum it stays in their stomach for their whole life or something like that. That's the same Ahmad who told all this stuff. I know that Ahmed.",
      "I've heard the stuff he says. It's not reliable. Yeah. But let's say it's Ahmed who, you know, this guy is like everything he's ever told you turns out to be correct. Then you're probably going to believe the thing about Heathrow Airport. Okay. So there's the question. So first of all, you have to have a chain of transmission and then how do you know the person in the chain of transmissions is reliable? Based on their track record. So in this case, you",
      "He's a serious guy. He's thoughtful. He doesn't lie. He does not exaggerate. He is not stupid, right? But let us say you do not know this person. You go and find out who are their students or who heard stuff from them. Okay, this guy, let us see, Abu Bakr heard something from him. Abu Bakar said, Ahmed told me A-B-C-D. And I go to another student, let's say Sarah. She says, Ahmed tell me A B C D. Okay. Go to another",
      "Haitham. Haithim says, Ahmed told me A, B, C, D. So actually it seems like everything they're saying Ahmed says is corroborated by other people. Now let's say I instead of Ahmed, it's like another guy, Tariq. I go to his students. They say, Tareq told me a another one he told me b. Another one he",
      "corroborating what this person said. So that person doesn't have a strong reliability. So you go back for each link in the chain of transmission and you do this. Who are their students? What are their saying they transmitted? Are they corroborated one another? Then, you have to make sure they actually met one another. So let's say you ask me like who told you he throws clothes tomorrow? Rishi Sunak told me this.",
      "Sunak told me this. Did you meet Rishi Sunak? Did you talk to him about this? I know you never met him, you know? You've been sitting at home all day like, and you don't... You never go to wherever these... Wherever the politicians hang out, right? So you never hang out there. So I don't think he actually met this guy or let's say I tell you, I say where did you get these glasses from? Malcolm X gave it to me. I was like, you were born this year,",
      "this year. It's impossible. There has to be some intermediary, and you're not telling me who it is. If I don't know who the intermediary is, that person could be a lunatic. He could be liar. So anytime there's a break in the chain of transmission, automatically this is unreliable. But let's say I figured out this person met this person, he met his teacher, she met her teacher, right? Back to the Prophet, alayhi salam. Each person I've checked, are they reliable based on their corroboration? That's a strong chain",
      "what's even more important isn't just that you have one chain of transmission, but that it's transmitted by lots of people. So if the Prophet said something, may he salat and salam, it's probably the case that multiple people narrate this from him. Or if let's say you're a really important scholar like Malik ibn Anas from Medina. Unless you're like the most senior student of Malik who studied with him the longest, chances are there's lots of",
      "Yes. So if you only have one person narrating from him, it's getting suspicious. Why aren't there more people? It's not just that you have to have a sound chain of transmission. That chain of transition also has to be corroborated for hadith to be very strong. You say the scholars of hadith went through this pretty involved process to determine whether a hadith is sahih or not. Oh yeah. And it seems like it's so involved it would probably take a lot of time up.",
      "It's a very, yeah. So it's an intense process. Yeah, very intense. I mean, it's difficult to when you read about what they're doing, it is difficult to keep up like it's hard. It's I'm at the edge of my capacity even trying to track what they are doing let alone replicate with them. And what's the relationship then between a muhaddith on one hand who's at the later stages you describe responsible for determining whether a hadith is sahih or not",
      "is Sahih or not, and a Mujtahid who's responsible for giving judicial verdicts or Islamic verdicts. Are Mujtahideen Muhaddifeen by definition? Or do they rely on the Muhaddiif to supply them with hadith? So an important thing to keep in mind is that let's say the different schools of law emerge from... The Hanifi school emerges from Abu Hanifa",
      "Abu Hanifa and his companions in the mid-700s in Kufa. Maliki school emerges from Malik and his students in Medina in the late 700s, early 800s. Shafi'i school, students of Shafii in Egypt, then after him. Hambeli school from students of Ibn Hambel in Baghdad in the middle 1800s. These all predate... Remember that the six books are compiled in the",
      "Yes. This is all post the actual emergence of these schools of law. So it's not like, you know, Imam al-Shafi'i or Abu Hanifa was like, I need to do a madhhab. I need make a madhahb. So go get me the books of hadith so I can figure out what to do. Yeah. Right? They have their own... They're collecting their own material. Abu Hanifah is collecting hadith that are circulating in Kufa. Imam al-'Shafi is going around to different parts",
      "the Muslim world collecting material, right? So their understanding of Islamic law is based on their school, its approach. The collection of hadiths in the books that we know of is a separate process. Now it doesn't mean it's isolated from that. For example, scholars who",
      "And scholars who compiled the six books, they're not like neutral people. They're not in a medhab, I don't want to get into these debates. They are all coming out of the tradition of ibn Hanbal and Imam al-Shafi'i. So what's called the Ahl al-Hadith tradition. They disagree with him on issues.",
      "They have disagreements with him. So the six books are an expression of basically what become the Shafi' and the Hanbali schools, a lot. Now, what then happens is... Let's say we're getting into the 800s of the Common Era, mid-late 800s, early 900s of",
      "scholar named At-Tahawi, who dies in 932 of the Common Era. He actually studies with... His uncle is one of Shafi's senior students. Yes. He starts out as a student in the Shafii tradition. He becomes Hanafi. But he learned the Sunni science of Hadith criticism. So what he goes and he does is he collects all these Hadiths and he puts them through the Sunmi critical process. And then he says,",
      "the Hanafi school of law, its rulings with hadiths. Then there's a scholar in what's now Lisbon and Ibn Abd al-Barr he dies in 463 1070 of the common era named Ibn Abdul Barr He does the same thing for the Maliki school There is a scholar from Beihak which is near",
      "which is near, kind of between Nishapur and Tehran today. He's called Bayhaqi. He does 1066 of the common era. And he does the same thing for the Shafi'i school. So what they do is these different schools of law will go and say okay we're now going to back up and kind of prove all our legal rulings with these hadiths and using our shared method of hadith criticism. Fantastic. Oh but let me ask",
      "Oh, but let me ask you. You asked another question, but I forgot to answer it right now. This debate about kind of division of labor is a really important one, right? A jurist, a faqih, is different from a hadith scholar. Hadith scholar studies hadith, maybe tries to authenticate them, collect different versions, figure out which ones are stronger,",
      "are stronger, maybe even explain the Hadith. The job of a jurist is different. The answer to legal questions. Can I eat this? How do I treat my mother? Can I buy Bitcoin or whatever, right? There could be Hadith scholars who are also jurists like Malik Bukhari. Bukhar was a Hadith scholar and a juristic. There could",
      "for example, Ibn Abi Hatim al-Razi died in about 938 of the Common Era. He's from Ray, what's today Tehran. He he's just a Hadith scholar. He doesn't write legal opinions and stuff. And you have scholars who are jurists and not Hadith scholars. So, for example Al Ghazali Al Ghазali knows more about Hadith than you and me times 10. Okay? So this is not to say he's like",
      "to say he knows a huge amount about Hadith. But that's not his specialization. His specialization is theology, law, Sufism, right? Those are his books he writes. So for him, by the time he's living in the 10 hundreds of the common era, he's got these six books. He's got other books of Hadiths. If he wants to go look stuff up and use it, he'll say this book",
      "give his evidence, say this book, this hadith that I'm using is in this book to show its strength. Or scholars have said it's sahih or said it hasan. So he's a jurist but you have different... That's a different job. For example, sometimes a lot of misunderstanding happens when people think that you just want to know an answer to a legal question and what do you do? You just go look at hadiths. This is ignorance",
      "is ignorance. Right. Because no Muslim scholar that I know of whose word they're sought would ever have recommended this. Right, because as I said before let's say I go and see this hadith about the Prophet used to do wudu after he ate cooked meat. I'll be like oh my god everybody has been doing this wrong you know? Everybody quick! You just ate this biryani don't pray you have to do",
      "for 1,400 years have been doing this work. They take the Hadiths, they figure out how they fit together, they figured out how do they relate to interpretation of scholarly interpretation, figure out it relates to communal practice, these different ways of understanding Sunnah. They put it in relationship with the Quran, they find out how it relates specific time and circumstance, then come up with a legal ruling. That's the job of jurists. It is not that if you study hadiths",
      "If you study Hadiths, you don't understand Islamic law. Or if you study Islamic law, you do not understand Hadith. You could do both. The mistake is to think that you can answer legal or theological questions just by randomly going to Hadith and kind of picking this and that because that's not the process that Muslim scholars followed. Whether they're Salafi or Medhabi, no people would recommend this. I know that time is against us and you have to move on to your next appointment but I would like to ask you a few questions about the modern context.",
      "modern context. So recently online there was a debate or discussion about Abu Huraira and his hadith, and the argument put forward in this case by some women activists was that his hadif tend to confirm a very misogynistic view of the world. And then they question whether he really",
      "really had the ability to relay the Hadith of the Prophet. He had only been a Muslim for three or four years, I think it was prior to the passing of the messenger. How would you respond to... and there are lots of debates like this all the time by also liberal minded people, postmodernist, socialist mind where they question parts of the Hadif based on",
      "they go back to the original sources and argue that the narrators, the source narrators were fundamentally flawed. Yeah. So this is a... As they say, we've seen this movie before. Tenet. Muslim scholars have been debating this since the 700s. I'm not joking. In the court of the Abbasid Caliph",
      "the Abbasid caliph in the late 700s, there was a debate between some of the kind of more rationalist scholars who were with the caliph and this early Sunni name Omar bin Habib. He died 820 of the common era. Yeah. And guess what they're saying? The rationalists are saying Abu Hayyad Nifa is not a jurist. He's not reliable. You can't take material from him.",
      "you've got to be really careful. If you're suggesting that the companions of the Prophet don't understand the Prophet's sunnah, how are you going to get the sunnah of the prophet? They're essential either through their transmission of hadith or their understanding of his tradition of problem solving. Yeah. They're an essential bridge. Be very careful. This debate has been going on for what is that like 1,200 years? It's a long time and",
      "And here's the thing about Abu Huraira, one. He very rarely narrates hadith that is not narrated by somebody else. So almost all the hadiths Abu Hurayra narrates are narrated but other companions. So let's say you get rid of all these hadith there still going to be narrated most materials already coming from other companions Second, people say oh we only knew the Prophet for three years",
      "Yeah, okay. But Ibn Abbas was only 14 years old when the Prophet died. He narrates thousands of hadiths too. How's this? Because they... As I said before, they're not quoting the Prophet most of the time. They just say the Prophet said or they say I heard this from another companion. So they're getting it from an intermediary. Why don't they say that? Because at that point in history people aren't obsessively... For example,",
      "For example, if you tell me the prime minister said this, the prime ministry said that. You say I saw on BBC, I read in The Guardian. Yes. I mean, you could but we get kind of bored. I'd be like listen, can you stop telling me all the weird places you've read? Just tell me what happened right? Yeah. That's how they're especially their first generation Muslim, they're not obsessively saying I heard this from this companion or anything. He just says the Prophet",
      "says the Prophet said. Even scholars like Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, big hadith scholar from Cairo who died in 1449, he says, in terms of the sahih hadiths that Ibn Abbas transmits, Ibn",
      "It would be like me going back and insisting that every, anything you didn't, anytime you quoted a British politician and didn't say where you read it, I'm just, I mean, I can't go back and ask you to act in a way that wasn't required from you at the time or expected from you. At the time. Yeah. So that's the thing about, and it's kind of weird that people keep bringing this up about Alvaro because it's very easy to explain. Yes. But the third thing is, you know, about him being misogynist. Hmm. This doesn't make any sense to me.",
      "make any sense to me. I mean, if you go in Sahih Muslim and you open up a chapter on the description of Jannah and its blessings there's a report where the Prophet has died, there are some people debating in Medina they're having little debate. Are there more women in paradise than men? And they go to Abu Huraira and he thinks about it and says okay, I think there are more women. He says why because",
      "Why? Because every man is going to, the prophet said, every man has more than one wife in paradise. So if there's more than a woman, then that means there's women and men. That's his own calculation. He's thinking about, okay, I think this. Yes. That' not a hadith of the Prophet but that's Abu Hurairah doing legal reasoning. Yes! So you can criticize him for being right or wrong or whatever, but he's not saying definitely men because women suck or something, right?",
      "or something, right? So I don't understand. Is this is Abu Huraira the misogynist? Yes. So I think this is people... As I said before, the difference... Let me rephrase that, right. Every Muslim scholar in history has acknowledged that Hadith forgery is a serious problem. Okay. That's why there's a science of Hadith criticism",
      "scholar that I know of in Islamic history has, you know, either they have openly acknowledged it or they belong to a tradition that acknowledges that a hadith can't contradict the Quran. It can't contradict established sunnah of the Prophet. It cannot contradict first principles of reason because those things can't be things the Prophet said, right? Oh by the way another thing they say is a hadit can't racist. So if you have a hadif that's like insulting a whole group",
      "It can't be something the Prophet said. Because people talk about this a lot today. Now, this is agreed upon. Where's the disagreement? How you apply this test? How willing are you to be charitable and offer time to reconcile between like the Quran and a potential Hadith? Yes. How humble are you? Right? One of the things you see in kind of Islamic modernists or kind of progressive Muslims",
      "of Muslims is, let's just say a significantly reduced level of humility. A certainty about their moral or scientific view of the world and not being willing to say like you know what maybe God in the Prophet no better than us on something that's I think the which really issue so",
      "although they might be about Abu Hurayrah or whether we believe Hadith or not, that's not really what the debate is. The debate is how willing are we to subordinate what people around us are saying are the certainties, the moral certainties political certainties whatever scientific certainties of our world? How willing are you saying these are more powerful than the message of God and his prophet? That's what we're saying.",
      "Or are we saying that if we're going to be Muslim, it can only be an Islam that is really defined by, let's say, progressive sensibilities? Or should progressive sensabilities have to stand the test of the core message of the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet? These are the real debates that are happening. Lastly, Dr. Brown, what's the rule regarding the person who... At the very beginning you said there are some Muslims or some people who argue that we should just abide by Qur'an",
      "abide by Quranic injunctions and not the hadith. Now, notwithstanding all that you've said, but the hadif explains the Quran and you cannot de-link the two and it's impossible to just follow the Quran. But notwithstanding that if someone insisted that the hadit corpus I reject as a complete source of Sharia what is the hukum shari'i regarding that person? You know he's state of Islam. Yeah so",
      "So, first of all, I'm not like a mufti and I'm qualified to give legal rulings or something. But I can tell you how other people have answered this question. First of all just as a sort of baseline the general answer of Muslim scholars like al-Hafidh al-Iraqi who died in 806 Hijri mulla Ali Qari I mentioned him already he died 1014 1606 of the common era",
      "Yes. So is to say, and this is generally shared, right? If you reject something that's mutawatir, that means massively transmitted from the prophet or like the Quran, that's Mutawatir. Right. If you project on me like this, like the Prophet existed, the Prophet's name was Muhammad, right. That he lived in Mecca, Medina. He told us that we're not supposed to drink wine and we're supposed to eat pork. Right? If your reject this kind of thing, you wouldn't be, you would not be Muslim.",
      "Muslim. Now, if it's just an isolated report, so let's say even one that's sahih. So let's",
      "If you reject this, then you could be—this could be sinful. You could be wrong. You'd be misguided, but you're still Muslim. Yes. In the middle tier there's something called Mashhur or Mustafid hadiths. These are hadith that are not massively transmitted, but they're very well known. They're not kind of single narrations. One opinion is that if you reject us you wouldn't be Muslim, but Mulla Ali Qari and I think he's correct in saying this that",
      "guided, you would be sinful in this but you're still Muslim. I think that's the correct position. And to this I would add something that the Mufti of Egypt Muhammad Bakhit al-Mutti'i he died in 1935. He was an Egyptian head Muftiyah, the chief Muftiya of Egypt in the 1930s, 20s and 30s. And he has a really interesting discussion with these kind of young, really like westernized Egyptians wearing suits",
      "suits and stuff, and they're just saying we shouldn't follow the sunnah. We should follow custom and whatever the custom of our time is. And he's describing this interaction, and he's very merciful to them. He says some people if they say they don't believe a hadith it's not because they're not rejecting the prophet. They love the prophet They love their prophet very much and what they're saying is I don't feel like there's something he would say So in some ways their rejection is actually a love of the prophet",
      "love of the Prophet. And in that case, he's not like... His response isn't to say you're a kafir or you're misguided or something like that. That's not the way to think. The way to is this person has love for the Prophet they want to be Muslim so the answer isn't condemn them or drive them away or something it's try to help them understand better and that's I think very important thing to keep in mind because a lot",
      "Because a lot of, you know, when you have discussions about this or you see debates about this. I mean, usually, I mean sometimes it's non-Muslims but usually it's people who are Muslim they want to be Muslim like if you meet like Parvazi people from Pakistan, you People who were like Quran only Muslims They want to me Muslim and I you know there they just see hadith and they understand how deal with them Yeah so the answer isn't to kind of say well",
      "you guys are misguided or you guys aren't Muslim. Or if you say this, then it's... This is a consequence.\" I think the most helpful thing to do is actually help them understand how like first of all, it's very important to tell them like listen, you have a problem with Tadid and your instinct is fine. Our religion doesn't say just believe whatever anyone tells you, right? You're supposed",
      "The Quran tells us we believe stuff when we have proof, when someone brings us revelation, when somebody brings us evidence. That's why I'm Muslim. That is why I decided to become a Muslim. It was like listen, I all believe stuff but you got to give me evidence. Yes. And if you hear something that seems to contradict the Quran, it seems to contradict what you know about the Prophet, it seems a contradictory reason, you have every right to be skeptical about this and to say like I don't think this is Hadith.",
      "is when you refuse to have any discussion about this or when you think you automatically know better than everybody else. So sometimes, this is kind of like a know-it-all competition. You have two different know-its-alls, the traditional Muslim, I know everything, you need to listen to me and the modernist Muslim progress, I don't know it all, you just listen to",
      "I've gotten in all like the Twitter wars, all the personal debates that ever had on these issues. The only time I have ever changed my someone's mind wasn't when I brought them evidence or when I gave the best argument it was when I was just, I mean, I, I had to be, I thought I had like the compassion thing on like 12, you know, I turned the dial up to 11. I was",
      "think this. That was the only time I've ever had somebody change their mind. It had nothing to do with evidence or who's right or wrong, it had to do being compassionate to why they thought something and then we were able to reach one another. Dr Jonathan Brown, Jazakallah Khair for your time today, it has been a fascinating discussion. I loved it! Thank you very much. My pleasure.",
      "and head over to our website thinkinmuslim.com to sign up to my weekly newsletter Jazakallah Khair"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - ICNA Dawah Conf 2020 - Why_pF4-elEGuh8&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748679683.opus",
    "text": [
      "author of several books including misquoting Muhammad the challenges and choices of interpreting the Prophet's legacy.",
      "thousands and millions of copies sold, best seller I think by a Jewish author if i'm not mistaken. Translated into so many languages. I've never seen it sold in the Muslim world which is interesting and I think it's because there's one thing I've always been really impressed with Muslims ever since I became Muslim was that they don't seem to have this anxiety as much as other people do. They don't",
      "tried by this question and afflicted by this questions as much as other people. And I think that's because the Quran is very clear about the fact, in effect, that this question is completely inappropriate, right? Why a good...first of all let me tell you why bad things happen to good people, right. Things are...no things are bad or good in and of themselves",
      "So the Quran talks about how, you know our children and beautiful things in our property and our lives and our health I mean think about children what's better than children right? Our children are both a blessing and they're a test. They're fitna for us, right so everything Everything that is good is but that is pleasant and pleasing to us is Both a blessing And also attest us right how do we react to it? so and and Things that seem bad like an injury",
      "like an injury or death or loss, right? They are a test for us. And there's something that gives us the chance to succeed and to gain not just to lose. So first thing is that there's no such things as good or bad things in themselves it's how we react to them. And second is whether you're a good person or not has nothing to do with you getting tested.",
      "good people are going to be tested and they're gonna be tested by losing things right so the quran says you know god says allah says or people do people think that they're just going to say oh we believe so we're wonderful people we're believers now and you're not going to have this fitna so i mean these two concepts are really important of the concept of fitnah",
      "and good things are a test for you, and bad things are tests for you or things that seem good are tests. I think it seemed better to us. And similar with Bala is testing something to see if it performs well so we can be tested and you can it can be an opportunity to show that you can succeed and you could be tested. And you can get some opportunity for you to fail. That's really how you react. It's important. And this is made very clear by Allah in the Quran. The Quran says",
      "So God says, surely we're going to test you. We're going",
      "So here's the second part that's important to keep in mind, which is what is the second half of the equal sign? Right. So the reason that the question of why do bad things happen to good people is so stressful and almost existentially critical for a lot of people in the world is that people don't take the idea of the afterlife seriously at all. Right.",
      "exists, then you look around and see a child die or an innocent person killed or thousands of innocent people killed by some dictator. Whereas if you believe in afterlife there's another side of the equal sign where all these things are equalled out. So the Quran says",
      "is unaware of what the oppressive people do. So rather, God is delaying their punishment for a day when all the eyes are going to be opened. Everything will be revealed and people will see what they've done and be punished for what they have done or rewarded for what you've done. If you have another side of the equal sign then the suffering of good people",
      "people or the death or loss of innocent people. That can be repaid, those who suffer get repaid thousands times with the rewards in their actual life and those who committed those crimes get punished. This is a very important concept in the Quran. Who's going to be the person that gives God a goodly loan? You give God a",
      "and being grateful, and bearing loss with patience in this life. And then you get that back multiple times in the afterlife. So that verse it says indeed we are going to try you with fear and hunger and loss and your wealth and yourself and your lives and your labors but then it says",
      "say inna lillahi wa inna alayhi raji'ur-man right so those the next verse those people who say when something bad happens to them we belong to god to him returning if you are sabir if you have sabr then uh you pass the test so the fitnah is the test whether it's good if you get a good thing you're tested what are you going to do with this good thing are you gonna think it came from you or do you think that you always remember that all blessings come from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala are you",
      "If you lose something, whether it's your health or property or a loved one. How are you going to react to this? Are you going get angry at God? Are going to get angry and give up and say God doesn't do anything for me or stop believing or something or go and hurt other people? Or are you gonna say Alhamdulillah that I had this thing, I had my health, I was given all these blessings when I had them I hope I use them well. And now my job is to simply say again I'm so grateful to Allah SWT that He gave",
      "that I was given the blessing of existence, and I play for mercy on those people who've died. And then that I'm giving a reward for what I go through and bear in this world. So you don't fall into kufr, which is fundamentally ingratitude towards God. Fundamentally ingratitute towards God.\" So these are two things to keep in mind when we think about this, as I said, very false or improper question why do bad things happen to good people? Because good people get tested!",
      "just like bad people get tested and um we're told we're going to lose things in this world and the question is how do you respond to that do we respond with gratitude to god and patience or do we respon with despair which is as the prophet says a tool of this of the devil a tool for the devil despair is a tool",
      "an inspiring talk. JazakAllah khair. And inshallah with that we will conclude, once again you can support us financially by donating at ikna.org slash donate or help volunteer at Embrace, Rise Time, Game Peace and other chapters by visiting ikna dot org slash barakah. JazakhAllah khayr."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Imam Bukhari and his Sahih_J4eZYQYOUas&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748683508.opus",
    "text": [
      "Insha'Allah ta'ala when we go back to the Qanunqiyya.",
      "He has written extensively on the Messenger of Allah and on the science of hadith. His PhD from Chicago is on the canonization of Bukhari and Muslim, and he has this book also just to plug I mean he has a new book that's coming out soon on blackness in Islam as well but he has his book on Hadith Muhammad's legacy in medieval and modern world And so he has an expertise on this topic inshaAllah",
      "of Imam al-Bukhari and some issues with regards to that. Bi'idhnillahi taala, I'll serve you to Dr. Brown. Hey, salamu alaykum everybody. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem. Alhamdulillah habibin astaghfirullah wa sallatu wa sallaam ala sayyidi wa salleen wa aalihi wa salloah. Thanks for inviting me. This is not my cat that's on my lap right now. This",
      "Seattle right now I had to come to Seattle to do stuff deal with some stuff so um my friend's house which is why I'm on a bed not in like my office or anything but uh yeah then he has these cats and uh I love cats but uh and these ones are nice like they just want to sit on you and get petted and stuff so this is a nice kind of cat they don't they're not",
      "for inviting me and um i just want to make a correction not because i uh for my ego purposes but just so that i'm actually a full professor at georgetown not associate professor and the reason i'm bringing it up is that since there's no way for me to get promoted anymore i don't have to worry about behaving myself i mean you know i'm i can speak without fear of not getting promoted or whatever",
      "Yeah, so Bilal's talk was really great. I love hearing from him and reading his work and hearing about his work. He's made some... I think he might be the only... Yeah, maybe the only person I know who's actually added something except for... Well, okay, he's one of the few people I know",
      "about Bukhari in his there for, you know, 1200 years Muslim scholars have debated about who Imam Muslim is talking about in his sahih about this the person he's criticizing for requiring direct evidence of direct contact between narrators. And some theory was that that was actually Bukharis Muslims teacher Bukhare",
      "but that doesn't make a lot of sense because Muslim speaks about this person like very harshly. And we know that Imam Muslim had a lot respect for his teacher, so it didn't really make sense. But then Dr. Bilal came up with the argument that I think it's actually correct that this was actually al-Karabisi that Muslim was talking about which actually makes a lot",
      "really like a 12 imagine like there's a debate going on for 1200 years and then you actually like kind of add something to that debate that's i think that's really uh in our honor um about man bucharest it's interesting his i think another thing that he is he has i think he has a unique opinion on is that he doesn't think that if you're doing pilgrimage that you can scratch your body",
      "self which i think is um pretty unique i don't think anyone i think i don' t think that's a known fic opinion in like the schools of law uh cat hair okay so um i think one of the things about the sahih that's so interesting is as dr blow was saying it's an enormous book",
      "really difficult to translate. It's a very, very intense book. I mean two things. One is the complexity of the hadith transmissions in it. It is extremely high and sometimes you'll see that some of the existing translations will just translate one hadith for every issue. For example Bukhari will most",
      "two or three or four narrations, if not more of a certain Hadith in his book at different points either the same chapter or scattered throughout the book. And I think as far as I know that the translations that exist they don't usually translate these repetitions but it's actually in looking at those repetitions you see the complexity of what he was doing and not just what he is doing but the complexity",
      "where they will you know, they'll collect and collate different transmissions of a hadith that sometimes differ only in very subtle ways. But those subtle ways really show you one their attention to detail two how those subtle differences can really show difference in memory or different recollections or context or how they kind of add or subtract",
      "note those subtle differences because that's really where you see the uh the excellence i think of this tradition and you know like whatever you think i mean whatever somebody wants to say about tradition or about it i mean you it's simply undeniable is the complexity and the attention to the complexity",
      "behind this book is undeniable. Like it's, it is simply not denied. It cannot be denied. I mean, you can, you could debate, you consider on debate whether do you think the prophet really said this or they thought Salamor said that or whether or not, et cetera, like you could have a debate fine, but this, there can, cannot debate the incredible sophistication of this book and it's not an outlier, right? The term of these, I mean sorry, Imam Bukhari's book is not",
      "you know, it's not kind of head and shoulders over anything else. It's not like he was the only person who did this. And, you know everyone is just blown away by this unprecedented work of art. It sounds like he's Mozart and everyone else are these kids scribbling on music sheets or something. I mean, he's really one of many people writing in this way about these issues. He's very good. And his, I think work is the best of its field but",
      "not an exception it's more representation of a tradition and uh you know you keep you can't deny i mean it's it's as sophisticated as any book that any human being has written as far as i now i mean as far I know about history the history of the humans human race is as i think i mentioned it's just incredible and it and i challenge anybody i mean",
      "up with what he's doing is a challenge. I would say it's almost impossible for me. Scholars like Ibn Hajar, Khateeb Baghdadi, Qadir Yad or Anwar Shaka Shamiri, dozens and dozens of scholars in Islamic history have devoted their lives to just trying",
      "with what he did. And I can't even keep up with their efforts to keep up",
      "projects. I mean, really if you, if I were to take it more seriously than I do doing the best I can, but like, you know, it would take your life to do that. Um, and uh yeah so he's just an incredible scholar um incredible scholar and you don't see, I don't think you see that unless you really look at the book in full not just like reading translate you know translations of snippets",
      "It just leaves you stunned. That's what I would say. The other thing I would is that it's really, it's also, Imam Bukhari is...I don't think when you say he sort of...I'm not saying anyone here is saying that but like he really is part of a bigger system. He doesn't...he's not an exception as they said.",
      "you know he wasn't a star above like you know this ocean of um mediocrity or something like he was and you you see that because he's the fight in some ways i think i know this is i'm probably going to get quoted and by this and there's going to be another like twitter attack on me and poor awesome it's gonna get attacked but i mean i want to make it clear i'm not i'm",
      "I can put this on my left. But in some ways, I think it's useful. Like it's you know, if you imagine you read one of these like tell all books from politics where I probably have these in the UK where let's say, I don't know what's that guy Dominic Cummings? Let's say Dominic cummings writes a book about number 10 Downing Street or something right? So he'll be referring to all his stuff and all these people and alluding to all these things and making these references",
      "And if you went to the bookstore and you got this book and you read it, you'd be like, oh yeah. I know what I'll do. I remember this. I don't know what he's talking about here. You know, it just sort of floating in the ambience but if you were to go get that book in 50 years or 10 years or even 20 years or 30 years or a hundred years or 300 years, you would be like what the heck is this guy talking about? Like what trip to this castle? What orange haired blind...",
      "I mean, you would have all these references that you wouldn't... You would feel like you were stepping into a discussion that you were completely unaware of. And I think that's how the Sahih is. I don't think anybody could deny this. It's... You're stepping into",
      "of the hedry calendar so let's say you know the 830s to the 86 you know to you know 8 30s to The 860s right you're stepping into this and some of those debates we know about um some of the stuff he explains but a lot of weeks it's you get dumped in discussions that you and of course if you know",
      "scholars, right? He doesn't say this idiot says this like, you know, Muhammad Ibn Fulan who's so stupid. I can't believe it says this or no, but he's very polite. You know, he doesn't refer to who he's talking about a lot of the time. He doesn' t kind of leave elliptically reference things. So you don't have sometimes you don' t know what he's talkin about. He does'n't would be helpful if he told you, but",
      "reader knows about it like when he's sitting reading the sahih in baghdad or in buchara uh he can he was confident that and he was you know just as as when i'm talking right so i just said dominic cummings who the heck is that guy you know maybe in 100 years no one's going to know who this guy is okay right but like or you know trump tell all by reference to all these things that we all know what this is because",
      "a dozen or centuries from that years from now you would um you wouldn't know what i was talking about only an extreme specialist would and only then maybe with some degree of speculation so that's what that's really the the nature of sahih it's like and this is not my opinion right this is oh jonathan oh johnson brought us in gets up he's he's you know uneducated or something",
      "so you know the uh it's it's not my opinion like this was what muslim scholars had to deal with even in the two centuries so people like called the yad um in the uh 11 49 i think right and khatib baghdad who died in 1071 of the common earths common era or",
      "for really the scholars who are first writing about Bukhari they also have the same problem like they're like oh what is he talking about here like who let's see why is he making this reference who's this debate involving so that's actually a big one of the things that commentaries and say Bukhar has to deal with is like actually making sense of uh his comments",
      "hadith book it's not i mean it doesn't it's uh it's bukhari's take on the on islamic law theology history hadith sciences right sorry about this so it's his it's like",
      "given in the sub chapter in the abuab right so any abuabb titles which are like um the the within a chapter you'll have sub chapters it's called abu'ab bab abu-ab right um these doors so those are the uh hill sometimes they can be uh you know half a page long",
      "be if you train i mean i remember one i translated i think the translation was about two or three pages long that's just his chapter title because what he does is he'll give you you know um you know let's say the chapter on uh uh you know judges rulings and then on the subchapter it'll be like the ju the chapter",
      "not ruling by things in his own knowledge or something. And then he'll have, and that this companion, Ibn Abbas said this, and Ibn Umar said this. And Iqraimah said this and it's narrated from Ibn Ishaq that he said this... Then there's a Quranic verse and then you know it will be this enormous long list of opinions",
      "the point he's trying to make uh by listing all these different um opinions or these different pieces of evidence so sometimes he won't sometimes they'll say this is my opinion or this you know he'll make it clear this is what he's arguing but sometimes you just have to figure out what he'd argue from all these these opinions and they can be as i said you can have a page sometimes of this material oh now the cat's leaving again something happened",
      "that there's food being served or something. So, yeah, so it's really like the Sahih and then, so the Hadiths in the book are actually just his evidence. So imagine I write a book where I say, you know, I'm going to tell you everything I think about Islamic history and Islam as a religion, Islamic thought, Islamic law and theology, right?",
      "and then i give you quranic verse and like companion opinion and then I list three hadiths next chapter, next sub-chapter my opinion on cell phone use here's a Quranic verse something your companions said four hadith the next chapter whether or not you can use zoom same thing so that's what the hadith are just the evidence",
      "that i'm laying out of one type of evidence because remember in his chapter titles he has quranic verses she has companion opinions yes successor opinions he has early scholarly opinions etc etc all sorts of material and the hadiths are just part of the evidence so actually bukhari's book is when we read when we use it as a hadith book where we're just picking his evidence from his book and citing it as hadith uh",
      "in a way that it was, there wasn't the original purpose of the book. Now that doesn't mean we're misusing it or something, and it's fine to do that but it just, the nature of the books is not like as a hadith reference. Someone like Imam At-Tirmidhi or Imam Muslim's books are much more referenced books. They're sort of like here's all the hadits on this topic, here's the hadit on that topic right? And those are much",
      "Okay, so yeah. That's I think what I wanted to say about his book and I don't know. It's really just a mind-numbing work. I don t think he...I don't it's hard to believe that he could have done this in 10 years. It s hard for me to believe anybody can do this book.",
      "his mastery of this material is beyond my conception like he doesn't and look i'm not saying this i'm",
      "sat down and looked at this book, there would be kind of their jaw would drop. It's a really, really stunning. And the level of again, he is not exceptional at all in this way. The attention to detail about you know, this narrator transmits this hadith and in this version it has this wording Hey Clark,",
      "Hey Clark, I'm fine. I got coffee earlier. Did you? Yeah. You've got a lot more to go or are you... I don't know. I'm not sure. I don' think so. Sorry my friend is talking to me. This is the owner of the cats who have been sitting on my lap now that's what they he woke up and now they're excited about their actual master to be around instead of me. So like and then he'll say you know this other narrator narrates it",
      "narrates it, but with this detail. This missing detail and it's incredible that means he was just kind of presiding over this ocean of information and then just selecting a piece and then selecting another piece and telling you this piece differs from this bit. It's like just to follow that is really hard and then to imagine sitting there without computers or",
      "databases or anything and just sort of from memory going through all this material. And then finding it's so consistent. I mean, one of the things that's really interesting is like if you look at, you know, um, the material is consistent through. So other scholars will be citing the same material before and earlier or before and after Bukhari. And",
      "Like he's not sort of doing some kind of Jorge Luis Borga simulacrum, you know, like performance of imitating a Hadith scholar and being like, I've been fooled on to this. No, no, no. This stuff is corroborated. This material is corrobarated in other sources. So it's really incredible. Okay. That was what I want to talk about in terms of this book. Then I wanted to say...",
      "Okay, then the other thing is people and I... Again, as Asim said, people attacks like Bukhari because Bukharis seen as kind of representation of the science of Hadith criticism and collection. So if you can undermine him, you sort of undermine the ability for people to make claims about things that Prophet said and did. And that allows people",
      "to sort of either discredit the Islamic tradition or to free themselves of it and so you serve you see kind of two types of people right there's the kind of just people who are skeptical a lot of skeptical about Islam in general and then you see people who were you know Muslims who don't really want but hadith and they find their nakshat or they fight them back or something that",
      "this material, this approach from them. But I don't... In some ways that I don' think this is fair for a couple of reasons. One because and my question to these people would be like what did the prophet do for 23 years? Was he just sitting around staring at rocks on the ground or something? You had to say something.",
      "this person is teaching and leading for 23 years. And we, I guess pretty fairly can presume that he was actually talking to people and saying things and teaching them things and giving rulings and right. And the people were obsessed with recording what he's recalling what he said because in for one piece of evidence, we have the Quran which means, which is textually intact from the mid seventh century. So they were definitely obsessed",
      "obsessed with preserving that i mean they had to there has to be some record of people recalling things he said and did so what what what is your answer i mean you're just going to say that you know we nothing we have no record of what the prophet setter did um you know okay i understand you know you don't like this hadith or you find that hadith backward",
      "I mean, what about the Hadith that talk about, you know, the prophet came out of his house and like washed his face? It's like, oh, is that also false? I mean what's your problem with that Hadith? He had at some point in his life he no doubt came out from his house. And did something like wash his face or looked up or look down right? I think some of these memories have to be something has to happen.",
      "our basis for just rejecting i mean the vast majority of material in sahih bukhari or inside muslim writing these books is not a controversial material right it's um it's uh you know in effect kind of mundane descriptions of something that a person is doing in the sense of like how he prays or how he eats",
      "that are not controversial like you know um uh how do you know when the iftar time has come they know you or into the prophet you know somebody made a mistake about whether the sun had said or not and you know do you have to make up your fast after i mean this is not something you can kind of get morally bent it been out of shape about um okay uh so i think that it's important to note to note that like",
      "most of the material in this book is not something that uh is part of some kind of you know human civilizational debate over you know morality or something okay uh the other thing that i was asked to talk about is because as i said the reason why and i know this is at least a couple years ago there",
      "of Sahih Bukhari, i.e., the extent to which we know that it actually comes from Imam Bukhar and some people said that we can't actually trace this book back to Imam Buhari. I don't think that's accurate. I think we can definitely trace it back to him but the motivation for this was this hadith in Sahih",
      "and i think this is very ironic that sort of the person making his argument was trying to say you know i can't believe someone thinks aisha was only nine years old and there's no evidence for this and look even sahih bukhari we don't even know it goes back to its author let alone back to the prophet and my my answer to that question is like what do you think you're accomplishing but let's say if you took sahib buchara you found every copy of sable car in the world and you just burned them threw them into garbage right",
      "age in many, many, other hadith collections. This is not something that Bukhari himself transmits alone and no one else transmits. So I wanted to share... You guys can share the screen now because we were trying to figure out this earlier. Okay so this is just a chart i did of the hadiths about Aisha's age and you can see that there are different colors",
      "colors and the colors of these metans, these texts to the hadith actually correspond to the change in transmission. So you can see, you can find in Sahih Bukhari, Sunnah al-Nasai, Sunna al-Darmi, Sunnat al-Sawiyyid, Sahih Muslim, Musnad al-Abu Ya'ad al-Mawsili, Sunnan ibn Majah, where is that? Musnad Al-Ahmed bin Hanbal, the Musanaf of Abdur Razak Sanani, the Sunnah of Saeed bin Mansour, right?",
      "This is an extremely widely transmitted hadith. And the different, okay, so the different metans actually match their isnas. What does that mean? Okay, so let's say you had like this red metan appeared with the red transmission but also with this purple one. So let's",
      "of these versions you know one let's say that one from even mad to ghost even imagine and not to nisa said he married me when i was seven and consummated when i so imagine one version of the purple has the purple and one version has the red that would kind of uh be there's a fly in here that might be an example of what muslim scholars are called or kind of problem problematicness",
      "or what modern Western scholars would often refer to as evidence of forgery. So if you have different chains of transmission that are not consistent with what they're alleging to transmit, then you have an argument that someone in there is fiddling with something or going back in time and inserting things into people's mouths. But what's interesting here is the different versions,",
      "which all have the general or same argument, right? He married me when I was six years old around. We consummated the marriage when he was about nine years old. This is generally what you see in all the different transmissions is that they're actually consistent with their chains of transmission, which suggests that there's not someone going back and like manipulating this evidence. One thing you hear and you'll find based on Muslim Hadith criticism and then modern Muslims who don't like this Hadith will bring this up",
      "up is they'll say hisham bin arwa when he moved from medina to kufa that his transmissions when he was in kufo became uh prone to mistakes and yes actually this you can see most of the transmission of this hadith actually go through hisham and yes he was incredible when he made these transmissions so um in fact we could say like yeah let's take all this just imagine like everything that's coming from him and just doing it",
      "and just delete it. If this were a PowerPoint, I could just do that, but this is an image. So imagine just everything here is deleted. Here's the thing, right? And let's say this very long chain of transmission to Mawusul, let's delete that one. Let's delete this one, Devan Majah, okay? Here's problem. This isnad here, Arwaa-to-Zuhri-to Ma'mi-bin Rashid-to Sana'ni, this is not only the earliest book. So Sana'n dies in 211 Hijri.",
      "the common era this is one of the earliest books we have and this chain transmission ma'amur to zohri the urban vince has been studied even western scholars like harold motski have argued that that this zohari is not like making stuff up you know he's generally mamar and zahiri that transmission is um they're not forging material especially legal material right so",
      "hearing before them we don't know what's what the case is that's what a western scholar would say we don' t know whether this goes back to the prophet or not but definitely Zohri who dies in 124 Hijri so he's studying with people like Ibn Omar he's Anas bin Malik he's a successor who meets the longest-lived companions so before him you're getting back to The Time of This the Companions of the Prophet like for example Aisha so Aisha died I think around 60 Hijri right so she's",
      "And Urwa is her nephew. So Urwa was the teacher of Zohri. You're getting back to the time of the companions or the prophet with this material, with Aisha. Again, Aisha's talking about her own life. This isn't someone else talking about it. She's recalling her own",
      "skeptical of hadith uh i think would probably say this report about isha's age was in circulation like it was being people were site repeating and transmitting it in the time of aisha herself like in the mid to late 600s of the common era i think um so uh one i think",
      "know within decades and certainly within a decade or two decades of aisha's own life if not during her life and second this is not comp there's not uh controversial right so you know if you had a report where it said you know um ali should have been the first caliph or abu bakr was the correct choice for to be the first khalif like you could say ah you know muslims are having this debate over who's going to be successor",
      "Some people were supporting Ali and some people were support Abu Bakr. And so, okay, we can imagine somebody saying, ah, like I'm going to forge a Hadith that says that Ali should have been the first caliph or I'm gonna forge a hadith that said Abu Bakar should be the first Caliph. Well you could understand that's at least an argument but there's no debate that I've ever heard of where people are saying like, ah let's forge a deep it says Aisha was nine years old because we want to say nine or one says oh, let's do a 10 or let's 18.",
      "So there's no debate about this. Remember, I mean you can read about this if you read my book Misquoting Muhammad but this debate about Aisha's age doesn't even the people who are sitting around during the time of the prophet in the centuries after his death so that his opponents from Quraysh early Christians were writing polemics against Islam like John of Damascus who died in the 720s medieval Muslim medieval Christians writing polegmics against",
      "islam uh none of these people mention aisha's age none of them say i mean by the way they actually do say the prophet alaysa that he was like perverted they say he was sexually obsessed with people that he they bring up the zayn zadem issue they bring out all such stuff they even bring up",
      "i like black coffee yes thank you my friend is making me coffee he's so generous so um my point is that uh they they they focus on the prophet sex life to attack him they even bring up asia as part of that but they don't bring up her age when is the first time they bring up rage in 1905. in 19 05 so my point",
      "evidence there's no reason to think that somebody would make this um forgery like for some purpose then you could say well it was a mistake okay well if it's a mistake but it's sort of insane why would they why would someone not correct this why would something be like um this can't be right you know so for example there's other there's instances like for example in one hadith about",
      "is when the Ramadan fast is revealed so this the companion who's narrating this hadith was not Muslim when Ramadan was repealed so he became a some later on and he says in the Hadith when the",
      "doesn't seem how could he have seen this but I mean Muslim scholars noted that from the very early period they say wait this guy wasn't Muslim enough so how he must have heard this from somebody else or they they definitely noted that so they notice when there's like some kind of error that's creeping in or something that that's like raising question marks about weight something's going on here but they don't say this about this hadith um what",
      "prophet married aisha she was too young like i.e too young for intercourse so they waited for that um asthma was 10 years old and she was 27 in the first year of the hijra she also died in hedra when she was 100 years old i don't know what is this person this is uh dr amam ahmama hamasha saying this um i'm not trying to be a jerk when i respond i just don't",
      "respond. I just don't have a lot of time to do this, but I would say I don't really think this is all derivative material. Okay. This what I'm presenting here is Aisha talking about her own life. This is Aishah recalling her own like that's like me saying when I was 12 you know my parents took me to Disneyland now you could say Professor Brown maybe you were maybe you don't remember correctly",
      "correctly you know you were actually 13 or you're actually 11. okay maybe I was 10 maybe I 12 and I was 11 I was 13 it was 14 but you're not going to get mixed up between 9 and 19 years old or nine at 18 years old so you don't have whatever other evidence people bring up about well you know Aisha was this much older than this person and this person was born in this year and then that year was the same thing this year happened and therefore those are all massive derivative amount chain uh arguments",
      "the data for those claims about when, you know, Asmat was born or how older she, how much older she was and so on. So this is all much less reliably transmitted than this Hadith that I'm showing you. Look at the number of narrations. Look",
      "think it's much more reliably historically than reliable historically then the other arguments that are made about her relationship to ice to asthma and in terms of age how old asthma was when she died what year she died okay um okay so finally the last thing I'll say before I go is that uh and",
      "i think bill maher is really funny i know i know he's a islamophobe i know she doesn't like religion i know it isn't like islam but i don't have a guilty pleasure which is like watching bill mahr um now though if my wife's watching this this is not true what i just said is a lie okay hopefully my wife stopped listening at this point and i can say yeah so i have a gilded pleasure which",
      "Wait, actually I don't like Bill Maher. I liked some of his jokes trying to dig myself out of this right? Okay so anyway a friend told me that last week on Bill Maer he talked... His whole kind of final discussion was about presentism which i find hysterical because you know this is the kind of stuff I mention in my books and no one would care or understand what it's about but",
      "comedian with lots and lots of viewers that he's talking about the academic idea. I was so happy that this was getting this kind of airtime. So presentism is this belief that kind of, um, the present day views of the world are kind of normal representative in the, you know, sort of we are the way human beings should and everybody else in history kind of just was backward or didn't understand or kind of what's just a less evolved version of us. And so where are the kinds of culmination",
      "what humans should do and what humans think. Now, so Bill Maher is very skeptical about this. You know, he's kind of saying how we want to go back and cancel like we think, you know, friends shouldn't watch Friends. We shouldn't Watch Casablanca. We Shouldn't Watch all these movies because they're not woken off or something that were sort of holding all of history to our own super woke standards. And I yeah, so I want to agree with him",
      "where I disagree with him and the general idea about this is that a lot of times people criticize presentism. What they're really saying is, you know, let's not blame people in the past for not understanding what we do. They were just kind of less... When he actually makes his allusion, he says, you",
      "blame ourselves for going back and seeing the way we dressed in the 1990s. And saying, you know, how could we ever have said this or dress like this? Like he's basically saying we were younger versions of ourselves. We don't know what we know now. But let's not blame ourselves For that. What I would say is not actually change it, I would see human beings aren't a species that's matured. Like it's not like humans 1000 years ago were stupider than us they were. They had there were just as intelligent,",
      "capable they were just as mentally capable or just as morally capable right they were in every way as able as we are so this argument of kind of maturation i just don't think works like what i would actually say if you're critical presentism you shouldn't say let's not blame ourselves in the past because we were younger and didn't know you would say you should actually say a few months a thousand years ago were just like us they were",
      "is say we shouldn't be so confident about our claims to know what's right because other humans who are just as smart and aware, and maybe even smarter and more spiritually aware than us disagreed with us. So presentism is not about not blaming the past it should actually make us humble about the present. It should make us much more humble",
      "Just to give you some evidence, like, you know, the average age of marriage in let's say like, Republican Rome or Western Rome. Well, women were able to get married at 12. Average age of a marriage for elite family would be 14 years old and even people like Montesquieu writing in he died in 1755",
      "1955, say that women in hotter areas like the Middle East or kind of the Mediterranean area start puberty younger than women in Northern Europe. And I was just reading about this the other day in the newspaper. One of the causes they think in the US now for a lot of teenage mental psychological problems is",
      "two years younger now than they were like 20 years ago and that their bodies, their bodies are chemically in mind or chemically maturing before their sort of socialization has caught up to that. So they're kind of becoming mentally and hormonally aware of all these social cues and issues around attraction and beauty and stuff, but they're not really mature enough socially to handle that.",
      "Human beings, the range of onset of puberty in human history is enormous. So for example, through the 1700s, the average age for the onset of menstruation for a woman was 18 or 19 years old in Western Europe. In Northwest Europe, the",
      "Isn't that incredible? I mean, so when in the 1200s and it's called this statute of Westminster. In England they pass a law saying that sex with women under, with girls under 12 is statutory rape. That's one of the earliest laws we have about statutory rape but a girl at 12 years old",
      "would be like a six-year-old in terms of because the average age for onset administration in northwest europe at that time was much later so this is a this was a girl this would be a girl who is still at 12 years old but it's still six years younger than the average edge for the onset administration her time in place so when we go back and we read Montesquieu talking about women in hotter climes tend to menstruate earlier",
      "you know, we might laugh at that. So what kind of pseudoscience is this? But actually he probably correct like there's and this is what we know from British travelers in India in the late 1500s and French travelers, India in 1600s they all note the same thing to see girls get married here in India when they're like 510 years old and they consummate their marriage when they were 910 years",
      "active much younger than in europe same thing even in the 1700s this is what uh this one british explorer named bruce who travels actually to try to find the source of denial he actually goes to the hijaz and arabia in the 17 hundreds and he notes this it's like you know women are getting we women are in england get married at this age and in arabia they get married much younger and it's not he's not like upset about it",
      "So I think that instead of, you know, instead of saying, you're reacting with shock about the prophet getting married at a younger age or actually married young age. We should just we should actually recognize that we shouldn't take what we think is normal and just apply it to human history because this is not only arrogant but it's also you're causing yourselves problems like if you",
      "if you just, if you expect everybody in human history to think and act and react like you do today, you're going to be constantly, you know, panicking or constantly feeling, you alienated from your own species and your own history because of course they didn't think, uh, they didn'T react like we do because, you historical circumstances change. Right? And, um, We know they do it because of all this evidence that I've just given you. And in fact until",
      "until the early 20th century, even Western people who were sitting around trying to find things to criticize the Prophet Muhammad for didn't criticize him for Aisha's age. And if you look at like, for example, Washington Irving's biography of Muhammad from the 19th century he's a guy who wrote that like Sleepy Hollow stories by the way. He mentions the Prophet's marriage to Aisha and that she was very young. He said women mature at different ages in that time, in that area.",
      "that area. He didn't even think it was something to make fun of, by the way, because the average or the age that women were getting married in America in the 19th century was also... You also have people getting married early teens 9, 10, 11, 12 years old. The age of consent I think in Georgia and the US until the 1910s and 20s was only ten years old",
      "Anyway, so that's what I say. Presentism shouldn't make us accepting but patronizing and condescending toward the past. It should make us humble about the present. Okay, that's my shtick. You can unshare the screen.",
      "oh my waist taking my kids to chuck e cheese okay uh you guys ready too so i'm gonna have to go in a few minutes uh maybe i can answer the questions now okay that's fine so we'll do that we'll get out there and then we'll bring uh mufti want to sit in because i think what they wanted had some interesting takes on this as well",
      "is you have an article that you've written on mutton criticism. So this idea that there are things contained within the hadith that don't conform to the human reason, the ulama of hadith have their own principles for dealing with this, right? And so I was wondering, that's what people are now trying to utilize to argue that those hadiths that don' t agree with modern liberal norms these hadith need to be wiped out and then pointing skepticism towards",
      "towards the whole hadith tradition because of their attempt to enforce liberal norms onto the hadiths tradition and what is contained within. So I just wanted to ask, what would be the technique or process that a traditional hadith scholar would use in trying to analyze a hadith that he might not feel conformed to human reason? And obviously how massively it differs from modern attempts to use presentism to analyze the hadit literature?",
      "um yeah so i would say that it's not the you know it's Not That They Have Contempt for Reason I think that they're just much I think they're Just Much Humbler right So they like For Example Trying to Think of a good example Like I Mean like A Good Example Always Comes to mind for me is this Hadith and Sahih Bukhari About",
      "bukhari about where the prophet says there's two days there's 2 months that have reed in them so there's no there's three months of eid that are never naqus they're never incomplete now from what we know about it what does it mean for a month is nakas it means that it's 29 days not 30 days",
      "The Hadith apparently seems to be saying there's two months that are not nakas, that are incomplete. And what hadith scholars did is they were like wait a second, yeah of course Ramadan can be 29 days right? So they immediately do compare hadiths to other hadith. They compare hadits to the Quran",
      "hadiths to the Quran, they compare hadith to reason. They compared it's empirical observation but instead of just saying oh well this clearly is just a mistake or clearly it's forgery or something. They'll say like well what could the Prophet mean here? Like we've looked at this isn't that we think that it's fairly reliable that the prophet said this so let's actually try and figure out what he means. So they say okay well maybe it means that both those months won't be 29 days in",
      "in the same year which is interesting but i think that uh i went back and looked at a bunch of hijri calendars and there were some years when doha hijra and ramadan are both 29 days but so they said well maybe it means that like there's two months that even if there's 29 days you're not gonna you're still going to get the full reward for like fasting during that month or good deeds during done during that",
      "if the isnad is weak and the content is problematic, then they'll just say, oh, well, forget about it. Don't worry about this. But if the Isnad is strong and the context seems problematic to them, instead of just throwing it out and saying, Oh, Isnad are stupid or you know, they'll actually try. And by the way, sometimes Imam al-Siyuti, Burhan al-Jinn al-Bajuri, Ibn Al-Ajazi, huge scholars, even Taimiyyah, if they come across a hadith",
      "across a hadith even if the isnad is strong but they just it's it is unacceptable to them like they cannot reconcile it they will they'll say we can't accept this it happens there's two hadiths in sahih muslim for example where a number of major muslim scholars like imam masuti uh have said we uh can't except the studies",
      "the medicine with what we know from the quran and so another prophet he can't accept it um so uh and in mufti tessar actually in his work on the high height of prophet adam has a great example of this so okay the last thing i would say to answer this question is",
      "established this is okay like muslim scholars did this and muslims scholars said sometimes we can't explain the sadiq even though we think the isnad is strong we simply can't really accept it this is a sunni scholars have done this they're reluctant to do it they don't do it easily but they have done it but if you're going to do iit's a lot stronger to actually",
      "to find a hadith to be like, for example, about Aisha's age. Like you're the first person you're like, oh, I think this is false. This can't just can't be the case. I mean, that suggests to me that it's more about your sensibility than about the hadith. If by the way, you can find scholars 1000 years ago who had the same reaction, that's actually a stronger argument. So Mufti Muntasir in his article on The Height of the Prophet Adam,",
      "he found this terrific piece of evidence which is um in i think it was uh muhammad who died in 1113 of the common era and his just he's just mentioning that you know he said people don't understand what this like they don't understanding this like the the uh the people that hear this hadith in the mosque about the prophet adam that he was that his human beings have been shrinking since the time of adam that adam was six you know 62 bits tall and that human beings",
      "beings have been shrinking since then. He says, like people don't understand that they don't really get it. And so that's actually an interesting piece showing it's not just us who have action. It's previous people a thousand years ago and you know whether or not it's appropriate to do metacriticism is another issue and Mufti Montessor is much more knowledgeable about this than I am but at that in that case at least it's Not You your generation who's having this problem? This is actually like something that human beings have, you know listeners and",
      "and have been reacting with for many, many centuries. Okay is that good? That's perfect thank you so much for that I don't know if there are any other questions on that specifically but again the critic who problematized Sahih al-Bukhari he had a single narration you know the Hadith of Sayyidina Musa",
      "I don't know if you have a response to that specific contention, but if not. Yeah, I mean, I remember what you're talking about. I can't remember the... Look at my friend is like giving me like a nesting table. They're so generous, man. One cup of coffee. Can you guys hear me? Sorry, this... My computer's slipping out.",
      "So what I would say is like that kind of issue is almost like a non-issue because, you know, there's so many. Sorry, my computer is really flipping out. I don't know why. We can hear you. Yeah, it's saying my computer."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - ImanWire Podcast Ep_ 78_ S_C3S5WxBbZqs&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748653153.opus",
    "text": [
      "In this special series of the Amanwar podcast.",
      "was one of the aims of the Sharia to emancipate people. Obviously, this trauma and pain of slavery especially in a world where all of our modern forms of oppression, exploitation, racism, capitalism, white supremacy are all tethered back to slavery. How do we fix our hearts when we see this institution being inscribed almost like written",
      "of revelation that we're supposed to just deal with slavery as somehow part of the Islamic legacy. So those African Muslims saw themselves as slaves, but not slaves to the white Europeans who were Christians. They saw themselves slaves to Allah. And this is what was liberatory for them and this is should be liberatory us. We are slaves to Allaah, and our true liberation is through this worship. In every single relationship the Prophet had peace be upon him whether these were",
      "whether these were his wives or servants in the household, or people that were brought as war captives, or who were freed, or given to him as gifts. In every single relationship time and time again he shows us how to interact on the basis of respect and compassion and ihsan time and times again. He never ever takes advantage or presses at his advantage.",
      "In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful. As-salamu alaykum and welcome to the ImanWire podcast. Salim here to introduce this special series of the podcast on Islam and slavery. This is a complex topic to discuss so to take a deeper dive into the issue and to enable different perspectives and an emphasis on different aspects of it,",
      "Jonathan Brown provides a broad and detailed overview of slavery in general, and slavery in Muslim civilization. The second episode with Dr Bilal Ware explores the heritage of emancipation and abolition of slavery and Islam, and examines the history of the quote-unquote Muslim slave trade. In Episode 3 with Imam Dawood Walid we focus on the aftermath of slavery, in particular its role in anti blackness",
      "and language in the Quran. And in the fourth episode, Ustaz Azain Abansari discusses the topic of female slave concubinage. So we begin with our conversation with Dr. Jonathan Brown, professor of Islamic civilization at Georgetown University. Dr. Brown is the author of the book Slavery in Islam. Assalamualaikum, Dr.",
      "How are you doing? Good, Hamdallah. It's been a while since we've been together for some of our listeners that, you know, uh, are familiar with the podcast. Uh, we've had Dr. Brown on for several episodes. Um, the last one was actually one of our most popular ones was about like the authenticity of the Quran and it was very beneficial for a lot of listeners out there, but that wasn't a long time ago. I mean, it was years ago and we were just, I barely remember. We were just catching up about, you",
      "COVID and it's good to sort of reconnect again. And the topic today is certainly a very controversial topic, it's a topic that you wrote a book on and that's the topic of slavery. You wrote a few years ago called Slavery in Islam. Before we get into some of the flow and the content of the book my first question is when we talk about slavery from a worldwide and Muslim standpoint,",
      "in the world and it's been abolished for a long time both in uh the non-muslim world and muslim world not just from a political standpoint but even all islamic scholarship now you know leads to be prohibited using the religion itself as a means to to justify the prohibition right um and so when we talk about slavery the question is well this is sort of a moot issue why even discuss this topic why even write",
      "to decide to write this book. I'm just curious, have people actually said that? It's like a mood issue while you're talking about this. Have you actually heard people say it? I will tell you this. I will",
      "um i mean i think that that's actually an interesting response from you because i think",
      "of the kind of comparison between a slave who's owned and has no capacity versus somebody who is able to spend their money in the path of God. So it's like, it's a parable about the difference between somebody who has no power and someone who has capacity. But when I remember,",
      "And when I remember, I literally remember. I remember where I was when I read this. I was in my old room in the house I grew up in. I reading the translation of the Quran lying on my bed. I remembered thinking... I was like, this is really weird because it's not addressing the issue of slavery. It's literally bringing up slavery as an analogy for something else and then it's",
      "taken aback by that to the extent that I remember it. And, you know, I think I just sort of like basically shoves it under mental carpet or something. I mean, I was a kind of standard operating procedure for a lot of Muslims not just in the US but I think a lot around the world is just to say okay well, it's not really relevant let's talk about something else or you hear some platitude given usually",
      "usually sometimes inaccurate, ends up being inaccurate platitude. So I think that was really how the issue was dealt with and for better or for worse but that didn't really work after the rise of ISIS because suddenly this weird movement in the Middle East was like taking slaves, slave men, slave women",
      "the sharia and it's completely allowed and why are you guys shocked by this and muslims kind of globally didn't really have much of a response um except to say like you know this isn't allowed anymore or something but i mean they don't really haven't answered like okay well you read about this in the quran like you muslim you read the qur'an every day see mention of slavery so what do you like what's your answer to this people didn't",
      "I don't know. I mean, I don' want to criticize them. I would just say that I think it was very difficult for people to either respond or be convinced by the responses. And so that's when I decided... You know, I need to answer my own questions about this and I need answer other peoples' questions. You know? And I'm going to do both through trying to research this topic. Prior to this, I had- I was not like a scholar of history of slavery.",
      "I'm an Islamic intellectual historian. I mean, I knew the Islamic intellectual tradition very well. I knew about slavery and Islamic civilization but to try and tackle this in I think the way that the comprehensive way it has to be tackled is to really address the questions I had. That was like a whole new scholarly journey for me which took a lot of work. But I mean I became kind of obsessed with the topic.",
      "2016. That's when I started researching on it, and I just went obsessively for maybe two years or so to write the book. And yeah, I would just say that... When I say you have to answer it comprehensively is what I mean by that is I think a good analogy is terrorism, right? The idea of terrorism.",
      "Like, you know, you and I can sit and debate. You know, it's actually interesting because it's not it's absolutely not as bad as it used to be. I think, you now days there's a lot more people are a lot kind of epistemologically critical and skeptical about when the US government comes in someone says terrorist or something like that. But imagine going back into the 2000s or 2010s or something when there was, you It was a lot, it was not really acceptable to if someone said someone is a terrorist",
      "You couldn't really be like, well are they really a terrorist? Someone you would be immediately condemned for that. But I think that's a very good analogy for the slavery issue because you can't really talk about slavery, right? If I say so-and-so is a slave and so-on so as a slave owner, the moral setting is unquestionable, right. So the slave is person who was persecuted unjustly it's unconscionable, it's unaccountable, morally evil. The slave owner is engaged in this more",
      "is engaged in this moral evil right there's no you can't say well okay well is that slave being treated well or not well is um uh does the slave want to be a slave i mean just even me saying this right now it's like uncomfortable it was uncomfortable to say it right so but if you think about it and i remember there was this podcast i was listening to a few years ago it was by an american academic a scholar who studies slavery in the americas",
      "It was about the kind of urban slavery in the pre-Civil War South versus like slaves who were working at agricultural settings. And the host asked the scholar, well what was the condition that those urban slaves lived in? And she said, well it was... The conditions were better and then she stopped herself. She said you know I almost said the conditions were but out of principle I can't say anything is better or worse than slavery.",
      "Like, the idea that you would talk about someone being treated better or worse is sort of an affront to the way we think about slavery as being this absolute and unconscionable moral evil across space and time where you can't draw distinctions of kind or degree because it's... It's like a binary. It's saying, you know, yeah, Hitler was bad but sometimes he could be a nice guy or he actually had a good sense of humor so I'm just making this up, right? But the idea, like, you can do that, right,",
      "do that right so but you can also immediately see the problem here which is there actually are different distinctions in types of slavery right so if you there could be a slave owner who treats his slaves extremely nicely and his slaves like that person and maybe they are happy with their lives maybe they'd rather be free but they're not you know unhappy right and you can have someone who's a horrible horrible slave or",
      "talk about the differences between these two situations then we're really in some ways handicapped morally and that especially is especially uh true when you're talking about slavery in world history so if you're taking about the you know the grand vizier of the ottoman empire let's say in the 1500s who's a slave technically he's a but he's the richest and most powerful person in the empire after the sultan and he's asleep and he",
      "And he lives in a palace and has millions and millions of dollars. He's married to the daughter of the sultan and everything, and he's going and leading armies and having power over life and death and finances and all this stuff. If you're saying we can't compare his condition to that of like a field hand in pre-Civil War South Carolina, that's not really where we're not really able to function as morally sensitive people because clearly these situations are different.",
      "are different. We have to be able to discuss that. So what I meant when I talk about comprehensive engagement with the issue is you can't just say, let's talk about slavery in Islamic civilization or let's talked about slavery and Islamic law. You have to actually first start by asking what... When we talk about savery, what do we mean? Why do we feel the way we do about slavery? What does our presuppositions entail",
      "our commitment prior commitments what assumptions are baked into those prior commitments so that was what i did in the book is really a comprehensively look at the issue not just look at islam you know slavery and islamic civilization but to go first going from like first principles about how what do we mean when we talk about slavery what happens when you define something so yeah that's right yeah i mean um so that is one of the things that that i noticed when you're in the beginning",
      "different definitions of slavery, sometimes with a capital S, sometimes we quotes. Talk a little bit about some of how we define slavery because we've already mentioned that just using the word slave or saying the word, slave owner it immediately directs us 100% to a specific image right? But then as you describe in terms of how do you define even the word",
      "And it seems that a lot of what slavery or how we conceive of slavery is, as you mentioned in one of the examples, is that it's slavery. We just know it. We see it and we know it if you could talk a little bit about in terms of how the definition of slavery why this matters in terms in this discussion? Yeah so I mean I think it's really helpful to go back and think about what we do when we define things",
      "I mean, think about this. Like imagine you actually even Ibn Taymiyyah is a very interesting scholar in this regard because he makes a, he objects to kind of a lot of aspects of kind of Greco Roman or Sicilian logic, the same kind of logic that we use today when we're trying to think kind of rigorously about things or scientifically one of his objections is his definition doesn't really do anything like definition doesn t give you knowledge right? So what imagine this,",
      "this like imagine we're trying to define dog what is a dog we could say like you know a dog is um it's like a small mammal uh it's furry it has four legs walks on floor legs it has a snout it pants to cool itself it uh is digitigrade right and meaning he walks on its toes not",
      "carnivore right okay so we could say that's a dog right um and then we see something that's uh like a i don't know like a wolverine or something and we're like well that's not a dog so we need to change the definition so that wolverines out and things that we know our dogs are in but if you think about it what we're doing is",
      "dogs are right we already know what dogs are and then uh and so we adjust the definition to exclude things you know aren't dogs and include things we know our dog so what's the definition really doing definitions just formalizing or at least attempting to formalize what we already no dogs are. Right, so we know dogs when we see them and then we pick a definition that includes that right over there is exclusive to that. So when we talk about definitions of slavery",
      "and this is something that scholars have been engaged in since the time of Aristotle, if not earlier. And really intensively in let's say the last 200 years of kind of scholars trying to historically and through development of a social sciences talk about slavery in world history. What people are doing is they're having... They come from different perspectives. Some of them might come from like a legal scholar perspective.",
      "Some of them might come from a kind of Marxist social science perspective. Some of the might come, yeah I'd say those are probably the two main ones and then what they're trying to do is fit everything into slavery that they think slavery is and then exclude what isn't slavery but here's the problem when you're talking about slavery in world history you have a huge variety",
      "You're assuming there is something called slavery in world history that's always there or constant throughout history. First of all, that's an assumption. And then what are you looking for in world mystery to act as your examples by which you define this thing? You're picking what looks like slavery to you. It seems like a scientific endeavor but in reality",
      "But in reality, it's kind of a projection of different Western historical ideas about slavery and assumptions. And then just kind of projecting them onto world history or kind of the diversity of the world today. And dann trying to arrive at some definition that is going to work throughout space and time. But a lot of it is just what... It's just trying to include things that look like slavery to us and exclude things that don't look like",
      "um so you know there's a there are some scholars it's a minority of scholars who study this but who say that there is kind of no um trans-historical definition of slavery that works like there's just no there's nothing shared in human history that we can just refer to as slavery and have it havoc have it have a consistent meaning or useful meaning uh the majority of scholars would say there is",
      "But there's huge diversity in what those definitions are. So some of them are based on things like freedom versus not freedom. Some of them think, or based on ideas of ownership. What does it mean when someone becomes property? Or is considered property? Some of the more based on the ideas of marginalization that slaves are kind of the most marginalized people and most vulnerable people in a society. Some",
      "of when you're coerced to work for little or no compensation. These are all, I mean, good definitions in particular contexts. I think the problem is that they don't really work if you project them backwards in time, right? So when we talk about that, let's say define slavery in American history. It's very easy to do, right? We have American law, we have American experience",
      "We have American experience, right? So you're talking about a relatively small kind of domain. And typically that's what we project on every discussion. If you want to talk about slavery even in like let's say Roman law, Roman legal is very easy to do. Islamic law it's very easy pretty easy to deal with, right. But once you talk about Slavery and world history then it becomes much more difficult. Even describing if you say oh well it's when someone's a property. Well how do you define property? It's when someones not free. How do you",
      "define that in like america but it's very hard to do it in world you know globally or across space and time uh so now one could say well you know professor brown you're doing all this like what about ism we can't find this yeah i mean that's actually not what i'm doing because the problem",
      "Of course, there's such a thing as slavery. I'm just trying to say that it's very easy to talk about slavery in let's say American history but it's much harder to try and come up with the definition that works for other civilizations and other times. And what starts happening is that you begin projecting your own moral assumptions, your own ideas of a tradition or a phenomenon onto other people who have totally different experiences.",
      "that's not, for example, study of religion, academic study of religious studies. There's actually no agreed upon definition of religion in religious studies in Western Academy. That doesn't mean religion doesn't exist. It doesn't you can't study religion which means people have competing ideas about what exact... For example, so I mean there's a whole like people who talk about let's say college football in Tennessee or Ohio State is America they actually treat this as a religious experience and they study it",
      "And someone goes, that's not religion. What are you talking about? Well, actually it is religion. Okay, so we're defining about whether this should be religion, just debating whether this Should be a religious experience or not. Fine. There's a big difference though because when you talk about slavery, It's a matter of being morally acceptable or morally repugnant, right? So if we decide that like, you know, University of Ohio, Ohio State University, what was it? Ohio State university. If their college football is like a religion",
      "is like a religion or not, you know whatever. But if we say that Ohio State University has slaves or not that's the difference between Ohio State university being like a morally acceptable participant in public life versus Ohio State Univeristy being an morally abhorrent criminal right? A moral and legal criminal right so it's a big difference it's like the differences between being a terrorist and not a terrorist",
      "is not a terrorist organization or such and such a terror organization is a terrorist that's a huge difference that's extremely um uh consequential because using the term basically infers a specific moral condemnation yeah exactly i mean it yes definitely so that's why it's really important because what i want to argue in this chapter is we can see through all these different definitions of slavery like just for example just for your listeners sake right",
      "sake right so let's talk about freedom um what is freedom freedom is the ability to do whatever you want except if it's illegal okay but then what's the difference you know freedom in one country can be different from another country because different things are going to be allowed and not allowed property what's definition of property property is the most extreme form",
      "but that's going to differ from time to time and place to place. What constitutes coercion? What constitutes marginalization, right? Again in any given context you can come up with good definitions for this, but it's to talk about globally and trans-historically well that's very difficult. So my point is when you're doing this we have to watch out because we're importing a lot of our western assumptions, American assumptions into these discussions",
      "And not only that, but you can see this very clearly in the debates over like modern day slavery. Right? Yeah. Where if you look at what's called a new abolitionist movement, new abolitionists, people are trying to fight against modern-day slavery. For people who talk about modern-days slavery, this is not a metaphor. This is actually slavery in their opinion. This actual legal slavery. This actually phenomenon called slavery, it's not a metaphors.",
      "In 2006, let's say one really famous guy. I won't mention him but a very famous scholar on this he talked about prisoners in American jails He said these are not prisoners. These are not slaves. Sorry The same scholar today or at least as a couple of years ago was like looking into this reconsidering this whether Prisoners in America American Jail or slaves or not their conditions have not changed",
      "The conditions have not changed. What's changed is the political acceptability or kind of fashion ability of talking about people in jail and prisons being slaves. Like now it's to the point where even in movies like Thor Ragnarok, and things like that there's the grand master character by Jeff Goldblum he talks about, they say the slaves are escaping so he's like I don't see that word. Sorry the prisoners with jobs are escaping.",
      "Hollywood now, it's kind of cool to talk about oh you know, you're so socially aware and conscious of justice issues that you acknowledge that people in American prisons are actually slaves. Nothing's changed except just the political environment about whether or not it's acceptable to say this. So you can see how much of this discussion about who is a slave and who's not a slave in world history is going to be potentially impacted just by our own political environment like whose suffering",
      "Whose suffering do we want to kind of evaluate? Whose suffering Do you want to ignore right exactly whose Oppression, do we Want To register Whose oppression do We want to consider normal Right Yeah so that's one of the point I try to make in That Chapter yeah i mean and then and Then You start Moving on Into Sort of The Muslim Realm If You could We Could Talk About a little bit was What Was the definition or was there a",
      "or was there a definition of what a slave was in the early Islamic tradition? And then we can get into sort of the authoritative sources, the Quran and the prophetic period in terms of what exactly that Islamic type of... We'll call it rikh just to be not... We're talking about terms in terms",
      "you know, omnipresent. It was just a every civilization that we know of had something that we would see as slavery. Every most societies and most human societies in history have had something we would consider slavery. This is very important as well. No society that had slaves abolished slavery",
      "prior to, as far as I know, prior to the early modern period. Prior to essentially like the... Let's just go very early, maybe the 1700s. That would be maybe the earliest we can imagine it. Just imagine that. Not only that, by the way, this is very important. If you won't go and search through the human heritage,",
      "for people who say that slavery, qua-slavery, slavery per se, not slavery that's excessive, not enslavement of the wrong people, not treating slaves badly. I mean just slavery per qua-Slavery. That slavery qua- Slavery is an inherent evil. The number of people...I don't mean the number of schools of thought. I meant the number",
      "1690 is about three or four people. I don't, I mean, three or five or four individuals. Just imagine that every philosophical school, every religion, every kind of moral tradition either defended slavery had no problem with slavery, excuse slavery, or considered it uncontroversial. That's very, this is just very important to keep in mind.",
      "important to keep in mind. In whatever form it was taking place and where those traditions emerged. This is not, I'm not making some special pleading case here. I mean this is undeniable. And if someone comes and finds, you know, what about Spartacus? Spartacuse wasn't trying to end slavery. Spartacuses did and his followers they didn't want to be slaves. They took their own slaves!",
      "oh people say what about the zan rebellion in the abbasid iraq and 800s yeah they didn't want to be slaves they enslaved the people they they conquered right so they're not even there's is not some abolitionist proto-abolitionist movement okay um so the when we talk about islamic civilization or the quran the sunnah for example the existing understandings of slavery",
      "The Quran doesn't say, verily there's this thing called slavery. Let me tell you what it is. Right? The prophet doesn't says let me tell what slavery is. It would be like saying I don't need to tell you a chair is. I can tell you not to do with the chair but I can't. There are things called chairs and we sit. This was like slavery was a reality in the life of us. And this is not just in Arabia. This is for all human history pretty much until the 1700s.",
      "So there are certain things about slavery in Arabia were... Slavery in Arabia was, at the time of the Prophet, first of all most of the slaves were Arab. The largest group not mostly but the largest group of slaves in Arabia where other Arabs captured on raids or bought in a slave market having previously been captured on a raid.",
      "largest groups were Ethiopians, people from the Horn of Africa and Persians. You also had Byzantine sort of Aramaic or Greek speaking Byzantines and then there were some Indians. Slaves were widespread in Arabia like they were everywhere but they were not a big part",
      "or the American South. They were kind of people that you would have to help you out doing stuff, but they were not an essential part of the economy. So there are certain things about slavery in that Islam just adopts. For example, that it exists. Other things like slavery coming through the mother. This is in Roman law. It's in pre-Islamic",
      "pre-Islamic Near Eastern law. It's in Jewish law, right? Which is that if you have a slave woman and she has a child, that child will be a slave and will belong to the owner of the woman. This is... Again, this is not... This is brought indirectly into the Islamic tradition. And Muslim scholars like Ash'afi say, this actually doesn't go along with other ideas in our religion because for example, your name and my name are our father's last names or our fatherís name.",
      "or our father's name. So similarly, our religion like if our mothers were Christian or something we would in our dads are Muslim, we'd be Muslim at least according to Islamic law. So Shafi says actually this goes against the general rule in Islam which is that things come through your father patrilineally but he says you know, this is just an existing tradition. Now Islam, the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet make some very marked changes to this",
      "Okay, another thing I should add by the way is the main way that people become slaves in the Near East prior to Islam The main way is either capture or debt you're in debt to someone. You can't pay them so you become their slave Self-dedition what does that mean? People give themselves into slavery. So why would somebody do that? Because imagine you're really poor and your dying of starvation or something and you listen. I'll be your slave just feed me",
      "slave just feed me, feed my family. People would do this. Selling your own children into slavery. Someone might say well what kind of monster does that? Maybe someone who doesn't care about their kids but also if your child is going to die of starvation and someone else is willing to at least feed that child you might do this So Islamic law closes all these doors except for capture",
      "only way that someone can become a slave in according to the quran and the son of the prophet is if you are captured by muslims you're not a muslim you're non-muslim cash right muslim's outside the abode of islam so if you're like a jewish person living under muslim rule or christian person living in your muslim world or yazidi person living on their muslim role you cannot be enslaved because one of the people who muslim servers protected minorities",
      "So that's the only way. You can't sell yourself into slavery, you can't be a debt slave, you cannot sell your children into slavery etc., etc. Okay so this is very important. That's one big change it closes off all the routes in the slavery except capture and warfare now by the way most slaves in Islamic history are not captured they're bought what does that mean if I'm if i go to",
      "If I go to the slave market in Baghdad and some merchant brings 500 Russian or Slavic peasants from south of Russia to sell, then these people are already enslaved. They're pre-enslaved, right? So I can buy them because they're already slaves. There is by the way a debate amongst Muslim scholars about whether or not that merchant should have bought those slaves, right.",
      "Right. So if I'm, let's say I'm that merchant, I'm in Southern Russia, like city of Bulgar or something on the Volga river. And this guy comes up and says, I've got a bunch of slaves here for you or something, you know? And you're like, who are these people? I mean, so one argument which ends up being the majority argument is if it's okay in that society, if they, if you can give, if those people sell themselves into slavery, sell their kids into slavery",
      "if they're brought to you acceptably as slaves in that society, you can purchase them. That becomes a majority position and it's oddly enough very culturally sensitive because you're not imposing your views on those other people but uh it's also very practical because how are Muslim scholars supposed to know exactly what other peoples' people are doing or whatever? But the minority view is no. The only way that someone can... Because",
      "They say that it's illegal to give yourself or your children or your relatives or your subject into slavery, even if you're not Muslim. So that position is actually more morally kind of demanding, but it ends up losing out I think just because it was kind of impractical. But the – it was a tangent. Let's go back to like the other major change that Islam introduces. The second one is",
      "repeated and fervent emphasis on emancipation, freeing slaves. The idea that there's this religious duty to free slaves which appears in the Quran over and over again. Right, right. And it appears in Sunnah of the Prophet even more commonly, even more frequently. That is... You see this a bit in pre-Islamic traditions or Christianity, even Roman philosophy but the extent to which it appears",
      "and the son of the prophet is unprecedented. Second, the Quran ties freeing slaves to expiation of certain sins. If you commit certain sins, if you break certain types of oaths, you have to free a slave or you should free a",
      "either encourages or requires, depending on how you understand it, slave owners to agree if their slave wants to engage in a contract to purchase their own freedom. So this appears in the Quran notion of mukatavel which is that a slave says I want to buy back, I want basically buy my freedom on installments from you. That the owner is either required or strongly recommended to agree. This is also Quranic. Which is interesting because for those scholars",
      "For those scholars who stated that it was required, it was an inversion of the power dynamic because it's almost as if the slave is over the master. It's basically saying... Yeah, so the reason why it's not required according to most Muslim scholars is for two reasons. One, the Quran says I think it's inra'ita fi him khair I think is the verse, right? So if you see good in them. So it says do this agreement if you",
      "person so it creates a condition so let's say you have a slave who's not going to be able to support themselves who's going to end up homeless and begging in the streets then you are not it would be bad for you to do this mohcatsaba agreement because this person is not able to take care of themselves so there is that it introduces introduces an element of discretion for the owner okay the second as you said is that some muslim scholars said wait a second like",
      "how can you have a slave owner who's forced to do something that the slave wants? They kind of broke with their legal logic around the institution. I'm not saying what's right or wrong, just describing it. So the first thing is closing all the doors into enslavement except for capture and warfare or raiding. The second one is fervent and vociferous slavery",
      "and vociferous emphasis on manumission of slaves, and creating a either requirement or scriptural encouragement for this. And then the third is very unusual in the sense that it's a total departure from what you would have expected in the Near East prior to Islam.",
      "But under Christianity, which had become the dominant religion in the kind of East, what would it be? Kind of Eastern Mediterranean world. Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Anatolia. The church had started to sort of funnel all types of sexual relationship into marriage, into monogamous marriage. This is based on kind of Roman understandings of Christianity.",
      "So under Roman law previously, you couldn't marry your slave if you were a free person. You couldn't married a slave. It said, under kind of Christianized law it said listen, if you're gonna have sex with your slave, you have to be married to her or a slave, doesn't matter. You can only have sex someone you're married to and that person is a slave or not doesn't",
      "and marriage. So only sex with, sex was only allowed in marriage and had to be monogamous. That doesn't mean this is actually what happened in practice. It means this is like the direction of the law. The Muslim community, and this isn't mentioned in the Quran or the Sunnah of the Prophet but it's just agreed upon from the very beginning of Islam as far as we know. It takes a hard right turn. I mean, hard turned one direction",
      "turned in one direction or the other. I don't wanna make it political and implication errors there. You actually can have, be married and have female slaves with him. You have sex if you're a man. And this was the big change as well which is that children born of that union or of that relationship are one legally free two they are legitimate right? So they inherit from you",
      "Three, they have the same social standing as your children born from a wife. This is unprecedented in the world as far as I know and certainly in the Near East which is prior to this if someone had like think about Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson had all these children with his slave Sally Heming. Those children were slaves. Those",
      "in a social underclass, right? Their father was part of the elite. They were not. If Thomas Jefferson was... If this had been a situation in Islamic law and Islamic civilization, those children would be free. Those children would have the same social standing as their father. So they would be like the next president or they would",
      "so that is a huge change and that's unprecedented in the near east and wider world as far as i know. So those are the big changes that Islam brings. And also, in terms of the conduct one has with slaves could you talk a little bit about what the prophet described? Yeah, so there's obviously a lot of teachings from the Prophet",
      "that you should treat your slave as you would treat your brother or your sister. You know, you have to feed them from the same food you eat, clothe them in the same clothes you wear. You can't overburden them with work when they pray with you. They're your brother and their sister if you strike them and it draws blood that you",
      "one lord which is the god right the one god and god has more power over you than you have over your slave so there's a lot of ethical exhortations towards um you know moderate treatment of slaves and not overworking them not mistreating them i mean just as an example of this like the if you look at let's say major christian preachers in",
      "in places like Constantinople, the way that they're teaching people to treat slaves. You know, don't beat your slave. Don't whip them more than 30 or 40 times or something. That's actually above the realm of what a lot of Muslim scholars would say is allowed for criminals. According to some schools of law,",
      "lashes for criminals who've committed non-Hud offenses. So the way that slave owners were allowed to discipline their slaves was significantly less than, you know, was significantly more restrained than what Christian scholars around the same time were advocating for their flocks. That, you",
      "that some Muslim slave owners weren't awful people. But just in terms of what the ethical... Yeah, in terms I think like the original sources which you know we're particularly concerned with you know will get into the the Muslim practice slavery over time in a moment. I thought it was interesting you know in terms and this is sort of segue as we move into sort of the Muslim practices of slavery versus the the Quranic prophetic ideal which i think",
      "in terms of the zeal for manumission, you describe about this drive in this period as Muslims are developing their codes of law, this drive towards emancipation, a manumition of slaves to the level where if you compare it to other property or other elements like they would take things. Like, for example, someone in jest would say like you're free.",
      "Or that if there was, as you were talking about, any type of abuse or harm that would come to, that would be a grounds for them to be freed. I thought that was very interesting to see that there was this almost zeal to try to give the benefit of the doubt for freeing a slave versus like other categories or other situations in law. Yeah, the impetus to free slaves is very strong and very old. So it goes,",
      "So it goes, you can see it in texts going back to like the earliest texts that have survived in Islamic tradition aside from the Quran which is things like the notion that God wants freedom. So there was an understanding I think if I'm hearing right for a lot of the Muslim scholars and people like there was not understanding that this is not desirable condition. Yeah so a couple of things one is that it's a",
      "It's a theologically problematic position, condition. So the way that the Quran talks about humans a lot of time is as Ibadullah, slaves of God. By the way, this is not just Quranic. If you go into the Old Testament or the New Testament, if you listen to someone reading like the gospels or something, they all talk about servants of God, that's actually slaves.",
      "willingly or unwillingly is very common in the kind of Abrahamic tradition. So if you're a slave of God, if you and I are slaves of God it's sort of weird to say that you're my slave too because wait am I like God? I don't understand so it becomes if everybody's a slave",
      "Slave, call them my boy or my girl. And slaves do not call your owner my master. Call them like my maula, my kind of guardian or something or my patron because he wants to disambiguate, clarify that the social and human economics, economic and social phenomenon",
      "free towards god to being a slave of god right you want to like remove the theological elements from this social relationship or economic relationship the second thing uh is as you said all humans you know one of the assumptions the basic legal assumptions in islamic law is that all humans are born free so humans the default assumption that is for humans is that they're free",
      "You can only become not free if you're enslaved or you become a slave, you know, become slave illegally according to Islamic law. So for example, Muslim can never be a slave. Even if I'm captured by a Martian, you like Martian slavers and like that, according to the Islamic law, I'm still free. In terms of reality, I might be a slaved to this Martian master but I'm actually legally from Sharia, I am so free because I cannot be enslaved as a Muslim.",
      "So it's interesting that when you look at the definition of slavery, there is no... Muslims don't really come up with their own definition of slave very early. The earliest I've seen them do it is in like the 900s and the definition slavery is just slavery is a legal handicap that is caused by unbelief. So you're an unbeliever, you're enslaved,",
      "which now we'll get into what that legal handicap is in a second but what happens let's say if you're okay that guy has a child or that woman has a job that person's a slave but they were never they were born Muslim let's the parent converted so that person was never an unbeliever how is it that their slave well they would most of jurors would say well that's like a vestige of their parents on belief which is not a very good argument",
      "actual legal handicap is just a combination of the different rulings that we have from the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet about what slaves can't do, that free people can. So for example, according to most schools of law, a slave cannot be a notary like they cannot bear witness to contracts whereas a free person can. According",
      "whereas a free person can't. A slave doesn't have to do Hajj, the slave doesn' t have to pay Zakat right? So if you take these different kind of rulings that adhere in here in a slave, that collection together is the definition of slavery. Now the final point I would make which you alluded to earlier is although neither Muslim scholars nor almost anybody else",
      "in human history that I know of said that slavery is a moral evil or wrong in and of itself. They couldn't say that, right? Because God allowed it. And if God allows it, how can it be wrong, right?\" But they did always acknowledge that slavery harmful. They said it is. It is harming. How do they know it's harmful? They know it was harmful because the prophet,, and the Quran are repeatedly urging people to free their slaves. Why would they do that",
      "if it wasn't, if there were, if it was desirable. Right? So it's harmful and Muslim scholars write this very explicitly because a slave can't do what they want. They can't make their own choices in every regard. They control the fruits of their labor. They're not have complete legal person, right? They don't have the same legal requirements and obligations that are free Muslim has. So this is what they're saying like slavery is harmful but",
      "uh it was a harm that for them was a kind of unquestioned reality of human life yeah just as it was for you know all civilizations that had this phenomenon which is that it just was part of life and i would i would just preface probably what you're going to ask next by saying that it's very interesting",
      "idea that you have people to do work for you and move things for you, and serve you, domestic and agricultural work. They don't really start to question this until lo and behold they discover that you can take fossil fuels and burn them and create steam power and have machines do that work. Then suddenly you start having widespread discussions about the moral of slavery when suddenly",
      "to have people and animals. It's interesting you mentioned fossil fuels because Justin Parrott from Yaqeen, he has a good analogy in terms of understanding sort of the ubiquitousness of slavery in the pre-modern world is akin to basically our use of fossil fuels, right? Hundreds of years from now, people are going to look at this error and be like, why did they ever use fossil fuels? Because of all the harms, you know. And it's because it's so intrinsic to everything that we",
      "everything is based on the consumption of fossil fuels, our current economic world. And that's moving in a certain direction, right? But it'd be as if looking back on it, it would be easier for someone to say why would they ever have used these? But living in the reality that we are now and it's shifting, it's so intrinsic to everything that the way the world operates. I just want to sidebar when you mentioned that but yes, talking about",
      "Yes, we're talking about as we move further into the Muslim history and into modern history in terms of the movement towards abolition. But before getting to that, you know, we talked a little bit about what rik is in terms Islamic idealization as it is in the Quran and prophetic model. And just one other comment I wanted to make was I'm always amazed at some of the last words of the Prophet in this world was",
      "the ones who you possess with your right hand, meaning the slave. It's very interesting that this was something of such showing the import of how you're describing the importance of conduct or the seriousness of that relationship. I mean, I would say that the Quran certainly places a large emphasis on freeing slaves but the Hadith Corpus is obsessed with freeing",
      "slaves and i mean that like literally there's an obsession in the reports from the prophet about the obligation to free slaves the encouragement to free slave and good treatment of slaves now what's fascinating is someone could say well you know people made these hadiths up okay but then they made up hadith about the",
      "Actually, one of the most interesting things. I mean, I thought this was really fascinating in my book and I encourage other people to do this if they want to study this is to just look in the books of forged Hadiths. So Muslim scholars beginning in the 10 hundreds start to produce books collections of hadits that they believe are forged. And if you look in those books, the hadits are forged about freeing slaves. They're kind of outrageous. Some of them are just",
      "of them are just ridiculous like but uh i mean there's one which is one of the longest quote-unquote hadiths anywhere it's a forgery but it's just it's extremely long and in it you see how much um freeing slaves is a part of the kind of moral universe",
      "of currency for measuring good deeds. So it'll say every step you take to the mosque is the equivalent, like when a son prays, is equivalent of freeing 100 slaves. So just the forgery, the forged hadiths on freeing slaves are fascinating because it shows you whoever's making these things up, they're also motivated by this same ethos or kind of impetus",
      "a duty and an urge to manumit. And I think this leads us into sort of the, you know, we'll try to give a broad overview of some of the Muslim practice of slavery after the early period. But as you describe, and one of the things I like about in your book is you give different examples in the chapter talking about slavery and Muslim civilization of just the diverse expression",
      "I mean, you were talking earlier about how slavery was in one way in the Roman Empire and one way say in another area. But even within the Islamic lands it was such an immense diversity as you described. Even within the Ottoman Empire there was a such a diversity right? And in your discussion of sort of the diversity of expressions of the expression of slavery,",
      "because there was such an impetus to free slaves, because of the importance of slavery in the world economy and that includes the Muslim world. There was a need to still have slaves in those lands. So Muslims were freeing a lot of slaves but that actually spurred an increase of trying to acquire more slaves to replace the ones that he just freed. And so hence a lot",
      "it was actually from importing slaves from outside the lands of islam to uh to fill that need um which it which is which is i think very interesting in understanding sort of that the trajectory of slavery in the muslim world yeah i mean so there's a couple things about slavery and islamic civilization obviously islami civilization is very big and very very big area over a very long period of time",
      "But there are kind of accurate generalizations and inaccurate generalizations. So let's try to only indulge in accurate generalization. One accurate generalisation is that slavery in Islamic civilization was very infrequently agricultural slavery. Slaves were not often used for agricultural work as we see in the Americas, in the Caribbean.",
      "And probably the largest single youth was domestic slaves, so people who would work in households. So if you imagine a city like Baghdad or Cairo or Istanbul, these people would be everywhere in life as maids, as people guards, as doing errands for you. By the way, as commercial agents, people running your shops. Let's say you're a middle-class shop owner in Istanbul in 1500.",
      "stumble in 1500, right? So you have, uh, you know, you're not rich, but you're poor. You're doing pretty well for yourself. You have a one slave woman who's a, um, cleaning the house and cooking and one who takes care of your kids helps you, uh... One who runs your-helps you with your shop so he, you",
      "like, okay I'm gonna send you to Bursa. You're going to go on this multi couple day trip to Borsa. You are going to buy 50 reams of silk or something and come bring them back. And it's up to you. I trust you to negotiate a good price. And here's your letter from me saying that you're my agent stuff like that is very common. It's called a Metvun slave who has the right to basically be a commercial agent. So you have then by the way",
      "And the army that is defending your city, Istanbul, is the most powerful units of that army are slave soldiers. They're the janissaries, right? They are technically slaves of the sultan. The senior administration of the empire are slave administrators who are very powerful and who are technically the slaves of",
      "of, then meanwhile nearby the big Sulaymaniyah mosque is being built by Suleiman. Sultan Suleyman has ordered this mosque to be built. Who's building the mosque? Some of the workers are free workers. Some of them are slaves. Let's say again sorry to like implicate you in this but you're doing so well this year in your shop that you've bought another slave who's a let's say an Italian",
      "who's been captured in a naval battle. And he's really good kind of with ropes and woodwork and stuff like that. And you're like, okay, listen, you go and you're going to work building the Suleymaniyah Mosque. You give me 80% of your wages. When you come back, you keep 20%. And when you've reached, let's say in five years, you've",
      "He's working every day next to free laborers building the mosque. This is accurate by the way The Suleymaniyah Mosque was built in exactly this way so There's they're both getting paid the same amount of wages by whoever's running the project construction Free worker goes home and does whatever this guy comes back to you gives you 80% of what he makes So he's actually this slave is actually investment for you, so you making money Having him go out farming him out to work And then he's gonna earn his freedom and let's say five or six years",
      "This is very common. The description I just gave you is a very common description of a city in Islamic civilization. Interestingly, another thing is generally the majority of slaves, not probably a big majority but the majority slaves brought into Islamic civilization were women which is interesting it's totally different from America where the majority were men. Another very important distinction",
      "distinct almost unique not totally unique but ex almost unique feature of islamic civilization was military slavery the idea that and this really begins in the mid-800s that you a prince or a ruler or caliph or sultan would have a bodyguard and then let's say a core of their army made out of slaves primarily in the beginning at least turkic slaves because they were raised riding and shooting bows and arrows uh who",
      "who are loyal to you and owned by you. Of course, the problem is that eventually they can decide we can just get rid of this guy. We're the ones in charge. We have all the weapons so that's what happens in a lot of different settings in Islamic civilization. One thing, another thing that's very important in Islamic civilisation is that slavery is not tied to what we would think of as race in any consistent way. Slavery was tied to race in a number of ways",
      "in a number of times, depending on where you are when you are and what the slave is doing. So I said to you before like a lot of let's say the slaves who were made up the famous Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt and Syria from roughly 1260 to 1517 they were at first mostly Kipchak Turks or Turks from the kind of Southern Northern coast of Northern shore of what today would be the Northern shore",
      "of the Black Sea. Then later on, most of them were Circassian but a lot of them are from other places as well with the bulk were from first Kipchak Turks and then Circassians. The Ottoman armies, the core unit of the Janissaries were Balkans or Christians from the Balkans are from Anatolia. If you for example in the Hejaz from roughly the 1500s through the 1800s",
      "The most beautiful women, and therefore the most sought-after slave woman were Ethiopian and Somali women. So depending where you are like if you were in Baghdad in 10 100 And you just said slave the assumption is that person is either Persian or Turkic or actually more common Slavic If you were Let's say Syria in 1300",
      "1300 and you said slave, probably that person was going to be Slavic, maybe Turkic, maybe African. So it depends where you are and what the job that the slave is doing. And that would tell you probably what their background is. But there's no consistent racialization of slavery in Islamic civilization. Another thing that's very important is because slaves were so often freed.",
      "often freed, so frequently freed because so many slaves are women. And a lot of those women ended up having children with their male owners and there's children of the, those owners were free and have equal standing to their fathers, right? You don't really have the buildup of like a slave population in Islamic civilization. So one of the reasons I think you don't have",
      "movements that emerges amongst slaves in Islamic civilization is because that population is not stable, right? There's a constant shift of slave to free. Think about this, right. Why are slaves in the Americas, the Caribbean or the United States or Brazil, why are they motivated to rebel or to advocate for abolition? One,",
      "One, they're probably never going to be freed. So let's take the United States. Through the late 1700s, through the Civil War, the slave owners and advocates of slavery in the U.S. make it more and more difficult to free slaves. So there is increasingly little chance you are ever going to",
      "you're marked out because you're black and only black people are enslaved. And you are essentially always vulnerable to re-enslavement, like in 12 Years a Slave. You are... Even let's say you're not going to be re-enslaved, you're always part of the underclass. Right? So... And your slaveness, your blackness is always marked out immediately and is absolutely the fundamental division",
      "of life in America, in the United States. Compare this to let's say, let's just imagine Cairo in 1700. If you're a slave in Cairo and let's, say you're an African slave, you've been brought from, let' say what's now Southern Sudan, you're probably gonna be freed in five to seven years at which point you can either stay there or you can go back to your homeland.",
      "If you stay there, you're a free person. You're a Free Muslim just like every other Free Muslim and let's say you're walking on the streets of Cairo and you see someone who looks very dark skinned darker skin than the average person this could be a slave or this could",
      "who's basically as powerful and rich as his father, right? So that's a free person. This isn't like someone you can mess with. That's a Free Person. That is like a member of the elite. So if you're walking around streets of Cairo on your darker skin than the average Joe in 1700, you are not going to be re-insulated. Skin color doesn't tell anybody who you are because of this phenomenon of what the great historian Ali Mazrui called",
      "called ascending miscegenation. The offspring of male slave owners and their female slaves are free. They're not slaves like in the case of Thomas Jefferson. So you have those people go up into the elite population, to the free population. You don't see the accumulation of a population who's invested in ending the institution of slavery",
      "institution of slavery because it's too transient and racial race or phenotype doesn't mark you out as free or slave. So that's just a great, And even amongst a lot of the former slaves who maybe have remembered their days in slavery there's not like was there any expression of the moral wrongness of slavery for those? Not that I know of right?",
      "There's one case I can think of which actually doesn't have to do with that specifically, but it has to do an Ottoman official who basically tells a bunch of Muslims in the Balkans who were upset because Christian... Their enemy states are raiding and taking some of their women and men as slaves. This Ottoman official tells them he's like, well you don't like this",
      "you don't like this but you didn't mind when you were taking their women and children right so he kind of is like you know that's the only, that was in the 1600s it's one of the Ottoman kind of governors in the Balkans. But he wasn't previously a slave he was just kind of telling them he's like well you guys you know maybe you shouldn't do this to them. But what you do find more often as far as I know and again we're dealing with a very limited amount of data is people saying yeah you know it sucks to be a slave but",
      "of us we would out, we would want to have our own slaves because it's tough to do work all by yourself. So it's more like I don't like being a slave and one day I'm going to have my own slave. That's the sentiment you see more often but again there's not a lot of data points here. The other thing I was going to say which is I think gives you an illustrates a difference between how the way we think about this in America",
      "the Islamic context is we talk about like reparations for slaves or descendants of slaves. So one way, and I say this sort of jokingly but I think it's actually accurate was if you wanted to find the descendants of slaves in let's say Egypt and Syria, it would be very easy. You go to the wealthiest people, lightest skinned and wealthiest",
      "because those are the elites of the Ottoman world from the 1700s to the 1900s were the offspring of free men and Turkic or Circassian or other Caucasian female slaves. So, the people who are most easily identifiable as descendants of slaves are actually elite, which is a very different situation than we would see in the Americas.",
      "I mean, you know to shift gears. I guess to the crux of the issue here I mean obviously, you this was an important context to to go through but certainly I'm sure a lot of listeners are still feeling this uneasiness I think a lot Muslims discussion about the topic of slavery veers into apologetics and Describes like, you,this is like, the milder form of slavery It's not like plantation slavery that we know of in North America and description",
      "of some of those realities, but it still never in a way tackles the moral issue of slavery itself. We've talked a little bit about how Muslims understood it to be a handicap and not desirable state and what came out of that. And also just as a disclaimer, I mean there's certain issues that we don't have time to fully flesh out like the issue",
      "women or some of the racial consequences of slavery in the Muslim world, which that is intention to revisit those in more detail at a later time. But in terms of what you describe in the book as you move on from this description of slavery and the Muslim World, you talk about what is really the crux of it, which is the conundrum of slavery for us living today in the modern world as Muslims and as human beings in general. You know, you lay out several statements",
      "statements, you know, statements of what is true. I'll let actually you explain the conundrum in terms of the statements that you posit. Well, I'm happy that you read the book and remember this concept. So it's what I call the slavery conundum. And by the way, I mean, you don't really crystallize this for me because I remember I was trying to figure out how to write this book. And then in the summer of 2017, I think that's when it was the summer. That's when they were at the protest in Charlottesville. Yes, right.",
      "right and donald trump gave this speech then president donald Trump maybe future President Donald Trump I don't know by the time this podcast comes out who knows hopefully not i'm going to go in with i'm gonna go in and say i'm not a supporter so he um he's you know there was this debate about whether or not there should be this statue of thomas jefferson at the university of virginia uh thomas Jefferson was the writer of the declaration of independence and said you know all men are created equal etc etc",
      "And he was also a slave owner who had children with his slave woman, with his female slave Sally Heming. So if slavery – like the argument of the activists was a very good argument, right? If slavery is an intrinsic and gross moral wrong throughout space and time, slavery was wrong 1,000 years ago, it was wrong 100 years ago. It was wrong 10,000 year ago, whatever. It's always wrong. If that's the case, why do you have a statue to this guy?",
      "Makes total sense. Like, I don't care if he did good stuff. If slavery is a monstrosity that only a monster would partake in and support, why would you have a statue of this person? And Donald Trump said something in his speech. It was really interesting argument. He said, George Washington was a slave owner. Are you going to take down the statues of George Washington? The kind of implied answer in American political life",
      "is no, because George Washington's the founder of the country. He's a hero. He was not some guy who said I think slavery is wrong. He owned slaves and he had one female slave named Ona Judge who ran away when he was in Philadelphia. And he spent, he and his wife spent the rest of their lives actually consistently trying to find her and get her back. So he was not",
      "some reluctant participant in this. So it's a very good argument if slavery is a gross and inherent evil throughout space and time, anybody who participates or defends it is morally compromised. If however... so what that means is as I said before every religious and philosophical tradition prior to let's just say the 1700 either defended, condoned",
      "Defended, condoned, accepted slavery, considered slavery natural. One of these. What you're talking about is if you're talk about toppling statues, you have to basically take the entirety of human heritage prior to let's just say 1700. That's being generous too by the way maybe 1800 is better. Maybe 1900 is better actually. Basically take this and throw it into a garbage can because it is morally compromised. Now that if you are kind of a radical activist",
      "or sort of a maybe kind of progressive, a lot of progressive people would say, yeah that's fine. That's what we wanna do. Okay, fine, that's their position. But if you believe that our past is some kind of moral source for us or legal source for use, source of wisdom even binding for us, you can't do that. So what do you do?",
      "There's two things you can do. You can either say, slavery back then, it was not bad, right? Which means that slavery is not always evil. Sometimes it's okay. Or you can say, um, slavery was not good. It was not so bad then, but it's bad now. Right? So what you say is either back then it was okay. But you have to say that it's not a gross and intrinsic evil throughout space and time.",
      "space and time. Either you get rid of your heritage or you change that. Unless you're willing to throw away your old heritage. Or you change the statement, right? Now it's interesting because when you look at the debates that are going on between abolitionists and not just defenders of slavery but people who just weren't convinced by abolitionist arguments let's say in the US or let's take 1790 as a year one there's",
      "exchange between benjamin rush one of the founding fathers and uh signatory of the declaration of independence and a very committed abolitionist between him and a southern slave owner and he says you know slavery is evil etc etc and this southern slaveowner writes he says if slavery's evil why didn't the bible prohibit it and",
      "if you say that, well, Jesus wanted to prohibit it but it would have been too alienating. It would have had the courage to say this is wrong? I mean, that's ridiculous, right? So he didn't... Let's say he can't end it but he could at least say this",
      "their masters if you say well you know there's slavery in the old testament but jesus came and kind of set us on a trajectory to end slavery you know we were kind of fulfilling even centuries later will finally fulfill this mission that he sent us on even though he didn't explicitly say it maybe he just set us ethically on this course okay but if slavery is wrong throughout space",
      "So this is the big problem with a progressive argument. And I mean, progressive even including progressive Muslims. Right? So progressive Muslims might say, you know, the Quran sets us on a trajectory to free slavery, to end slavery. Okay, that's fine. I actually agree. I think it does. But that doesn't solve your problem because you still can't explain why God allowed it ever at any point. So there's no way short of saying and by the way, this had a big one of the reasons",
      "reasons i think it's not i don't know what it's one of the reason i don' t think it is the most important reason but it's certainly a factor in what we think of as like liberal theology in christianity in the west. One of the reasons that many prominent Christian theologians in the late 19th century and 20th century until today",
      "is because they, if you do that, so if you say that the Bible Old Testament or New Testament expresses God's clear will for us in an intact way, you either have to say that slavery was not wrong back then or that the slavery described in the Bible is good slavery and not bad slavery which gets you into the whole like yeah but it's slavery isn't that bad",
      "that bad in this place, which of course is unacceptable in our society to say. Or you have to say the Bible doesn't really represent in an intact way God's will. It was for that time it was kind of a human expression people who were inspired by God but they weren't really talking God wasn't speaking through them so you can't have a progressive argument Progressive argument can explain why God wants us not to have slaves",
      "slaves but the progressive argument cannot explain how god ever allowed it in the first place right and this is how you um when you talk about the conundrum when you describe about the muslim uh conundum or islamic slavery conundroom um you know there's one pro in the sense that as you mentioned earlier there's not this uh it certainly was not a the racialization systematic racialization that's up that's a pot that's",
      "as it existed in Muslim lands. But the disadvantage, even further disadvantage from the Islamic slavery conundrum is that unlike perhaps people of the Jadid tradition now, Muslims rely on the authority of the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet. So if you are going to... You were really stuck as a Muslim. If you want to be a confessional practicing Muslim, you cannot in any way state anything to the line",
      "of the uh definitely and i mean it's interesting that the same thing muslims get really upset when you talk about this because progressive muslimers get really obsessed because they don't have an answer for that and when people are confronted with this by the way like donald trump like donal trump said you know i mean if you",
      "was an evil throughout space and time you should tear down all the statues of george washington and rename everything the same after george Washington if not then you don't you need to tell me how you understand this because what you're not really being consistent yeah where's the line right yeah either you're saying it was okay back then or it was not the slavery that was practiced back then wasn't that bad",
      "get really stressed out about this because it involves, it brings up a contradiction in people's minds and the values they have. They're kind of commitments and people don't like that. So I mean, I've had a lot of people, a lot Muslims, you know young Muslims come to me and say if I can't say slavery is absolutely wrong throughout space and time, I can be Muslim. And I just say to them like okay. I mean I don't argue with them",
      "provoke a crisis in their faith. But you can see in the way they're looking at the issue that they are kind of, they're a walking case of cognitive dissonance. I mean certainly this is a tension that I think it's motivated you yourself to explore the issue. It's a reason why I decided to read your book and talk about it with you today.",
      "And even if we're going to, you know, there is a tension there which I think for a lot of our listeners share that same tension in terms of reconciling our modern sensibilities with the reality of what our tradition is. So one of the ways I deal with it is to say first of all, if you are American, the debate over slavery is an effect about American slavery. I have no problem condemning slavery in America.",
      "There's a reason why people started to really talk about the immorality of slavery in the context of the North Atlantic slave trade. There's reason why, right? So people who knew like, for example Bartolome de las Casas in this 1500s was one of the first people who really starts talking about the horrors of slavery and America's there he was from Spain. There were slaves in Spain. He thought it was mellow. You just didn't care",
      "The stuff he saw in the Americas shocked him, was shocking to his conscience. At that time, by the way, it was Native Americans who were enslaved there in the Spanish colonies of the Americas. So when you read the descriptions of early critics of slavery, it's interesting.",
      "1600s in the early 1700s all come from people who have direct experience with the slave trade they see stuff and they are horrified uh now i don't know of anybody who writes like that from the muslim in the muslin tradition prior to the modern period right so there",
      "the level of violence in the transatlantic slave trade was enormous. I mean, it was like unbelievably violent. It was so violent that there were hundreds of mutinies aboard slave ships going from West Africa to the Americas, hundreds over a 350-year period,",
      "or upraising is among slaves, enslaved people from West Africa. It was unbelievably violent. If you read the descriptions of written by slave overseers in let's say Jamaica in the 1700s if you read them or anywhere you read that so they had places like the British colonies of the Caribbean South Carolina in a lot of places the black slave population was like 90%. It's like nine to one black slaves",
      "slaves to white overseers or owners. That ratio in Islamic civilization is insane, it's extremely rare if it ever happens. When you have this situation the only way that these white owners can manage these people is to terrorize them with violence that is... I'm a pretty cold guy like I can talk about nasty stuff all the time",
      "get affected by it. But I can't even say the stuff that is written by these people about what they do to slaves. It's horrific, horrific. So when you see that and you see, by the way, that essentially one out of 12 people are dying on the ships just to begin with. Think about one out",
      "violence against slaves. The fact that it's all black and white, this is a traffic that is totally racialized. It is justified by the fact that these people are non-Christian, centrally lower forms of human beings who can be enslaved. A lot of people are like, this has really demented. And that's where you start seeing the major criticisms. It's not really about slavery per se. It expands from there.",
      "We just earlier were describing sort of the practice of slavery as a whole. I mean, obviously with exceptions, there's exceptions everywhere in the diversity of Muslim lands in the Muslim civilization, right? And without delving in... I don't think this necessarily means we're delving into apologetics here, but it is, I think, important to know the context of what slavery has existed in the",
      "and slavery in North America. The reason being is because I want to move into sort of our final topic in the book, which is Muslim abolitionism or abolition of slavery, because understanding where that movement comes from requires an understanding of the context that they were living in. It was not the context of this horrific... That was what you just described in North American plantation slavery. It wasn't a completely different context. So with that being said, let's describe a little bit about some of the avenues",
      "avenues that were, um, that led to, to, uh, Muslim scholars and Muslim, you know, areas to consider abolishing slavery. If we're going to use the modern terms, I mean, we had, you back in episode nine, we went through his book, The Walking Quran, and he described, um Abdelkader Khan and the abolitionists of slavery in that area predated, you",
      "And that's one place where this wave of abolition, you know, came about. Describe a little bit about the avenues that Muslims took in terms of reconciling the authority of the Quran and the Sunnah with the desire to fully eradicate slavery in their societies. Okay, so first of all, there's a huge debate amongst scholars, amongst Western scholars, academics,",
      "there are two essentially two arguments one is what you might call the moral awakening argument well there's three arguments right so one is which you might called the moral Awakening Argument which is actually kind of comical when you hear it right. It's basically human beings, there's all these great human beings Moses Jesus Buddha and we're best in right all these people right at some point Europeans of course because Europeans are the greatest they",
      "they decide, they wake up one day and they say oh my god slavery is wrong let it be known go forth and proclaim it in the city slavery is not",
      "somehow getting more protein in their diet or something. They're getting higher IQs. No, no evidence of this. The second argument is we could call it like the economic argument which is that people need slaves to engage in labor. Aristotle says this in his politics. He says there will be slaves until looms you know looms that make cloth until loons move themselves they will be slaves. That's actually totally correct right? What happens suddenly you have technology",
      "you have technology, industrial revolution by which... Where does the first opposition to slavery emerge? In Britain and in the British colonies of North America. Two places in which industrialization first started and there were massive accumulation of wealth gotten through non-slavery means. The northern colonies of the Americas, not like this American South, the American North and Britain.",
      "and Britain. Industrial wealth, industrialization develops wealth accumulates based on non-slave industries, slave base industries. Is that coincidence? So the argument is basically the first people in human history who really realize you don't need slaves and we can get rich without them they're the people who start to talk about slavery as a problem. They essentially have the luxury.",
      "I mean, imagine you could talk about it as sort of like... It's like I was watching this documentary about the Taliban. It was just filming in Afghanistan. It's really interesting. You have these stories of my... I became a vegetarian when I went. We had this lamb and we raised him to a sheep and then we killed him and I became vegetarian because I was horrified. How could we? This was my friend. And now I eat. And you have this picture of this Afghan kid who does that and he just gets the head of the sheep. He's like,",
      "the head of the sheep he's like hey look i have a head of my sheep you know and they're eating it because if your star if you need me to live you don't have a emotional like this is not an emotional conflict for you it's not it's a luxury conflict right it's so uh the first people who don't who have the luxury to to think morally about this think morally that's the kind of economic argument the third argument which essentially mixes these two which I think is correct",
      "which I think is correct, uh, which says that the beginning of this starts with people who are in the economic position in the North Atlantic, in Britain and Northern Americas to have the capacity to engage in labor and economics and wealth accumulation without slaves. It happens to be that the slavery that is around them is absolutely horrific",
      "absolutely horrific, amongst the worst in human history. And so they are not only now able to think about this being immoral but presented with compelling evidence that it is immoral. Once their arguments start to be successful in their own societies, it feeds into this idea that we are in an era of moral progress where we are realizing things are wrong and previously people didn't think were wrong",
      "didn't think were wrong. And we are able to improve the world, the world is getting better. If the world was getting better if we can actually change things and make things better that kind of reinforces your motivation to engage in abolition. And then reinforces you're motivation to go and bring this to other people, sort of spread your message to other because you see the world can be changed right? So that's I think the correct argument it's a combination of economics and the moral possibility created by economics.",
      "By the way, I won't just say economics. Technology. This is very important. Technology and the moral possibilities created by technology. And then the moral certainties that emerge in the wake of that. When I say technology, I think a useful example is... One example I think is very helpful as an analogy is showering.",
      "So, I mean, I was just talking to my friend who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. He's about my age. He grew up, you took one shower a week on Friday. You took one hour a week. And I just want to imagine like, imagine, you know, you're on the Metro into crowded on the metro and your next is somebody who takes one shower week. What do you think about that person? Let me tell you what goes through my head. This is a filthy person. This guy stinks.",
      "stinks what is this like some kind of he's probably from one of these like awful countries or people who are like backward and it's just like filthy people like they don't you know these are we're like much more civilized than these people in fact there's no like there's all these moral implications to what i'm saying and kind of moral conclusions i'm drawing but actually it just has to do with whether or not someone has access to water or access to hot water are they actually disgusting like no our this is we're getting confused between technological",
      "and economic plenty, and morality. So a lot of our moral certainty about slavery is real. When you ask me about slavery I'm disgusted. That's a legit... I'm not making that up. Like that's a legitimate feeling of a person who was raised in North America, in Washington DC in late in the 1980s and 90s and 2000s.",
      "That's how people are going to think. That's 100% sincere, but that doesn't mean that that's because I've tapped into some kind of vein of moral truth that previous human beings didn't realize. It just means that I live in a world where this institution is not necessary, right? So just like by the way, when you listen to strict animal rights activists talk about eating meat and stuff",
      "eating meat and stuff, they use the language of abolition. They say that we want to abolish the slavery of animals. I mean, think about what do we do? We take animals, we raise them in cages, we keep them in cases then we eat them. That's mess...I mean on what basis do we this because they're not...we don't do this other human beings. We do this to other except for homo sapiens it's okay to do this with other animals except for dogs for some reason because we like them right. Strict animal rights activists",
      "is say, you guys are just speciesist. And we're like, ha-ha-ha, that's really funny. That's speciesist.\" No, they mean it. On what basis do you say that Homo sapiens cannot be eaten? Cannot be caged and kept as slaves but cows can? On what bases? It's just based on which species you're from. So if we get into a point where humans no longer need animal products,",
      "very well without them and more easily without them. We'll look back at the time when we ate meat, you and I today, and people will just laugh at it like these people were barbarians. Why did they not have our moral awareness? It's not about moral awareness. This is technologically economically not feasible for most people. A lot of people in the world need meat to survive. Right?",
      "when people talk about like slavery or abolition in Islamic world, it's no... Abolition didn't... It's not like people knew that slavery was wrong and Muslims just didn't get it. Nobody talked about slavery being wrong in world history per se except I've mentioned four or five people in human history prior to the let's say 1700s. This was every slavery that every society, every civilization",
      "had slaves, something that we would consider slavery. None of them ever even mooted the idea of abolishing this. Okay? The first people who think about this idea in Britain and the industrial north of the British American colonies don't do so because they're Christians or something, or because they are like possessed the Greco-Roman heritage. Because Western Europeans have been Christian for",
      "Christian for 600 1600 years or whatever, for over a millennium and had the Greco Roman heritage for over 1,000. And this didn't occur to them. So it's not about being Christian or being Western somebody that it's being in a specific place with certain technologies become available on the economic and moral possibilities of those technologies allow. And Muslims if if the Industrial Revolution started in let's say Cairo or Baghdad or something",
      "Muslims would have been the first people to come up with the idea of abolishing slavery. In fact, they would be more fitting for them too because the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet are absolutely obsessed with the ideas of emancipation. So how do Muslims encounter abolitionism or the idea getting rid of slavery? They encounter it in the same way they encounter modernity namely through European",
      "either European diplomatic contact with European powers who are stronger than them or through colonialization. So that's how Muslims encounter the idea of abolition. Let me just run quickly through like, the different schools of thought Muslims have. The most radical argument and end with a least radical argument. Okay so argument number one. Slavery was always wrong in Islam.",
      "This was the argument made by the famous Indian Islamic modernist Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan, died 1898. He says The hadiths that talk about slavery are forged they're not reliable. The Quran emphasizes emancipation and he says by the way it's interesting he says the the quranic verses that actually talk about enslavement in i think it's surah muhammad uh when it says",
      "So if you encounter those people who are the unbelievers, fight them until you defeat them and then bind them firmly, the prisoners firmly. Then either release them just for free, just let them go or ransom them back to their families, their side. It doesn't say or keep them as slaves. So what Sustaid Ahmed Khan says is",
      "is the Quran actually doesn't allow slavery. The Quran allowed the slavery that existed at the time of the Prophet, but then ended it and didn't allow anymore. That's his argument. Now, there's... What are the... The upside of the argument is it turns out the Quran ended slavery according to Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. The downside is all those hadiths you like? Gone. The entirety of Islamic tradition",
      "Islamic tradition, it was a big mistake. Okay? The other problem is, and this is kind of subtle but I think important, is he actually can't say that slavery was always morally abhorrent because the Quran doesn't say",
      "not according to he doesn't say this but according to i think according to his argument the quran should have said slavery is morally wrong immediately cease but it doesn't so that's first argument the second argument is you could maybe call it uh you know muslims went off the rails yes right okay the second and this you see first developed by islamic modernists like rashid ridha who died in 1935 um and other figures and it's very common after that the idea is",
      "Look, slavery was too economically important and too economically omnipresent to end. Just like that. You can't do it. And by the way, what Rashid Durdada says is we saw what happens when you try to end slavery by fiat, by executive decision in America, and they had a civil war. So it's interesting. He says like the civil war is actually... We don't want it to happen. Okay.",
      "closes the doors on slavery except captures through war. So basically you're going to have a very small amount of slaves coming in, a lot of slaves going out and it's just going to die out on its own. That was the Quranic mission or the Quran kind of intention but Muslims like went off the rails and instead of doing that they just started to enslave lots of people so that was a mistake in Islamic civilization. The good side, the upside of this argument is you can say",
      "slavery is wrong. The bad side is a lot of Islamic civilization was kind of errant, but at least like the you retain... Well I mean the fiqh traditions and stuff were wrong on this issue, but you retain the Quran, you retain this another prophet, but don't get the ability to say that slavery was always wrong throughout space and time because if it had been why didn't",
      "why didn't the Quran say this or something, right? But this is very similar to kind of similar arguments being made by Christian and Jewish scholars at that time. And made until today by a lot of Christian and Jews scholars. Yeah, yeah. The next argument over is the Makasar Sharia argument. The aims of the Sharia Argument. This is in my opinion unquestionably correct.",
      "You think the other ones are correct or not is another issue, but this one is definitely correct which is to say that Freeding slaves is one of the aims of the Sharia and sure enough when you go back and you look at earliest hadith collections earliest works of book these I'd say it felt with the idea that God wants freedom The way in which the Quran the Sunnah obsessed with emancipation the way that even an Islamic Transaction and contract law. You constantly have regular rules subverted to emphasize freeing slaves",
      "freeing slaves. And go back to like text, let's say Ashatab in the 1300s who writes one of the first people to talk about Makassid in a really systematic way. He says, one of them, Makassar, the Sharia is it's freeing and so basically we are now in a position where slavery is no, there's no reason to have it. It's not economically essential. So by just the best way to fulfill this aim of the Shariah simply to end",
      "Because a ruler has what's called the power of taqiyyid al-mubah, or restrict me permissible. So a Muslim ruler can say you can't drive faster than 55 miles an hour. You can only drive on the right side of the road. You're not prohibited in the Quran and the Sunnah but the Muslim state or government has the right to restrict these things for the best interest of the community. Muslims don't have to have slaves",
      "don't have to have slaves so we can simply say no more slaves because this is the name of the sharia next argument over is the if you can't do it right you can t do it at all argument and this is an argument used by ahmed bey in tunisia in his famous 1846 abolition declaration where he says everyone here in tunisian is free no more slave brought into the country what he says is too many of the slaves that you guys are bringing in",
      "are actually originally Muslims. You can't even tell the difference between who's Muslim and who's not. In addition, people are mistreating their slaves or not living up to the Sharia requirements for how slaves should be treated. No one can do this right. No more slavery. And again, it's within the ruler's right to do this. If the ruler says no more fasting, no more praying, that's not allowed. But if the ruler has no more driving over 55 miles an hour, no",
      "The next argument over is the, let's just say, remit of the ruler argument. This argument says slavery ultimately falls under the purview of the Muslim ruler. For example, you have a bunch of prisoners of war. What do you do? Do you ransom them? Do your free them? You keep them as slaves? This is the rulers decision.",
      "Do you sign a treaty with your neighbor saying we won't enslave any of your people and you won't to slave any of our people? Ruler can do that. Do you signed a treaty saying, we're not gonna buy anymore slaves at all? And we're going to get rid of all our slaves? This is all up to the ruler. The ruler can do this based on what he or she or whatever the government thinks is the best interests of the community. The next argument over, and now we're getting into like maybe a little bit less comfortable",
      "is the bad PR argument. It's not that slavery is really wrong, it's just that it's a really bad PR. So don't... And this is in fact, bin Baz was asked this, no, sorry, Mohammed Salih ibn Uthaymeen was asked us, he died 2001, why one of his students who's actually an American Muslim scholar asked him this question about can Muslims fighting in Bosnia",
      "bosnia in the 1990s can they take let's say serbians captives going to take them as slaves and you know what i mean said technically yes but we need international support on this issue so it's on this issues so it was really bad it's a bad image don't do it it's politically bad idea so it is a politically bad yeah idea yeah the last argument is what are you talking about",
      "Rahimullah Allah, died in 1999, made this argument. You know, why do you care a bunch of like kuffar unbelievers telling you about slavery is wrong and all that stuff like that? Follow the Quran, the Sunnah. What are you thinking? These people are, you know, they're weird racial slavery in the North Atlantic and their plantations. These people have your tradition which is ethical and only wants good for the slave and the master, et cetera. This is what he argued. So he said, this is just a distraction to get into this moral debate.",
      "full range of muslim arguments and just points of view on the issue of abolition did any of those arguments like didn't take hold more than the other that led to the eventual abolition of slavery uh yeah so they eventually right slavery is abolished in the islamic world or the muslim world because muslim rulers beginning in the sort of 18 probably 1870s is the best time maybe actually really 1840s if you think about ahmed bey and tunisia start to",
      "restrict more and more the import of slaves, and then end slavery or just don't recognize it legally anymore. And people really start to see it as something that is unacceptable. One thing that's helpful in this regard... I mean, the same thing happens to Muslims as happened to people in North America and Britain. Eventually they go through the same kind of moral journey",
      "on the basis of their, what is possible for them economically and technologically and things like that. Another thing I would say it's important to remember is you know, I always had this idea that slavery if you look at slavery in let's say the Mediterranean or Indian Ocean world of Islam was sort of would gradually go down, down, it was decrease, decrease, increase until modern period. That's actually not true. It spiked in the 1800s so",
      "slavery and slave raiding in across the sahara and in east africa and even in muslim lands like yemen and balochistan and things like that and the capture of people coming to hodge indonesian pilgrims coming to hajj african pilgrims come into haj getting grabbed and taken as slaves in the late 19th century in the early 20th century peaked it was a huge problem it was unprecedented so one of the reasons that muslims start having",
      "like in Egypt and Syria and places like that, start having extreme... They start writing against slavery and enslavement of people. In that time period isn't just because they're influenced by Europeans. It's because there is now a blight of enslavements of people who you cannot legally enslave that is unseen before. So that's another reason is people start seeing stuff that actually had not been practiced before. Right.",
      "Right. So, I mean, you know, as we close here, I would advise all the listeners to read your book because you go into all this in a lot of detail. But as a way to sort of move towards a conclusion here and if you permit, I'd like to ask you personally what brings you certainty? What brings you comfort as someone who professes, as a practicing Muslim who believes in the authority of the Quran, the authority",
      "What brings you to a comfort and certainty there by upholding those sources, but also believing that slavery today is wrong? I would say that first of all, to know that the disgust I feel in my stomach when I think about slavery, that's true. That's real. There's not faulty programming in my brain or something. But that doesn't mean",
      "mean that anybody who didn't have that feeling in human history is somehow morally less than I am or something like that. I have this feeling the same way I have the feeling about the guy in the metro who's only showering once a week because of the specific customary world in which I live. And those, custom is really important in Islamic law. Most of the details",
      "are based on custom. That's fine as long as you, how is a husband supposed to act towards his wife? How does a wife support ass or just husband this is based on Custom so Custom is morally real that's very important part of our moral lives So to say that this is kind of technology and change in customs and different mortal at realizations There's nothing that doesn't minimize those moral feelings And doesn't that doesn' t illegitimize them in Islamic terms no they're totally legitimate think about how much",
      "Think about how much the Quran says, ma'ruf, ma'thuf, ma'mtthuf. Right? Ma'thuff is what is known to be right. That's the first thing. Second, I actually find it comforting to know that human history is a much bigger place than just Western European sensibilities, you know, Western urban sensibilities in the late 20th and early 21st century. Guess what?",
      "you let, you happen to live in New York city or Washington DC and not in 2023. And you think something's right or wrong doesn't mean everyone in world history thought that. Yeah. Right. And, you know, you might be the one with a bad argument, not them. So I think it's really, I find it comforting to know that human history and the experience of our species is much broader than what I know. And that if you want",
      "if you really respect human beings, not just ones that think like you, you have to be willing to think in wider terms than we're normally used to. So I find that comforting because it means that when things don't make sense to me, it doesn't mean that there's something wrong with the world. It",
      "We can't understand the sentiments of people who lived in different times and places than us because they lived in very different situations. It doesn't mean they're morally less than us or we're morally superior to them. You know, finally I would say that the last thing is the idea of it was unquestionably – and I don't care if you're some super skeptical Orientalist who thinks the Koran was written in 800 and every Hadith is written in 900 and it was all some kind of conspiracy, right?",
      "or the son of the prophet there is no historical understanding of these sources that can not conclude That these sources were absolutely obsessed with emancipation the freeing of slaves that they encouraged it more than any other pre-modern document I've ever seen and That it was one of the aims of the Sharia to emancipate people and that if the best way to emancipae people in our modern day and age is to",
      "and age is to for rulers and states to top down end the institution of slavery that's great we support that 100 percent that is a 100 muslim you know muslim mandate i just wanted to close with you know what uh directly from your book which i feel sort of summarizes what you just said in terms of reconciling our our um our relationship with the past and with um you know the tradition",
      "you know, the tradition. You basically talk about Muslim abolition and say it was programmatically baked into the Sharia's internal logic and functioning reaffirmed and supplied ceaselessly for over a millennium if the Shari'a tradition did not elevate maximizing freedom to a main aim of the Shariat until the 20th century and Islamic civilization did not universalize its drive to emancipate or call for ending slavery as an institution it was because none of this was or had ever been conceivable anywhere to anyone.",
      "the end of your book. I couldn't have said it better myself. What you've done in this is give us the tools to be able to try to reconcile some of this tension that we may have, certainly with our tradition and be confident moving forward as Muslims, as we said in the beginning, like me, be able read our text and not feel a discomfort that may indicate a concern that we're not certain in our faith and certain in",
      "Remember to check out almadina.org for the latest programs and also the latest episodes, and inshallah till the next time we'll see you then. Assalamualaikum. Waalaikumsalam.",
      "manipulation by the forces of reaction and conservatism, and empire and oppression. And the tradition is also open to interpretation that is radical and revolutionary and emancipatory, and a healthy sound thriving heart that has taken its place and dislodged the ego put that tyrant in his place and has become a humble servant",
      "is going to have the inner discernment and understanding that is going bring forth that which sets humanity free from internal oppressors and external oppressors. Because ultimately, that's how I read the Quran, that' s how I understand what the sunnah of the messenger was. Is that he came, peace be upon him with the most complete set of armaments",
      "all internal and external oppressors."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - _Is Islam-anti-Black__ _ C_Z2iSCCPyw7I&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW3SBwkJsAkBhyohjO8%3D_1748691432.opus",
    "text": [
      "Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Everybody, welcome again. It's a new day and a new session in this amazing series and it's just getting better and better. So we have started a few days ago and we had very interesting guests. We had Dr. Nisa Islam in the first session who spoke about Qawla and her story",
      "who struggled to gain her rights as a Muslim in the prison. And we had, in our last session, brother Rasul Saifullah, who spoke about blackness in America and it was a very fruitful discussion and a deep one. Today we have another honorable and interesting guest who is Dr. Jonathan Browne. We expect that today's panel will be",
      "I expect that today's session will be very deep and will open up doors and new opportunities for us to understand better our own history, and to understand as well and to navigate through the relationship between Islam and Muslims",
      "race and how SLAM dealt with this issue. Kim, would you kindly tell us a bit more about Dr. Jonathan Brown? I certainly will. We're just delighted to have Dr. Jonathon A.C. Brown. He is going to be entering the waiting room in just a moment but i'm gonna go ahead and just start to say his bio before he gets on.",
      "Since 2010, he has taught at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service where he holds the Al-Waleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization. He's authored several books including Slavery and Islam, Misquoting Muhammad, The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy Hadith, Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World,",
      "Muhammad, A Very Short Introduction and the Canonization of Al-Bukhari in Muslim. He has also published articles in the fields of Hadith, Islamic law, Salafism, Sufism, and Arabic language. And I'm just so delighted to welcome Dr. Brown. We're getting ready to have him come out of the waiting room.",
      "and it's the Muhammad's legacy in the medieval and modern world. And he does a phenomenal job in explaining. So let me get him in, he's probably wondering what's going on here? We'll let him in here. Sorry, hey how's it going? Assalamu alaikum. For some reason when someone else sends me a link I get signed in by my kid's name so I will change-",
      "So I will change it to my name. Here we go. Perfect. How are you, Dr. Brown? I'm good. How're y'all doing? I am doing great. Me too. Communicating with you. I'm Kim Alston from Smith College's Center for Religious and Spiritual Life. And then of course, Heba, you see Heba at she's actually overseas.",
      "where you are and what you do as well. Yes, assalamu alaikum Dr Brown it's such a pleasure and an honor to be in your presence today um I my name is Hibafullah Saleh and i am the community religion liaison at Smith College and right now I am like I'm zooming from Sweden so nice to meet you. Sweden? yes What are you doing in Sweden? Well I live there. Wow that's a good reason",
      "reason to be there. Yeah, I was just looking at where Smith is. It's one of these things where you're like, boy, I wish I'd been able to go there in person. Looks like a gorgeous area. Yeah it is great. Northampton, the Pioneer Rallye, Western Massachusetts. What's that river that it's on? Or like the river that runs through that and it goes down all the way to Hartford and Connecticut River?",
      "studies major, and he just loved the Connecticut River. He was always there doing different studies. So that's the Connecticut river basin. But Dr. Brown we really enjoyed the essay that you wrote it's very in depth, very thorough. And it is a great topic. I guess you need to tell us how you came upon this topic while you decided upon this",
      "this topic. And the fact is, it does have a very provocative title. It's a much debated topic around the world and we know that a lot of Black people in particular have asked this question and I assume that many people have asked it not you know doesn't have to just depend on your race. And The Question for those that are in that want to know there used",
      "The question is, is Islam anti-Black? Are we recording? Should I talk or should we... Yeah. We're recording. Okay. So yeah. Isn't it charming and this is proof that this is not staged. See, I'm not going off any cues. Well, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Rahim thanks for inviting me.",
      "the most nervous I've ever been to talk about something. And I've talked about a lot of controversial stuff over the years, but this is... I think the thing that I'm the most ner- I actually couldn't sleep last night until about 3 AM which was like I couldn't. I mean obviously it's a stressful topic for a lot",
      "I'm white, which is probably pretty obvious to the people who are watching in case they're cooking or something or microwaving something and listening to this instead of watching. So I guess the reason why I picked that title is because there's a lot of discussions that go on like you'll see them amongst an African-American community with different strands",
      "You see it in kind of very sort of white nationalist or Western supremacist communities, which are sort of like the two opposite ends of a spectrum. But sometimes you see the same discussions going on and it's really, sometimes it's like, oh is Islam inherently committed to slavery? Is Islam foreign to Africa? Is Islamic colonial force in Africa? And at the root of all this is this idea that is Islam anti-black?",
      "black? That's kind of, in a lot of ways that's the question that is being asked. And so I really just wanted to address it and I want to address first of all because i'm Muslim and I wanna know the answer this but more immediately was because this last summer there was this debate on Research Africa for academic studying African studies. This debate came about is there such thing as Arab Islamic",
      "of Islamic slavery, like Islamic slavery. And then so people kept I'm actually not on that list but people kept forwarding me questions because it dealt specifically with things that I talked about in my book on slavery and Islam. And so I started to look into these specific questions and now I realized that you couldn't really look into them without answering bigger questions and then even bigger questions. And the I started getting interested in those bigger questions",
      "kind of working to answer my own questions about this topic. And maybe I'll just start out with three little episodes or nuggets that bring up some of the problems and that, hopefully in the course of our discussion we can answer these questions. I feel that there's very good answers for them but the first is, for example Muslims will always hear about Bilal",
      "always hear about Bilal. So, Bilal the first muezzin in Islam we hear that he's Ethiopian, he's black, he is African or we hear about some of the discrimination he was exposed to both before he was Muslim and then after he became Muslim whether it's the Quraysh of Mecca when the Muslims conquer Mecca and Bilal gets up on the Kaaba to do the adhan like the kind of Qurayshi leaders who saw him become Muslim they're like",
      "to do the call to prayer, you know? And, you now, the fact that it was sometimes hard for him to find a wife. And then okay so that's one we people are really familiar with this but what you don't hear right is that Omar bin Khattab's both mother and paternal grandmother were African or black like it's unclear in Arabic whether they're just",
      "whether they're just like really dark skinned or of African descent. Umar bin al-As, the famous conqueror of Egypt was described his mother was African he was described as short squat and very dark skin black skin. Safwan bin Umayyah a number of other Meccan elites elite of the Quraysh are would be phenotypically maybe indistinguishable from Bilal",
      "But we never hear about that. So why is that? That was the first question I had. The second question, and this was the one that I got forwarded from that debate on this serve was there's this Hadith it's in Sahih Muslim, it's considered to be authentic Hadith where a slave comes to Medina presumably from outside of Medina. And he basically says, I'm Muslim and I wanna pledge allegiance to the prophet",
      "and I want to make hijrah. I wanna come and live in Medina.\" And the prophet says, you know, welcomes him right? And then the man's owner comes and we don't know what religion he is. We don't where he's from. He comes, he's looking for a slave and he comes to the prophet and the prophet's like, oh, I didn't realize who your slave. And he basically says, okay, I will buy your slave from you with two black slaves. It doesn't say what race the original slave was",
      "it doesn't say, it just says two black slaves that you will buy this slave for. Okay so obviously there you said wait a second what's going on here? Why is it that two black slaves are equal worth one slave of unknown ethnicity or color whatever and the third one was an episode that I actually translated in my appendix in my book called",
      "an appendix in my book on slavery. And it was, for me, it was both really touching but also I didn't know how to make sense of it. Whereas this there's a famous scholar and like Sufi kind of great pious Muslim in Basra in the 700s, mid-700s, his name is Malik bin Dinar. There's a drought in the city all the highest people of the city are out praying to God bring rain and nothing is working.",
      "And then he describes this like kind of scrawny black slave with a, it turns out he's a slave. He's a scrawny Black guy and he has a potbelly. He goes and he just makes a small prayer and then water starts pouring down from the sky. It's so much water everyone's happy. And so Malik bin Dinaran, a lot of the other big scholars in the city see this happen and they follow after what they followed the guy. And they see he goes to the house of this slave trader",
      "trader. And so they wait there all night to the next morning to go in and say, we want to look at your slaves. And finally, they find that one guy and they said, we wanted buy him from you. And the guys are like, oh OK, well he doesn't really do much. He's just always praying and crying at night. They take him. And then the black slave is like why did you buy me? I'm no good at serving creatures, created beings.",
      "created beings. Like I only serve, you know, Hintzins, I only served the creator and they said no, no, you don't understand we want to free, we bought you so that we can be your students like we want us to serve you as your disciples and the, you now cut to end this story basically their teacher, this black slave dies and he dies in prayer and then Malik Medinaur goes up to him",
      "lies on his back to see what happened to him. He sees that he's dead, and then he describes that the blackness disappeared from his face, and his face became like the moon. So in this story you have one aspect which is just... I mean it's sort of when you really think about it kind of incredible right? The idea that would I even oh i'm Jonathan Brown, I must be a great guy. I think",
      "Would I go and make myself the student of the lowest person on the social ladder in the United States? Right, would I be willing to do that? Like these people are willing to go. And they that's how much they value piety and Baraka knowledge. And They don't care what form this comes in, what body this comes from right so they put that on one hand, that's really inspirational. On the other hand there is a description at",
      "of the blackness disappearing from his face. So like, it's almost like wait a second so then the black is bad right? And so then you're like, wait a sec. So even in this story which seems really inspirational there's this kind of seems like an anti-black element. So those are the questions I wanted to answer and that's why I wrote this thing and why I as a Muslim want to think about it.",
      "So does that mean you think a lot of the symbolism are more metaphors for different elements, like whether piousness or challenge? Yeah. One of the things I got really interested in during this research was",
      "of blackness as metaphor and blackness has literal description. We'll say, for example, this piano is black. And we also say like oh it's a Black Day, he's the black sheep of the family, etc., etc.",
      "use of the term black are kind of always linked in language. So what I found is really interesting, is the idea that black is sort of metaphorically bad, dirty, impure, you know, black or dark, right? Black, you",
      "language, but if you go and look at the languages that have been studied on this it's pretty much everywhere in the world. And so here is my question what about languages in Africa south of the Sahara spoken by people that we at least would kind of identify with say are like phenotypically black or African? So how does the word black function in their language?",
      "found is that if you look at languages like Wolof, what is it? Pular, Hausa. What is the other one? Hang on, sorry. I wrote down a lot of Jola Yoruba Shona Fulani Zulu Zarma Hausa More Luau right in all these",
      "In all these languages, what you see is in almost all of them. Well, in all of the totally normal for someone to say that their skin is black. So to say like oh his skin is Black, that would be completely normal. It wouldn't be a negative thing to say about them but in all those languages either the word Black or in one case the word dark are used metaphorically to say things are bad",
      "things are bad like black hearted you know uh things like that so this is really interesting because you have situations where people are using the word black to talk about their own skin color and it's not bad at all and then use the same word to talk abou,t like black-hearted person and then",
      "not in the way we expect, right? So it's present in the language but not in that language is actually talking about skin color. Then the other thing I thought was insane or really blew my mind which if you look at Scandinavian poetry and kind of epic from between the 900s and 1300s and like this one poem called The Rig Sula",
      "we're not sure exactly what comes from probably 10 hundred, 12 hundred, 13 hundred. It talks about the origins of the kind of Scandinavian social classes and it says you know the nobles and the farmers or they were born and they were like bright and ruddy red-haired and blonde-haired. The slaves are born dark. They're either...it's depending on the reading of the poem either it's dark black haired or black skinned and svartan like that word that is black now",
      "Now, who are the slaves? The word in Scandinavian is thrall. Who were the slaves of these people? They're other Scandinavians or they're like Irish people. And I mean first of all those people don't look any different from other Scandinavia's and second there is no universe where these people could be considered anywhere near a dark skinned person. These are probably the pastiest people in the world",
      "So what's really interesting is that here the metaphor of the idea of black as kind of low and bad, is actually creeping into the way they talk about the physicality of these people even though the people physically don't look any different from them. So anti-blackness can be present even when there's actually no black people, no people that... And everyone looks exactly the same and they're all super white",
      "super white. Yeah, because there was a question that I had the fact that you were talking about Africans and they'll say something about the black skin and then at the same time say something negative about blackness or black hearted. I'm thinking okay fine because they're Black people able to talk about those things in different ways because they are the same so yeah",
      "So that's a little different from what you're saying now about Scandinavians and others that don't have any melanin. So they're not seen as Black, and yet they're talking in that way. I just want to understand how the Quran and the Hadith are handling that. Sorry, some guy is at the door, and I'm trying to get my wife's attention to go in.",
      "You can edit this out. Layla, the guy is here at the door. We do everything live. They'll see it, understand it. Zoom is what it is. Excellent. So first of all I think it's interesting to think about why darkness or blackness is associated with something bad and lightness or whiteness is associated",
      "with something good. First of all, and this is just I've never seen this discussed but it's my theory. I could be wrong, I'd be right which is that human beings are like we're part of nature and when do we do stuff? We do stuff during the day. When do we not do stuff, we do at night. Like what scares people? Darkness scares you. Not being able to see things scares people. So at a really basic level,",
      "The second thing is really economic. And this is where you see it in the case of the Scandinavian description, is people who light skin is attractive and good because it's economically well endowed, right? So what does it mean? People who are attractive when they have a lot of resources.",
      "food they have. And nowadays it's, wow, that guy's attractive because look how thin he is. He doesn't sit around and eat. He actually goes to Whole Foods. He didn't buy his dinner at 7-Eleven. He has time to exercise. He does not work all the time behind a desk. So whatever is kind of economically advantageous is seen as attractive. So for most of human history, who are the people who are rich? They're the people don't have to go out and work. So if you're inside,",
      "burned, you're going to be more attractive economically attractive and therefore physically attractive than people who are out like doing the manual labor. And so when you look at the Scandinavian descriptions of the black slave they're both black in color but they're also dirty, sunburned their hands or rough. So this idea of blackness and darkness overlaps with being someone who's out in a field all day working and doesn't have the luxury of being inside.",
      "So the reason why this is important for talking about Islam and anti-Blackness is that the Quran very clearly uses this metaphor, right? So it talks about on the day of judgment there will be faces that are blackened and faces that whitened. And you know the faces that whitened are those who believed in good deeds, these that are Black into those people who disbelieved and didn't do good deeds. It talks about how when people,",
      "of having a daughter, their faces would be blackened with bad news. And it's obviously criticizing that. Now, it's very important to note that when you look at Muslim scholars talking about this verse, they say very clearly this is not about people's skin color because first of all, it says that the faces are blackened or whitened on the day of judgment. It's not that there's black and white faces.",
      "So that process happens on the day of judgment. It's not about our earthly color. The second thing that's really important is that, sort of black white binary in metaphor that the Quran uses to talk about good and bad is not really found amongst the Arabs when they talk about their own skin color. So the Arabs don't talk about black and white during the time of the prophet or pre-Islamic",
      "and early Islamic times. If they're going to talk about two colors, they'd talk about black and red. So red would be essentially lighter skinned Arabs. And you can think about Mediterranean and Persian type people. Northern European white people were off the map for them. They would sometimes call them blue or ashkar which means really ready or fair.",
      "and it's sometimes blue because if you think about, if you're an Arab and you see like an Irish person for the first time someone who is really white. It's almost like you can see their veins through their skin and it kind of a bluish color almost. So they either talk... And so red was light-skinned Arabs in North and black was most Arabs and then Africans, Indians, et cetera or they talked about three colors. They talked about black, white",
      "white and red. Black would be like Africans or people who had very dark skin, including dark-skinned Arabs. Red would be kind of Mediterranean, Northern Mediterranean sort of light-skin Syrian Persian look. And white is in the middle and white would be medium toned Arab skin,",
      "interesting is you can see in the language of the Quran and the language or the early Muslim community that the black white metaphor is not even the same language being deployed. It's not the same tool being deployed when you're talking about people's skin color. So, I think a really important point to make is that when you read these like Quranic",
      "this notion of black and white as a metaphor, I think for Americans we would correctly in our case kind of assume that that maps on to a whole vocabulary about judging people in society. You know, on a you know black-white dichotomy but that's not the case um in the in the Quran or the time of the prophet now i mentioned before",
      "why do we talk about Bilal being black but not Omar bin al-Khattab or Amir bin al-'As, or Sifwan bin Umayyah, or any of those people? And that's because... Here's another question. So why is it that if Professor Brown, if you're saying that the kind of black and white good and bad thing doesn't really translate over into skin color description, why are those Quraysh saying",
      "saying, who's this black crow? Who's giving the event like that's they're clearly insulting his blackness. Like so wait a second, you know what gives So here here's the thing you have to understand that in Arabia at the time of the prophet in Arabian society it doesn't matter what you look like It matters if you're part of the tribal system or not If your inside or outside That's the only thing that matters If you're Part of the system if you are part of like the tribe especially elite parts of the tribe",
      "of the tribe you are protected, you're secure no one can touch you. You're like a made man in the mafia right? If you're outside that you live a precarious life. You can be killed hurt and no one's going to help you unless you're sponsored by a tribe so who are the ultimate outsiders? Slaves. Slaves are the Ultimate Outsiders now it's important to remember that Arabia at the time of the prophet most slaves or",
      "it's not necessarily the majority, but the largest group are other Arabs who've been captured. The next biggest groups would be Ethiopians and then probably Byzantines, Arabic speakers or Greek speakers coming from what we'd call like kind of the upper Middle East sort of Syria area, Egypt, Anatolia.",
      "In this case, Blackness is bad because not because it's bad in and of itself. Because it means you're an outsider. Okay? You can't tell that another Arab is a slave because he doesn't look any different from bunch of other people but you can tell an Ethiopian person. And so he's like whoa! That guy is that guy's not from around here. This guy's an outsider and why don't use... Why don't they say that about Omar bin al-Khattab",
      "because it would make no, it would mean nothing. It doesn't matter what color Omar bin Khattab is. It does not matter what colors Safwan bin Umayyah is. These guys are Quraysh elites. It's doesn't, it doesn't their status as guaranteed by their father's tribal identity. So when you, when they're picking on Bilal blackness, they're not picking on him for being black. They're picking them from being an outsider",
      "picking him for being an outsider. And this is another really interesting thing. Bilal had trouble getting married. Guess who had two times as much trouble getting marry? If we go by the number of reports and instances of getting rejected, who had double the amount of time trouble getting marriage than Bilal? Salman al-Fadisi, who was Persian, right? Who's also a former slave who's free just like Bilal, who's also complete outsider in the tribal society.",
      "So it doesn't matter if you're, you know, you could look like Brad Pitt and you'd still have a really hard time getting married because you are an outsider. You have to have the prophet has to come and vouch for you and say like no, no, this system you guys are living in and that you're preaching or that your upholding is wrong. So that for me was really instructive. Sorry go ahead I didn't mean to interrupt you.",
      "So I just would like to highlight what you're saying right now, Mr Brown. And because we or most of us know that in our history and the Muslim history and specifically during the Prophet's time, the skin color as well as the issue about slavery was were not as loaded topics as they are today.",
      "and how did things take a different turn? So I don't know if you can hear, there's like some discussion going on in the house behind me. Maybe I'll try and mute if it gets too loud. But so actually I wanted to say this at the beginning of our talk and I forgot. Like what we're talking about is kind of Islam as a religion, right?",
      "as scripture, normative tradition. Look there if you want to talk about anti-blackness globally and black Muslim community of course these are huge problems like that's a huge I don't wanna... I don' t want there to be any ambiguity that I'm saying that the oh there's not really this problem in Islam has it you know we're in the Muslim community. Of course is a huge problem and I do my best to whatever power I have to deal with it or to combat it but so",
      "But I don't, like that's a separate topic we can discuss another time. Hang on and see what these guys are leaving or not but okay so how did this come about? I think oddly the best description of this actually comes from Bernard Lewis who gets criticized a lot for being an orientalist and things like that. He wrote a book on race and slavery in Islam",
      "slavery in Islam. And he wrote a couple of articles on this and some of his ideas that I don't think are accurate, but I think he was really right about one thing which is at this kind of anti-blackness is not... Anti Africaness contempt for African people is not really something that's present in Arabia at the time of the prophet and it's not present in the prophetic community. When it is like when the prophet says... So to be clear, he goes out when those Meccans say that about Bilal",
      "out the verse comes down that says you know we created you from uh one soul and we made you um tribes and nations to so that you may come to know each other and the most pious in the eyes of god or the best of you in the odds of god most noble views in the eye of god are the most piers right so that the quran actually comes down and condemns that language and the prophet says then he goes up and gives a speech and he says that you know",
      "that human beings were all created from Adam and Adam is created from dirt, right? And he reiterates this in his final sermon at the Farewell Pilgrimage when he says that the Arab has no virtue over the non-Arab. The non-arab has no virtual of an Arab. The red has no version of the black. Black has a virtue for the red except in piety. And then he says in another I think a beautiful Hadith which is that God created Adam from a handful of dirt",
      "colors of people come from that the different colors of the dirt right so it's like the different tones of that dirt or where you get our different colors um so but what he's trying what he and with the quran and the prophet are trying to do is they're trying to completely break any link between people's ethnicity their color",
      "really moving, almost like terrifying scene. The language, the prophet's language is so fierce when the Ansar and the Khazraj start to kind of get in a fight and bring up some of these pre-Islamic tensions they had. And the prophet comes out and he says, how that munten, munten means like putrid. It's just this is disgusting. He came into this as disgusting. It is unclean. And so there's this effort to break",
      "effort to break this link between tribe, ethnicity, religion. Sorry, tribe, ethnic background, skin color and your value in the eyes of God. But what happens is when the Muslims basically leave Arabia they go out of Arabia, they conquer the greater Middle Eastern world, the Greater Middle East Iran, Central Asia, North Africa, Spain right? First of all",
      "First of all, slavery during the time of the prophet had been present throughout Arabia. But Arabia is a very poor place. Actually in a lot of ways it's similar to England or Britain before the Viking Age and like the 600s 700s where you go, you do a raid on another village, you grab a few people they're your slaves but there's not like a slave trade. These are just kind of part of life, it's captives",
      "it's maybe you buy a slave who's been captured from Ethiopia, but it's not really a big part of life. They end up in the charge of the Near Eastern world which has had a robust and extremely important slavery industry for centuries and centuries and that trees right so um you know like a third at various points like a 3rd of the city of Rome is slaves like the population 1 3rd",
      "Andrew Singer,d.B.A.: The slave trade capturing people from areas and bringing into another place where there can be sold at much higher prices is a big part of the big industry in the kind of near Eastern world that Muslims are now in charge up so first of all there's a complete change in how slavery functions. Andrew Singer,D.B.\"The second thing is there's there's A change in How Muslims have experienced African this in a way right, so the the the.",
      "So the Africans that, I mean first of all like Ethiopians that are present in Arabia at the time of the prophet and kind of before the prophet. They're there some of them are slaves, some of then are there as merchants. There's instances you know in the life of the Prophet where there's delegations of Ethiopian come to Medina. And the Prophet himself often uses words that are Ethiopian words.",
      "a Guz dictionary, you can find basically that same word. So Ethiopia is this place across the Red Sea. They respect it, these people are knowledgeable. Remember, the Muslims go there as their first place of seeking refuge and they know that the king there is going to treat them justly. These are not like people that they have contempt for. These were people who were their peers and also culturally familiar to them. Old Ethiopian",
      "is basically as different from Arabic, as let's say Aramaic was the language that was spoken in Palestine or Syria was from Arabic. So they're like culturally very close to these people but when Muslims are now in this bigger world of trade and slave trade and economy",
      "like East Africa, sort of Kenya, Tanzania area. They would call them Zange. Africans being brought from across the Sahara, from what we think of now as like say Chad, Niger and South there up to places like Tunis, Cairo later on becomes Cairo. And these are people from another universe to them. They're not people who are... they're exotic.",
      "they're getting slaves from India and from Persian lands, and from Turkic lands, And from Slavic lands. So what you see in Islamic civilization is that slavery is racialized but it's racialized in a lot of different ways. In America, slavery and blackness and freedom and whiteness are",
      "inextricably linked. Whiteness is defined as being free and not being Black, being Black is defined below white and slave or enslaveable. That's why I think it's funny when people talk about White nationalists. We can talk about white culture. I don't think there's a way to talk about",
      "racism. I just don't think it's, like, I wish they were possible. But that's not the case in Islamic civilization because there what you have is slaves could look like anybody, right? Most slaves in Islamic Civilization probably we don't know exactly but most are probably Slavic, which would mean something from Europe or Turkic and of course there's a lot of African slaves as well",
      "But it's there. Yeah, out. You mentioned in your essay around the Hadiths and the fact that those that do talk about blackness in a negative way like saying that the black faces disfigured or you know if there is a person is stupid or lazy these negative connotations that we in America are used to",
      "in terms of it being racialized specifically in that way. But you say that some of those hadiths are considered forgeries. Yeah, I mean they're all forgeries by definition because Muslim scholars say that you cannot have a hadith that insults an entire ethnicity. It just doesn't mean...it's not possible for the prophet to say that because it's just grotesquely inaccurate right? So",
      "So when you look at, well see, why do we find these hadiths in hadith books? Well, you don't find them in the main hadith book. You find them kind of totally uncritical books of hadith they're just gathering a bunch of material and you find them tragically in the works of Muslim scholars where there'll be like oh, look how smart this guy is. I mean, there's this sort of shameful episode. I don't think it actually happened first of all",
      "happened, first of all. I don't think it occurred but I'll tell the story right so Imam Shafi is allegedly in a mosque and this kind of African slave or African comes in and sort of lies down and then leaves and this other guy comes in he's looking around and Shafie says okay you're looking for this black slave right? And he says",
      "He said, he's in jail. Go look in the jail. And then the guy says, how did you? He goes to the jail, he finds him there, he comes back and says, Imam Shafiq, how do you know that? He says well, the Prophet had said that black Africans when they're hungry, they steal and when they are full, they fornicate. So either he is going to steal or he is gonna fornicates and end up in jail Now first of all, that's not Hadith of the Prophet it's complete forgery and many Muslim scholars have said that The second thing is I don't think this story with Imam Shafaq",
      "with Amman Ashafi actually took place because our chains of transmission for that story are either terrible or unidentifiable. So I don't think it happened, but here's the problem. It appears in books about like the virtues of Amman Ashafi and like oh look how clever he was in this situation. So whatever... I can say with confidence that the prophet didn't say that. I can stay with confidence",
      "we know for sure that this is in a book written by, several books written by prominent Muslim scholars. And the problem is that anti-Black sentiment is pervasive, right? I mean it affects people who are otherwise intelligent and sensible and morally acute people. So you're saying then that the theology is sound obviously",
      "obviously, because the prophet would not have said that. We know that a law would not sanction that and so we have to be able to differentiate between the flaws of individuals and people which unfortunately permeates into society at times and the chorus to present day were not exempt. We still have the same flaws.",
      "I always remind students, my Muslim students and Muslims is that in Islamic history sometimes some people have crazy ideas. Sometimes a lot of people have ideas but there are always voices and they're usually really authoritative voices like I don't mean some marginal scholar. I mean some senior respected scholar who is out there calling BS",
      "on whatever issue you think of, like whatever problem you have, whatever issue your concerned about. I can just inductively from my experience say that there is always a voice making that same point right? And so people were saying this even scholar who's essentially in the same time period as Imam Shafi when someone brings up like that kind of Hadith",
      "that kind of Hadith to him about the thought of the black slave. He says, whoever narrates this, they're not reliable. Just discount them immediately. So they are very aware. Even things like when we talk about in marriages or suitable partners for Muslims and sometimes Muslim scholars will let's say North Africa",
      "go down like some racial rabbit holes on this stuff. But not just about African people, but also about white people. So they'll say that in Maliki law you'll see that one of the things that makes a woman kind of undesirable would be that she's black or dark skinned, but it's also that she is like a convert, like a Persian or European convert to Islam or something. Both ways are impugnable or seen as undesirable.",
      "But then you'll see big Maliki scholars at the same time saying, no, this stuff is all nonsense. This is all non-sense. The prophet says Muslims their blood is all equal. You always have to look for but I know that you will always find these voices when one kind of trend starts to go",
      "David Koffman, Ph.D.: will be there to call those people out and sort of call them back and the thing I would say, I want to make sure I mentioned this before you know when whenever you guys cut me off but. David Kopfman, ph.D., politely obviously i'm not saying you're going to be rude, but you also have stuff to do so that the. David Gellman, PH.D.- This story of that the kind of slave saints who dies and then the blackness disappears is this is.",
      "I think this is one of the hardest things for us to, by us I mean like an American audience that's sort of very naturally reading a lot of these things with a sensitivity towards what we know how we know language is used in our own society. So you kind of have to step outside our assumptions and step into the assumptions of someone like Malik Bindinar. And you can find stories like this",
      "stories like this in Rumi's Masnavi, lots of Sufi really wonderful works of great mystics like Rumi or you know etc. In the same story a black saint who is just immensely respected for their piety, they're like closeness to God then something happens and the blackness leaves them but it doesn't say they became white, it doesn t say they look",
      "you know look like Max von Sydow in greatest story ever told or something he was Swedish by the way, the late Max von Sidow. It says that his face became like the moon and here you really have to understand the kind of cosmology and the language that's going on in the Sufi tradition right so the goal of the Sufis path is to become close to God",
      "in a physical sense to rise out of this world, to rise up towards the heavens, towards the divine. And the symbol of that, sort of the barrier between our earthly world and the world of reality is the moon. And that's true it comes from neoplatonism, you have the sublunary world like the moon is the kind of edge of this word in a way.",
      "an image of beauty in Arabic poetry. So the prophet's face is like the moon over and over again, you see this in praise poetry by the prophet his faces, the moon, his faces the sun, his face as the moon it's like going like the Moon. And that's both because the moon is beautiful but also because he is the best of creation right? He's the closest you can get to the closeness to God. The closest you",
      "is becoming like the moon they're not becoming white like you know jonathan brown or david bowie or something like that right they're becoming on they're going up towards quote they're they're coming close to god right they are leaving the kind of dirty and messed-up earthly world with all its constraints and limitations. And then this is the other thing that's really important in that language if you're trying",
      "transcending the earthly world and attaining kind of almost enlightenment, right? What stands in for the human being? The black slave. Because not only is the black slave seen as this sort of lowest rung on the social ladder, a slave but... And by the way, how does Sufis always talk about human beings? They always talk with them as slaves of God just like the Quran and the New Testament,",
      "human beings the slaves of god but this is especially pronounced in the sufi tradition where the sufis wants to be the muslim who's going above and beyond the regular requirements of the sharia just to do to attain true closeness to god is trying to become the most devoted slave of god right the one who's freed by in their in becoming a total slave of God you become free right now then why blackness because",
      "because what is Adam? That's my question, why blackness. What does Adam mean? Adam means dark, very dark. Uduma means very dark or black, right? So Adam is created from dirt. And actually my kid just asked me this the other day. He was like, why are black people not white? And so that's actually an interesting question except it should be the other way. It says, why white people not black and both kind of in terms",
      "in terms of our kind of sacred narrative of humanity, where humans come from Adam. So Adam is created dark. That is the natural state of man. The natural state that human being is this dark-skinned creature of the earth. And so when a dark skinned creature of Earth escapes like transcends the world or forms and moves towards God, towards the moon, right?",
      "That is the story of a saint, of a wali. And then to my kid I explained also why is it that white people with skin? It's because a bunch of human beings kept walking north because they were following some woolly mammoth. I don't know what they were doing. They kept walking North and if you have a lot of melanin in your skin well first you're not gonna get sunburned but if you don't have that much sunlight and you need to synthesize vitamin D you're",
      "Sure enough, environmentally lighter and lighter until you get pasty white people. It's tough when you read that story it's really hard for us to say come on this is just anti-black I mean give me a break Professor Brown stop pushing it but look are we saying that Malik bin Dinar literally bought his slave so he could",
      "could make himself the servant of that slave. So let's give this guy the charity, that he's not some kind of callous bias racist person who can't see beyond skin color. So lets give him that charity I think he deserves it but let's also take his language seriously when he says the blackness left his face and his face became like the moon. Let's take that seriously but he doesn't mean he stopped being bad Black because Black people are bad or ugly and unattractive. It's he stopped",
      "stopped, he stopped being human. He stopped being tied to this world and his sort of journey towards God was completed. Well that seems like an excellent place for us to start to wrap up. I'm going to give Heba the opportunity to do that and I say Dr. Brown, this has just been absolutely intriguing and excellent. I don't want to say conversation because it's more like an education",
      "an education about some of these different components that a lot of us are not familiar with so have a i'm gonna pass it on to you oh thank you so much dr brown uh i am sure that our audience the students at least um are benefiting or will benefit from this session as much",
      "and amazing discussion. So thank you so much, and I really hope that we can have another session in the future with you about this particular topic because it's very loaded, and um I believe there are lots and lots of other topics that intersects with this one that we haven't been like knocking on their doors yet. So, thank you",
      "It's my pleasure to, you know, like I, you anything I study it's usually because I have these questions right so i mean for me this was a lot of it was about kind of trying to answer these questions myself and so if it's useful for other people that makes me happy. You know, I also try to be really honest about this stuff and not you know not kind of fudge things or cherry pick. So yeah I think that's important and",
      "I'm always available if you or your students have questions. They can email me and look up my email. If I don't reply within a few days, just email me again. If i don't apply, email me. Again, I won't get bothered it just means that I miss emails. Thank you so much and we'll definitely share your email with students and we're going to share this also as asynchronous recording. Students are really excited. We're hoping that they will use the different highlights",
      "out of these different discussions that we're having and have their own discussion because there are things that students like you said don't fudge, don't not deal with what is really bothering you. Let's get into the history let's see what does a hadith say? What's what is the actual religion as opposed to societal biases and um you know racialized issues um there's just a lot",
      "I'm sorry, I just haven't. I feel like I've been irresponsible because I didn't explain the... And maybe you can edit this or slice it in or not. I don't know. But the incidents where the Prophet gave the two black slaves for the one slave, I wanted to explain this but I didn t do it. One of things that's really important to keep in mind is that the way that especially in the early Islamic period people actually throughout Islamic history thought about slaves was they associated",
      "they associated certain ethnicities or backgrounds with certain skills. Now, sometimes this was like very reasonable. So they would associate like young Turkish men with really good riders, the course riders who knew how to do mounted archery. And so if you were looking to build an army or a bodyguard, you would buy one of these bunch of these guys. Sometimes it was just sort of silly stereotypes, like Greeks are really trustworthy and good accountants. It's just weird things like that. Some",
      "Islamic period, you see this. It's a practical aspect, right? So Malik in his Muwatta, so he's writing essentially the third or fourth generation of Muslims. And he talks about how it's okay to trade by one Arab slave for two or more Ethiopian slaves or some other group that don't know Arabic and don't have commercial experience.",
      "Like one guy who speaks Arabic and has commercial experience, you can trade for two, let's say Ethiopians. But he says Ethiopias who don't speak Arabic and who don' have commercial experience. So think about like the world of the Middle East in the early Islamic period to where Muslims oriented like they're oriented towards the Mediterranean, Persia, North Africa, right? Kind of Ethiopia and that world is sort of it's like even Arabia is kind of marginal place by that time for them, right.",
      "they want people who are going to be able to like, one of the reasons people bought slaves is actually to make them commercial agents. Have them run your business for you so go like we need someone who can speak Arabic, speak Aramaic, speak Persian, who can go out do a bunch of trading come back and bring the caravan back right? So that person is gonna be more valuable than somebody from Ethiopia who doesn't know Arabic. We have no idea what their background is",
      "So it was, but you see this very clear association of background and like geographic and cultural origin with the skills they have. And it's really interesting that Jahid, the famous Mohteselite kind of literatura dies in I think 868. He says people like to make fun of Africans and Indians and they say they're stupid.",
      "they have super advanced mathematics. Those guys aren't the ones who are being brought to us, right? So it is a point he's making is like don't judge these other cultures by the people that you encounter because the people get captured on the coast of Sindh or inland in what's now Kenya or something, there might just be some guys like farmers out farming and suddenly they get grabbed by raiders or something.",
      "Here you are like an educated person judging these people who were in no way necessarily any representation of the world that they come from. And we know, because we know these places have super advanced sciences. So it was a very interesting thing to think about this idea of why somebody whose one race quote unquote is more valuable than another race. It's not necessarily cause white people are better than black people or something like that. It is because there's a lot of other assumptions sometimes sound assumptions",
      "sound assumptions about what type of skills that person is going to bring. So I'm sorry to like take that last section, but I want to be responsible and to explain that. Yeah. Well, there's so much to explain and we really appreciate the fact that you brought up that point because I think that even when students listen to this conversation they're gonna have plenty of questions. That's what we do. We have to analyze and try to figure it out make sense of what we already know",
      "what we already know and then go in deep, deep and learn new information. So but thank you so much Dr. Browne and may Allah bless you. We're going to- And you too as well. I was always talking to you, hope I get to meet you in person. Yes me too. I assimilate them. I'm sorry I got you. So Heba that was just a phenomenal discussion.",
      "So much. What do you think? I know we're well over, you know, we told students we were going to be just like half an hour, 45 minutes but Dr. Brown had so much to give. So we're asking for forgiveness and we hope that you enjoy this program. Yes, I did. And I honestly didn't want it to end because there are lots and lots of other things",
      "important and very crucial to this topic as well. And we can handle this topic, the racial justice topic and race in Islam from different angles. So as he mentioned so like from what he said we could definitely just take this whole discussion",
      "a huge difference throughout history in shaping our own understanding of different concepts and different values. That's one angle to take this topic from, there is another angle that has to do with culture and society and sociology. Another aspect we can discuss definitely is as well psychology and the psychology of the Muslims at the time of the Prophet",
      "and the psychology of Muslims living now at different places, at different societies. And how this weighs in as well. So there are lots and lots of things but I'm really glad that we had Dr Browne as one of our guests today. Yes so signing off just know that we have several other sessions in our series. We have been enjoying it continue to look for",
      "the information on our Center for Religious and Spiritual Life Facebook page, as well as sending it directly to those that are on the Smith campus and throughout. So may Allah bless everyone. We're going to be signing off. As-salamu alaykum."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Islam 201- Book Review_ _M_2LNCbOBeuMI&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748674174.opus",
    "text": [
      "I think this is going to get started. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Alhamdulillah, wa ala alaykum salatu wassalamu ala sayyidina Muhammad wa alaa alihi wa sahabihi ajma'in. Bismillahi r-Rahmani r- Raheem. Alhumdulillahi Rabbil Aalameen. As-Salaamu Alaikum Wa Rahmatullahi Ta'ala Wa Barakatuhu",
      "So inshallah, we're going to talk about this book. It's published in let's see 2014 so it's not hot off the presses but a very interesting book written by Dr. Jonathan Brown and I just wanted to see has anybody read this book before?",
      "or no? Okay, good. If you have it can contribute to the discussion inshallah. Essentially the book is named this because there is an earlier book by a scholar of Christianity, a religious scholar named Bart Ehrman, very famous book called Misquoting Jesus and so I think when Dr. Brown was thinking about",
      "play off of that title. So Dr. Brown, if anybody's not familiar with him he is a professor at Georgetown University in Islamic Studies and they have a center called Muslim Christian Understanding in Georgetown which he also connected with that school as well. Before I go into the details of the book to understand",
      "broadly speaking, what he was trying to attempt and to give you a bit of a summary as to what was the thought process behind this book. When you go into the details sometimes we get lost in that but essentially my summary of the book is that he was",
      "that there is a great Islamic tradition, legal tradition and scholarly tradition going back to the time of the Prophet. And a lot of that was created in a different context. And then what happened is when we had the rise",
      "and you had essentially a Muslim world being taken over both physically but also intellectually to the point that a lot of the state was destroyed. There was a rise of nationalism, rise of constitutionalism. You had Islamic law replaced by French and English law. And so there were these challenges",
      "and which we are facing still, and will continue to face. And the challenge that he felt the need to address here was this idea about there's an authenticity to the earlier tradition that Muslims of course want to remain connected to. There is a search for truth, which everybody is...that it should be their ultimate objective.",
      "modern realities. That's always the nature of life, you have a new reality and you have to adapt to it in any situation. And then you have new modern ideas that you have somehow deal with while remaining true to what Islam is all about. In fact, a lot of the book he talks about how Muslims themselves, scholars dealt with this issue",
      "and how they struggled with different things, and what were their different solutions to the problems that they saw. And ultimately, the nature of a book like this is that this is not Islamic meant for an Islamic audience that we need to call for action or something like this. This is an academic, even though Dr. Brown is a Muslim, in these type of books you don't get",
      "You don't get a prescription like this is what you need to do, this is the problem. You get sort of a hint from the author kind of what they think and if you had to squint you would see I think this is he's talking about as a solution but that's not the nature of academic texts so of this type. So take that bear that in mind. Any questions on that before we get started?",
      "Yeah, he's Muslim. I mean, he converted to Islam, I believe many years ago and He's now written you know several different books on Islam This was probably his most famous in earliest one So there is a new one I think it's called Islam and blackness which I haven't read yet but supposedly",
      "supposedly is very interesting. So at any rate, he uses the persona of this great scholar Shah Waliullah Dahlavi. Shah Walyullah from Delhi. Yeah, you know Shah Wallyullah? Is that what you're saying? Yes yeah so of course one of the most famous scholars period in Islam but",
      "But one of the interesting things about him was he studied in Hanafi doctrine. And then, he spent a lot of time learning the and kind of tried to integrate some of the ideas. In fact, he criticized a lot somethings that we did in India. It was all India then but now India-Pakistan you could say. And he wrote a book.",
      "love and he was trying to have some justice between these different reasons for difference so he's trying to be fair that we need to be fear in essence to understand the different schools of thought and then each one has some evidence for their position but anyway his character in this book is that he's basically",
      "It uses his example many times and follows him. But it's not really about him, it's about using him as a kind of way to personify the book, really. Otherwise it would be very dry. So he uses him as character. So first of all, there is tension between the idea that we need to preserve truth but at the same time you know the words of Allah they require human mind to understand them",
      "them. In other words, the scholars always said this, you know, either you learn by reading and learning information or you get divine inspiration. In another word, the prophets they get divine inspirations it's a kind of teaching which is not available to the rest of us. The rest of we have to read books and we have struggle with the words and try to understand the meaning what the person was trying to say",
      "So there's always this tension between these two things. And he said the slaves of God can do deeds that, and this is basically the broad category of Sharia which is that the servants of Allah can do deed that please Allah they can do deeds that displease Allah and then they have deeds that neither cause anger nor approval which is called Mubah",
      "So Dr. Brown says that the Quran is the epicenter of the Islamic movement, but it's not a lengthy book and only a fraction of the book actually has what we call, the legislative. Whereas the Sunnah is quite a bit broader. It has a lot more to it",
      "we as Muslims, you know how we need to implement Islam. And the Sunnah is he describes it Quran's message implemented in one time and place by the living example of the infallible messenger of God. And he said how the Sunna was communicated and implemented would be the central cause of diversity in Islam. So this is a critical point",
      "This is a critical point. The Sunnah is not the Ahadith. You know, the Sunnah Is the practice of the Prophet. How do we understand the practice? Some of it comes through the reports about how did the Prophet practice. Some of them come through in those early scholars who had directly learned from the Messenger",
      "learned from the Messenger of Allah. And we'll go into detail, but there was a tradition that some of the early cities they had very prominent companions who, that they learn directly from the Prophet. They were scholars of Islam because not all companions were scholars. And they set up institutions of learning in these different cities like Kufa and Basra",
      "and Basra, in Damascus, in Cairo, in Mecca, Medina. And those institutions were led by those Sahaba but they... By them people learned the Sunnah as well. So that was another way of learning the Sunna. So sometimes Sunna is a term we use it's obviously some of the scholars of fiqh say its the actions",
      "Prophet and his approval or the thing that he did not comment on, and he saw it. So his acceptance in other words. And in fact later scholars said about the Prophet that he is the possessor of the two revelations because he had the Quran and the Sunnah, the two Revelations from Allah.",
      "because they think of the Quran as the sole scripture that the Muslims follow, when in fact it is only two of the sources that we follow. So there's a Quran and the Sunnah are the two sources but also we use our reason because our reason is used to interpret how these things go together. Okay so one of the problems",
      "with understanding what is the Sunnah, is that very soon after the death of the Prophet, there started to be a lot of conflict in the Muslim Ummah. And in fact, a political division between the Umayyad dynasty, the Abbasid dynasty and the followers of proto-Shia as they would call it or Ahlul Bayt",
      "However you want to determine, to call them. Because earlier on they were not really what we would know now today as Shia. They were called the scholars say proto-Shia. The earlier maybe partisans of Ali. Anyway this dispute without a doubt led to forgeries of Hadith by the thousands. There's people in fact some of these",
      "In fact, some of them encouraged hadith fabrication to detract from the other group. So to understand what is the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ became difficult. For example he gives this example of this hadith that's fabricated but it says about the founding of Baghdad and it said the people who supported the Abbasid they gave this hadit to the Prophet what they reported to have said. This was fabricated.",
      "planted like an iron stake in the sand. I'm sorry, it would be planted like a iron stake and the people that were against Abbasid they said the actual hadith is that it will be planted as an iron steak in sand so it will sink. So in other words both ways people fabricated the same hadith to try to prove their point.",
      "their challenge was we don't want to be caught up in politics. We don't wanna support that party or that party, why? Because each one forces you to do certain things. Maybe compromise your values and your principles. Their ultimate goal at that time is preservation of deen. This is the main thing expansion of deem because the expansion",
      "was very rapid and the people that knew what Islam was, were very small. So they had to expand the kind of people who knew what islam was and that was really their primary objective so in every city there was one scholar that emerged in Basra there was Hassan al-Basri There was And he was raised in Medina in the household of one of the Prophet's widows",
      "and he learned from Ali ibn Abd al-Talib, Anas bin Malik and other companions. So in Basra there was Hassan al-Basri, in Kufa... Who is in Kofa? I can use this as an example. Anybody want to make it interactive? Who was the companion who was identified with the city of Kufah anyway? Abdullah ibn Mas'ud. He was established in Kulfa. And for example for him we have the chain",
      "chain to Imam Abu Hanifa, it goes from Abdullah ibn Mas'ud to Alqama ibn Qais to Ibrahim al-Nakhi to Hamad ibn Sulaiman to Imam Abul Hanifa. So that is like the chain and of course Abdullah ibin Mas'ood comes trained by the Prophet. And you know the sources for Abu Hanifah so use this",
      "so use this as an example for him when he was establishing his madhab the Quran he knew of course and the hadith he knew were reliable so who would he rely on for a hadith? He would rely on the narrations from Abdullah ibn Masud and all the companions of Kufa. So in other words, from his town why does he need to venture outside?",
      "not just any companion, one of the most learned in the Quran and the hadith, the companion to the Prophet ﷺ. So he taught them what was Islam. He gives an example of niyyah and wudu. He said it's not required because the Quran never mentioned it as a requirement. And he knew this hadith innama al-amalu binniyat. This is a famous hadith that deeds are by intentions.",
      "So this is why on this basis he said that intention is not required in wudu. Meaning, if you jump into the ocean and you didn't think to make wudhu intention when you come out, you're soaked and you've washed everything. If you didn' have intention it still counts for you as wudh according to the madhhab. Another example of a Hanafi ruling",
      "a thief who stole bread from a baker be punished so the Quran says to cut the hand of the thief right sorry so and but Hamad we said we already heard about Hamad Suleiman from Ibrahim Anna hi he said that the Prophet sallallaahu alaihi wasalam only ordered the HUD's",
      "greater than 10 silver coins. And then there was a hadith famous in Kufa, it said there is no amputation for stealing fruit of a palm tree or its heart and so he developed an analogy. He said that the reason for not amputating for fruit is that it's perishable meaning that anything that's perish able similarly will not be eligible",
      "of Qiyas, analogical reasoning. Similar property. So Qiyasa itself was developed and that was to extend the ruling from one situation to another based on a shared legal cause an illa. And the problem was of course and it remains is that the Quran and the hadith they rarely explain the legal ruling behind or reasoning behind a ruling",
      "ruling. So it's often hard to agree on what is the illa, what is actually legal reason for a rule. For example that same example, the date palms we talked about it right? Why do you not cut the hands according to Abu Hanifa because the date is perishable but according to others they said this hadith the reason why its there is because date palms in Medina were considered semi public property",
      "meaning they're not belonging to anyone. They're like, you know, if you go to... You see sometimes pictures of date palms in the middle of the highway, and if you take that date from there it's not really private property so that's why nobody allowed the cutting of the hand for that. So again, the exact same hadith, the exactly same idea but two different principles developed from it because two different understandings",
      "that hadith. So in fact, this is one of the main problems with Qiyas for the scholars. And in fact there may be no reason given for a ruling such as in worship action so he goes into the example of pork. Pork is forbidden and the Quran's called rijs it's filth The Prophet instructed Muslims to wash a dish",
      "out of seven times. So does it mean that the dog is also rijs? Is he also filth, just like the pig? By analogy Abu Hanifas concluded that he was also an unclean animal but Imam Malik disagreed with this idea because he said the Prophet sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam allowed use of dogs in hunting and herding",
      "to kill an animal and bring it to you, how can your food be unclean? So he actually concluded that washing of the plate, he didn't say had any reason. It's meaning you just do it because that's what you were commanded to do. But he said there is no, it doesn't imply that the dog is unclean. You obey it without rationalization. The scholars also developed this technique called",
      "technique called istihsan, and it means seeking the best. Because sometimes qiyas led to something unjust or harmful. So this is an example given in this book, the selling of breast milk. Previously they did qiyass about this topic, and they forbade the selling",
      "leave the body they become impure and impure substances cannot be sold also humans cannot sell parts of their bodies you know like and so by analogy they could not sell milk but the Quran allows the consumption of pork and carrion in necessity and so if you have an infant who needs to drink breastmilk",
      "produce enough breast milk, then it becomes a necessity. So in that case selling of breast milk can be allowed on that basis so this is the example of istihsan where there's an analogical reason earlier but you overrule it from different principle that higher principal. The problem of course",
      "It suggests that you have some notion of equity and justice outside of the Qur'an and Sunnah. Meaning, that you are coming with your own idea of what it means to be just and you're bringing that to the text. The point of Qiyas in the first place is an analogy is that you're extending an original ruling to a new ruling because its similar. In other words, you're following the Qur-an and sunnah and you are trying to follow it more perfectly",
      "When you have an outside standard of what is fair and you try to apply it to the Qur'an and Sunnah, then by necessity your view of fairness may be different from somebody else's. And so what they thought was fair a thousand years ago maybe today we look at it and say well I don't agree with that principle. So in fact it adapts something from your culture, your upbringing, your society and puts it into the Sharia itself.",
      "So he was a servant, but also a learned scholar as well. And he collected hadith from Zuhri. Zuhr was the famous early Hadith collector and he compiled all of that into a very famous book Al-Muwatta which means in Arabic The Path That Is Well Trodden Of which there are 1800 reports in Al- Muwatta 527 are hadith 613 are rulings made by companions",
      "made by companions, and 285 are rulings by the tabi'in, the successors of the companions. And the rest are Malik's own opinions. So we know that he believed that the action of the people of Medina just like what did we learn from Abu Hanifa, he believed in the practice of the",
      "he learned and believed that had a special standard. So same thing Imam Malik believed in the practice of the people of Medina, why? He said that Islamic state started in Medina many of the Khulafa Rashidun they were based in Medinah so the practice at the Medinans should have a higher value it should be something you should rely on as maybe reflecting the Sunnah of the Prophet.",
      "So I'll give you an example of where he applied this, and this is in the book. He heard a hadith from Nafi that a buyer and seller can rescind the sale. So if you're buying or selling something, you can take it back until you part company. So when you're separated from each other, whatever that means, part company, then the sale is final.",
      "He didn't apply it. He also pioneered a sort of form of thinking called which means blocking the means, so it means prohibiting something legal if it was like a slippery slope to something illegal. So an example of that is what's called the double sale. Double sale is very complicated, so hopefully I will explain it and anybody who doesn't understand ask me question.",
      "you don't have the money, it's $100. So you buy it on credit from somebody, the seller for $100 but you say I'm going to pay you $125 I don't know how much that is. I don' t have a hundred dollars. I'm gonna pay you 125 dollars in one year so he has a year to pay 125 dollars for this item that he bought",
      "The seller buys back the cloth for $100. So when I have the product, I can resell it right? I don't have any limitation on myself so I bought it for 125 from this person. I'm gonna pay him 125 in one year. He buys it back for me for 100. So what do I owe him? You know, $25 right? An extra $25.",
      "basically like he's lent you $25, right? Because you bought it for 100 and you sold it back. Sorry, you bought if for 125, you sold i back for 100 to the same person you bought from but you have to pay him the 125 in a year so it's basically like they gave you that $25. It's like a credit transaction. Now every part of this transaction is legal",
      "is legal. There's no part of this transaction which is Islamically forbidden, meaning you can buy something, you can pay for it later, you know, all of this and once you have the product you can sell it but Malik when he looked at this transaction said that this was kind of like a form of interest. You're borrowing money and paying more when you give it back even though there's a product in between. In fact",
      "This kind of double sale became the basis of Islamic finance. They use this double sale, all of the Islamic finance and in fact what they do is they have platinum as a product and instantaneously change back and forth to platinum as transaction but Imam Malik forbade through this example of Sadat Dara'i so he wanted to block the means to interest",
      "But other schools allowed it. So that's just an example Any questions about that? Yeah, go ahead Yes because he thought it will lead to interest transaction basically Yeah, because every other part of the transaction was allowable yeah Because you can buy and you can say I'm going to pay you in the future",
      "You can sell whatever you bought for less than you bought it. There's no problem for that. And so, that's basically the analysis but it did become kind of like the basis of Islamic banking and finance. Yes. Yeah, so there are differences in the schools. Not all of them had the same reasoning in this regard. So yeah go ahead.",
      "No, they use different things which is you know and different kinds of contractual obligations. But this is Islamic banking in the sense that where they give you like you put it in Malaysia and Bahrain they have these Islamic banks. It's a different kind of part of that banking system where they actually return on your money",
      "and things of this nature. The one we're dealing with is not that. We deal with these local companies, they have Islamically sanctioned kind of transaction which is either Musharraqa or I'm forgetting on the name of the other one, either a partnership or sharing profits yeah, the other ones so you know the transaction in those cases are different. I don't want to go into it, I'm not an Islamic finance expert but it's not to do with this",
      "What is the equivalent of this term in Islamic terms for this transaction? Double sale. Do you know Arabic terms?",
      "listed I can check it on for you yeah so that was just a little bit about the scholars and what they were struggling with now the second part was that as this is particularly true during the Abbasid period Muslims they very much were hit with Greek logic Greek sciences because as",
      "to a certain form of thinking, Aristotle, Aristotelian logic or Plato's logic. And when they saw that, they also saw for example, the logic of the Hindus as well then they had to figure out how are we going to defend Islam using that system? So and Muslims struggle always with trying",
      "struggle always with two things in the Quran one is that we're encouraged to use our reason and The second were cautioned about trusting too much in our reason, you know because everybody's reason can be faulty as well but you know But we are encouraged to reuse our reason as well. So there's a little bit of attention between those two things and What they did with reason was their old form of reasoning They took it and reintegrated it different way through",
      "learning there's always a course on logic and where does the logic it's coming from this kind of interaction with Aristotelian ideas so this is nothing that has changed actually. So we had this group at that time called Mu'tazila, Mu'tazzila were from Ahlus Sunnah but they're called Mu'atazila because they used to study with Hassan al-Basri",
      "Mu'tazila means to withdrew. He withdrew from the halaqa of Hasan al-Basri because he disavowed some of their ideas. This is why they were called Mu'tazzila. But they tried to contend with Aristotle, and he said there cannot be any belief in the unity of God except by admitting that he is of a single substance without any plurality of elements. So I'm going to kind of summarize this.",
      "and it could go on and on. It's the courses on these kinds of things, but in essence you know the Quran talks about Allah being on his throne and then we have hadith where Allah descends at certain times, descends and there is movement and then We have the throne and we have the hand of Allah. These are things that Muslims when they saw Aristotelian logic",
      "they said that if something has motion, meaning it moves, it means it changes. And anything that changes cannot be eternal. So they had to explain or deal with this kind of logic and hence now we have the... If you go to any Aqidah class especially the ones that are more Ashari in nature, they will say that you know,",
      "these things, meaning the hand of Allah means his power not meaning that he has a hand but it's about his power, his authority and throne of Allah doesn't mean there is a real throne it means it's dominion of Allah so in other words they took this reasoning and they said yes this makes some sense so we need to explain who is Allah what is Allah by",
      "by using the Quran and also logic, this kind of logic. So it became integrated. And originally the people that were involved with this were the Mu'tazila they were the first to engage in that. Also if you technically the Ibadi also were very heavily involved in this but Ibadi probably I don't know who has interaction with Ibadis? Nobody yeah probably no Ibadies that much but anyway",
      "Anyway, so they developed this idea that God is single, unified and just. This is the Motazila idea. And his justice is what was their main purpose. They said that he only asks of human beings what is fair. And man can grasp objective realities of right and wrong. So there were saying that you have a mind intellect, you know what is right or wrong",
      "And if something is asked that is unjust, then you know it. And then you can determine that. So I'll give you some examples of some of these things. So there's examples of Allah coming in ranks of angels. Meaning he's with the angels and coming with them. And they said this is an allusion to signs of his power.",
      "in the last third of the night. And they rejected this hadith because it indicates that Allah is moving, you know? So they also use reason to reject a hadith as well. There's a famous hadith where Musa he's arguing with Adam. And Musa is confronting Adam and said, You've condemned your descendants to earth!",
      "He's saying it's not fair to blame him because it was God's ordained fate. It was the qadr of Allah and so in the hadith, he says Adam beat Musa in that argument And the Mu'tazila rejected this hadith because they said it indicates that Because we have free will and it means that one cannot One is escaping free will by just saying it as a qadar of Allah Meaning they didn't really rejected it because what is Adam saying?",
      "He's saying that it was the Qadr of Allah, I couldn't escape it. We said no this is unjust you know human beings have their own free will This is what Allah gave them and so it'd be unjust to say You're punished just because you it's the qadr anyway. That was their interpretation of that I Don't want to get caught up on it because not really the main purpose of the book but anybody wanted to add anything to that or Correct anything",
      "Yeah. Yeah, so and this is about a larger issue but So we of course have the position which is basically that you accept all these things without explanation as they say. You don't know what it means",
      "what it means. You don't need to speculate what it mean and nobody will really know what these things mean, we just accept them. We accept there is a Throne of Allah, we don't know what that is, we dont know what the hand of Allah is, its not obviously human hand but whatever it means we don' t know it.",
      "Right, exactly. Exactly, so... Yeah. So the brother is again saying the same thing which is basically that he's given an example of the clock and the hand of a clock it's not a human hand but it's the same word so in other words it's",
      "without asking what it is, as they would say. Yeah right and then they don't intend anything except that Allah intends it for them yeah so yeah I mean these are things of course I don't mean to present any one opinion I'm just trying",
      "that the Muslim ummah really, you know engaged with and struggled with and the scholars struggle with. And like I said most of these ideas even though they say the Mu'tazila are defeated, most of those ideas are part of their standard curriculum of most Islamic schools it's not like these have gone away in fact.",
      "Quran is created. Yeah, uncreated word of Allah. That's what the aqidah is. But there's more detail to it. I don't want to get bogged down into it but in fact some people if you go into it they said anyway I'm not going to get stuck in that topic but I will just say I was listening",
      "a scholar from the UK, Akram Nadawi. And he did have a very long topic about it and he said in fact we say that they rejected this idea but in fact they kept it in a different way so So he said you know and I didn't investigate it too much because obviously when you get into Aqidah issues it never benefits you too much you get stuck in them",
      "in them, and in my opinion anyway. So we had these two scholars Imam Abu Hanifa and Imam Malik then we have Imam Shafi'i, Imam Shafa Alhamdulillah he was upset by the idea that every area has its own Hadith you know? We have Kufa here, we have Medina here,",
      "He said there needs to be some kind of overarching ideology that everyone can tie onto. And in fact, this is when Ahl al-Sunnah wal Jama'ah is actually forged because he said the hadith can specify the Quran such as in case of punishing a thief. The hadiths can detail what is vague in the Quran, such as how to pray. The Hadith can add new rules such as this hadith about you cannot take a woman and her aunt",
      "So again, this is a new rule that is in the hadith not in the Quran And he was trying to erase regional boundaries to create a common language You know in science you need a common Language. You can't have a science in China and a science and England and this is not how science works and it's the same thing that He was trying say and if in the Resala Of Imam Shafi'i you see he's clearly going through one step by step What are their sources of law? He says the Quran and the reliable Hadith",
      "reliable hadith and the reliability of hadith is not dependent on regional authorities or practices so this is when at the same time as him also rises the practice of isnad. And as a scholar said, at that time isnad is from the deen without the isnad there's no deen. So the actual chain of the hadiths meaning where we identify who reported this hadith",
      "to who, to the Prophet Sallallaahu Alaihi Wasallam. That chain is important and it's critical and that is the thing we need to harp on more than the actual companions that we learned the sunnah from. And he favored a type of qiyas which is called Qiyas Jalli. It's a manifest analogy meaning that a factor in one case",
      "you extend to another case which is extreme. So the example that Dr. Brown gives is of women leading men in prayer, he says since they cannot be in the same row then they cannot not be in front of them leading the prayer so this is an example of Qiyas Jalli. He also had this way of thinking called.",
      "understanding by in English would call it negatively implied meaning so I'll give you an example the Quran specified women that if you're taking a loan you can get to you need two witnesses and if you don't have two men then you have one man and two women this is I am the Quran specifies this idea because this is according to Shafi'i Madhhab they said",
      "in financial matters, it means that in any other matter there cannot be witnesses. This is what mafhum al-mukhalafah, the negative meaning. It's a negative meaning Imam Abu Hanifa did not accept this idea of this kind of logic but this was a logic that the Shafa'i Madhab used They also allowed Yes, no, but he",
      "Yes, no but he was... No I'm talking about Hanafi method itself. Yeah you should say, I should say clarify yeah because he did spend a lot of time interacting with the Hanafis yeah but not Abu Hanifa himself. You're right yes this is a good correction. Anyway so he did allow also custom or to specify rulings. So example we go back",
      "buyer and a seller they have a right to cancel the transaction when until they've and then they parted the company yeah so what does that mean and he said every he said we can allow custom meaning whatever your customary would in your area what that means you know it could be different from some other area with that means so he said",
      "the foundation of hadith on isnad and he was harsh against the Mu'tazila for rejecting a hadith because they contradicted reason. He didn't think that was a valid reason to reject a hadit. Okay, so there's once we have this is not now we have strength of hadid how strong is a hadid? So something that's authentically narrated",
      "from every transmitter to the Prophet. This is Sahih Hadith. And then some hadith that were so well known, that everybody knew them they called them Mashhoor. So there's famous hadith. He said that some of the problems of localization of hadith were things like for example Imam Abu Hanifa and their followers in Kufa, they allowed Muslims to consume non intoxicating amounts of alcoholic beverages other than grape wine",
      "Grape wine. I'm making nabid as an example. Because grape wine is khamr, khamar is technically grape wine. Because they never heard of this hadith, They'd never heard this hadit that every intoxicant is khammer and all forms of khamer are not allowed. And also the hadith that whatever intoxicate in great quantities small quantities of it are also forbidden",
      "So part of the problem of localization of the madhahib. One of the students, Imam Shafi Ahmad Ibn Hanbal of Baghdad, he started to collect a hadith in large quantities and he traveled everywhere. He went to Damascus, he went to Basra, he want to Kufa, he wanted Yemen. He would everywhere to collect hadiths and he compiled them all into his musnad",
      "this is just an example of the opposite idea of hadith as a guide to reason. And Ibn Qutayba was a famous hadith scholar, he said we do not resort except to that which the messenger of Allah resorted and we do reject what has been transmitted authentically from him merely because it does not correspond with our own conjectures or seems incorrect to reason",
      "and escape from baseless whims, meaning your own desires. And as Shah Ali is quoted saying that when it comes to knowing what is best the Messenger of Allah ﷺ is more trustworthy than our own reason. This is the position of Ahl al-Sunnah on this matter because the Sunnis",
      "We don't reject hadith based on content. And that's true with probably some small caveat, for example Bukhari mentioned there is a hadith that says the signs of the day judgment will appear at 200 years and he said since those 200 years have passed without incident this hadith is unreliable in that sense but it's very limited sense",
      "And the problem is, of course, what you or I consider unreliable or nonsensical another person considers perfectly sensible. He gives the example... Let me see if I can find it here. Yeah, I won't be able to probably find it. But basically, the example he gave in this book, Jonathan Brown",
      "There was a Basit scholar who went to southern Russia. And he went to northern Russia, and it happened to be a funeral of one of their leaders. And the funeral that he witnessed was so shocking to him. He said, what happened at this funeral? He said that they put the body of their chief on a boat, and then his wife or his slave girl was put on this boat.",
      "and then she was assaulted sexually by seven of the warriors, his warriors. And then she killed. And they burned the boat.\" And he said to the person next to him, what is going on? This is your funeral? It made no sense! What are you guys doing? The Viking or Russian, because the Viking and Russian were similar in Islamic history, they kind of interchanged them. But he said we do not tolerate...",
      "How do you tolerate, you know, worms eating your people's bodies? You know, meaning when you bury them. So in other words this is a great example of what sensible to one person doesn't make sense to the next person so if we try to use our sense or reason to apply to hadith that this is invalid or this is valid then it will soon be rejecting every hadith, every person will have their own deen. So hope that makes some sense.",
      "And Imam Ahmed Al-Hambali said, a flawed hadith meaning a daif hadith or with some flaws is nearer to me than a scholar's opinion or qiyas. So even though this is how little he used to rely on qiyass analogy and he said only when no hadith are present and as Imam Al-Turmudi said the correct approach to hadith",
      "in terms of the ones that talk about, for example, God descending. We don't ask how that is happening. We accept it as it is. But Dr. Brown did find, for instance, some of the earlier companions of the Prophet ﷺ. They did have explanations for these things which are somewhat similar to what the Mu'tazila used. So, for",
      "in fact added pieces of Aqidah as well. For example, punishment and reward in the grave, the return of the Mahdi, sorry, the arrival of the, and the return Issa. These are all from Hadith literature not from the Quran itself. And later on, the Hanafi and Maliki Madhhab we know we talked about them as they have the practices of Medina and Kufa is their main Hadith that's how they established Hadith but in fact later on Imam Al-Tahawee",
      "And in fact, the schools themselves had diversity. So we have, for example, the Hanafi school. We have Imam Abu Hanifa. We Have Muhammad Al-Shaibani. We Abū Yusuf. We Zuffar. These are some of the major scholars of this school. And then Imam Malik had his senior students and sometimes they disagreed with each other. And Imam Shafi because of his long travels he had an old school and a new school of the Shafai Madhhab.",
      "There are two different sections of that. And Imam Ibn Hanbal also had some older opinions when he didn't know some Hadith, he learned some new ones, he changed his opinion so even that has different opinions in it. Eventually this diversity became part of the Sharia strength and as Ma'am Nassafi said our school is correct with the possibility of error and another school is an error with a possibility",
      "the standard opinion of every madhhab basically, and every scholar. If you assert something, you believe it's true but you know that it could be wrong so that's the... And so that basically allowed this creation of Ahl al-Sunnah wal Jama'ah otherwise if every school is fighting and killing each other and they have no connection with each other then there's no one Islam. So this became the way for Islam to be all over the Muslim world.",
      "For example, diversity as strength. So this is just some examples Dr Brown mentions. So if a couple wanted to marry without the permission of her father they could go to Hanafi court. In Hanafi Court you don't need the guardian's permission for marriage. And women whose husband was lost overseas so according to Hanafimadhab you have to wait in the average lifespan of a human being. You know she has to wait until whatever 80 years 90",
      "you know, whatever the average life span. So that such a person could go to a shafi'i madhhab court and after four years they allow her to remarry so you know this is just an example of how the different madhhabs became a source of strength through diversity. Eventually after the 11th century basically it became impossible to start a new madhhb there was no new madhahib",
      "things became much more rigid and restricted. The Mu'tazila ideas became more integrated into Islam as Abu Hassan al-Ash'ari was a former Mu'tazzila scholar, he saw in a dream that the Prophet ﷺ told him to embrace the teachings of Ahmed bin Hanbal so he rejected the Mu'tuzzila rationalist idea and he supported Sunni theology",
      "Rightness and wrongness of an action is determined solely by a laws relative revelation, right? What did the Moet Angela said we determine it We have to use our reason to determine if there's some justice to this ruling and we reject some things because of that but he said that and this is what The scholars who will tell you today about a lesson is that whatever is in the Chariah is good Whatever it tells you to do is good. Whatever it forbid you from his is bad And that is the essential nature",
      "nature of what is right and wrong, good and bad. Truths that are accessed by reason often become just the products of culture, convention, education. So in other words you think it's a universal reason or principle that you're using to decide something as good or bad but in fact most of the time its due to your upbringing, due to the society where you're at, due with the education you had, due the ideas you were surrounded by. And again now I found the example I was looking for this Viking funeral",
      "Viking funeral. In the 10th century, legal theorists started making kawa'id or doctrines. They have many centuries of Islamic law and now you have certain doctrines that people follow so certainty is never removed by doubt. For example one of the qa'idas of fiqh. Or difficulty calls for easing another principle of fiqi. So certainty is",
      "never removed by doubt, that's the Hanafi ruling that the marriage of a woman whose husband is lost it's a certain marriage you cannot remove it by doubt. That's why this Qaeda applied there or the same difficulty calls for easing allows for the Shafi'i court to allow divorce to ease the hardship of the woman who is in this position so then we get into another thing which we have the Sufi tradition",
      "that now we get involved in as well. And of course, we have the different Sufi scholars, Abdul Qadir Al-Jilali, Abu Hassan Al-Shadili, Bahadeen Al-Nakshband and each one of them they created their movements and students which they called tariqas and they had devotion or wurdh you know, the word which they would write for their students to recite",
      "And they would, and so initially it's another form of trying to get closer to Allah, of course. But then it became more and more distant and now people started doing weird things. So for example, Rafai Sufis of Southern Iraq, now they're walking on hot coals or they are eating snakes. They became from closer to Islam to something very strange.",
      "They also started to claim about esoteric knowledge, you know, knowledge that nobody else could get. You have experiential knowledge which is called vogue or taste and some people even went so far as the esoterics knowledge, the hidden knowledge that became part of the Shia tradition, the botanies they have... The Imam has a secret knowledge that you cannot access and you can only access through the Imam",
      "became part of how splintering happened in this deen. And then we have, later on he calls them the iconoclasts and Islamic revival. And so we have Ibn Taymiyyah who is one of the most controversial figures in Islamic history according to Dr. Brown but also one of those important because he started acting against these certain types of Sufis like the Rafais, the fire walkers",
      "He personally destroyed certain sites of local pilgrimage in Damascus, where he's from. And he spent a lot of time rejecting and writing about rejection of Ash'ari theology. And essentially the basic theory behind that is that you trust in the instinctive understanding of the average believer. Meaning that when you go into Greek logic,",
      "to get to understand their theory. But the Quran, it talks to the instinctive understanding of the human being. And so this is what the other idea is that we don't need this specialized training to understand what is Allah and why would such a thing exist in the first place? If the Quran is meant to be something clear to be understood which should be clearly understood by people without needing specialized logic. And then we have some other reformers,",
      "He was very popular, very influential in the Indian subcontinent. He was against a lot of the Hindu ritual and imagery that went into the Muslim practices. We had, of course, Shah Waliullah as we were talking about, Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab, Usman Dan Fogio, he is the founder of Islamic state of Sokoto, and then we have this group in Turkey called Qadiz Zadehli. And then we get to the rise of West",
      "and the conquering of Muslim lands. I don't think I'll get to all this, it's too much maybe we'll do another stop here but essentially we had modernity hit us in the face so actually it is 941 so I think I will stop here inshallah probably do a part two on this which is talking about how the traditional understanding now connects with modernity",
      "using this book. But I will reschedule that with you."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Islam 201- Book Review_ _M_divU3VwNC_Y&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748672860.opus",
    "text": [
      "So this book, just to recap we did part one of this book in about a month ago and",
      "I'm going to give a little bit about the author and background just for anybody who missed the first part of this, just to understand the reason or some a little",
      "you know, this is a book for public consumption. So it was meant to kind of attract people's attention to the fact that it's in a similar sort of vein and to give indication about what the book was about. Dr. Jonathan Brown is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and Muslim Christian Understanding",
      "and understanding at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. And he is a Muslim by the name, you may not understand that if you don't know him but he's also a professor of Islamic studies. So in essence the first part of the book I will summarize for you.",
      "for the core of the author's argument. And so in essence, the first part of the book is basically going as a history of Islamic knowledge, the history of Sharia, the History of Hadith development in terms of the science of hadith and also a history",
      "of the controversies between themselves. So it kind of has a very large scope and the book as you see looks small but the print is very small so he tried to pack many things into this book. But today we're going to talk about the last section of this book, and basically where",
      "what he wanted to talk about. And, he starts this part of the book talking about a time period where Muslims in the early 1900s they were especially in the Near East Egypt and the Arab world but really all the Muslim world",
      "colonialism, or I should say most of the Muslim world and increasing exposure to Western ideas. But also when you get a sense of dynamism and you see that in civilizations it's a dynamism that affects the world and then the whole world sort of looks at this new dynamic culture as a paradigm against which everything else is measured so",
      "So in essence, even though it might not impact your country or area but the world is impacted by this paradigm. And that was the Western paradigm, the Western thought process and in a very real sense as he described in his book we find that some of the thinkers modern Muslims you can call",
      "they were trained in classical Sharia, classical Islamic studies but they were also being exposed to Western ideas. So many of them at this time were going to France or other countries but particularly France was a very common place to go and study. And more than that the European leadership was in Muslim countries",
      "this backward civilization that you have. So in essence, they were confronting Islam and Islamic civilization. And so there was this conflict between modernity and Islam. And in fact, there are many different ways people address that conflict. Some people went the other way as a very deep apologists meaning they really tried to defend Islam",
      "some people became totally westernized, and some people tried to adopt some kind of middle approach. And the central battleground which was then and now is the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ because many even liberal Muslims will accept the Qur'an as the word of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala",
      "it is the hadith literature or rather broadly the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ that they say is not transmitted in a very solid fashion and they have problems with it. And, in fact, you know, the Qur'an is relatively a small book but the hadit literature is so widespread. So there's so many things which you could have potential problems with.",
      "وكان يتحدث عنه من أجل حديثات مختلفة",
      "So that's just to give you sort of a baseline about his opinion. In fact, books like this which are for public consumption many times you have to decipher what the author is actual opinion is it's not meant to be like that polemical where they have a certain viewpoint that they're trying to convey to the Muslim community it's really for a broader consumption and academic but in essence through reading between",
      "between the lines in this book but also knowing some of his other works, I can tell you that's his position. So for this exercise we're going to go over the different hadiths that certain modernist Muslims in the early 1900s had problems with and we kind of dissect the problems",
      "out and drink the drink. He said on one of the flies wings is the disease, and the other is its cure. And this is Sahih Hadith in Bukhari. So he gives the story of this man Tawfiq Sidqi, and probably Muhammad knows more about these people than I do but in fact he was a doctor at medical school",
      "of Sheikh Rashid Ridha. And he used to regularly defend Islam against Christian missionaries, but at some point he took the opposite or kind of took a radical departure from mainstream Islam and he started writing controversial articles that the Sunnah was only meant for the time of the Prophet. And after that time Muslims were meant to follow two things, the Quran and their reason",
      "writing articles and text about this. But that was one of the hadiths he had a problem with. There is another hadith which is in Bukhari Muslim, which is when the call to prayer is announced, Shaytan takes to his heels and breaks wind with noise meaning he passes gas so loud that people cannot hear the adhan And when the called to prayer",
      "returns and when the Aqama is announced he takes to his heels and after it's over, he returns again to distracting the attention of the worshipper until the end of this hadith. But in essence people had a problem with the wording of this Hadith because it says that Shaytan is passing gas loudly to distract the believers and so some people had",
      "about the setting of the sun. And the Prophet ﷺ has reported and said to Abu Dharr, r.a., that he asked him, do you know where the sun goes when it sets? And he says, Allah and His Messenger ﷺ know best. And The Messenger of Allah ﷺ is reported to have said, It goes and prostrates beneath the throne. And then it asks for permission to rise and permission is given to it. So in essence...",
      "this hadith. So some people have problem with this idea that the sun is going somewhere to when it's gone out of the sky and so they said this was unscientific. There's another fellow, Mahmoud Abu Raya who wrote polemical works against hadith literature and in fact he wrote entire work against Abu Huraira. And in fact this fellow if you look online many",
      "many of the Shia websites they don't like Abu Huraira so they actually take some of his things from what he's written but anyway, he became popular in some circles for that kind of position and of course when we see these hadiths the Imams of Ahl al-Sunnah they did look at these hadits and try to interpret them. And one thing I will tell you about",
      "in terms of the hadith, which we talked about in the last one but I wanted to reiterate this point is that by and large when they looked at a hadith they criticized the isnad but not the content. By and large. In other words if you say a hadif is weak or strong it is on the basis of the chain of narration meaning the person who translated from",
      "to the Prophet, that is called the Sanad, and the Sanada is the issue for Ahl al-Sunnah in terms of what is weak and what is strong. And the reason for that was they felt if they went too much into the content of the Hadith literature, that everyone would have their own opinion about which one of these contents could be actually from the Prophet.",
      "So in other words, you or I could think something is absurd and definitely the Prophet ﷺ wouldn't have said that. But somebody else may say something different so if you go into content it becomes a very chaotic way of understanding hadith but if we go at the people who translated and we rely on their trustworthiness and we can establish that then that is basically a much simpler methodology",
      "and maybe a more sound methodology for establishing whether the Prophet said something or not. And so that is what Ahl al-Sunnah has by and large used, there's very small examples on the contrary but there are some examples of content criticism as well. So talking about these hadiths that we mentioned, Imam An-Nawawi he explains that the Hadith of the Sun is metaphorical",
      "Subtitles by the Amara.org community",
      "passing gas. He said that when a horse suddenly goes very fast, you know from like he's just standing still and then he has to go super-fast. He says the people who are around horses they know that they pass gas because they have to immediately go at a fast pace. So it could be a rhetorical device so it could",
      "Arabs of the time of the Prophet ﷺ, the people who are closer to nature. And so they would understand this meaning implicitly. It wouldn't mean anything to them unusual. They would understand it. But in another sense, it could also be just a rhetorical device. Meaning you use in literature, you don't mean it literally but it just symbolizes shaytan's intense hatred for the adhan, for the call, for remembrance of Allah ﷻ and that is what this hadith is talking about.",
      "talking about. And as some scholars mentioned about the hadith of the fly, they said it's not unusual because in their time he they were saying about a snake venom. They said snake venom sometimes the cure is secured from the snake you take a portion of this snake and use the cure extracted from that to cure against the snake venom so in other words there are many times where the animal has",
      "So that was another way of our scholars try to examine these hadith. And Dr. Brown mentions that sometimes some of these things were unsuccessful, for example Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani he mentions a hadith where God created Adam and he was 60 arm foot tall meaning he's 60 feet tall",
      "He looked and he saw that the cliffs of ancient people, their houses are no bigger than the houses of normal people. And he said I couldn't...he said I thought about this problem a lot meaning this hadith and I couldn´t resolve it. This is what ibn Hajar said about this hadit. So sometimes you know the understanding eluded the person even if ibn hajar who of course has famous commentary on Sahih Bukhari",
      "famous thinker about hadith. So Dr. Brown asked us to take a step back, he says that let's look at a few differences between how one looks at a topic depends on how one's pre-existing mindset is about that topic.",
      "the pre-modern Muslim thinkers, they took the hadith if there's something that they didn't understand or it didn't make sense to them. They took it as a challenge how are we going to interpret this to be in relationship to what Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala we've already learned? Meaning, they were not talking... In their mind, they're not using the hadit to disprove Islam or something like that. In their minds, they are trying to see how do we fit this into the larger view of Islam",
      "view of Islam. He said modern scholars came with westernized sensibilities and they started looking suspiciously at all the literature of Islam, and they tried to disprove all of it. So in other words he's saying when you come up with a mindset one where you're thinking that this is the word of Allah, this is what the words of the Prophet and we just need to understand them or you get the mindset",
      "fabricated thing and we need to disprove it in the minds of other people. When you start off with that mindset, the two different mindsets, you will come up with two different conclusions. And in fact he described this term which is an academic literature called charitable reading meaning it's the willingness of...and this word is hard to...you need to pay attention to it...of a canonical community",
      "community to read its text in the best possible light and in that way diffuses contradictions with truth or order meaning again this is doing the same thing again but charitably looking at anything anything in the literature if I you or I were to open it we would try to understand what is the Prophet trying to tell us that's charitable reading but uncharitable reading you're reading it and saying you know",
      "7th century, what does he know? So forth and so on. That would be sort of an uncharitable way of reading any literature. So in fact scholars interpreted the Hadith and Quran so they will be true to each other and to rational realities. So he said that when they looked at a Hadith, they looked reason reality, they look at the Quran and Sunnah, the rest of the Quran",
      "it in the context of all those things to find what does this hadith mean meaning they didn't abandon reality in front of them but they used you know the Quran and Sunnah to kind of give them a framework and then they interpreted the hadith. This is what Muslims scholars did and he went back and said you know what was the problem for these modern Muslims? He said that there were Europeans",
      "that would tour Cairo, for example. And they would tell them things like Islam and good order are incompatible. And modernize Muslims on the far left. You know, if you were a Muslim thinker and somebody who's defending Islam, what were you faced with in the early 1900s? European colonialists saying that. On the far",
      "not on the Sharia. And so they felt that they could save Islam by overhauling the entirety of pre-modern tradition. So, you know in essence if you want to think about them charitably meaning these people who started some of these very deviant ways of looking at Islam, you can say maybe they were trying to in their mind protect Islam. So that's what he wanted to at least give them the charitable way of looking",
      "Abu Roya, we mentioned him earlier. He said I am more knowledgeable than Abu Hanifa or Shafi'i This is what he said about himself And he said his mission was to save Islam from medieval darkness You know so this was his mission So he had the most narcissistic arrogant view about himself and his mission with the highest mission you know so when people start off with this kind of Narcissism Allah makes them you know more and more deviant in their views",
      "does to a human being. But nonetheless, at one sense we can at least say maybe our brothers were trying to defend Islam in the way that they thought was best. So moving on from that he quoted a Noah and on the basis of Islamic epistemology. Epistemology is a term which they use in western academic settings. Does anybody know what epistemologies?",
      "I'm just curious. Epistemology is the science or how do you know something? Meaning, how is it that you know anything? And that is what epistemology means. So in other words, before you start studying something, this is the basis of our knowledge. This is how we know something. And he quotes Imam al-Nawawi. He said that when the ulema have arrived at certainty regarding a stance from the Quran and Sunnah.",
      "Meaning, they know that this is part of the deen qata'an. Meaning absolutely, for example, that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has won. This is absolutely part of a deen there's no dispute about it. Once they have arrived at that conclusion then all the other individual Quranic verses and hadith must be interpreted according to that conclusion. Does that make sense?",
      "has as a definitive part of itself already, then if we run into any hadith which is... We find, we interpret it according to that what we know Islam is already about. He mentioned that this is a way of thinking about things. He",
      "we reinterpret the whole in light of our understanding of the part. I probably don't have to explain this, but basically this is just what I said before and another way of saying it. It means that once we understand what Islam is definitively then if we run into a hadith we interpret that hadith in the light of what Islam",
      "be also integrated into what Islam is as well. So both things are true, but both parts of this form the basis of Islamic knowledge or how do we know something to be true or not? Do you have a question about that? Does it make sense? I'll move on unless somebody has a question",
      "Quran 5 verse 6 talks about if you have touched women, then according to the interpretation of that verse, you have to do wasl or wudu depending on what your interpretation of what that means is. But he said that the ulama exempted close family members such as your mother and your father. And he said why did they",
      "that because they said the issue at hand was sexual arousal. And in those cases, it was not applicable.\" So in other words there's an overarching sense of what rules and values exist and you apply them to the verse and literature that you have.",
      "another example he gave about interpretation of ayat for example in Surah Tawbah verse 28 we find that Allah says the mushrikeen are najis and let them not approach the haram after this year. And Hassan al-Basri said, Rahimullah, he said that his opinion was that if you shook hands with a polytheist",
      "with a polytheist, a mushrik then you had to do wudu based on this ayah. He said by the 11th century there was a basic qaeda of fiqh which is tahara adani meaning that man in general is pure meaning even non-muslims and they base that on their understanding of the Prophet's interactions with mushrikeen",
      "the mosque and other hadith talking about their interactions. So in other words, they moved from this evidentiary meaning, the meaning which is obvious, which is that the mushrikeen are najas to a secondary meaning and they said that what it really means is that they're impure in their beliefs. Meaning their beliefs are impure",
      "for example, their sweat or their tears or saliva and so forth. So that's an example of moving from the literal meaning to a secondary meaning based on other evidences. And he said Dr. Brown gives an example where sometimes literal interpretation can be in fact dangerous.",
      "The verse in Surah Al-Ma'idah, وَمَن لَّمْ يَحْكُم مِمَّا أَنزَلَ اللَّهُ فَأُولَٰئِكَمْ هُوَ الْكَافِرُونَ And whoever does not rule by what Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has revealed, they are kuffar. They are disbelievers. And they assassinated, according to Dr. Brown, Ali ibn Abi Talib radhiallahu anhu on the basis of him not ruling by the decree of Allah subhana wa ta'tala.",
      "of Ibn Abbas who said about this, it is not the unbelief that they think it is. Meaning it's not the kufr that they thing is which removes you from Islam but rather it is a rejection which is less than that. It is an unbelief other than unbelief. Kufr other than real kufur so something different from what the Khawarij are thinking. So in this example Dr Brown is giving is that sometimes literal interpretation can be dangerous and",
      "and cause actual people to deviate from Islam in a very real sense, and cause violence. And sometimes literal things in the hadith literature for example do not make sense. For example there's a hadith in Tirmidhi where the Prophet is reported to have said that two months of the festival do not fall short. Ramadan and Dhul Hijjah. He said two months do not",
      "Ramadan can sometimes be 29 days and sometimes 30 days, and the same thing is true with Dhul Hijjah. So literally this hadith doesn't... You can make sense of it if you look at exactly literally. Imam Ibn Hanbal said his interpretation of this was that no year could fall when both months are short meaning one of them has to be 29 day, one of then 30 days. And Imam Al-Turmidhi he collected this Hadith, he gave commentary on it",
      "He said that even if the days are short, the reward is complete in a spiritual sense. So you get a reward for 30 days even if these days are shorter. So in some sense, in some hadiths, looking at a literal meaning is very difficult to do. And sometimes, literal he said could be a challenge to human nature. For example there's a hadith of course we all know from the Prophet that he says",
      "dearer to him than his parent or his child. And one of the scholars, Khattabi said that the love here is not natural love. It's not the natural love but rather it's a chosen love. And this is what the Prophet ﷺ is talking about. In other words there's no way to overcome a natural love of your children and your parents",
      "which is a higher function, such as when a sick person takes a bitter pill because he knows it's going to cure him. And he said in the same way, he prefers what I chose for him over the folly desired by his parents and children. So meaning your parents and your children they desire sometimes for you negative things",
      "and you choose what the Prophet ﷺ has chosen for you above them. And that is what this hadith is talking about in reality, what love...what this love is. So he said sometimes literal... if you take it literally, it's really a challenge to human nature in a sense. And the scholars did try to examine this as well. And he said language can sometimes be inherently ambiguous such as what Ali ibn Abi Talib told the Khawarij",
      "He told them when they said they want to rule by the Quran. In fact, they had on their spears the Quran and they said we want you to rule By the Quran And he told them in his famous explanation to them because they were very foolish people obviously When they said that The Quran is but lines written between two covers It does not speak it relies on men to speak for it In other words every text requires an interpreter",
      "language is inherently never immune from ambiguity, any language or misinterpretation. He said boundaries are set by the community that reads the text and the basic as Dr Brown said that scholars abided by is that the literal meaning is adhered to of any text unless some reason exists otherwise significant evidence requires otherwise",
      "requires otherwise that you don't need to read it literally. And so there has to be some other reasoning behind that. So in general, we default to the literal unless there is some reason to not do so. And he talked about in this book also just to again talk about the levels of evidence and just to give you an idea about how language can be misleading or how there can be",
      "there can be a definitive meaning which most people can agree upon. So first of all, we know that these scholars differentiated two things the source and the meaning in terms of their level of strength so for example we know definitively that the Quran is transmitted by numerous thousands of people from generation to generation",
      "So its transmission is mutawatir, you know. But sometimes the specific ayah could be qat'i or dhanni. It could be absolute or it could have some open for interpretation. In the same way, certain of the hadith literature, the transmission is also dhannin in a sense. If it's just transmitted by one person to one person",
      "called Khabar Ahad. So the transmission itself is not absolutely certain. So there's the transmission and then there's actual text, so the text can also be certain or uncertain. And so the example he gave was if you see somebody in a lake, in the middle of the lake, and he's saying help me, then you think that person probably needs help because they're drowning or having some problem with water. Not that they need advice like legal advice",
      "like legal advice. This is what an example he gave. So in other words, there's an obvious meaning that everybody would understand. Somebody looks like they're drowning, they're saying help me, they are probably drowning. But if they... but help me could mean anything. It could mean help me with my taxes, help me... But most rational people faced with that circumstance will understand what help me meant.",
      "texts which obviously mean a certain thing to most people and are really not that much open to interpretation. So he went the next part of what he's talking about, and obviously this is all meant to try to understand the hadith literature and to address some of the complaints of the modernist Muslims.",
      "how do the scholars of Islam use hadith? So he gives the example of Ahmed ibn Hanbal in his Musnad. He included hundreds of weak hadith, and why did he do that? This is Imam Ahmed what he said. He said he thought they may be useful for Muslims in some legal issue or in their manners. And in his Madhhab he says he prefers a weak hadeth over qiyas, in fact analogy.",
      "So that's why he included so many weak hadith. And sometimes, Dr. Brown says that even the language people would use would indicate they know the hadith is weak because they said they used certain words. They would say it has been reported that the Messenger of Allah said. It was narrated from him that, meaning that they didn't hear it directly.",
      "of writing, how they would write about hadith that would indicate there's some uncertainty about the hadith itself. And then certain unreliable hadith were used... were very useful for preachers as we anybody who studied Islamic history you see there are scholars and then their storytellers There is Qasas, there's people who are street preachers, there are Sufis, there're people that want to inspire a certain spiritual elevation in people",
      "although they say something that is false. And he quotes Ghulam Khalil 889, a person who was considered at that time like a spiritual person and eventually he was questioned about all the dubious hadiths that he was reporting and he said in the end we forged these so we could soften and improve the hearts of people. So in other words, in his mind, he's doing it to improve people, that's why he was forging hadith.",
      "18th century in Egypt and at one point it was the most commonly owned book after the Quran, in Egypt. And he said of the roughly 25 hadiths in the introductory chapter 20% are not only weak, he says they're untraceable. They're not in any hadith collection known to man or even in catalogues of forged hadith. Even in forged hadits they don't exist.",
      "of things that have been put in there. He gives an example of one hadith, he says, that they claim is a hadith but it's one of these that doesn't exist anywhere and just to give you a taste of that, he",
      "and each head has 70,000 faces, and each face has 70 thousand mouths, and every mouth has 70 thousands tongues, and the tongue praises Allah in 70 thousand words, and God rewards him for each one. So this is an example of a claim that's a hadith but obviously it's not. But he's trying to give us an understanding that scholars and even other people they used certain weak or even imaginary sometimes claims of hadith",
      "claims of hadith. Why? Because they wanted to bring people closer to Islam and that was one of their motivations. And he also said that the scholars themselves, in fact, said that they had different levels of authenticity depending on what they were using the hadith for. So he quotes Ibn Hanbal here, Ahmed Ibn Hamal,",
      "to us from the Prophet ﷺ concerning rules of sharia, meaning what is haram and halal. We are rigorous with the chains of narration, meaning we scrutinize the sunnah very carefully. But if we are told hadith dealing with virtues of actions, their rewards and punishments, something dealing with something permissible or like dua, then we are lax",
      "that in that case, it's something that doesn't really affect behavior other than encouraging something we already know is good then we don't scrutinize the chain as strongly. And this what he quotes Imam Ahmed on this one. And in fact you will see many of the madhab have adopted this sort of opinion that for aspects where of encouraging good behavior or",
      "or encouraging spiritual development, or things that are already permissible, or thing that are known to be prohibited, to encourage people to avoid them. Those kinds of hadith they accepted them even though they were weak for that purpose. And in fact in Hanafi laws Dr Brown says you can use weak hadith to categorize an action into recommended or disliked.",
      "So even in the law, there is this differentiation between what they would use the weak hadith for these purposes. And why did the scholars take this approach? He said because the foundation of deen was salah, tahara, siyam,",
      "marriage, contracts inheritance these are the foundation of a Muslim's duties to Allah and each other. Other topics were of secondary importance or these weak hadiths were emphasizing something already emphasized in sound text so he gives the example and I think this is an okay example but it is some scholars have said they consider this hadith to be sound",
      "and that the lowest form of riba is like having sex with your mother. This is what the hadith says, the least of which there's 70 degrees of usury, 70 degrees or riba, the list of this is this category. And this is found in Ibn Majab but he says that this is a very disputed hadith. Ibn al-Jawzi and As-Sakhawi two very famous hadith scholars have declared",
      "And many of the hadith scholars declare this to be very weak, although some in later years did claim to authenticate it including Sheikh al-Albani. But nonetheless he said that reason why nobody really cared that much about it is because we already know from the Quran that riba'ah is a serious sin and so if this emphasizes it to people",
      "then it still doesn't change the underlying basis that riba is haram and you should avoid it. It's a serious sin, and if it's true, then we've narrated something that will also benefit people. So that's why they were lax in certain of these hadiths. And so, in essence, and I'm sort of going to conclude on this, so we've looked at all of this kind of review of the hadith literature",
      "and how Muslim scholars viewed knowledge itself. And so at the end, the conclusion Dr. Brown says is that some hadith which seem somewhat strange to people could be explained by this phenomenon. Meaning that not that the scholars took the authentic chain and they didn't take it seriously but that at each level of",
      "transmission meaning from the beginning if you have for example tabain the generation after the Sahara they long or the generation After them if they heard something like this which a hadith, which didn't really pertain to changing You know a command of Allah and only related To something which was encouraging someone that's already known to be",
      "to be encouraged or forbidding somebody for something that's already forbidden then they didn't scrutinize it or naturally he says it would be natural for them not to have scrutinized it on the same level you know naturally when it doesn't change behavior in that sense they would not naturally scrutinise it so he said even though the sun had itself the chain is authentic",
      "as hadith which is actually about mu'amalat or something that's going to change a behavior or make something halal or haram. He said, naturally an inclination on the part of the person and he describes these inclinations over and over again you find them in the scholars they're evident there would be that you don't scrutinize these kinds of things that harshly and so even though there's sahih but he's saying",
      "especially in these kinds of situations where it may be that they were less scrutinized by the scholars all along. And that's one way to try to understand some of these hadiths that are in the thousands and some things that don't make sense to people. Yeah, so that was his attempted explanation at true... To give people a way of understanding first of all",
      "first of all, the hadith literature itself and also to understand that even the hadits that are sahih sometimes there's a way to understand them. That they could also be at different levels of authenticity or different levels emphasis of authenticity and we should also correspondingly sort of take that into account when we're reading the hadit literature.",
      "what I had for today. I don't know if, Rabbi Mohamed, you had any comments you wanted to say about that or wanted to add? I know you probably know some of these people. And frankly, this topic I thought was useful because number one, Quran-only people are abounding everywhere these days. People are adopting this position and unfortunately it's really not in keeping with the Sharia or Islam itself",
      "Islam itself because you know these people are abandoning the fact this one of the Prophet sallallaahu alayhi wasallam for you know trivial relatively trivial reasons so Haji Hassan can call you Haji has some dr. Hassan whatever whatever you like but I mean I think this is a very",
      "مهم جداً للطفلين والمدرسة المتحدة هذا يشارك بعض ما قلته عندما تنظروا إلى الحديث من أجل عباد الإسلام",
      "قد ذكر أن هناك اثنين جانبات من الحديث. واحدة من يترسل هذا الحديظ من النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم إلىنا. هذه هي السلاح. الثاني هو المطن. ما الذي تقوله الحديوث؟ لذا عندما رأى أصغار الإسلام بعض من هذه الحدياث كانوا يتحدثون عن هذه الحادث في مستقبل ما ذكرته",
      "that Allah is the creator and he sent Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi wasallam, the prophet with the teaching, with the huda. And they were looking at the saying of the Prophet sallallaahu alaihi wasalam within that context. As he said, they did have some issues with the meaning of some of the hadith. Now mind you that",
      "when Allah SWT want to get something specific to us without any interpretation it's crystal clear. So, when Allah says that if a man dies and leave his wife and children she gets one-eighth of his inheritance. Do people differ on what is one- eighth? One-eight is",
      "One-eighth is one-eight. One over eight. If he did not have children, she gets a quarter of what he leaves. So when Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala wants something specific without a different possible interpretation, it is said in that way.",
      "and so on and so forth, and there are many meanings along the same line. However, there are things that the deans came with an area where basically a big chance for each scholar to have an understanding. And it was by intention that when Allah revealed I'm talking about the Quran now",
      "Quran now we're gonna come to the Sunnah so when Allah says when a woman get divorce she is to wait for three Qura'a. Now what does the word Qura mean in Arabic? It has two meanings one is the period of purity that",
      "period of impurity that the women have. So, the Arabs use the word qira to mean this and to means that which means it gives the ulama space to interpret this depends on the situation when there is a divorce matter that comes to them. And there are other examples, the hadith of Prophet Muhammad about Asr and Bani Qurayza",
      "Qurayza and so on and so forth. So when it comes to the Quran itself, there was a movement in the beginning of the 20th century which he alluded to where basically when the Islamic world was overwhelmed with colonial rule",
      "With the exception of the bulk of Arabia and some other minor areas here and there, the bulk",
      "so on and so forth, all of it fell under colonial rule. And then the kuffar start talking to the Muslims that basically you are defeated because of your way of life, because of Islam. And the answer should have been easy and clear that when the Muslims adhere to their deen they were the masters in terms of civilization of the world. They were",
      "They were the people who carried the beacon of justice all over. And whenever someone had an issue in any place, they would come and live under the Muslim land. And when Islam started to be weak in the hearts and the action and the lives of the Ummah, that's when trouble started. Which is different than Western civilization. When they adhered to the church, they were in the dark ages.",
      "the dark ages when they left the hegemony of the church and they start going their own way freeing themselves from i mean imagine what the church would tell people you know if you say a statement which is crystal clear in science it's not a theory it's a fact and you go against",
      "i mean this is an event that the people of mecca have observed because there was amel field was just the time around when the prophet sallallahu alaihi was born so there were so many people living and nobody dispute come to say what are you talking about there was no elephant and there was notice who was there there was not that so those people came among them muhammad abdo",
      "it is, is a plague, a disease. Because they said the Western mind will accept this. Now you might these days laugh at these things but at one point in the Muslim world especially in Egypt and Lebanon where really the influence of Western ideas Turkey at the same time in this regard was big time. What has changed",
      "ما تغير، أعتقد أن حجي حسن يتكلم عنه، ما تتغير هو أن الناس يبدأون بالبحث عن بعض هذه الأمور وفي الحديثات أيضاً لا من ناحية مفرطة لحمايةها ولكن في المستوى الديني.",
      "لدينا قرآن يستمر في مجالسه منذ 1400 عاماً ونحن نملك القرآة التي كانت هناك منذ 1400 عامين مع الله تطلب من الناس أن يجدوا أي ضرورة فيها لا أحد يتحدث عن إعادة شيء مثل هذا الذي هو مختلف للعرب في ذات المرة، من هؤلاء الذين يعرفون اللغة؟ عندما يبدأون بالبحث عن هذه الأشياء ينظرون إلى هذه الأموال من ناحية حفاظ على الدين",
      "I do remember Rashad Khalifa. Some of you might have heard the name, some of you may not. Rashad Khalifa is a guy from Egypt who came to America and he started with a theory that there was a miracle in the Quran that he discovered. What is this miracle? The numbers. And he started having followers in this country",
      "At one point, Rashad Khalifa started attacking the Ahadeeth. One of them, the Ahdeeth of Shaytan that you mentioned. And he was calling this utter nonsense. How could this and this and that? But that was a second stage. The third stage, he was talking to himself as a Mahdi. As somebody who is coming with a certain mission. At the fourth stage,",
      "prophet of Allah. And in fact, I know locally here in Raleigh, North Carolina that we have at least one person an American Caucasian Muslim who believed in him until he declared the prophethood. Now what happened to him somebody entered his office and stabbed him and killed him.",
      "That is something that took place, of course, in the 80s. And some of you are not, of cause aware of the name because either you are too young or you were not here in this country. But the point is where did he start? He already have an agenda. First of all, he wanted himself to be known",
      "known and to have followers, to have money coming his way, to be able to have people under him. You know he changed eventually the way that people make salah where men and women make salah together and other things. But the point is he was heading toward kufr. That is I am a prophet of Allah",
      "a prophet of allah i am a prophet although he started on the premise that he have a new miracle in the quran and for a few years look he did not do this within few months no for a Few years, he kept talking about the miracles that he had discovered in the Quran. And there are other scholars who followed his logic and they said utter nonsense. The numbers do not add up",
      "قد كنت تقرأ كتابة هنا أو هنا يقول أنه لن نرى ألف لا ميم ، فالسورة الألف هي أكثر من السورة الميم في ذلك الصورة أو عين سيقف أو شيء ما في هذا الطريق. قد رأيت بعض هذه الحجمات أو أن ترى أنه نسبة الوقت التي تسمحها الرجل بالقرآن هو",
      "ومع ذلك أريد أن أضحك كل هذا بأن هذه الترنسة من إستخدام بعضها حديثات",
      "Whole Islam does not make sense. How could you do that? I mean, the worst that you can come to say is that this hadith is... The Prophet did not say it. I mean if a person of knowledge got beyond there's no doubt in terms of the meaning. You can say easily at the end if you are a person who knows the most that you're gonna say the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam did not",
      "كان هناك مشكلة مع أحد المخطرين لكن للأتي وقال لهم أنه لدي مشكلتكم بالحديث هذا فإن كما قال حسن لا يأتون إلى القرآن لأنهم يعلمون في الوقت الأول عندما تبدأوا بمشاركة القران يستعرضون المسلمين على مفاهيم أنك تعني أنك تقول شيئا عن قصة الله سبحانه وتعالى",
      "وكيف يستخدم هذا الحديث من الشيطان في عدالة الأذان والإقامة",
      "So it's very important to recognize this aspect and that if one of the, you know, our sons and daughters they come with some of these questions not to come and say, ah, you want to become a kafir? Oh, you said this about the Prophet? No. If you do not know enough let them talk to someone who have the knowledge, who have",
      "وكان هناك أحدثاً، كان هناك بيضة مجالية كبيرة تقول شيء مثل هذا إذا كنت مسلم صغيراً وتريد أن تترك دينك اتصلوا بـ 1-800 وإعطوهم رقمه وكان في أطلاندا وجورجيا وأي مكان آخر لذلك هناك هذه المشاريع",
      "There is a movement that is active on some campuses against Islam, confuse Muslims. There's no doubt about it. So when a young man or young woman come to you as a father or mother with some of these issues don't get mad at them, oh how could my son say this or my daughter? Well if they hear something they need an explanation and again the attitude",
      "And again, the attitude is different from that of the old days. The old days, the hadith were studied within the context of what this deen was all about. Now some of those people are coming to this to really attack Islam and this is a very important aspect that we have to understand. The last comment inshallah on the brother Hassan he said rightfully that a scholar like Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal",
      "يأخذ بعض المعاركات بحديثاً قويًا على قياس ويأخذه بعضها في ما هو مسمى فضاء للأعمال",
      "سبعين ألف وسبعون وسبعة ألاف في هذا الموضوع لدينا حدث هنا في رالي أتذكر قبل عشرين سنة من قبل إن شاء الله سوف ننتهي بهذا جاء أختي لإعطاء العلم بالأرابي إلى أخاتها العربية وعندما تحدث تمكنك من سمع الصوت من غرفة الأخرى يمكنك أن تسمع أخوانك تصويتهم من غرض الغرفة على ما هو مستحيل",
      "effective is she but what's the problem the stories that we she brought are all fabricated it has no basis but it just make you know if you do not you do you do your salah those are the consequences and she kept piling these things which has no bases and subhanallah we confront the sister you know took her on the side he said you know",
      "وما إلى ذلك. هناك بعض من هذه المنطلقات التي توجد فيها. لذلك، يجب أن يكون هناك كافٍ ما في ما هو صحيح. لا نحتاج إلى الناس للصوت لمدة 15 دقائق، عندما يتركون، فإنهم مروراً أعلى. هذا ليس ما يخص الدين.",
      "for next month book. Jazakumullahu khair wa baraka Allahu feekum Subhanaka Allahumma bihamdik Nashhadu an la ilaha illa ant Nastaghfruka wa natubu ulayk"
    ]
  },
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    "text": [
      "Hello everyone and welcome to Blogging Theology. Today I'm delighted to talk again to Jonathan Brown, your most welcome back sir! Hi and welcome in Salaam-Alaikum to everybody and it's nice to be back although it's funny because i just saw you in person in London we did now we're talking like no i don't even know if it's 20 maybe 24 hours later",
      "later uh now i'm in washington dc and you're not i felt particularly embarrassed because we had an english sort of an english breakfast together then we ate a vegan bait was it vegan bacon these two strips of something yeah no it's not going on my list of best breakfasts but you know what that's not the point it was it was not about the food no but i feel embarrassed you know you got american coming to london",
      "but you know actually i went to um slough and they have a place called like kashmiri cafe it's a big building actually it's not a little it's kind of big building with a park around it and they had uh i had a i actually the guy was kind of he was like oh you think you're gonna eat all this but i ordered full english breakfast and then a kashmir breakfast",
      "their own and so I you know, I was really struggling but it was delicious. So I had a delicious halal English breakfast. So you don't have to worry about that. No, the food was definitely halal although questionable integrity. Anyway, we're going to go there. It was good to see you yesterday. We had a fascinating conversation. But back to today for those who don't know Jonathan Brown is professor and our lead bin Talid chair of Islamic civilization in",
      "at Georgetown University in Washington. Is it Washington, D.C., where you are now? Yep. Yep, cool. He's the author of the following books, Slavery and Islam. There we are. This is a classic work, very seminal work. And this one, misquoting Muhammad, The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy. If you've got any non-Muslim friends, I think it's a particularly good introduction to the subject. One of my favorites is his second edition",
      "in the medieval modern world because your PhD is in the subject and this is your PhD I think canonization of al-bukhari a Muslim the formation and function of the Sunni hadith Canon so I recommend all those it's actually written also they are the very short introduction to Mohammed I think is called in the Oxford University very short Introduction series which again is really great for a general reader who doesn't know anything about Islam",
      "So that may not be an exhaustive list of all your books, but those are the ones I've read anyway. That's all. That is all. I've heard all your book. Now Jonathan has kindly agreed today to discuss his critically acclaimed new book. Yes there's another one titled here we go Islam and Blackness. And what a striking cover that is. I think it's a very brilliant cover book cover actually.",
      "very positive reviews indeed on the back cover. One for example from Imam Zaid Shakir who's a professor emeritus now of Zaytuna College and other scholars as well, and I just want to read you just briefly what The Dust Jacket says on the inside front cover about the book. I assume the publisher wrote this rather than you? Well I wrote it. Oh you did okay. I think they say",
      "on the inside of the dust jacket and then i write it for them they may check it and say you know this makes i mean they may it may some person might write one that's lousy and they don't use it but they've always used the ones i sent them so yeah now yeah this is uh about you though so isn't a third person um it's commonly claimed you you're right or it says that islam is anti-black even inherently bent on enslaving black africans western",
      "is in the face of very scriptural foundations and its traditions of law, spirituality and theology. But what is the basis for this accusation? Best-selling scholar Jonathan A C Brown examines Islamic scripture, law, Sufism and history to comprehensively interrogate this claim",
      "origins in conservative politics, modern Afrocentrism and the old trope of Barbary enslavement. That's a particularly common one on the internet I noticed. He explains how anti-blackness arose in the Islamic world and became entangled with normative tradition from the imagery of blackened faces in the Quran to Sharia assessments of Black women as undesirable",
      "Africa, this work provides an in-depth study of the controversial knot that Islam and blackness is. It identifies authoritative voices in Islam's past that are crucial for combating anti-black racism today.\" So that's the book, Islam and Blackness, the subject of our debate. I wrote all of that except bestselling author Jonathan Browne. I probably just wrote,",
      "and then they just added that thank you for your honesty there yeah you didn't write that bit um so just something we need to get we need is it clear the decks on this first one if i may some people might have an issue with the fact that a white guy you uh has written a book titled islam and blackness and another thing that came up recently when you were in london a couple days ago at so i think and actually",
      "beginning of your book immediately, actually. What is your response? I mean, yeah, I've heard this a lot. I understand people...I'm not angry at people for having this criticism. It's just that I don't think it has anything to do with the book. If I were writing a book about experiences of black Muslims or even kind",
      "kind of getting into like the defined grains or dynamics of anti-black racism in the modern world. Like, you know maybe my being a white guy is probably not helpful or it doesn't give me some kind of perspective that I'd need but this book is about... It's a book of Islamic intellectual history really. I mean, it's a about how Muslim scholars over 1400 years dealt with texts and society interacted",
      "Muslim scholars dealt with their own legal and normative traditions in surrounding questions of race and color in their society. So it's really, yeah I mean I just wonder like if I were a black Muslim in the US, I'm not sure that would give me a lot more insight about what you know",
      "ninth century Baghdad is saying. I mean, it's just sort of the only way that would make sense as if there was some kind of trans historical unchanging thing called blackness so that if you're black in America today, it serves same as being black and bagged out in the ninth century. And I think that contradicts basically all the established understandings of race which say that it's not some kind",
      "time and space, but rather it's socially constructed. So I think that the criticisms are kind of... I mean, I understand someone's criticism if they think this is a book about being black and Muslim or about how challenges of being black Muslim, but this is book about the interaction between Islamic normative tradition. Let me just make sure my computer is not ping every couple minutes focus. Okay do not disturb.",
      "So, but you know that's not what the book is about. The book is it's about and we're I mean the funny thing is like we're all Foreigners to the past so none of us is from in the past Yes if the past is foreign to all of us. Yes, I think I think it's interesting to think about like what these questions assume about the word and also I mean not to be kind of a pain about this but Someone could say well your books called Islam blackness",
      "you know, we have concerns about this. Okay, that's fine. I understand. I don't expect people to read the book but there is the blurb that you just read which tells you what the book is about which I think if they had not read it would probably make sense why you could have someone who isn't a black Muslim today writing it. But I might as well use this opportunity to say why I wrote the book. It wasn't like",
      "I you know it wasn't like i woke up one day and i said hey you know i really want to write about islamic blackness or something. In fact when i wrote the slavery book, Islam in Slavery book people would ask me oh you should write a book on islam and race or something and i was like no way! I'm not crazy, I'm going to do that but what happened was in the summer of 2020 there",
      "actually a recurring debate in some circles about that where some scholars like actual professors in the US, in academia were saying that Islam had its scriptural foundations and the Quran, the Sunnah of the Prophet, right? The normative tradition of Islam is itself anti-black. Not you know Muslims are racist or something but actually the scriptural foundation's normative are anti black. Yeah. So I kept getting these",
      "these emails forwarded to me from by our questions people my friend you know colleagues asking me like hey you know there's this debate going on and someone's bringing up this hadith in this quranic verse and this thick opinion and do you have any do you Have any responses to this I'm trying to figure out how to respond And I was like oh okay interesting so I just kind of I was Like okay, I'll look at it, and I'll try and send you helpful information And then I started to actually look into it. I was well This is actually really interesting and then I",
      "started to in order to answer those questions i had to look at other issues that was raised other questions issues of context and history came up and so before i knew it i had a book on my hands and that's how yeah yeah so it happened almost not accidentally but you have yeah it actually was it was entirely accidental right yeah it was something where i i didn't think um yeah it",
      "I didn't intend really to do it. It kind of came up. You do write books that tend to address these popular misconceptions or misunderstanding about Islam, obviously a slave and Islam being one. And this one, I know you told me before, you didn't choose the title of this, Misquoting Muhammad. This is with reference to Bart Ehrman's Misquoten Jesus. But, you know, and you do push back against misunderstandings in this book as well on Hadith. So you do have a history of really tackling some of these red button issues as they arise in our culture.",
      "arise in our culture even though you're not looking for them they tend to find you perhaps i mean i think that i think what it is is that i'm you know like i'm muslim and i i mean when i come across these questions as you know i also have these questions right so someone when i see these you know hadith or a fake opinion that seems to be really shocking in the context of blackness uh i mean I also want to know what's going on so i mean",
      "Curious readers want to know. I'm a curious reader, I wanna know the answers to these things as well. No that's fair enough. You touched on this briefly but my next question is what is the argument of your book? In fact you have a section of your books. What is the arguments of your work? So I actually have a session in all my books which is called The Argument of This Book",
      "so if you really don't want to read the book this section and it will tell you everything or we'll give you a summary but take everything i give you very brief summary yes yeah okay so I'm gonna read it's oh it is two pages exactly yeah what page is it again I can't remember where it is page three and page page 3 to 5 but it's okay though a contested concept anti-blackness",
      "Blackness is most succinctly understood as racism directed against people of Sub-Saharan African descent. Stereotypes about real or imagined black Africans are nearly as old as historical records from ancient Rome to medieval China, however these stereotypes rarely stood out markedly in societies that were often cosmopolitan and where skin color played a less important role than other markers of identity. The notion that the rights and standings",
      "determined by that racialization became pervasive only in the early modern period with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade and Europe's powerful colonial states. The understanding of race, sorry, the understandings of race and blackness that formed in the West, particularly the United States have profoundly shaped global discourse. They have forced a dualistic template of black and white onto social terrains from Mali to Karachi which are often too dissimilar or complex",
      "as skin tone and blackness is metaphor. Neither has aesthetic preference always entailed judgment of human worth. Not all descriptions of color is a prescription of value in the West Islam Muslims have been particularly singled out as anti-black an accusation emanating from a centuries old Western stereotype of Muslims as slavers, as well as from contemporary American conservative culture on political agendas. Anti-Blackness is rampant in much",
      "Africa to South Asia. It causes real pain that goes unrecognized, but it does not originate in Islam scriptures or its system of law and ethics. Islamic civilization inherited stereotypes about black Africans from the Greco-Roman conviction that climate shaped both body and personality, and from Judeo-Christian lore about Africans being cursed with blackness and enslavement. Though prominent Muslim scholars oppose these ideas as antithetical",
      "The Sufi tradition, however, inverted this image using it to represent the saint's journey from earthly subjugation to liberation through union with the divine. And it portrayed the black African as the pious and devout slave of God who taught",
      "who taught and inspired his or her social betters. In Islamic law, particularly norms around marriage when the correlation of blackness with low status and undesirability was recognized it was as a social reality that law had to manage not as a norm for it to protect. Whether in Islamic law or how Black Africans have been perceived in other genres of Islamic scholarship anti-blackness has been incidental, not essential.",
      "recognized that what blackness meant, whether it was attractive or unappealing ended on where when and who is perceiving it. Negative stereotypes about Black Africans in Muslim writings on geography and ethnology were often mirrored by stereotypes about Slavs and Turks. And the association of blackness with slavery and primitiveness including in the writings of many Black Muslims from the Sahel ultimately turned not on phenotype but on their locating blackness beyond the southern boundaries of the abode of Islam.",
      "of islam whether anti-blackness was incidental or accepted as social customs however leading voices of muslim scholarship from medieval to modern times have rejected it and advocated vigorously for the prophet's teachings that no race or tribe has any inherent value over another as judges jurists and moral guides muslim scholars have had to balance a realistic accommodation of custom with their duty to enjoin right as heirs",
      "It is clear that their duty as moral guides must be to promote and ratio of the color line That's in that section yeah, very eloquent. I just noticed something in terms of the way you Express yourself in this is that the word black itself? Sometimes a word like black African is capitalized The capital being capital A but other times you have a small B when the word Black is what was the logic here in switching from capital to non",
      "capital to non-capital when you're using the word black. Yeah, so there's a lot of actually writing and debate around this in various academic fields in the US primarily in the context of kind of Africana studies in the kind of Atlantic world The So that the debate is is is that black can mean different things? Yes, oh if I say, you know",
      "say you know like this book cover is black like that's just a color descriptor right um if i say that uh you know um a person is black well now i mean i've never actually met anyone whose skin was actually exactly there's always struck me as this whole language of black and white but look at you",
      "So when we use it to talk about people's features, now we're getting kind of into more of a realm of figurative description and also not just that but inscription. Right? For example, in a lot of languages in Africa south the Sahara if you ask someone what color is your skin in your language they'll say black right? And that doesn't... That's just a description for them.",
      "for them. They don't mean anything, but when you say a British person or an American person says someone's black or an Arab person says one is black there are also other connotations about that that come through history. In addition this is also very important if you're like Herodotus we know the famous Greek historian from",
      "Yeah. Oh, my God. He's not from Miletus. He died in 14... He's from... Today it's Bodrum. Heliconassus. When he talks about Ethiopians being black, he also says Indians are also black. So for him, blackness... And this is actually not uncommon in the Greco-Roman tradition but also in the early Arabic tradition that blackness is not just something",
      "It also includes like people who are very dark skin toned in southern India, for example. So it's it doesn't this is important. Right.",
      "feature is features are right so there's all these um kind of stereotypical phenotype ideas that come along with saying someone's black so that's becoming suddenly a lot more complicated than just saying the color black of this book and so the question is do we want to uh put a capital letter there to show that we're not this is no longer just a neutral",
      "about race and ethnicity and value and history and power coming into it. Then you take another step, right? Which is that some people will... It's very common to find this among scholars in Africana studies that black can also mean for example if I... It actually interesting my friend giving me a ride at the airport yesterday is British Muslim his family is from Zambia okay?",
      "walking past with him to the car actually so he um when he went uh to visit his family members in zambia they said you're not yeah uh you're no,t yeah you're black you're white. They said to him it's nothing to do with his skin color they meant like culturally you're",
      "like the word they use for white foreigners right so it was really funny because someone's telling him he's not black right but in the uk he's always being told he's black yeah so the reason why is for uh some people and this includes by the way some you know scholars and activists in let's say a black american culture or anti-race",
      "Black with a capital B isn't, is really for it's not for people in Africa from Africa. It's for people who are part of this diaspora community that had the experience of enslavement of being taken away of growing up in these kind of almost like Creole communities that have different cultural and racial kind of inputs into them in the 400 years or so since the, or four even 500 years",
      "years of the Atlantic slave trade and the European enslavement of Africans, and then exploitation of their labor in the Americas. And then the growth of community of these diaspora communities in the America's right? So in this case black would mean so someone with you remember when President Obama was there is a debates about whether Obama is black or not. What the heck is this I thought he was black but the idea is",
      "The idea is he some people would say he's not black because he doesn't share. His father was from Kenya. You know, his mother was white. His mother was what? The idea that he doesn' have shared this black experience in terms of enslavement segregation and exploitation of communities that come out of the diaspora. So there's all these debates about what black means. And people will come with various ways kind",
      "using capitalization to indicate this. I think it's difficult because on the one hand, you want to kind of acknowledge and abide by these conventions. On the other hand, the problem is if you start to capitalize and not capitalize, it sort of becomes unmanageable because you're reading, let's say some 10th century Muslim jurist or 11th",
      "And he says someone's black and you're like, do I capitalize this or not? I mean, I don't know. What what do they mean by this? I means if I if I was or don't count, then I might imposing my reading of what he's trying to say on something that he might not mean. So when I say in the book is, you know, if we're going to talk about like black British or black American will talk about capital B, capital A right. Black Americans. Yeah, we're talking about",
      "as a modern construct that we're discussing in the context of race and everything, I use capital B. But generally, I just default to lowercase because otherwise it becomes... You end up backing yourself into a corner and forcibly interpreting for the reader something that maybe the reader should be able to encounter unmediated. Okay. Well, from that very sophisticated theoretical analysis",
      "theoretical analysis of the dilemmas of how we capitalize words. I want to go to perhaps another extreme in my experience at Speaker's Corner here in London, this occasional bear pit of a place don't necessarily recommend it. A lot of Muslims go there. A Christian missionaries go there and they're not terribly mainstream. They're quite that they're definitely anti-Muslim. They all are actually. I think it was one exception who wasn't anti, wasn't polemical and hostile",
      "hostile and uh i know one particular issue amongst a number one that came up repeatedly um still does sometimes is um what you call in your book the the so-called uh raisin headed hadith we're going to quote it because i'm not actually sure well you say that it comes a different variance anyway it's not like a single hadith some do mention",
      "the accusations of anti-black racism in the sunnah is the point here and um now personally i don't i don' have an issue with it i mean what i think is not really the point but how what is it what is the most likely wording of this hadith and why is it problematic and how do you respond to it? I mean, is it an example of racism from the prophet himself?",
      "occurs in several variations the general uh pretty consistent part is that you should obey your commander so it's in the context of um essentially like being on a military campaign right so obey your even if he is so some versions will say like an a mutilated slave",
      "in the kind of byzantine tradition actually that sometimes slaves would be like mutilated like have their nose parts of ears cut off and then some versions say you know even if he's an ethiopian slave right and then Some versions say even if his Ethiopian slave who had whose rasu kazabiba",
      "meaning of the hadith is very clear. It's not really disagreed on, right? Which is that says that whoever is your commander, you obey them. It doesn't matter if they're someone you think is socially higher or socially lower than you. Even if it's the lowest person in the society, this kind of mutilated slave, they're in charge, you obeying them. This was then interpreted extended analogically to apply to any official and authority. So one of the instances",
      "in which the hadith is actually transmitted. And the main transmitter of the hadit, the companion Abu Dharr al-Ghaffari, he settles after the death of the Prophet, he settled at a place called Rabatha, which is like kind of if you were to go on the trail from Mecca, Medina to southern Iraq, it's sort of like a station way and this was also where all those Zakat camels, the camels who are collected for charitable tax work were pastured there.",
      "there so he lived there and uh one of this a like an official under the umayyad government is brought out to or the muslim government is is brought to is they're like assessing for taxation and this is the official is a an ethiopian slave whose job is to do this right",
      "is like okay abu dhar has seen you know very old the companion of the prophet they say you should lead us in prayer and abu dar says no like you the uh the gesturing to the ethiopian slave official he says you you should leave us because the prophet said you know obey your commander even if he's ethiopian slave right um so he uh he kind of he he he's almost interpreting this indeed",
      "general meaning of the hadith is generally it's understood to apply to any official who's an authority you obey them even if they're someone you think is lower than you okay now let's put that aside that's pretty simple the other then the issue is uh so everything about the hadit is fairly straightforward except this one clause which appears in one actually very rare narration of the",
      "not in other books it's and it's actually not the most reliable narration of the hadith if you were to get all the different narrations of the hadeeth the part that has the clause that says his head like a uh his head is like a raisin that is actually a minority clause right so this is specifically in one version it's not themost reliably transmitted version it since i bukhari so there's no people don't really debate its authenticity but if you",
      "like look uh we have lots of different versions of this hadith which is the most reliable it would not be it would be the least reliable version okay but let's but you know no pre-modern scholar that i know of and no modern hadith scholar that I know of has ever argued that this clause is somehow false or has been added in so let's deal with it. But indeed, and you say to continue",
      "commentators this was not understood that this particular clause or the whole hadith in any ways is pejogative in a negative way at all it was only much later um that it was understood with perhaps more racist early terms the earliest uh descriptions of scholars in like the 900s and 10 hundreds they just say you know oh it just means",
      "dark, their skin is like dark color, like a raisin. And they also say that the texture of tightly coiled African hair looks like peppercorns. So if you have it looks like a bunch of peppercorn together, the outside, the kind",
      "the it's the color and the texture of the raisin is like the texture. Their hair, they just say this is what the prophet means, and then they move on. They don't have a problem with it. Incidentally, I mean, I should add right now that it's actually hard to okay. So if you look at how African Muslim scholars use his Hadith, it's",
      "say like scholars like muhammad bello the second ruler of the sakoto caliphate in what's now northern nigeria um uh people like his father osman don fadio died at 1817 the founder of the soko to calibrate people like um muhammed i mean sheikh muhammada who just died a few years ago who's actually ethiopian right so he's not just",
      "they don't ever say anything about the Hadith that indicates that there, they consider it to be like offensive or something. They just in fact, Mohamed Bello and Abdel Mosman Danfadio, they actually use it in instructions to their commanders, like how to act on campaign. So what does happen roughly in the sort of 1200s, 1100s, 1200s amongst Hadith scholars who are living from kind of",
      "kind of Cairo, Syria, greater Syria, kind of Iranian world is you see a shift to a much more pejorative language. Right? So what they'll say again, they don't, they're not trying to say anything pejoratively but the way they read it shows much more of a kind of social openness or contextual openness to a negative meaning.",
      "And the reason why the prophet is using this example is because, you know, Ethiopian black slaves are those sort of the most disregarded sort of lowest rung of social ladder. They'll say that they're, you",
      "like just kind of a lot more negativity whereas the early commentators they're just like it's color and texture and that's it and they don't really go into it anymore so uh there's definitely after the 1200s and that really continues into the you know essentially uh early modern period or maybe even to the modern period depending where you're looking that this the negativity really it becomes much more pejorative",
      "the stereotypes about ugliness and stupidity, um, and loneliness associated. I know this is purely subjective, but I know some Ethiopian brothers in London. I would never ever think they were ugly or stupid. It's just, I'm just wondering where this idea comes from. It it's not obvious that this will be something that could be said. Um, and even the raisin head thing, maybe I need to go look at some Google images of raisins, but it's just doesn't, it's",
      "either but hey I mean so I mean here's the thing like I mean you so what's interesting is I remember I was reading this French ethnographer mmm a study on this in the 1960s on this oasis in Algeria and she talks about the describing the hair of some of the people who live there she says it looks like peppercorns which i thought was really I was",
      "with the same description of peppercorns not raisin but um i would say that it's interesting right the one of the kind of pitfalls of this sort of looking into the past is that we tend especially on issues of race and blackness there's kind of been this globalization of american conceptualizations",
      "but actually kind of retroactively, imperially into the past. So it's sort of Western, you know, it's like American cultural conquest not just at the present, but of the past which is kind of a horrific way and so there's always this idea that what blackness means to Americans is somehow what it means everybody in the past or the present which is totally untrue. So one thing you find that's very interesting is... And by the way, this is same thing with Herodotus.",
      "Theopians being the handsomest people. Oh, did they? Right. Okay. The handsomiest race, right? Interesting. Then what's interesting is there's a book written in the 1500s, the late 1500s by Medinan scholar named Ibn Abd al-Baqi who was actually a khatib like a guy who gives the sermon on Friday's sermon at the Prophet's Mosque in Medina. So him you know, you can see in his work and other works from the 1600s",
      "from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s early 1900s from the Hejaz including foreigners who go there like Snooker Gronia, the Dutch foreigner. Like this one Scottish traveler Bruce who travels there in the 1700s trying to find the source of the Nile. They all say the same thing and they note the same which is that people in the Hejazz are absolutely obsessed with Ethiopian women. And by Ethiopian they mean both kind of horn of Africa so Ethiopia and Somalia.",
      "These are considered the most beautiful women, and they're obsessed. So this one guy, Ibn Abd al-Bakr's teacher, he's writing all this love poetry about Ethiopian women, how much he longs for them, and he has some concubines who are Ethiopian. And it's so bad that he also has to write a poem to his wife apologizing for his obsession with Ethiopian",
      "you could say well these people are definitely not ugly according to hijazi men from the as far as i know the 1500s pretty consistently from the 1500's to the 1900s okay on the other hand if then abdul baki in his the same book right i mean he has a whole section about the beauty of ethiopian women and",
      "stupid they are lousy parents their dad I mean just so what is zange for him and the general way it's used in its kind of Arab Islamic civilization is it's people from further South on the East African coast so kind of you can imagine kind of Ethiopian Somalia and then you're going south down into you know Kenya Tanzania Malawi that area right",
      "the coasts. So these people he sees as completely different and considers them extremely ugly. And this is very widely held in kind of Islamic civilization, uh, in the medieval to the early modern period, roughly from North Africa across through the Middle East into Iran and Northern India, very common opinion. But the reason I bring",
      "categorized as black uh that for someone like ibn ad-dal baqi are two totally different groups that he has absolutely dimension always assessments of in terms of their beauty yeah no that's absolutely that's very fascinating actually i think we have to uh ask the question just for the record in case anyone is unaware what did the prophet muhammad upon whom be peace teach about race and what really matters to god because he did teach things so",
      "It's very, I mean the Quranic rule is very simple right? The most noble in God's eyes is the most noble view according to God is the one with the most pious. The one with most taqwa. And of course we also have the Prophet saying that you know in his famous farewell sermon the Arab has no virtue over the non-Arab and the non Arab has",
      "and the black and the red which is interesting we can get into that if you want he's the black person has no virtue over the red and the Red has no virtual with the Blackburns except in their deeds so what is read so I don't know what it read in a mobile it's very interesting early Islamic Arabic and kind of pre-islamic arabic as far as we know if you're going to use a bipartite division for people for their appearances",
      "So two groups, you have black and red. And most scholars would say that Arabs were in the black group. So Arabs would lump themselves with Ethiopians, Southern Indians, and everyone like that. So they would say we're black. The reds would be people who are lighter skinned from maybe the North and the Mediterranean kind of Syrian Anatolian populations.",
      "they said white black and red um which is interesting by the way because when you go back and you look at like let's say ancient egyptian artwork and even some of the pre-islamic arab depictions we have some like it kariat alfou uh from roughly uh maybe 200 or 300 a.d 300 common era place that's about kind of south east of mecca there are some",
      "there are some wall paintings and it's the same as the way egyptians are portray themselves in kind of ancient egyptian art that we all know about right uh they they draw themselves a red color almost like an ochre color so they call themselves red whereas they'll portray like a nubian or an ethiopian as literally black colored like this book color or sometimes a kind of light brownish color a lighter black so um it was interesting that you know this idea",
      "considering what we might think of as like an Arab or Middle Eastern phenotype being more red colored than, uh, then. Okay. But what's also interesting is when that's not very common, right? So generally when Arabs talk about they'll either pre early Islamic Arabic, pre-Islamic Arabic, you either had the bar type bipartite division of red and black,",
      "being very dark skinned, including or dark-skinned Arabs. White would be sort of what we think of like a Mediterranean complexion which is interesting because who came up with the idea of saying white people was the Romans. The Romans used word albus to talk about a Mediterranean complection. You and I Paul would not be white for ancient Romans",
      "early imperial Romans, we would be what's called pallidus or candidus which means pallid. We're basically pallid colored. We are not white in the Roman kind of taxonomy of phenotype and color but that idea of a Mediterranean look is also what the Arabs meant when they said white. So the Prophet was described as white? Exactly this is I was just going to ask you on that very point because it has caused some controversy",
      "it wasn't really an arab or something because he's white what that means is he sort of has like a you know medium olive tone kind of you're sort of a mediterranean picture kind of an arab italian or greek anthony quinn let's go i feel like that's how anthony quin there you know did he play hamza in the the message the film i mean yeah yeah he did i mean",
      "zorba and god and another guy in in uh alhamdulillah his mom in um guns of navarone but i don't know if how much makeup on anthony quinn this is true he could have been heavily made up yeah think of anthony queen in all those movies that's probably pretty good you know but i mean the point is that he's sort of he's a greek and he's an arab at the same time so that's that's white to black white",
      "Mediterranean person, a lighter skinned Persian person, Turks, Byzantines, Russians. What's interesting is when Muslim geographers start to either travel to or hear reports about Northern Europeans, people like the British, Celts, Irish, you know, Irish Irish people that just off the radar for them. They don't know they're like they say their red color, they say they're blue colored. They have this stringy red hair, stringy blonde.",
      "might be because uh the celts sometimes were portrayed with wearing blue uh makeup that might be it but i my guess is and i don't know for sure my my guess isthat if you people who look really really white light skin you can kind of see their veins the bones a lot that's my guess uh but you you the woad thing might be yeah i'm going to go for the word thing is i prefer it because it's more exotic explanation",
      "So now what's interesting as well and very important is that I just mentioned that when early Islamic, you know, kind of Arabs at the time of the Prophet in early Islamic Arabia, pre-Islamic Arabia. If they're going to talk about people's looks, they'll say either red and black as a division or black, white and red. If They use black and whites, they don't use it for people's appearances. So black and white is metaphoric",
      "Metaphoric right, right. It's metaphoric it means noble and ignoble So if you're when this is a business term is used in the Quran the Sun and so on Yeah, not to understand that as a racial classification then it's not no No If you say in the Koran it talks about for example When people hear news of their that they have a daughter Their face is blackened on the Day of Judgment There will be faces that are blackened and faces that our white ends. Yeah This is not",
      "This is not, this doesn't mean they suddenly look like an African person or they suddenly looked like David Bowie or something. This isn't, that's not what this means right? And Muslim commentators are very clear about this. First of all, they debate whether or not it's just totally metaphorical and not physical at all but in the case let's say for example, in this world it's obviously metaphorical because it's not like your face gets dark or colored when you get bad news if anything you might get lighter color blood drains out of your face",
      "But in terms of the afterlife, when the believers, their faces are whitened and disbelievers, their phases are blackened. What they say is this is obviously the whiteness of nobility and ennoblement before God and the blackness of perfidy and kind of debasement before God. And if they even do, if they say it's physical, what they'll say,",
      "So it's blackness that differs from any kind of blackness in this world. It's an otherworldly color, that is not related to phenotype. Like it's not like people, everybody who you know again there's nothing to do with black and white in this word. And what's really interesting is when you go to let's say famous Arab poets were writing in the 800s like Al-Mutanabbi",
      "who, and at this time, right. When their commentators are writing in the 900s and 10 hundreds by this time you know, anti-blackness has become common amongst Muslim scholars from Iraq to Iran in that time it's they've been influenced by the same kind of anti blackness you'll see in the rest of the Mediterranean world which we can discuss later if you want but what's interesting is even those scholars",
      "culturally primed to see black people as lower and white people as higher. When someone like Al-Mutanabi uses saying, this guy is black or this guy's white, they don't interpret it in their descriptions. They'll say he means noble and ignoble. The strength of this notion that black and white as a distinction is really something that is first and foremost metaphoric",
      "after anti-blackness has become rampant. That's interesting. When I read chapter four of your book, Islam and Blackness, when I started on the first sentence, I didn't realize it was a quote. Maybe that's deliberate, the shock value. The chapter is entitled The Western Narrative of Islam, Slavery, and Anti-Blackness. And the chapter begins... I'll just read the first couple of verses.",
      "Absolutely right. So the question really is about the Barbary slave trade in part, and this also has a theme that's come up at Speaker's Corner and certainly on social media as well. I'll just read a sentence from Wikipedia which I looked up earlier about this. The Barbary Slave Trade it says involves slave markets on the Barbry coast of North Africa which included the Ottoman states of Algeria, Tunisia",
      "16th and 19th centuries. European slaves were acquired by Barbary pirates in slave raids on ships, and by raids on coastal towns from Italy to the Netherlands and Ireland and South West Britain as far north as Iceland I didn't know that and into the eastern Mediterranean so this is like a huge almost global slave trade. So in terms of Western narratives on Islam slavery",
      "uh an anti-blackness i mean this what is going on with the burberry the barbary slave trade and why are you talking about it in your book on islam and blackness yeah well it's very important when we think about the way in which this notion of islam is anti-Black how this idea comes about and how it's why it continues so strongly and what I say is that it could be traced back to",
      "uh or three or four kind of root causes i'll list the root causes and we'll count how many are listed in the end so the first one is this idea which is very present in western europe from france spain england and then also uh the american colonies of the northern united states what becomes the united",
      "Muslims are so Islam is a slaver religion and Muslims are slavers. So this association now in this case, it's enslaving Europeans so what happens is from roughly the 1500s until Really? The early 1700s is kind of the heyday of this of the Barbary slave trade is that Pirates raiders operating out of you know attend, you know Algiers especially Morocco Tunis",
      "Tunis to a certain extent, are capturing French, Italian, British and American ships and capturing the crews and the passengers if they're passengers. And keeping them in slavery usually for purposes of ransoming them. Right? So they want to ransom them back to their families for money. Right. So that's the Barbary slave trade. And this is like a you know, it's not real issue one guy who was a famous guy who is remember",
      "crusoe in his story he talks about uh being um in fact i think maybe even the author was captured at one point we can look that up or the viewers can look this up robert lewis stevenson the author no i what the hell who the hell is the author of uh because i haven't actually read the book anyway getting who's who wrote this book uh anyway so that but it's a very early novel so as much earlier than robin yeah yeah but the",
      "John Smith, the guy who's one of the founding figures in the Jamestown colony was also captured by pirates. Now these Muslim pirates, these raiders are a real cause of fear in the kind of public imagination. In fact this song rule Britannia, you know, Britannian rule the ways Britain never ever will be slaves. What does it tell me? This is actually talking about being powerful at",
      "Being powerful at sea and then not being enslaved by being captured by the pirates. And what, but what? Okay. So this is very important. And this persists in popular imagination until I mean, until the present day, you know, you can, I have a list in my appendix in my book of all the movies, including some movies in the 1990s and 2000s that have totally extraneous scenes of white women or white, especially white women,",
      "white women being auctioned at these north african slave markets um this is today it's like a vestigial but in some of the earliest one of the early genres of films uh were was the it's called the sheikh genre where white europeans especially women get captured and sort",
      "uh so there's this very mixed up like there's a lot of you know you could put kind of british and american culture on the couch for some analysis here because of the one they're terrified of being captured on the other hand there's there's like they're terrorified of falling in love another thing by the way really is there's",
      "um the muslim cap it's a little too there's a lot too much focus on it in my opinion i'm not a psychologist i'm that's like college or something no but um you know post-freudian here is impossible not to uh see deeper what happens is this right just say it was daniel defoe i've looked at that 19. so yeah much earlier than uh the person i mentioned yeah so what happens",
      "navy and of other european navies has actually turned the table so after that it's actually more europeans ship european pirates and raiders and ships who are capturing muslims in the mediterranean and there's a very you know uh brisk trade in slaves of muslim from morocco and algeria and that area being captured at sea",
      "the mid to late 1800s or the 1860s, 1870s, really kind of healthy trade of slaves being Muslims captured at sea and brought and sold as slaves usually for domestic slavery in places like Naples and Genoa. What I'm trying to say is that this becomes it transforms from a reality into this kind of phantasm",
      "that remains kind of an important part of the European mind, in my, in American mind until the present day. Yeah. They're board games, they're novels, they are films. They are everything. What was interesting is not only do you have a genre of people writing really their own experiences, kind of coming back and saying my time as a bar captivity in the Barbary's end up on the Barbry coast, but it also becomes something where you make when people write fake ones. So you get people writing these,",
      "writing these best-selling stories of how I was captured, especially British or American women. How I was capture by the Moorish slavers and their horrible black African slaves that they're made up there so this is like a hot market for this. So that's one important origin for this The second is what does it have to do with Blackness? Okay here's the second part",
      "After the abolitionist movement, which is based mainly in northern United States and Great Britain really has its big victories in the early 1800s. In the 1830s and 1807 with the end of the British banning on the slave trade in most of the book by the way that every issue read that yeah, 1830 s with the prohibition of slavery in Britain, and many of its colonies not all okay? Yeah. And then",
      "attention starts to turn amongst abolitionists to non-atlantic slave trade so the atlantic slave has been crippled ended or crippled significantly then they start talking about okay they say there's two kinds of slavery there's a christian slave they say it was incorrectly called the christians late trade has nothing to do with christianity but europeans did this we've now stopped",
      "is the Mohammedan slave trade. And so for that kind of Europeans and Americans thinking about slavery globally after the 1830s, the only other show in town for them is what they call the Mohammedans slave trade. And so this is, of course, completely inaccurate. It's not inaccurate to say that Muslims were engaged in the slave trade in, let's say, trans-Saharan or across the Red Sea or in the Indian Ocean",
      "or in the Indian Ocean. Yes, of course Muslims were involved in this. No one's denying that, right? But the idea that it's only Muslims doing this is totally incorrect. You know that inside there's all these intra-African kind of circuits of slave trade whether it's from what's now like northern Nigeria down to the southern coast of places like Ghana",
      "in Ethiopia, in the late 1800s who is expanding his state and capturing and enslaving other Ethiopians and non-Ethiopian Africans. So this was a Christian ruler who's doing this. But the point is that from this point on, from really the mid 1800s onward you get the idea of the Arab Muslim slaver now their other target is the black African, the peaceful black African native",
      "my idea but this is how it's portrayed you know they're out and you know dancing and doing various noble savage things and then the evil arab muslims come in and enslave them remember well first of all what are some of the most successful early films tarzan movies in the 1920s why in edward rice burroughs uh novels and in the movies why is tarzan there why is his family there that",
      "whatever the tiger or the monkey, the gorilla. Right? Why is it his family is part of an anti-Is part of a British effort to end Arab slave trade. So now you have a new theme, a new story which is the white British and Americans who've come in to help save the Africans, black Africans from the evil Arabs, the evil Arab slave traders. OK, then you add",
      "or moral advancement, this is a great way to kind of shift the blame. So you can say, yes, we were engaged in the slave trade but we repented. We tried to end slavery. The Muslims never did. The Arab Muslims are – they never repented and they're still doing it. This is what Stephen Molyneux was doing. And by the way he's just one person. If you just – Douglas Murray says the same thing on Bill Maher show after the book was compressed",
      "book press he came on the show and said this you can find it if you just go look at kind of these more conservative or sort of west is best west supremacist figures in in the public public life they will regularly bring up the idea that the muslims the muslam slave trade was equivalent to the atlantic slave trade and unlike europeans who realize it was wrong muslim have never realized it's wrong right so did you see this over",
      "some detail in my book. It's not, it may be true, it's very hard to calculate but it may",
      "that the Western European slave trade is basically three centuries, roughly essentially 3 1⁄2 centuries. So you're talking about 3 1⅔ centuries worth of enslavement compared to 12 centuries or 1200 years or 1300 years. So the intensity and the violence of the European slave traders I think it's not comparable",
      "severe than the very these various kind of muslim islamic slave trades and of course then there's all sorts of problems about calling anything like muslims slave trade islamics what does that mean i mean uh what does it mean if somebody is you know somebody one day becomes muslim and they're still a slave trader is that now the islami slave trade some of people engaged in the slave trade are local african potentates",
      "went in and just started grabbing people. They would go and buy them from people who had already captured them or were selling their own members of their own communities. So I'm not trying to say that Muslims have no blame, or Arabs have no blam. By the way then Arab slave raiders from the Gulf for example would go to Zanzibar in the 1800s and they would just start raiding the Zanzabar Island and taking Muslims. They",
      "and local communities are extremely angry about, writing protest letters. These people come from what's now UAE area, kind of Persian Gulf area, come down and raid and taking people who are Arab-speaking Muslims as slaves. So it's very complicated. Anyway, the point I want to make is that you have this idea of the Arab as slaver",
      "un-cured slavery is very useful for conservative, Western conservatives who want to push for like a West is best, Western superiority to others narrative. Now, who then picks us up? The fourth very important kind of source for this, not temporal source but in terms of who's driving it, like who's really revving this engine and keeping it going is Israeli public diplomacy.",
      "Someone might say, oh, here he goes. Protocols of elders of Zionism. You call it Zionist. Yeah, you mentioned this. Israeli Zionists and others. This is well documented. I didn't go and document this. This was well documented that the role of Israeli public diplomacy either by American Zionists or by Israelis in one Islamophobia,",
      "the Islamophobia industry. Two, the narrative of Muslims as anti-black. A lot of films that have these plots are produced by Israeli producers. They're produced in Israel with Israeli actors. So why would someone... The question is why? What's the political reason? Israel was one of the earliest supporters of the South Sudanese liberation movement",
      "movement in the 1960s. It allows you to break the solidarity, the kind of first of all Cold War third world non-aligned movement colonized world movement of solidarity between colonized people so black Africans and Arabs maybe North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa right? You break the",
      "quoting the idea that the Arab North and Muslim North is a predatory slaving force on this, on the real Africa. Right? Quote unquote, the real African. Then another thing is they'll highlight anti-blackness in Middle Eastern Arab society. So they'll say, and you can see, you know it will come out every couple of months. You don't have to go back and look at history just wait around",
      "for discourse online when you have someone like Allahumma salli wa sallim Muhammad I forget his name But every time there's like kind of effort or by some kind of black American thinkers or writers to talk about solidarity with Palestinians between like black You know Black Lives Matter and and in lives though. You'll see in like Jerusalem Post",
      "like Jerusalem Post or something will pop up an article saying, oh how do you have solidarity with Arabs when they think- they call black people slaves and Saudi Arabia and Palestine these are all places where they treat black people terribly. So there's a though you'll repeatedly see this idea of Arab society and Arab culture as anti-black brought up in Israeli media, in pro-Israel media in the west to fragment or fracture",
      "of kind of black Muslim or black Arab, or black Palestinian solidarity. It's actually to manipulate public opinion with a view to protecting the what some have called the apartheid policies of the state of Israel by as you say fracturing any- Putting in the rights watch as referred to it as this. Yeah. Divide and rule basically by bringing this.",
      "or going off subject, but where public opinion is manipulated to reach certain conclusions on events that happen in our world. So we don't live in a... We've got to be wary of fake news and how we're being manipulated. Okay, well, just draw to perhaps draw to a close, but I was struck by a sentence very early on. I was",
      "And you said, one comment on social media however stuck with me. A black Muslim asked me with the sincerity of a Muslim brother, do you know what it feels like to be considered subhuman? And he replied I do not. Once in the outskirts of Dhaka as I sat with the family that raised me there, a toddler came into the yard saw me and started bawling in fear.",
      "the one time in my life that i've ever felt singled out by my race and it was more uh entertaining than anything else you said throughout my life i have been treated like royalty at home and abroad and i thought that's very revealing and i can actually in a smaller way relate to that um when i went to california san francisco airport just a week or so ago long queue of people and",
      "and you know i was anticipating being interrogated or asked questions and i knew what questions they'd ask because i heard everyone else been asking them ahead of me so what's your length of your stay and what's the purpose of your visit when i saw people in front of me people have different ethnicities you know one woman was taken away i don't mean him screaming i mean she was yeah a guy the immigration guard said yeah over here please uh and this person came away and took this woman away for i don' tknow questioning i've no idea why",
      "So I was all prepared for questioning. And the whole interview lasted about four seconds, it was like, purpose of visit, I'm saying seeing friends, how long you'll be here for five days? Off we go. And it was whoosh straight through and I thought hang on that's it. Why? Because I've been told all these stories by Muslim friends of mine, Muslim brothers most of whom are not white about the experiences they had at US immigration.",
      "about us immigration particularly but same in britain as well and elsewhere and i didn't have that problem and i have never had that problem maybe i will now um uh but uh your experience of being treated like royalty this sense of effortlessness of just passing through things of being accorded a welcome and it almost becomes norm the normal behavior and it's not the experience",
      "sometimes the same marriages and so on. And this whole notion of white privilege, whatever that may mean, but nevertheless comes home with renewed force. I thought in that comment in your book and in my recent experience in the United States, I'm not complaining by the way, I am glad I got through your country's immigration very easily, but I was aware how different it could have been for some people I know. Yeah, I mean sort of the question is if you",
      "If you were to or if I were to be wearing like a shawar kameez and have like a big beard and, you know, like a little Pakistani hat on or something. Yeah, I think we would get treated very differently. And that's not to say that there is that that's Not to kind of try to problematize the notion of white supremacy, I Think are white privilege. I think these are You know, very well established facts But I think what it means is that this idea of the racial the racial",
      "the racial Muslim, right? That being racialized as Muslim is not necessarily about your actual ethnicity or your skin color but that there are other signs you send of your Muslimness. Those will also racialize you as a Muslim in the eyes of the other and I think this is important because sometimes people will kind of be like, you know, there's no great Muslim is",
      "where they're coming from because they're like, look at other races about your kind of your ancestry and how you look and things like this. And Muslims look like everything and they have all sorts of ancestries. But the fact of the matter is in the eyes of the general non-Muslim public there are certain signals that mean Muslim and that if you give those signals then you'll be racialized as a Muslim and you can't get out of that right? There's nothing",
      "to the guy at the border, I'm moderate. I have no problematic views. I'm wonderful. I love baseball. I am a Sufi Sheikh and I... They all matter right? You've become racialized as a Muslim. That's what this concept of racialization means is this notion of people reading into you something, people more powerful than you reading into something about you that they make indelible and unalterable. Yeah anyway it was a wake-up call. Perhaps we can conclude there",
      "can conclude there and uh this is the book we've been talking about Islam in Blackness with this incredible cover by your good self. This is quite substantial, some very positive reviews indeed from very distinguished scholars and experts in the field on the back cover I do recommend it it's not been out long and presumably it will come out in paperback in due course i assume? Yeah I think so usually and I usually try to stuff some extra things into the",
      "the i'll say can before you do this kind of stuff i try to stuff more stuff into your notes you know so the paperback versions of my book actually have stuff that hardbacks don't have they have more stuff more um data in there yeah gosh and i'm going to plug another one of your books with one of my favorite by you is a misquoting muhammad the challenging choices of interpreting the prophet's legacy in the contemporary world it's an outstanding introduction uh",
      "uh the islamic tradition today and you take a lot of really thorny issues about 434 we're not going to go then quran 434. uh and you know lying about the prophet and when scripture can't be true these ip idea some people saying no to the script because they don't agree with it and hermeneutics interpretation so it's full of history and narrative as well as taking on board complex theoretical questions about how in the modern world",
      "So that's my favorite particularly for non-muslims and Muslims as well. We I certainly learned a huge amount from it so Do you have any concluding words Jonathan before we wrap up? Thanks for having me on That's all of my concluding word, and I'm happy that you sort of let me ram Ramble on and know your rambling is always Edificatory and interesting so once again thank you very much dr.. Jonathan Brown for your time. I'll put a link to",
      "to the two books I mentioned, primary ones, Amis Quoting Muhammad and Islam of Blackness in the description below. And if you haven't got them, get them both. They're both worth your time and share them with friends as well. So Assalamu alaikum until next time. Thank you. Thank You."
    ]
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      "Do sit back and enjoy. Thank you very much.",
      "Islamic Human Rights Commission for inviting me to chair this wonderful event. Again, before I get into it, I wanted to kind of do a formal introduction with the brother of my father who has done an introduction for our two esteemed guests. Two books, Islam and Blackness, and Beyond Bilal. I'd highly recommend each and every one of you to purchase or copy. Well, I'd just highly recommend you to buy two copies, one for yourself and one that you can give to a friend or loved ones given that it's Valentine's Day tomorrow.",
      "but yeah in all seriousness a very highly recommended book i've had the pleasure of reading two or three um the book at least two or free times and again i highly recommend not only for ourselves also for anyone who has any doubts about islam whether they're muslim or non-muslim or even black or nonblack it's both exceptional reason again i'd highly recommend each and every one of you to purchase these two copies",
      "yn fwy gydweithredol. Felly, yn hytrach na'r ddau cyflwynwyr arferol yma sydd wedi cael cynnal cyfres gyfrifol, rwyf am ofyn cwestiynau o hyd i hanner neu 45 munud ac yna bydd gennym ni unigolion o drafodaeth. Ond os hoffai unrhyw un ofyn gwestiwn, eto pan fyddwn ni'n dod at yr unigoliad, gallwch chi gyhoeddi eich llaw. Ymhellach mae gennyf cod QR a fydd hi'n mynd i fynd i mewn? Ie, mae'n cofio. Iawn, mae hi'nt yn mynd tuag atoch ac yn amlwg gallwchi adda'r cwestiyn neu anfon eu cwestii drwy'r unigolaid ond cyn i ni fynd at hynny,",
      "do you mind i want to ask each of the authors if you can read a short excerpt from your book and then i'll start asking some questions if that's okay so we'll start with age before beauty so professor brown can we go with beauty before age or beautiful yes needs to find section",
      "Oh, okay. No wait, beauty I said right? I'm older than you. No problem. How old are you? Okay, bismillah. So I'll read just to give an introduction to the actual book and the reason why I wrote",
      "I'll read, inshallah, the four words after saying Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem. As-salatu wa sallamu ala ashrafil anbiya wal mursaleen Sayyidina Muhammad wa ala aalihi al tayyibeen at-tahireen wa ashabi il hadinein al muhtadeen wa alat tabi'een wa man tabibun bi ihsanin ila yawm ad deen.",
      "let alone speaking at. Back then I had no idea that the 30-minute presentation would evolve into a lecture series that would travel to over 50 universities across three different continents and result in this book that you have in your hands right now. The intersection between black history, identity, Islam and the Muslim world especially in the West is something that although understudied has long been a subject of debate and discussion from as early as the 8th century with books like",
      "race over the white race by 8th century polymath Al-Jahiz up until the Tanwin al-Ghabash fi fadlis Sudan ul Habash, the illuminating twilight concerning the virtue of Sudanese and Abyssinians of Ibn Jalvi in the 11th century and Suyuti's Rafushan al-Habshan elevating the prestige of Abyssianians in the 14th century. Although the subject is often belittled overlooked or under emphasized in the Muslim community the fact that these scholars who devoted themselves to producing books aimed at",
      "saw that it was just as important to write about it is a testament to the serious regard in which they held the subject and in which we should hold it as well. Most recently, due to the connection between the spread of Islam in the West and Black Liberation movements with some of the most prominent figures in Western Islam such as Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali also being key figures in both the Muslim world and the Black Liberations struggle, we see that there's been a resurgent exploration of the connection",
      "are separate, they are in fact very much connected. A truth that led to the events that inspired Beyond Bilal. I grew up as a young black convert to Islam in inner-city London actually from down the road and from Camden and as part of a millennial generation that saw the world transform into a globalised community. Issues of race and identity were central to my existential search for meaning in society and it was through my quest to reconnect to my history and identity as a",
      "decided to adopt the faith. Wanting to know and understand who I was and where I came from, beyond the popular narrative of slavery and colonisation I was taught in school and unfortunately at home, I discovered the rich history of Islam in West Africa – its fearsome empires such as Mali and Songhai and Sokoto, and its charismatic scholars and saints such as Ahmed Ubamba and Sheikh Ebrahim Niasse. They both represent a thousand-year legacy born of the combination between traditional Islam and African culture,",
      "towards the end of 2007. For me, uncovering this seemingly hidden legacy and history was like discovering a long lost treasure or heritage, and I did my best in the following years to learn and study and immerse myself in it, absorbing as much information and history as possible. I travelled to the lands that I read about when I was able to, and sat at the feet of the people who inherited this rich legacy and tradition and history, internalising this knowledge which not only informed",
      "but my place within the wider world. Then in October 2016, The Black and Muslim in Britain YouTube project was launched in an attempt to address the lack of faith representation during Black History Month in the UK which consisted of black Muslims relating anecdotes and voicing their opinions and experiences about being black and muslim This was followed by other such projects which sparked a series of events and reactions with black Muslims becoming the hot topic around the time that the idea for Beyond Bilal was born in 2017",
      "This period also saw the global rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which led black Muslims to start wondering at what their face answer was to the global questions surrounding their existence and identity. Should I stop or should I continue? It's a bit long yeah? You get that idea. Professor Brown. Yeah i feel like it's the whole getting you to do a reading thing is kind of... if you're bad if you read too much but then like you've read",
      "Anti-blackness is most succinctly understood as racism directly against people of sub-Saharan African descent. Stereotypes about real or imagined black Africans are nearly as old as historical records from ancient Rome to medieval China, however these stereotypes rarely stood out markedly in societies that were often cosmopolitan and where skin color played a less important role than other markers of identity. The notion that the rights and standing of people racialized as black African",
      "became pervasive only in the early modern period with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade and Europe's powerful colonial states. The understanding of race and blackness that formed in the West, particularly in the United States, have profoundly shaped global discourse. They have forced a dualistic template of black and white onto social terrains from Mali to Karachi which are often too dissimilar or complex for such a binary. They",
      "color is prescription of value. In the West, Islam and Muslims have been particularly singled out as anti-black, an accusation emanating from a centuries old Western stereotype of Muslims as slavers, as well as from contemporary American conservative cultural and political agendas. Anti-blackness is rampant in much of the Muslim world, from North Africa to South Asia. It causes real pain that goes unrecognized but it does not originate in Islamic scriptures or in its system",
      "inherited stereotypes about black Africans from the Greco-Roman conviction that climate shaped both body and personality, and from the Judeo-Christian lore about Africans being cursed with blackness and enslavement. Though prominent Muslim scholars opposed these ideas as antithetical to the Quran, the bulk of Islamic tradition indulged in added to this body material. While anti-blackness did not define the lives and destinies of people with darker skin tones,",
      "and correlate with inferior social status. Sufi tradition, however, inverted this image using it to represent the saint's journey from earthly subjugation to liberation through union with the divine and it portrayed the black African as the pious and devout slave of God who taught and inspired his or her social betters in Islamic law particularly norms around marriage when the correlation of blackness with low status was an undesirability was recognized it was a social reality that law had to manage",
      "had to manage, not as a norm for it to protect. Whether in Islamic law or in how black Africans have been perceived in other genres of Islamic scholarship, anti-blackness has been incidental, not essential. In law, Muslim jurists recognized that what blackness meant, whether it was attractive or unappealing, depended on where, when and who was perceiving it. Negative stereotypes about black Africans in Muslim writings on geography and ethnology were often mirrored by",
      "and the association of blackness with slavery and primitiveness, including in the writings of many Black Muslims from the Sahel, ultimately turned not on phenotype but on their locating blackness beyond the southern boundaries of the abode of Islam. Whether anti-blackness was incidental or accepted as social customs, however, leading voices of Muslim scholarship from medieval to modern times have rejected it and advocated vigorously for the Prophet's teaching that no race or tribe has any inherent value over another.",
      "value over another. As judges, jurists and moral guides, Muslim scholars have had to balance a realistic accommodation of custom with their duty to enjoin rights as the heirs of the Prophet. In light of the severity of the blight of anti-blackness today it is clear that their duty as moral guides must be to promote the erasure of the color line.\"",
      "Interesting, I wanted to see which parts of both your books you wanted to read about. The reason being was because to see if my understanding of like your intention or why he was writing the book was in line with kind of what i initially thought and from reading both of your books for example with Mustafa Briggs's book for me it felt like he was taking me through a personal journey from you finding Islam discovering not only about the rich tradition that we have",
      "roedd yn ymwneud â'r rôl sydd wedi bod yn ddifrifol i'r rhain, mae'n rôli ar gyfer yr holl rolau o fewn gwlad yn y brosesau.",
      "Islam is anti-black which some people, some critics of Islam have whether they are black orientalists or pan Africanist and also some Muslims who may have some doubts that is the religion anti-Black because of what they've heard or seen from some Muslims even some respect Muslim scholars or intellectuals so where you skillfully was addressing okay let's answer this question is Islam anti- Black by looking at the Islamic legal tradition it's particularly",
      "Maliki Madhab, some writers from Sufi Saints as well as some other Muslim contemporary and ancient scholars who say in relation to blackness so they're both exceptional reasons for different reasons but they both deal with the topic of blackness and Islam. And funnily enough just before coming here someone messaged me was like why are you attending an event about blackness",
      "and I think it's important that this is addressed. This book is phenomenal, both of the books but particularly Islam in Blackness from an academic perspective and this idea that only black people or people of African descent can speak about race, I don't agree with that and even within our Islamic tradition we have great scholars such as Ibn al-Jawzi who was not black who wrote this phenomenal book called Tanwira al-Ghabash fi Fadli Sudan wal Habash which is roughly translated as illuminating the darkness regarding",
      "and Abyssinians, like modern day people from the Horn of Africa. And you had Imam al-Nasir too as well who also wrote a book speaking about the virtues of black people because anti-blackness has been an issue from the time of the Prophet peace be upon him up until recent times so as Muslims although we like to act like um anti-Black or racism doesn't exist it does exist but fortunately we do have we did have scholars of the past and today who are sitting with us which kind of addressed this issue not only",
      "religion but also to uplift and enlighten us about some great people of african descent who've contributed to an early world civilization by islamic history my question i have for both of you what are the key takeaways that you'd like people to take from reading your book go ahead go ahead no i started the last question yeah i assumed the person was talking about me the one who asked",
      "Yeah, I don't know. That's that I hear that a lot. I don' t know so Just to say why I wrote this book it wasn't like I woke up one day I was like you know I want to write about blackness because this is not something I ever thought about right People asked me actually I wrote a book on Islam and slavery people were like we should write a book about Islamic race I said I'm not crazy. I'm okay. What do you think? I'm nuts but then this in During 2020 in the summer of 2020 there was a debate on this research Africa",
      "list serve, and there were professors actually like professors with academic positions making the argument that Islam is not that Muslims are racist. That Islam at its scriptural core, the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet is anti-black. So I wasn't on this list serve. I was in the summertime doing whatever. And people kept sending me emails like someone's saying this. Do you know about this hadith? What about this Hadith?",
      "I look into it and I finally eventually started researching this stuff. And then in order to answer one question, I had to answer another question. Look at this, look at that. So eventually just piled up into a book but the... It came out of people asking me questions about these accusations about Islam as a religion so that's why the book exists. So I mean I think that what I... I guess the argument I'd want someone",
      "that no, Islam's not anti-black. That's one thing, you know? Let's put that aside. I think the other thing that there are two issues I think that I would really... Well maybe three, I'll try to be quick with them. Three issues I would like people to think about. One is that so many questions about things like, I mean think about this. Why do we call white people white?",
      "paper is white. My skin's not white. Why do we call black people black? I've never met someone who actually has black skin. These are the kind of basic questions that we don't really think about, that are really... why do people call... like where do they get names for colors? This is actually really interesting. I found it to be fascinating and that is stuff that it's very hard to find answers about and I really enjoyed learning about in this book when I was writing this book",
      "how much of these issues around color and race and appearance are, like we don't really question where they come from and how they're shaped. That's one thing I found really interesting. The second thing is that we impose, I don't even think it's like a modern view. I think it' s like America. The United States has effectively imperially dominated not just the world but also the past right? So everybody",
      "Everybody today, whether I mean, I'm not just talking about like, you know, racist white people or something. Even people who, let's say are racialized as black identify as black are angry about racism, justifiably upset about this right? Even everybody is looking at the past through a very specific lens that's created by various Pacific society in a very Pacific time and completely ignores the fact that all these other societies in our human history have their own ways of thinking",
      "about race and color and community all this stuff. And we just go back in time, we impose our like cookie cutter view of these issues on the past. And that's as I said sort of like imperial domination of the past and even the people who are like you know anti-racist activists a lot of times are kind of complicit in this. I think that's something that's important to keep in mind. The third thing i want to say is that you know uh a lot",
      "and identity, and discrimination are actually very hard issues to resolve. So if you think about this like... Let's say there is a Pakistani Muslim family in America okay? And then there is black Muslim family of African American Muslims converted two or three generations ago or something right?",
      "The kids want to get married. The Pakistani parents, if they're hesitant about the marriage, right? Is it anti-black racism? Maybe, right, and maybe that's part of it or is it like this person is from another community, like they don't speak our language, they're not from a same culture. That mean so one of them is invalid, right. Racism is unacceptable in our religion. Concern",
      "about culture and the ability to live together, have common expectations with communication that is valid. Right? But how do you tell the difference? So it's really hard. Imagine your Muslim scholar and you're trying to figure out like someone brings you this issue. You have to try and balance a cap. You can't look into people's hearts. And so there's like a real challenge in Islamic tradition about trying to balance the mandate to deny the legitimacy of prejudice, to deny",
      "on the one hand, but also to accept like the human foibles of communities and like the need for humans to be able to relate to one another. And this is it's really hard to see. It's almost painful to watch Muslim scholars trying to balance these. I think that we have to have maybe much more compassionate for some people who are involved in this. Before I start to speak about my book, I have just finished reading Professor Jonathan's",
      "Yeah, I loved it. Hamzah Ler was a very well researched and detailed book And I feel as though the existence of this book is important in discourse around this subject because The paradigms in which we see blackness, race, community and the way in which We see the world that the professor mentioned Is largely the result of things that we don't think about so it's largely the results of Western academia and the Way that western society has defined the world",
      "the world and then applied those definitions on a global scale. And we've all been socialized to accept these Western terminologies in how we define ourselves as individuals, and how we defined race, and our function in society. If we look at the global culture like that as much as we all come from different parts of the world, and we have different ways of seeing things in different cultures or different languages essentially",
      "a western global monoculture all of us in one of our societies are products of colonization or Western education and so the way in which we've been taught to see ourselves whether we like it or not is shaped by Western academia as well when we see issues such as racism Islam or blackness and Islam even as Muslims but as Western educated Muslims it's important that we have people who represent Western academia",
      "works that can allow us to re-look at all of these issues the same way for example these scholars in the past were the result of the highest standard of academia available in their times and so they produced works that dealt with race and religion according to the paradigm of their time. The paradigm of our time is Western Academia, so to have a western academic who comes from a privileged class you are white and you are Anglo Saxon",
      "and definitions, and the systems that define whiteness and blackness for you to tackle this issue in the way that you have I feel like is very commendable. And it's essential for us to be able to read it and understand it. And if you follow Professor Jonathan's trend in academia and publishing books, the first book that I heard from you was Misquoting Muhammad which dealt with the accusations levied against hadith.",
      "you defended that issue as a Muslim, you felt it was your concern as a Western academic but also as a muslim to answer the questions and challenges of people against hadith studies. And then when the question came to slavery you also thought it was responsibility as a Muslims to defend Islam and to defend the teachings of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam against the accusations levied against Islam via slavery. So when the questions came about Islam and anti-blackness",
      "Muslim but also as a Western academic to approach it in the way that uses your knowledge and your expertise and your privilege and your skills to defend the Prophet sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam and to defend",
      "these social phenomenons came about and how we can address the accusations levied against Islam, about the origins of these accusations. So for example, how the racialization of black and white came about in the world at large and then in Muslim society specifically. How anti-black racism crept into the Islamic tradition? How racial discrimination crept",
      "origins of these and possibly solutions and defenses for these my book on the other hand was more about dealing with the results of these things as a lived experience as a black muslim somebody that has faced these um discriminations or this anti-blackness etc and appealing to muslims to relook at history in the lens of how they practice islam today",
      "speak about Mbyon Bila, and this is a child... This is like a criticism that I've received in the book. Wouldn't have been classified as being black in their societies at the time that they lived in because blackness as a term not as a physical description but as a social terminology did not exist at that time because there's black as Professor mentioned in his book with a lowercase b and then there's Black with a capital P. There's black in terms of",
      "And then there's also black as a social status and as a product of specific social events that produced the class of people that were racialized as black without them having essentially been black. So my premise of the book is that if we racialize people as black in the 21st century, and we have certain stereotypes associated to them, and",
      "If we were to re-look at the past with the same lens that we look at the present, many of the figures classified in the Qur'an would be considered to be black. Many of the figure around the Prophet ﷺ would be considerd to be Black. Many other amazing nations and states that contributed to the development of Islam as we know it today were established by Black people. And so then how would we now look at",
      "we still have inherent anti-blackness and discrimination within our practice of islam and so my main takeaway for the book was just basically if you have these issues, if you do discriminate against black people or as a black person if you don't feel as though you have a place within the religion and you feel discriminated against it's important to re-evaluate the tradition with this lens that we've been given now to realize that many of the major figures",
      "this attitude and these kind of practices in terms of racism anti-blackness colorism etc shouldn't exist in somebody who has real love for allah real love from the prophets real love to the messengers because for many of them if they were to live in this day and age they would be racialized as the same people that are discriminated against",
      "You've kind of both answered it in both of your previous questions, but if you could expand on what would you say was the source or sources for anti-black racism amongst Muslims in history? I'll pass that to the professor because he explained it really well in the book. Really? Sure. I mean, I feel bad. Because half your answer, you were talking about saying how good my book was. I felt like, oh man, so guilty. I also read his book, by the way, which I really enjoyed and I had a copy, but I gave it away. So I have to get another copy. Okay.",
      "Okay, so it's interesting. The sources are... You can think of a couple of sources, right? So one is kind of general in the sense that if you're in parts of the world that are fairly far from the equator,",
      "north the central india north right um there's actually kind of a weirdly common sense link between darkness and lower status in the sense that if you have to work outside in the sun and like not just you're not only are you getting tanner but you're getting dirty right so the idea of blackness as darker and skin tone because you're tanned right",
      "dirt your hands are dirty and like calloused and stuff like that the idea and then first is the lighter per lighter skin person is don't doesn't have to go outside it doesn't happen get dirty so you have this association of darkness with lower status manual labor I kind of thought and a lighter skin was like higher status so in that you can imagine there you have sort of one potential source for valuation of light lighter skin tone over dark skin tone the second",
      "You know, I would actually say that it's really... It's sort of the unfortunately kind of a Judeo-Christian tradition. And I generally don't like to throw cast blame on religious traditions but I think this is you can clearly identify this in the Old Testament idea of the curse of Ham. So this is a story in the book of Genesis where one of Noah's son",
      "Noah's son Ham, Noah gets blotto drunk and passes out naked. I'm not saying this actually happened. This is in the Old Testament, okay? And Ham, his son does not cover him up and his other sons do. So when Noah comes to he curses some of Ham's descendants with being slaves to his brothers. Notice being slaves, right? Now what happens in the let's say between",
      "say between roughly 200 BC and around 400 AD or 500 AD is you have other versions of this story emerge in kind of Judeo-Christian lore where it's also a curse of blackness. So, it's a curse slavery and blackness or blackness, or slavery right? And also the idea drawn from the biblical scriptures that Ham's descendants populate Africa.",
      "black Africans are sort of cursed to be slaves. And then if you add to this kind of Greco-Roman notions of science and where, how climate affects not just how we look but how we think and our personality there's this idea that kind of African people in the it's not because they're Africa it's because theyre in the south hot areas they're sort of like emotional and really sexual and you know uh kind of hot headed",
      "and maybe not so smart. By the way, they also say people in the far north are not so smar but they're also drunk most of the time. So these are some of the ideas. But you can see if you take these together, you get a pretty potent mixture. Now when... In Islamic tradition really major scholars like Ibn al-Jawzi, Asayyuti and others, Dimash Kli and kind of geography and sciences, they totally deny this story of the curse of Ham. They say it's",
      "It's inaccurate scientifically. It goes against the reliable hadiths we have on the origin of how people look, right? But unfortunately there although they're very high status, they are a minority in the Islamic tradition and a lot of Muslim scholarship just kind of like it if it's just taking a lot material from the biblical tradition one of things to take is this notion of the curse of Ham, right. And so you get this association",
      "of blackness and slavery. Yeah, I don't think I need to add more to that. But it was literally one of the things that are highlighted from the book when you summarized there and you said Islamic civilization inherited stereotypes about Black Africans from the Greco-Roman conviction that climate shaped both body and personality in the Judeo Christian law about Africans being cursed with blackness",
      "Shukran. Actually, one of my favourite chapters was your last chapter, Daughters of Hajar where you spoke about female scholarship in African Islamic tradition Reason being is because I think one thing even in my book I kind of overlook which people kind of criticise me for rightly so",
      "people it's always black men and then oftentimes we don't hear about the contribution of black women um black Muslim women in particular and I was very glad that you know mashallah you dedicated a chapter acknowledging and celebrating the contributions of black Muslim Women in history do you mind talking a little bit about that chapter why are you dedicated to chapters specifically about female scholarship in this Islamic African tradition um okay yeah personally I the main one of the main reasons was during the presentation that I gave about beyond Villa",
      "about Bion Bilal, I grew up seeing representations of and I took a large portion of my Islam from female West African scholars. So as much as you know I mentioned I came into Islam through Sheikh Hassan Siseh it was his niece Aisha Sise who lives here in the UK that taught me how to read and write the Quran and I memorized the last Juz with her so like my Quranic education and my Arabic education began",
      "all of her mother and all of the aunts had memorized the Quran, and were scholars. Her father's side same thing, her grandmother had memorized The Quran and was a scholar she studied the Arbaeen and Nauwi and memorized them along with her brothers and she was known as somebody of knowledge and it goes back generations and generations. Her grandmother was the daughter of Sheikh Ibrahim Yassin and he had over 40 daughters that all memorized the Qur'an",
      "organizations and built masajid and were very, very active. And whenever I would go to Senegal, I would visit them, I'd spend time with them, study with them and they were accorded the exact same status and respect as the male scholars were. That was just how society functioned. The same way you'd visit a son of Sheikh Ibrahim and learn from him and seek blessings for him is the same way that you do so for your daughter. The only difference became in things like leading Salah, women don't lead Salah because",
      "than that there wasn't really that distinction between male and female figures of authority. And so, that was something I grew up seeing but then i never really saw replicated in a lot of other religious manifestations of the Muslim community and it was something that is severely lacking in the west as well we don't really see female scholars in the same way we see male scholars there are not as many female sheikhs and teachers who are",
      "cultural reasons as I wanted to highlight that to show that not only was there a history of that in West Africa that wasn't being spoken about and wasn't known but also that it has deep relations to the female scholarship tradition in Islam anyway. The Quran, as we know it came to us through a woman because after the Quran was compiled by Sayyidina Abu Bakr and Sayyida Omar they entrusted it with Sayyeda Hafsa, the wife of the Prophet. So when Uthman",
      "produce his copies of the Quran and send them out to the Muslim world. He did so from the copy that he took from Hafsa. When we speak about hadith and sharia, 25% of the sharia comes from Aisha radiallahu anha who was a female scholar. And when we look at some of our greatest scholars such as Imam Ash-Shafi'i, his main teacher even though he had hundreds of teachers including Imam Malik, the teacher that he loved and respected the most",
      "Sayyidina Nafisa, who was a great granddaughter of the Prophet ﷺ and he respected her to the point that when he passed away, he wrote in his will that he wanted his body to be taken to her so that she could make dua for him before he was buried. And then even before all of that Makkah, the city that we face five times a day towards to pray, the City that we have to visit at least once in our lifetime, the City that when we go there and perform Hajj we run between Safa and Marwa",
      "of these things because of a woman. Samzang was discovered by a woman, the first inhabitant of Makkah was a woman and she was the one that established the city and made the city into a city and not only was she a woman but we know that she was an African woman and black woman so all of these kind of intersects and my reasoning and proof for the blackness of Hajar because a lot of people challenged me on that is if you go to the Seerah of Ibn Hisham which",
      "biographies of the Prophet ﷺ. The Prophet ﷺ is very specific when he speaks to his companions and he tells them a day will come when you will enter Egypt, and he says when you enter Egypt and you see the people with dark skin and curly hair treat them well because they are our relatives through blood and our relatives",
      "gives dawah to and sends a letter to al-Muqaukis, his name actually translates as the Caucasian because he was of Greek origin. And it was the Greeks and the Romans who were administering Egypt at the time that had placed him in power over Egypt. But the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was speaking about the original inhabitants of Egypt being dark skinned and curly hair and that his ancestor Hajar was from amongst them. So when we talk about marginalized communities within the Muslim world,",
      "and discrimination they're always kind of interlinked the subjugation of black people within islam or the minimization of black women in islam is also the same as the minimisation of females in israel and so the fact that makkah was established by a black female brings together the two struggles and so that's why i decided to write that fifth chapter professor brown um do you mind sharing us share some thoughts on your i think it's the final appendix",
      "the final appendix on islam and the caste in south asia because oftentimes when we think about anti-blackness it's generally within sub-saharan africa or african american context whereas i'm glad that you actually spoke about the issue of anti-blackness or colorism within a south asian context so do you mind just talking a little bit about that appendix yeah um by the way i want you to when i was writing this book after i finished writing it um i i was like i wonder if",
      "I wonder if, um, cause I have even actually wrote several books on this topic. He hasn't mentioned this, but I, uh, I was like, I wonder he would email him and he would give me advice. So I sent him the word document and a, as a guy, you know, maybe like could look at it or something. This book is fairly long book, right? So he's like goodwill hunting a con day as far as they can tell because one",
      "and he annotated the whole thing, mashallah. I've never seen anybody who can read mashallah this fast so you take lessons from me or something. So he gave me comments on the whole things it's very valuable. He is too modest to talk about this. Yeah well I mean this is kind of pretty well studied issue and I just was drawing on existing scholarship of notion of colorism. So again I talked about this before right? The idea that",
      "kind of a long traditions of what lighter skin darker skin means in societies where there's like a potential for large variation and that. And you add to that, let's say colonization by European society, like let's see Britain in India. And the idea not only do you kind of you're now sort of standard of beauty being imposed",
      "and then the colonizers also favoring people that kind of look like them, right? So there's that dynamic added to it. You have a strong element of colorism in South Asia, although there's a lot of debate in South Asian about whether or not this kind of color ism goes back to pre-modern period or if it's a product of colonialism but we won't get into the debates. But the reason so that's one issue. The reason I was interested in caste however",
      "Because I was trying to think of something where, because there's not a lot in the fiqh tradition. You do have discussions about blackness and what that means in terms of marriage and things like that but it's not incredibly well discussed and fleshed out whereas one thing where you do have this really discussed at length is in the question of caste and marriage amongst Muslims in India basically from South Asia",
      "South Asia. So I was really interested in how, like what looking at the way Muslim scholars talked about caste and you know it's just like the example of blackness we talked about right? There are some Muslim scholars who were like look Muslims are equal right? And caste is not from the Islamic tradition okay so this is not Islamic, we know what our values are so it's clear that we shouldn't indulge this at all. On",
      "Muslim scholars say, probably the majority of South Asian Muslim scholars, say okay but one we're part of the rules around Islamic laws of marriage is that we're supposed to respect custom. Right? We're supposed so respect custom as long as it doesn't violate the Quran or the Sunnah of the Prophet like we can we can respect it and if part of that is you know that there are these different castes in different communities and they really don't want to mix a lot and if they mix it causes a lot of social problems",
      "I'm just conscious, I think we've got five minutes. Can I ask another question or should I open up for everyone? People look at me like they want to ask a question so maybe my questions aren't entertaining enough. So shall we open up?",
      "Does anyone want to ask a question?",
      "its signification and so i was just wondering um as questions for any of you i suppose but how do you kind of think conceptualize darkness in relation to the idea of sort of phenotypical blackness or phenocyptical darkness within islamic lord um how that's sort of negotiated thank you good question yeah go ahead because i liked the chapter sorry i like the chapter",
      "I keep talking about this but do you know what it is? I did the same thing as Habib. I started reading the book yesterday and I finished it today so it's still fresh on my mind. It's not going to be good people. Social media is going to obliteration. The only thing I would say, sorry to interject, before answering about darkness, even as Muslims when we think about slavery we shouldn't just think about black people. That's an issue that a number of Muslims have",
      "have their supplements so oftentimes when i ask people when people think about slavery they might speak of but then also i'll pose a question how come you don't think of yusuf he wasn't slaved and he was in the quran so even as muslims maybe we need to change the way we view some of these concepts whether it's slavery and even darkness being somewhat negative where they shouldn't be um that's everything i want to say on that part sorry yeah",
      "the usage of darkness and light metaphorically in biblical scripture but then we also have that accusation levied against us in the islamic tradition because there are verses in the quran for example when allah speaks about the people who has received paradise in the akhira as being people whose faces have become brightened or whited and then people who are about to go to be punished",
      "verses that deal with for example the Arab custom of not valuing female children or valuing male children over female children Allah describes in a particular verse the fact that when a female child is born to them their faces are darkened or their faces become dark and so many people when we see that translate into the Islamic tradition, not specifically the Quran and the Sunnah per se but the scholars interpretation",
      "scholars make problematic statements or statements that would seem problematic in our time where they take these metaphorical descriptions and say that they will become physical phenotypical descriptions. And so, they talk about for example people's faces literally being turned black and literally being white and so yeah I won't give away too much the defense of that and the interpretation of that in the book is really good but i would say it's something that's present within",
      "I'll pass the question over to the professor who researched it.",
      "Because that's not the case in, let's say modern America. You know like you want to change blacklist or something they wanna take away, there is constant melding inability distinguish between metaphor and race in our society right? I'm not gonna criticize that or say what's right or wrong but the point is in Islamic scholarly traditions it's a very clear distinction so even when they talk about",
      "white and faces, and black and faces they might say your face actually becomes black but like they say very explicitly that's not like Black people. This is another this is otherworldly. This isn't like in our world right so It this is very explicit Either they say it's metaphoric or if it's actually physical then it's something completely different from this universe",
      "The second thing, and what's very interesting is if you look at let's say black African scholars like Abdullah bin Fodio or Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse or Sheikh Adem in Senegal. They come to these verses they don't go and think oh my god like yeah but you know it's ah they just say oh yeah it's the same thing everyone else said. Black means",
      "you know, denigrated lowly. White means you're proud and noble. And the reason they do this is because in early Islamic Arabic and pre-Islamic Arabic, you don't see the division of if we're going to talk about skin color and people's appearances, you have black white binary. Right? So in early pre-islamic arabic and early islamic Arabian black and white, if you using that binary, this is a metaphoric binary. So if your weight of face,",
      "If you're black of face, it means you're ignoble. Right? If you want to talk about how people look if you have a binary It's black and red So and there's a debate by the way about whether or not Arabs are in the black or the red group So black and read the other ways is a tripartite division of black red and whites so When Muslim scholars were presented by the black white with a black-white binary",
      "tradition and like hadith and quran early islamic arabic dictionaries black white is oh this is metaphorical this is in contrast by the way and again i don't i hate doing this but it's true the early christian tradition is very different there is an immediate and very intense kind of perforation or blending",
      "writings of the church fathers, John Chrysostom, Augustine, etc., you'll see the idea of the devil is the black one. And there's a story in the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament about the washing of the Ethiopian. An Ethiopian guy comes to become Christian and he gets baptized. And when he's baptized, he is brightened, he looks different. If you look at medieval European",
      "prints and illustrations of this he comes out looking like you know those angel babies, cherubs? He looks like a little Gerber baby. You know the Gerber Baby? Comes out and he looks like white guy. Looks like me. So in the early Christian tradition this persists there's a very quick cross blending of metaphor and phenotype to the point that they're inextricable after that",
      "Whereas in the Islamic tradition, they really stay apart. And sometimes they cross over a little bit but there's like a very consistent separation between the two. I wanted to... Can I add to that? I wanted just to add as well with regards to the tripartite classification of race that was used by the Arabs it is interesting to see that for Arabs the way that they use the term white in the Arabic language has been translated into our languages as if it's the equivalent of how we use white today when that wasn't the case",
      "The Prophet was sent to the black and red",
      "even darker than but closer to what we consider Anglo-Saxon white today they weren't described as white by Arabs, they were described as Ahmed Red when they spoke about Persians who had a lighter skin tone than the Arabs. They didn't describe them as white they described them as Asfar yellow and then when they speak about people within their own region who would include people who had interacted with East Africans etc they will be described as Abiyat or Aswar",
      "that lightness was seen as a completely different colour from what we describe as white. But then when we translate Abiyad into English, we use white and we associate it with European whiteness when that wasn't how the Arabs thought of being white in the first place. It's like if we go to certain parts of Africa for example people that are mixed race would be described as being white they're not white, they're mixed race, they brown, they have lighter skin but because they're lighter than the general population",
      "The skin color of the Arabs was darker than the black one",
      "black sheep are not seen anymore when he tells saying this dream say now interpret it as that means that the non-arabs will enter into us and we'll be indistinguishable instead and they'll share our wealth and our lineage with us to the point that they become indistinguishable from us and the sahaba were like so will the non arabs really come in and mix with us",
      "former territories of the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia we start to see that happen many of the people that we classify as Arab today or Middle Eastern today are of Levantine descent or Phoenician descent or Eastern Roman descent because the capital of the eastern roman empire was Constantinople in Turkey or Damascus before that in Syria so Syria Palestine Lebanon Jordan all of these places were called Romans to the Arabs and they",
      "described as being Arab so it's just about understanding historical context, understanding definitions and so even when we see the word Abiyad in the Quran or whitened etc. It is not the same white as what we conceptualize as white today which is linked to a very Eurocentric and Anglo-Saxon definition of white because those people were described as something completely different by the Arabs that were using the Quran at the time",
      "I think it's also important when we are reading the Quran or hadith especially these historical books, especially in relation to race. We have to understand how words was used in the 7th century Arabian law and our modern context and especially even when we look at race similar to what Professor Brown said even when you look at races which viewpoints which vantage point are we looking at so in America we've got binary black white in other parts of",
      "way and oftentimes we project our own prejudices and biases when reading historical texts i think you have to kind of be careful with that and um quick story when i was um studying in egypt i remember when i one of my tutors he would teach me pre-islamic poetry and he was talking about how the way the arabs used to praise women i mean they used to describe the women like a cow",
      "Mae hi'n cael ei ddysgu fel gaw. Dyna'r llyfr ffensol, sut gallwn ni alw ymlaen gyda chwaeth yn cael cae? O ran y cyd-destun Bristain, byddai'n golygu bod hynny'n mynd i'ch atal chi. Yna fe wnes i ei ddarparu ac roedd yn dweud, gwnewch efo fi. Gwybod eich bod chi mewn deser, mae dim llawer o'r amser yn dod o hyd a dyma'r sylweddoliad nad ydych chi'n gweld caw. Mae'r caw wedi troi arall ac mae'n symud yn sôn. Edrychwch ar agor y caw, y pictur hwnnw o dyniaid.",
      "Do you understand the context? So for them, in that case it's actually a praise... The link of a cow to a woman in that context is actually a Praiseworthy thing. But if you're taking it from a modern day Western European or British context, you automatically assume it's a negative. Maybe I was at Nipro, sorry about that. Anyway next question. Just quick comment on the cow issue.",
      "But then like Maha is a name. The guy told me soon as his mom means water buffalo Water both was even worse than cow right you call them in a water buffalo I imagine that's like another level of bad, right? but then and I have a picture to prove this they do have very beautiful eyes So the idea is a water Buffalo has a very beautiful ice so that's what you're actually",
      "How was it? Oh, wow. I didn't even see those. Do you think there will be a book for other population i.e., Vikings, Chinese, Koreans, what's SEAs? Southeast Asian. Oh sorry, Southeast Asian? Does someone, Professor Brown do you want to answer that? So do you think they'll be... Do you thing there will for book, I'm assuming someone is asking do you thing they'll",
      "I mean, there's not a lot of anti-white races. I've never seen like a tall blonde Norwegian person getting discriminated against that much. Maybe it happens, I don't know. But it is interesting because... So I was just looking at my hands during this talk. You know what's really entertaining? It's just like looking at skin color change. My skin color is not white.",
      "like some kind of purple or pink. So my point about this is, imagine you're like a... Who came up with the idea of calling people white? The Romans. Okay. So white in Rome, albus, means basically Mediterranean Arab-y look. When Arabs call say white, they mean someone who's got a Mediterranean type look. And that's actually shared with Latin.",
      "When Romans talked about people whose hands were like mine or looked at me, they say palidus. They would say paludus. It means pallid or candidus. That's not white. I'm not white, I'm another thing. And if you come across... Imagine you're an Arab, you've been hanging out in the Mediterranean with Persians and Coptic Christians. Everyone has a really good tan, they have great hair etc. You go to Ireland.",
      "you're like holy moly what are you gonna call people they call them blue they call him red because their hair is scraggly and ugly. They're really kind of grotesque so I think it's interesting to think about there was a time when people who were whatever white, Northern European they were kind of weird looking to other people in the world",
      "Can you take the next question? There's going to be more questions. Yeah, yeah. Next question. This question is for you. Could you elaborate on what colour the skin of the noble Prophet ﷺ was? There are a lot of seeming contradictions in the narrations. So, the main narrations that we see if we study the Shama'il and this is a book that Alhamdulillah I just finished studying re-studying recently so it's still fresh in my mind",
      "The descriptions of the Prophet ﷺ use the word Abiyat, which I explained earlier was not the white that we know today. But it definitely wasn't dark, which was Adam or Aswad. There are however, there is a narration from Anas ibn Malik who was the servant of the prophet ﷺ who describes him as being brown.",
      "Asmar or aswad but people who are Adam complexion they're described as being darker so with the description of the Prophet sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam was being not abiyat amhat meaning he wasn't extremely light and then not adam, he wasn' t extremely dark. The same way for example he wasn''t extremely tall but he wasn ''t extremely short his hair wasn'' t extremely curly but it wasn''T extremely straight the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa salam was described as",
      "What other groups do you think need to be uplifted in the Islamic tradition?",
      "Yeah, I felt like I needed to write a book so I did.",
      "In terms of why that is the case,",
      "why that is the case within the Muslim community it relates to what I said earlier in terms of for most of us even if we are Muslim, even if come from Muslim cultures, Muslim backgrounds, Muslim heritages or Muslim majority countries. We're all products of colonization and we're all product of Western education and we all are part of this global western monoculture that is formed by western academia and this pseudo science is a part of that academia so anybody who studied",
      "studied in school anybody who has taken part in this global monoculture will have remnants of this with them. In terms of my personal experience I see certain things and I hear certain things like for example sometimes I'll speak or sometimes there'll be a video of me that I'll see online circulating and somebody would say oh wow he's so eloquent and I'm thinking in my head",
      "would be able to speak English as well as I do or would be abl e to articulate myself as well ss I do, or not speak in particular dialects or whatever. I can speak all dialects of English if you see me outside of an academic setting I'll be speaking English in a very different way. If you see m at home for example i come from an ethnic group called the Creole who are descended from liberated Africans who returned to Africa after the slave trade so we have",
      "home called creole that is unintelligible to most people who speak english and it's similar to jamaican patois so any song that i hear in jamaica but i can understand 100 percent and i can by proxy speak that as well but i say all of this to say you do see the remnants of it in thought but i feel like that's all the product of western education essentially and then also us as non-white people trying",
      "So for many of us instead of trying to decolonize or deconstruct these concepts we try to say okay well let me get in where I can fit in.",
      "hierarchy as you can or get far up in the hierarchy as I feel like it's all about kind of understanding the origins of these thoughts and then deconstructing them as a solution. I think people are just afraid of, um, you know, they're afraid of losing what they have. They're afraid world around them. They can't understand or control it. And so they, they like, you",
      "people are incapable. It just comes out of insecurity and fear, and you know, if white people say this I think they need to hang out around more white people because I don't really understand like white supremacy that well because when I meet white people they're kind of...I don't know, they have a lot of problems in America. Well, I don' want to get into it but you can do a lot",
      "they have and you could oh this is because of your i mean it's ridiculous he's i mean or jahid says something really interesting in the you know he dies in what uh 256 55 so like around 8 50s 860s are the common era and he's people were saying to him you know like the indians we meet and the black people we meet africans they're not that smart and he was like yeah you know why because that guy was",
      "boat and brought here. And like some Indian guys, you know, grabbed him out of his farm right and brought him here as a slave. We know that the Indians have all these mathematical formulas that we've been copying. We've been using their mathematics after he'll talk about, for example, the eloquence of Ethiopians. We knew about all these things that we respect the Ethiopian's for but you're not thinking about that. You're just thinking about the people that happened to show that you happen interact with here who are surprise, surprise,",
      "super well educated Indian or super well-educated Ethiopian who ends up here, right? So you we a lot of these assessments are based on taking people who've been like victimized or have their identity obliterated Or like multi generation for like two centuries have every chance at having a family or any stability Obliterated education obliterate it and then you're like what's wrong with you. Like why aren't why don't you why aren t you smart like me I mean so the",
      "And it's the fact people don't accept. It I think is just because they're deep down very insecure",
      "gynyddu'r ffordd y mae'n rhaid i ni ddechrau. Felly, rydym wedi clywed... Beth sydd yn dod yn glir i mi yw bod yn blas yn yr ardal gyd-eang honno ac yn bles yn bawb eraill, sef pobl sy'n cynnal llygaid bles ond nid o'r ardal Cogedigol, chi'n gwbod? Yn yr aral Gyrfaenol. Mae gennych chi'r un bles sy'r eiweinyddion Cymru, ond os ydych chi'nghyd-arab, os ydi'ch chi yn Asiantaidd, does dim penderfyniad os yw'ch llwyth eich llyfr yn blis,",
      "black um and one of the things that came up during this whole black lives matter thing was where south asian i might say well we're brown where do the brown people fit into this so i find it quite interesting in a sense that you know we're talking about black people today and um i just want to say that some of the best muslims i've met are black muslim i've always felt that they had carried special priority extremely good characters",
      "i do think that you know and i appreciate this was them within racism towards our black brothers and sisters from within the community not denying that but i do",
      "that alas panda has created yet i think at the same time we have that solidarity of being dumbed down because we were invaded and not given those opportunities and that we are all in a similar sort of place and i think it's really great you've done this today i'm not sure what my question is but it was all a bit kind of muddled in my head um i think i appreciate your contribution thank you for that and i",
      "something that we don't really see develop until the modern era in terms of blackness and whiteness as we know it today. And if we study America as the case study, because America is where everything kind of starts and then it infects the rest of the world, and we kind of sign up to the concepts that exist in America, you're correct in saying like for example whitenest begins as the colonizers and it's a power dynamic rather than actual racial classification",
      "at people phenotypically and describing them as black and white it becomes people become racialized so you see for example why anglo-saxon protestants are the ones that establish america and hold all the power in america so when for example irish catholics immigrate at first they're not considered white and then when you see jewish east america east europeans immigrate they're",
      "things change and power dynamics change they're given an opportunity to assimilate into whiteness and not be a part of the other. And so, they start to assimilate into that white power structure it's the same with the UK if we look in the uk in the 1960s there was a term that was called political blackness in which even people of South Asian descent would describe themselves as being Black because they felt as though",
      "change that's when we start to see different categories develop of Asian and brown and all of these things so it's something that shows how arbitrary the concept of race actually is because it's not a reality, it doesn't exist. And I say the same thing about Africa to be honest, I don't feel like Africa as a concept exists because Africans before colonization never described themselves as Africans they describe themselves as whatever tribe or ethnicity",
      "Africa becomes a colonial project and there's the scramble for Africa, and Europeans define what the boundaries of Africa is. That's when we start to see the identification of being African as being imposed on us, and then we take it upon ourselves. As a Gambian personally as well, for example, the Senegambia region is somewhere that... We all speak the same languages, we all have the same culture, we look kind of the same,",
      "Gambia and the British took Senegal we have this distinction in our heads now after colonization of I'm Gambian, this person's Senegalese. If i trace my family back six generations we were Senegaleses and I have cousins that live in Senegal that are Senegalese but their mom is from Gambia do you know what I mean? And so even with race I think it's a similar concept there are people who are racialized as black that weren't considered black they're people who aren't considered",
      "Europe in the Middle Ages that racialized as being Moors and are grouped together with black people because they're all darker skinned And they're or Muslim so it changes according to society according to power dynamics, and it's not essentially a real thing Yeah, I think it's very important that You know I also appreciate what you said but it's really important to remember how power functions So why is it that? In like the",
      "late 19th century, Italians get lynched in America. There's lynchings of Italians. They're definitely not white, right? Irish, not white. Why is it that all these groups start getting acknowledged as white when in the 1920s and 30s, all these black Americans who don't want to live in Jim Crow South start what's called the Great Migration. They go north to cities like Boston, Chicago, New York, right",
      "Suddenly there's all these black people around and then the anglosaxons are like, okay you guys are all white. We're all white now right? Because there's the other that they're really afraid of Why did political blackness fail in the UK literally it was a movement called political blacklist why did political Blackness fail In South Africa, why did most of the Indians The majority of the Muslim community even side with the apartheid regime because those in power know how to divide and conquer",
      "idea of kind of blackness, political blackness solidarity is it's basically anti-blackness. Why? Because in the end of the day all these other groups they're going to leave. They're going get accepted. They are going to get their door prize and be happy. And they're all going to be standing on top of the floor of humanity which is blackness like that thing that allows people to be alive and social and real which is there's always this other at",
      "One about the Indians in South Africa. I mentioned that as well, but it's referring to actually the whole Southeast Asian community not only South Africa, but a lot of other African countries where they've kind of enjoyed a little economic benefits over the black communities and it still is continuing today as well. A lot of investments still goes, you know,",
      "Southeast Asian communities. And it's got to a point where black Muslims feel so marginalized that they created their own Black Muslim Congress of South Africa, which they had about three conferences so far in itself. But there is the point on... The question was around how do we approach texts of sort of ancient Muslims? Not ancient but the older Muslim scholars like Ibn Khaldun",
      "So I think you know as far as I know we're kind of maybe unfairly",
      "unfairly criticizing even Khaldun here because sometimes people will say it's like oh look this Muslim geographer historian says that there are these black people and they're like animals and they like pagans, they're naked, they are cannibals. And that seems really racist but they're not talking about black people again we just assume",
      "But they're talking about non-Muslims. So if there's like a black African tribe, let's say Hausa or Fulani, right? And they're Muslim, they're not included in that group. You'll see people like Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Majid, Damascus, all these great Muslim geographers and historians and sociologists will say like,",
      "their rulers are extremely just, they're extremely wealthy. They're very good at prayer. They are extremely fastidious about their prayers and Juma prayer. Their obsessed with memorization of the Quran all this stuff. And then to the south there these like black people that are more like animals than human beings and they're pagans, cannibals or naked. And we forget that we just read descriptions of all these people",
      "Maybe even the same ethnicity because they're non-muslim Fulani and their Muslim Fulaini. There's you know these as especially as these group become Muslim They basically get brought up into the world of like human beings were described as like oh, there's a great societies And they have you know, but they're good size in their bad sides It's always the people beyond the boundaries in the boat Outside the abode of Islam who are described in these ways that we today kind of register is very racist so we shouldn't read these as like Descriptions or condemnations of all black Africans",
      "They're very specifically of pagan groups.",
      "Does Islam in this day and age still hold the transformative power that it did when Allah attacked?",
      "when allah subhanahu wa ta'ala sent the message to us because it seems like we're working from that this brother said we're",
      "you know, if you look at the Japanese 100m sprint team they came fourth in the Olympics we don't look at their race as being a reason as to why they're so fast. So we've got implicit racism and racism changes in form. So accepting that reality does Islam hold the same transformative power or do we as black people need to find safety in Afro-pessimism, pessimism",
      "created these fields and we find safety within them because black is not pejorative in these spaces. We will not be stepped on or trampled upon by anyone else, because we understand and legitimize ourselves through ourselves. I'm sorry, it's a bit of a wrong question. But just like you said, Professor, I think that's really what you said as well. To make a comment is really problematic, because if you look at the concept of intersectionality, at this day and age, I feel like I'm black more than I'm Muslim",
      "saying black house people that you just mentioned i'm only just the only distinguishing quality i have from them is that i'm muslim so even say ah muhammad you're muslim masha allah you saw this you saw that but my house brother over there who's non-muslim by virtue of him being polytheism the true concept of of black now comes forth",
      "content model i will kind of describe that where you kind of internalize these kind of so-called prejudices or the so- called like black people being somewhat inferior but then you say oh my shadow buddy they're still a muslim or things like someone's pretty for a dancing girl or like what most of the people are saying that even though you're black you're still intelligent on martial you were able to write this book so that's kind of a defense that i saw from some muslim scholars and even muslim speakers today in terms of trying",
      "like Al-Jahid, who was for me very inspirational. He's very unapologetic. Some people say he went over the line but he wasn't trying to seek validation approval from even his other Muslim Arabs, Persians and what have you. And that's kind of what inspires me. And I see what the brother is saying my blackness and me still being a Muslim. So again it's whatever works for you because I look at it like I do not need even though Ibn Khadun said respect to his scholar may Allah have mercy upon him and elevate his rank in paradise inshallah",
      "Insha'Allah. Anything that anyone says, other than the Messenger of Allah ﷺ if it doesn't go in line with what the Qur'an and the Prophets said you can ignore it. So I don't need to seek approval from every single statement a scholar has said so that's how I look at it. But I think as Muslims sometimes we look at scholars as if they're somewhat infallible but they are human beings, they are products of their environment. Some things that they say, some what scholars have said not only about black people, about women is horrific.",
      "it's this and that no it's wrong and i don't agree with it i can maybe try and rationalize it understand where the person was coming from but i'm not going to wait for this person to kind of like see my humanity and i'll go with people listen to people who kind of make me feel human and acknowledge my culture acknowledge my race and then obviously then you've got the message of allah who is obviously gonna transform you so when you're saying in order to is islam a transformative religion if",
      "Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him and his early companions it will transform your life that's what my person believes now if you're looking for guidance from those who maybe look at you as less than then you might find it quite difficult that's kind of my personal perspective on it yeah my perspective on is well is that when we speak about Islam we like to kind of conceptualize Islam as this institution that has always existed in the same form and the same way from",
      "the Prophet was given the complete religion. Allah tells us that he has completed the deen for us and made it but the way that that deen manifests itself in different times and different places changes there's an aspect of the deem that is stable and it doesn't change then there's a aspect of The Deen that is constantly reinterpreted over time for different situations at different ages and that is the secret in why the Prophet",
      "a religion that's adaptable to every time and place, not that it stays the same in every time or place. So for example when we speak about Islam in the time of the Prophet there are no books of hadith, there is not even a book of the Qur'an, there's no book you can gather together in your hands and say this is the Qur-an they only have the Prophet. And the Qur-'an came through him he was reciting words that's what they knew as Qur'aan, he was speaking to people that's",
      "and don't do this that's what they knew as fiqh but when the prophet sallallaahu was no longer there it was up to the people now to say okay well how do we preserve the command of allah to obey him and his messenger how do you preserve the quran and differentiate it from the speech of the prophet salallahu alaihi wa sallam that's when you start to see scholars develop the science of hadith develop the signs of quran",
      "word Aqidah was never mentioned by the Prophet but when we have interaction with the Eastern Roman Empire and different philosophies in different ways of thinking and Greek philosophy people had to say well the Greeks classify being as this they classify human nature as this, they classified divine nature is this. As Muslims what is our response from the Quran and the Sunnah? That's",
      "to develop the science of speaking about these realities and then they developed aqeedah to preserve the spirit of the Quran and the Sunnah. And so as every age appears, every age with its own challenges and its own rhetoric and its on phenomenon that need to be addressed from the spirit from the Quran & the Sunna. So I would say Islam does still have that transformative power if there are scholars",
      "If there are scholars and people who are willing to engage with the Qur'an and the Sunnah, and manifest it in a way that approaches the phenomenon of the time, and interacts with the phenomenon at the time in the spirit of the Prophet, which is why we have a hadith where the Prophet says, At the beginning of every Qarn, every age, Allah will send someone to renew the religion. It's not that the religion has changed or needs to be changed but it's that the society",
      "to have a renewed interpretation for the age, the day and age that we live in and the unique challenges that we're facing. So for example you can't go to a 14th century scholar for answers about how to interact with artificial intelligence and AI because it didn't exist they don't even have a concept of that. You can't goto a 16th century Scholar and talk about marrying someone over FaceTime and having a fatwa for that.",
      "understands what's going on, understands the conditions that people find themselves in and then can go to the Qur'an, go to Sunnah and find answers and solutions and a manifestation of Islam that doesn't stray from religion but fits into the religion. And that is why when we look at the ahadith about bidah as well it is very interesting because there are certain groups within Islam who always constantly attack bidah But they don't ever talk about the fact that the Qur-an itself in a book is a bidah",
      "bida praying on prayer mat having rocks in the masjid is a bidah using a microphone to give a khutbah is a bida so they differentiate between different types of bidah as this is a good bidah and this is bad if they realize it or if they don't so when the prophet says whoever innovates something into the religion people don't complete the hadith he says whoever innovate something into",
      "they'll always exist in every time and the prophet says i'm guaranteed that there will always be people of guidance in his ummah who can not to say reinterpret the religion but manifest the religion in a way that deals with the problems of the era so it is transformative if we use it in the way that it's supposed to be used",
      "They didn't know anything beyond the boundaries of their world, you know. So that's why they're dismissive I mean I think if they had like more exposure to them he wouldn't say this kind of thing but I think it's just that's just like You know It's like that medieval world where they think there are sea monsters out in the ocean. They don't know what's going on there",
      "If you were thinking about Islam as a uniting factor, if you're thinking about what role faith has today bringing people together I think that would be an interesting example to look at. Thank you. Iman, Inner City Muslim Action Network I think. So the next question What is the perfect starter pack for those who want to learn more about blackness and Islam? We've got it right here.",
      "We've got it right here. No, I would get... And Habib Akande's Illuminating the Blackness.",
      "is a very, very brilliant book that I can definitely recommend. Can I add to that? Yeah, add to it, yeah. So in this book, the Islam and Blackness book by Professor Brown, he does have an extensive list of all the other books that deal with this topic, traditional books and modern books. So he highlights all of the books that have been written in Arabic by traditional Islamic scholars, and then he talks about more contemporary books like my book, like Habib Akande's book,",
      "So you do have like a very extensive list here. If you do grab this one from this one, you can then branch to all the other ones and kind of create your starter pack and get beyond below.",
      "um did this impact their incentive to write so the person asking are there any right are there",
      "There's a book I came across a couple of weeks ago called Dispelling the Darkness. Forgive me if anyone speaks Turkish, but I'm not going to butcher this word. The Han-Birdies Treaty, A Comparative Look at Black Africa in Ottoman Letters in the Early Modern Period. And there's a couple",
      "videos on youtube and ultimately he's um he's looking at some books that are written by i think mullah mullah ali and you mentioned the new book so mullah aliyah similar to um um brindis but like the virtues of black people in islam basically his book is a translation of an early book in arabic where he was writing for a turkish ottoman turkisch context",
      "Like I said, he's got a book, Dispending in the Darkness which you can check out. Does anyone else have anything to add?",
      "in egypt and the hejaz which are at that time all you know ottoman areas and there's actually another it's not a book i've got um studios or in films ilm film studio they've got a youtube page",
      "the youtube page um islamic youtube page they talk about blackness within their content yeah that's me that's my that's what people call me yeah go ahead",
      "Yeah, I've been to your talks in recent days. I see mainly you have brown faces, Muslim faces. Alhamdulillah, you got quite a good reception from the people inshallah. So I'm wondering like are you interested in taking it to non-Muslim Caucasian or white people? Like your findings and your message",
      "and if so like what changes you would make to the presentation because i'm not a student at this university but i'm assuming it's all people i don't see many white regrets here or why faces here",
      "Yeah, interesting question. So one of my students who graduated is supposed to come and he's white but he didn't show up. He said he wanted to make sure there was one white person here. He's not here. I don't know if they'll talk to him about this",
      "but I don't know. Like, I actually didn't know what to expect in the audiences here. I thought it was going to get yelled at more so I'm honestly so far pretty happy with that. I think... So I don' t know my experience is like white people in America is either they don't",
      "they feel really bad about, like they feel kind of guilty being white and they sometimes beat themselves up maybe too much about that. But I don't know, I think it's just... So if they're interested, I'm always happy to talk to anybody about this subject but I mean, I mean it's a slightly different question",
      "it comes to mind as being important like you know i i've been treated just i have been i traveled throughout the muslim world and i get treated like royalty you know and it really really breaks my heart like when i see you know every one time i was in this scholarly event and there was this really famous scholar from syria and he was like sitting up on the you know in like the front of the room there's all these scholars",
      "more knowledgeable than me, spent so long studying in Syria. Probably always wanted to meet this scholar who's up there on stage and then they just like picked me and put me up next to the scholar and I looked at an audience and he didn't look at me... my friend didn't even look at a bad way. It was like I could just felt so bad that there was no he really should have been out there and you know if you're I feel bad that someone can say oh well it's important because you know how to communicate to white people or something",
      "white people or something but at the same time i feel really lousy that um that people who are you know i go to muslim countries or something and i get treated better than other people who really deserve to be treated better",
      "What did I do? I mean, at the time, I was 25 years old. I was terrified and I just sat there. That's an interesting question, right? Because let's say I'm like, you know, you really should bring up this other guy. Then what if that's really embarrassing for everybody to organize it or something?",
      "it or something. I don't know, maybe that was the right thing to do. I'm not sure what happens if my friend actually dropped a bag of dog poop on this guy's porch once and he doesn't like him? I have no idea. I just don't",
      "I mean, I think today I try to bring this up. Like, I try and always make sure that if I'm being invited somewhere that it's either because I actually am the best person to do that or if not then I really encourage people to bring others who wouldn't get the same attention.",
      "but we can try and keep our answers quite brief. How do we give blackness its own merit whilst also recognising its nuance? What marks out someone as black is not solely tied to skin colour. A brief answer from me would be literally, blackness is whatever the culture or society that you're in or engaging with defines it as.",
      "it as and so it is very nuanced because there's no strict definition of it. It's something that you know changes from society to society, from place to place so you just have to look at the context in which you're in what does it mean to be black in that society who is racialized as black as who isn't like I remember I had a interesting debate with my sister-in-law so my wife is half African American and Native American her father's like mixed African",
      "of her is mixed white and Mexican. So she looks very light-skinned, she could pass as Arab. She's like racially ambiguous, and so is her sister. So I was talking to her sister one day about something, and she said to me, yeah but you know you won't understand because you're not black. And I looked at her and I'm like what do you mean I'm not black? I'm blacker than you! And she said no no no, you're African it's different. Where I come from if you're black you're descended from African Americans who were enslaved",
      "you're still black. He's like, so I'm black, you're not black. Which flipped my whole perception of what it means to be black but in her context that's what being black meant and I wasn't a part of that whereas in my context growing up in England I'm Black and she's mixed or she's a lighty or whatever do you know what I mean? So it's like... You have to look at who you are engaging with, what society you are engaged with, their paradigms are and then kind of go off that.",
      "Yes, it's valid. I think it's not It should be that's my brief",
      "Was it recorded? Will it be made available? That's the question.",
      "uh we can't answer okay so this question i think we could speak about this what is the islamic position on reparations if any thank you i don't think we have that yeah i mean i know that i this is interesting actually working on an article on this because it's really",
      "for Muslim slavery. Go to Egypt and Syria, Tunisia and Jordan and Turkey find the lightest skinned people you can give them a bunch of money.",
      "Explain what's a Circassian and a Caucasus",
      "elite people in Egypt or Jordan or Syria they're all like they have their really light skin, they have you know straight hair and that Arab. That's because there are multiple generations of their mothers are slave concubines from Europe from yeah from the essentially southern Russia caucuses area or maybe also Greek",
      "That's a good way to get people who are descendants of slaves. But the reason I bring that up is it's kind of ironic, which is that it's a really different situation than the Americas, very different situation. So I think you have to like think about reparations very differently from the very beginning. And it also plays into the debate and the illumination that needs to be brought to the fact that slavery in the Islamic world wasn't specifically racialized",
      "racialized towards black people there were a higher amount or just as much an equal amount so in the time of the prophet sallallaahu alaihi wasalam for example we have instances of african slaves people who were enslaved such as bilal and his mother etc but the majority of the slaves in the arabian peninsula were other arabs that were captured in war and enslaved by fellow arabs then when we see the expansion of the islamic empire under you know",
      "The Prophet's mother was a princess",
      "Abbasid period and in the Ottoman period many of the rulers, many of elite people were people who their fathers were wealthy Arabs or wealthy people in society who had these children with enslaved European women and enslaved white women and that's why the kids ended up getting lighter and lighter because as he said it was generations of them getting a slave from Russia or a slave Eastern Europe or a slaves from this place or that place having children with them and then continuing. So slavery wasn't racialized",
      "Racialized in the same way that it was in the States in the Muslim world. It was equal opportunity slavery And we can sign them right I've been signing a lot of books",
      "miscegenation yes we need to uh inner we have intermarriage",
      "We need to have intermarriage. That's why, that's my... Well first of all like mosques need to partner so the rich Desi mosque needs a partner with America, like the black mosque and they need to barbecue stuff together and hang out, their kids get to know each other, they get married, racial problem solved. You said other than purchase being in love. Other than purchasing the book.",
      "the book, read it and purchase it for other people and just pass it on inshallah that's my solution.",
      "so hopefully you'll be able to hear me. So as Habib mentioned, please purchase the books from outside. They are discounted today and obviously you've got the benefit of the speakers here. Also, Mustafa Briggs doesn't live in the UK anymore, he lives in the States and so does Brian as well. He plans on getting the book signed and asking free questions directly to them. I'm going to emphasise on buying the books",
      "for various reasons Amazon has ethical issues but by buying the books and purchasing books from the iChelsea bookstore you benefit not only us, but also the speakers so that you support them to make this a full-time profession so they can teach us and write books on the topic continuously. So I wanted to talk about on the topical racism",
      "organized by the far right at some asylum venue where there were violence and we foreseen the rise of far-right across the world whether it's in Europe, in Latin America, in America, and Asia wherever it may be you see like hate and racism on the rise. And I want to highlight the work that we do with the Islamic Human Rights Commission. There are a couple of people in the room here who are trained immigration solicitors",
      "supporting individuals who have a precarious immigration status to become regularised in the UK. Now imagine a world, these three speakers, our teachers were forced to migrate. May Allah preserve them and protect them from such situation. But imagine some sort of natural disaster or famine or conflict has erupted and they had to relocate",
      "They are forced to not teach, not write, not lecture at universities but you become a cleaner. Not be able to produce the works they're producing now and the work that we've done at the Islamic Human Rights Commission We've seen how many people countless people come to us with qualifications such as doctors and lawyers and engineers who are here in the UK and because of the immigration status they're not able to apply their skills to this country",
      "There's a case that I want to talk about, a story that has touched me ever since I've come across this brother. And I think truly if I have ever met a Wali of Allah, this guy is a Wadi of Allah and I'll tell you why. This brother was introduced to us, he has a large family from Indonesia struggling with finances",
      "in the UK and I was interviewing his family. At that time, his wife had given birth, lost a child so we got talking and I asked my brother, tell me about your situation with food poverty? He goes, I am not allowed to work because of my immigration status, I don't get a job anywhere",
      "she was so malnourished the lack of iron in her system has meant that she miscarried the child but also her strength in her body had so diminished that she was bedridden for months. For months because they weren't able to afford red meat or anything that's high in iron and that made me think about the time of Umar ibn Khattab when there was a famine and where people had come to Medina",
      "And Umar ibn Khattab said that because of the poverty, people who have come to my city I will stop eating meat myself. It was reported that Umar's skin colour had changed because of a lack of meat and iron in his system. He goes on to tell me this brother that the accommodation he was staying at he was subletting illegally so that he can make some money out of it and he has got a roof over his head",
      "to um there was one brother who was distressed in the corner so he got talking to him and asked him brother what's that you know how can i help you he realized that this brothers of british citizen out of a job and for some reason or another he's going to get kicked out of his house by his family he said brother don't worry i'll help you so literally couple of days he went down the streets found bits and pieces",
      "a shed in his garden. And I sat in that shed where I was interviewing him for the research, and that shed was fully equipped with heating and electricity and it was comfortable. So he moved this brother into his house, he was given him shelter, he gave him food. Now when I asked him what food you were eating, he said the children who were eating the food were rice and maybe some curry to go with it. I said, what did you eat? He said anything that was left over we would eat, sometimes we'd eat nothing, we'd skip meals.",
      "meals, would literally skip meals. And he then said that I always used to leave a portion for this brother who was living in the shed and this brother used to preach to him saying that brother you don't work hard enough, you should go get a job, you take care of your family. And this brother didn't say a single word to him despite his circumstances he accommodated this brother gave his food that he should have given it to his wife so she can recover and regain her strength",
      "I can go on about this brother. Truly, I think this guy is the Wali of Allah because of this one incident he tells me about He said that his eldest son who studied in a madrasa in Darul Ulum up north Because he couldn't afford to keep their son at home He was going to the Madrassa and The university or the college or the madrassas were asking him for the fees and he just couldn't get it And it got to a point where the madrasah had said we are gone beyond our patience",
      "beyond our patience so we have to reject this boy who's becoming a scholar of Islam but you can't afford to pay for him. So he and his wife said, let's make dua to Allah. And literally they were both turned and making dua to allah. A few minutes later on top of the wardrobe they saw something glittering and they realized there was some jewelry that was given them it was imitation",
      "that was given to by the next door neighbor. And he said, look my wife just passed away and I've got no use of these items. Please take it your children will play with it. He thought nothing of it. You put it away in a corner until this moment when he realized you've got some imitation jewelry. So he calls his brother up and said can you go to a local shop where you can get some money out of it? He's too afraid to go out and about because he fears that he might get caught by the police or authorities and be sent away and then his wife and his children would be left destitute",
      "left destitute. So this brother goes to the shop, to the pawnshop and found out that they're actually gold. They were actual gold. He ended up getting £3500 for it. £3,500! So he comes back and he said look you know I was about to say his name. He said I've just found... This is real gold and Allah's answer to him was",
      "I just need 2000 pounds for the fees for this madrasa, the remaining you can take because you've been trying to raise funds so they can give dawah in certain countries. Because he was a tablighi brother. He wasn't even greedy for the money. And... The reality is that we have seen so many people come towards us in such destitution that they are not able to regularize their status because they don't have the funds,",
      "and in most cases they are exploited. They will go to dodgy solicitors, and they'll exploit them. And I am not making this up. I have had sisters come to me and said that these solicitors were charging me extortionate fees and the only way I could pay for it was by selling myself. Not making this",
      "for support and being turned away literally been turned away because most mosques in this country don't even accommodate uh muslim prayer facilities for our sisters imagine if that was your sister or your daughter a mother or your grandmother and so please if you visit our website you can see the work that we do when it comes to racism and immigration sort of work that",
      "saw these pillars, these pillars here. And I was doing some research for IHRC in Mexico. I was looking at the migration crisis and the person that took me to this place they said there's a train that travels through all the way from Mexico into America it's called The Monster. It's a massive train that takes passengers and goods and whatnot and many of the migrants jump on this train so",
      "there's some spots where they can jump off, get some food and then try to jump on the next train. But what the authorities have done is that in spots where these individuals were jumping off, they had built pillars like this so that when they're trying to jump off they get hit on the pillar. So many out of desperation have to get off the train end up falling onto those",
      "children dying, sometimes children left behind on trains, father and mother separated, husband and wife separated etc. This hate goes on and on and it's created a reality where we just ignore the plight of migrants and migrants from Muslim communities especially the sisters who are having to sell themselves. There are brothers and sisters who have worked with us who have come across these cases",
      "seldom cases. These are common cases that we're having to deal with. So please, brothers and sisters, we say take your zakat and sadaqah. I'm not asking for you to give your funds to us today but just come here to raise awareness of the work Islamic Human Rights Commission does. JazakAllah khair. As-salamu alaykum."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Islamicate Interview _ Sla_wBFFcLvnFhc&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW3SBwkJsAkBhyohjO8%3D_1748658168.opus",
    "text": [
      "Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem, salamu alaikum wa rahmatullah and welcome to our second session of Islamic authors with myself Osama Al Azami. And I'm delighted to have with me today Dr Jonathan Brown or Professor Jonathan Brown as we say a dear friend but also one of the in my estimation most interesting scholars in the field of Islamic studies in terms",
      "in terms of just the sheer range of topics that he covers and we'll be discussing inshallah his recent book Slavery and Islam. And just a brief introduction to Professor Brown who will be well known to a lot of our viewers. He's currently the Waleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.",
      "an extremely well-traveled scholar and extremely well published scholar who's written on topics from hadith studies to quranic studies to early islamic history uh to all sorts of sort of fascinating topics including the controversial which basically covers today's topic so inshallah the standard format will be i will allow professor brown to cover this topic",
      "I know Jonathan Brown for a long time so I'll go ahead and call you Jack if that's all right. So Jack will inshallah be covering this topic for maybe about 10 minutes just giving us an idea of what motivated him to write the book, and in a sense what the main themes of the book are after which i will launch into a discussion",
      "Please feel free to write in questions. I would encourage you all to buy the book and there's a link that's present in either the video description on YouTube or on the post on Facebook.",
      "was a topic that I basically, by the way everything I say now is actually in the book so if you're interested in more reading it instead of hearing it you can find it in the books. But when I first became Muslim I was probably about 19 years old and at some point early on I remember I was reading the translation of the Quran",
      "Where God compares, you know, a slave who's owned that cannot do anything versus someone who God has given like good sustenance to. Right? And this is actually a parable of people who call on false gods versus call on the god. So false gods are like slaves that can't do anything.",
      "And I was struck. I mean, I remember being struck because I was like, wait a second, you know, like you can't just mention slavery. Like you have to say something about how slavery is wrong. Like, you can' t just talk about slavery and then it wasn't even saying, you go get a slave or do this with the slave that was it was just mentioning it as a parable, like as essentially, you as figuratively, figuratively so that I was kind of understand",
      "I don't understand, but anyway it wasn't a big deal. I think that maybe like a lot of Muslims you know the Quran talks about slavery, talk about freeing slaves a lot right? But you can... It's not really a big issue that comes up a lot for at least for me it wasn t. So then of course so I went out of my mind but then when",
      "ISIS thing happened, right? There was this you know a lot of these newspaper articles came out like in the New York Times You know I system that theology of rape and everything although it turns out actually did some of the reporting on that with her was inaccurate The reporter is it would see basically reprimand Yeah or just yeah, like basically it was you know not there's stuff. That was not well authenticated so anyway the",
      "you know, that was a became really big issue. A lot of Muslims were, you know they're in shock because like here's all these guys saying that there are following the Quran and Sunnah and their enslaving, you Azizis and Christians and other people in Iraq and Syria. And, you now, and they're saying like what this is in the Quran? This isn't the Hadith, it's not Sharia so what's the big deal? You know, and Muslims didn't really know how to answer that.",
      "some of the responses were by muslim scholars like well there's you know consensus that slavery has been prohibited it's like oh okay so what so a bunch of people today say something but i'm telling you i'm following the quran and sunnah and you know what's your answer that today we decided we're not going to do that doesn't really seem like an answer so it was a really big issue for a lot of muslims and i mean i completely understand uh so i was i really wanted to deal with this topic kind of and try and answer these questions",
      "And I guess that the main question in the book is, what do you do when the source that you consider to be morally authoritative seems to allow something that you",
      "Muslim and I'm supposed to follow the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet, and they know best. Why is it that I feel so strongly that slavery's wrong? So first of all why do I have that feeling? How do I make sense of that? Second of all how do I makes sense that my feeling contradicts these authoritative sources? And what does that mean about the kind of truth value of those sources or the ability of those",
      "I was writing this book at the same time as this protest took place in Charlottesville, I think it was 2017, about taking down the statue of Thomas Jefferson. Now, Thomas Jefferson had slaves. Thomas Jefferson has a slave concubine that he had children with, Sally Heming. And George Washington had slaves and this whole idea that George Washington was like, you know, I didn't want to have slaves, freed them all.",
      "There's a book I recommend reading called Never Caught about Ona Judge, who was a slave girl, a girl who was enslaved. Her parents were slaves of the Washington family. She ran away when the Washingtons were in Philadelphia and they spent the rest of their lives hunting for her like they are always trying to get her back. So this idea that they didn't just say, oh, it's fine. It's good she left. We wanted to free her anyway. No, no, no. Not at all.",
      "And when this happens, it was funny because Donald Trump came out and sort of said what I more succinctly than I could brought up the point which is he said okay George Washington's a slave owner. Are you gonna take down the statue of George Washington? Are you going to rename everything in America that's named Washington which is pretty much everything? And here with this was the crux of what I was interested in right which is that",
      "is that it's what I call a slavery conundrum, right? So you have three axioms and you can't really reject any of them. Maybe you can but we'll talk about that. You can't, can't re reject any them but you also can't hold all three of those actions at the same time so it's a, it's an unandromed. The first axiom is that slavery is intrinsic and gross even throughout certain times.",
      "This is all stuff that now we know. These are fixed points of inquiry. These axiomatic in our society. So slavery was evil today, it was evil 100 years ago, it's 1000 years ago. It was 2000 years ago and even 3000 years ago right? And if you want to say that that's not axiomatic try going into any kind of social setting and saying that slavery was actually okay 200 years ago or something. See what will happen and then we'll talk later.",
      "The second maxim is that all slavery is slavery. So there's no such thing as like good slavery, bad slavery. You can't say, yeah, Thomas Jefferson had slaves, but he was a really nice guy so he treated them well. No, no, there's not such thing any type of slavery is unacceptable. Slavery is a gross and intrinsic moral evil throughout space and time to all slavery, slavery. Three, our past has some kind of moral or even legal claim over us.",
      "to our past for guidance. Maybe we look to our paths for strict rules. Now, here's the problem. If you look at human heritage or the heritage of humans beings prior to let's say the year 1690, prior to the year, 1690 in all of world history",
      "I know of one, two, three people in all of human history. I don't mean in like the West. I mean everywhere that we know of. Three people who said that slavery in and of itself is evil, is a moral evil. Not enslaving the wrong people, not treating your slaves badly.",
      "I mean that is slavery in and of itself isn't evil. Can you mention this? Yeah, one is Gregory of Nyssa he's a bishop one of the church fathers a bishop from Cappadocia died in 394 I think the common era the other one is Jean Baudin he's French jurist and historian and kind of man about town Renaissance man died 1596 if i'm not mistaken",
      "And the third one is a German jurist named A.K. von Repgau, who in the I think he's in the early 1300s if I'm not mistaken. He wrote a book called Saxon Spiegel, The Saxon Mirror, which is, I think, one of the earliest books kind of Germanic law books. And he basically repeats Gregory of Nice's arguments with a little bit of adjustment. So that's it.",
      "So here's the thing, right? Now look, if people who are saying like we should take down the statue of Thomas Jefferson. People were saying we should Take Down The Statue Of That Guy In Bristol. People are saying we Should You Know Change The Name Of This Building Or That Building Because This Guy Was Involved In The Slave Trade They Are Completely Right. They Are Totally Correct. Logically Speaking We Are Completely Correct. Slavery Is A Gross And Intrinsic Evil Across Space And Time.",
      "All slavery is slavery. If you're involved in that, if you're a gross and intrinsic evil throughout space and time, something that's so horrific no one can countenance it, why would you ever honor that person? Why would you look to that person for guidance? Osama do you take advice from people who think slavery is okay? Do you ask them like I don't know what I should do in this situation or something. What do I do ethically?",
      "Right, you know tell me about God. No we would it's ridiculous They're completely correct but Here's the problem It means you're gonna take at the least at the very least all of human history prior to 1690 into the garbage can That's it and then you know Then we can talk about the 70s 18 hundreds whatever, you",
      "But at the very least every single philosophical tradition of note that I know, every religion that I knew all were either condoned slavery had no problem with slavery maybe defended slavery thought it was totally normal. So what do you do? That's a big predicament some people might be willing to pay that cost some people like yeah, you're right let's get rid of all of human heritage before 1700 why not if",
      "If it's evil, it's even get rid of it. But very not a lot of people are willing to pay that cost and certainly people who look to reveal traditions that come from the classical period or whatever, the Axial Age or after they wouldn't usually be willing to play that. So that's that's the main kind of issue I'm wrestling with in the book. Anyway, I'll summarize the book really quickly now. So the first chapter is I talk about",
      "And the main point I'm trying to make there is that really when you define slavery, it's a very political action. And it's about defining what you think slavery is as opposed to what other people might do. So it's kind of saying who matters? Whose suffering matter? Who's suffering doesn't matter now? There is no agreed upon definition of slavery. That's not necessarily a problem. Right.",
      "definition of religion. You know, you and I are sort of in religious studies and there's no agreed upon definition of religious. That's not a big deal because if you say religion is this or that, no one says you're an evil person. But here's the problem with things like terrorism and slavery, these words that are not not agreed upon in terms of their definition. But if you are guilty of those things, you become kind of you have been cast out of the circle of discursive ability or thinkability right then",
      "Then that's the problem, right? So when these definitions are both there's a degree of subjectivity. There's a problem with subjectivity there but also they can be used as moral cudgels. That becomes really problematic. The second chapter looks at slavery and Islamic law. Third chapter is an overview of slavery in Islamic civilization.",
      "abolition of slavery in Islam, I give the different approaches Muslims have taken to that. I say what I think the best approach is and then actually after I look at analyze their approaches from the problem of the slavery conundrum. And then last chapter deals with kind of puts all this together and looked at the issue of sex concubines basically in Islamic law owners nail owners having sex with female slaves. Right so very light reading shall we say",
      "shall we say. That's a wonderful summary of actually a very, what can I say? A fairly lengthy work which will...I think this may be the longest book you've written is that fair to say? I think so yeah. But it certainly rewards spending",
      "within the next half hour or so. And wa'alaikumussalam to Samina Awan, who's just given salam to us. Why 1690? You were mentioning before 1690. I'm curious. Oh, that's around when this one Quaker tract is... Anti-slavery Quaker track is written in Pennsylvania. Right. And you kind of spoke in passing that, you know, who is going to discard everything before 1619? Maybe some people will.",
      "some people will and I actually think that you know the reality is so much of our laws, so much about sort of like society and culture is so deeply embedded in a history that sees itself going back to the ancient Greeks for example or to Magna Carta or what have you. Our institutions couldn't survive that kind of extirpation so",
      "you present the dilemma in a very compelling way. How do you accept moral guidance from a tradition, whether it's religious, in my view, whether its religious or irreligious because moral philosophy in the modern world which is largely secular and the academy for example still draws on these kinds of norms that are pre-modern as well even if they're very often critical about them so how do you deal with that conundrum?",
      "I'm curious to sort of, and it's, I actually read the book about six to eight months ago. And I've gone through certain sections in advance of this meeting but I'm just curious, I can't recall a very detailed treatment of a kind of Islamic theological question that arises in these sorts of contexts. So I want to compare it with Sherman Jackson's fascinating book on The Problem of Black Suffering which covers again",
      "sort of moral dilemma and he is you know perhaps a lot more, sort of... He doesn't show himself to be very directly implicated in the debate. In the way that you point out in the beginning, you're a white male and you are Muslim and therefore there are two traditions through which you are an inheritor",
      "course, being an African American is more likely to be at the receiving end of that tradition. But he doesn't in my recollection, you know, make such a big issue of it and he presents the four also, you Know, for all we know his ancestors own slaves too. I mean, so if you look in I mean I'm not You know, I'm happy to admit my More immediate guilt in any number of issues but I mean what's interesting about this? Is it you know human history is one in which All of us are",
      "descendants of slave and slave owners probably right at some point or the other yeah and i think this is what's fascinating for me um because you know we also have these kind of dna tests that you can do i don't know how accurate they are and what scientists think of them but they show us as being all deeply intermixed as a kind of human society so my question uh i went on a bit of a digression but",
      "question of tahseen right you know what is moral evil and this certainty that we have in the modern period i'm just speaking sort of obviously into theological theory here but these certainties that we havetheism it's like wait we don't actually have any moral 70s and so I wonder if that's something that you reflect on in the book I cannot recall that being a particularly salient feature yeah so I talk about that now it's interesting because there's a prominent Muslim",
      "Prominent Muslim scholar in the West whom I have a lot of respect for so I'm not gonna name this person. I'll just say that They you know, this person Wrote in several of their books that that called the Abdu Jabbar famous muwattaz Ali Shafi scholar died 1025 Right That he says that Slavery Rick and slavery is",
      "Yeah, that to hear it's kind of its morally evil and in trickly in an assault now He never says this in his book. So by the way that scholar never gives the citation Right I looked through this book and also so did Sharon Jackson and he never says is in fact called the algebra says the opposite Now if you're more tazza light There you cannot the things that are allowed by law",
      "by law, by God have to ultimately be morally right. So the things are you know, the relationship of like exactly how things are right and wrong in the world is another issue but the point is that things are Right and Wrong in and of themselves in the World. And there can't be contradiction between that and what God says so God for example can't say murder somebody because murder is wrong now for ushery you could say God could say murder",
      "Definition of just is what God says. Okay now from what Tesla so called the other Jabbar if you're on what has lights He can't say slavery's wrong why because the Quran allows it So he says in fact, he says the fact that God allows slavery means it has to be Hassan has to do good right now What so Muslims scholars never?",
      "Never free my no pre-modern Muslim scholar that I know of nor could I conceive of them doing this ever said that slavery was Evil in and of itself, right? Okay. Remember by the way Except for those people I said earlier nobody said this. Yeah, I'm not just a Muslim. Yeah now Why but what would they say? They always think though acknowledge it was harmful there's two things one In Islamic law an Islamic theology",
      "and islamic theology humans are born free this is not a muslim invention roman law also said that the default status for human beings is freedom if a human just flops out of the womb all things being equal that person's free right okay um the difference between let's say us and the romans is that the roman said there are certain ways that you can legally be enslaved",
      "But to the it's a default of human existence is freedom and Muslim scholars were also clear that only God owns our freedom But God can allow certain Situations in which people can lose their freedom, right? They can lose it Let's say if they commit a crime or something like that Right or in the Quran the Sunnah if you are non-muslim outside of the Islamic World and you get captured",
      "and you get captured in a war with Muslims. And the Muslim can take you, and they can keep you as a slave. I mean, losing freedom because of a crime is not something which is in the Islamic tradition. Yeah, it's not. But I mean we Muslims use prisons at various points in history. So the point is they take somebody, they put someone in a prison, we would say that has not been free right? Right.",
      "and morals or moral legal theorists talk about this they freedom and slavery are controlled by the state held by the ruler of the government as almost like in lieu of God so just like the Sultan or the government can have you executed if you commit a crime right like they're the ones who hold this right of God they also hold the right of",
      "Yeah, exactly. So let's say Ahmed the Muslim owns a slave in Cairo in 1500. So Ahmed the Muslims owns the right of using that slave. The actual freedom and slavery status of that person is held by their government. Fascinating. That's why for example the government can say you're mistreating your slave I'm gonna make you free the slave or I'm going to take the slave from you or something like that so there's this oversight",
      "to happen to you if we become a slave sure now but they all does that is harmful it's it has daughter means harm right why is it harmful they say this very explicitly you can't do whatever you can make your own decisions you can do whatever want you don't get to benefit from all the fruits of your labors you're not a complete legal person so for example in most schools of law slaves can't own property some schools of laws slaves can lead prayers",
      "You know Couldn't be a witness in court. So you're not a complete legal person so the reason why freeing a slave is good and and by the way, I don't know of any Source scriptural tradition or work of thought That is as obsessed with emancipation as the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet The Quran the son of the prophet are obsessed with Emancipation with emancipa ting slaves",
      "So why are they so obsessed because Muslim jurists would say or legal theorist and say slavery is harmful I Know you're but the difference the harm for them did not outweigh The owners right of the owner, right? Right. Um now someone might say also like wait a second You said the kind of center obsessed with emancipation. Well, why didn't the Quran just say? Slavery is prohibited",
      "Slavery is prohibited. Right. Because nobody said that no society that had slaves, which pretty much every society, certainly every civilization ever suggested the abolition of slavery until the early modern period, until really the 1700s and 1800s. Why is that? I mean, that's another issue we can talk about.",
      "what other traditions prohibited alcohol for example um in the pre-modern tradition yeah i'm not sure i mean i know prohibition took place in the united states but that's kind of a modern state kind of effort but it would be an interesting comparative exercise i mean so so that the thing is that you know some people say why you know oh the quran didn't prohibit slavery because it would",
      "prohibit polygamy or sorry to play get that's pretty polytheism yeah, but Islam did that In addition it's possible right? That the Quran or the Prophet could have said look We can't prohibit this but this is wrong Right. They don't say that but the point is that I think the reason why and just to make a slight digression But I'll tell you it makes sense which is what one of the things that I get emailed every night",
      "every day, about once a week, once or twice a week I get an email from somebody saying, I can't understand how people in the past have allowed sleep. Fascinating. And it's always causing them great consternation, anxiety. So this is probably because I'm a professor and I think about all this stuff all the time. And you've written a book about it. But what really interests me is",
      "Not how could they have thought it? But why is it that I don't think that, right. So if we're looking at humanity, everybody in humanity who's ever lived get them up on stage you've got Aristotle, Buddha the Prophet Moses, everybody and you say oh yeah everybody who thinks slavery is evil intrinsically in and of itself go over here everyone thinks that slavery is not evil intrinsicaly in and out of itself, go over there",
      "there the people who think it's people are going to be very very small and they're going to have a very specific time in place in human history so here's the thing what is what do those guys not have hearts i don't understand these earlier people that they just don't they're like dysfunctional their hearts don't work their brains don't",
      "What does our revulsion mean? How do we think about morality, right? It's not a problem for example for us to say we don't... We think slavery is wrong because slavery is not really an issue today. Right. It becomes a problem when we want to talk trans-historically about all morality being the morality that should apply for everyone throughout history. Can I interject briefly here? This is another point where",
      "you know, um, you're a historian. Um, I was trained as an historian in my undergraduate years and one of the things that's kind of drilled into you is, you know don't think anachronistically right? Don't bring your own moral universe to bear upon the people you were studying in the past who, you now as Quentin Skinner sort of famously put it witchcraft made sense in medieval Europe, right? Or I had the good fortune study with Jeff Stout at Princeton",
      "all our sort of commitment to secularism in the modern academy, there are certain sacred points which we cannot really just disregard and think. Actually you can be nonchalant about that point and no, you actually have to take a moral position on it otherwise you're not a member of our civilization so to speak. And I find that fascinating as well. I think that's historically anthropologically interesting as well to be honest. Well also you could look at",
      "said you know like different notions of truth so there's like the coherence notion of truth or the correspondence notion of true i mean there's some people who say like truth in the past doesn't exist like narratives of the past are just things that make sense to a community right now if you look at these debates usually what someone will then say is well if so are you saying the holocaust didn't happen and then you're like well i mean okay obviously the holocast stuff so there certain i mean i'm not i'm",
      "look at some of these discussions that's how the discussion plays out yeah so the things that are the fixed points the dogmatic underpinnings if you will they are i find interesting they're usually things that recent changes hmm so like if you look at in in america i think probably in britain too what are the two things that you just cannot say",
      "You can't support slavery and you cannot support pedophilia. Interesting. Right? Now, by pedophila we mean like sexual interest in people that we legally today would consider children. Under 18 to minus. Yeah. So, I just saw this thing yesterday about some listicle about... We should stop thinking that these people are great. They were actually horrible. One of them was Charlie Chaplin because he had all these",
      "these sexual relationship with 16 and 17 year old girls although the age of consent time was 16 but at the point they're like he is garbage he's awful so but if you think about these two issues that these are two issues i think i would say there maybe the two things that you really just they're sort of like uh taboo",
      "until very recently human history slavery was totally normal and uncontroversial Until even more recently in human history a man having interest, you know like a Nubile 14 year old Would be it wouldn't be a debate. There's a great book on this called American child bride by a guy named Styrus is last name American child ride",
      "laws because you can still get married yeah exactly that's minor so but the point is that you know the thing is that and this is i always use this example with my students i say look if i told you that um a guy was brutally murdered outside of campus a week ago brutally murdered they'd be like oh that's terrible what if i said okay a guy would go he uh lured in this 10 year old girl",
      "a 10 year old girl and then he had sex with her and ran away with her. And the students are like, oh, you know, I mean even me saying that right now, like I feel like kind of disgusting feeling in my stomach, right? So you're like, Oh, that's like, that messed up. You know everyone is quiet after that no one says anything but if you look at human history all societies think murder is wrong,",
      "And I think pretty much every society would say that just randomly going up to a person in the middle of street and bludgeoning him to death is wrong. I mean, it's an absolute moral wrong throughout time and space. But in terms of the societies where the second thing would be wrong, the majority of human societies in our history even today don't have some places that have a problem with them. So why is the thing that is actually much less... I think the luring component of it would be",
      "would be i mean in a lot of pre-modern societies they would say okay well if it's done in conjunction with a conversation with the parents then it's okay or even if you read jane austen let's say he her dad agrees her dad agreed yes i mean these things in yemen that people talk about the parents agree to it right right okay so but my point is not",
      "that we feel in our stomach. Why is our reaction stronger to something that is actually much less agreed upon as wrong by our species in history? Why is it less fierce reaction to the thing that actually is agreed upon by our",
      "Right. Yeah, um so that I think is an interesting way about the relationship between moral avulsion and right and like kind of anachronistic or trans historical notions in morality And there's another dimension if I mean like some this stuff is really dynamite thinking you're talking about it But obviously we're engaged in a sort of reflection which is an intellectual exercise here We both respect it inshallah",
      "inshallah i hope i am a respected academic we're both respected academics in shalem you know reputable universities reflecting on a question which is you know intellectually significant um by the way this is the same there's the same debate that the same problem that christian christian tradition has jewish tradition has buddhist tradition has hindu tradition has no moral uh natural law thinking has",
      "khan by the way read his stuff on uh race and slavery while he's writing the categorical imperative you know or what's a universal discourse on morality i forget what it's called like you know he he's same thing he's saying there are certain africans and uh native americans yeah you know they're so lazy he says that they need to be enslaved in order to be productive yeah liberal luminaries like john locke as",
      "colonization of India and civilizations in their knowledge. So the point is that, another thing is, I mean it's interesting like you know who...I talked to so many people about this issue when I was writing this book and there are two kinds of conversations. One conversation, first conversation is people just get completely disgusted and freaked out and they can't deal with it. That's a normal response. Do you know the people that consistently have the best discussions with this?",
      "African-American Muslims without a doubt Because I think for a lot of Muslims they don't want to deal with this and it freaks them out And they get really uncomfortable. Hmm. I Think african-american muslims, this is like day one They have to think about this absolutely absolutely and they this is something that is like they Really? They're there they wrestle with it right and they have to come to terms with it or we're not right But the point is it's not something they can kind of put under the carpet",
      "So yeah, for when I was writing this book and in terms of feedback I got on it is the African-American Muslims were by far the most productive discussions.",
      "part of what we had as the Windrush generation, so to speak. And then he converted to Islam, so he's actually a convert Muslim. We've had brief discussions on this but to be honest they are some of the deeper more meaningful conversations I have had where I thought it was worth recommending your book to him because I thought... He was saying that you know this is a dimension",
      "was less familiar with and he wanted to really think about and explore because of the moral sort of complexity of the issue for you know his own personal heritage. And I think that, you know, that's something which I hope to bring him on as an Islamicate author at some future junction and perhaps in part discuss some of... although his own book is on a different theme. This is really sort of like there are so many threads in this conversation",
      "up very fruitfully, I wanted to perhaps hone in on this one element that you kind of mentioned in passing. There's a lot of material covered in this book but i was just thinking about sort of the modern condition of what Marxists call wage slavery right so there are all sorts of forms that we experience in an uh in a given moment in time and at a given",
      "moment in history that given the nature of you know modern liberalism and in a sense a progressive understanding of how history morally progresses so to speak we can come to an understanding that potentially actually the way we're living right now may be seen 100 200 years from now is completely morally abhorrent as well. So, the forms of employment that we have and I wonder if you have had",
      "in your sort of broad reading for this project notions that debt is a form of you know bondage. In fact, of course we had debt bondage historically but the fact that we all are going to university and massive amounts of debt and we're then getting a mortgage so to speak which will again embed us within a system. You have this quote from The Matrix in the text where you're saying that",
      "obviously that's different from being owned by someone but you also have these fascinating anecdotes of slaves in very good conditions historically one of my teachers once commented that most of the caliphs in islamic history were actually children of slaves and because you know uh",
      "of concubines who would, of course by giving birth to a slave of the sorry, a child of their master would thereby be freed upon there and potentially become extremely influential figures behind the throne as well. So you know that sort of like multi layered nature of slavery I wonder if he can comment on it? You know how it's difficult for us to really sort of have a uniform understanding of Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the challenges is that slavery",
      "that slavery is both a metaphor and a legal concept. And sometimes those legal concepts and the metaphor overlap, but a lot of times they don't, but they can be kind of invoked. So there is no... Since 1926 basically or let's just say 1980, the last possible date, there's no legal slavery in the world. There's no slavery in",
      "in the world there's no slavery if you define slavery as a legal category that is acknowledged and can be adjudicated right there's not no slavery in the word now you know the question is how do you define slave so one way to say well it's someone being property of another person another way you can say is somebody who's not free but then things like property and freedom really only make sense inside a consistent or coherent legal or moral tradition",
      "Because if you look at kind of humanity as a whole throughout history What is property? What is freedom there's no property just somebody has a right over something else some rights that that's freedom is The ability to do what you want except when you're not allowed to do. What you want That's the definition. So I mean like these are it makes notes. It's meaningless Transistorical can I in one yeah on the point of that being no legal slavery doesn't the 13th amendment",
      "13th amendment leave a kind of space um no because i mean people who are prisoners in prison i mean this is a this is the big debate over the 13th movie the 13 right is that uh slavery can continues by another name right but you're not the people in prison are not safe they're still free people",
      "Now, there's a great book if you're interested. There's called The Slavery by Another Name by Douglas Blackman, which talks about the way that especially in the South, you know, mostly black men, 100, 200 thousand black men between 1865 and 1920s or so would basically get arrested for like, oh, you're loitering by the 7-Eleven. Like you come to come to like, OK, you are guilty of vagrancy. You need to pay a fine of $100.",
      "dollars okay you're going to prison oh and now by the way before even anyone can find you i'm gonna give you to this company i'm selling you to do this company up in pennsylvania to build railroads you're gonna go get worked until you die and then they're gonna bury you next to the railway that's it's ridiculous so but that person is not legally a slave so that's my i'm not saying that you can't have a continuation of exploitation or coercion",
      "The third way to think about slavery is a sort of coercive relationship, a relationship of exploitation, an asymmetrical relationship of dependency or exploitation. This is where you get what I thought it was like modern day slavery or new abolitionism which really starts to get articulated in the late 1990s and",
      "it really works along the idea of slavery as being a coercion. So, it's coerced labor with essentially no remuneration. Now, the problem here is that what's coercion? If you look at a lot of the major writers on modern day slavery in the 1990s and 2000s,",
      "you're in a gulag in North Korea, yeah, you might be a slave. But if you're a prisoner in the UK or the US, you have work you can do, you can choose not to work if you don't want to work, then you're not a slave, okay? But now think of the whole movie 13 and the whole idea of prison as this sort of carceral slavery is now much more accepted. And a lot of those authors, at least one that I'm thinking of,",
      "that I'm thinking of is now it says he's reconsidering the issue. What's changed? The conditions have not changed. Conditions have not change, it's just what are we comfortable calling... So that's why this idea about slavery in a lot of ways, this is a political definition. Now here's the thing, with coercion if you're in a federal prison in the United States, federal prison, you have to work. You don't have to but if you don't work, you're gonna get what? You're going to get put into solitary confinement",
      "confinement you're going to get denied access to the canteen and the prisoners usually don't serve food after about 5 30 p.m so okay no food from 5 30 pm to like 7 a.m they can deny family visits no family solitary confinement starving you to death that seems like coercion to me especially the un considers solitary confinement to be a form of torture",
      "Americans say, well, these people aren't being coerced. They're in prison. They did something wrong. But if you look at what happens to you if you don't work in prison... And then, by the way, where are these workers in U.S. prisons? They've done work for Victoria's Secret, for other companies. Even according to international label or organization definitions of modern-day slavery, U.K., U.N. prisons are places that have slaves. There's no... I mean, it's just prima facie.",
      "just prima facie per se they are uh there and there are people who are in captivity or being farmed out to private corporations right right and as you say the the film 13th which um you know i guess we'd both recommend it's on netflix um to for people to watch illustrates very sort of um very powerfully that and has created inaugurated this really serious debate along with many of the scholars",
      "about these themes for a while but here's the problem so let me interrupt you but the problem is like there's if you can look at cases there's a case called cilia dean versus france i think early 2000s another one called queen versus tang from the australian high court a couple years later and in both your cases are basically people saying i'm a modern day slave i'm being held in slavery um in france in one case in australia in other case and in the first case the the i think it's the european court of human rights phenomenon city comes back and basically says",
      "back and basically says look um this person it might be being treated badly but they're not being treated like property so they're they're kind of going back to this very property-centric understanding of slavery right very legalistic formalistic understanding in the australian high court case they said no if we look at the the coercive relationship we think this is slavery right so you can see even in a one decade or within a few years in the 2000s",
      "There's these two still these two polls about what slavery is that are like pushing and pulling against one another And then it's like, you know, I remember Okay, what the you know kind of like white nationalist people say? I think this is even in a state curriculum educational curriculum in some states in the US they'll say that Actually, a lot of white people were slaves to came to the Americans because they were indentured servants Right now by the way, there's some crazy stuff Like the year that",
      "1619 when Africans were first brought to the u.s. America North Slade yeah same year about think 100 English children from like the streets of London brought them here a bunt most all of them died But my point is that some people do well these indentured servants were slit Now someone would say and it's a limited period of time, right?",
      "through the 1700s. I'm not sure exactly where it ends. But no, in terms of you can go into... You can sell your services to go to the New World. Someone would say, these people are not slaves. This African guy is out hunting or his village gets raided. He gets taken, put on a ship, sent to Brazil. That's a slave. And he's going to stay there for the rest of his life. He's going",
      "These guys, these British guys, they went and they agreed to do this. They say I will give up certain freedoms of mine. And even you can punish me if I run away. You can brand me. You could chop my hand off. You would kill me. But in return for my trip to the new world, I'm going to be your servant for 10 years. And after that, I am going to get a piece of land. I am gonna go try and make my living. So those are very different. One is unwilling and one's willing. That's a good point.",
      "That's a good point. But guess what according to You know things like international label organization other walk free other anti-slavery organizations in the world today, right? debt bondage and denture indentured service is a major type of slavery so sure so what you see is You can think of it as like inflation or the term Right, the term slavery is inflating and flooding play It's sucking up more and more things underneath it",
      "In one sense, this is good because look if there's some guy who's getting treated badly in another country Well, we don't want that to happen. Yeah So what's it but if someone says oh he's a slave now suddenly like Bono is out there saying We gotta fight for this guy's rights or whatever, you know and then Everybody now this guy his life is better That's good right? But at the same time if you expand the definition expanded Spanish banner it starts to cheapen the suffering and experience of the people who were actually",
      "actually slaves and when i say actually slaves yeah i put quotation marks around that because modern day slavery is not a metaphor when people talk about modern slavery they're not saying it's like oh you're working my boss is making me work like a slave right they're saying no these people are actually slaves just like people 200 years ago were slaves these people were slaves but actually what we're saying when we we say that hey wait a second",
      "as a slave in the antebellum south what we're actually doing there is saying there's different levels of slavery and that breaks that first the second action which is all slavery so you start to like people start to get really uncomfortable and this is the kind of discursive system starts to break down i wanted to so i just wanted to say that um there are quite a few questions and um",
      "Right, inshallah. But thank you everyone for putting in your questions and we'll put them to Professor Brown in just a moment. I wanted to close with a reflection on what this all means for Muslims. So obviously you're writing both as a Western academic and as really a Muslim theologian thinking about serious questions from a Muslim perspective as well. And I really like the way in which you blend those two traditions of approaching the Islamic tradition",
      "in a very rigorous fashion. In a sense, one of the major challenges and I kind of hinted at this when I was referring to ish'alism that what is the source of our norms? And what you're saying is in the slavery conundrum that slavery is wrong. That's an axiom that we know. Slavery, slavery, slavery is",
      "pre-modern Islamic moral universe where okay if you're an ash'ari norms are purely given by God everything that humans do are completely contingent they in a sense have no moral value whatsoever or you're a mu'tazili and there are other options as well of course and if something like slavery has been mentioned neutrally",
      "as you know in the case that you mentioned which struck you so much when you had just converted, that was a neutral mention but in other instances it's mentioned as something that is encouraged to bring an end to through freeing of slaves and so on. So you can say there's a sense of discouragement almost but I think neutrality is quite salient there. The Mu'tazila would seem to suggest actually you know that's something which we cannot say is evil right? And I sort of sent you",
      "I don't believe it's mentioned in the book at all but in Sahih al-Bukhari where Abu Hurairah says quoting the Prophet that the slave has two rewards and he mentions the rest of the hadith",
      "So there's a completely different sort of conception of what it means, because for him it's like, you know, a slave is getting a double reward. A reward for being obedient to his guard and a reward to being obedient t o his owner despite all of the other harms that are recognized in this judicial tradition. And so in a sense, there's this moral sort of challenge that I would suggest that our modern circumstances puts us into",
      "into this bind that actually you have to have this sharp, strong moral position on this question. But at the same time, you have a tradition which if you want to be a part of, you can recognize there's even moments where certain members of the tradition like Abu Huraira are saying, actually, there can be a moral good almost involved in being in a state of servitude and he almost says that I wish I was a slave, right? So yeah, that complexity. I wonder if you",
      "Yeah, I mean by the way like you know i'm not saying that Abba Herrera was getting to some Christianity or something but I mean you see a lot in the Christian tradition in the gospel and in the letters of writings of Paul and the gospels that Jesus comes in the guise of his slave right? That the christian is like you should be a slave to their fellow man. Not just to God but to their",
      "the way that saints like Ignatius Loyola, the way they serve other people. They serve them like slaves. That for them is this expression of piety or a way to train themselves in piety. One thing it's important to remember is that ushers don't go around and say,",
      "You know, you need to cook me dinner right now Osama You know Oh what's wrong? You're offended by me saying that but God never said don't tell someone to cook the dinner I know and there's no way to wrong stuff. No, of course is right. It's called Yeah custom yeah And that's what people like, you know when others Ali and others write about this That's where most human morality comes from custom. And by the way This is how Islamic law also we'd notice from one of the major five major principles or",
      "principles or maxims of islamic jurisprudence al-adam muhakkima in another version uh custom is probative custom is dispositive custom is authoritative as long as it doesn't violate the sharia obviously but when someone says like you know um like if i went and told my wife hey uh where's dinner and don't forget to clean the dishes and i'm gonna go to the i'm going to go to",
      "I'm gonna come and then if I did that, I'll tell you where I'd be. I'll be outside the next second The next minute I'm going to be outside on my butt Like wondering why how I flew that far out of the house in that amount of time And then I'm Gonna get taken a court my wife's today This guy is a deadbeat dad. I want to be divorced from him And if there was a Sharia judge there they'd say yeah this guy's a terrible husband either because I am not but what determines Obligations of husbands or wives his custom hmm right so um these are",
      "Um, these are real custom is real customer isn't like you know Oh, I don't know what to get osama for his wedding present. That's not custom I mean it is but that's like a silly form custom is like these deep senses of right and wrong we have Interesting, right my custom can change So um now that's really important to remember uh the second thing You were talking about was I forgot now oh about the the um Yeah, so yeah muslims",
      "Muslims scholars Like the idea of freeing slaves was something that Muslims did for pietistic reasons they wanted reward forgot exactly say sometimes you have these documents of Manumission where they'd say I do this hoping for my word from God, right? One of the things that people that Muslim scholars talk about when they start discussing abolition of slavery is some people think wait a second But then if you're taking away",
      "a major good deed from people because they can't free slaves anymore. And we would say, what the heck are you talking about? What? You crazy? But that was a serious... For them it was really important. The reward you got for freeing slaves is really important and that was as serious concern of theirs. Another thing that you mentioned which I think was an important point is this idea of how we look back in time at the past. So",
      "You know people who look back when I just said we look at this guy's are you crazy? How could they not understand like or you'd see for example Muslim scholars Who would say it would fight they literally die They would die and there's examples of this hum down on Jesus was another is a good example Moroccan scholar in the early 1700s There's a command the ruler of Fez Mellis mile orders all people who were like of African descent of slave dissent In Fez and around that to be enslaved For his army",
      "Hamdoun al-Jassas writes a fatwa against this. He's told to shut up. He writes another one. He says, if you write another one we're going to execute you. He knows he's going to get executed and gets executed. If you do this, it is a mockery of the Sharia. No one has ever said this in the past. It is absolutely unacceptable. He went to his death but Hamdou al- Jassas could care less if a Christian got enslaved. We would say what's this guy's problem? Why doesn't he understand?",
      "But if you look, read like for example strict animal rights activists today. They write and they talk about animal rights as abolition. And they're not saying that as a metaphor. They're saying, look what is the idea that before there was an idea that you could take let's say African people and enslave them? You couldn't enslave a white person. How is that any different from saying I can take a cow",
      "can take a cow and put it in a cage and take its milk and kill and eat it but I can't do that to a human right they'd say that's just speciesism they say it's speciesism right right man and someone could say oh come on that's ridiculous well why is it ridiculous 100 is 800 years from now if we're you know all these animals are killing destroying the environment anyway it's totally environmentally unsustainable to eat meat this is true",
      "whatever the unbelievable burger uh and we look back we're like what the heck was wrong with people they didn't understand these animals have rights so you know the same way that our world view makes sense to us the fact that someone in the past doesn't make sense it doesn't mean it didn't make very good sense to them right um i guess the i mean the final point",
      "in the 1200s. But there's earlier, it's a hadith. It's probably not an authentic hadith but it's something probably said by a companion or something that God wants freedom. So that's why if you say, Osama, if you're my slave and I say, you're free, Osamah. No, I'm just joking. You're not free. I said you're",
      "pick me up with it. But I'd say, you know, your current car, okay? If I said, you don't want to make any other decisions...I'm just joking, I'm not joking. That wouldn't be a legal contract because I know it was never my intention to buy the car. Yeah. But if I say free you and I mean it's joking or I make a mistake or something boom that's free why God wants freedom. This is what's the Arabic phrase that's used in Qatun who says this again?",
      "Okay, okay. I think you can see it in the habit of Tahrir Right right. Okay. I mean that's one of the earliest texts we have yeah in Islamic tradition. Yeah, so anyway, so that that's a Yeah, that's that's very important because they're there to sell in with and if the irony is one of reason that There's so many states brought into Islamic civilization from the steps of Russia from Turkic lands from",
      "from Europe, from Africa, from India. It's because Muslims are constantly freeing their slaves. So they're constantly having to replenish the labor supply. You don't have a self-reproducing slave population. This is a point that you made and I think we've referred to it briefly already which is that there was a capitalist imperative to get rid of slaves",
      "get rid of slaves and that's one of the things that actually there's a big debate about this so there's like you wait about then i don't understand why this is a big debauchery in my opinion but uh if you okay you're talking to like the dutch marie type guys and you start saying or for hitchens or something starts saying right the west sucks wes isn't that great what are they going to say what's our first thing they're gonna say",
      "have slaves no and you guys had slaves in what and we especially british people what do british always say what are these like you know uh not nigel farage but these other like uh winston winston churchill is great type people let's say we ended slavery we ended slave for the whole world they went around and controlled the oceans so uh the idea that western europe the west doesn't have slaves",
      "is a is like Nail I call the natal miracle of Western civilization and you can see this even in like, you know French historians like Marc Bloch who said that the disappearance of slavery? Westerner one of the most incredible phenomenon human history. Right so there's Of course it actually I Don't know if you can hear me my camera is like you hear me right now Yeah, I can hey, I think your internet. I don't know why but the point is that slavery",
      "slavery, enslavement of Europeans within Europe actually goes on a lot longer than people think. Definitely through like the 1200s in Scandinavia and then the enslavemen of people from North Africa, Muslims in Italy, like through the 1800s. Of course we know about the slavery in the colonies but my point is that",
      "somehow is at this leading the leading edge is that before the vanguard of freedom in human history it's very important for like a Western self-identification right so founding method of West yeah see so this is a big debate because when you come in here's the question very simple fact right something that essentially nobody in human",
      "goes from being fine to being completely, absolutely unacceptably evil essentially within 150 years. And how does that happen? I mean do some people or people in the 1800s are they eating more protein? Are they somehow smarter?",
      "than Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine? Are they, do they more spiritually in touch with God than St. Agustin or then the Prophet Muhammad or Buddha or Moses and all these people? No. So what happens? I mean, the narrative of course very often is about you know we've liberated ourselves from our influences so to speak. But how, I mean where look where is this you know in Renaissance we discovered",
      "Roman law which allows John Locke or My god name is it gave me right now he could our laws bar ocean then dies in the mid 1600s major early forerunner of human rights discourse international law and Hugo",
      "operating with the Roman law tradition where there's legal ways to enslave people, which is you capture them. Now it's really only in the 1700s, in the mid and late 1700s that you start getting like a real this enlightenment rejection of slavery. Why is that? It's interesting they're reacting to well, there's a couple reasons but one of the reasons is they're reaction to the Atlantic slave trade, which",
      "which is horrific right it's not only horrific but it's racialized to that it's racially based and justified right and that doesn't it really does not sit well with a lot of people like uh um with air with um these other names are forget escaping me right now i can't believe i'm forgetting them but the um the a lot",
      "I don't think you can say that there was this enlightenment because The Enlightenment is a rediscovery of attrition. That had no problem with slavery So what happens? What is it in human Aristotle has a very prophetic line. I think it's in his politics He says that they'll be slaves until looms move themselves, right like that What actually happened when its when did slavery become the sort of the ball start to roll",
      "Balls start to roll and then gain momentum. And really you hit a tipping point Let's say in the 1800s, right what's going on in mid-1800s? You already have industrialization revolution and it's not of it's Not a coincidence that abolitionism emerges as Is it first expressed and then catches on in two places that had First industrialized and had gained extreme economic prosperity without reliance on slaves Britain",
      "Britain, England and the northern colonies of what became the United States. Fascinating. I mean, you say this is very contentious and you kind of outline some of the reasons why that might be the case but I wonder if there could be pushback as there has been against Whig historiography for the last century or so but with great divergence debates talking about",
      "and you signal this in your book the reason, in a sense, that this becomes normal later on in much of the Muslim world is because economic development takes a while to get to those parts of the world in the way that capitalist development has taken place in Europe before. Well no but there's another difference which is that slavery in the Americas is an economic phenomenon Slavery in the Islamic world is not economic It's social",
      "that's why it's so hard to get rid of slavery in place let's say like saudi arabia or the arabian peninsula or something because it's not about like i need this guy to i need these people to pick cotton in a way where i can make a profit right they don't need that they but it's how you think about like how do you have your people your retinue that you trust king abdulaziz has been served with the founder of saudi",
      "him at all times when he's praying he stands behind him with a sword and a rifle at all time right right that's his not his brother it's not his son it's a slave yeah of course right so there's this is a big uh difference is it's when you have if slavery economic phenomenon and of course it also has social elements as well in the west but i mean the point is mainly economic phenomena economic change will",
      "have economic change and maybe the social system doesn't change that much um I mean I'm not trying to like whatever flog my own wares but it's better I'll just read this from note so then I don't you know make a you know Mick a lot of mistakes in recalling it which is a brief 390 on the footnote okay yeah yeah summary of",
      "book slavery capitalism and slavery 1944 landed on me okay i talked about the moral awakening narrative the moral awakening narrative is basically says uh abolitionists happened abolitionism had when human beings basically woke up and were like holy crap slavery's wrong that's basically their narrative okay the moral waking narrative he he landed a major blow against the moral awaking narrative arguing that anglo-american abolitionism triumphed in ending",
      "because the rise of free trade and industrial production, along with a weakening of mercantilism meant that the agricultural industries that depended on slavery had entered economic decline by that time. In short, slavery was no longer part of a good business plan. In his 1977 response to this book Seymour Drescher in a book called Econocide showed that far from being in decline slave based agricultural production",
      "had actually entered its peak profitability in the early 1800s, ending it was quote economic suicide for a major trunk of the British and American economy. Moreover, slavery was totally compatible with industrial modes of production. The moral awakening narrative had been right in effect, says Drescher. Dresher and others since have argued that abolition was brought about by a major change in Anglo-American public sentiment regarding slavery, sentiment that ran counter to economic interests.",
      "Other scholars have tried to counter the Drescher school. What Williams had introduced was more than simply the obsolete or incorrect specifics of his decline thesis. It was the notion that in the end, that the end of slavery ultimately hinged on changes in material circumstances not the idea of slavery as immoral driving history. They have offered several proposals for reconciling this economic narrative with Dreschers critique. Thomas Haskell argued that the peak profitability",
      "So, yeah. Maybe things in the Caribbean had entered decline but if you look globally economics was shifting away from a slavery model to one where you have to have workers who are also consumers and things like that.",
      "Which he basically says both arguments are correct the economic narrative and moral awakening narrative But they could there wreck in the sense that they create a feedback loop, right? So people are start thinking slavery is wrong because they're able to think it's wrong so Osama why don't you think like You know your family some of your family lives in India or Bangladesh Okay, if you go to those families say I just took my kids the other day to like kind of their place. There was",
      "of the place there were chickens and lambs and stuff like that right and a lot of kids they said like hey this is a lamb i don't want to eat lamb chops anymore if you say that to like uh bengali or pakistani what do they say they'll laugh at you man yeah like what are you talking about you're crazy you're a crazy person oh you want me to die of starvation like this is meat if i get me that means that's actually going to have real chance to develop a brain so these are luxury once",
      "you start thinking about them and you can start kind of coming to new moral realizations, like a more refined morality. So this starts happening in places where they don't need slaves, Northern United States, Great Britain as they start to industrialize. And then they start",
      "that's something you can change. Progress is happening. You're at the forefront, we're getting better, we are the leaders, we were morally superior.\" Then you start saying I can actually express this moral sentiment that I think slavery is wrong and ask other people to believe that they can get kind of join on to the bandwagon as well. And then economic change starts happening there as well, people don't need slavery in other places as well it catches on it becomes easy to get rid of slavery. They become more",
      "The beginning is economic change in certain places But then that creates a moral sentiment that changes and it that creates part helps create more Economic development and it's sort of like snowballed into this Like a feedback loop as I said. Although just in terms of the language they used, I mean the challenge for from an Islamic theological perspective Is to describe That as more morally refined partly because we look back at the Prophet as a moral example It is more morally refine. I mean think about this so",
      "think about this so it's not about good or bad or better or worse hmm so if you um like how often a Muslim supposed to be according to the Sun of the Prophet like once a week is typical okay yeah it's all my do you ever talk anybody who bathed once a",
      "is I think he's a bad person so like we actually it's we start to think like there's something wrong with this person they're not civilized right but there's nothing morally wrong with bathing once a week right right nothing morally wronk with it. But that judgment comes naturally almost? It's because custom creates morality, but that doesn't mean I would rather die than say",
      "Sure, I mean that's part of your theological... I would rather die than sound a better person than Omar bin al-Khattab or Ali bin Abi Talib. Right, right. But there's... That's what I mean by more refined morality. It's not about being better. It is about having like you're all these other issues are taken care of where you gonna eat how you going to sleep your health is taking care pretty much, right? Now you worried about the other things. These other things is Kamaliyat in the language of Maqasa Al-Sharif",
      "Yeah, so if we if we are now in a position where we don't need there's no economic need for slavery Right. We can fulfill that mandate for emancipation by just getting rid of the whole category of slavery and fulfill one of them across of the Sharia This is an entirely Islamically legitimate right argument It's 100% from within this Sharia tradition and someone could say and this is often said you hear this Well, you never would have thought about it hadn't been for Western abolitionism",
      "thing western people would never have thought about it either nobody thought about abolitionism until it became economically possible right so western people it just happens to be the industrial revolution started in england and then north america west northwest america sorry northeastern north amerika yeah that's just it's not because western people have like some kind of gene where or like they read some book that makes them love freedom more than other",
      "because you have the kind of more ideological historiography which says that no, precisely that we're more freedom loving. But my impression is currently... Really? Well, I mean... Freedom loving for themselves. Everybody's freedom loving for themself. Yes. But they weren't super freedom loving about like other people. Yeah. My impression is that the sort of more serious historiotherapy now recognizes the contingency of where the Industrial Revolution ultimately took place due to various kinds of accidents in history.",
      "of history. Jazakum Allah khairn, it's really been wonderful and I feel very guilty sort of hogging all the time because there are a bunch of questions. If it's alright I'm going to post them on the screen and then we can read them out and then inshallah you can sort of... Actually so here's a question from Aisha Sayyid, I'm just gonna post if that's right. It says given that Islam came for the emancipation",
      "from all bonds demanding submission only to one true God. Slavery and concubines is one unanswered dilemma, especially for the youth who find this irreconcilable with the benevolent image of our Prophet ﷺ. How can we tackle this? And I think this is one of those questions that you have in your chat room. Yeah, I get this question a lot. I mean, I",
      "a really hard issue. I'm not trying to turn it around on this person, but I would ask people to ask themselves, okay, we're the outliers. We have to explain why we feel a certain way about this issue. And then I guess this whole issue of changing custom and economics and everything like that,",
      "Now, so I simply don't think. I mean, I think it's factually incorrect. It is factually correct to say that having slaves or allowing slavery is irreconcilable with the benevolent image of the prophet. That's not true. That wouldn't be true for a Christian in the year 1600",
      "the year 1600 or a muslim in the year 1600 or a buddhist in the air 1600 right they just would not this would not be an issue just like by the way even people who are trying to find dirt about the prophet's personal life to insult him with which is you know essentially all the opponents of islam not until 1905 did any of them say he married aisha when she was nine years old and that's messed up because they didn't care about that stuff no one cared about that before okay so the point is",
      "So the point is, what's changed is not... We have to ask ourselves why are we looking at the world in a certain way? There's nothing wrong with the way we look at the role as I said. Ending slavery and freeing slaves and improving people's conditions no one's gonna debate that that's good. That's one of the aims of the Sharia but that doesn't mean it should be impossible for us",
      "that people in the past didn't have a strong reaction as we do. Now, another thing that's really interesting is slavery was a dilemma for Muslims and you can see this in the Sunnah of the Prophet but it wasn't a moral dilemma, it was a theological dilemma. And this is a very famous hadith, right? So the Prophet says in Sahih Muslim and other books owners of slaves don't say to your slaves",
      "So if a Rabb, the Lord is God and we're Ibadullah or we're Abid We are all slaves of God How do you have A slave who's also the owner of another slave Who's a Rabb of another say so they this idea of there's an anxiety about making sure that the relationship between God and human beings between the Lord and the slaves of the God is not mixed up with the",
      "with the relationship between the slave and the owner of the sleep but that's there's so there's a tension there that Muslims try to sort of push down or allied away by saying that this is this relationship is not like a master-slave relationship it's a it's like a patron junior relationship although",
      "now uh yeah so that's what i'd say it actually is a dilemma the theological one and when um interesting because yeah go ahead sorry i wonder if i could also mention i mean like there are it's a multi-layered tradition you know i think we need to develop historical consciousness to a certain extent because you have this beautiful appendix 1 a slave saint of basra which",
      "extraordinary anecdote about this kind of a wali of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala who's a slave and very poignant in many respects. And so, you know, there are ways in which... But it's not just that, right? This other major scholar in the city two major scholars they buy the guy and he's like why are you buying me? I'm not like a very good servant. He says I don't serve creatures.",
      "So yeah, I mean, sometimes I personally think about this in historical terms. As you said that there are these historical shifts that have taken place that give us these modern sensibilities that we don't need to deny and say, you know, this is wrong and we're going to reject it but that shouldn't also cause us to reject and deny the sort of station of the Prophet ﷺ And I think those two things are... Honestly, I think it's healthier",
      "I think it's healthier. Like, I mean, I think there's a, there's something very unhealthy and unproductive and unsustainable about the way that the rhetoric, um, the moral rhetoric is working. And let's just take UK in America. You can see like if you say that, I",
      "view of our past where that we are so morally certain about things and black-and-white about things because I think that it doesn't acknowledge the changes in sentiment right. And I think when you think about it more as like, you know, I can...I'm trying to improve people's lots as best as I can. We're all trying",
      "than people in the past or that we have to condemn people in The past you stop thinking about and these like kind of morally black-and-white terms I think it's actually more and by the way, it makes it possible to think about your opponents as well So you're a conservative or Republican or Democrat or liberal? You know labor stopped being Evil because they see the way the world in a certain way And they start being you know Someone who has different views about certain interests or certain priorities and you can that's someone you can negotiate with and deal with a lot better. I Think you highlight in the book",
      "in the book, the reason for this kind of uncompromising moralizing about this question which we recognize and see all the time but in a sense the abolitionists needed to project that in order to persuade everyone look we just have to stop this now. Yeah because slave owners would say like look you're right this guy is a bad slave owner he treats his slaves terribly I don't do that or like look I understand you guys have legitimate concerns so what are",
      "we're going to do, we're gonna make sure these slaves are treated well and then we agree okay so they it was in order to kind of make it something non-negotiable they had to make it non-numershible. Yeah I wanted to switch over to just the remaining questions ibn Battuta 7 says assalamu alaikum but you have other questions? I think a lot of them are already answered yes you've already answered so I'm just going to at least read them for the sort",
      "the sort of hope for so that their voices don't get sort of silenced as it were. Yusuf Ali was saying, classical Islamic jurisprudence say anything about turning free people into slaves and you kind of covered that I mean in essence my understanding is and you can correct me if i'm wrong here the only context in which you can enslave people really in the Islamic tradition",
      "modern scholars basically said and that was at the discretion of the imam. And so it's possible to even stop that I really found fascinating this point you made, that a lot of later scholars said look we cannot buy and sell slaves anymore from outside because we have no way of knowing whether they're actually legitimate slaves or not. This kind of goes in tension with Ahud Tel Adana's remark which you commented replenishing slaves",
      "slaves from the outside which was in a sense this socio-economic imperative i wonder if you could briefly maybe comment on that yeah i mean so the thing you're talking about is relatively i mean it's not it's a minor discussion in the sense that it doesn't have a big impact but what they're saying is um if you are not sure",
      "The overall answer is if you want to be careful, don't buy them. But bottom line is you can because you're going to assume that... For example, Osama, when you go to Aldi's or whatever people go to, where you go the local store, you don't know whether maybe this guy stole all the eggplants you're buying and all the cucumbers. You don't now but we go around and we operate as if everybody's getting these legally because otherwise we wouldn't be able to buy it. Yeah, we wouldn' t be able",
      "So basically they're saying the same thing which is it? In general just assume that everything is unless you're if you know this person was not gotten illegally You can't and by the way here. They're not even talking about If there are Muslim, and they were enslaved you cannot buy them Right. That's it. You cannot buy the right I can't but that debate is specifically about was the hump tax paid because if their Someone went out in a raid into like Central Asian steppes",
      "central Asian step and brought this guy back. That person should pay a tax to the Imam as part of the khums, and if you don't know they've done that then has the person legally been sent? So that's actually that debate. The other debate which we see with people like Ahmed Baba, and this is very common in the Maliki school of law where there's...in the Sudan area, Sahel area or also in Central Asia",
      "If you get someone who is claims to be claims to the Muslim, right? And they are the general rules also if they say they're Muslim The burden of proof is on the person who got them who captured them or something. That's nice To prove that they're not Muslim which is very hard to do and by the way It's all important number that most slaves probably Most slaves probably were brought into Islamic civilization not through capture but to buying them from Slave merchants who brought them from some other place who got either beat from some",
      "from some way or the other. And there's even a debate amongst Muslim scholars about whether you can do that because you don't know if those people have been legally enslaved, but again, the rule that kind of wins out is like you just assume that this guy got them legally and if it's according to their crazy customs that they have, that's alright for them then you can buy them. Yeah, I mean the pragmatism of law kind of winds out. It makes sense legally speaking obviously sort of it's kind of like",
      "it grates for modern sensibilities certainly. The other sort of questions, as you mentioned we kind of had a discussion about someone was asking about abolition in the industrial revolution and the debate that you mentioned between Eric Williams and Seymour Drescher but there's one last question which is an interesting one here I would like to understand the wisdom behind Dr Brown locating being Muslim and American as opposing identities",
      "Didn't I didn't feel it was opposing but I'd be interested to yeah, it's not opposing I think maybe I meant by that is that is it they're two kind of They're too. I talked about the kind of this American slavery conundrum and the Muslim Islamic slavery country right there similar but not identical, but I mean in the case of You know, I mean so they're there which is that as an American you have this issue of",
      "and Thomas Jefferson, the same guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence which is a very compelling document. And you know, the guy had children with his slave woman. But the Islamic one is different, which it's similar but the prophet Muhammad is not... Like Thomas Jefferson I could say, forget Thomas Jefferson. You know what? Take his statue down, I don't care. Forget about him. If you're a Muslim, you can't say that",
      "They're similar, but there are differences between the two. So I think I was more trying to say that they're two different kind of discussions Each with its own characteristics This has really been Thank you so much for your time I mean an hour and 40 minutes and I am also grateful for all the questions that were sent in I cannot encourage enough people to read this book, you know go ahead and Purchase it inshallah and have a read of it. I think it's just",
      "just a tour de force of so many different disciplines and moral philosophy sort of wider epistemological questions I found the discussion on nominalism very interesting you know history that is very wide-ranging and do you mind if I ask how many books you read for this did you have a bibliography which is a select bibliography in the text but it's long enough",
      "I actually realized that left some out which is kind of annoying but the Yeah, I don't know. I read a lot of books but I was very driven you know and I did this I was You know, I dunno maybe this isn't same for everybody But for me like when I write books, I become like obsessed, you know My wife's like this guy's going crazy for his sleep and do anything else. Oh I mean it's a very intense experience",
      "Perhaps in closing, I can just ask what you're working on currently.",
      "of colonial presence in africa it's not really an indigenous part of africa so i was uh and basically it's all saying islamic anti-black so i always really someone asked me specific questions about things that had come up in this debate about hadiths can you answer this that and this so i started looking into it okay look at him start looking like you know what i just i need to in order to answer this i need you to answer the spirit question or to answer his bigger question you'd answer this big question so now i'm writing a book called uh is islami anti black",
      "it's uh actually it's getting close to being done okay and uh it won't be a big book it'll be a smaller book right but that's fine so actually directly connected to this book i was under the impression that you're going to be writing on um the notion of siyasa yeah i have that book it's like 90 percent done but i can't i can' finish it because you're distracted by",
      "I think it's a great service actually because your books are a great services on two levels of course the academic community but also I think the wider Muslim community can really benefit from these texts and it's really wonderful to have someone who is doubling as that sort of Muslim theologian and professor at Georgetown so speak. So we look forward to that and inshallah, I will definitely bring you back when...as in when you're available",
      "have the opportunity to discuss some of your other books. But Jazakum Allah khairan for your time today, it's really been sort of wonderful to have you and I look forward to inviting you back before long. Jazakuma khairn for everyone who's stuck around for nearly two hours at this point. This has really been enlightening for me and i've benefited a great deal from also the questions that",
      "and uh you know inshallah i'll have another author we're in conversation with insha'Allah at that point my pleasure until then uh jazakallahu khayran again Jack and we will be in touch in the near future"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Islam_s Approach to Slaver_1uQiosiIz44&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW3SBwkJsAkBhyohjO8%3D_1748668094.opus",
    "text": [
      "uh salam alaikum people um look what word i just found in my turkish roca cards ozer dealerin that means i apologize another good word gizemli mysterious series i'll put those away now uh thanks for inviting me i'm very happy to be here yeah so",
      "it's interesting like uh the topic of this discussion or this lecture right is probably people say like well how can this guy talk about this because you know he's a white guy which is true but i'm also you know but that's actually interesting because it really shows what our assumptions are regarding this topic",
      "As we'll discuss, and as no doubt many of you know, for most of human history and in most places in human history, slavery was not based on race or skin color. So in fact, even an Islamic civilization, it might be more correct to say that if you want",
      "talk about a subject if your ancestors were subject to that thing. It actually might be more appropriate to say that I can talk about it because some of my answers are Slavic and if you think about in English, there's only one in that title even though it keeps flicking in and out right? There's only word in there that's actually refers to an ethnic group. Does anyone know what that word is?",
      "Blackness is a color. Which refers to? Slavs! Literally, the word in English for slave comes from the word slav. So before, the first usage we have of this in Western European languages is about 967 I think as far as we know. 967 of the Common Era. Before that,",
      "the term that was used for slaves in romance Latin languages was servus usually where you get the word surf which comes from the Latin word uh service meaning slave right so it's interesting that uh automatically when we think about slavery uh we think About Africa we think of African people black people um but",
      "post-Atlantic slave trade perspective in which we associate slavery, first of all with skin color and blackness. And second of all, with Africa. Again this is just if you... This is fine like if we want to talk about slavery in a modern world, if we wanna talk about what slavery in the last 200 or 300 years, fine. This is probably fair assumption but for me I'm interested...",
      "slavery in Islamic history, which is much bigger than just the last 200-300 years and much bigger that just the North Atlantic world in which the Atlantic slave trade took place. Everybody understand? So I think it's...I always find it interesting to think about...and then by the way another interesting thing which is someone could say so I just wrote a book on Islam and blackness, which I should have brought with me but I forgot",
      "And also, I was convinced that I was going to lose it after the talk. And it belongs to my father-in-law, so I didn't want to do that. So someone could say, you know, you can't write a book about blackness because you're not black. But that comes with a huge assumption, which is that let's say our black American Muslim. Why would I somehow be able to write a",
      "Islamic history. The only reason I would have some qualification is if we assume that there was some kind of trans-historical essential thing called blackness, that it's always the same throughout history which is rejected by pretty much all scholars right? So I mean there are scholars who study race will...the first thing they'll tell you is race as a social construct. It's not a reality and before somebody says wait a second that's Professor Brown that's ridiculous",
      "ridiculous like what's your name so they man where are you from so they're mine wow yeah i've never been there so should they man i'm gonna guess that if you go to niger and you just grab some random person they're probably going to look more like you than like me is this correct okay if you",
      "Yes, that's true. But the significance... Race isn't just about some aspect of your body. It's about the significance given to that aspect of everybody and who gives that significance. So for example, like one of my kids it doesn't have earlobes you know like Earlobes? Like some people have ear lobes, some people don't have your earlobe I do. You sure?",
      "I don't know. We could have a society in which people who have earlobes are in power and people who don't have ear lobes are slaves. In that case, it would not matter that Suleiman and my skin color is different. All we would look at is do you have ear loops or not? Of course there are things about our body that are real. If I go out in the sun, I'm going to get a sunburn.",
      "sunburned. So they met if you go in the sun, do you get sunburn easily? Okay. So my ancestors, God knows how many thousands of years ago decided to drag their like scrawny butts up to the Northern part of Europe where there was not a lot of sun and then gradually in order to be able to process synthesize vitamin D or whatever, their skin color got lighter and lighter and",
      "which is great i guess if you want to live in a place where there's not a lot of sun the point is this these are realities but the fact that we choose to say that uh someone who looks like this we think that they have this status in society or someone who look like that is that that is a social decision does everyone understand because people sometimes get confused when they hear people say race isn't real it's a social construction and they're like i'm confused like there's definitely",
      "important thing there could be all sorts of for example let's say i don't know maybe so many men has like uh you know big muscles and i have small muscles there's all sorts things we could say they're different between two individuals and we could load those things with significance it happens to be that in the past 500 years in the north atlantic world and then globally as kind of western cultural sensibilities are globalized it happens",
      "human history most of human history in most places in human history uh skin color was not the definitive part of your body that determined which group you fit into everybody understand okay um so this when we talk about things like race and slavery or slavery and blackness it's very odd this topic is almost impossible to cover because these are two concepts",
      "two concepts that are so vast and so contextually dependent. They change based on time and place, right? That if you want to talk about it across history and across space and time, you're automatically going to be in trouble. You really have to be very careful and also very patient. You have to",
      "with other people's views, right? Because you're talking about times and places where people thought or think very differently than people think in a kind of global Western context. Everybody with me? Okay. I wrote here, we must be aware of change and careful of judgment. That's very well put, I must say. Very well. Be aware of",
      "Interesting question. Do you know what a big debate among scholars is? If race actually is something we can talk about before the 14th century, so there's a lot of maybe the majority of scholars who study race in world history really think about race as something that as an idea emerges in Iberia, so Spain basically,",
      "Christian, Spanish and Portuguese thought about the identity and religion and blood and descent mixing together. And by the way, the word race comes into it starts being used in Western European languages only in the 1200s. And it's it comes to mean kind of descent and origins. But it only comes to me what we think of what it means, what it",
      "talk about race before, let's say the 14th century in Western Europe. Some scholars say you can't and if you want to talk about, let us say race or identity and communities and ethnicities in Baghdad in 10 hundred or Rome in 200 AD that you have to talk of other things like cultures and ethnic groups and things like that but you cannot talk about",
      "Gossett is another who say, no, no. Yeah, maybe there's some changes that happen with concepts of race in the Middle Ages and Western Europe but before that we still talk about groups origins, descent so we're still talking about someone's body where they come from and that some mixture of where they",
      "who they are, what their personality is like, where they fit in the social ladder. But my point is there's a huge debate about whether you can even talk about race and let's say medieval Baghdad or if that's anachronism, if that'S anachristic. Everyone knows what the word anachranism means? Anachronisms something that's out of place in time. Like talking about Haruna Rashid having a cell phone or something",
      "a cell phone or something like that. It's anachronism. All right. In the case of slavery, it's very hard to escape the dominant Atlantic political and moral conversations about slavery we have today. I kind of already gave an example of that, but it's important. If you're interested in slavery as not doing it, but if you're",
      "if you're interested in studying it, then just turn on American television or read like American news. And within a week, maybe even see movies. Like the number of movies that deal with slavery, they don't even have to do it. Everything has to do with slavery in America. It's incredible. So right now there's a big debate last week. This was the last week slavery debate",
      "I think in Florida, we're saying that some slaves in America benefited from slavery. Like they learned useful skills. Did you guys, did anyone hear this debate? No. So you don't just watch American news all the time, I guess. All right. No, it's pretty good for you. So there was a big, and people were outraged. What are you talking about? Yeah. There's people who don't, how did they benefit? You know? So it is pretty, it is a pretty hard argument to make.",
      "a pretty hard argument to make that people who were grabbed from inland areas or coastal areas of West Africa and brought on a six-to-ten month trip in which one out of 11 or one out 12 people died across the Atlantic, and then spent their life in servitude in slavery in North Carolina or South Carolina or the Caribbean. Yes, I think it's very hard to make an argument that those people learned valuable skills from that.",
      "from that. But remember, we're not talking about slavery in the Americas or the North Atlantic. I'm talking about a slavery and Islamic civilization. And slavery and Islamic civilization, you can definitely make an argument, this undeniable argument, that some slaves benefited tremendously from slavery.",
      "a city that is many of the famous buildings of which were built by those people so we're in uskudar now correct yes so there in uskadar you can go to the valley atik jami which was i think funded by gulnush who was a venetian concubine of the sultan he's from a noble venetians family who became the slave concubine",
      "and later endowed this beautiful madrasah and mosque complex, right? Madrasah. You can go to... If you go to Sultan Ahmed's and you go down not the Aminun side, you go on the other side where all the fish restaurants are, the good fish restaurants, not the ones that make you... I'm not going to impugn any fish restaurant. But if you go out on the Marmara side,",
      "Okay, so Sokolo Mehmet Pasha Jami built by funded by Sokola Mehmet pasha who died in 1579 who was the grand vizier of three sultans married to a Sultan's daughter and one of the richest people in the Ottoman Empire and he was 100% legally a slave of the Sultan He became as he was given by his family to the devshirmeh to the",
      "Shirme to the palace enslavement process. When he was 18 years old, he was given so that he could become a leading member of the Ottoman bureaucracy. He studied in the Enderun Mektebe. If you go to the Topkapi Palace today, you can see they have a sign saying Enderum Mekdebe where he learned to be a high administrator in the empire and he",
      "for several decades an empire so haruna rashid sorry hold on what am i talking about did i say more than once yeah yeah we'll talk about her no no but this time that's not good i'm probably okay i mean maybe maybe i'm like becoming senile okay good because i've been forgetting like actors names recently and it's really concerning me like i couldn't remember nicole kidman's name the other day",
      "my kids asked me who is Tom Cruise's prior wife I was like Australian yeah maybe make room for better stuff so point is you can go to on the other side by the and probably either Bosnian or Serbian family Christian",
      "I think assembly might have been pig farmers. That's the story. Also became a very powerful person, obviously became the grand vizier and endowed this gorgeous mosque, right? So my point is that in the U S this discussion, if we just are constrained by the kind of American Western discussions about",
      "are we artificially constrained? But we're also going to make errors. We're gonna do things like deny that some families wanted their children enslaved so that they could become senior members. Sokolo Mehmet Pasha's cousin and nephew also became grand viziers after him. So this was like a family business. Sokol Mehmet Paşa hooked his family up. That's why he was put into this,",
      "into this service, right? Another area of discussion which I think just shows how the political and social pressures around this issue prevent us from being accurate is when people talk about modern day slavery. Anyone ever heard of modern day",
      "oh, you know, the modern day people who work for Walmart are modern day slaves or something. So there is like their organizations, the same organizations that work to some of the same organization that worked to end slavery in Britain and United States in the 1700s 1800s still exist. And they work to end modern day slavery. And this is they don't talk about slavery today as like a metaphor. They don't mean like, you",
      "They say there is actually slavery today, even though it's not legally recognized. And there's lots of debates about the definition of what slavery today is. Some people say it's forced labor with no pay under threat of violence. Forced labor with low pay under a threat of violent. But then there are debates. Is it no pay or just a little bit of pay? Because you guys followed the whole World Cup drama during",
      "During the World Cup, it was always like, oh, Qatar is having slave labor or something. But is it really slave labor if someone's getting paid? Well, but they're not getting paid enough. Well, is it real slave labor If they agreed to come and work? Yeah, they agreed, but They are being mistreated. So the point is there's lots of debates about The definition of slavery today. What exactly constitutes modern day slavery? And the definition changes.",
      "who wrote, let's say in 2006 about modern day slavery and said, I won't name the person because I don't want to make them feel bad. But in 2006 they wrote that prisoners in American jails are not slaves because you know, they're paid for their work in federal prison. You have to work in American prisons, but 13 cents an hour, which if you're probably working in the Gulf, they'd say that slave labor. But the point is they said this,",
      "The point is, the scholar said this is not slavery. Ten years later, same scholar says I think I have to reconsider it. I think it is slavery. Did American prison system change at all in ten years? No. Did the conditions of these prisoners change in ten year? No What did change? A movie called 13th came out. It became cool for rock stars and people with rappers",
      "or slaves in America. This became like a kind of cool and edgy thing to say. Now suddenly it's politically allowed to talk about, and maybe even cool to say, and suddenly you can start talking about... Like who saw Thor Ragnarok? What's your name? Are you from Niger? Really? I've never been there. My dad went there. Is anyone from Kenya here? No?",
      "No? Because I'm trying to get a Kenyan currency because of my currency collection. Don't worry about it. Okay, so in Thor Ragnarok, nobody saw this? Amr saw it. You saw it? So there's a scene where this guy played by Jeff Goldblum has this kind of gladiatorial combat he has and he's all these prisoners and they rebel and the person comes and says, sir, the slaves are rebelling. He says,",
      "are rebelling. He says, shh, don't say that. He said, what? Don't say the S word. And she says, okay, the prisoners with jobs are reneging on our social environment. Our social environment has nothing to do with the people we're talking about in the present or the past. Another good example of this",
      "Another good example of this is if you go to white people in America who are maybe not such big fans of black people and really big fans",
      "White people saying my ancestors were also slaves because they were indentured servants. This is true for me, actually. One of my ancestors was an indentured servant who came to Virginia in the 1650s. An indentured service by the way, do you know what the punishment for indentured servents running away was? In Maryland it was death. In Virginia it was mutilation.",
      "Now, those people agreed. So thy ancestor, whatever his name was, he agreed. I agree that you will pay my trip to Virginia. I will work for you for 10 years and you can tell me to do whatever you want. After that, I'll be free. But the point is a lot of some white Americans say black people talk about how they were slaves but our ancestors were slaves too",
      "And the response to that usually is, That's horrible. How can you compare what your suffering with their ancestors went through? Your ancestor chose to do this. Their ancestors did not choose to do it. Like Malcolm X said, we didn't land on Plymouth Rock. Plymoth Rock landed on us. Correct? Is that actually a quote he said? He said that right? Yeah. Okay. It was in the movie so I want to make sure. My point is... But here's the thing. According to modern day",
      "modern day definitions of slavery. If you look in the global slavery index every year that comes out, or every couple of years, one of the biggest, if not the biggest groups of modern day slaves today are bonded laborers, indentured servants. So you see how like the definition of slavery is when we look back in time, we say those white people weren't slaves but the same people who were objecting to these",
      "to like white supremacists saying our ancestors were slaves because they're dead servants. Those same people are the ones who talk about there being modern day slavery today when the majority of people that you're talking about are indentured servants, you can't have it both ways, right? So if you wanna say people... If you want to say that indentured servant or slaves today, indentured service in the past were also slaves. You can see how complicated the discussion is and what is politically and socially acceptable determines what we say,",
      "what opinions are acceptable or laudable and which ones are considered repugnant. Okay, having said all this, I have a question. Who came up with the idea of calling people white and calling people black? Who? Who ever has the power?",
      "Whoever has the power. I thought you were saying a guy's name. I was like, I don't know that guy. So when you go to if you look in oh did we have the... I forgot all about this.",
      "Okay Yeah, but how do you make those big? How do we make them take up the entire screen oh and then you just go like this. Yes Okay, sorry, there's not that so cool in my head posture there He's got a pile of heads in front of him. He's had several piles of heads This guy is not Weak this guy is extremely powerful So he's getting people are getting soldiers were getting rewarded",
      "The soldiers are getting rewarded for the number of heads they brought him. This is during the conquest of part of Hungary. Let's see, here's another this is from a 13th century, sorry 12th century copy of the Maqamat of Al-Hariri, a famous literary work. There's this scene in which a slave is being purchased. The slave is on the left. Does that slave look? What does it look like? Where does it looks like they're from? They're Turkic.",
      "They're Turkic. They're a Turkic slave, right? That's interesting. Here's from the same book, another slave market. Who are the slaves in this picture? Can you guys see? Yeah, they're African. Now it's interesting to look at this picture and think about what color... So you can see these",
      "You can see the Africans there like what their hair is darker than their skin, right? So the artist is using probably black paint to color color their hair and some kind of slightly lighter Paint to give mark your skin I've never actually like met a black person. They never met like an actual black person Someone who's actually their skin is like the color this iPhone Yeah",
      "Yeah. I've never actually met an actually white person, like someone whose skin is your color of your shirts, except like David Bowie at some point or something like that. But I never met him. My point is there's no... If I were inventing my own language and I were trying to figure out what your skin color is, I'd be like... Actually, it's really hard. Does anyone have any guesses?",
      "What's my skin color? Somebody tell me. Imagine you're making up a language. You have to try and figure out how to... What's your skin color, man? White mixed with brown? That's not a color, come up with an actual color. Okay so do it name it do something be productive Orange I mean a lot of times people say peach right",
      "Peach color. All right, fair enough. I think of his shirt as being peach color. Now, if I were inventing a language and I saw someone from Niger, African person, I don't think I would call them black. That wouldn't come to my mind.",
      "I can think of, you know, a lot. You could say like...I mean for example chocolate colors. Can anyone think of problems with this method? What happened when did human beings, Europeans and people in the not-the Americans get chocolate? After 1492 right so after the discovery the Americas before",
      "discover the americans before that chocolate's off the table you can't use chocolate so what else can you use let's say by the way you live in a place where there's no peaches so now you don't have peach i think maybe whatever we are so whatever americans are whatever isn't that is black okay so you're not specifying yeah but",
      "an interesting approach, which is oddly correct. But that's not the point I want to make right now. My point is just think about this. Where did the idea of saying people are white and black or brown or red come from? It's almost... I don't think anyone actually knows the answer to this. But one possible answer is that when you look at language development",
      "So if you go back and do linguistic studies of how languages develop over time, right? They seem to start out with two colors which is black and white or like light dark black white hot cold Then they develop a third one. So imagine this day night Day and night right light and dark that can't make sense And then what's the third color it develops? Red",
      "So you got light, dark, red. The stuff that comes out of our bodies, blood. Then blue-green mixture of the same word for blue and green. So if you want to talk about like blue, you talk about sky this color. And if you wanna talk about green, you say grass that color or something, right? Colors like brown actually is almost the last stage",
      "last stage of language development. So it might be, this is just a theory because I don't think anyone really knows the answer to this, but it might that at the stages in which people are like going out and encountering lots of different ethnicities they don't have like the actual colors available to them so they do things like black red and whites which are among the most common when you talk about identifying people",
      "identifying people. Like brown is a very late development in human languages, basically what I'm trying to say. And if you think about it, there's not, I mean, there are not a lot of brown things out there right? There's kind of dirt is sort of brown colored, I guess sometimes tree trunks are kind of brown color but It's hard to think about things to point to when you talk about like a dark brown color which is interesting",
      "is interesting. So I think one of the reasons that people start using terms like black and white is because they don't have a lot of other color naming abilities or color naming tools at hand. Okay, who decided to call white people white? He said whoever has the power. That's kind",
      "time, at least in the Western Hemisphere? Who had the power? First you get the power. What movie is that from? Then you get money. No, actually he's not the right entity. Sorry. The Romans. So as far as I know, the first people to talk about like... To say that people who are basically... Imagine",
      "basically imagine like a typical Italian guy, which probably also looks a lot like a typically Turkish guy and a triple Greek guy. It's typical like North African guy. So typical Mediterranean person that was Romans called this Albus white person. Do you know what they called Northern Europeans? Like people who are from Germany or Ireland or Britain could guess they were barbarians, but what,",
      "but what did they talk about their skin color being? It wasn't white. Remember, the Mediterranean look is white. They were what's called pallidus, pallid or candidus. It was a pallid color. So it's interesting that the original white people are actually like a Mediterranean. We call now kind of olive skin look, right?",
      "What about blackness? What did people talk about in the time of the Prophet, peace be upon him, in Arabia at the time Of the Prophet? So if you wanted to talk About people And this we know from Early Islamic history and Hadith collections Things like this. The best evidence we have I wish I had this Is there internet on here?",
      "can you look up this yeah look up karya q a r y a t karyat karyet alfaw qar kariat y80 okay try that l-a-l dash f-a w f-e-w",
      "yeah is that a dash or d no no yeah go back and now i screwed everything up you may write yeah go ahead let's see here okay where's the where's",
      "You want to see images? Yeah, I don't see that. Let me click on it. That's what I was going to do. I was happy. It was going be proud to demonstrate my Turkish knowledge but didn't work out. Okay let's see here. Ah there is the image but it's not a good one. Ah, there you go. This is interesting this is probably from maybe first century of the common era",
      "of the common era? Whoa. Okay, maybe you can go and see if you can find that image. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go back.",
      "Sorry, guys. I should have gotten this picture before I left. So this is a town. It's a ruin, basically. Here we go. It is about halfway between Mecca and Yemen. If you go here is Mecca, here is sort of Yemen like this. It goes right about here to ruins. This is epigraphic South Arabian alphabet",
      "Africa alphabet. So the stuff they've written is in Arabic, it's an early version of Arabic but it's written in epigraphic Yemeni South Arabian script. This is interesting this is maybe like the closest we get to Arabs in the Hejaz trying to draw pictures of themselves as closely as we can to the time of the prophet very interesting what color is his hair by the way it's also based on what kind of paint you have access to right so if",
      "So if you have charcoal, you can use coal and charcoal to make black. His eyes are really black. You can see that it's a very delicate image. There's shading on his forehead. You don't actually see he's got stubble. It's a well-done picture. It is detailed. It isn't some kindergarten or picture. No offense to kindergartners. My point is what color is the skin? It's sort of like an ancient Egyptians painted themselves",
      "So if you look in let's say tombs of Pharaohs from 2500 BC, you can see they paint themselves in this color. You might think about as like burnt sienna or ochre or something like that They paint Nubians as black with black paints and they paint people from like Syria with essentially off-white paint basically a little almost like",
      "little, almost like ivory off white paint. So it's interesting to see how they see themselves versus other people in the area. And it's interested that these Arabs are looking at themselves as red. So if you are in the time of the prophet, if you want to divide people by how they look, you're going to either use a bipartite or tripartite system. Bipartite, you'd use red and black. So black would be people from Africa",
      "Africa people from India especially South India would be black red would be like people from Mediterranean world and there's a lot of debates because it's unclear from the actual evidence where Arabs saw themselves a lot Of evidence suggests they can they consider themselves black not red But it's interesting from here this image which again, this is an image one image from a place You know three or four five hundred years before the time of the Prophet sallallaahu alaihi wasallam but it's in here. It seems like",
      "Here it seems like they're, oh, what else is in that picture? Anyone see? What kind of fruit is he being? He's being fed grapes by these two ladies. So it's interesting because people often say, oh there were no grapes in Arabia at the time of the prophet how could they talk about grape wine? Those are great funny. Okay so let's see if we can go back to that other section of images. So you either talk about red and black or you have a tripartite division",
      "division, which is red, black and white. So black people from Africa like if you imagine you're in Medina or Mecca at the time of the prophet so black would be people from Ethiopia who were there very dark skinned Arabs. White is the sort of middle ground kind of Mediterranean look",
      "like a typical arab book not that there's such a thing but you know if you google arab maybe what that's what you'd get and then red would be like you that guy the end of the table right so uh all of the tone but there's like a red flush you can see like kind of blood flushing behind the person's skin so that would be more of a red look again white people from ireland and britain and stuff they're not even on the charts",
      "In fact, it's interesting when Muslims start to write about people like al-Mas'udi in the 10th century of the common era start to writing travel logs about these people who are living up in the British Isles and stuff. Sometimes they say they're just blonde. They sometimes call them red. They always call them blue. Why would they call them Blue? Their eyes but I have another theory.",
      "Let's see. Can you see my vein? My skin is unfortunately essentially transparent, so yeah. So I think like if you imagine like a super white kind of Irish person, they can almost see like the blue veins behind there. That's, I don't know, it may be why they picked this term. I'm not exactly sure. But it's very interesting when they talk especially about like descriptions of people in Ireland. They say their hair is like scraggly and red",
      "sickly and their skin is just like disgusting palette color it's very interesting uh there's not this like fetishization of that look as some standard of beauty okay um so i told you bipartite black and red tripartite black red and white what did i not mention well yeah i didn't mention yellow but what did it i mean",
      "You guys ever listen to Michael Jackson songs? It doesn't matter if you're black or white. I didn't talk about black and white. Black and white is not used in Arabic at the time of the prophet as for phenotype. It's not used to describe how people look. It is used, and it's used in the Quran, for positive and negative. Right?",
      "On the Day of Judgment, believers, their faces are going to whiten and unbelievers, their face is going to blacken. This has nothing to do with suddenly somebody starts looking like David Bowie or they start looking like who's a famous Black person? Denzel Washington? Who?",
      "Who? Danto Washington. No, no. This is a ridiculous discussion. Okay, my fault. The point is that people don't start looking like a black person and white person today, right? Kunta Kinte? Yeah, that's LeVar Burton. The actor is LeVAR Burton. Well actually",
      "Well, actually he was played by LaVar Burton who later went on to play Geordi LaForge in Star Trek. Okay so the point is if you look at Muslim scholars talking about these verses of the Quran they don't talk about people like they're looking like Africans, they're like white Europeans or white colored Arabs right? This is about their nobility or ignobility. It's a very important point everybody understand",
      "Does everybody understand? And it's interesting because even when you have African Quran scholars, people like Osman Donfodio, Muhammad Bello his son. Osman Donford died 1813, or Mohammed Bell died in 1837. Or Sheikh Dem in Senegal. Or Sheik Ibrahim Niasse in Senegal right? In their tafsirs of the Quran",
      "the Quran, when they come to these verses they don't say what is this? so everybody looks like me in hellfire I'm so offended no one associates this with your earthly phenotype in fact Allahumma salli wa sallim Fakhr al-Din al-Razi he died 606 1210 of the common era says this is sawad yukhalif sa'ir anwaa asawad",
      "This is a type of blackness that is not, it's different from any other kind of blackiness. It's not the earthly blackness and it's not what you see early Arabs in their poetry talking about someone who is like white of face. It doesn't mean he's a white guy. It means they're noble. If there's someone, if someone says may God blacken your face, it doesn't",
      "you or insults you. And yes, people did talk about people being black and white but as I said when it came to phenotype if you're using black and White it was part of a tripartite where you had very light skinned people were red medium tone people were white very dark people wore black. Okay. How much more time do I have?",
      "46 minutes when I started Okay, that's fine. Um, I can do this People I'm on vacation okay, it's August Yeah, so I'm grateful you're here so the Variety where most slaves in Islamic civilization Where were that most of the slaves drawn from?",
      "the slaves drawn from in Islamic civilization? Three main groups. Balkans? Which three main groups? The first group was mainly Persian and Turkic. Persian and Turkish. Second, Slavs. People from what's now southern Russia, Ukraine area.",
      "Third Africans, black Africans. So again it's very interesting when we looked at these images... This is an engineering book written about 1300",
      "1300 of the common era in the city of mardin actually no city of diarbaker today in southeast turkey southern turkey and it's a desi scholar named jazari he had an idea this is an automatic wine pouring machine which is what what does your local ruler need what is every local who where do you get the ruler who has everything",
      "Jadiyah means female slave. Eight times an hour, it will come out of the closet and a little thing will pour the wine in and it'll offer wine to the person who wants the wine. It's an automatic wine pouring machine. That's... It says this is a jadiyyah. This is a female slave... It's interesting because you see how this... How do people conceptualize what a slave woman would look like",
      "century Mardin or Diyarbakir. And she looks probably Persian or Turkic. Maybe from the Caucasus, right? So it depends where you are and when you are. But for example in Baghdad in 10-100 if you said slave the assumption would be this slave would be either Persian or",
      "or Slavic. That's the assumption. If someone is a black slave, then you say black slave. You specify that. If you are in let's say what's today Central Asia in 1300 probably a slave would be Indian actually. One of the things Muslims do in India is enslave local people. It's just one of the",
      "Right and sell them to the north to people who want slaves in Central Asia so Where you are? And when you are really determines what your assumption of what a slave looks like this, right? So if we'll talk about racialization of slavery or the association of slavery with a certain race I Think you can say that Islamic civilization slavery is racialized But it's racialized in lots of ways at different times depending on where you are",
      "depending on where you are and what purpose the slave is being used for. And here's where we get to another very important feature of slavery in Islamic civilization, which is inherited from pre-Islamic, the pre-Islamic Near East, which has been ocean of what's called physiognomy, the study of like bodies and descent and origin. So pre-islamic Greco Roman and Persian scholars had an idea that the earth was... Like there's a kind of middle band",
      "geography and things like that. They're sort of the middle area, and then the farther you get away from that to the north and to the south, the more extreme you get. So the middle is the moderate area where people's bodies are the most perfect, their minds are the best perfect, and because they assume the climate influences your character also your character is the most perfectly. And the further you get way from that, the further deviate from this golden mean right?",
      "They said this is closer to the sun. The sun makes your blood congeal closer to your skin, which makes you black. This is their explanation. And people are hot-tempered. They're very sexually appetitive. Theyre smarts, quick-witted, but also quick to anger. You get to the far north, they get stubby little noses. Their skin gets white because it's cold.",
      "Their hair gets scraggly and blonde. They get drunk all the time. They're stupid. They are very good fighters. So these are the assumptions, the kind of stereotypes you have. And you can see a lot of these stereotypes actually continue to this day. So Muslims inherited this.",
      "fan of Greco-Roman philosophy. He talks about it in his history of Baghdad. Baghdad was built in the perfect area of the earth, this area where everyone is kind of their bodies and their minds are the most moderate and perfect. Mu'tadzir. Along the golden mean. Now why is this important for persons of slavery? Because if you different peoples are suited for different things",
      "things. So people thought like Greeks are really good at being administrators. Turks are really",
      "the historical Mongol lands of Central Asia you from a you're from second you can move your riding up horse and you're shooting bow and arrow so if you want to buy like The Abbasid family one Prince in the Abbassid family later becomes the caliphate in the 1850s he starts to buy his own bodyguard of Turkic slave soldiers from Central Asia and eventually they become",
      "because they're really good fighters and horsemen. So the idea that Turks are really good at fighting, really good being soldiers. You see things like people from Western Europe are really singers for example. And I'm not saying these are true or not but it's just the kind of thing you see in Muslims. There is a scholar named Ibn Butlan he's a Christian physician in Baghdad",
      "in Baghdad. He died in 1066 of the common era, Ibn Butlan is a Christian physician and he writes a book on a guide on purchasing slaves and he tells you what each person from this area they're good at this person from that area they are good at it. And he says when he's talking about Nubian women he says trigger warning he doesn't say that I'm saying that he says",
      "so good they're almost like natural slaves and so this is often pointed to when people say look these medieval muslims even though he's actually christian but medieval islamic civilization thinks black people are naturally slaves but this is where we have to remember the last point or second the last",
      "that people have had throughout history. If you look at, question, how do we define if someone's black or white today? In this world? I mean skin color obviously. Hair right, skin hair facial features but the way that for example in South Africa",
      "If you are mixed race You're called colored. You were and this is still people call terms that are used, but this is during the apartheid period But it's still used right? So there's a colored community which are people in mixed race black people are like Darker than colored people and then white people are people who are only have white ancestry They just they don't have any mixed ancestry allegedly",
      "In America, if you're a mixed race, at least you appear that way. Are you white or black? Black, right? So if you are not white, if your even a little bit black then you are black. Yeah so Barack Obama is black even though his one parent is white and the other parent is black. Interesting why did this... Why is this the case?",
      "the case. But you know, it's interesting, the one-drop rule only actually ever comes into action in Virginia in the 1920s. Before that, most states that have rules on this and they develop these rules after the Civil War, it is usually 1 8th. If you are more than... if you're 1 8 black then you're black. Yeah. So",
      "So why is it that if you're a little bit black, you're black and not white? I mean, why don't they... Put it this way. Why is it okay to enslave Africans according to American slave owners? Why is",
      "Slave like Now so it's okay remember they're getting criticized for this right, so it It's okay for us to enslave as you will because they're naturally slave-like now Let's say you start having sexual relations illicit sexual relations between white slave owners and their feet black female slaves until you get children who are mixed race Are those people free or slaves according to American law and Roman law? Right there slaves right there slaves",
      "If they're white, should they be slaves? What? A white slave? That's not right. If they can't be white, then they have to be black, right? So if black people are slaves and if this person is a slave, then it doesn't matter how white they look, they have",
      "Based on their particular history, on their legal system, on what the social assumptions about why people have certain statuses. Okay. If you... We have to be very careful when we look at the past that we're not judging things quickly and just based on our own understandings.",
      "on different types of races and what each race is good at, and their skills and their liabilities are as slaves. Yes, he says Nubian women are so obedient it's like they're natural slaves. But he doesn't say that about all these other groups that we would also consider black. People who are actually from one group from Niger,",
      "By the way, what's another group that is considered by Muslim scholars like Ibn Butlan and Ibn Sina to be natural slaves? Turks. No offense. So my point is their notion of natural slavery isn't reserved for people from Africa. They use it for one very specific group of people from sub-Saharan Africa and not for lots of others.",
      "Yeah, but that's not the issue. One of the most important things to keep in mind is that for pre-modern Islamic civilization there was not one understanding of just black people. People talked about three main",
      "people talked about three main groups. There was Sudan, which means black people, which is basically people from what we can think of as the kind of Saharan and sub-Saharan West Africa. Kind of a belt across like the Sahel region. Then there's Habash, which has Ethiopia, basically the horn of Africa, Ethiopia and Somalia. And then the third group",
      "which are people from farther down at the African coast, from the Horn of Africa and then inland in East Africa. These were three dramatically different groups. Does everybody understand? So when we talk about what let's say some 15th century scholar in Egypt thought about black people, you have to specify which group he's talking about because they see these groups as being very different. They see different ethnic groups.",
      "the groups, they talk about let's say different kinds of Ethiopians. Different tribes of Ethiopian. They distinguish between these groups. They don't all think of it just lump them in as black people. A good example this and this is the point I'll end on has to do with let's see notions of beauty right? Is black beautiful or is black ugly? So this scholar Ibn Abd al-Baqi he's from Medina. He's a Medinan scholar we don't know exactly when he died. He dies in the late 1500s.",
      "He was the khatib, one of the khateebs in the Prophet's mosque alayhi salam in Medina. He writes a book called what is this? I forgot the name of the book but it's a book on the virtues of Ethiopians. Yeah, it is. But I can't remember the exact name. It's a",
      "a book on Mahasana al-Huboosh, the good aspects. This whole book is basically love poetry about people from the Horn of Africa. He's obsessed with them. No, not Ibn Al-Jawzi. Ibn al-Jaws died 1299, sorry 1201 and he wrote a book called Tanweer al-Ghabash Fi Fida'a al-Sudan wal Habash",
      "This is a this is there's all Muslim scholars have a hole in Muslim scholars who are living in like the Mediterranean world Have a whole series of books on the suit. He has three books on his top So you tease concubine who with whom from whom his son was born? Her name was a wholesome and she was Ethiopian The famous Egyptian scholar assumed he died 1505 so this scholar Even Abdel Bakri this book, I mean it's his teacher",
      "His teacher was also obsessed with Ethiopian women. In fact, I think it's pretty clear from the evidence that from the 1500s to the 1700s, at least actually to the 1800s, the most, the people who were considered the most beautiful in Mecca and Medina were Ethiopian woman, women from the horn of Africa.",
      "His teacher, Ibn Abd al-Bakri's teacher writes a poem to his wife apologizing to his because of how obsessed he is with the beauty of women from the Horn of Africa. Right after that in his book, Izn Abdul Bakri talks about how horrible the women, the Zanj women are. They're the worst. Theyre hideous. They re terrible parents etc., etc.. My point is",
      "Loves people from the Horn of Africa. Right south of the Horn Of Africa, absolutely horrible. All of these people in America and Europe and in a global public square today would be considered black. But for someone like Ibn al-Babaki and for aesthetic tastes in the Hejaz at the time it was two totally different worlds. I'll leave... I'll close this discussion with a line",
      "poem quoted by a Suyuti in his book called Allahumma Sayyidina Muhammad Nuzhat al-Umar Fi Tafdili Bain Al-Bidi Wa Sudi Wa Sumr right so the delightful walk in the choosing which is better black white or brown",
      "Which women are the most beautiful? He ends with this poetry by Gainud al-Bahaa Zuhair. He says, إِسْمَعْ مَقَالَةَ حَقٍّ وَكُون بِحَقَّكَ عَوْنِي إِنَّ الْمَّلِيحَ مَلِیحٌ يُحَبُّ فِي كُلِّ اللَّوْمِ Right? Listen to a word of truth and be with this truth, your truth, my aid. Aid me with your truth. Beautiful is beautiful.",
      "It's loved in every color. All right, thank you very much. I'll do my best to answer your question",
      "What's your name? Where are you from? Really I've never been there one of these days. Yeah, one of",
      "Yeah, well different colors right so people there's a sadiq I think it's in Sunna Timothy if I'm not mistaken yeah that truth he talks about this and that it when is like Adam was created through like a handful of dusters all the different colors",
      "the different colors in that handful yeah so it's really interesting because when i was making the illustration and uh i see that if you look at the beach stand or the sandy sun and look at",
      "Yeah, that's a good point. But the problem is that I mean...",
      "easier but my guess is that most languages don't have like a lot of different words for different kinds of earth they probably have you probably use color naming four different fort like red or black or you know gray earth or something right so i don't know if the if like linguistically there's a lot enough material to actually use different kinds",
      "color clay. So, I mean, it's in...I think even sand like you said there's different colors and we would just say red sand black sand yellow sand right so It's not like a fruit where you have the associated strawberries or reds you could say plums are purple or something right? So it's not that association between a color and an element. That's a very interesting question. What languages do you speak? What's your native language?",
      "What's your native language? Yoruba. Yorubu, yeah. So one thing that I did this and it's in my book on Islam Blackness as an appendix. And if any of you are like linguists and want to do this, I can't believe no one's done this. As far as I know, no one has done this and the greatest project I can imagine, right? One thing I did is I tried to talk to speakers of people who live in Africa south of Sahara",
      "look to look at research on those language or give a survey to native speakers about language and ask them What is the color like for example? What is this?",
      "So one of the things that's very interesting I found in this surveys is that In a lot all but in many languages in Africa South Sahara What language do you speak? Do you know what language do, you know?",
      "okay wow fulani is very difficult language wow what about you i forgot where you're from uganda yeah so this is really interesting like if many of the languages the word for like your someone's you could say someone's skin is black",
      "is black. And then the same word you could use for like, oh, this is a black day. This is bad news, black day or something. But there's no... The color black doesn't have that negative association. So in English we think that if you say if black metaphorically means something bad, then that necessarily means anytime it's used to describe somebody",
      "word black to describe like metaphorically something bad but then talk about their own skin colors being black and there's no uh relationship between the metaphoric bad meaning and the kind of descriptive color which is very interesting so it's such a great someone should do a study on like all languages up there in Africa and try and uh like look at how this works in the language okay uh yes",
      "Okay, I'll try this is a very important question so do my best to answer it um, I know I don't mean to cut you off but will be efficient here. So Very big biggest difference maybe between Islamic law and how it functions socially in Islamic civilization and the way that Roman law and the ways slavery function Western Europe and the Americas",
      "Western Europe and the Americas, except for Brazil maybe, but certainly in the United States. In Islamic law, Thomas Jefferson's children with Sally Heming, his slave woman, they would have been free, and more importantly, they were children of his free wife. The next president of the United",
      "Remember, the Ottoman sultans, except for I think at least after 1390, only one married. All the Ottoman Sultans were children of concubines. Most of the Abbasid caliphs are children of convicts. In Islamic law, and this goes back to the very beginning of Islamic law as we know it, there's no... It's actually not in a Hadith and it's not in the Quran. It's very interesting. There's no, it's",
      "where this came from, but it just was always the case and no one disputed it. Which is a child born of... If a man owns a female slave and he has a child with her, the child is free and has same social status as if he or she were born of a free mother. And the slave woman when he dies, well first of all he can't sell her anymore, and when he",
      "It comes from a hadith, but the part of the child being free and the child having the same social status as their father is I don't know where it comes from, but it's omnipresent Hmm Oh even Omar yeah, I don' think so because that's Yeah",
      "Yeah, I know but I don't think that's too late and it's not very widely. I mean That's not a very like widespread if you don't see this mentioned as the like typically justification So This is very important Because what it means it's extremely important so one of the reasons you don t see like a lot of let's say an abolition movement amongst slave populations in Islamic civilization is for",
      "a couple of reasons. This is my theory and it's alluded to by other scholars, but as far as I know no one's... I'm making this argument. I think it's correct, but it's not like a well-established argument. One, if you have... If you're walking around Cairo in 1300 and you see someone who looks black they could be",
      "be the son of the sultan and the sons and the sultans African slave woman, in which case that guy is extremely powerful. So you know someone's skin color has nothing to do with their status. If you're walking around Virginia in 1750, the state of Virginia in 1550, and someone looks black, they are a slave. OK? That's it. If someone's white, they're free. And laws developed to make sure of that.",
      "in Cairo, in Delhi or any other place. What someone's skin color is does not tell you what their status is. That's very important. The second thing is because of the Quran and the Sunnahs absolute obsession with emancipation. Absolute obsession. Unprecedented as far as I know unprecedented in like world history the obsession of the Qur'an and the sunnah of the Prophet with emancipation",
      "emancipation, Muslims are constantly freeing slaves. Constantly. Which kind of ironically means they have to keep buying new slaves from Turkish lands, from Slavic... So it's like Islamic civilization is like this vacuum cleaner sucking people in because people are constantly freeing their slaves creating a need for more slaves, right? The point is if you're a slave in Islamic civilization you are probably going to be freed in a couple of years.",
      "So whereas if you're a slave in America, in the US, you're slaved for life. And by the way, if somehow you're freed, you are still at risk constantly of re-enslavement because all black people are soon to be slaves. There's something like 12 years of slave is not some weird thing that happened. Black people were free, black people were constantly at risk even in Northern states of losing their status in the United States. Okay?",
      "you look like if if you were dark-skinned and you were uh the son of a really wealthy guy in his african female slave you're a free guy and you're rich powerful person second if you are a slave you are going to be freed in a few years at which point you're just like every other free person right you can do business and you've so uh the great africans story laid out late africano historian ali mazruri i think he died",
      "transgenation whereas in the US and in the Americas and Europe if there's a mixture between or coupling between a Slave male slave over nurse female slave The child goes down into the slave population into like the lower class an Islamic civilization that person comes up That child comes up into the free population Which is not distinguishable their freedom in slavery is not distinguished by skin color. So it's a big difference",
      "population of people who are stuck in slavery and upset enough and organize against that because that population is constantly moving up into the free uh part of the society that's why i think one of the major reasons you don't have like abolitionist movements in the muslim world okay other questions last two questions i'll be very quick",
      "No, no white has superior over a red. Yeah, it's red and black. Yeah because people you say read people are like what the hell is he talking about doesn't make sense so they say white because That's basically what they mean but they say it's black and red Yeah, yeah black and right yeah",
      "Yeah, it's black and red in Arabic. Al-ahmar wal aswad. And Musnad Ahmed ibn Hanbal. Yes?",
      "Yeah. I mean, look, it's not rocket science, right? If you put me and a black guy together, you're going to say that these people look different. This is a very important point I also want to make. I'm trying to shoehorn all these important points into the Q&A, which is if you have why is it",
      "Okay, whose name in the Companions of the Prophet named me someone who's black? Bilal. Okay. Anyone else? Abu Dharr? No, he's not black. No, Suhaib is white. Osama bin Zayd. Zayd bin al-Harithah debated, but Osama, his son, Osama Bin Zayd, Amr bin Al-As, Safwan,",
      "Safwan bin Umayyah. Safwan ben Umayyah. Safuan ben Umaya. Amr bin al-As. According to some reports, Omar bin al Khattab. No. You got to read my book. You have a copy. Okay, so the point is why do you never hear people talk about let's say Amr ben al-Aas being black? Because it didn't matter.",
      "Because in Arabian society, you are defined by your father's tribal identity. What? Yeah, because he's a slave. So no one sits and says to Amr ibn al-As, you black person. He's like, what do you mean? I'm a member of Quraysh, an elite member of Quraish. No one talks about that.",
      "talks about that because it's not important they go after if someone's weak they go After whatever about them is like easy to get at so Bilal like oh you crow you're a Crow like that's what the met when in uh Allah says very early book he died 150 Hijri 767 common era he's Bilal gets up to give the Adhan when the Muslims conquer Mecca and the Quraysh say like who's this well",
      "So they're insulting him because of his color. But they don't insult Amr ibn al-As. They don't assault Safwan bin Umayyah, whose mothers were both African. And they're described... Amr Ibn al-'As is described as short, dark skin with a flat nose. You never read about this because it doesn't matter. Because his identity comes from his father's tribal identity. We know Bilal had trouble getting married.",
      "who had more trouble getting married than Bilal? According to the number of stories, double the amount of trouble that Bilal had getting married. Anybody want to guess? Salman al-Farsi. Salman Al-Farsi had even more trouble because what matters in Arabia at the time of the prophet? Does it matter what skin color you are? If your father is important,",
      "And neither, Salman was also a slave from Persia. With Bilal they make fun of his skin color. With Salman they'd say, who's your son? Tell us your ancestors. You don't have ancestors. We know our ancestors. I'm Salman ibn Islam. Salman the son of Islam. So it's very, that's why it's important when you read stories in the time of the prophet, you'll see things like when the,",
      "It's like when the Muslims go to Egypt and they conquer Egypt, and there is a delegation of Muslims who go and they meet the Melkite bishop of Alexandria, essentially the administrative leader of Egypt at the time. And the main guy is, I think, Abu Ubaidah, who has very dark skin. And then the bishop said, Who's this black guy talking to me? And they say, Well, he's wiser than us. He's more pious than us We respect him.",
      "him. And blackness is not something that is bad amongst us. They say blackness Is not something That's bad amongst Us so if Blackness is Not Something Bad Amongst Us Why do they Call why Do they insult Bilal Because of his skin Color it's because He's a slave If he had if he Were A free Person With High Standing They Wouldn't Talk About His skin color They Just go out Whatever They can't for the Slave or The weak person They just Pick on whatever But like Makes them an Outsider It's being An outsider That's Bad it Doesn't if You're an Insider it doesn't Matter what color your Skin is",
      "skin is. If you're an outsider, it doesn't matter what color your skin is because you're still going to get attacked. Blasphemizing against a prophet? Do I have to talk about this?",
      "My life is like a giant trail of things I have to apologize for. I mean, yeah. I appreciate the chance to contextualize that but I don't feel like discussing this. Thank you. Anything else or do we have to leave?",
      "Oh, the briefly no difference between the institution of slavery in the US and the institution Of Slavery in the United States? There's a huge... but this is such a big discussion. I mean you have to have um yeah i mean the so people in slavery in western europe and the us in theory they could buy their freedom but it's very rare and in the late 1700s",
      "in actually even in the late 1600s, in slave states like Virginia, Maryland and farther south in the US they passed laws making it extremely difficult for a slave to be able to purchase their own freedom. Whereas in Islamic civilization is very common for people to purchase there own freedom In fact, a lot of times it was contractual It's called mukhatabah And this is mentioned in the Quran",
      "Like in the Ottoman Empire, like the Suleymaniye Mosque. This was built by laborers. Some of them are free and some of them were slaves. And they're all paid the same amount. So the slave is getting paid just like the free person. Okay, how does that make sense? Well, this is how it works. If I'm a slave owner in, let's say I'm living in Galata or something. I have like 10 slaves. I'm like, guys, listen. You go work on the Sulaimaniye",
      "the Suleymaniyah. Every day you're going to get paid like, I don't know, 200 whatever they have. You give me half or two thirds. Every Day I get two thirds, you keep the rest and in five years you will make enough money to buy your freedom back. This is an agreement now it's an agreement. I'm contractually obliged to this so those guys go and they work and they save money up and they buy their freedom after five years. It's very common. So this is how",
      "Islamic civilization is a very big and long period of time. One generalization I think is accurate, is that a lot of slaves were actually bought as investments. You buy someone and then they go to work and do things like being a carpenter or rote maker or whatever. They just give part of their salary to you and eventually, usually anywhere between three to ten years, they buy back their freedom.",
      "their freedom. Very common, very, very common. Yeah, I mean in Islamic law you can't force your slave to change their religion for example so even if they're Christian or Jewish you have to allow them to practice their religion you can make them change their religious. You can't punish them more than you would punish like your child or something you can discipline them in a way that's unreasonable. If you do then the government",
      "the government has the obligation and the right obligation to force you to sell that slave or to oblige you to free the slave this goes back to the son of the prophet that's not um uh yeah so that's there's a lot of major differences one of the biggest differences i said before is that children born of a male slave owner female slave are free and uh of the same status as someone born of",
      "Yes, Ibrahim. Yeah. So it's very hard. I don't know this",
      "I don't actually know if we know who Bilal's father was. Like, I don' t know...I have not been able to find information about that. There are some people who say his father was Arab but I don´t know where this information comes from. I've not been abl e to verify that. If you know it, I would love to know it because... But Rabah could be anything, you know? We don't know.",
      "I mean, the problem is some of this information we just don't have any information about it. But if you find out, I would love to know. Thank you, Professor. AMIR ALI KHANNAB- Amr, we can talk later. Thank You. I know that you have more questions but the time is coming. Not unfortunately. And Professor Brown is already tired and- AMIR AMAR- I'm not tired. What time is Maghrib? 10 past 8.",
      "Okay, I need to pray Asr. I didn't pray Asar. Oh, okay, I can pray here. Yeah, if people have questions, I'm happy to stay and answer questions. Is that bad? After the prayer or whatever. No, I mean the prayer is in 810. So that's like a while from now.",
      "I think it's better to take questions before the prayer. No, I mean, I'm happy to just talk to people if they want to come up and ask me questions. I'm glad to do that up here. It's like this. Yeah, yeah. But I mean that's after the prayer so before the"
    ]
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      "I met you and wrote on the board. So, uh, you can all hear me. Excellent. Thanks for inviting me to University of Pennsylvania. I'm trying to think if I've actually ever given a talk here before. I can't remember. I actually almost came here for college. But that would be many, many years ago. Over 20... It would have been like 2015 or something.",
      "Would have been like 25 years ago. But I went to Georgetown instead, and one of my organizers came here instead of Georgetown so things balanced out in the end. Alright, so... Interesting picture. Anyone know what this is? I'd actually be very impressed if anyone knows what this it. I'm just curious. Nobody knows what that is? Okay, that's good. That makes sense. You know what it is?",
      "Is this ancient Mesopotamian art?",
      "How Arabs in the Hejaz, in the 7th century would have represented themselves in art. Also, I mean granted you know if you only have... You go to one of those restaurants where they give you some crayons for your kids and they have like three crayons right? And if you had to represent yourself you'd have green yellow and red. You might not have the most accurate picture but you can see that actually have a lot of colors. They do some really subtle shading on kind of the light on his forehead",
      "and the shading under his lips. This is probably a noble man, he's got two ladies behind him offering him grapes. You can even see that he has kind of five o'clock shadow drawn in. Their hair is sort of wavy, and big, almost like Byzantine artistic style eyes. And what color would you say the skin is? Anybody have any guesses? Anyone here do art history or anything like that?",
      "funny joke, which is this is New York. We wear black until they find something darker. That's as dark as you can get, as far as I know. His face needs facial hair. The color is... it's sort of like burnt sienna or ochre? Or red? How would you make this? You'd make this out of some kind of iron oxide painting? Or minerals? By the way, when Egyptians and when Mesopotamians want to depict",
      "Want to depict people they call black what color do they use? What but yeah, this is a trick question. They just left and I mean like They say pitch black like you don't pitch black means What's pitch? It just taught Like you know the stuff he put on road surfaces tar that's top pitched or they think black which is ink so When I want to make someone black day",
      "They use actually black color which is actually kind of weird because Most people in the world there are very people in a world who actually have totally pitch-black skin like the color for hijab Just like there's really people in The World Who Have White Skin you have to be like David Bowie in the 1970s Pretty funny I remember. I've been trying to find this clip online. I can't find anywhere",
      "And this guy, he's like an American jazz artist. African-American jazz artist He was talking about how he met David Bowie for the first time and he was like This guy came in and he is white I mean white! Like actually physically white. The color of his sweatshirt. Very few people are like that. Like the wall here Who came up with the idea of calling white people whites? These are my kids. Do you guys know the answer to this or did you just raise your hands?",
      "I don't know how long that one was, but probably so when humans died down. More white in the future from death.",
      "Pallidus. Where do we get, what word from that? Pallad or pail. So interesting. This is a lot like how an Egyptian in 2000 BC or an ancient Mesopotamian or a Roman would represent themselves in painting. Very interesting. But it's a good question where did Romans get the idea of calling themselves white?",
      "Where do they get the idea of calling people black? That's an interesting question. Why, I mean... It's an intersting question. If you were going to come up with words for color and you were supposed to just say what is everyone's color in this room and you're supposed to think of different things I don't think white or black would actually come to our minds if we came at it from a totally blank palette. Correct?",
      "And it seems to have been pretty widely agreed upon, deciding to say black and white. Which is very interesting. There's theories for this. None of them are very good, in my personal opinion. But that's interesting because you're seeing how people... Madsen Hashim why do you guys have your hands up? No one knows the answer. No you don't know the answer? Nobody knows the answers. Okay. So, interesting point.",
      "This is maybe how Arabs... I guess. This is 500 years before the Prophet, but we don't have a lot of artistic evidence from Arabia period. This pretty interesting. Question... Here's another question for you. What did Arabs in the Hejaz at the time of the Prophet... Western Arabia at the Time of the Prophets Muhammad in the 7th century How do they divide up people in terms of color? Kind of ethnicity, color... Yes",
      "comes to mean like Persian, not Arab but from the north? Habashis or Ethiopians. They would say black white and red So black people are like people from Africa or southern Arabia or India Red people are what? I'm red You're red",
      "You're red. Sorry to like single people out. So, we're red and if you think about it If I say something really stupid what's gonna happen to me? Let's say I turn around and there's just my pants split open or something What's going to happen to you? I'm gonna turn around Even if I get a little bit hot on the floor My skin is basically transparent I don't know if you can see If you saw someone's skin like mine you'd be like that guy has kind of purpley-red color",
      "Red would be like people from, you know some Syrians, Turkish people, from the northern Middle East. And then what would they say about Irish people? They call them blue. Sometimes blonde sometimes blue. Blue is really... if you think about people with really light skinned you can almost see their veins. Like a bluish color.",
      "If that's red and then black, what is white? White is just like a kind of lighter skinned Arab. Kind of a typical Arab color would be the whites. Interesting. Alright. Why are we talking about this topic? They asked me to talk about our choice of justice which was terrific. I want to talk issues of race because that's in the news not because I'm just talking about things that are topical but because people ask these questions",
      "I wrote a book on Islam and slavery, it's called Slavery in Islam. Not because I had any passion about this topic, but because I have questions about the relationship between slavery and Islam People had questions about this because of ISIS and other things like that And they kept asking me these questions and I wanted to know the answers and I want to give people the answers so I wrote this book And then people were- Kept asking me about Islam and blackness Is Islam an anti-black religion? Etc etc Why are Muslims racist? Et cetera et cetera",
      "So, I wanted to address that issue as well. That's why I wrote this new book called Islam and Blackness And if you're talking about issues of social justice in the United States The issues of race and issues of slavery are going to come up. These are important topics to have knowledge about, I'd say.",
      "at the beginning of this lecture, seems like a really tough opening topic. It's very upsetting topic, right? Because if you talk about... That's a rhetorical question, Maz. It is not an actual question. But, Bayla can you explain to him why it's a retorical questions? So the reason I want to bring this up first is because if you are Muslim or if you're just involved in discussions around Islam and social justice",
      "Islam and social justice, or Muslims and social Justice. This is sort of like the elephant in the room? Is that what it is? 300 pound gorilla? It's some kind of big animal that nobody wants to talk about or mention. That's an elephant in a room right? Okay good. So because you know Muslims in America really tend to care about social justice issues, of course not all of them but a lot of young Muslims are really concerned with things",
      "and they feel that they can participate in this cause sincerely, meaningfully. They mean this deeply in their hearts. But the problem is that... Well two problems. One, unless you haven't watched the news in the last six years a lot of times slavery's associated with Islam. The second issue is that even if you don't watch the news usually there's some person making up a variety of different ideological backgrounds",
      "Also, America started by four countries and rich countries.",
      "Slaves are people you've captured and you decide not to kill. Like, uh... I could kill this guy but he looks like he knows how to make really good guacamole or something like that We're gonna take him back to our village we're going to put him to work for us And maybe eventually this guy actually will want to become part of your community You don't know So as far as we know at least in the Near East As far as human records go Slavery starts with people who are captives",
      "A couple of important points. We don't have a lot of time to get into details, I can answer questions if you have them during the Q&A. Someone just sent me this tweet. Don't worry about it though, I was not on Twitter. My wife controls my social media activity.",
      "activity. This is probably very wise. Somebody sent me this. Jordan Peterson said, without divine like basis... Without a basis within the divine it's impossible... Without divine validation of human value it's possible to say that slavery is morally wrong. Which is really interesting point. Not because you need to have a divine",
      "Who thinks slavery is not morally evil? Okay, that seems to be a pretty good police representation of university population. How many do you think that... I don't know if I'm allowed to do this. I mean how many of you think abortion is evil?",
      "Pretty much everybody would have the answer.",
      "people would say, at least this is very suspect. What's interesting about this topic is that this is an issue which in the 20th century was publicly agreed upon. But prior to... and this is being generous. Let's say the 1700s. That's really being generous! 1800s probably more accurate. Maybe even 1900s. This was not agreed upon at all. In fact, prior to, I bet you take the 1700, Gregory of Nyssa",
      "The Warrior of Nyssa, Christian Bishop in Cappadocia died 394. Jean Baudin French historian and legal scholar died 1596. Maybe Giovanni Pontano died around that time? I think he's from near Venice. And a German guy, a legal scholar from the 1200s named Ecke von Röpkeau. That's it!",
      "Four people. Not Moses, not Jesus, not Saint Augustine, not Thomas Aquinas, not Buddha, not you name it, not Aristotle, not Plato, not any... You name it? Either they had no problem with slavery or they thought it was tolerable or defensible or even natural. Very interesting. What did Aristotle... Okay, I have a question. When did people start talking about slavery being in and of itself",
      "in and of itself evil, in any meaningful way. I'm kind of giving you a hint. Very late 1600s, 1690 there's a tract published by the Quaker Association here in Pennsylvania actually. Then the 1700s, really mid-1700s with Montesquieu",
      "Montesquieu and his Spirit of the Laws, discussion of it. Later with... I'll almost say Zayzib Mohammed Condorcet in late 1700's. 1800 is really- Late 1700's when you start getting like abolitionist movements in the UK and then in Britain and the United States in the late 1700s. 1800 they'd really pick up steam So I have a question did people just wake up one day? I mean this interesting question did human beings wake up on day there was like",
      "Not smart. Buddha, spiritually aware? Not spiritually aware. Spiritually aware. Okay so it seems like... what happened? I gave you another hint. Well this is one that's highly debated but in my opinion this is how it happened. Where did I tell you the first major abolitionist declaration came from? Actually wasn't an abolitionist declaraton was just a criticism of slavery.",
      "Looms move themselves. You know what loom is? Like for sewing cloth? And so, looms move themselfs. That's an incredibly prophetic statement. What happened in the... human beings realized they can use first water power then steam power to do what? Move things, move heavy things. Until that time, what did they use? Animals and other people. So I think this is real- but this is a real moral conundrum",
      "Because if you ask somebody today, what's the thing that you bring out as the final hammer in an argument about moral relativism? If you're going to debate on moral relativist. Well, if that's the case slavery would be okay. And then what does the person say? I mean this is kind of like Jordan Peterson trying to do in his argument. He's saying, you have to believe in God because if you don't believe in god, you actually can't say slavery is wrong and you have",
      "So that's the... this is the one... if there's one thing we're morally sure about, it's slavery is wrong. But if you were to look at human history through a history of our species intellectually socially This would actually not at all be the case! So this is a real conundrum You can call this the Charlottesville statue debate American history is a great example of this I have a question",
      "I think they'd hear them out. Oh, no...",
      "This is Thomas Jefferson. The problem is, the guy that we look to as our moral and legal and kind of political guides has believed in things that put him outside of the realm of the acceptable in our society. That's a conundrum. But this is not...this is a human conundum. It's not an American conundrm, it's not a Muslim conundram, this is a",
      "This is a human conundrum. There is no religious tradition or philosophical tradition that I know of, that did not either find slavery acceptable, natural, or defensible prior to the essentially modern period. Maybe early modern period, but essentially modern. What do Muslims say about slavery? It was first of all like most other traditions it was just part of life.",
      "It was like talking about the weather or something. Or a disease. You don't want to get some horrible disease, but you don't sit around and say it sucks that this happens to somebody else. You hope it doesn't happen to you. Incidentally, when did people first start talking about abolition? The idea of getting rid of slavery as an association is too huge. When did this start? When is the first instance that someone talked about abolition",
      "the slaves, slave rebellion in the first century BCE. Around the 60s of the first-century BCE. Spartacus is a slave who rebels and according to the movie he says we're going to keep fighting until we free all the slaves in Italy. That's not what Spartac...Spartacus and his other slaves they didn't want to be slaves but they weren't trying to end slavery. In fact they took their own slaves. No society that had slaves in every civilization, every human civilization",
      "No civilization or society had slaves. Even suggested abolishing them until the early modern period. Very interesting, as I said this is a conundrum. I can't resolve it for you if you're interested in it read my book Slavery and Islam And if your uncomfortable that's not my problem That's literally not my Problem It's everybody's problem",
      "What does the Quran say about slavery?",
      "2. You're not a complete legal person. What does that mean? Like, a slave in most schools of law and Islamic law can't own property. In most schools they can't be witness in court. 3. You don't have the full range of requirements that a free Muslim has. So let's say slaves don't pay Zakat, they don't to pay charity tax. Slaves don't HAVE to go to Hajj. They don't need to do the Hajj jamaica.",
      "the Hajj to Mecca. They can if they want, right? So by the way this is a pretty clear listing of certainly with this idea of not being able to control your movements and enjoy the fruits of your labor, it's very clear understanding of the problems in slavery. One of the clear principles that goes back as far as we can identify anything in Islamic tradition",
      "It's attributed in a hadith to the Prophet. Probably not something that the Prophet said, probably something an early Muslim said that got incorrectly attributed to him but it gets picked up in Islamic legal thought very early God wants freedom You see it as a legal maxim in Islamic law The Lawgiver, God, the Lawgivers looks expectantly towards freedom God wants Freedom",
      "In Islamic law, there's always this favoring of emancipation. So let's say... what's your name? Abeer. Let's say Abeer and I co-own a slave. Let' s say Abeeer and i co-owned a car. And I say, hey Abeer, I just don't want my half of the car. I gave it away. I just gave the car away to somebody. Would that be okay?",
      "Would that be okay? Okay, I have one on my half. So in every Islamic school of law if we owe Cohen a slave and I decide to set my half free That slave actually is free now Now the only question is do I have to pay you the amount Do I have pay you immediately over time or does the ex-slave now have to work to repay you that amount Or do you just have to eat take a haircut as they say in finance",
      "You remember the Wharton School of Business or whatever? Had a haircut. So, it's unlike other types of property... If one of the partial owners said you're free, then the slave is totally free. Other things... If let's say I'm walking down this street- Oh! How about this? Let's say, I say to my slave, Okay, uh thanks for setting the table Listen, you're fre until after, uh, the second- I don't mean your- if the second I say you're Free BOOM he's free that's it. Even if I didn't intend it",
      "Even if I didn't intend it. In Islamic law, in general, in contracts and declarations and marriage and all these things If you make a statement that you don't intend... It happens to be a contract for some new telephone or something like that right? I'm not bound by the contract. It's not my intention to sign this Same thing in Islamic Law But with Emancipation even if its not intended, even if it is a joke Boom! The person is free Let's say you bump into somebody",
      "introduces things unknown before in, as far as I know, human history. Which is it makes not only is freeing slaves a good deed but freeing slave expiates sins This is in the Quran if you Let's say somebody accidentally kills someone they commit manslaughter One of the things they have to do first they have compensate the person's family But they also have to free a believing slave let's say you",
      "Well not if you're kind of people out the other schools Let's say it's Ramadan and I sit here, and I'm like giving a lecture and I go. I'm really thirsty Not accidentally I do what I just can't stand it What have I just done first off that we do this day of fasting but also I have to do I Have two three a slave or if I don't have a slave I have two feed 64 people or run up when you do that I have",
      "Fast for? What is going on with the NSA here? Imagine how much. Fast for what? Times two. 60 days. That's if you intentionally do it, so don't intentionally break your fasts. If you don't like fasting because you're gonna...",
      "So, yeah. Then the reward as stated in the Quran, as stated endlessly in sayings of the Prophet and the Hadith Corpus The reward you get for freeing slaves in afterlife is enormous There's kind of an irony here which is one of the reasons that Muslims Let's say Egypt or Baghdad or India keep buying slaves from outside Islamic world because they keep freeing slates",
      "slaves. It's actually kind of ironic, right? Because they need more labor so it's sort of like a vacuum machine sucking in people because they're constantly freeing them up into the free population. Another big major difference between slavery and Islamic civilization or Islamic law and let's say slavery in the United States or most places in the world Thomas Jefferson we talked about him before his children what about his children does anyone know who",
      "Yeah, I think they share... like his black and white children share ownership of the state right now.",
      "And this goes back to the very beginning of Islam. Although ironically it's not in the Quran or specifically stated in the Hadith, but it's understood by all Muslim scholars immediately which is that if a Muslim male fathers a child with his female slave, that child is one free, two same social standing as children born of a free wife and three his mother or her mother is freed upon the owner's permission",
      "on the owner's death. And she can't be sold. So, most of the Abbasid caliphs all I think of the Ottoman Sultan except one far as I know, except one were children of slave women not of spring mothers What does that mean about let's say race?",
      "The Ottoman Sultans, by the time you get to the 1800s I don't even want to think about how little the amount of Turkish blood they had in those. They were probably genetically mostly Serbian and Greek and Italian because for generations their mothers are all Serbians, Greeks, Italians Russians, other things like that",
      "Things like that. What about Abbasid caliphs? Some of their mothers were Persian, some of their mother were Turkic, some other mothers were African. What does this mean about phenotype, people's appearance? If you're walking down the streets in Cairo in the year 1300 let's say and you see someone who would look like phenotypically black to us, let's just say one of their parents is Arab, one of the parents is from Africa South Sahara",
      "That person could be what? I mean, just based on their appearance. Their skin color, their phenotype They could be anything. They could the son of the or the daughter of the well if they're daughter you probably not gonna see their face in 13th century Cairo There could be a son of The ruler! They can be member of the elite Freeborn member of elite Or they could be from...they could be enslaved from Ethiopia You don't know",
      "You don't know. I mean you go by other indications like how they're dressed, how they have a bunch of dudes around them But their phenotype is not going to tell you these things This is interesting. This is a picture from a book written in the 1200s The painting's done around 1300 From, by the way Mazen Hashim Mardin Where you've been Right? The ruler of Mardan It was designed for the ruler of mardin It is a- guess what this is",
      "I know why that, um... The Sultan's now probably like... the descendant of the Sultan probably is like...",
      "This is interesting. This would be like, if you were going to make a typical paper mache slave woman in 1300 she's probably Persian or Turkish. Okay. This is Iqlas Khan the Grand Vizier, Slave Grand Vizer of the Bijapur around 1650 in the Deccan in India",
      "Anbar died 1626, the basically de facto ruler of Ahmed-e-Ghar in India. They're both Ethiopians. Brought as slaves, become senior administrators and rulers of these dynasties for many decades. So slaves actually become part of the elite.",
      "This is a picture of, from around the 1300s, painting of the Prophet Muhammad's companions visiting the king of Ethiopia to ask for permission to seek refuge there. Here's an interesting incident that's described in Ibn Abd al-Hakam's Conquest of Egypt written in the mid 1800s but drawn on earlier sources.",
      "The Muslims have just conquered Egypt. And there's a delegation that goes to the administrative leader of this Byzantine province, Melkite Bishop. They're led by Obad ibn Salman who the bishop asks,",
      "And black is not something disparaged amongst us. Interesting. But, who can think of an objection to this? Nazlan I don't think you know the answer. Has anyone ever heard? But I admire your courage. What is the...no one's ever heard of the...actually well there's often a story that you hear that Bilal",
      "the first Mu'adhid of Ethiopian descent, a slave of Safwan bin Umayyah. Sorry, his father Umayyah. He was freed by Abu Bakr, the first successor to the Prophet and early Muslim convert. Freed, he becomes a very important early Muslim. And there's this dispute between him and another early Muslim named Abu Dharr al-Jafari.",
      "This is not a reliable story. People get very mixed up. The actual thing that Abu Dharr says is, I got in a fight with a man and I insulted his mother. Then some people report that was Bilal. But actually the report where Abu Dhahr says you son of a black woman this is very rare",
      "Very rare hadith, and it's very unreliable. Very unreliabble from the perspective of Muslim Hadith scholars. Which is interesting. People know this story. But in effect... Well first of all now you know that story is actually highly unreliably but the meaning is still indicative In a sense that when Bilal Muslims have conquered Mecca Bilal goes to give the adhan on top of the Kaaba in Mecca",
      "What do the Meccan elite say, who are still non-Muslim? They say... Look at this crow. They couldn't find anybody with this crow to give the Adhan. What do they mean when they say crow? What? Yeah I mean crows are what? They're birds and they are what color birds? Blackbirds right so there um you could easily if you want to insult somebody in Arabia",
      "If you told somebody in Arabia if they had African descent, you could say that you're black. So isn't that a contradiction? Between what these guys are saying and what I just told you? Isn't that an contradiction? Not really. Blackness is not in fact disparaged. Other people who are black have never heard of Ahmad bin al-Ahs, a Muslim who actually oversaw the conquest of Egypt on his own initiative.",
      "This just did, Caliph I want to inform you, I've conquered Egypt. Other people Safwan bin Umayyah The son of the owner of Bilal They're described as black Their mothers were African You know who else is described as Black? Who's the second caliph of Islam? Omar ibn al-Khattab One of the most influential people in Islamic history without a doubt",
      "without a doubt, died 644 of the common era. Omar ibn Khattab there's some reports that he was light skinned, some report that he dark skinned at least two of his grandmothers, two of grandparents sorry both I guess his grand mothers were African isn't that interesting? did you ever know that? Did you ever think when you hear a story about Amr ibn al-As being insulted by someone saying you son of a black woman",
      "someone insulting him saying you son of a black woman, son of two black grandmothers. Did anyone ever heard this? No! Because in Arabia at the time of the Prophet the only thing that matters is being part of a tribe and your tribal identity comes from only one person, your dad Your mom could be whatever it doesn't matter If your father is from that tribe especially noble tribe like the Quraysh",
      "like the Koresh or Temim, you're set. You're like a made man in the mafia. Nobody can touch you. The worst thing is to be an outsider outside of the tribal system. What are indications of being an outsider? One of them is that you look like you're from a different country. Like you have really dark skin, like you look from Ethiopia. But if you have dark skin but everyone knows your dad as part of the tribe",
      "You're part of the tribe. They're not going to insult you by talking about your skin color because your skin colour is irrelevant But if you are a former slave like Bilal, they'll attack you for what they can see Question! Bilal had trouble getting married. Anyone ever heard that Bilal has trouble getting maried? He did. Bilal got in trouble getting marry There's another Muslim who had double the trouble Bilal have getting married",
      "Is it in conflict? Salman the Persian",
      "Just like Bilal, he's an outsider. But he's not black. It's being an outsider that is the issue. If the way to sort of get at your outsiderness is blackness, that's what we're going to bring up. If you are not an outsider, like Omar bin al-Aas or Omar bin Al Khattab or Safwan bin Umayyah, no one's gonna talk about the way you look. Is this clear to everybody? Does everyone understand how it seems to be a contradiction is in fact not a contradiction",
      "What people, if anyone needs to have...",
      "It looks like a knife? Um, maybe...",
      "You're not allowed to speak in front of other people.",
      "and drawing a little thing on the shield. That's supposed to be Muhammad, Prophet Muhammad. It's interesting in European thought even in the medieval period, the conflation of Arabia and Africa, blacks, Arabs, Saracens, demons it all just mixed together in one big stew of other bad non-Christian people. Black as phenotype, black as metaphor very important. Question!",
      "What is the name for like, the typical person's skin tone? Where does your family from in Mali? Yeah. Are they from like... Bamako. Okay. So if you were to go and describe a random person on the street in Bamako, how would you- In Bamboorah what language- where do you say their skin color is? Noir. What? Noi? That's completely French. It's noir. In Bambrook you'd say noir? Yeah",
      "Cloud means skin and then fiend means dark. So it's like dark skin",
      "Black sheep of the family Think about it I I did as many languages like you get information on and try to interview people from these native speakers are language as well a Lot of lot a lot of languages in Africa South Sahara Then the word for normal skin tone someone in that area is the word four block Like the same color as her hijab That language also has phrases like",
      "Black-hearted, black day, right? Does everybody understand what I'm saying? So in America we have this assumption that you have a negative metaphoric meaning for blackness is always assumed to translate or be equated to or tied to black as a color descriptor. So the fact that we say blacklisted",
      "black-hearted, right? That means that there's somehow like coded in our mind a contempt for or denigration of people who we call black. The problem with this argument is that in lots of languages I don't want to say all, I mean certainly in a... I'd say the majority of these languages that have been studied in the world light and dark",
      "Light is a positive valence, dark is a negative valence. Not all the time, you know sometimes things like this chocolate is really dark or that can be good or like dark beer could be good. It's not always the same but light is sort of positive, good, dark as negative Why would that be? Why would humans have... why would this be pretty consistent across human languages? I have a question. Has anyone ever told you, I'm afraid of the lights. I woke up in the middle of day, I was screaming",
      "I'm afraid of the light. There's a monster right over there. Humans are diurnal creatures. We do stuff in the day, night time we go to sleep where darkness is something you don't know and can't see it. It kind of makes sense if we metaphorically speaking that this is pretty consistent or widespread in human languages. As in even languages spoken by people who would describe themselves",
      "global west would call black. Unisibically black. That is very interesting. I find that fascinating as an academic. Does anyone else find that facinating? What does this mean? This means, that we can't always assume a direct link between blackness as the color descriptor and blackness in metaphor. Very important.",
      "This is it, this... One of my friends was talking about this yesterday. People love to talk about kind of cultural colonialism or intellectual colonialism or imperialism American imperialism I'm not going to debate this stuff But you know what the irony is? Often times super woke academics are involved in essentially American imperialist of human history",
      "Not everyone in the world has to think about race the way Americans think about it. Which I find to be, well, imperial. Other people talk about color in different ways. Not everyone has the same racial issues that Americans have. I'm not saying nobody else has them but not everybody does and not everybody in history did. This is very important. The Quran talks about",
      "and the faces of those who are white, and the face of those that are black.",
      "and by the way, most scholars think that Arabs consider themselves on the black half. When you see in Arabic black and white especially early Arabic at the time of the Prophet and early Islamic history it is almost always being used not to describe people's skin color or their features but to talk about moral evaluation. White is noble",
      "He's noble. He is white of face, he's noble Black of face. Ignoble It's a metaphoric language So black in faces, white in facing of their judgement People who are felicitous believers People who're infelicitous damned unbelievers And when you look at Muslim scholars commenting on these verses This is exactly what they say",
      "They say, this is a type of blackness that has nothing to do with blackness on earth. Nothing to do...with it. This is whiteness that has nothign to do whiteness on Earth. Interesting question! When you go and look at Muslim scholars from Africa South and Sahara Like let's say Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse, great Senegalese scholar died 1975 In his Tafsir of the Quran, his commentary on the Quran Other scholars in Senegal How did they explain the meaning of these verses?",
      "of these verses? Exactly the same way. Exactly the sam eway, whether you're Persian or Senegalese, your understanding is the same. Very important to remember that metaphor and color descriptors don't always... they're not always connected at the hip. Alright I talked for a long time so I'll answer any questions or hear comments you have. I'd love to hear what you have to say. Mazen do you actually have a question?",
      "This is an app massive that's actually a good question. Thank you very much Here's the interesting question What was the color out of the path Mohammed look There's actually number of different reports yeah",
      "That would be white, colored skin. No pressure. But my point is that's probably what they meant. But guess what? And this is interesting. I asked one of my teachers, a Senegalese sheikh about this. Very interesting answer. So if you're in Malaysia... Let's say you live in Java and it's the year 1700.",
      "So you live in a village in Java. Okay, there's no TV, there is no internet whatever You've met other people from other villages near you in Java That's it and you have a dream and you see the Prophet Muhammad And the prophet said in a hadith whoever sees me in their dream It's like they've seen me in real life. The devil does not take my form What would that person see? That Javanese person what would they see? We don't know but likely what would he see",
      "1400 And you see someone who looks, who's the Prophet Muhammad in your eyes. Who looks like people you know That's the prophet Muhammad Interesting answer It's all the prophet Mohammed that he's not slain Even though, that's, I mean The prophet Mohammed had to look one way and we have descriptions of it But his spiritual manifestation is however people... Is in the eye of the beholder Alright Other questions that are not from my own child",
      "Why didn't the Senate outright ban slavery the way it banned all other things?",
      "occurred, it wasn't conceptually possible. I think that's the best answer to the question. People will say, oh, some people will say same thing by the way Christians in the 1700s and 1800s said about Jesus. Why didn't Jesus Benjamin Rush? I think he was from Philadelphia, wasn't he? Founding father, abolitionist. You could read his debates with southern",
      "It's funny, not just with Southern slave owners but people who actually didn't really... they didn't like slavery but they didn' find abolitionist arguments very compelling. So it wasn't like they were supporting slavery, they just didn't buy a lot of abolitionist argument and you can read these debates And they asked Benjamin Rush why didn't Jesus ban slavery? I said well it would have been too difficult, it would've been too disruptive",
      "Because I never really thought about Jesus being a guy who wasn't afraid to make waves. Second, so he said... What one of the letter writers says to Benjamin Ross is So what you're telling me is that The Son of God on Earth didn't have the courage To state something? He could just say slavery is wrong. He could've just said that. He didn't need to say I order you to get rid of all slaves.",
      "Russia didn't have an answer for that. Abolentious actually didn't had an answer to this question. So, uh... That's a... Who was I talking to? Oh it was you. Yeah there is no answer for the except that nobody thought about that until actually it was economically possible.",
      "Is there an influence on the US Constitution from the Quran?",
      "I love this stuff. I kid. No, you know people have a lot of ideas. Neil Armstrong went to the moon, heard the event. Jack Cousteau went to",
      "So I didn't answer that question. Thank you so much for speaking on this area of the technique. My question is, how does a legal way to obtain Islamic Islam differ from other religions or just like free Islam?",
      "There's a couple of major changes that Islamic law, the Quran and Islamic law makes to slavery in the world in general. In the Near East particularly. One I did not mention is that it restricts... So the main way into slavery if you were like in Rome in 200 AD or let's say Greece in 200 A.D., or Damascus in 500 B.C. was debt.",
      "in general end up as slaves. You can't pay someone money, you end up their slave. It's called debt slavery. Islamic law prohibits debt slavery Another major source of slavery in human history is selling your children into slavery I know it's shocking to hear but if you're starving that might be the best way to not have your child starve at least they are going to get fed",
      "It's very common. Leaving your children out, exposing them like leaving a baby out to die because you can't support it. Someone comes and takes it. This is the major source of slavery in Europe up until the Middle Ages. Another major self-dedication giving yourself as a slave. I know people think this is crazy but sometimes they think about this especially during COVID 19 or I watched this movie, this TV show Station Eleven. I watched a few episodes of it. It got too intense. I couldn't finish it. Anyone watch this?",
      "I would just be looking for anywhere like there was a community where I'd be safe. Like, there's food, there are walls and food and stuff inside. Someone said,",
      "And it's very interesting, anthropologists have talked about this especially in the 1970s and 80s. Freedom, like negative freedom is the idea that no one can control you people can't tell you what you can do This is only valuable if you actually have basic security Once you have basic Security then you're like I want to wear this, I want wear that, I wanna do this job, I wan't to do that job, i want to go over here, i wan't go over there If you don't have basic",
      "then that's actually your primary concern. And negative freedom, what we think of as normalist freedom is actually pretty useless. So a lot of humans in history who became slaves gave themselves up to slaves. Another major source? Capturing war. In Islamic law the only way people can be enslaved like taken from free and made slaves is they're captured at war. Non-Muslims from outside the Muslim community",
      "the boundaries of a Muslim state, captured in war, those people can be slaves. That's your only source. That is legal in Islamic law. Yes?",
      "If I understand you correctly, instead of looking at slavery... Their first option is if you have a slave you should free a slave. Yes. So I'm curious, is that just a cultural thing or something to do with the time? Or is there something fundamental about Islam and the Quran that leads people to look at slavery in that light? I think it's something fundamental. I'll tell you why. There's a...",
      "The earliest known dictionary of Arabic dictionaries was a guy named Khalil bin Ahmed in the late 700s, early 800s. He, in the definition of A'ab as slave he says just to make it clear you're all slaves of God",
      "The slave of God. Abdur-Rahman, the slave of the most merciful. What's one of the main words that the Quran uses to talk about human beings? Ibad Allah, the slaves of God When Muslims invented human rights Go look it up Tell me when someone started talking about rights that all human beings have Muslims talked about Haquq al-ibad, the rights of the slaves They mean the slaves...of God",
      "All human beings have these rights. The right to physical inviolability, the right to property, the due process. Whether you're a man or woman, Muslim non-Muslim, free slave. So...the main way that the... Especially if we go back into like the all the way back in ancient Near East In the Old Testament and New Testament Anytime you read the New Testament like the servants of God",
      "the Prophet says, don't call slave owners, don' t call your slaves my slave. Slaves, don''t call your owner my master. They should say Master Maulaya like my kind of patron and the master should say to his slave, My boy or my girl because the prophet says you are all there's only one Lord, only one master and you're all His slaves so I think it's a conceptually part of Islamic tradition",
      "I think Bethar's our first question.",
      "I read a book called Topics of Jefferson's Habana.",
      "Yeah, and so I'm making this... asking the question differently. Not necessarily direct to the Jewish side but I realize that there's some form of animosity between Muslims in Europe or America. So what do you think is still fundamental?",
      "I don't know. I mean, I don' t know the answer to that. Maybe something...I mean, i know this book. I haven't read it. I have nothing against it. Im sure its a good book but I've not read it so I don´t know any... I don''t know. Well, I can't answer your question. I'm sorry.",
      "We'll take one more question and then they set up for us to play Manga outside so... No questions from any ladies. I did actually have one but I don't know if it was better. No, go ahead. Okay, I was gonna say, actually before I came today I had been like searching your name to watch a couple of clips and I noticed some of the first insults actually have to do with contracts",
      "controversy, which has happened to a lot of Japanese scholars and whatnot. And I was wondering how do you handle that sort of thing? You talk about sensitive topics like today we talked about race and slavery and everything How do you kind of handle those people looking at you as a controversial figure or fake mistake? Oh well, I don't know.",
      "The job's a jury to answer them. If I were not, if I were a full professor, I probably would be a lot more reticent to discuss these things. But I think that you know, I think if you're honest and if you have good intentions And if you You're always getting your work checked. It's very important to constantly get feedback on one's work",
      "Is that kind of why you involve your children in this sort of thing?",
      "I don't know. I just don't how well that works in the US.",
      "So, I don't know. Probably like 20 years ago... Let's just say 10 years ago. I think 10 years as a Muslim... Look, you know, I told this to the organizers and I hope they're not angry at me but I mean if you...10 years ago this talk would have been completely unnecessary. It probably could've caused a lot of problems. But when ISIS happened, Muslims didn't have answers how to address this issue.",
      "They didn't have because they just swept the center of the carpet. Didn't want to talk about it or tiptoed around it. They didn t have answers And this is a major crisis for a lot of Muslims, a major crises Similarly issues of race I mean, I don't know about you but I can't go like if I do if you google like Muslims and race or something in blackness just put that in Google Islam and race I guarantee you I guarantee one of the first things are gonna see is",
      "is Islamic slave trade, Arab slave trade Arabs are racist against black people I mean I just don't know how this is avoidable It's in almost every media and I would...I just think you have to know how to address this if your gonna deal with these things Otherwise you're going to get swarmed. You're going be a tsunami",
      "No, not in slave trade. I mean like as a business",
      "There were not really a lot of slaves. In Arabia at the time of the Prophet, slavery was very... It was widespread but it was very minimal in the sense that there was not... It wasn't like 25% society or something where you see if it's rolling.",
      "There's a big difference between societies where slaves are commercial articles and where they're just part of the economy. So what do I mean by that? If you say, OK we just raided this other tribe and captured five people from that tribe. Most of us, the largest group in terms of ethnic groups, slaves in Arabia were other Arabs. Number two group was Ethiopians. Number three about the same, Persians.",
      "So the largest plurality was actually other Arabs captured and raised. But they weren't engaged in slave trade, so people didn't make money off this. Now this is a big change that happens for example in England, in Britain like in the 800s when the Vikings started attacking Britain. Before that there was slavery in Britain but no one thought that we could grab someone from this village here",
      "So we want to thank you, Dr. Bellen so much for your experience"
    ]
  },
  {
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    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.",
      "really happy that you joined me on this podcast and of course let us not delay and bring on our guest of honor this evening inshallah none other than dr jonathan a.c brown how are you doing so lovely to have you and thank you so much for agreeing",
      "to be in it so i'm going to do oh no no i think the honor is ours really um i've known you for a couple of years now hamdulillah i'm happy to call you teacher uh i remember the first time walking into a into a lecture hall this small little lecture room and we were gonna learn this course on hadith with this book hadith muhammad's legacy in the medieval and modern world and i'm reading the book i'm thinking okay it's written by jonathan brown like",
      "Like, where do you get a Jonathan Brown who writes a book on hadith, Muhammad's legacy in the medieval and modern world? And I was just expecting to get this whole Ignis Goldsyear, Joseph Schacht type of thing. And then as I read the book, I was like, oh, this is interesting. And also have a sunnah that goes through. In fact, we had so many",
      "we had so many requests for you to narrate that Hadith, Al-Musalsa Bil Awaliya. There are many of our colleagues and teachers there who didn't have that opportunity the last time and they said, You know what? You have to ask him to tell us about his Isnaad and his Mashayikh and his studies in the traditional world. So over to you Dr. Ibrahim, what do you have to say about that? BismillahirRahmanirRahim. It's sort of silly.",
      "silly i mean it's not a silly request it's silly for people like you i mean you all have done so much more study than me uh that i why you would no it's true it's",
      "questions i try to explain in a different way and so it can be useful but you know i don't think that anything in that book is something that is you know is an insight that you're not going to find in the islamic tradition it's just sort of organized differently um although except presented really well for western audience as well like really taking uh doing a good job",
      "and telling the story of hadith really as opposed to you know normally what we tend to do when trying to present hadith is we or at least I did in the past basically just try and convey mustalah al-hadith which is like a whole lot of terminology and when people start hearing all those terminologies then they just get completely turned away from hadith because it's like no this thing is just too complicated and you know it's not for me",
      "which is what really got me into your articles and your books and so on. It was somewhat different, right Dr Yousuf? Yeah definitely! And let me state here Dr Brown, Moulana Irshad was my teacher at the madrasa when I came in to third year and so you taught us hadith and I remember obviously studying mustalah and various other sciences within hadith but every lecture we got an article from your respected self,",
      "I mean, definitely you'll benefit by reading the classical texts like Nukhba and so forth. But personally for me, and I'm sure for the other students in the class and in the madrasa was that your works augmented what we studied. And I think that's important, especially from an academic perspective of being able to articulate certain points because usually students at madrassas they tend to remain within a cocoon and within this sort of traditional shell. And they're not really aware of the studies that are going on within the academic centers, the valuable studies here.",
      "So who's your inspiration? I mean, this was surely like uncharted territory for you. Where did you draw from in terms of presenting the traditional sciences in this format? What was your guru in this field? Well, by the way it was funny because I think that class that I taught that year at South Africa,",
      "on sitting on a pile of my books and leaning on a file of my book. And then looking at me, it was just sort of this incredibly narcissistic image of just like lecturing on something and being recorded on a pilot in my own books that is funny. I think I still have a picture of that. But yeah, I mean, I think for me it was I kind of I think",
      "strains. One would be reading the books of Muhammad Abu Zahra, Sheikh Muhammad Abu-Zahra, I think he died in 1974, Egyptian Azhari scholar who wrote a volume on each of the four Imams. He wrote one on Jafar As-Sadiq, he wrote one Ibn Hazm, he worked on Ibn Taymiyyah and then but he really looked at",
      "like Malik or Abu Hanifa was trying to, they were all trying to accomplish the same task. And so he would kind of look at their perspective and it wasn't judging them or engaging in kind of polemics. It was really trying to understand what was this person trying to do? And why did that lead them to make this choice and that choice? Then I realized that he was drawing a lot on Shah Wali Allah, the great Indian scholar died 1767",
      "died 1762 miladi and so when i read his books especially his um his uh al-insaf he has babal yeah is uh hujat allah and i saw kind of the same approach where he's he's really trying he's looking at all these madhavs or all these schools of thought as kind of perspectives on one",
      "They have different priorities. They have the same anxieties, but different ways of addressing those anxieties by anxiety here. I don't mean like some kind of teenage thing where you walk in just worried you don't have your pants on or something. I mean, they're worried about misrepresenting the prophet's words alayhi salam. They're worried abut misunderstanding their religion. They worry about corrupting it. They are also worried that people won't understand it there.",
      "Like they have these anxieties, you know whether it's like the Mu'tazila or Ahmed ibn Hanbal rahimahummaAllah They all have the same concern right? They want to understand their religion correctly. They don't want to corrupt it. They Don't want him to represent it. Um, they want to Understand what aspects of it are kind of eternal and unchanging what aspects out there are change with with circumstance and You know Although they might sometimes oppose each other bitterly on some particular",
      "on some particular issues, they're all motivated by the same approach. And I think that seeing that like and when you look at history like that an Islamic thought like that it stops being this as you said sort of like a dry and almost academic examination and really you go back and live like you put yourself in the shoes of those early community that early community and then as the generations move on you can like almost kind of live",
      "almost kind of relive that experience of trying to address these challenges. And as time goes on, as you move geographically and temporarily away from Arabia. And so that was really like to try and go back and show how the Hadith tradition emerged not as some kind of dry academic or obscure science but actually has a very common sense way",
      "to sort through claims people are making and how do you know which ones are correct, which ones aren't. And then so that was one way. And the other way was through what, you know, people who study Hadith today would talk about is like, you I got this from some of my teachers in Cairo and especially they turned me on to the books of Sheikh Hamza Mellibari in the UAE and he's an Indian scholar. And I read his books",
      "I read his books and I eventually actually met him. It was really nice to meet him in person, but you know where that approach also kind of goes back and says let's like these mustalha they don't really work very well. I mean which is true that I mean this is In some ways I you know it's a mustalhar the useful way of learning about things But you it's not really I Mean it's time. It's not that useful right because just say like oh moon car means this",
      "Munkar means this. And then you go and read a book, that guy doesn't mean that by munkar. There's really little practical application to understanding the story of hadith in that sense. Yeah. So you always have to know what a certain person means by a term because they don't follow these books that are going to come off. They didn't know were going to centuries after they died. And so I think that approach also is very common sense.",
      "that so those two i think there's two perspectives really it's quite interesting that uh i think and this is maybe why i was so you know taken by your work especially when i read um misquoting muhammad um and and your fascination with shawhaliullah and our own teacher the late manatara we sadly lost malagrant in jannah he was also",
      "Iqtul Jee'd, Hujjatullah al-Balighah was actually one of the works in the final year. It was studied in the Final Year once upon a time and Al Insaf as well but it is more of the accomplishments in the revival of Hadith and his approach that really stood out and its quite evident in your works as well and SubhanAllah for us it's like we have a rock star in the field of academia",
      "academia who's representing the tradition. I think that's how many of us felt. Of course, I can't speak for everyone. That's at least how I felt. Alhamdulillah, when I met you it was like wow! Not only is he a rock star in terms of his... Subhanallah, I know you were talking about that. Yeah, I mean, I think yeah, I was really sad to hear about Marlana Taha Kiran's passing",
      "I was really, I met him, I think in Cape town and. I thought he was a really interesting person. He was very open-minded. He's very conservative but also very open minded which I thought was an impressive disposition to have.",
      "I've tried, I think maybe if I've attributed anything it's to just sort of show that you can be a Muslim who is really proud of their tradition and be an academic in the West. I'm not sure that's a big accomplishment but I mean I don't see those things as intention. I mean, I see the Islamic tradition as a tradition of academic excellence with the same thing",
      "supposed to be pursuing as a professor or as a writer, researcher. And I don't see these things in any way in conflict at all. So I think that trying to reveal the idea that these are supposed to being complicated and revealed it has been one of my main objectives. Of course there's disagreements or incompatibilities",
      "abilities uh those are not inherent in those two kind of traditions right so if you say well you know you have to be secular to be an academic i mean i don't know who said that i mean why is that the case i mean it is a perception yeah no that's definitely a perception i think also in the past um you know that uh that dichotomy of secular and sacred always plays out",
      "honest about it. It does play out there because this is historical baggage, not to blame the students or to blame structures but I think that's something that needs to be looked at and ameliorated. And again, I think these types of works, these type of engagements finding common ground between scholars like yourself, scholars within traditional settings sharing platforms speaking engaging working on shared projects those type of engagement definitely help and I think it breaks that perception.",
      "that perception um absolutely but how do you do it uh dr brown like seriously we were just discussing this before we started and we said you know what this man mashallah is producing like really amazing works and yet you know you're active in facebook whenever we hear when if we hear from you you always commenting about some movie or something of the sort",
      "to accomplish what you're doing. This is no ordinary feat, this is your latest, or rather your largest large publication Slavery and Islam I haven't read the entire book yet but mashaAllah the way you tackled this topic it was a brave step. Even for me this was interesting because I remember at the madrasa when I think it was the fifth year this topic came up in one of the classes we were discussing maqasid",
      "something that a lot of the students were i wouldn't say battling with but they were trying to understand in a bit more detail and then a week later uh you know i just saw a message coming out that you'll be pursuing a book on on on the subject so it's yeah it's really interesting how these things sort of spur yeah do you do that though i think that um well one way i was able to i think do what would do a lot produce a lot",
      "married till I was 32. Take note all the students out there. Yeah, I lived a hermetic existence for a long time. I would travel a lot to do research, to meet people but I just read and read and red and read, and then just researched and researched and learned and studied and stuff for a",
      "um maybe when other people would be uh busy with other things you know and i was just like obsessed and i didn't i just did nothing but read and read and study and listen and listen for years and years and so i think that's it. When I started to write stuff, I had a lot of kind of research to draw on and then the second thing was you know to to know Muslim scholars who",
      "who I could ask for help on things, who were able to direct me to sources that I wouldn't know about or I wouldn' have thought of consulting. People like you, people like you guys. So that was a big thing. A lot of what I've done is really just to take work of Muslim scholars and translate it, not literally translate it but kind of translate it",
      "it conceptually or kind of shift its presentation to, you know, a kind of English language, kind of secular facing medium. So those are two ways and again I think this is, you people have a negative view of Muslim scholars and they're all stupid and backward and stuff and that's just a very unfortunate view and I think that people",
      "who have that view, maybe they haven't really met enough impressive Muslim scholars. And I think when you do or when you meet some and then you read books of others, you're just kind of blown away. To this day, I don't think there's a day that goes by where I don' t believe what these people do. I mean, sort of... You know, I have internet",
      "internet and word processing and search engines and all the indices we have. And, and just like keeping up with let's say the books that, that had be a sighting or even HUD your site. I mean, you know, you're, you, you are, you have all these tools and you're just using them to kind of keep up with what this other guy was doing who didn't have any of these tools, you",
      "massive multi-volume books that he wrote let alone you know, you could so I think that that's You know what? My point is that there's people, you know I don't think there's necessary people like even Hajar today. I mean There's very rarely other people like that someone like how 30 was a lot of the Omari brothers were like that But you know you there are there are people like today I mean there are they're certainly one or two right and if you can meet those people and learn from them",
      "and learn from them, and then meet their students and learn form their students. And have those people there to help you when you have a question, then you're going to be... You know, you're gonna have an amazing guide through the things that you want to study. For me it's always... There are always questions I wanna answer. They're not just sort of... I'm not trying to act like my questions are somehow important but I mean the questions I've found over the years",
      "years are usually questions other people have you know that they're useful so you know like one uh uh one set of articles i did was sort of on like metin criticism and how you like how you can show that the early muslim scholars are doing metin",
      "get over the problem of subjectivity with met and criticism. I mean, I don't think there is but I also don't that's necessarily a problem. That's not an impediment. It's just something to keep in mind. Another question I had was Muslims have been all this time authenticating material but they also or at least some Muslims use material that they know is not authentic so why is that? So those are questions",
      "those are the questions I had. You know, questions about miracles like you know Muslims are supposed to believe in miracles of saints what does that mean? Does that mean have Muslims always agreed on that? I mean I'm not even talking about bringing some kind of insane left-field progressive view or something. I'm saying just within the Sunni tradition what have been the views on this and you see that when Muslim scholars differ on these topics",
      "differ on these topics, their disagreements are really, not only they're very sensibly grounded disagreement but there the same disagreements that people would bring up today. If you believe in miracles of saints and if miracle of saints keep happening then eventually miracles lose their meaning, lose their importance or people will",
      "will end up kind of harming their relationships. They'll say like, well I'm gonna this miracle happen and so I'm going to leave my wife and go off and wander around in the wilderness or something. Muslim scholars are just like a social cost to these things. So I mean I think that there's a when you explore these things you realize that we tend to look back at these Muslim scholars quote unquote and say these guys",
      "really they never really had what it they don't they don' t have what it takes and they never had what to address modern problems like they're always kind of lacking that capacity. And I think that you find out what i find over and over again is quite the opposite, I feel like they are very aware of because a lot of these problems are perennial problems we think that there are new problems with their perennial",
      "those are the same disagreements we have today, right? So you find that there's not really an objection you can bring up today or some kind of concern you can get today that some Muslim scholar in the past, some prominent Muslim scholar hasn't already looked at. And he probably has the same point you have and was making that 1,200 years ago or something.",
      "know just in terms of other things like literally the questions that i have uh like something about slavery or um i mean yeah those are um you know these tend to be questions that a lot of muslims have and that's really like the misquoting muhammad book came out of that of trying sort of going giving lectures and talks at mosques and islamic centers and then you know you just hear the same questions over and over again and he realized that someone needs to",
      "you know a lot of that those articles and essays are all on this precisely these topics you know hudud apostasy um you know the quran and sunnah addressing men and women um and so uh that's really like um you i think those books are here to provide i hope very thorough and scholarly but also accessible answers to these questions",
      "No, Mashallah. Job well done. Right, Doc? Yeah, yeah. Definitely. Dr. Brown, what I wanted to ask, obviously many Muslim students, academics know that your PhD was on the canonization of Bukhari and Muslim but what was your initial study years in terms of your BA? Did you explore languages or did you immediately go into Islamic studies? What was your foundational years like?",
      "When I was undergraduate, I was originally, I think, a Russian major before I was Muslim. And then when I became Muslim, I just got interested in everything. I wanted to take any class that had anything to do with Islam or some world or Arabic. So I started to do that. And a lot of the classes were history, literature, things like that.",
      "But I took anything I could and I just really got it. Again, I was trying to answer questions that I had. How do I understand? How am I supposed to live as a Muslim in the United States? What does it mean to be Muslim in a place that's so different from where Muslims began? And in a lot of ways, that's the big question that everybody has.",
      "United States is not like being Muslim in a predominantly Muslim country. It's quite different, the dynamic is different. Yeah I mean in some ways I think you're really lucky in place like South Africa because you have both very strong Muslim community but also diverse larger society to be part of so I think that's a good comment",
      "good combination. In the US, it's you know, most of the community is obviously a lot younger and less established and has spent the last 20 years as the object of immense scrutiny from the government and constant attack from kind of conservative groups, constant attack",
      "uh, toll on Muslims in this country, unfortunately. Uh, but, uh, yeah, so I think I studied that a lot was like history and with that really was kind of intellectual history, which is really sort of studying Islamic thought. Um, and then I went to Cairo for a year and I studied Arabic and I did some, uh sitting in on like traditional study circles,",
      "at the beginning to do that. But I met a lot of people where later on, I would go and study with them. But then I went to grad school and it's funny, I think if I could go back, I have spent a lot more time studying in like a Muslim country and traditional studies. I did a good amount of that but it was never like a systematic study. So more informal?",
      "informal well yeah i was i mean i would say informalism i don't think you meant mean that is an insulting way but i think like informal if you're doing one-on-one studies with somebody that's informal but it's also a hell of a lot more effective than sitting in class with like 30 other people who are you know passing notes to each other and throwing paper or something so i mean",
      "It's just kind of A to Z study, course of studies. Like all these different subjects. So I mean, to this day, people will ask me like how do I do this? And I'll be like, I don't know. How do I lead the funeral prayer? Like I don' t know. I never learned about my religion. Islamic studies, Islamic sciences is a way to actually live my life. It was more intellectual topics.",
      "topics. Right, interesting. So in terms of your traditional studies, Doc was asking about your academic studies but in terms if you're traditional studies what is the most impactful or who was the most impact for teacher and or what is most impactful reading that really affected and impacted you in terms as to where you thought when you mentioned some of the scholars but in term of your own teachers and books that you read with them? Was there anything that stands out?",
      "yeah um i mean i think that uh i mean it's kind of unfortunate because the people that i really benefited from i think you know i would no i disagree with them significantly on you know some political issues but i i still really still really really really respect them as scholars one of them",
      "you know one of them was is uh shaykh the egyptian scholar and you know i got to know him when he was still relatively not famous um in the early 2000s and i got a chance to study with him and read one full book with him which was by",
      "that he had commentary on. And yeah, I mean it wasn't you know the just like kind of being exposed to his way of thinking was really had a big impact on me. You know it just showed me how what it was like to be around a Muslim scholar who was really you know had the kind of gigahertz the kind",
      "say this is like an elitist way but what i mean is that he could have been anything in egypt, he could've been a neurosurgeon or whatever and he decided to become an alim. And then to have somebody who brought together hifdh and dhakah and ihatha and to see",
      "you realize like how in some ways, how impoverished one is if one just reads books because the books are not to be. They're not kind of guides, they're living lives or their sort of resources and you know, when you see someone using the tools and you're like, oh, that's like otherwise would be like, Oh I don't understand this thing at this part of the book says X and this part",
      "book says not x and that's a contradiction and look muslims contradict themselves and look at our heritage it all messed up is i mean you realize like that's not that's",
      "again by somebody, you know when you ask a question and you think you've got somebody and then they just sort of wipe the floor with you. And you're like oh wow. It's really humbling for me it was really humbing. Then some of his students especially there's a number of his student that I studied with that I really benefited from but the one I think that I ended up studying the most with personally and he really had a big influence on me was scholar named Osama",
      "uh he's only about a year older than me or so you're too older than but he was really i mean this guy was incredible i mean that's when you realize",
      "books and books. And just, and then just that's just like the data bank they're drawing on. And then they're also, you know, cognitively really capable and, and, you to sit and read with them and to hear them reply to questions is it's just kind of awe inspiring for me. And I think it would be for anybody. Like, I don't think I'm particularly, it's not like I'm insightful either insightful or kind of have low standards.",
      "standards. I was, I think anybody intelligent or not would be impressed with these, with this, with experience. So yeah, we read, I read a lot of books with him, but he would mostly sort of assign me books to read and then I would come back and talk to him about it and ask questions. So one thing I think that was like, I mean, I remember really being",
      "kind of learning a lot from his reading the whole Meezan al-A'tidal of Al Dahabi with him. The whole thing? Yeah, and then you know and then reading like the Muqaddimah of Sayyidina Muslam, reading Ilil As-Saghir of At-Tirmidhi, reading... I did that with you. Oh really yeah, I hope it was probably like it made some use. It's very good. And also reading like",
      "like the first quarter of the Sunan of Ad-Darami, which is if anyone hasn't read that I mean you're interested. It's really fascinating. Abu Abdur Rahman Abdullah bin Muhammad Ad-Dadimi died at 55-ish about 878 or 868",
      "He's from near Samarkand and he was kind of a scholar in the Shafi, not yet Shafii Medha but Shafie tradition. And his Sunan I think it's about quarter of the book is sort of like an usul of the Ahl al-Hadith. It's sort of an usual approach to interpretation",
      "and constructed out of a thought of the companion, you know, the prophet, it says on the companions, the successors that sort of the first two or three generations. And it's really amazing. And sort of to read that with him was I mean, so I think that these kind of those experiences were formative for me. Nice. Yeah, I think those are interesting points. Something definitely",
      "many of us experience as well with someone like mononauta i remember i mean i came from the medical field i studied medicine first and so when i was in med school you know you sort of had this grand picture of a professor when they present you know on the ward rounds and that's something that you aspire to and you're really impressed with their with their breath of knowledge in terms of how they apply clinical medicine and studies and theory and so forth but then you know when you meet people uh as you mentioned uh like sheikh ali jumma and so",
      "you really get affected and influenced in terms of how scholars of the past, as you mentioned as well, scholars today actually still hold that legacy up. I remember when I met Mulla Lattar for the first time, I was just blown away in terms his breath. Like you really appreciate this concept of when they say someone's an ocean of knowledge like he is a bahr. It's an idiom used in English as well but I really appreciated that within Islamic studies",
      "is uh domain when i met someone like monotaha and i think it gives confidence to muslims you know just to to know that there is a tradition a lot of people speak about reformation and i",
      "tradition and the tools and instruments so i found that really uh you know influencing on me personally absolutely all right hang on hey guys i gotta run grab my power cord because i okay my computer's gonna die i'll be back in one second or whatever so so i actually have a secret writer we started the isn't academy um podcast",
      "delve into what an isnad is or speak about it because I was kind of saving that for the day that we got Dr. Jonathan Brown on so that he could explain it because i felt that you know, it's such a central concept in our tradition like from the tabi'ain al-isnadu min haddeen right and and it's so central that every single science that we have",
      "you name it, every science in the traditional world. You don't just pick up the book and read it. You get to isnad and that's essentially what connects you to this legacy. And you can see the impact that it has I mean, people say oh Dr Brown, a American scholar but he is connected to scholars who essentially even attaches himself too as part of this tradition",
      "like what sets it apart um so now that he's back we can stop speaking about him dr i was just saying that we started this channel right um uh we said we were not going to actually delve into the c this concept of isnad and i know many people were thinking is not academy like what's this about but uh i was telling doctor batalia that it's such a central concept",
      "science comes through this isnad. And I remember when I read it from your book and hadith, I just felt that it was so beautifully explained that is not just this chain of verification, a chain that you can verify authenticity with but it has so much more than that. Would you care to share your thoughts on isnad? Let's talk isnad with Dr Jonathan Brown. Bismillah.",
      "I mean, I guess, you know, in one perspective it's just very obvious and I think that we ourselves have a lot of benefit by not seeing. So when he talks about knowledge right? I mean you either... And this is kind of again,",
      "didn't say he came up with. He's just kind of giving you a summary of how Muslims talk about, not just how Muslims but how like Aristotle or St. Augustine would talk about the acquisition of knowledge. But here I mean knowledge literally just perception and idrakh of the world around you. So either you get things through perception or for reasons which are very few. Sense perception obviously is a lot. For anything you haven't experienced",
      "an experience you get through it's not like whether it's someone telling you something or it's something you read or it say video you watch right so everything getting by some kind of transmission that you anything you have an experiences comes by transmission. So in one sense, to think about that and to think",
      "are perceiving from outside your own experience you have to be critical of that right um or you're not critical but like you then just be honest about that right so like when i when i um you know when i look on like the the weather forecast and it says you know it's going to be cloudy today or something like",
      "you know, when I hear that my son's soccer practice is going to get moved to some other time. Like, I don't want to be like, who's telling me this? So much of our lives we just – you know we kind of trust things because we are used to them or it's not that important if we're being misled that we don't necessarily have to do it. It's not going to cost us that much but then when things are important",
      "of effort to verify uh information so that's one sense like the thinking about isn't as like what we learn or are the way that we perceive the world around us is i think very important because that's how muslim scholars thought about it right they thought about um anything you don't anything that you can't pers experience yourself or grasp through principles of reason",
      "And then you should be aware of what that chain is and what its potential risks are. The second thing is, you know, that our traditions of knowledge to this day are still isnad based even in the West. Right? So I mean there's when you go to like, you could buy my book on Hadith and just read my book",
      "And that's like pretty much anything I'm going to, I mean my classes, like I might give examples that are not in the book but like you know everything iIm gonna tell you is pretty much in the same thing. I've written so many books now people could just read my books or you know... But why do you go to class? To be with a teacher because you interact with them they correct you and ask them to specify right",
      "like they're teaching you how to think critically. Like one of my students asked me yesterday from one of classes, what am I supposed to learn in this class? And I said actually for this class, I don't really care if you've learned anything because this class is not really about you learning material it's about you, learning how to thing critically read critically speak articulately right. And so that's what you get from being around people who are more knowledgeable than you and more capable than you or older with more experience than you.",
      "same tradition in our, uh, in, in any kind of place of education, any kind traditional education or practice where if they're like medicine or me now how do you learn how to like cut a liver to transfer a liver? I mean, you could read books on it but you got a basically someone who's done that a lot. It's going to teach you how to do it. Um so that the other thing and then finally the last thing is just",
      "you know, the idea of connection to the past, the ideas a lot reliance on the past. The idea of being both an inheritor and it kind of junior inheritor of something that's bigger than you and greater than you from people that were better than you in greater than",
      "so that you are now the face, you are not the latest edge of this, the leading edge of it. This tradition as it moves into the present and future and then you have to step, you have fill those shoes even though you might not be as capable as you'd like to be, you've got to fill those shoe. That's a big responsibility. It's not your shoe size. Yeah, I think that's really important and I think",
      "you know i i yeah i think that's that's very important awesome you know where this is leading today we're going to culminate into getting that isn't from uh you know what i found interesting really in these uh in in these recent times of covert 19. is the application of hadith principles and we actually got a comment just a moment ago in fact we should actually look at the comments uh i think it's exactly what you want to say i'm just reading there um yeah so basically that as",
      "that as Tauhidah Isaac says, even during the whole experience of COVID-19, isn't it has been essentially has been essential but so easily discarded. That's really just what I wanted to say as well in terms of the practical utility of hadith principles and the value of isnad with all this mass information not really being verified from sources particularly on WhatsApp emails people are more confused than ever",
      "and the value of what they're reading. And especially when it comes to, you know, something so serious as COVID-19 where so many people have passed away, so many become sick, have been impaired. It's important that we at least are able to draw on our tradition. Yes I mean it's not hadith proper in a sense of practicing the principles but it's something that we could translate into our general daily activities and our daily areas. I don't know what your thoughts on that Dr Brown with regards to the situation in the US?",
      "the u.s um but yeah that's what we've been experiencing here in south africa a lot of criticism on misinformation and fake news yeah i mean definitely i mean first of all the idea that you you know you verify information uh you verify it by getting corroboration you verify",
      "of providing information, right? So it doesn't matter if I think Maulana Irshad is a nice guy or not. That just doesn't matters. What matters is have I consistently gotten reliable information from Maulna Irshada, right, or does it matter that Maulnana Irshaad is Hanafi or Shafi or Shiite or Sunni, right. Like the issue is his performance.",
      "Trusting people's claims is just never a good idea in the sense that so, you know, Milani or Shag come and say like, oh, you I heard from this guy who I really trust this thing. And that guy's full of it. Like, you don't get information just because somebody told me something and he says the guy's reliable. Which guy? Who is this person? Really go and check. Did that person really say this?",
      "Because Mir Shad misunderstood the person. I always remember this example in Al-Kindi's Tariq al-Qudah that I think it's Bakar bin Qutayba, the Hanafi chief judge of Cairo in the time of Imam al-Shafi'i",
      "He wants to rebut Imam Shafi's, some of his opinions. But he doesn't just do that. He goes and he sends two like his reliable secretaries to go and attend I think al-Muzini's class. And he says did Al-Muzzini, did Shafii actually say this? And they listened to the whole book and then they checked. Did he say this thing? Yes, he said this. Then he comes, he gets a report back and then he rebuts the opinions.",
      "opinions, right? He doesn't just say like, I heard Shafi says this and oh my God, he starts typing about because maybe that's not what Shafie said. Maybe he never said that. Maybe somebody misunderstood him, right. So how much of our reaction to each other or reaction to information or reaction is based on this kind of off the cuff unverified. And that's",
      "the way that errors come into reasoning and to chains of transmission. And this is not just, I mean we're talking about hadith but this is like in any... What I just gave you as an example from law, whether it's law or theology or sufism anything, the methodology of the isnad permeates all Islamic sciences except right? It doesn't... I remember there was this",
      "So whatever is, it's proof is inside it. You don't need to know, like if someone says two plus two is four you don't even be like who said that? Like that person reliable? Where did you get that information?",
      "or kind of critical point, right? So if someone says like you know, like I'm trying to think of something from like COVID-19 or something. Like, you know if You know, if you're immune someone says, like if you are immune compromised it's more dangerous to get this disease.",
      "disease yeah like okay it doesn't really like that just that's a basic kind of almost rational principle if you lack the resistance of a regular person to x then you are going to be more vulnerable to x than regular so um so that kind of thing is but then you know you also have to be very careful about when you like where",
      "I am really nervous about COVID-19, so I'm going to wipe my groceries with Blythol wipes or something. And then because you're thinking about kind of like you're getting a cold or something but then you don't... You're thinking this is reasonable and maybe it's a good precaution when you don t have access information yet, but then we find out actually this is transmitted through inhalation",
      "something you get like a cold where you're going to touch something and then put, touch your eye or something like that. Right? Like, so it's, I, you know, sometimes we think that some, that our conclusion we come to is, uh, is reasonable. Whereas in fact, we don't understand that it's actually not accessible to like first principles of reason that it actually specialized subject of study that, so for example, and again, but this would be like, um, that, uh",
      "you know, improving healthcare reduces population growth. They're like, wait a second, what do you mean? You have bad health care and more people die that means there's less people. Okay but if you look just sort of over time how this actually functions in society if you increase healthcare people have less babies. Okay I don't know why it is, it's just something like the specialized data people have observed who study at one area",
      "and so you know a lot of times we get mixed up between um you know what's like cool in the sense of uh or uh like first principles of reason yeah versus what's actually um has come through another right another so if you another end uh tajruba so you have to have investigation and then empirical study",
      "empirical study before you can say that you can like rationally grasp certain things. So I think, look, we are failure to kind of appreciate these categories and of course then like it doesn't matter who says certain things like, you know, tell me though, how are you going to listen to that point? That guy's a bad person or that guy is a Republican or Democrat. It doesn't even matter when you don't listen to people because",
      "because you don't agree with other things they say, then that's your fundamentally misunderstanding how knowledge and truth work. We could do an entire podcast just on that last point. It's such a huge thing these days. I mean, with cancel culture, sort of flowing over into the traditional circles, all of a sudden there is this scholar who said one thing somewhere, you're willing to write off every single thing he has ever written because of that one statement that he said. Look, I've got one question from Karim",
      "Qari Malna Salim Gaby is one of the top scholars of Kira'a in South Africa and he said I need to ask this question so in honor of one of my teachers, one of our teachers actually Malna Salaam Gaby wants to know what's your advice to a student who you know wants to further their studies either they're just beginning as a student of deen you know studying Islam in traditional seminaries etc. And they want to go further do you advise them",
      "to enter into academic studies in formal universities? And how should they approach that if you do? Well, I think it depends one where you are and what you want to do with it. I think like in a place let's say you're in South Africa, I'm not sure who teaches in universities there but I mean it kind of depends right so if you",
      "general i would say be very careful of academia because um you know i might not see any clash between you know being a muslim in the islamic tradition and being an academic but most people most people do and those people are not fans of the muslim part of that right so in a lot of ways uh and by the way like people",
      "but I think, I imagine he would agree with me. You know, I think one of the reasons they kind of got turned off by aspects of academia in the West is that they saw that a lot of Islamic studies or discussions about Islam in the academy are essentially political projects, that there are these created to sort of just suck in Muslims and just crush them",
      "crush them spiritually, and then also kind of neuter them politically in a lot of ways. So I think that this... Sorry, I think I tell Muslims they should not take classes on Islam in universities because the person who's been selected to teach for you is... And it's not like there's some conspiracy. There's not some committee of people",
      "People were like, I'm not saying that. It's just the way that academia works. So in the United States, let's say – I don't know how things are in South Africa, but in the U.S., you have – okay, Muslims are a problem because this is how they're seen by the mainstream. They're a problem",
      "gender and they don't conform to our culture right so the organs of that society, the infrastructure of that is going to work to break those things down. Right? So if you like you're gonna actually I full people who are generally progressive liberal on feasts right and they are going to perpetuate those views",
      "on their students. Like that's just the way and who's going to get the job? Who's going",
      "the power elite in those societies wants, right? And so they want liberal progressive depoliticized unsure understandings of religion. That's what they want, right. They and so that's what though, and you can see this if you read the 2007 building moderate Muslim networks report that was produced by the Rand corporation,",
      "says we should go and promote like liberal progressive Muslims and Sufis and uh you know Gulenists and stuff like that that's what it literally says this stuff you know and so it's not some kind of conspiracy how is how a society's functioned so I think that universities are organs in that system and that doesn't I love universities I never left university I this is not a criticism this is just a sense of the you need to know",
      "university, go to university. Is that really going to benefit? Things that you're going to be kind of put into a meat grinder over now, it depends like if you I if you go to if you can if you study with people who are not like that right so if someone can say oh I want to study with Jonathan Brown well i'm not gonna be like that you know i'm",
      "treatment. And, you know, it doesn't mean that I'm not going to try my best to make you a good scholar. I am. But it just means that the environment is very different. And so I think that it depends who you have the opportunity to study with. And I would say that you should not whatever you do, do not go do not study Islam or anything about religion or philosophy, anything about kind of morality or knowledge.",
      "or knowledge without this very strong traditional grounding. You really have to know your stuff, or you're going to get chewed up. And I've seen this happen more times than I can count. And now, I mean, I look at the kind of Muslims that I went into grad school in the same cohort, not just at my university, but kind of across",
      "over the past 20 years. And I mean, it's been like you can see a few programs where you have professors who have more kind of integrity as Muslims. They're producing, I think really good Muslim scholars and good scholar period but a lot of the program they just producing essentially not just people who are completely lost themselves to doubt",
      "committed to propagating that and sucking other people into that as well. That's very disturbing and sad. Yeah, it's sad for you and we're not like that. Absolutely. I think this is a beautiful perspective and I think many of our viewers who inform me that they are waiting eagerly for this podcast, they'll appreciate that advice. And also many students currently and people who intend on pursuing the study",
      "pursuing the study of Islam. It's a big question because, I mean, there are real benefits to taking your studies further at university for whatever reason but these are the concerns that they have. Dr Brown as we proceed to the end, I know we've had you on here for about an hour now how do you feel about that request? I don't know if you can give... You can read in a snad I guess",
      "ijaza over podcasts i don't know i mean i'm sure i know people have written books on or written stuff on this if i were we've done my friend probably know the answer to this i mean I'm sure that people have done effect was on this topic uh yeah i mean it's been so long since i uh yeah",
      "I mean, it's not going to be like an award-winning book or anything. But it would be... And I have friends that have shorter isnads than I do. But you know, I try my best. So I understand. What do you want? You just want me to read an isnad for you? Is that the...? Yeah, I think the one in particular we were speaking about was the Hadith al-Musalsalb al-Awwaliya. If possible. We don't really put you on the spot and pressure you into that.",
      "today? I mean, you know, I'm not going to read it to you because I haven't. I'm confident that I wouldn't make a mistake and there's no reason to make stupid mistakes. But yeah, it's not a short snad but it's a nice one. There are other ones. Let me see if I can find some other ones maybe once again",
      "Yeah. Oops. This is from Bukhari, which is pretty short.",
      "which is a pretty short, shortest nod. Okay I'll do two and then you can... Bismillah. I can just do two, and then again it's sort of cheap to read but otherwise",
      "Otherwise, it's not going to be accurate. I don't feel comfortable.",
      "The famous Hadith scholar of the Hijaz, but originally from Sindh.",
      "to the hadila in zabeed and yemen",
      "حدثنا أبو الخير عمر بن عموس الرشيدي وعول الحديث سمعته من قال حدّثنا الشيخ الإسلام زارية بن محمد الأنصاري الشافعي وعوالحديث السمعتهم من",
      "محمد بن محمش الزيادة وعوى الحديث سمعت من قال حداثنا الإمام أبو حامد أحمد ابن محمود ابن يحيى ابن بلال البزاز وهو عوى",
      "سمعته من قال حدثنا أمير المؤمنين في الحديث سفيان بن عيينة وهو أول حديث وإلى السفيان تنتهي الأولية على هذا الملوال قال حذّثنا عمر بن دينار عن أبي قبوس مولى سيدنا عبد الله بن عمر",
      "قال رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم",
      "And then the second hadith is The first hadith from Sahih al-Bukhari",
      "أخبرنا عبد الحكيم الجيوري أخبارني نذير الحسين قال أخ برن الشاه محمد بن إصحاق الشهوة محمود بن إسحاقة دهلوي أخبة شاء عبدالعزيز بن ولي الله الدهلوية قال أثبتنا والدي سماع إلى كتاب الحج مع اكمال اكمل باقياته على خلفائه. أخضرنا ابو الطاهر الكوراني",
      "That is was illiterate but who remembered hearing",
      "hearing Sayyid Bukhari when he was a child in Damascus and then going out afterwards and playing in the canal with his friends, who is later found to be the last surviving person from those Hadith sessions.",
      "سفيان قال حدثنا يحيى بن السعيد الأنصاري قال أخبرني محمد بن إبراهيم التيمي أنه قال سمعت القمة بن وقاس يقول سمعة عمر بن الخطاب على المنبر قال سماعت رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم يقول إنما العمال بالنيات وإنما لكل امرئ ما نوى فمن كانت هجرته إلى الدنيا",
      "Thank you very much for your time. All of us and we look forward to having you in South Africa again really soon. I know you love South Africa",
      "i know you love south africa and you love the people of south afrika so we really really need to get to your please yeah i really want to come uh you know whenever you uh you or whoever can manage to finagle an invitation for me this time i want to try and bring my family on it so you know bring my kids over you'll get that sorted no i mean not asked i'm not asking anyone",
      "you guys can chip away at the cost i'd appreciate it um we'll make a plan just uh just a sideline question your favorite espionage movies now the reason why i asked this is that i had to debate today with a couple of friends after juma regarding the born trilogy or the set of the bone movies",
      "you know what would probably uh take the the top few places like the best foreign movie or the best just in terms of just in term of these espionage spy movies like what could you write uh like as your personal preference obviously uh do you enjoy it yeah it was funny actually i i the boring movies you know the one i really liked was the the born legacy the one that doesn't have matt damon",
      "Bourne Legacy with Jeremy Renner. I thought that was really good. It's funny because it was a bizarre circumstance, but I ended up talking to the director of some of the other Bourne movies. This is very bizarre. And I said, you know, I just want you to know that I like this other one the most. And he said, well, that's the one I like the least. I was like, oh, okay, well. Anyway, then I really liked Spy Game",
      "spy game with Brad Pitt and Robert Redford. That was very good. It came out not long after 9-11, so it's an interesting kind of document of almost pre-9-11 film on espionage. I liked the spy game. I mean, I like all the James Bond movies obviously.",
      "I liked my favorite James Bond is either Timothy Dalton or George Lazenby. I did not expect Timothy Dalten. Yeah, I did so much passion. You know, he's got a really good day. I like that. I think the Living Daylights is my favorite one. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Although Golden Eyes, close second. I would have gone for Pierce Brosnan. Yeah yeah. I enjoyed watching Roger Moore.",
      "and they're all good this is not to knock any other one but i just think simony dalton brought a kind of level of passion to the role that i hadn't seen uh and then you know which movie he used uh not their mission impossible fair day the mission yeah i like jim paul i like them well i like commission probably",
      "last one or two didn't blow me away. I liked the one with Philip Seymour Hoffman. Yeah, of course Mission Impossible is great. I think that's a good summary.",
      "I don't know how many... When I started writing books like you do, then I'll start watching movies like you. One of the ways... I almost never watch movies on television. Especially before COVID-19, I traveled a lot. So I would watch movies in the airplane. That's what I'd do as well. Just catch up with everything. What else can you do?",
      "Ever since I had kids and maybe even since I got married, my wife was trying to call me actually right now. I probably have to go in a second because... Oh yeah, no, I mean we've kicked you away. But thanks for that. We really, really are looking forward to having you in South Africa. Yeah, well, I would love to get you. You know what? Invite me. Sorry, I'm on the point. Invite my wife because she can also give talks on lots of interesting stuff.",
      "Yeah. And we would love to come as a family. Well, yeah, I will say something about speak to one of my good family friends, Professor Yasin Mohammed. I think he's with your team as well. Yeah. A few of our local our local academic centers that are really an academy. We'll work on something as soon as COVID allows inshallah. We all definitely think it's allowed now. I mean, I think it basically. Yeah, yeah. I know everything is allowed now sort of like it's kind of the",
      "It's kind of the, it's sort of a hard situation because you're like, I go to Germany in a month or two and I'm like, should I just go to German? Actually. I, it was fine. I went to Turkey in the summer and it was a lot less stressful than thought, but it was also kind of before that Delta stuff happened. So now am I supposed to, should i do this or not? I don't know. I dunno what they will hopefully we'll all know what to do in due time. And uh, you covered Dr. Brown because you know, doctor",
      "is actually a medical doctor we'll sort you out inshallah yeah but i think it's it's a wise decision just to see how things go over the next couple of months see how thing span out that's i mean it's novel virus we don't know how the vaccines obviously in a sense with regards to long-term immunity so i think its worthwhile just to say how things pan up but insha'Allah in the near future will definitely work on something the niyaa there and himma there so absolutely and we need to hear that jazza in person as well inshAllah",
      "town eh just to oh yeah it's a beautiful place and the food the food bunny chow all that stuff there was some place that had prawns no you know that's in general i think that wasn't joe but yeah",
      "There was this place in Alto in Johannesburg, but I remember this coffee shop called Motherland Coffee. And it had a drink called the Dictator. Make the day obey you. If any of you go to that coffee shop, take a picture of that drink on the menu. I somehow just stupidly didn't take a photo. The Dictater, make the day over.",
      "hope to have you on soon again thank you so much for your time okay stay safe uh shukran everyone for joining us you know it's quite late we all have other things to do tomorrow inshallah but thank you and shukr to dr yusuf batal for joining me as a co-host on this podcast and then i said and you're welcome anytime inshAllah until next time"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Justice _ Islamic Law_ Maz_tdp-sR76-ps&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748672570.opus",
    "text": [
      "lecture we're basically going to get a taster of his latest research the lecture is entitled justice and Islamic law mazalem courts and legal reform with that I ask you to welcome professor Jonathan Brown thanks this is my student Zanira from Qatar who's now in Oxford international travel and then former student Michael i recognize you before you recognized me sorry",
      "That's pretty good. From 2012, I recognize you. Okay, well first of all thanks very much. It's really...I mean look as you can imagine from recent news reading by the American reading public we're still highly anglophilic and so being invited back to the motherland is a big honor. I'm not going to lie. I wouldn't turn down the invitation. So thanks for inviting me and thanks for showing up. Can you all hear me? There's no microphone here",
      "Okay, well all right. I'll talk loud and you can hear me So as one of preface is by saying that you know everything I have ever researched or studied You know I sort had dual purposes in one sense I'm interested in kind of academic critical study of continuity and change in the Islamic tradition But I'm also Everything studies comes out of my own questions as a Muslim about you know Something that matters to me or that it's usually pressing question the Muslim community",
      "Muslim community. So that's certainly the case with this topic, and I want to sort of start out by just reminding you all it looks like a lot of your experts, you know, that Islam in the Muslim community is a community and religion of law not that Muslims are sort of obsessed with law and suing each other and things like that but that this is kind of an idiom of law right so it's a this is Islam is a lot more like Judaism than Christianity. I always say Islam is like Judaism take two bigger castes, bigger budget",
      "But the law is how you interact with God, right? One of the primary ways you interact With God and with each other is through a notion of law about duties and obligations and ritual practices And so what does the Dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam according to medieval jurists, the Abode of Islams is where the Sharia rules, right. It doesn't matter if it's a majority Muslim or not It's where the sharia rules and Muslims should live where they can practice the Shariah, where they Can practice their religion and What do you do to show you're a Muslim? When I meet Osama How do we know that we're both Muslims",
      "that we're both Muslims is when someone comes over and offers the beer at the pub, you say no thanks. And when it's time to pray eventually he and I will acknowledge that we have to pray. That's how we kind of identify as Muslim. So with a primacy of law here one of the most sensitive and agonizing questions for Muslims in the modern period has been this anxiety that God's law is not good enough, that the Sharia is not",
      "It's immoral, it's backward. And if you are, if it can be changed or if it should be changed that duty to change a reform actually undermines the entire notion that this religion is some kind of revealed wisdom that we're obliged to follow. You know, if God's law is really God's Law why would it need to be reformed? So this is, you know, If you study Islamic history or if you know Muslims or if your Muslim what I just said to you shouldn't be a big surprise. Hopefully I've expressed in a succinct and clear way",
      "clear way so I want to just kind of going off this idea you know is God's good at law good enough I want start with a story and it's uh it's recounted by the famous Ottoman jurists Mohammed Zahra kothari he died in 1952 in exile in Egypt he was the last last academic sheikh of the Ottoman Empire the Sheikh Darce so if you were to think about like you know the senior scholarly position the other empire",
      "scholar. I recommend reading anything by him if you want to learn anything about Islamic history. He tells a story, and he's complaining about the kind of legal reforms going on in Egypt, in Syria, in the Middle East, in 1920s and 30s and 40s, and especially, of course, his own home country which had then been... You know, Sharia law had been completely obliterated from the books of the Turkish Republic from their legal scene. And he tells a",
      "He died in 1174. The nobles and the scholars of Aleppo write to Nur ad-Din Zangi and say, Nur ad din Zangi, probably more politely than that. They say, Sultan Nur ad Din Zangi. There are a series of thefts here. There's bandits. People are being robbed in the streets. You need to come and really establish order here. We want you to chop off hands. We don't even care about due process. You",
      "good enough the sharia is not good enough you need to come and step in here and nuri zengi writes back and says if god had wanted me to do these things he would have made this part of his law god's law is sufficient so for kowthari at this time this is sort of a response to secularists and legal reformists are trying to say that the shariah is backward and insufficient he said no a real pious person like nuridin zanghi knows that god's laws enough now uh",
      "source a famous ottoman kind of literature scholar named kinazade ali chalabi who died in 1572 he wrote a famous book called akhlaq aloi which is a very typical persianates late sunni ethical treatise of ethics and he tells the story as well and it's a little bit less provocative",
      "zengi please come we need beer mcdary mcdotty siya sat some amount of siyasa and we'll talk about this word in a second and basically uh god's law is not sufficient you need to come here and he says the same response if god had wanted this be part of his religion he would have made it part of religion i'm not going to do anything beyond what this what the sharia asked me to do now the funny thing about this is that's",
      "which appears in Abu Sham al-Maqdasi who dies in the 1260s. His history of the two sultanates, so the Zengids and the Ayyubid sultanate. There you have the original story. And what happens is that ulema and nobles of Aleppo say there's a bunch of bandits and thieves going around causing trouble here in Aleppo. We want you to come and give nu'a siyasah, a type of siyasat, and we want you deal with issue of hiraba. Now actually they refer exactly to a verse in the Quran",
      "quran which says that those people who make a war on god and their prophet under and his prophet right their reward is that they will be executed and crucified and their hands and feet will be cut off in from opposite sides right so this is this is the aladdin those people",
      "violent robbery organized violent robbery so what they're actually saying they're not going they're Not Going One Inch or one centimeter beyond what the Quran says they're saying here's the quranic crime of haraba is occurring we would like you to come and deal with it we want no siyasa a type of siyassa which we'll talk about in a second and norian he's actually the he's wrong",
      "mandated god mandated here in the book of god says you have to go there and deal with these people harshly so these are my nobles of aleppo were doing exactly what a pious muslim should do which is they're turning to their political executive authority the guarantor of law and order and asking him to guarantee law and okay so what is this thing we talked about siyasa it's referred to in these stories",
      "executive authority of course if you know Arabic you know siyasa means politics it can mean policy in kind of classical Islamic law or pre-modern Islamic legal thoughts and political thought siyassa could mean a couple things it could mean almost like administrative law like it could be the siyassah of a dynasty that you know there's going to be this department for taxation this Department for foreign affairs and things like that all right you know this is going to",
      "military functions it can be Imperium in the sense that it's like literally the ruler's ability to give muscle to the law so somebody in the end is going to have to be there and say if it's been found that you owe x you know Osama owes someone else money somebody's gonna have to go to him and say trying to pay up right someone they're ultimately asked me some compelling Authority in the law and that that's ultimately provided by the guy who has or you know the guns are the storage of the bows and arrows or the thugs with the clubs and",
      "authority and punish people for not obeying that authority. And finally, sciatica can be thought of as what you might think is royal justice, the notion that the ruler is ultimate guarantor of justice in the realm. And this both comes from a kind of Near Eastern tradition of the Sassanid shah as the shadow of God on Earth or the Roman emperor is the ultimate guaranter of justice In the empire for citizens of Rome who can in the end theoretically ask for hearing before their Emperor right?",
      "the Arab tribal sheikh whose job it is to provide justice in a sense of resolution of conflicts for his tribe. So this is not something you see generally in the Near Eastern tradition, and it carries over strongly in the Islamic tradition where you have notions that they're not reliable hadiths but kind of made-up hadith that the sultan is the shadow of God on earth, and ultimately it's up to the sultans who the ruler to make sure that the law is applied. So these are all accurate notions of siyasa",
      "But siyasa is also very, it's a source of anxiety in the Islamic tradition, especially after the Mongol invasions. Because at that point, siyansa also becomes a doorway through which illegitimate non-Islamic foreign ideas of justice and rule can be sort of brought into the Islamic",
      "talk about siyasa and they'll say siyasi comes from the word yassa or mongol law which is actually not true but there is a thing that siyase is like this it's like this weird turco-mongol idea of justice. It's not the sharia, it's not Islamic. In that anxiety you see the same type of anxiety we see today when we talk about the kind of misuse of political authority by Muslim rulers which is that they are using",
      "or disguise what are their naked political ambitions, or agendas of various parties, or their own kind of venal interests or desires for power. So this is sort of one of the abiding anxieties around siyasa, that it's illegitimate, it's something from outside the sharia and it's used by corrupt powers to insert their own and justify their own wants. Okay so there were some areas where",
      "where siyasa was highly contested so i'm gonna this is actually not the way i would like to discuss this but it makes sense in the general flow of what i'm going to say i'm to start not with notions of siyasi that were totally accepted and legitimate but i'ma start with ones that were actually contested right and this is especially the case after the mongol invasions prior to the mongo invasives you don't really see the term siyase used in a very controversial",
      "executive authority you'd expect from any functioning state. Like, okay the streets of Baghdad camels are gonna walk on the right side of the road... Sorry I mean it would be interesting to find out if they were like British or American or be a... But look somebody's got to decide which side of their way the camels they're going to go on and that's good siesta otherwise you can have camel accidents. That's not contested but there's other things that are really contested as",
      "the mongol invasions when people like makrizi will talk about siyasa dalima and siyasi there's unjust siyassa and there is just siyass what is unjust yes unjust siyas is when the ruler is being excessive in their application of force when they're going and someone says there's oh there's been a theft of the in this house so the police come and they drag the people they think are guilty and they drive them into the street and they strip their clothes off and they start smacking",
      "applying your executive authority here. Yes, we want you to cut to the bottom of the crime but these people have rights. Just siyasa is the government using its muscle to do things like enforce law and order to make sure that someone who's been found to owe money actually pays up and things like that. Other ways in which siyasi was contested but eventually gained ground it was accepted",
      "law and legislation so one of the things you start seeing is post the 1200s and 1300s you might not know this but even in one Islamic school of law there's usually more than one opinion on something. So, the ruler might say okay let's say the Ottoman government would say listen there's two rulings in the Hanafi school of Law about whether or not a woman needs the permission of her male guardian to marry. Abu Hanifa says she doesn't need the permission his two senior students say",
      "the permission, the Ottoman government says we're going to pick the rule that says she does need permission and that's going to be the law of the land. So the ruler has the right to if you have several options in the medheb this is the official method of the Ottoman Empire I'm going to tell you which option to choose and the scholars by the time you get to the 1300s and 1400s even in a lot of times people think it's only the Hanafi school that says this but actually even in the other schools of law they'll say if the ruler tells you follow this certain rule in your school of law",
      "school of law, then you follow that ruler. Even though that might not be the main or most reliable opinion of that school. And by the time you get to the 19th century it goes even further than that. In fact you could find other examples earlier but really formally it's accepted in the 19-century that the ruler could pick and choose from different schools of law so going outside to when the Ottoman Family Law Act of 1917 is passed they take rules that are not only outside the Hanafi School of Law",
      "schools of law. They go to sort of early or pre-school of law formation rules. So this is all, by that time, uncontested siyasa right of the ruler for his role or the state's role in legislation. Another thing they could do is, and the Ottomans did this as well in the 1500s, is they introduced a totally new law, sort of administrative regulation where they'd say there's a 15 year statute of limitations for claims about income from a foundation or disputes over contracts",
      "the ruler or the state aggregates to its arrogates itself the right to make something not allowed that is actually allowed by god and the prophet this doesn't really show up on the radar screen until the 1700s late 1600s early 1700s around what issue coffee",
      "prohibit for yourself what God has made allowed. You do not have the right to make prohibited what God is allowed. So, what is restricting the permissible? It's not making it haram. It's simply saying it's administratively not allowed. It' s administratively, not allowed, okay? This becomes a really robustly discussed in the 19th and 20th century, early 20 centuries around two issues abolition of slavery and ideas about prohibition of polygamy.",
      "another area where siyasa really becomes very robust it's contested initially but eventually accepted uh now there's some areas where siya was always allowed never controversial and in fact might be the only game in town one of them is warfare if the ruler gets to decide you know how the army's organized what the army does what kind of troops you have right now there are certain restrictions like",
      "You shouldn't use fire on your enemy, right? So there are certain rules. But within these broad restrictions, the ruler can kind of do as they see fit. Other things like taxation. The ruler is also very important in what we would think of as public law, in the sense of public order or criminal law.",
      "or in Roman law, like a delect. So I have to compensate him for his injuries. So that's a private issue, private law issue. If I get in a fight with Osama and punch him in the face and really bloody him, again, I have compensated him for these injuries. But there is also a public element because I am disturbing the peace. We would think about it as an Anglo-Saxon tradition of disturbing the piece. Let's say I beat Osama within an inch of his life. Who is it who",
      "Who is it who actually facilitates this provision of justice or compensation? Or God forbid, let's say I kill Osama. Who is that who's going to bring the case to court so to speak? Or actually to court right in theory Osama's relatives do but let's see Osama doesn't have any relatives then the government does the ruler does because the Prophet says I am the guardian of the person who has no Guardian and",
      "When you see in the cases, in The Life of the Prophet for Injury and Murder that it's the prophet as the judge who controls the trials. And sometimes let's say no one is there to pay compensation money from someone who has been killed but you can't find who the murderer is. The prophet himself will pay the compensation money out of kind of public fist. So this is siyasa in a sense of criminal law both responsibility for public order also controlling",
      "controlling and facilitating the private claims and public claims. The final area in which siyasa was really uncontested is what I find fascinating, which is what's called the mazhalim court. Mazhalim is the Arabic term if you're with our Persianate brothers and sisters, you'd say mazalim or our Kairian brothers and sister at mazalam. Mazalim means grievances or wrongs. And the first instance we find of these",
      "we find of these in the Islamic tradition seems like maybe they emerged in the late Umayyad period, but we don't have any... The sources explaining this are all Abbasid-era sources. We don't know if they're just kind of back projecting some of these institutions. But definitely by the late 700s you have the existence of madhalim courts that are created and organized by the Abbaside caliphs. And what is a madhalin court? A madhali court is a court of grievance so if something wrong has happened",
      "go to the Madhulam court. And the Madhalam court is, in theory, held by the ruler because ultimately it's the ruler's responsibility to solve or to bring justice and provide justice for his subjects. Now what ends up happening is the ruler usually delegates this to some vizier or delegates it to a judge, a qadi, or whoever is in charge of course they're going to have qadis and muftis there and scholars to supervise things",
      "ruler who's going to provide, ultimately provide justice. So what kind of, what is the function of the Madhallam court? In one sense it's like an internal oversight for the government so if let's say I've appointed Osama my tax collector for the region around Basra and I start hearing rapport you know, Osama has been taking a lot of tax money. I saw him the other day he was being carried",
      "and you know had way too much, way too many pistachio nuts or whatever piece of what he had to show they were rich at the time. Say I'm okay I'm gonna launch an investigation on Osama find out what's going on here that could be done so internal self prompted not by complaints who either government's own or someone in the government's owned concern now if let's say Osama is the tax collector and his comment overtaxed my melon shop I can go because he's a government official and I can take this complaint to the Maddalam court. What's another way? Another thing it does",
      "essentially a court of appeals because who might be a government official who treats you unjustly? It could be a judge. So I've gone to the regular Qadi court, the normal fiqh is applied, right? Normal Islamic law is applied and I don't think I've gotten a fair judgment because I think this judge is being unjust so then I take it functions like an appeals court or finally it also functions as a criminal law court. Criminal law courts because",
      "like the instances in the lifetime of the prophet where a muslim is found murdered in khaybar which is a jewish town right the jewish population say we didn't do it the muslims say we don't do so who's going to pay for this person's blood who's gonna compensate his family who's to answer for the wrong done the prophet eventually pays himself he pays out of the public money",
      "injustice that have fallen through the cracks. And so, that's one of the things that the Maddalen Court does is it catches things that fall through the crack and why are there cracks that can be fallen through to begin with? This is where we get into this question of like why isn't God's law sufficient if God's Law is perfect why are their cracks? Why are instances of injustice happening? Some of these cracks exist because",
      "of law procedural law and substantive law derived by muslim scholars from the quran the precedent or the prophet there are practices early muslim community is a very concerned with protection of defendants so the default state of affairs is that people don't owe things to one another if i'm going to say osama needs to be punished because osama did something to me i have to provide evidence",
      "Otherwise, he would just go around saying stuff about other people all the time and collecting money or having them punished. So in order to move from the default state of affairs to a new state of Affairs, the plaintiff has to provide evidence. Now what that means is that if I'm let's say Osama really did attack me but he's just very cunning and made sure no one saw him and there was no cameras and like that right? I've still been wronged But now I have no route to justice because Osama as a defendant is justifiably protected by",
      "by, you know, I have to provide evidence if I'm going to infringe on his rights. Or another case in which the kind of rights of defendants are protected, judges, this is not always true in different schools of Islamic law, but in general, judges can't rule based on what they know. They have to rule by what's given as evidence in the court. So let's say Abdul Khaliq says, Osama roughed me up and robbed me in an alley in downtown Oxford the other day.",
      "other day. I don't have any witnesses, but I swear to God this happened. Yeah, there's no cameras surprisingly. But lo and behold, I was walking by the exact same alley and I saw it happen because I'm sadistic. I just watched. But I know you're telling the truth. I still can't rule against some of why? Because I have to go by what's based on evidence. Why would this be the case? This is moronic. Because imagine this.",
      "imagine this what happens if if i'm a judge who can rule by what i know i can just say i like those uh shoes eugene those are my shoes you took those shoes from me and i saw it happen i know you did it so that the judge could pursue his own ends or his own agenda using his claim of knowledge of the law do you want to protect people from corrupt judges okay",
      "So one way in which the Mizallim courts are more flexible and can pick up things that fall through these cracks is that the judge is allowed to act on their own knowledge. The second thing, the judge does not bound by their school of law. In general, and this is true throughout Islamic history although things start to get a little bit more flexible in the 1300s and 1400s than much more flexible",
      "they belong to. In fact, mostly they should rule by the main opinion of the school of law they belong unless the ruler has come and said take this other one or we've decided that we're going to take this another one for some public policy reason. The judge overseeing the madhalim court doesn't have to do that. The judges in the madhulam court can pick from any of these schools of law as long as there were within the outer bounds of the sharia so they can't go outside all the",
      "within that. So if you, I like the image of Mr. Potato Head. Do you guys have this in the UK? Mr. Potatohead? Maybe you're a little old for this. They have Mr.Potatohead and Toy Story? Okay so Mr. potato head is bucket of parts. So in theory a judge should only take pieces from their meth to make their Mr.potatohead. The Muthallam judge can go and say from other buckets apart to make like a composite Mr. potatohed that is going to give justice in this situation",
      "situation the madhulam judge based on that actually has more flexible in terms of what they can accept as evidence because some schools of law for example the hanafi school of law is much stricter about only accepting oral evidence as opposed to documentary evidence so even if i have a document in theory i have to present somebody who's present at the creation of that document or have a witness",
      "at this certain time other schools of law like the maliki school much more accepting of documentary evidence so you can accept evidence that you might not otherwise be able to accept if you belong to one of these more strict schools of love what you could think about the madallan courts is doing as shifting the burden of proof or stop i wouldn't say shifting the preference it shifts the preference from protection of the defendant to facilitation of the plaintiff getting justice",
      "And you could say, wait a second. Couldn't a plaintiff come to the Madhulam court? Let's say I want these shoes and I happen to have some documentary evidence and I happened to have, um, you know, the judge happens to be in cahoots with me. He also wants some of Virginia clothing we could go and, and you would be deprived of your rights. And that would be a correct, that would",
      "being wrongfully deprived of their rights, that could happen in this situation. But it's sort of like if you're... The idea is if a plaintiff has decided to go to the Madhulam Court then in theory their decision to take that initiative is going to suggest that they really have been denied justice right so there they've taken the time and energy to go into the Madhalim court and do this all right? It's interesting that Madhullam courts were criticized for meddling with",
      "for meddling with the Sharia, right? For being kind of attempts to usurp or to undermine or to question the provision of justice by God's law. There's a wonderful book by Christine Hayes called What's Divine About Divine Law. It looks at Jewish and Greek law. I really recommend this book. I think it came out in 2015. But to borrow her title, if you need to seal cracks, then what's divine about divine law? The way that Muslim scholars answered this",
      "The main text I've seen on this is from a fascinating text. Hopefully, I'm going to have done a critical edition of it and translation of it from Persian. It's by a scholar named Jalal ad-Din Davani. He's basically the last great Sunni scholar of Iran, especially southern Iran. He was from Shiraz, and he dies 1502 of the Common Era right before the Safavid takeover of southern Iran",
      "in some time in some senses he's taking some earlier treatises on madhulam courts like by the famous shafi jurist abu hassan mawardy who died 1058 but he's adding a lot of his own thoughts and a lot new material from his own time and he mounts a very vigorous defense of madhalim courts what he says is going back to the beginning of islam the duty of",
      "Jew or Muslim, man or woman, slave or free. They have certain rights. They had the right to physical inviolability. They can't be physically harmed without just cause. They've the right of property. They cannot be deprived their property without just because they have the right due process. They cant be deprived due process without just cost and then add other ones on to that some which only apply to Muslims, some which apply non-Muslims as well but those are three basic one. The ruler has to and the judge has to protect these and you go back to letters like the famous letter Omar Al Khattab writes to Abul Hasan al Ashri",
      "Hassan al-Ashri, which is found in the earliest place I've seen it, is the Adab al-Qadi by the Hanafi scholar Al-Khassaf in the 900s where he says God has protected the rights of the slaves through the bayinah. Bayinah is the requirement for evidence. The fact that you're required to give evidence to place a claim on somebody is to protect people's rights. Another great Hanafi",
      "of faith says the judge's job is to make sure that people get their rights, get their hakuk. So if it's the salt, the judge has job and ultimately assault under the ruler's job to make that the rights of the slaves of God are protected. You have to have some kind of provision whether or a forum to deal with instances in which someone has not received their rights in the regular court. You",
      "divani actually goes even further he says that if you say the madhalam court is wrong or haram that that's kufr that's unbelief this is my kind of guy i like to like this guy he's like you know let me make this very clear okay",
      "earlier on mawardi makes it clear the madhalim judge cannot go outside the bounds of the sharia so this is where for example the um i'm trying to think a good example oh so if i said osama you killed my brother so i'm gonna kill your uncle that cannot be accepted there's no and there's",
      "for a crime is the person who committed the crime there's no medheb that allows this right or if i in the case of ottoman um or the famous instance in which the tunisian president habib like drinks orange juice on tv during uh ramadan he says we are engaged in the jihad of modernization and then he says the two shaykh al-islams the hanafi and the maliki one will give",
      "next day on the newspaper that is not permissible to break your fast during ramadan unless the normal reason so there's certain you can't go outside the bounds of the sharia this madallam just cannot go outside but your job is as a medallion judge to get the moat to get justice and get what is usla what is best and most fitting in that situation using the kind of larger mr potato head bucket of parts that you've made out of all the different meth hebs",
      "All right. Now, what's very interesting is in the 1860s and 70s when the Ottoman Empire starts to go through a process of legal formalization and routinization which by the way they're not doing in a kind of pathetic attempt to imitate Europeans but they are doing really at the same time as this is being done in Western Europe",
      "engaging in like codification of law at the same time this is being done in England or in the United States, or in France right. So they see themselves as they're not engaging in a process of westernization, they're getting a process modernization of like you know creating more routine courts that are better organized taking advantage of new technologies of administration and communication so they create a new court system called the Nizamiya Court System",
      "the Sharia courts, right? What is one of the ways they justify this to kind of naysayers or doubters who are saying you're creating something outside the realm of the Shariah. You're creating new we never had before. Jebdet Pasha died in 1895, who oversees a lot of these legal reforms including the formation of the Nizamiya court, including the drafting and promulgation of Ottoman civil law called Majella. He goes and brings Devani's treatise, his Persian treatise",
      "this Persian treatise, he translates it into Turkish and he provides it to his opponents. He says look I'm not doing something new. This is essentially a modern day madhalam court so what ends up happening is whereas in the pre let's say pre 1700s or the pre-1800s in the Ottoman Empire the majority of legal issues contracts property family issues inheritance walks things like that",
      "things like that be handled by the qadi courts and certain issues like criminal law commercial some commercial issues dealing with foreign rules would be handed by the kind of political courts the political court column is getting expanded through this nizamiya system and the sharia courts are getting contracted to just deal with things like family law succession inheritance child custody right but what's happening is them",
      "sort of madhalim rubric is just being expanded to suck in material that otherwise it was being handled by the qadi courts but none of these institutions is illegitimate none of them are illegitimately at least technically but this brings us to our final problem excuses sometimes are hard to believe right so if somebody says",
      "from current in the United States. The United States just assassinated Qasem Soleimani in Iraq, right? On what basis? What was it called? UMDA, Uniform Military Declaration of Force, right. So after 9-11, the United states Congress said we give permission for the president to pursue the parties involved in 9- 11 and those people who facilitated them.",
      "stand, invade Iraq, fight the Shabab, go into the Sahel and apparently like vaporize some Iranian guy. Right? So as far as I know Iran was not responsible for 9-11. So the point is at certain points I can say that I'm using this originally legitimate rubric to engage in some kind of activity but a certain point you've sort of stretched the fabric way too thin and people aren't buying it anymore if you want to think about in terms of like statutory interpretation",
      "you've departed so far from any conceivable meaning of this original text that the threat of credibility has broken. And you're clearly just pursuing your own aims, they may be legitimate or illegitimate, but you're really pursuing your aim without the justifying presence of that original kind of mandate or justifying element. So yes these new court systems and the court system",
      "on it in the successor countries of the Ottoman Empire or in other Muslim countries. Yes, they all are in theory sort of modern equivalents of these mazallan courts or other siyasa expressions of siyassa authority but we're kind of back at our original anxiety which is that siyassah can sometimes just be politics or it can be used to facilitate what a government wants so for example",
      "IPO of a certain percentage of the shares of Aramco, the Saudi state-owned oil company. If you go back and look at some Saudi scholars or state sponsored or state affiliated scholars a couple years ago it is haraam to have an IPO. This cannot do this. And if you go about a few weeks ago it's entirely acceptable to have in IPO. Another thing in Saudi Arabia used to be that if you",
      "car insurance haram any kind of insurance because insurance like you're paying a company money you might never get anything you're engaged in unacceptable risk it's called but recently you see scholars say okay now you're allowed to have car insurance and other kinds of insurance",
      "make it legitimate, so now you can have insurance. Now I happen to think car insurance is a good idea. So don't go around saying John the Brown came to Oxford and started saying don't have car insurance. I have car insurace, you should all have car inurance if that's the type of thing you do in your country. If not forget what i'm talking about. My point is this might be a good Idea but what is motivating this? Is this really kind of sincere expression, a sincere attempt to understand God's law or",
      "bowing to different political winds. Another thing, the Ottomans in the 1850s after the British and the French helped them out in the Crimean War I suppose someone should be thanked in here for that right? The Ottomians make a promise to end religious discrimination in their realm. And so they stop levying the jizya which is the tax that non-Muslims pay under Islamic rule to continue practicing their religion receive protection. They stopped levy the jizzia on what basis",
      "basis because in the hanafi school muhammad hassan shibani said that it can be the decision of the rule the choice of the ruler whether or not to uh implement the jizya or not and they use some examples from the caliphate of the second caleb omar bin al-khattab so but what's driving this is it you know a sincere attempt to understand god's law is it trying to placate powerful forces of western europe",
      "of how states function I mean it's sort of we becomes confusing about what's motivating what's driving these moves or the case today of Iran so the Iranian government in general and Islamic law the blood money you pay for a non-muslim would be less than a Muslim so at Vimy anonymous living under Muslim rule if they get killed by a Muslim that Muslim would pay less money to compensate that person's family then if the Muslim had killed another Muslim",
      "The Iranian government says in order to protect justice, the current Iranian government, in order protect justice in our realm, the state is going to step in and use its siyasa authority to top off that amount. So we're gonna fill in the rest of that money so you can have equal compensation for Muslims and non-Muslims. We might sit there and say these are good ideas or these seem to be efforts to wrestle with",
      "aims of the Sharia or what God wants. But how do we know when they're that, or when there are kind more attempts to follow a fad that's being promoted by Western governments or something? Another good example is the new family law that was passed in Morocco, promulgated in Morocco in 2004, Mudawuna al-Usra. There are new laws that use the drawing from other medhebs, for example,",
      "that a woman, uh, that divorce has to be... You can't... In theory in Islamic law, if I say to my wife, you're divorced, you are divorced, and all around is like some pigeons. That's a valid divorce. That is a valid Divorce. But according to this, and also the case in Malaysia, you have to pronounce the divorce in court. There is no Madhhab that says this. This is pure restriction of the permissible.",
      "the permissible for the benefit of the muslim community this could be a good argument do we really want to have situations in which men are divorcing their wives and then denying it or women are saying they're divorced and they weren't you know we should regulate this or make it official similarly marriages have to be documented in the courts in all in uh all islamic schools",
      "shemany for their children together that's legitimate in god's eyes so this is a case of state restricted and permissible some of these might be good ideas some of These might be questionable ideas the problem is it's very hard for muslims to engage in these discussions when the discussions take place in light of overwhelming power imbalances right so if muslim could free themselves from you know the tensions of or the poles of",
      "and the West, tradition and modernity, colonizer and colonized, imperial and ruled, right? Kind of global consumer capitalists and local indigenous and authentic. These polls sort of suck everything towards them. It makes it very difficult for Muslims to have a kind of authentic and honest discussion about this issue of whether God's law is enough or whether we need to rethink aspects of the Sharia to deal with changing technologies and changing times. Thank you very much."
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    "text": [
      "Thanks for coming. Thank me for coming and so everybody did the reading which is great",
      "do a trial in this couple days is well today we're going to talk about the context around like the prophet they thought so not and we're go into Chawla depending on how much time have either talked about what's called historical critical issues around elective profit or will talk about criticism",
      "are really there for your background we're not going to spend you know some of the readings will look at but we're gonna you know the readings are kind of they're there for you to have a background for our discussions. Our discussions would be about other issues particularly I think you know we could sort of sit around and talk about life-to-profit for a couple days which would",
      "that we're in regarding issues about Islam and Muslims. I think that it's much more useful to focus on particular issues in the life of the prophet, and then kind of see how we build on those and deal with issues of controversy that are put in our face all the time as Muslims or as people who are interested in religion or interested in how we think about truth and morality across time.",
      "across time. So we'll talk about things like blasphemy, we'll talked about notions of authority, we will talk about how you deal with... How the Prophet dealt with religious difference and building bridges across communities and we'll",
      "way in case you're wondering um and uh so that's why we focus on these issues not so much just like another this year the province is and then this year they're profitable okay first let's look at i still don't feel like there's no this is not it what is this this is",
      "about the recording my voice is even the pictures are the important thing not by yeah that was it there you go that's the way to do it that's a way to doing that okay does anyone know what this is yeah this isn't isopia so the ottomans ashallah not a destructive people decided instead of destroying these mosaics let's just plaster over the mosaic",
      "since 1924 and this is one of Mary and Jesus I'm not sure what there's lots of different images of Jesus different kind of stylistic images this is a, no actually this is Jesus as a child then there's like image of Christ Pantocrator which i love that word he's like the universal king but this is you can see from a standard",
      "Mary, I think it's Theotokos. Mary the carrier of God. The person who is bearing God as a child. Okay. And the reason I bring this up is because in order to understand the life of the prophet you have to understand",
      "It's a, well I think it had a bit of history about this periodization. Until really the 1960s and 70s, study of... The kind of study of the ancient world and Islam were completely different sub-areas. So people would study Greco, you know, the classics, classic, classics of Ancient Greece and Rome, and they would study from the time",
      "ancient Greece of Homer, classical Greece of Aristotle and Aristophanes and Plato. And then they would go up to the Roman period at the end of the Roman revolution from around 100 BC to around the time of birth of Christ when Rome goes from being a public empire. Then they were studying kind of the period",
      "period of Antonine Rome in the 100s to the early 200s of the Common Era. And, you know then they would have interest in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire if you're ever interested in a really great read that'll take you about 10 years depending on your... You know it's good bedtime reading, it will really improve your vocabulary, you'll learn a lot. The Decline and Fall of the",
      "it's one of the most fascinating and sort of foundational works of modern history. A lot of, when you read it, you sort of see not only the way in which the subject that this historian is studying, Naaman, The Roman Empire, how it influences him as a writer, how he is trying to revive and is almost channeling the great Roman historians like Tacitus and Ammianus Marcellinus but then how",
      "that also informs the way historians write today. And what you see is, and this is actually very informative, that historians are deeply influenced by what they write about. And that's important to keep in mind. Historians are not... They don't stand outside of history. They are very much part of history Anyway, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbons. Fascinating book. It'll take you a couple years to read unless you're sort of goodwill hunting",
      "of goodwill hunting smart, in which case you should be teaching this class not me. But then Islam was another issue. Islam was studied I mentioned this in my book on Hadith, which you've all read but the study of Islam in the West comes out of three channels.",
      "Sorry, people sending me messages of grievance. The first comes through three channels. One is two are deeply colonial. So one is when the British basically",
      "basically begin to exercise actual administrative and military control in India, in the 1750s after the Battle of Plessy in 1757. They actually become administrators of several provinces of the Mughal Empire. And by this is fascinating they actually are in charge of running Sharia courts in the Mugha empire so you have something fascinating that arrives called Anglo-Muhammadan law if you're ever interested in this it's fascinating we can talk about but one of the things they",
      "They actually, the official language of British administration in India until the early to mid 1800s was Persian. And British judges had to preside over Sharia courts and administer Sharia. So they had to basically start understanding these people that they were governing. They had to understand their law, they had",
      "some of the beginning of the study of South Asian religion, Islam in South Asia, South Asian languages, Sanskrit, Persian. This comes through the efforts of British administrators in the late 1700s. One of the director generals of the East India Company was Warren Hastings. Another person whose last name was Jones. I forget his first name. These are the... In addition to being administrators they were also often scholars",
      "who pioneered the Western study of languages and linguistics, and religion in South Asia. So this is sort of matched by French study of Islam and Muslim culture, sort of the ways of the natives of Muslims in North Africa because this was from 1830 onwards. Algeria was invaded by the British",
      "invaded and occupied by the French, and in fact it was considered to be part of France. It was actually a province of France, and by the way hundreds and hundreds of thousands of European settlers, settler colonialists came from France and other European countries to settle in Algeria, of course displacing and killing hundreds of thousand if not millions of Algerians, local population. So for the French engage in the study",
      "Islam and Muslims for the same exact reason. Who are these people we're governing? What are their traditions? How do they think about law? The second venue is diplomatics, and this is especially the case from roughly the 1830s through the end of the 19th century and early 20th century when Western countries like Europe, Belgium",
      "Britain, Germany are increasingly involved with the Ottoman Empire at a diplomatic level and needed to have people who understood Ottoman politics, understood the internal geographical forces of the Ottoman empire and the political forces that they shaped. So that's a second route. The third route is really an extension of essentially biblical studies",
      "studies. So we have to remember that until roughly the mid-1800s, Western universities like Oxford founded in the mid 1200s, Cambridge just a few decades later, the Sorbonne",
      "seminaries in the sense that, I mean they weren't literally called seminaries but the study of anything. Scholarship was religious scholarship. There wasn't secular scholarship and religious scholarship you went to if you went into Oxford University in 1290 or 1390 or 1490 or 1590 you were going to learn to study the Bible",
      "to study christian theology you were going to learn the tools you needed to do that so you're going to learning latin grammar, latin rhetoric and uh... the basics of logic basic Aristotelian logic and along with that i was called the trivium along without you might also have moral philosophy and then you'd have the quadrivium before other subjects music astronomy mathematics and",
      "I think geometry is the fourth one, if I'm not mistaken. You can just look up the quadrivium. It's easy. So this was studying the rhetoric of Cicero, studying the logic of Boethius' translation of Porphyry's Isagoge, the introduction to Aristotle's categories. This was how you learn basic logic,",
      "how to use rhetorical language in Latin. Beginning in the 1200s, and just a little bit, you started having also the study of Greek in Western universities, and that really didn't pick up until the 1400s. My point being is that biblical studies was the old... That was studies. There wasn't a theology department.",
      "Everything was added on to that later on. Now, what happens in beginning in the Renaissance is what could be eventually led to the historical critical study of the Bible. The idea that you're going to go back and try and reconstitute the original form of a biblical text, that you are going to think about it in its own environment,",
      "that you think about it more as a product of its own time than as an expression of universal truth. Universal truth by the 1700s came to be seen as something that the mind and philosophers could attain, and that the Bible was an expression",
      "and part of what led to kind of the, in effect, marginalization of the biblical text in the greater search for truth is that by going back and finding early manuscripts of the New Testament, the Old Testament, and seeing how the Old testament changed over time, seeing how The New Testament was formed and discovering new non-canonical gospels. Part of what emerged by the late 1700s was a notion",
      "becomes a very important crucial assumption in the Western study of religion period, which is that religions are not born fully formed. Scripture isn't born intact. Scripture is built up over time. It's shaped. It doctored. It altered parts or hidden parts are taken out things are added and Theology or the dogma of a religion",
      "of a religion is also built over time and that the orthodoxy isn't the original version. The orthodoxie is a later kind of, in effect, a conspiracy that hides and shuts away the earlier heterodox elements. So this is... You can see this as early as the writings of Voltaire for example who died 1778. This idea",
      "idea that there's all these early Christian writings which don't share the Orthodox positions of the Catholic Church or the Christian church after the 300s of the Common Era. So this is sort of part of what leads to the gradual secularization of European scholarship and European thinking about truth because",
      "ceases to be an intact vehicle, vessel of truth and starts to become a historical product that is primarily meaningful in its own time. And can only be mined for meaning later on because it corroborates things we know are meaningful from reason. So Jesus stops to be, by the time you get to the early 1800s, mid-1800s",
      "in the universities of Germany and France and England. Jesus is no longer important because he's a... How did that happen? Okay. Jesus no longer is important because of the details of Jesus' life, because he said this or he did that. He's important because",
      "It's the Christ of spirit, not the Christ history that matters. So there is a long way to get to the point where which was the original point I was making which is that what happens in by the late 1700s and especially in the mid 1800s is that European scholars, especially in universities of Germany, the great universities of German like Tübingen, Heidelberg",
      "are reformed and strengthened by what's called the reforms of Alexander von Humboldt in the mid to late 1800s. They simply assume that they've studied the biblical tradition, and now let's go and study other traditions. And they assume that other traditions function in exactly the same way. There's a fascinating... The records of this",
      "conference of Western scholars, Orientalists in the early 1900s. And this German scholar gets up and says we have now brought in lights to the forests of India and to the jungles of Africa. So the colonial endeavor is paired with the scholarly endeavor of uncovering the origins of other people's religions just as Europeans that uncovered",
      "religion, they would now do this for other people's religion. And that would not only help those people understand why they act the way they do and teach them truth but it would also be part of this greater European study of everything in a categorization of all knowledge."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - MAS ICNA Convention 2017_NjHY9_z8US4&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748692546.opus",
    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum. Make me thank you very much. Okay, so complicated topic I'm going to do my best to talk about it in as efficient a way as possible. So everybody knows",
      "Everybody knows or should know that in Islamic law, in fiqh there's two different kinds of ruling. There are what's called thawabit these are rulings that don't change regardless of time and space and there is what's call mutaghayrat These are rulins that change based on circumstance, based on the person involved, based",
      "The Thoabit include things like pork is prohibited. Pork is always prohibited, okay? It doesn't matter if you're in France or in the United States or in Syria or in South Africa whether it's the year 800 or the year 1800, pork is always prohibited. Of course, if you are dying of starvation you can eat pork but that's not an exceptional circumstance so these are things that are unchanging. These Thoabet rulings don't change regardless of who is involved or when or where.",
      "The second type are mutaghayrat. Mutaghayrats are things that change based on circumstances and these include a lot of areas like let's say mahr, how much mahar does groom pay to his bride is based on custom what's expected in a certain time and place? What are the appropriate duties and responsibilities that husbands have and wives have so you know in United States especially at",
      "Husbands are expected to do a portion of the housework. Husbands expect to do portion of child care and if let's say I don't do that my wife can say you know, you're being a bad husband and If there was a Sharia court she could go to the judge and say this guy is not pulling his weight And she would have every right to do that because that the expectations of husbands and wives in relationship are based on custom and that changes according to time and space so",
      "So how do we know whether a ruling, let's say from the Quran or something stated in one of the hadiths of the Prophet, how do you know when one of them is one of thawabit or mutaghayrat? There are a couple ways. One is based on how strong is the text from the Sunnah of the prophet. For example if you have a very clear ruling in the Quran about lahm khanzir",
      "That's very good evidence that something is not supposed to change. If you have the Prophet giving a very clear condemnation of something, then you can be pretty confident this is also going to be prohibited maybe in every time and space. Sometimes... A good example, liwat. Liwat is... I don't know how to translate it hopefully. Liwat is sodomy. So this is prohibited in all times and places because of the strength",
      "of the Quranic story of the people of Lot and the condemnation that the Qur'an gives of their behavior, and also because of hadiths on the issue. But also because the consistent consensus of Muslim scholars generation after generation is prohibited. Another good example is prohibition on silk for men, that men cannot wear silk. This comes not from the Qurʾān but from a Hadīth of the Prophet,",
      "not only the hadith but also the consistent consensus of Muslim scholars over the generations made it clear this is something that doesn't change regardless of time or space. Of course, there's rukhsa, or a license given by the Prophet to Zubair when he had a skin condition that he was able to wear silk there because it didn't scratch his arm so this is an example",
      "specific license to somebody and we can then take that license as an example that we can follow later on for let's say someone being allowed to wear silk for a medical reason. Okay now another division, theoretical division when you're thinking of the rulings of Islamic law is between what's called tawqifi and mu'al al. Tawqif means something that is a ruling",
      "God, there's no reason for it. Or at least there's not a reason we understand. So for example, there are five prayers. Why not six prayers? Why not four prayers? Because this is what God said and the prophet taught us. These are the rulings from God on the Prophet and there is no reason why. At least none that we can understand. Why is pork prohibited? You know you can sit around and people sometimes say oh pork's really unhealthy,",
      "the invention of refrigeration, pretty much everything makes you sick. So uh you know pork would make you sick in the Arabian Peninsula so would beef if it had been out too long. So there's no reason behind this is something that God gives us as a rule and we follow it based on our faith and devotion to God. That's tawqifi. The second type is I said mu'al al-al. This means there's some reason or illa. There's",
      "are explained in the Quran. Sometimes they're explained in Sunnah of the Prophet, sometimes they're fairly clear just from context and from the nature of their ruling. A good example of this is prohibition on drinking wine. People who are prohibited from drinking wine because wine and other alcohol or intoxicants make you lose your inhibitions and make you behave badly and make irresponsible and cause you to lose your judgment and lose your senses and control yourself.",
      "Okay, now of these two of the mual'al rulings. So first tawqifi then mual al and underneath mual you have two types One are a type where the cause is permanent. The reason is permanent it's always present Alcohol is a good example Alcohol is going to be prohibited in every society for Muslims so it doesn't matter if You're living in Saudi Arabia where no one's drinking at least no one drinking openly or whether you're going to",
      "to Georgetown University where I teach, where there's a healthy party culture and you can say hey everyone around me is drinking why don't maybe I should drink. No it doesn't matter that cause is always present alcohol will always make you irresponsible irrational and lose control of yourself therefore this is prohibited that cause doesn't change. There are other types of mo'alaal rulings where the cause can disappear cause can",
      "These were the elite of the Quraysh and of Taqif tribe from Ta'if who were given a portion of Zakat, and actually given back a lot of their property that had been taken when they were defeated in order to kind of reconcile their hearts to Islam and make them committed Muslims. So in the Hanafi school of law, they see that this ruling doesn't apply after that so this group doesn't exist after the time of the Prophet there's no more whereas in other schools of law",
      "potentially there. So for example in Malaysia, one of the states in Malaysia like United States, Malaysia is made up of different states right? One of the state has a way of dealing with people who want to leave Islam that they...the government will actually see if they need help in their business or if they needed help in your personal life if you're suffering financially and use and give them some of this Zakat money and in order to kind of endear them to the Muslim community further",
      "community further. But that's a good example of some, the Hanafi school of law says no this ruling only existed at certain time and then the reason for it disappeared and other schools of law say no the root reason is always there. Okay what's maybe the big challenge when we talk about Islamic law in the modern period",
      "economic change that occurred with modernity. London in 1600 had more in common with Istanbul in 1600 than London in 16 hundred has with London today. Between roughly the early 1700s and mid 1800's place first Great Britain, then Germany, United States, then Western Europe goes through this immense change called modernity which involves",
      "which involves a complete revolution in the way human society is organized. Technology, economics, politics, the way we think about science, the ways we think of religion and then this basically gradually spreads across the globe. And so we're living in a time that's not just a result of tremendous change in every sphere of our lives but it's also continuously changing. So you can imagine what it's like let's say my great aunt who's now 103 God preserve her life",
      "preserve her life. So she was born before air travel, before cars were widespread, before TVs, before all this stuff and now she's living in a time when everybody is walking around with a super power computer in their hand they can look up any piece of information in the world or take pictures and all these things. Just imagine how much the world has changed. What this tremendous change means is that there are a lot",
      "Was this ruling in Islamic law, was the cause something that was the reason for it? Was this permanent? Was always going to be around like case of alcohol or is there something where if the cause disappears then the ruling is gonna change. And a good example I mean a good examples in the pre-modern period kind of show that Muslims in the past also faced this kind of question is issue Juma prayer.",
      "the late 700s, early 800s of the common era each city had one mosque for Juma. There was just one Juma literally there's one Jum'a prayer in Kufa, Basra and even Baghdad originally everybody went to Jumma prayer but then a place like Baghdad there's too many people so they have to start building different mosques and actually had to ask sit around asked themselves is are we allowed to build more than one mosque",
      "for Jummah? And the answer was yes, because they realized this is the reason that for which the Muslim community had been praying in one time and place was actually susceptible to change as conditions changed. And then when Muslims let's say went to North America and Europe and Friday is not a work, not a holiday you know people have to go to work, then we have multiple jummahs per day",
      "and in the US, in the 1960s and 70s and 80s. Eventually this also became accepted because this was seen as not compromising an unchanging rule and that the cause for this custom of having one Juma even a Juma all take place at one time in a city was something they could change based on context. A good example of modern debates, and I'm not trying to...",
      "reason, but I'm just giving you an example is the debate over inheritance. So some like for example Islamic modernists like Fazlur Rahman professor University of Chicago died in 1988 he argued that The Quranic verses on inheritance were not meant to be permanent right they were meant to you know give women access to property to make sure that both women and men inherited",
      "inherited, but that once you add a situation in which men and women were let's say financially equal or both working and both seen as having the same responsibilities in society. That idea that the man is going to inherit more than the woman and therefore he's gonna because he's supposed to take care of and spend on his female relatives. But that reason no longer exists therefore the ruling of the verses no longer exist and you should have equal inheritance so that was people like Fazlur Rahman argument now",
      "The reason that's very controversial is because no Muslim scholar ever said that. So, no Muslim scholars in history that I know of up until the 20th century ever had this idea. But the question is did they not have this idea because this idea was wrong and they knew it was wrong or do they not had this ideas because society really hadn't changed that much? Society really hadn' change that much from the time of the Prophet",
      "until the 19th and 20th centuries with the advent of modernity. The other really big question that comes along with this is, are these rulings supposed to respond to social change or are they supposed to guide us in times of social change? So let's take",
      "are we supposed to change this law, this Quranic law? This comes in the Qur'an. One of the longest verses in the Quran talking about the different shares of inheritance that people receive in a family. Are we supposed see this as guidance for society? So what that would mean is even if you're in time when my sisters have jobs just like I have a job maybe they've made more money than me. Maybe my mother had a job, my father had a",
      "inherit more than my sisters because I'm supposed to have responsibility for them and for my wife, for example. Is this sort of telling us that even if society changes there still should be kind of a...there's still a responsibility on men to care for their female relatives? Or is this law supposed to change based on changing society? So these are again, this issue didn't come up on inheritance because human",
      "he didn't change very much from the time of the Prophet until the modern period. Now we're actually confronted with a kind of change where, you know men and women are both working in the same jobs. This was not something you found in human history until essentially the 20th century really until after World War I. Okay um the second issue I want to talk about is what's called Takhayyur. Sometimes people use the word talfiq but",
      "between the rulings within a Madhab, within a school of law or between schools of law. So you know most of you probably know that on any legal question there's usually in any school of Law more than one opinion for example in the Shafi'i School you have you know the old opinion and new opinion of Imam Shafie or in the Hanafi school you have the opinion of Abu Hanifa, Imam Abu Hanifah and opinions of Muhammad Hassan Shaybani and Abu Yusuf and Zafar and other people like that so oftentimes even",
      "you'll have more than one opinion. And then of course, taken together between the Madhhabs, you also have kind of a menu option of opinions. So what Takhayr is picking based on need, based on situation. The general rule that Muslims have is that you should follow your school of law and then Muslim scholars disagree about how easy it should be for you to pick within your school",
      "school of law or in the case of a scholar, how reticent or how easy it should be for a scholar to let's say give a fatwa based on another school of laws instead of his own or her own school of Law. But what they all agree on is that in this situation of necessity or really pressing need, usually words used are Darura and Hajja, that you can choose between different schools",
      "So of course this is risky because you can get what I call the, you know, Franken-fetwa. Like Frankenstein's monster, you're a Franken-Fetwa? Fetwas are just made up, you now, okay, a dog came and licked my pants. Oh, I'm going to take the Maliki school fetua, dogs are not neges. Okay then I go and I've been doing wudu but my hair looks really good so I don't want to mess my hair up. So I take that mask, the shafi ruling where I just have to wipe part of my head. And then I'm praying but I don' t want to move my arms too much",
      "I don't want to wrinkle my jacket. So, I take the Hennepin ruling and I don' t raise my hands in prayer when I go... Now I have a prayer that's not accepted in any of those schools of law. That's a Franken-fetwa. And you do what is called fetwa shopping where you're always looking for the easiest way in any situation. That s a risk but really for an individual that's up to the person because no one is here watching you and supervising you except maybe your parents. But really if you want to take a certain",
      "judges. You have to go by your own intentions, but then as a community or as religious scholars we have to ask ourselves a couple of questions which is what's socially at stake? What's socially and state when we think about choosing between schools of law for example an issue of shaking hands between men and women now in the United States and in a lot of societies if you don't shake hand with someone this",
      "And this really makes interaction very difficult. And you're not even going to have time to explain to them why you're shaking their hand, right? This is gonna be something that is very offensive and cause a lot of social disruption. On the other hand, wearing hijab should not cause social disruptions. This isn't interfering with your work or duties as a citizen or responsibility. If people have a problem with hijabs then they are just being bigoted. This is getting in the way of basic social interactions. So maybe on the handshaking issue",
      "handshaking issue, people like the European Council on Fatwa and Research and a lot of other Muslim scholars have taken rulings in the Hanbali school that you're allowed to if you are female merchant in the market you're allowd to shake hands with men. Well sort of we all like merchants in the markets today in our world so that men and women are allowed to shake hand. On the other hand you have to think about what are the potential costs of engaging in Tachayur and taking a ruling that's easy?",
      "One of the costs might be that you we break down the things that make Muslims stand out and If a community starts stripping away all its identifying markets markers everything that makes it different Well, eventually the community stops being different and actually ceases to exist Especially a community that is constantly being attacked constantly being criticized by The government by the president by media like the Muslim community so when Muslims think about their dress like hijab or beard",
      "hijab or beard for men, right? Or whether men should wear like a hat. I think Muslim men should have to wear little hats maybe to make them stand out so they carry part of the burden. If you say well life is difficult I don't want to stick to stand out yeah it's gonna be harder because you stand out and you get noticed but also that protect that actually propagates the Muslim identity protects our community and the Prophet understood that if",
      "on their symbols and if you wipe away your symbol, you will become like them. And you will disappear. As the Prophet said in Sunan Abu Dawud. So you have to think what are the potential costs? Yes it might be obnoxious I don't want to stand out, I don' t want people to look at me but once you win peoples respect and once you've won a place in society you will have secured your identity in this society. You wouldn't have given in on those markers that make you different from other people.",
      "And finally the last point is not just to think about what socially is at stake for the survival of the Muslim community or whether or not a certain ruling is too disruptive to our interactions with other people, or not disruptive. It's what's really religiously and morally at stake? So when we think about... I keep using the word steak it's a good segue right? Think about the issue of halal meat. Of halal meet. Now this might be better at the",
      "the IKNA mass conference and the Mass-IKNA Conference, because in my experience Arabs tend to be not so strict on the halal meat issue whereas Desis are really strict. But when Muslims go to countries as a minority and they're very strict on halal meet, they start their own butcher shops and they start there own meat industry and even become major players in the meat industries in those countries until they're able to provide halal",
      "go to a place and they say, oh we're just going to eat the meat of people in the book. They don't actually create that religious infrastructure. They do not create that infrastructure of halal slaughterhouses and butcherers having meat sold in supermarkets. And so they end up actually not being able to find halal meat when they want it. So because they took the easier ruling on this, they ended up not pushing themselves to create an infrastructure. You can think about like working out right? When you work",
      "your strength and capacity. If you're always looking for an easy way out, yeah, your life is going to be easier but you're not going to build yourself up as a person or community. And then the last part of that is to also look at Muslims who look at themselves as moral leaders in society around them. We are not just reacting all the time to how do I act as Muslim in this society so it can be easy for me? Or how do i respond to this? But also thinking what is a Muslim's role as moral leader?",
      "as the best community brought out for the people to serve humanity. And so when we talk about, let's say, the issue of halal meat, we need to think about ethical treatment of animals. We need to thing about what our religion teaches us about how animals have to be cared for and can't be put in horrible factory conditions and can suffer and can see each other slaughtered, right? And that something being halal is a lot more than just having someone say Bismillah when they kill an animal.",
      "And so we should think about, you know, what is the... How can Muslims contribute to stewardship of the planet? By eating less meat. By having society as a whole eat less meat because livestock take up a huge amount of land and huge amount resources and they fart out massive amounts of methane and cause climate change and all these things. So Muslims by advocating more like humanist or humane or moral treatment of animals also are helping to promote more moral and sustainable treatment of the plant as a",
      "the world and the planet as a whole. So Muslims shouldn't just be reacting but we should think about these issues as questions of our moral leadership in Muslim community. So to end on, just to review there's two types of rulings in Islam one that change and one that don't change regardless of time and circumstance. And amongst those rulings that change some change because the ruling disappears and sometimes the ruling is always there so they don't",
      "of law in America. To what extent are we really responding to a pressing need that merits us taking an easier option? But, what are the costs of doing that too? Are we crippling ourselves? Are not pushing ourselves to establish ourselves more, to become more self-reliant? And, to what extent by also doing that shirking potential role as moral leaders in this society? Jazakum Allah Khair"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Methods to Look at The Sun_S7lVNNkMkJE&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748649000.opus",
    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum. I'm a holy man, Shaitan al-Rajim, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem. Inna lhamdulillahi wa bihi nasta'een wasalatu wasalam ala as-sail mursaleen wa ala ali wa sahbihi ajma'een Well thanks it's really my honor to be here to be able to talk to you and to be asked to share any thoughts. I find the title of",
      "The title of the panel is very interesting, or this talk's very interesting because I think it in some ways it shows a misconception of how we think about the Prophet's legacy, alayhi salatu wasalam. But it also emphasizes some important aspects of how understand it correctly. So everyone here, has anyone ever heard the Gettysburg Address? Yes obviously. Has anyone here memorized the Gattiesburg Addresses in school?",
      "Yes, okay. So actually there is no Gettysburg Address. What? Georgetown Professor Jani's Gettiesburg Addresses exists. That's not what I'm saying. In terms of something that we know the exact words to... What you want it... I can't have the glass? Yeah, what up? Oh yeah, I'll put it down here. Why am I playing with this pen?",
      "I'm gonna leave this alone. Go here, stay there. There's actually Abraham Lincoln wrote four drafts. We have four copies that he wrote. One that he gave to a newspaper afterwards after he gave the speech. Two drafts he wrote beforehand and actually they differ in their wording so one version says that this nation shall have a new birth in liberty",
      "Another version says that this nation under God shall have a new birth. So it adds under God, and one version doesn't actually have that section at all. Actually even something that we memorize word for word in school in the United States doesn't really exist in the sense of there just being one digital yes or no version of it. There's actually differences. We choose one version that we want to have as the Gettysburg Address.",
      "I think that's instructive when you think about the sunnah of the Prophet, because when we talk about the prophet's words, even if you go to the most reliable hadith collections in Bukhari and Muslim, you find let's say in Buhari two or three or four or five different narrations of the same hadith that might differ in some wording. So when someone says to me is everything in Bucuri true? I say well it kind of depends what you mean by that.",
      "depends what you mean by true. I mean, did the Prophet actually say,, every single thing that's in Sahih al-Bukhari? Maybe sometimes he said a statement two or three times and had different companions transmitted those different statements. That explains sometimes where there's differences in wording but sometimes it's just the fact that there's this chain of transmission",
      "error or they remember something differently. So even Bukhari, according to his standards might have two or three different versions of something that the prophet said, alayhi salam, that actually differ from one another in some of the wording. Like the Gettysburg Address differs in the wording we don't really think about that and a lot of times it's not important. It doesn't really change the meaning but it means that sometimes I think it's a mistake",
      "the Hadith of the Prophet as being these literal exact recordings of things he said because actually you have differences in versions even amongst the most Sahih hadits there's different times differences in slight wording between different versions of the hadits and that doesn't mean anything profound it just means that we should think get away from thinking about this kind of digital",
      "kind of digital notion of one, zero exact recording of the prophet's speech and start thinking about the Prophet Sunnah as a whole as being his legacy. So in that sense, the Islamic tradition has several avenues for transmitting the sunnah of the Prophet that check one another, they keep one another in check, that correct one another.",
      "of transmitting the sunnah through hadiths is that muslim scholars collected and transmitted and wrote down and compiled all these different reports about that they had heard from previous generations that went back through change of transmission to the prophet and it recorded things that he had said and things that He had done so one way to think about the sunna of the Prophet is just collections of these reports, these hadith's about things the Prophet said",
      "together and you start trying to figure out, okay what comes earlier? What comes later? What's a general rule? What is the specific case? What an exception? What not an exception right? You try to fit these all together. You can actually try and come up with an understanding of what the Prophet Sunnah was in terms of how Muslims are supposed to pray, how Muslims were supposed to do their fasting, what they're supposed to believe about the Day of Judgment etc., etc. So that's one very important way. Of course one of the problems",
      "if they're putting these pieces together in the right way. So you could think about it as putting together a puzzle, the difference between this and a puzzle is that with a puzzle you know when you're finished because there's a picture of whatever, a fire truck or something like that or whatever you're making the puzzle of, and you can see oh the picture is complete and you say well I have an extra piece or there's not there's",
      "what they understand to be the proper relationship of these reports to one another, or these reports for the Quran, of these report to the context of life of the Prophet. So there's a real possibility for disagreement. And of course some of that disagreement is the cause where there being different schools of law in Islam and within Sunni Islam because people put this data together in different ways. But so there are other ways of transmitting",
      "of the Prophet, one of the ways is to do it through principles. So that the Prophet taught certain principles to the companions, principles of how to interact with one another, principles about how to think about the nature of God, about God's justice. So you see in early Muslim period and the time of successors and generation after the successor, the generation of scholars like Abu Hanifa and Malik ibn Anas,",
      "about all sorts of areas of life and conduct. So for example, a rule that you can't buy and sell things that you don't have. You can't buying and selling things that don't exist. These are principles that they come up with. The idea that let's say if someone, if you murder somebody,",
      "I don't know if I say, well, I'm gonna get some inheritance from my father and I want the money now. I don' wanna wait for him to die. Somebody will kill my father that I'll inherit from him. I might be in prison but at least I'll have money. No, you, if you murder someone, you cannot inherit any money from them even if you're their child, you can not inherit any from them. So these are things that were mostly principles that the companions and successors learned from the Prophet. And these principles would sometimes help correct understandings of Hadith",
      "understandings of hadiths, correct? Understandings of Hadith. So for example if you had hadith that like in the Maliki school of law or there's a hadith called Khiyar al-Majlis that two parties and they're buying and selling things until they part company",
      "or recant on a sale, so renege on the sale. So they can reneged on the sail until they part company, hata yaftarqah, until they park company. Now if you hear that phrase until they apart company it means until let's say go their separate ways. Well Imam Malik and others in the Maliki school said no, no, that's not how we know from the general son of the prophet, that is not how this hadith should be understood. It means parting company means the verbal agreement",
      "the verbal agreement. So that was how the Maliki school understood this hadith because of these principles they learned from the sunnah of the prophet. The third way, so the first way is actually just getting hadiths and trying to put together this puzzle to figure out what the prophet's sunnah was. The second way is think about the prophet sunnah as a set of principles. And the third way is the prophet sonnah has a tradition that's lived by the pious community.",
      "So the best example of this is prayer. People don't learn how to pray from books, they learn how pray from their parents or they learn other pray from the Imam at the mosque or their teachers at school and those people learned how to play from their parent's and their parents so on all the way back to the time of the Prophet. So there are certain aspects of Muslim life that are handed down generation after generation. Of course these things also have to be checked by Hadiths because",
      "Hadiths because as we all know sometimes you can have a tradition from generation to generation, every generation it moves a little bit away from its previous generation. A little bit farther, a little further. So after 100 200 300 years people are doing something very different from what their ancestors were doing even though they think every generation thinks it's transmitting and inheriting something and not changing at all so you always have those hadith that you can go back to take sure that you're not going too far away",
      "from the actual original practice of the Prophet, alayhi salatu wasalam. So when we think about the sunnah I think it's better... When we think things coming straight from the prophet's lips, alaysa as-salam, it's to think about this sunnah as the precedent of the prophet overall, the authoritative precedent and teachings of the prophets overall, as opposed to thinking about just things that he says or reports that he said because the reports if you don't have the lived",
      "the lived tradition of Muslim community, if you don't have principles that Muslim scholars derive from the Quran and the son of the prophet. You might not understand those sayings correctly and you might not be able to put them in the right relationship with one another. Okay now I just want to discuss a few examples I think that really help us should give us confidence about",
      "of our knowledge of the Prophet Sunnah, the overall intact nature of this tradition. Of course if you read books about Islam written by Islamophobes or just generally by Western scholars they're very skeptical about Hadiths, they're really skeptical about data about the life of the prophet. Part of this is because of certain religious or let's say metaphysical positions or presuppositions that these scholars have for example",
      "So it doesn't matter if a report is accurate or not. They don't believe, for example that the Prophet made the moon split, or they didn't believe that water came out from between his fingers and filled up pools so all the companions could do their wudu in that water. These are things that are well established hadiths or referenced in the Quran. So those things they just won't accept.",
      "And also in general, they don't think that any one generation or any one community is different from any other community in history. So there's the idea that the companions, let's say, were not able to lie about the Prophet, or that the Prophet was immune to error, immune to committing sins. They just don't accept these principles. All human beings are the same.",
      "just flat-out disbelieve lots of reports that come about the Prophet, peace be upon him. They don't believe that the prophet could be given knowledge of the future by God. So anything where the prophet is predicting the future they'll say well this is obviously made up later because people don't know the future now. But I want to give you some examples of why this tradition is actually quite reliable. Now that being said",
      "That being said, all Muslim scholars acknowledge that thousands and thousands and dozens of thousands of hadiths were forged. All Muslims always acknowledged that there are countless thousands of forged Hadiths. They're totally unreliable or mostly unreliably. The reason that Muslim scholars came up with a science of Hadith criticism was to sort out the forgeries from the reliable Hadith",
      "reliable hadiths. So just saying that there's lots of forged hadith is not news, that's actually the reality that caused Muslim scholars in the second third fourth well third fourth fifth generation of Muslim scholars that actually caused them to construct and elaborate this science of hadith criticism to try and figure out what the prophet really said and what he didn't say alayhi salam. But even so when we look at let's say the six books in Sunni Islam",
      "books in Sunni Islam or the especially Bukhari Muslim Sahihain, you see there's a couple of I think indications of real authenticity here. One of them is that these hadiths do not serve the interests of some school of law or some school",
      "A lot of hadiths don't go along with any Madhab's rule. So you're thinking, well if people make this stuff up they're gonna make it up to support some school of law or some agenda they have, some understanding of Islamic Law or theology but some hadith don't make sense according to any of these schools but there still considered to be Sahih Hadith by Sunnis. Just a couple of non dramatic examples",
      "a man comes to the prophet and says, you know this relative of mine he had a child with a walida who's a slave woman. And there's debate about whose child this really is. And the Prophet says, Allah says al-walad al firash wa lal ahir al hajar right? The child belongs to the marriage bed, firash",
      "firaash and if you're a prostitute or if you are the man who commits zina, gets nothing. So let's say that the man was not the actual father it doesn't matter the child belongs to the marriage bed. You assume that the father is the husband or in this case the master of the slave woman right?",
      "This becomes a really important principle in Islamic law. It's a very important principle. In fact, it's the same principle in American law up until DNA paternity tests. But even with DNA paternal tests, how many people have kids? How many who've had paternity don't answer? How you will have done paternity test? I'm going to guess not many because if you don't have to get a paternity",
      "father of the child, it's assumed if you're married to your wife or in a relationship with this woman that the child is yours. So actually it's the same thing, the presumption is that the father, the child belongs to the relationship bed or marriage bed. The same thing still in our law today. This is a very important principle but if you look at the context of the hadith, it is not actually a wife, it",
      "There's a debate amongst Muslim scholars. It's, there's something called Amum al-Laf. Amum Al-Laff means the general meaning of language versus khususa sabab. Khususa Sabab means specific reason for statement happening or let's say a verse of the Quran being revealed. So let's see the verse of Quran La Ikraha Fi Deen We all know this verse right? There is no compulsion in religion. Does that mean that",
      "that's just a general rule, there's no compulsion in religion ever? Or was this verse revealed for a specific circumstance regarding a specific person and in that case it means no compunction for religion but not generally. That's a good example of these two poles that are pulling on any hadith or Quranic verse. Is the language supposed to be understood generally or is it really only for a",
      "this has been understood as a general rule. Even though the specific circumstance is that it's a slave woman, so if there's a specific circumstance, they would only apply to people who have children with slave women which doesn't happen anymore but the general rule means marriage bed,",
      "is meaning marriage bed. So if it's understood generally, it doesn't actually apply to the specific case that was originally said in and the original case that we set in doesn't apply to married people but so you can see here on this example of this hadith, it actually doesn't really fit in any of the way that Muslim scholars later came to understand this issue. It doesn't mean it's... Actually I think that means it is sahih. I think this is an excellent example because nobody twisted it",
      "thought it should look like. Okay, so there's lots of examples of that. Lots of examples where you have a hadith that doesn't really fit into any one school of law. You can see that there are different schools of law and they're all each trying to make sense of how do we understand this hadith? How does this fit in with our understanding of the sunnah overall? So they're not twisting material to make it fit what they think it should be. They're actually keeping that intact",
      "Another excellent example of the overall authenticity of certainly the core of the Sunni Hadith corpus is that it contains extremely archaic language. I mean, there's language in Hadiths that even the second and third generations of Muslims, they don't understand what it means. It's weird desert language that comes out of Western Arabia. No one understands.",
      "By that time, we're living in Damascus. They were living in Basra in southern Iraq. They're living Egypt. Even though they were just one or two generations away from the Prophet, they were living very different worlds than the Prophet lived in terms of technology, in terms culture, food, what type of animals they were around. I'll read you one hadith. It's a little bit long but it gives you an example",
      "some of this material was actually very foreign. It was very foreign even to the early Muslims. So I'll read you this study, this is from Sahih al-Bukhari. Muhammad bin Kathir narrated to us, this my translation saying Sufyan reported it to us saying Al-A'mash narrate to us from Zaid ibn Wahab who said Hudhaifa, Hudhaifah bin al-Yaman the famous companion narrated",
      "seen and I'm waiting for the second. He told us that faithfulness, amanah was placed into the roots of men's hearts then they learn from the Quran and then they learned from the Sunnah and he told us about its disappearance ie the disappearance of faith he said quote a man will go to sleep and faithfulness will be snatched from his heart until only a spot wekt remains",
      "be snatched further away from him until only a trace will remain like the callous from a blister, medjil, like a coal you rolled on with your foot. It swelled up but now you see it as a raised-up mark but with nothing in it and people will follow each other and no one will keep their pledges.\" And the hadith continues but I want to just focus on that part. Does anyone understand that?",
      "very hard on it. So there's a spot, there's going to be just the remainder of faith like a spot mechit and then it's gonna be like it'll disappear more, faith will disappear even more from society and it'll be like a callus like when you step on a coal and it swells up and then there's nothing maybe the blister pops or something and then you're left with",
      "Unusual imagery. I mean, this is not something you would come up with he wouldn't be like hey, I'm gonna forge a hadith I want to Talk about stepping on coal. I think this is the kind of things that someone would come This is very foreign imagery and at after the Hadith Bukhari's student Al-Farabri He said he asked al-Bukhara secretary again in Abu Jafar who was the one who would help him write things down? I told this to Abu Abdullah to Bukhar",
      "Abdullah to Bukhari and Bukhar said, I heard Abu Asim, Ahmed bin Asim say, I hear, I have heard Abu Ubaid as a famous scholar of language. Say, I've heard Al-Asma'i was a very famous grammarian and lexicographer in the early 800s of the common era. And others so I heard Al Asma'is saying along with others concerning the roots jithr of men's hearts that jithir is the base",
      "and walked is the slight trace of something that mark and Medjil is the callous left on the palm after working so even two or three generations after the death of the Prophet they saw salam Muslim scholars there like no idea what these words mean they have to go in and ask specialists in grammar who go and you know collect weird words from Bedouin tribes and things like that and they try",
      "There's another hadith which I couldn't actually find, I was looking for it. I didn't have enough time to find it where it's talking about the people who will enter across the bridge on the day of judgment, sirat and it talks about how their small number is like the white hairs on the white fur on the armpit of a donkey.",
      "That's after you figure out what the words mean, that you figure it's talking about this white hair on the armpits of donkeys. This is an extremely unusual archaic imagery. This imagery of people who live with animals, who live out in the desert, who lived in very poor environments... They don't live in cities or towns and anything like that. So this imagery is not being made up by people. This was extremely archaical imagery that even the early Muslim scholars have trouble deciphering.",
      "deciphering. They have to go and consult experts on language, all they do is go and collect weird words from Bedouin tribes. Okay so finally I wanted to end with a third I think really important piece of or set of information that gives us confidence in the overall authenticity of their Islamic tradition overall which is the testimony of non-Muslim sources. So we don't have",
      "you know, we don't have some... It would be nice if like there was this Byzantine or Persian tourist who happened to go to Medina in 622 and he was hanging out there. And then suddenly here's the singing and this guy comes into town everyone seems really happy. And he says, this is really interesting I'm gonna stay for a couple of years. He writes down every day what happened. That'd be great! We don't that, right? All we have",
      "prophet did in his life, and the details of his life comes from Muslims. Muslims who passed this on for one or two or three generations, and then it gets set down in writing of various forms. But we do have early non-Muslim historians and religious scholars, priests especially, in Syria, in Egypt, who are writing about, in Iraq, who actually write about their first encounters with Muslims.",
      "encounters with Muslims. And if you take all this information together, you get something that's actually a pretty good outsider's understanding of what Islam is. Even though they don't like Muslims very much, they still do generally describe them accurately. So here's an example. In 640, so just eight years after the death of the prophet, there's this Christian document in Syriac language. And it's a history of the world from Adam",
      "from Adam all the way up until the year 640. And what it does actually mentions the prophet Muhammad by name, just mentions him by name. So this means they already know the name of Muhammad and remember, just two or three years after the Muslims had entered into the greater Middle East coming out of the Arabian Peninsula. An even earlier document in Greek",
      "from North Africa, which is written in 634. So two years after the death of the prophet. It talks about how in Palestine this army had come, this army of Arabs had come and they said they were following a religion of this prophet and that he claimed to have the keys to paradise. So just two years out of the death",
      "who were following this prophet, not a lot of other information. Then in the 680s, so during the time of Muawiyah, no sorry right after the death of Muwaiya and 680 of the common era there's a monk writing in Mesopotamia, Christian monk, and he writes that Muslims are very lenient to Christians they respect their monasteries if you pay your taxes",
      "They leave you alone. They don't care what religion you practice. He says that Muhammad was the guide, an instructor of the Muslims. He taught the Arabs to worship the one God in accordance with their ancient law and that the Arabs kept to the tradition of Muhammad, his sunnah, to the extent that they punished people if they broke with the sunnah of the Prophet, peace be upon him. Actually he has one criticism of the Muslim's. He saids they did not persecute Jews enough",
      "He wanted them to persecute Jews more and they didn't do that. Another guy writing in the 660s is our Armenian bishop named Sabaeus, he said that the prophet had awakened the Arabs to their Abrahamic ancestry. That he had reminded them of the God of Abraham and this Prophet Muhammad when he was a child",
      "to go from when he was young used to go the hijaz to palestine on trade so this is it's actually non-muslim in the 660s who's confirming the stories that go along with uh surat al quraish right what's life so that information",
      "Marian, Meta, and they don't drink wine. And this is just some examples. Then we have all sorts of fascinating rock inscriptions like graffiti. You know people now they write I don't know what they write graffiti what kind of stuff I can't even read what they right most the time it's weird symbols or something back in the day people would write more interesting stuff. I'm so-and-so I was here God forgive me God help me. They so in",
      "in the, especially south southern Saudi Arabia and the Southern Hejaz there's a lot of rock writing on the rocks that are preserved. For example one of them says In the name of Allah, Bismillah I Zuhair, I'm reading it in English obviously it's an Arabic. I Zhuhair wrote this at the time of Omar who died in the year 420.",
      "24. This is really interesting, so one they're using Hijri dates already. Now you have to remember some Western scholars had said that Muslims didn't invent the Hijri calendar until much later but actually here who does anyone know who invented the Hijra calendar? Omar invented the hijri calendar that's what Muslim said it turns out this is well it was being used during the time of Omar and it mentions",
      "It mentions, it also calls him Amir al-Mu'mineen. Amir Al-Mumineen which is the title he went by right? In Muslim sources and another rock inscriptions which I think is pretty recent recently discovered. It says, I am Qais the scribe of Abu Kutair may God's curse be on those who murdered Uthman ibn Affan and those who have led to the killing without mercy",
      "So again, this is very early. It doesn't say what the year is but it's extremely early because it's near this other early one that I just read and it mentions the killing of Uthman. So again this a very early event that Muslims said happened at certain time. A lot of non-Muslims historians have said well we don't believe these stories or they're not reliable. But here you have the early rock inscriptions",
      "So if you take these non-Muslim sources from the 630s, just a few years after the death of the Prophet going up into the 680s. You have a vision of people who followed this Muhammad, who was their guide and their prophet. He taught them to worship the God of Abraham. He told them don't drink wine, don't eat carrion.",
      "So this is actually not a bad description of Islam from people who don't know anything about it. Okay, so these points together I think well for me they really provide a lot of clarity right? So first of all we talk about the Prophet's legacy, we don't just speak about reports of things he said and did because those reports they can sometimes you're not exactly sure",
      "you're not exactly sure what the precise words of the Prophet were. But, the fact that there's all these different versions preserved shows you the diligence that Muslim scholars had like Bukhari and his teachers they didn't... They recorded different versions of Hadith even if there was just one word difference for example it would record the different versions but the Sunnah of the prophet isn't just contained in these reports right? It is contained in the legal thought, the legal tradition of Muslim scholars",
      "tradition of the Muslim community. And, the overall accuracy of this tradition is bolstered by one, the fact that it contains material that is clearly extremely archaic even for the people who were first collecting it. Two, non-Muslim sources that are contemporary to just after the life of the prophet and in the decades, just two or three decades",
      "taken together a pretty accurate representation of Islam from outsider's perspective. And finally, you have rock inscriptions that actually back up a lot of the material... A lot of them are sources or reports that Muslims had been treating as historically accurate. Okay, Jazakumullah Khair, Assalamu Alaikum."
    ]
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    "text": [
      "Welcome to Zealots of the Gate, a podcast from Comment Magazine. I'm Matthew Kamink. I am Shadi Hamid. Together we research politics, religion and the future of democracy at Fuller Seminary's Mao Institute of Faith and Public Life. We are writing a book together. This podcast represents an informal space where we can talk about how to live with deep difference. Thanks so much for joining us!",
      "Yes, welcome friends. And do make sure you subscribe wherever you listen. Please leave us a review. Five stars. We love all that. Feel free to join the conversation and ask questions by using our hashtag on Twitter. The hashtag is ZealotsPod. You can also feel free to email us. You",
      "Expect a good exchange. So yeah, why don't we get started by way of introduction? You know, Shadi and I are good friends. That said, perhaps we shouldn't be. You know I'm a Christian. Shadi's a Muslim. I research and teach theology while Shadi researches and teaches in the area of political science and international relations. So we come from pretty different perspectives but this is our space to work those things out",
      "democracy, and how we live together with deep difference. And Shadi, today we've got a good—we've got guest and a good spicy topic to explore so why don't you introduce our guest? Yeah thanks a lot Matt! So we have a treat today for all of you. Our guest is Jonathan Brown who's a professor at Georgetown. You see him waving there. He is",
      "I do think he is one of the most important and influential scholars of Islam in Islamic history around today. He is a Muslim convert, he's the author of a book which is an excellent primer on Islamic law and Islamic tradition it's called Misquoting Muhammad we'll include a link to that in the show notes highly recommended",
      "slavery. We'll also include a link to that in the show notes. The topic we're going to be talking about today, I'm excited about it but I'm also slightly apprehensive because I don't like thinking about certain things in the Islamic tradition. Sometimes it's better not to know and to not overthink things",
      "uncomfortable things in the Islamic tradition. One of those is slavery. Islam, or at least the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad did not expressly forbid or prohibit slavery. Slavery is there in Islamic history. And as we'll find out it's also in Christian history and Jewish history. We'll get to all that but maybe just to share more of a personal perspective on this",
      "the bigger set of questions here is how do we understand or reinterpret the past in light of what we know now? Are we morally superior today than the Prophet Muhammad was, or even Jesus Christ was because Jesus Christ did not forbid slavery either. So we have a bit of a conundrum",
      "of morality that we hold to so strongly today versus what was acceptable and what was customary centuries ago, 14 centuries ago and so forth. And I'll just quote one thing that Jonathan says in his book on Islam and slavery which i think gets at this conundrum in a really profound way he says",
      "realize this until relatively recently question mark it's a good question he also says i believe slavery is wrong what interests me is explaining how almost all moral authorities in human history thought it was right there's a lot of implications here but maybe that's",
      "did talk to prophet muhammad or jesus christ um would we really get like all worked up and say hey prophet um hey divine figure you are wrong and we are morally superior like just maybe try to imagine that as a kind of like um hypothetical scenario and that i think gets across the lev the",
      "would you respond to some of these earlier points as, you know, many of our listeners will be believing Christians also believing Muslims people who are religiously oriented and they may avoid looking at the past for precisely these reasons. Well yeah thanks guys for inviting me Shadi I always like talking about this kind of stuff because you're not afraid to talk about these things. I think that",
      "there's two points to keep in mind one is that the question we're asking is a much bigger question than about slavery right slavery is the thing that forces us to ask the question but the question is really much bigger um which is how do we think about our the authority that the past has over us if we're going to hold certain moral convictions today uh and",
      "And it's a, in some ways like, and this is not a Muslim problem, right? This is not the Christian problem. This is a, this is an American problem. Basically everybody problem. And actually for a lot of communities and traditions, it was actually slavery that forced us as well. Right? It's not, it's the issue, the moral problem of slavery isn't just something that let's say Christians",
      "Let's say Christians or Muslims or Jews have had to wrestle with. It's actually strongly influenced how people come to view their scripture, right? So it's our more—you know, imagine you go into a cocktail party today and you're like, oh yeah, I think slavery is fine.",
      "It's maybe like one of the few things that you can't question, right? So Holocaust is bad. Slavery is bad like that's that's you know Maybe two things that just no one can disagree on and remain kind of a person in good standing in our society And in the kind of global Western society more broadly On the other hand There's no I don't know if any religious or philosophical tradition",
      "that prior to, let's be generous. Let's say 1700, but really probably more 1800, but let's say 1700. Okay? Prior to the year 1700 of our common era was not totally comfortable with slavery, didn't endorse it or defend it or consider it natural or tolerate it. Right? So all",
      "is essentially morally unacceptable according to our standards today. And it's sort of mind-boggling that people don't have to confront this all the time, and they tend to get very upset when they are confronted with it. You can see this constantly being performed,",
      "performed in our society with these debates over statues. I don't know if you want to play the clip from Fox News, but I'll just give an introduction about why I wanted to mention this is because when I said I wrote this book on Islam and slavery, and I think I started in 20s, the very end of 2016. So basically after Trump had been elected right around the time of his inauguration",
      "inauguration. Inauguration, is that correct? Yeah, I was going to say coronation, inauguration because the ISIS phenomenon happened and this had really caused a lot of Muslims big problems because ISIS had been taking these sex slaves and reintroducing slavery and saying hey like slavery's in the Quran and the precedent of the Prophet Muhammad and slavery's on the Sharia so why are you guys all upset? And Muslims didn't really have an answer for this",
      "And this was constantly in the newspaper. This is causing a lot of Muslims serious crisis and their faith. So I wanted to write a response to this or try... And I answered these questions myself, when I did so like I found that when I tried to talk about this everybody would get upset at me because people would say things like academic scholars",
      "would say things like, the Quran prohibited slavery. And I'd be like, no it didn't. Look, I understand you want to make Muslims look good, you're not an Islamophobe, you know, you are trying to push back against Trump and the Muslim ban. I understand that you have a good intentions but you can't say something that's not true. You can't just say that the Quran prohibits slavery because it didn t right? People would say",
      "slavery is i remember this one muslim guy was debating with me and he was like you need to say that slavery is wrong throughout history and i said i was like look i don't know what you what is the case is either the prophet because the quran allows",
      "that's wrong. Or you're telling me that the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad did something that you consider to be morally evil, in which case you're not Muslim anymore, right? That like caused you to exit Islam. And even if it weren't an official statement that makes you not Muslim, why would any of us take religious advice from somebody who thought slavery was okay? I mean,",
      "And by the way, I think slavery is fine. Would that person like get very far in political life? I mean or public moral life. Right. So this I was like, this is I was Like how can you ask me to do something That you know is going To either result in me In sort of an absurd Statement. Either I'm gonna deny that history Or I'm going to deny my own religion And I mean how can we Have this discussion?",
      "to the guy about this, he said, well I won't discuss this in public only in private. I was like why are you asking me to make this public declaration? Shadi, I don't want to interrupt you. I just want to finish by saying so when I was trying to write the book on Islam and slavery I decided to write and I remember I was in Turkey that summer it was the summer of 2017 and there was the Charlottesville protests and",
      "Jefferson in Charlottesville, the University of Virginia. He was a founder of University of and he's, of course, the guy who wrote, we believe all men are created equal, et cetera, with certain inalienable rights to freedom, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. And yet here's a guy who owned slaves, who had children with a female slave of his, et",
      "And then I remember watching Donald Trump speak about this, and he kind of summarized this in a way that only he just like a kind of with succinctness. Only he could. He says George Washington had slaves are going to take down the statue of George Washington. And then you just think about the sort of what it would require for the American political, the American polity to disassociate itself from George Washington, just the sheer toponymical challenge of changing names of everything.",
      "You know, and yet that's the logical conclusion. Like if you think slavery is a gross and intrinsic evil throughout space and time, somebody who is complicit in that is a is complicate with evil and they're not a qualified moral role model. Right? They are not qualified to give us leadership or advice or anything.",
      "Which is that every political movement, every religious movement has heroes. And those heroes have flaws. And how do we wrestle with those historical moments?",
      "that clip and then I want to dig into that because it's a question that haunts me as a Christian, as well. You know how do we deal with these the sins of our past? So let's play that clip.",
      "It's not a joke. Suddenly, it is a serious question. Thomas Jefferson indisputably was a great man. He was the author of the Declaration of Independence, founder of the University of Virginia and maybe most importantly, the greatest thinker in American political history. All of us live in his shadow. Unfortunately however, Jefferson was also a slaveholder. That's real. It's a moral taint. We ought to remember it. But for the fanatics on the left, it means that Jefferson must be purged from public memory forever.",
      "The demands are already coming that we do that. In 2015, students at the University of Missouri demanded the removal of a Jefferson statue. Two years ago on CNN, anchor Ashley Banfield suggested the Jefferson Memorial in Washington might have to go. Needless to say there is literally no limit when you start thinking like this. Last year hundreds of activists in New York demanded the statue of Theodore Roosevelt",
      "They argued that Roosevelt was a racist. That's the standard. Nobody is safe. Watch out, Abraham Lincoln. You're next. Now to be clear as if it's necessary slavery is evil. If you believe in the rights of the individual it's actually hard to think of anything worse than slavery but let's be honest up until 150 years ago when a group of brave Americans fought and died to finally put an end to it slavery was the rule rather than the exception around the world",
      "of years, sadly. Plato owned slaves so did Muhammad peace be upon him. Many African tribes held slaves and sold them the Aztecs did too before he liberated Latin America Simon Bolivar owned slaves slaveholding was so common among the North American Indians that the Cherokee brought their slaves with them on the Trail of Tears and it wasn't something they learned from the European settlers Indians were holding and trading slaves when Christopher Columbus arrived",
      "None of this is a defense of the atrocity of human bondage. It is an atrocity. The point, however, is that if we're going to judge the past by the standards of the present, if we are going to reduce a person's life to the single worst thing he ever participated in, we had better be prepared for the consequences of that and here's why. 41 of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence held slaves. James Madison, the father of the Constitution, had a plantation full of slaves.",
      "the bill of rights also owned slaves unfortunately but does that make what they wrote illegitimate if these men were simply racist villains and that's all they were then the society they created is as evil as they were there's no reason to respect its traditions or uphold its laws so i think the what's so he i think you have the kind",
      "session like a meeting you should have someone say call the God's peace and blessings down upon the Prophet Muhammad. And so Tucker did that for us, so that's good our our medjlas are is acceptable as a Muslim learning session. I was surprised by that and I chuckled a bit. I assume he was being ironic but I wasn't entirely sure. Who knows? Maybe he's surprising sometimes. What's fascinating",
      "address the question. He does a bait and switch because what he says, I can't remember if it was in that, I'm fairly sure it's in that segment. What he says is, he says slavery is evil. He says, in fact, if you believe in individual rights, there's not much worse than slavery. Okay? So but then he says slave is immoral taint. So on one hand, you have a statement such as it's an evil basically throughout space and time. There's",
      "with Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, it's a taint. It sort of takes the luster off a little bit, right? That is a bait and switch. You can't have both these things, right. So imagine if you say something is evil and someone is complicit in it, like imagine cannibalism or something or human sacrifice or child sacrifice or something. You wouldn't have somebody do child sacrifice and then be like, but they're",
      "actually, he does not have a way of dealing with this. Either you say, this is an evil throughout space and time, and we're going to act on that. We're going someone who's complicit in this or who defends it is disqualified morally, or we're gonna say that it's actually not a disqualifying evil throughout spaces. Essentially, we're gunna have to reduce the sort of level of evil that we're giving it in a kind of real trans-historical sense. Similarly,",
      "Similarly, something Matthew you said earlier. You said we have heroes but they have flaws. Yeah, a flaw is... They make a bad decision. Maybe they're a great president but not the best father or something like that. Being okay with slavery does not qualify as a flaw in our moral sentiments today.",
      "I guess what you're saying is it's not a mistake. It's not an whoopsie to be a slaveholder.",
      "is that although he's incredibly Islamophobic and hates religion, I don't agree with him on that. He really does kind of intellectually engage with things in a way that very few other people do. And so he talked about this idea of presentism and the idea that we're kind of holding the past to the standards of the present. But his way of dealing with that is he sees it as absurd because it's like us looking back at our childhood and kind of blaming ourselves for something",
      "we were 15 or something like that. You know, look, everybody makes mistakes. We can't hate ourselves for our past selves for what we did. The problem is that's not how we view our pasts, right? If you're a Christian, right, or if you're an American or whatever, in theory, all these different traditions who view their past either in terms of scripture or some kind of storehouse",
      "past is not infancy. Your past is in fact the best time. We're living in a degenerate era compared to the time of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad or the time when Jesus was in the world, right? I mean this is we're living like a shadow of a great era and we look back to that past to instruct us. We don't see it as something that we can forgive ourselves for",
      "for. Yeah, so a couple things I want to touch on here. There's a lot. Maybe the first thing is that in hearing this, I feel like my own apologetic instincts are coming out and let me just give voice to them as an example of what probably many Muslims would say in response to this discussion. They'd probably,",
      "that the Prophet wasn't necessary. So in the Quran, and you can talk more about this if you'd like Jonathan, the Quran encourages the freeing of slaves. There are really incredible and overwhelming incentives for the manumission of slaves and some scholars argue that through that kind of natural progression and organic development",
      "the quran and the prophets example kind of um it implants an ethical premise that leads to the emancipation of slaves that's one interpretation and i think it's one that like a lot of muslims will gravitate towards because it allows them",
      "forbidding slavery and actively supporting it. So that's where it gets a little bit tricky, because in many of these cases, whether it's the Prophet Muhammad, Jesus Christ, Apostle Paul, they wouldn't have enthusiastically supported or encouraged slavery to my knowledge. And I should just mention a couple examples, just in fairness to all of our faiths so we can be somewhat ecumenical.",
      "earlier that Jesus did not forbid slavery. The apostles included slave owners, and Paul instructed slaves in Scripture, in the New Testament to quote-unquote be submissive to their masters and to obey them as you would Christ. St. Augustine offered various justifications for slavery tied",
      "significant period of time, the Catholic Church was a leading slave owner. Catholic theorists in natural law tradition did spend many, many centuries finding justifications for slavery, so on and so forth. So I just want to be clear that we do have these various shades of either not condemning, but that's maybe",
      "as the pinnacle of sin, these distinctions presumably won't matter. You have to condemn something if it is one of the greatest sins in human history and that's where maybe it's not about flaws because you know for example we as Muslims don't believe the prophet is capable of major error or sin on theological matters he can have more... scholars debate whether",
      "of just kind of some more ordinary things like that. But when it comes to major sins, we as Muslims don't believe that the prophet is capable of committing major sins and presumably Christians would say something similar about the apostles. I just wanted to put that out there and feel free Jonathan to react to any of that. Again, my way of resolving...I call it the slavery conundrum right? So",
      "a conundrum we create for ourselves in, let's say kind of modern global Western society. Right? Where you basically have three axioms that cannot be individually... none of which can be rejected but all of which cannot be held together at the same time. It's impossible. So the first is slavery is a gross and intrinsic evil across space and time. Slavery was wrong 2000 years ago. S lavery was",
      "Slavery was wrong in Arabia. Slaverty was wrong. It's South America. Anything called slavery is evil throughout space and time doesn't matter to all slavery, slavery. Right? There's no like good slavery. Yeah, it's not that bad. It was okay. It Was more like being a servant. There's No again just imagine going into a cocktail party and someone's talking about slavery you're like yeah but it wasn't that bad his owner was really nice guy and he treated them very well stuff I mean just imagine the kind of what would happen",
      "happen in that situation. The third, so the second axiom is all slavery is slavery. The first axioma is that our pasts, our past has some kind of moral or religious authority over us or legal authority over",
      "say that, and you'll see biblical commentary even today will say that slavery in the Old Testament was not like American plantation slavery. It was more like servants and stuff like that. It wasn't that severe. So in that case they're getting out of it by saying not all slavery is slavery. So you violate the second axiom. You could say well",
      "well, back then it was okay. That would be violating the first axiom. Or you could say take down all the statues we don't care yeah get rid of them all which we should not be honoring slave owners and yet rid of the third axioms you know which is to say and this is by the way basically what William Lloyd Garrison a famous you know 19th century American abolitionist who's most active in the 1830s and he had a magazine journal called The Liberator He said about the Bible he says if it's between",
      "If it's between slavery and the Bible, the Bible has to go. Right? But it's interesting that in The Liberator, in one issue, he's talking about George Washington having slaves. And he says, well, yeah, but we don't really think he meant it. He didn't really believe in this. So he actually has an orthodoxy, right?",
      "politically can't. You know, he can't go against the kind of patron saint or whatever, the founder of our polity, which is interesting. And by the way, in case you have any ideas about George Washington, there's a book that came out a few years ago called Never Caught about the Washingtons had a female slave who ran away when they were in Philadelphia and they spent the rest of their lives hunting her down. They were not like, oh, it's okay. We don't really like slavery anyway,",
      "like slavery anyway, so it's good. God bless her. Nuh-uh. It's called Never Caught about a slave named Ona Judge. I recommend reading it. So I think that we have these axioms that we're committed to and very few of us are willing to make the sacrifice to actually make them coherent. And I'm not saying that... I mean, I'm Muslim.",
      "and what my prophet allowed is evil throughout space and time. I won't say that. It would make me not Muslim. But other people are not as comfortable with this. So Jonathan, we want to encourage people to read the book itself but if you would give us a little bit of preview of how you yourself wrestle with this conundrum and how do you emerge out it and make sense of all this? Yeah so what's the resolution basically?",
      "give it to us i feel like we just skipped the whole podcast and went to like the resolution but what no big deal well no i mean i think christians have their own ways of wrestling with these kinds of things but i'm genuinely curious i mean it's really interesting because you can see um muslims in the 20th and 21st centuries essentially doing the same thing that christians in the 19th and early 20th century were doing",
      "And it's not that's not because they're copycats or unreleased. It's like this is structurally what you have to do if you're presented with a revealed source that you look to as guidance from God and that is clashing with something that you are contending in the present isn't evil, like that is... The process is going to be the same right? So",
      "happened in the U.S., between, like, founding fathers or... So for example there's one of the founding fathers Benjamin Rush was a committed abolitionist so he's very anti-slavery and he has you know it's the signatory of the Declaration of Independence etc. And he's has this exchange of letters with this southern slave owner and the slave owner is like look, the Bible allows slavery",
      "allow slavery. And Benjamin Rush says, well okay yeah it's in the Old Testament but Jesus came to sort of he was this like force of liberation and wants us to end like sets us on the trajectory to end this. Like yeah he didn't say it's wrong because if he had it would have been too disruptive and to cause you know too much strife or something.",
      "slave owner's like, okay. Um, you're telling me that like the son of God comes to earth, right? Jesus, the guy who's like never makes any, makes any waves. Right. And he didn't just have, he didn'T just say like, Hey, slavery is wrong. Like maybe you can't get rid of it right now, but it'S morally evil. Right? Um, so you'Re basically saying this son of god on earth doesn'T have the courage of his convictions to say this thing IS wrong. There's no answer to that. Similarly",
      "Similarly, you can engage in what Shadi's suggesting, which again is a Christian response and a Muslim response, which is essentially what's called trajectory hermeneutics. Which is to say that, yeah, let's say the Quran or the Bible doesn't say slavery is evil, get rid of it. But it puts us on a trajectory towards that.",
      "us to realize that when it's feasible. The problem with that is, it allows us to make sense of moral progress. What it doesn't do is explain how God could ever have allowed something that's evil, right? So the problem isn't us talking about how it's good not to have slaves or how we should end slavery. Like, that's a theological discussion and a hermeneutic",
      "unks themselves very productively, right? Which can be a separate topic. But that's not the issue. The issue is if slavery is an evil across space and time why did God allow it even in the Old Testament? It's not good enough to say Jesus came and fulfilled the law and was a new law that replaced the law of the Old testament etc. If you believe the Old Testament is the word of God or revealed wisdom how did God ever allow that if it was an evil",
      "And there's no answer to that, except either to say it was okay back then or it wasn't as bad as the slavery that you think is really bad in America. Or something that a lot of Christians, a conclusion a lot",
      "at a specific time in their own words, with their own worldview and is not actually binding on people. In other times and places. So would those options which answer would you? So yeah I mean in some sense this is the challenge. I have a sense of where you land on this but maybe just spell it out a little bit more. Yeah so I can't tell if Matthew",
      "combust or is like mellow about this. It's like, I don't know. Let's see where this guy's going. I don' t want to foreclose on Christian responses. I'm giving my take on them and then... And by the way, the reason I'm even bringing them up is because it's actually a common script, right? It's a common... Their approach is shared between Muslim and Christians. There might be like a little tweaking here and there but I think they're fairly similar.",
      "So, you know, a fun fact on this point for people. One of the great Muslim theologians of the 20th century, someone who I've written about in my work, Rashid Rida, actually drew very directly from Western arguments where he basically said that the Quran couldn't have expressly forbid slavery because doing that would potentially lead to civil strife and chaos",
      "Yeah. It's interesting because, I mean, I don't want to say like if the Civil War was a good thing or bad thing, I'm not going to get into that.",
      "or bad thing. I'm not going to get into that, but it is interesting that I've read that with the money that was spent on this, like the Northern war effort, they could have literally bought all, essentially compensated the entire Southern economy for its slave economy, which is interesting. So earlier, for those who are just listening and not watching on YouTube,",
      "or had something to say, and Jonathan very thoughtfully saw that. So yeah, I do have a number of smaller quibbles with what each of you have said about Christianity and slavery, and I don't want to get lost in the quibble's about this or that but more sort of this broader discussion about guilt and how we think about the failures",
      "of people who are very important to us. And I guess, to just interject on the Christianity side, as a Christian my faith does not hang on whether or not Abraham was a good guy, or David was a god guy, Peter or Paul were good guys. My faith hangs on whether",
      "filled with stories about the failures of these people. Abraham lying and being a coward in one story, Peter once again being a coward and lying. Scripture itself is filled with the moral failures of our heroes—King David committing adultery",
      "And so what's interesting to me in this conversation is how there are so many similarities between Islam and Christianity wrestling with this issue. But there's also some really important differences.",
      "human beings, many human beings wrote the Bible over centuries in very different contexts in exile and in kingdoms and throughout the Roman Empire. So you have sort of this wild diversity",
      "of holy text to wrestle with that makes the conversation a little bit different, I think. And so anyways, just my own little reflection on there are moments when I listen to the two of you talking where I completely identify with the moral wrestling that you're having with the legacy of Muhammad. And then there are parts where I just can't identify at all",
      "So, for example, the fact that Abraham had slaves. That doesn't bother me at all in sort of the broader that doesn't create a moral crisis for me because my faith doesn't hang on him being perfect and to just then just to make the larger thing of you know this discussion about the the the moral standing of George Washington.",
      "of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and these other figures. What I'm thinking about in terms of our culture today is what is this longing for our heroes to be morally pure? What is this long that they have to or they will be canceled?",
      "We long for this level of purity from these people, that it is so scandalizing that they had a different moral vision from us. It seems that something different has happened over the last 20 years,",
      "And that, you know, for me, I love David's Psalms. You know, those are very important poetry and prayer to me. And I can enjoy those things knowing that he did some abominable things. But it seems that our American culture today can't abide that.",
      "cannot abide moral diversity or development today. I think you're correct, there are really important differences between a Muslim approach and a Christian approach to some of these questions. For example in the Islamic tradition prophets are morally upstanding right? So the story of David Bathsheba is not acceptable from",
      "from the point of view of the vast majority of Muslim theologians, right? On the other hand, I would say that you say your faith doesn't hang on Abraham being a good guy. Okay, but what about the law, right? So the law that's revealed to Moses is divine guidance. I think even from",
      "divine guidance, right? It's divine guidance that is later superseded by with the coming of Christ. But that law allows slavery and tells the Israelites to take slaves and tells it, you know, it allows Israelites to have slave concubines, et cetera, et",
      "I won't push this. No, do it. Do it. I'm a seminary professor so I'm used to these kinds of dialogues. You're not triggering me though. I would say that just funny you know the other day my kids watched the don't tase me bro clip when I was having to go back and tell them about the don' tase",
      "I'm not going to push this, right? I would just say what I've noted is that I think that there are more weeds to wrestle with and get out of on this than a lot of the Christian explanations suggest. The other thing I think it's interesting you mentioned is this notion of a quest for purity or demand of purity in our current age. And I think",
      "I know Shadi and I almost certainly on the same page in this. I hope I'm not like implicating him in this, but I mean, like, you know, when you're saying that a movie that came out like 10 years ago is didn't held up hold up well and it can't be watched now, you",
      "who thought slavery was fine, that's not like being too demanding. I mean, again, it is a fixed point of inquiry in our discourse today that slavery is a trans-historical gross intrinsic moral evil. So saying that I don't want to respect or venerate someone who engaged in that even if they did other things that were good, that is not an outlandish claim or demand.",
      "outlandish demands. But Jonathan, it seems that no one's really willing to take that premise to its logical conclusion because if they really believe that you can't take moral advice from anyone who was complicit in slavery or didn't condemn it even then you would have to basically remove the entire history of human existence before as you said circa 1700 so you would lose every single philosophical and religious tradition",
      "So I would maybe just, I would wonder if they're holding to the, if they have the courage of their own convictions.",
      "Some like there was this one guy who is like a black intellectual activist and he had this Like kind of tweets or memes or something, and it was like Racists and they're saying oh so we're gonna get rid of the Statute of George Washington And then it's like black people respond yes, and then the racists are like dot-dot-dot. We don't know how to respond So there are some people and I think I mean think about this from like a kind of Marxist march of history towards",
      "of history towards some kind of perfection, Shadi. Right. There's no problem with getting rid of our past. Right? Our past is just a parade of failures that we're marching towards a more perfect future in theory. So we have no attachment to the past. So there are people who from a variety of social justice activists, leftist perspectives and I'm not trying to lump all",
      "and dismiss it. I'm just trying to say convenience, right? I think are actually quite willing to pay that price would do it happily to get rid of all the statues and all this heritage. So Jonathan in the modern moral imagination, uh, moral progress is possible potentially even inevitable. I's a Muslim. Um, what are,",
      "Do you think moral progress is possible or is happening or is inevitable?",
      "to condemn my prophet and my scripture. And if somebody wants to say Jonathan Brown is a bad person because of that, then I guess you know, I'm guilty as charged, right? Like, I am not going to say that the Quran allows something evil and the prophet did something morally evil. I will not say that. Okay. So what I'm... In terms of those three axioms, I would actually disagree with the first two. I would say one,",
      "say one, slavery is not a gross intrinsic evil throughout space and time. And part of the reason you can say that is because not all slavery is slavery. I don't think that all things that we call in history slavery are actually the same and that they deserve the same moral judgment. I think some of them are a lot less severe than others. There could be certain things like the way that a field hand is treated in Georgia getting whipped and raped and all this stuff",
      "that, yeah, I'd say that is a gross intrinsic moral evil throughout space and time. And I think if that's done to anybody in history, that's evil. But I don't think all slavery throughout human history—things we call slavery today or the past—can be labeled with that moral judgment. Okay then here's the second problem.",
      "right? And I feel in my gut that slavery is wrong. Like, there's a lot of Muslims. Shadi's probably met these people. You know, they'll say things like, if you tell me that the Prophet had slaves or that he allowed slavery, I won't be Muslim anymore. For them, the moral certainty of the evil of slavery is fixed and any other commitment they make has to fit with",
      "That's the immovable point. And any faith commitment or confession they make has to be tailored to that, right? So how do you explain—if you're telling me slavery is not as gross and intrinsic evil throughout space and time, explain to me how I feel such certainty that it is.",
      "I'm going to guess that all three of us, when we watched 12 Years a Slave or Roots or Amistad, when that guy is saying like give us us free. All of us are probably our eyes were like pouring water. OK, I'm just going to you know and guess we're not heroes for this. We're just Americans in good moral standing who've been raised well in our society.",
      "How can you then go and say that this in the past was not evil? Your moral conviction today is testimony to the evil of slavery in the",
      "although we feel that they have to be true for everybody in history, are simply not the case. Right? So and this is an interesting I bring this I always tell my you know discuss with my students which is I'm going to I would contend and I don't know if you guys disagree with me the two things that will turn your stomach not just not just you say this is bad not just to say I disapprove it's wrong but really make you sick slavery",
      "slavery and pedophilia. Am I right? That's fair, I think. Okay, if I say hey guys a guy down the street was brutally murdered two weeks ago somebody took his body chopped it up and spread it on the lawn you'd be like oh yeah that's messed up but I didn't feel anything murder is wrong then he told me a guy",
      "sex with a six-year-old. Like, I actually feel something in my stomach. Or you say like, you know, someone has a slave. There's a slave chained up in his house. But here's the thing. All societies in human history have considered murder wrong. Most societies in humanity and society did not consider slavery wrong and would not consider",
      "like, let's say a six or seven year old. This was actually totally fine. Even saying that freaks me out. OK, even but it's true. St. Augustine, his fiancee was 12. He was in his 30s. Right. You know, so the point this is complete and that's not even a big deal. The Prophet Muhammad married a nine year old and his critics, people who literally sat around looking for things to criticize him",
      "him for, especially in his sex life, didn't criticize him for that. No one criticized him for until the very late 19th century. Do you understand my point? Right. Yeah. So it is interesting that the two things that make us morally sick to our stomachs are two things",
      "So I think that one thing that you're saying is that our deepest moral intuitions and convictions can be wrong, just to kind of put it bluntly. We can be wronk about the things that we feel most deeply and resolutely, which has, I think, profound implications if it is in fact true. OK, I don't want to say they're wrong there right in our time. Right?",
      "get married when she's nine. Like that's not, I'm not wrong in saying that that's actually completely correct in our society because she has to go to school and she's probably immature and she wants to, you know, she has",
      "new conclusion about the immorality of slavery at the same time that they had discovered that you can use fossil fuels to create steam to move stuff, and you don't need animals and humans to move anymore. That's not coincidence. Even Aristotle says in his politics there will be slavery until looms like the things we've clothed, until loons move themselves which actually is the case. That basically what happened right? So these moral intuitions are not wrong now. They're contingent",
      "They're historically contingent.",
      "sentient moral, competent moral thinkers and spiritual reasoners could not have these reactions. There's something wrong with them in the past. Yeah. So I just two points I want to make, and then I want get Matt's thoughts on this. Um, so I think one way of dealing with this and, you know, various theologians",
      "that if you see something in Scripture that provokes this gut reaction, this sense that we can't reconcile our moral convictions to Scripture or revealed text, that we",
      "as to what was ultimately right and wrong. And until that moment of final judgment, we can issue I think what he calls a faith-based objection which is to kind of acknowledge our discomfort but then say that it can't have a resolution. So maybe that's one way of resolving and probably in some ways that's what I would lean towards, a kind of more sophisticated version",
      "an available option for everyone. The other point I want to make, and Matt this is more relevant to you but i think it brings us back to some of these bigger questions um you know with Christian scripture with the christian tradition traditions matter to different degrees and perhaps in the christians context it's less central than the discursive Islamic",
      "you know, let's say 1,700 years. There is the New Testament, there is the example of Christ, there his Word made flesh and people who are committing themselves to that for many, many centuries. How do you—I just would want to hear more from a Christian perspective—how do you make sense of the fact",
      "this flaw, which is—and I know that your faith only hangs on Christ, but presumably people who follow Christ are doing so for what they consider to be legitimate reasons and they're not coming to the same big definitive conclusions that you are. And I'm just curious how you would grapple with",
      "condemn and forbid slavery? Because that is the question that was posed to Benjamin Rush, I'm actually not sure what the answer to that could possibly be. Because unlike the Prophet Muhammad, if Christ is divine, if he is God, son of God, and has this kind of definitive sovereignty and authority, presumably there would",
      "Yeah, yeah. Wonderful questions.",
      "moral conundrum with quite the level of intensity, because there are so many of these questions. Why did God allow slavery? Why does God allow war? Why doesn't God allow pain or suffering if God is omnipotent? God could have done all of these things. So my faith is filled with mystery and questions that",
      "too. So I'm not so haunted by the things my forefathers have done in that, and that's what was going on with sort of this contemporary desire for moral purity. And so I think yeah, this is too broad of a statement but I think that in general the Christian imagination",
      "might make space for more moral mystery than the Islamic moral imagination. And I'd be interested to hear your reflections on that, but sort of the moral messiness of life and the sense that I hang on the goodness and holiness of God",
      "love and justice and mercy. And mysteriously, God continues to work with morally flawed human beings and cultures throughout time in history because God is gracious.",
      "or in 1800 America, or in the year 100 in Rome. I don't know why God is not making those things. And in the Christian tradition we have this word Maranatha which means come Jesus quickly, come quickly, stop this! And so we have to live with this mystery of why do we live in this time of God's patience?",
      "with evil and injustice and violence. And that is a mysterious question, but we rest in knowing that God is good and just and is wise. So that may be an intellectual cop-out, right? So that might be just unacceptable in the academy to sort of say well it's mysterious. But that's sort of my initial thing",
      "my initial thing. In terms of why Jesus didn't condemn slavery outright or why Abraham didn't, or David or Paul, I think that what I would say is Jesus did not condemn the Roman Empire for wars of aggression. He did not",
      "He did not condemn a wide variety of, you know, moral evils. And part of that is that he's within a moral universe of first century Judaism, which already knew a lot of things about what God wanted. And so these things—he didn't have to state prostitution is wrong because in the Jewish moral imagination that was sort of well understood.",
      "And I think what's notable about ancient Israelite culture is how restrained any kind of engagement with slavery was.",
      "restricted in ancient Israelite culture. Why did that happen? Where did that come from? Because it was so prevalent everywhere. I find that more morally interesting. That seems to me to be the problem to wrestle with. So yeah, and then finally,",
      "understand that to be a universal rule. I see the Bible to be complex patchwork of poetry and stories, laws and teachings to a very diverse network of peoples over 1,000 years. They have very different moral questions that different books and verses are interacting with.",
      "And so I see that if I want to understand what is a quote-unquote biblical understanding of politics, I'm going to get a lot of different insights. And my task is not to sort of grab onto one verse or another but to put them in conversation with one another, to say, okay, I see this is being said over here, but I also see this as being said.",
      "that the very first thing that the people of Israel learn about God, their very first encounter with God is that he hates their slavery and wants to save them from it. That he hears their cry and he responds and he liberates them. That's the first thing they learn about",
      "And whenever moral questions come up, it's always the same thing. It's treat the widow and the foreigner like yourselves because you yourselves were slaves in Egypt. So the whole Israelite morality is built off this understanding that God liberated you so you should liberate others. You should have this community",
      "and liberating force because of who your God is. And so, yeah, I mean those are just some of my reflections and I welcome pushback on these kinds of things but yeah, those are some of the things I'm thinking about. I would say a couple of things I want to mention kind of respond to that also building on our earlier discussion which is when we",
      "When we think about moral progress, I think one of the really important things to ask ourselves is what is the source of morality? Right. We especially I think the United States tend to think it's interesting.",
      "We talk about things like custom and moral relativism with kind of, they're sort of disdained ideas. You know, moral relativist is kind of lazy. It's cowardly. It not a conviction. And yet I think that for me it's very clear... This is actually the general position of Muslim scholars historically. Almost all human morality is customary, right? It's based on custom",
      "custom. So God gives us certain rules, don't steal, don' fornicate, don eat pork right? And everything else is customary it's just you know do you tip or not does the husband help cook dinner or not? Does the husband change diapers or not this all customary how you know when your parking you know a guy comes in front ways and back ways of the parking space who gets to this is all custom right so morality is dictated by custom",
      "dictated by custom. And that's not a bad thing. Like, when you have a customary moral conviction, that's a real moral conviction. So if I see somebody yelling at somebody on the street or treating them badly and I'm disgusted by that and I go intervene, that is based on custom but that's what's a moral reality. That has legal reality if we're in a court, that has moral reality, right? Yet so much of this is actually technological and economic",
      "economic. And I mean, one example I like to give students is the idea of cleanliness. So if you come across somebody who smells really bad, really dirty, they smell, they have horrible BO, there's almost this moral revulsion that this is a dirty person, they're not really well behaved. But the idea that you can smell good and shower every day or twice a day or whatever",
      "This is entirely economic and technological reality. There's no moral element to it, right? And yet the Prophet Muhammad—these guys bathe once a week maybe, if they're alive—once a week, maybe, and then maybe more than once a but they probably—the companions of the Prophet, the people that we—the disciples of Jesus—probably did not smell that good. We would be shocked by their environment,",
      "I think we have to think about a lot of custom. If so much of our morality is actually custom and so much if custom is actually shaped by technology in economics, then we have understand that can change. And that doesn't mean it's not meaningful. It doesn't means it's just not meaningful, it just means that it's... Our morality is not constantly accessing these different moral truths. Actually, our morality",
      "like economic resources and technology. The second thing I wanted to say in response to what Matthew was saying is it's interesting that the first people who start to organize and express abolitionist sentiments are, first of all, they're Quakers in 1689-1690 in Pennsylvania,",
      "interesting that you have a religious tradition, in this case Christianity which never had any problem with slavery. Yet the first real motions of abolitionism and moral objections to slavery come from people who's...in whom though that objection is 100% religiously motivated. Christian religiously",
      "The people who in the late 1600s and early 1700s, and even someone a little bit earlier like Bartolomeo de las Casas in the Caribbean and Spain. Who start to really criticize slavery? Morally criticize it. They do so because of their direct experience with the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas.",
      "is something that is so violent and so grotesque, that it really shocks people. It shocked people someone like de las Casas or British or French Christians in the late 1600s early 1700s who in their own countries were not troubled by slavery. It was just...it was not a big deal but when they see the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in the plantation slavery",
      "it shocks them. And that when you see these Quakers and then later abolitionists in the 1700s in the U S and Britain, it's almost all what is it called? Nonconformist. So basically different Protestant Puritan groups who are, who see their objection to slavery as an expression of",
      "man and the unacceptability of how fellow human beings are being treated like this. So it's interesting to think about that people's motivations, their kind of opposition to slavery, their moral objection can come out of that same ethos and that same tradition that had previously essentially approved of this. But what changes is",
      "Most slavery in human history, the vast majority of slavery in history is not justified racially. It's not justified based on how you look or what your hair is like. Right? It's based on you're just someone from not our group that we captured. We don't care what you look like. The idea that you're saying these people are enslaveable because of how they look and because",
      "discuss some of these early abolitionist figures and especially kind of Enlightenment people like Condorcet and Voltaire. In the case of Islam, what's very interesting again a tradition that never had a Never declared slavery morally wrong. Interestingly, and I write this in my book Muslim scholars could not say slavery was morally wrong because the Quran allowed it. If the Quran allows it, it can't be morally evil. What they did say very clearly however",
      "very clearly, however, in the pre-modern period is slavery is harmful. Why is it harmful? It's harmful because it prevents someone from having control over their own decisions. It prevents someone enjoying the fruits of their own labor. But what they said is that harm is superseded by the property rights of the owner. So that's why",
      "rights to the owner should precede the harm that's done to the person. But freeing slaves, and I think Shadi mentioned this, freeing slave is an obsession in the Quran, the precedent of the Prophet Muhammad, and Islamic law. The incentives to free slaves, encouragement to free slave, legal obligation to free slaves comes up over and over again. So what's interesting is when Muslims start to",
      "kind of become morally convinced of abolition as Christians had in the Americas and like the British, kind of an American Atlantic world in the 1700s, 1800s. They also start to express that through their religious tradition, like the Quranic and prophetic mandate to free slaves. So in both cases, a tradition that allows slavery can also become an engine for emancipation",
      "emancipation. That's a really great point and you know it does bring us a little bit back to the role that custom plays I just want to like unspool that a little more because our customary morality in America today is changing rapidly or seems to be changing rapidly and if we kind of zero you know zero in or out beyond the question of slavery these debates are",
      "These debates are applicable to any number of other moral and ethical dilemmas. The things that would have been seen as morally acceptable or tolerable in good company just, I don't know, 10 years ago or 12 years ago are now seen as something approaching evil. Just to give an obvious example, President Barack Obama did not support gay marriage when he became president. That only happened later on.",
      "later on. That wasn't too long ago, and now the thought that someone as supposedly liberal and progressive as Obama seemed to be wouldn't have this kind of intuitive moral knowledge—it does sort of make a lot of people wonder. And then with new developments around gender identity",
      "standards of moral progress keep on changing and much more rapidly than they used to because of technological advances, social media. The way that things spread very quickly in the zeitgeist almost like a sort of contagion. So ideas spread very fast which means that morality can shift very fast. And I'm curious how this fits into your kind",
      "if you're saying that custom is important and that it's legitimate, and that in some sense we should be deferential towards it. Can we also say that we as Americans should be differential to the new customary morality that is emerging just in the last 10 to 15 years? Or is there a moral case for resisting it? I can answer but also I don't want to like shut out Matthew",
      "shout out matthew he's not he's in the combustion phase he's a thoughtful phase but maybe he wants to participate yes i look more relaxed yeah uh well matt on this point i'd be curious what would you say to this i i think this goes back to my question about moral progress and do we believe",
      "shifts morally. I think that's to be expected. What worries me is a belief in moral progress. I'm not very convinced. I don't feel comfortable saying that today we are more moral than France in 1700 or Kenya",
      "Kenya in, you know, in 700. I think that human beings as a Christian, I believe that human being are sinful and rebellious and flawed. They're also graced with... And given a conscience. So I think what I worry about is the sense that we need to purify our history because",
      "history because we are morally superior rather than we have some level of reverence for the fact that there might be moral wisdom from the past or from cultures other than our own. So I get concerned when we are locked into a singular custom, you know? This group of people at this age is morally",
      "opposed to having a sort of moral curiosity and a moral humility, um, to learn from, uh, other cultures and other times. Um, I think that's, that's particularly important because I know with great conviction that, you know, my sons and, and my grandsons will, you",
      "done differently. But hopefully there will be some things that they, that they miss and they would love for that virtue to come alive again in American life. And so I just wanted to dig in on that little piece there that's, um, I do have concerns about the current cultural milieu that, that believes that it has progressed because I see a culture filled with consumerism",
      "consumerism, individualism, selfishness. And the scourge of abortion to me is terrible. So I don't think that we are this morally evolved incredible society in that kind of way and I hear those kinds of notes in our culture today and that concerns me as opposed to a sort of moral humility",
      "from, you know, other cultures and customs. That's what I get worried about. You know, there was this Onion headline maybe in the early 2010s where it's like Kim Jong-un is like, of course I support gay marriage. I'm not a monster, right? But I think the problem is the kind of absolute moral absolutism that people engage in which",
      "which is really bizarre because I don't understand like progressive mindsets. I can understand a progressive mindset that says, like it's sort of more humble kind of like what Matthew was talking about. Like we're you know, we may not we might have different views in the next couple years but that would make me very merciful towards people and who didn't share that view because what I'm basically saying is I'm going to think I was wrong in a week so I really",
      "So I really like, but there's the you have the opposite. You have this absolute moral certainty about the latest moral conclusion to the extent that anybody who doesn't share it has to be condemned absolutely, which doesn't make any sense to me because we are all going to have to absolutely condemn ourselves for this certainty in another year. Like that doesn't",
      "better than this. And then like, you know there's gonna be another iPhone, you",
      "very important. And I always think of this line in Lawrence of Arabia where Prince Faisal Alec Guinness says, you know, for Lawrence compassion is an obsession. For me it's merely good manners. You may decide which of the two is more reliable. Good manners are reliable. Like one of the problems I think with a kind of social justice and I don't say that in a dismissive way or a kind",
      "is that it's, it is absolutist in an almost comical way. Right? Where you can't like I can't be on the same... I can' t be in the same podcast as Shadi because Shadi did X. So Shadi once said X about I'm not going to get into the hummus. Shady knows what I'm talking about. Okay. Shadid made a statement about hummus, I don't want to get Into it. There are people who say I should not be on The same platform of Shadi Because of the humus statement",
      "hummus statement, right? But if you take that... I just want a point of clarification. Are you serious that there are actually people because of the hummus tweet which is actually a real tweet that I wrote and some people really didn't like it this is not just something that Jonathan is joking about but I'm curious if there are actual people who see that as morally disqualifying. I mean... You want me to name names? No, no, don't name names!",
      "that you know i think there are for the hummus thing but let's take it like let's bring it one level closer to like politics just one level like one you know one ratchet down okay but for the outsiders guys what is the horrible thing that shadi had to say about hummus i can't i'm not gonna say it shadi um own it own it sir say it out loud okay it it wasn't meant",
      "in Amsterdam, and I thought their hummus was very good. And I didn't think a lot about the political implications of what I would say, but I made a comment. And we Arabs, we should be better. We shouldn't be shown up by Israeli restaurants on our original food. But let's be honest, Israeli restaurants do make really good hummus, something to that effect. Yeah. And it wasn't well thought out, obviously.",
      "out, obviously. Okay. All I know is Shadi's the guy who invented in my book, the phrase RIP my mentions. So but my point is that if you can't, like it's manners that allow us to interact with one another. I'm a professor, I'm not any smarter than a lot of other people in our society, etc., etc. But it's pretty clear",
      "And one of the problems is that both sides, or if there's more than one side, every side seems to think that everybody in the country should have to abide by its sense of morality.",
      "People it's a sense of not necessarily humility. I think humility is important, Matthew, but I can be dead certain that abortion is wrong.",
      "sometimes just share a meal with someone who I disagree with strongly, that allows us to coexist. And if we go around always expressing every one of our moral certainties in the most strident way and demanding that everybody around us either accept that or go to hell, we can't live with one another. You can maybe in a homogenous society but not in one that's very diverse like ours. So Jonathan by God's providence you have brought us to the core",
      "us to the core question of this podcast, which is how we live together with deep difference. And I think there's much more to be done in political theory and political theology around manners and custom. And, I think you're absolutely right. It's more than just humility because you can have a real conviction that you're unwilling to apologize for but being willing",
      "to you could use the word forbearance um that you're willing to bear difference uh in your presence difference that is deep that is right up in your face that's difficult and that is something that you know muslim moral philosophers have looked at christian moral philosophers",
      "of political manners quit i mean to put it in that way uh that the sort of basic understanding of forbearance and willing to break bread and sit down uh and have these deep convictions uh and talk with one another and in a way this conversation has to do with actually historical manners um being being a person who's willing to forbear and sit with",
      "sit with our ancestors and have a moral conversation with them rather than simply tearing them down or burning them. We have to recognize these human beings, they are fellow humans. They're our brothers and sisters and we still have to break bread with them and acknowledge that they're not moral aliens. They don't exist. Our times and histories are contingent",
      "And we could be connected to that. We've got a lot more to talk about here, but I do know we gotta wrap this up a little. Shadi, do you have something else? But I just wanna say thank you so much Jonathan for digging in and Shadi and I try to tackle difficult subjects in our own writing and our conversations. And while there's more disagreement to be explored here",
      "I just really appreciate the courage and the care that you have in tackling these kinds of conversations. And it's a rare thing in the modern academy, and I know you've taken a lot of hits for that. It's noteworthy, and i'm grateful you made time for us today. Yeah, amen to that!",
      "talk about a very difficult topic. I wasn't sure exactly how it would go. I don't think it's common in mainstream podcasts to have such a deep dive around slavery, religion and moral progress. We did it! And um...and I think it is doable. And we wouldn't have been able to do that without Jonathan Brown so thanks again Jonathan for being a part of us and joining",
      "I hope you all enjoyed it too. So thanks for listening to Zealots at the Gate, dear listeners. If you like what you heard today with Jonathan, this is one of the episodes where we would really love to get your feedback and see how you react to the various points and questions we raise. Oh, Jonathan's shaking his head. You guys can have the feedback. You can share positive feedback with me. Sure, okay. But don't share the negative feedback. Deal.",
      "Deal, deal. And if you like this episode, check out our other episodes and check out",
      "So please do feel free to reach out. We would love to hear from you. Our thanks as well to our sponsor, Fuller Seminaries, Mao Institute of Faith and Public Life, Friends Zealots at the Gate is hosted by Comment Magazine. It is produced by the wonderful Miss Allie Crummey, audience strategy by Matt Crummie, and editorial direction by Anne Snyder. I am Matthew Kamink. And I'm Shadi Hameed. Thanks for joining us, everyone.",
      "joining us everyone thanks guys bye"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Muslim Identity_Case Studi_sXrNnNHV7p0&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748673461.opus",
    "text": [
      "As I said, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Rahim. So I was coming over here and thinking about something my other students... He's staying hydrated too but he is not doing it very well. You have a drinking problem? No. You ever see this movie Airplane where the guy has a drinking problems every time he drinks he puts it on his shoulder.",
      "Okay. So anyway, I was talking to my other students asked me where I went. I gave a lecture yesterday to a group of students and they were non-Muslim students until they're asking me about inheritance in Islam and Muslim families. So how does like inheritance work? And I said well",
      "In Islamic law, these laws are in the Quran actually. And well some of them are in their Quran. So for example, the Prophet tells us that you can do with up to one third of your estate like everything you own, you can give it to anybody you want except those people who already are gonna inherit from you unless all those people agree but otherwise like for example let's say",
      "For example, let's say I want to give a third of my estate to Dhar al-Hijrah. I can do that. No one can stop me. None of my kids or wife or parents or brothers and sisters can stop right? Now otherwise the rest of my wealth is going to get divided up according to the shares that are stated in the Quran and in the Sunnah of the Prophet. Right so my wife is gonna get I think 1 4th",
      "of my fourth or eighth, an eighth. My wife's gonna get an eighth of my estate and then the rest is going to divide between my two sons. And it doesn't matter like let's say one of them is a jerk and he you know I don't like his life choices and he has bad hair cuts all the time for example. I just don't approve of his lifestyle.",
      "There's nothing I can do, right? This guy, he's going to inherit half. So I was thinking to myself, this is a real blessing because a lot of times, especially when... I see this a lot with my relatives, my non-Muslim relatives. People are always trying to be nice to their relatives that they think they're going to",
      "You know, if you're nice to somebody, you're a nice someone because you want to be nice to them. Because there's no... It's not going to do any benefit right? To be nice your uncle or not, right? Now, if the person wants like let's say if I want, I can give part of that one third to one of the people who is gonna inherit already but all the other inheritors have to agree.",
      "Hadith of the Prophet, alayhi salat wa sallam. La wasiyata li warath illa insha'al waratha. Right? So you can't give... I can give up to a third of my wealth to like Darul Hijra but I can't get any to let's say I talked about my wife and my two sons unless my wife my two son all agree that okay let's give one more to this son because he needs more help or he has a business he wants to start or something like that. So anyway I was telling my students about this",
      "about this. They were, you know... So in the Quran it says that a daughter gets half the share of his son and of course the students are like why is that? It's not fair. And I said well, you now, the Quran doesn't say why but scholars have usually assumed that it's because men have more responsibilities. A Muslim man has to pay mahr when he",
      "responsible for his female relatives. So I'm responsible for my sisters, I'm responsibIle for my mom right? I'm responbible like I'm reponsibIble for all these all the females who are related to me if they aren't able to care for themselves or if they don't have someone to care fo them. But you know in any case I thought it's interesting because these students were thinking was",
      "And what the students were thinking was, they said this is an example of in Islam. This means that Islam doesn't really think of women as having the same value as men. So I thought about that and I said well I don't think that's true because for example in the same verses in the Quran who knows how much if I have parents my parents are dead but let's say I had parents",
      "How much would each of them inherit from me if I died? Anybody know? Come on guys, use your phones for something useful. Who said that? You? Well actually that's wrong but it's not a bad guess. But you know what, look, look. Mashallah this guy's brain is working. There's like nerves or...",
      "electrical impulses are being sent along synapses, activity is happening. One fifth? Are you guys just guessing? You guys are hysterical. I'm thinking about my kids",
      "thinking about my kids being your age and I'm like, I'm full of dread. But also I'm optimistic because I'm gonna abuse them mercilessly. I'm going to let them have it whenever they make bad hairstyle choices. So my point is that how much is it? You said a fifth, you said a fourth sub-reef. What?",
      "Yeah, well it depends on who else is alive but one sixth each. So I have a question if my father and mother both get one sixth what does that mean about how does the Quran think about the value of men and women? In this case its same then I thought about this hadith",
      "Hadith in Sunan of Nisa'i and Sunan at-Tirmidhi where the Prophet, a man comes to the Prophet and asks him he wants to give gifts to his children. His children, he's alive, his children are alive right? He wants to get them a gift. And he asked the Prophet how much should I give to each one? And the Prophet says be just between them. What does that mean?",
      "What does that mean? Well, that's an interesting question. What does it mean to be just? Here is a question. So let's say what's your name phone play guy? Adam. So Adam and then what's you're name? Ahmed. Ahmed, what's her name? Tasneem. Tasneeem? Yeah. Oh, that' nice name. Okay, and? Maryam. Maryam, so let's",
      "I have a pi, how am I going to be just in dividing this pi between these people? So it seems like the default is one quarter each right. Okay but now let's imagine that you know it has been a long weekend and you guys have been doing all of your stuff activities and Adam and Tasneem they were working",
      "They were working the whole time. They were making the coffee, they were making tea, they organized everything and what was your name again? Ahmed and Miriam, they're basically sitting around playing on their phones for two days. So now let's say who... Now I have this pie how do I divide it justly? They've been working hard. You guys are all four of you hungry but Adam and Tasneem",
      "common good, Ahmed and Miriam they were basically sitting around. What is the just way to divide my pie? You still think equally? I mean maybe you're right, maybe that's correct but probably you could also make an argument that Adam and Tasneem should get more",
      "should get more. I mean, they spent more calories didn't they? Correct? Does everyone know the difference between you probably know this because you follow like woke social media or something like that, between equality and equity? Who knows the difference in between this? You guys why don't you stop talking to each other and listen to me answer my questions.",
      "intelligence, not your ability to whisper probably unimportant things to your friends. What's the difference between equality and equity? Yes, what's your name? Yusuf. I'm blown away people. Yusof you've restored my hope in the youth of today.",
      "I was, I was going to go home. I was gonna start crying. I Was gonna write some kind of insulting social media post but now Yusuf has restored my faith so Equality is when things are divided equally equity is when you as the Prophet says Everybody who has a haq gets their haq everybody who has it right gets there right",
      "right gets their right. Everybody gets what? Everyone ever heard, he got his just desserts? You ever heard that phrase? Just desserts. You never heard this phrase? Not Adam, not the guy. Who's this? Abdullah. You've never heard he got your just desserts. He got his something like that. You're a saint. Thank you, Abdullah. My faith is also bolstered. Sabri, you've heard it? He got",
      "you get at the end of the meal which you really want it's from a French word to deserve. The idea is like oh, you've earned this here's your desserts right? So dessert comes actually when you say just as already means what you deserve. When you say oh he got his just desserts this is a saying it doesn't mean he got like a pie or something or cake it means he got what was coming to him.",
      "Good job, Fahmy. So with our pi example we had like one example is to think about one way of being just is to divide things equally. One way is to divided things equitably. Is one better than the other? Is one more just than the another I don't know. I mean it kind of depends right?",
      "Right? I mean, you sort of. It kind of depends on the context like let's yes. Okay yeah so I have a question now let's say that",
      "Let's say that there's two teenagers. One of them is like the best, this person is gonna be a professional football player. You know, this guy, I'm just gonna use guys because I don't know about girls' sports. And I guess they won't get paid that much so it's not going to help my example but let's...",
      "this one guy, this guy's gonna be a professional football player. Another guy is going to be a profession Thumb Twiddler. This dude, this guys he's not gonna make any money. He's got no future in professional sports maybe he's got nothing future in anything. Not very impressive. Now let's say that some crazy, some guy is a jerk and goes around attacking Muslim people",
      "and he hits one guy in the arm with a baseball bat, and the other guy in an arm of the baseball bat. How much should they get paid? Like how much did they get as their damages from the court when this guys is having his... Hmm? Or from insurance, yes put that way. Do you think there's gonna be equal amount? So the guy who's going to make millions and millions of dollars using his passing arm should get the same amount",
      "not gonna, you know wasn't really going to make any money. Interesting. That's not what the American law says. Although interestingly okay that's interesting I'm surprised that was your answer does everyone agree with that? I'm curious I'm not angry or anything I'm just curious she said there should be equal amount no what's your name? Hatham so what do you think",
      "but when they got the future ruined, you get paid more because then more. Yeah. In fact, they lost more, right? Their arm was more valuable basically their arm was valuable, right. So Tom Brady's arm is not like my arm now it doesn't mean my arm is worthless, but it just means that Tom Brady arms are worth a lot more. But so it's interesting like I thought this example",
      "I thought this example would be clear, but Marion disagreed with me. So it's not clear. You said they were both attacked because the attacker was attacking Muslim people. Yeah. They should receive the same kind of punishment. That's interesting. No, that's an interesting question. So let's say... Let's think of another example.",
      "Equity versus equality. It's like a raffle, right? Everybody should get one raffle ticket, right so everybody gets the same number of raffle tickets. Everybody has the same chance to win. There it seems like equality is a good thing what's just but when we think about let's say a company",
      "a company and there's a couple people who are in a company, and one person is doing all the work or let's say 90% of the work when the other people are all doing 10% of their work. You think it's just that the person who's doing 90% percent of the works maybe gets more money? Or not? Depends on what?",
      "they do other things. All of the things are equal, all other things are equals. No it's a good, what's your name? Omar is making a good point. There may be more things at play right? Maybe one person is doing 90% of the work but the other person is 10% of their work but they're bringing 90% percent of the assets, they provide the computers and chairs in that building everything. Good point.",
      "But let's say all things being equal, maybe the person who is doing it, let's just he's bringing 90% of everything. Maybe he should get more like more of the earnings of the company or if it becomes successful, he'll take get more of earning over there as a value. Okay so it's interesting that in the case of the... There's another Hadith this one is narrated by Ibn Abbas",
      "where Ibn Abbas remembers the Prophet saying, not be just between the children. Be equal between them. That's interesting. So what he remembers is the Prophet said, be equal between",
      "different ways of being just, you don't know which one to take. And you have another companion remembering the hadith and it's give equally between them. What do you think you should do with these two pieces of evidence? Let's say I tell you guys go get me a beverage.",
      "And then someone else says, no he said go get me a hot beverage. What should you do with these two pieces of information? I mean the one that's more detailed is actually gonna like modify the other one. You're like oh this ones unclear, this ones clear so we're going to take the clearer piece of evidence and it's gonna like modified the other on. It's gonna specify right? So its interesting in this case",
      "Islam is saying, is like actually if you have children and you're giving them gifts, you should give equally between them. What does that say about the valuing of boys and girls or males and females in the Prophet's view? Yeah they are equal right? And then it's an interesting case",
      "It's an interesting case because Muslim scholars historically had no problem. So let, let's say that I have two sons and a daughter and I want to make sure the daughter like gets you know maybe um... You know she wants to do a business or something or she wants go live separately from another country or something so i want to",
      "for my estate. I go and ask my sons, I say okay listen guys do you agree that I'm gonna give some of this one third to your sister? And then she's going to get the same as you? And they said yes. Muslim scholars had no problem like writing the documents for this and helping families work this stuff out. So the bottom line is they didn't have any problem. Like there was no indication that Muslim scholars ever thought that these Quranic verses meant",
      "that boys were somehow more valuable than girls. And we know from this hadith I told you about the prophet answering the question about giving gifts to a person, you know, a person giving gifts their children when they're alive, there's no evidence that the Prophet thought that boys should get more than girls in fact it seems like he is saying give equally to your children. So you have like a system that as of default or presumption gives more to your son",
      "more to your son than to your daughter because the son's probably going to have more responsibilities. But if you don't want to do that, or if the son is going to be less responsible, maybe the son kind of an idiot and the daughter is really intelligent then there's no problem with giving more to the daughter. Okay. So I thought that was an interesting answer to the student's question because their assumption about what the Quran meant",
      "I don't think is accurate. It's not accurate when you look at that Quranic verse in the context of the teachings of the Prophet, peace be upon him, and how Muslim scholars understood these things. Then the students were asking me about marriage. In three of the four Sunni schools of law",
      "Hanafi school of law. So almost all Muslim scholars, if a daughter wants to get married, does she need the permission of her? Let's say male guardian like her father or for father's dad, like her uncle or brother or someone. Does she need that? Yeah. Okay. That person is called the wali, the guardian. This, of course did not make these students happy. They said this is not fair.",
      "I was thinking about this, and I'll be honest. You know, when you're... I'm not an imam, so I don't get a lot of marriage complaints, but I do get some. Like, you know, imams, they get lots of people coming to them with marriage problems. I get some people coming in with marriage problem. Alhamdulillah, it's gotten less over the last couple years. Is it time to stop?",
      "Okay. But I keep seeing these instances where a Muslim woman gets married to a guy who everybody knew was bad news. Actually, a woman I know very well when she was going to get married to this guy, I met this guy and I was like, this guy is terrible. There's no way she should get married",
      "Now they're getting divorced. Total misery. People, when you're in love, you don't, uh, you're not thinking about practical things. You need someone who's going to be there to say, you know what? I think this is right or it's good for you or this is bad for you. But my students, I made this case to my students but they said, Professor Brown, you",
      "That's not how this is gonna happen. What's going to happen is, what if the dad is like oppressive? He wants you control his daughter and he doesn't let her marry some wonderful guy who everybody thinks is amazing as a great Muslim and so talented but your dad just doesn't like him. And I said well it's very obvious what to do in this situation. You see this in all the Muslim schools of law. What happens if your dad doesn't",
      "that no one could object to? Yes. Yeah, you just go to another welly or you go to the judge and then the judge will just say this guy your dad is being unreasonable and I'm going to supersede him as the welly. What's your name again? Were you like sneezing or something? Are you okay?",
      "Okay, if you have allergies do you need an EpiPen or something? Okay good. I just want to make sure that you're all right. Herbal light nutrition. Herb-a-light nutrition.",
      "Yeah, it's written on your shirt. I'm just wondering maybe you're like, you know, you got swag from them or something. Okay. Huh? It's good to get free stuff in some of the time. Okay, so what was I talking about?",
      "Marriage. Exactly. So anyway, I said to my students like this is not the things that you're thinking this means are not entailed by what the Quran and the Prophet Sunnah and the Muslim tradition actually teaches. Right? So all these things that they thought when they heard about these rules or these Quranic verses, I don't think were actually entailed",
      "I don't want to talk for too long and not give you a chance to ask questions. Do any of you have any questions about these specific issues, like inheritance and marriage laws and things like that? And issues of equality and bias? Yeah, what's your... Maryam.",
      "So I think some of these guys are kind of lost causes. I'm going to look over here. I actually don't know why I was looking at these guys. I think they were just getting too entertained by that. Do you mean like when you're young or when youre older?",
      "This is very common. I would say that, you know we We know from the Quran right there the importance of You from Surah Al-Ukman, you have to be good to your parents unless they're parent even if your parents ask me like they like Want you to worship another God or they want you to stop it, but they want to do something wrong You still have to kind to them But you just you don't obey them, but you're still kind and respectful to them",
      "From the son of the Prophet they says london like that duty especially to be kind to one's mother and I know that a lot of times Especially with women they could Obviously sometimes people have great relationships But sometimes there can be like a lot tension with mud between mothers and daughters if you would get older, you know And it's really important that You are always good to your parents now. That doesn't mean you have to listen to what they say",
      "especially if what they want you to do is wrong. But, I mean my advice and I think this is based very well in the Quran and Sunnah of the Prophet is it's a very important to be good. When your parents... I'm not just saying even like you but when one's parents die, you never can go back and fix these things",
      "And you'll regret. You'll regret the bad feelings and the fights, and they'll seem silly. So it depends like sometimes if people are really being harmful and nasty and mean, you might have to be distant, have some distance from them but it's always really important",
      "Even if the person spits it back in your face, even if they say nasty stuff to you, always be kind to your parents. It doesn't mean you have to do what they say, especially when you're older. It also means that you don't listen to everything they say but you always have to be respectful and always have been kind. If you let yourself get angry at them in a way you think they deserve and treat them in the way you've earned being treated,",
      "you'll regret this. And when they're gone, you won't have a chance to fix it. When people... You guys, I don't understand how things can be so funny. Like, I mean, I remember being your age but life wasn't that funny. Okay, so the, I think that...",
      "Okay, I think I answered it. Yeah go ahead. Also on the thing like marriage this is something that I didn't realize when I was younger and I learned as you get older. I wish someone had given me this advice which is it's really important that your spouse gets along with your family. It's really importance. And I didn' ever really think about that. I got lucky Alhamdulillah",
      "My in-laws are very nice. But being married is tough, it's hard enough to be married but if you're married and then your in-law don't like you, it can make life really, really unpleasant. So a lot of these rules that I used to think when I was younger, I thought about them as kind of old fashioned or limiting, I realized later on these were just really good advice",
      "good advice, really good advice. Like and you know there's no um when you're especially when you when you are young and you're meeting people like you always think like this is the only person for me and if I don't get married to them i'm never going to meet anybody miserable my whole life ah things like that but that's not true there's lots of people in the world and you'll meet someone else that are probably just as good if not better and so",
      "I think that's something that it's hard for young people to hear, but it's useful and it's true. Other questions? What's your name? Hashem. You've been very well behaved. Do you have any questions? How about you Yusuf? Oh, you who restored my faith in the young.",
      "Yes. In your past life, like in a previous life? Like reincarnation or... In the past. Yeah. I say it's always good to forgive people. Really. And because you don't want to...",
      "Anger at people is like a weight. You carry it around, and it starts to eat at you and burden you. And especially as you get older, there's just not... It becomes a real burden. If you don't get in the habit of forgiving people... There's a hadith of the prophet.",
      "The person who doesn't have mercy, they're not going to be... People aren't going to deal with them mercifully. Or as the Prophet said, be merciful in this world and God in heaven will be merciful with you. So you have to get in the habit of being able to forgive people. It's hard when you're angry. But especially like as time goes by it'll be easier to forgive them. Maybe like when something happened recently",
      "something happened recently, it's hard to forgive. But as time goes by like make if you start feeling a little more relaxed about the thing, act on that kind of build on that and make a decision to forgive the person now that doesn't mean you're stupid right? So if someone is, if someone took your car and trashed it and you're angry at them and then they took your other car and they trash it and",
      "you know, you lend them your what a kids have that they care about. What is that thing? Is that some kind of video game that's like a fidget spinner? It's a fidgit? How does it work? Oh one of those little things that pops. Yeah so let's say you like these and then you keep lending into your friend and then he keeps losing them right? Like don't lend him",
      "you don't lend them your fidget spinner, right? So it doesn't mean that you don' recognize that people can have bad habits. That people can be troubled. Maybe you don want them around. Like there's some people and they like attract bad stuff. They're just always causing drama. They are always having problems. And after a while if you have a choice you might not wanna be with this person. You might wanna have some distance.",
      "it might mean you have to give them another chance to hurt you, but it just means you forgive them for that thing and you don't carry that anger around. And then it's also very important to have good manners, very important. I've learned the value of adab especially when people are disagreeing a lot. It is very important",
      "of politics in our country today is really, it's just about bad manners. People can't be polite to each other. They can't have to be respectful. You don't have you can really disagree with someone, you can think they're wrong about something but you always just have to respect them and this is a very important habit to be in. And that's why like a lot of the rules we learn as Muslims for example if you have a guest you'll always honor your guests",
      "You always offer them food, you always offer drinks. It doesn't matter they could be a jerk or someone you hate or someone who did something bad but it doesn't really matter you honor your guest that's just a rule you follow. If we all went around treating each other according to how we felt about one another and whether we liked their political views or not our society would fray",
      "hey, we wouldn't be able to deal with one another. It's very important to have like you know... So forgiveness good manners are important habits to develop. These are habits you developed they're not things that just are automatically part of your personality and when you're young it's a good time to start these habits.",
      "No. How's it going? He's just, no he's fine. Other questions? Come on guys. Ladies?",
      "Ladies? Tasneem, nothing. Yes, what's your name? Selma. I was wondering what do you think is the biggest reason why people. Like non-Muslim people? Yeah, like have your students ever asked you about? What's kind of the biggest misconception? Misconception.",
      "I mean, I think probably it depends like how intelligent they are. So let's take someone who is not just kind of bigoted and doesn't like stuff because they're not used to it or something right? I think it's not necessarily something about the prophet that he says Islam, it's more that there's certain things",
      "And things that don't, if someone doesn't affirm those things they just don't really find them to be appealing. So certain things about... I don't wanna say too much but like certain things are all gender or sexuality and things like that. Some people today there's just will not believe",
      "you know, morally in the right at all. Let alone be worthy of following. Huh? Polygamy I think is not so much a big deal anymore. You know when I was younger, when I...when I was like in college or in graduate school this was a big thing. Polygomy was always being debated. I haven't talked about polygamy for like seven years. Okay. I've been talking about this for years. It's just once you...let's put it this way. Once you've",
      "at least notionally as a society decided that other kind of relationships are okay and it's all about just consenting adults and stuff, who's gonna object? So now it's about other things like LGBT stuff. I think that's actually one of the biggest issues. Guys, ladies...",
      "Ladies, it's been a pleasure. Guys, Yusuf, the other guys who did well, I'm impressed. How old are you guys? Teenagers."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - New Books Network _ Islam _Ms4Lzyahv_o&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748656018.opus",
    "text": [
      "You will fail. So what? Everybody does. But your gym, your watch, your yoga pants... they pretend you won't. So when you miss a day eat the pancakes! Give up on a workout? You failed? Seriously, what the hell? We're body. We've been a part of that too but not anymore. At Body we are rejecting perfection and embracing reality. Not in a Pizza Monday kind of way",
      "In a loving your whole life kind of way. In an I'm eating healthy and it's okay if I indulge kind of in a Yeah, you will fail. We all will but we're not gonna let that be the end. You see that? We're already making progress. So let's keep going.",
      "b-o-d-i dot com. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to a new episode of your favorite podcast, New Books in Islamic Studies which operates online through the New",
      "and thoroughly riveting study of the tensions and conceptions of blackness in Muslim intellectual traditions and social histories, pre-modern and modern, in a variety of contexts. At once deeply reflective, philologically majestic, and theoretically productive, Islam and Blackness engages and examines a range of texts from a wide expanse of scholarly genres to show that",
      "and naughty. Unafraid to pose and address difficult and provocative questions on issues of race, class, and difference in Islamic thought, this book not only represents a profound meditation on Islam and blackness but also a painstakingly researched presentation of the depth and complexity of Muslim scholarly traditions and debates. The ethical perceptiveness of this book competes fiercely with",
      "and the intellectual-cum-political significance of its argument. Here now is my conversation with Professor Jonathan Brown. Hello, Ajak. Thank you so much for your time and for speaking to us on New Books and Islamic Studies which operates online through the New Books Network. We are discussing your latest and phenomenal book Islam and Blackness",
      "blackness. So I think what we'll do with this book, since it is a mesmerizingly layered book and it's really an experience I would recommend all listeners to read this book from the beginning to the end. The treasure trove of analysis information ethical discussions is just staggering. It's quite an experience so i thought maybe to begin with before we get into",
      "we get into some aspects of this book and you talk about this in the book early on what got you to write this book could you share with our listeners that story about something you encountered and that led you to right this book, and how it sort of perhaps builds on but also departs from your last book on Islam and slavery. Yeah well Shirley thank you I mean I should thank you for your time considering",
      "That's very generous of you. The older I get, the more I realize that it's not so much that we should expect other people to listen to what we have to say but that it is really a privilege that somebody will take their time to think about your work and take it seriously. So I really appreciate it. I mean that in a sincere way.",
      "or slavery in Islam. And, you know, someone was like, oh, you should write a book on, you I didn't intend to write this book. But in some ways, I think it was like maybe latent. There were some interests left over from the previous book because there was a story. I actually end the, I",
      "in Islam book on, which is I translate the story of this eighth century Busserin saint. He's a Black African saint. We don't know his name and kind of the last scene in the story is that the Saint dies and His sort of disciples look at Him and the blackness vanishes from His face and His face looks like the moon. So on one hand you have this incredibly moving",
      "you have this incredibly moving story where long story short, these the bleeding scholars of the city basically make themselves, you know, subordinate themselves to this black slave because they realize that he's like the true saint of God in a city or the true friend of God and the city, et cetera, et. So you have incredible, um, You know, story about how piety and devotion to God and commitment to truth kind of transcends all social hierarchies on the other hand,",
      "On the other hand, you have this story where at the end whatever the case may be blackness is something that it should be wished away. It's sort of like a bad thing that someone who's good like that the goodness is revealed by the blackness disappearing so I was like that's a really weird story. That part is really weird and that kind of lingered with me but I probably would never have done anything about it. I just would have consigned",
      "What really made me write this book, actually I didn't even intend to write the book when I did this but was in the summer of 2020. Was that the summer COVID? COVID was happening then right? I can't remember. That's right. Yeah, I think it was summer of 20-20. There was this debate on a list serve called Research Africa which I'm not on, not that anything against it",
      "anything against it. I just, I'm not, I don't happen to be on it. But I kept getting emails about this and people keep asking me questions about stuff that was happening in this debate. And the debate was about this one scholar named Moses Achunu from Vanderbilt University, he's a historian. And he was arguing what is evidently, I didn't know about this like an actual academic position, namely",
      "So Islam, at the level of the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet, is sort of theologically and ontologically anti-Black. And so people were sending me messages like this. The guy's brought up this hadith and he's using this hadit as evidence. Do you know how to address it? I kept getting these emails and I was like, oh, this is interesting. I'll try and look into it.",
      "I was just, you know, I really should answer these questions more thoroughly. And so I started looking into it. One thing led to another in order to understand one question, I had to answer another one or to answer that, I have to answer other ones, etc., etc., and before long, I was working on a much bigger project and then I just sort of worked obsessively on until it was a book and that's how the book came about. So it was really response to that debate.",
      "theme that runs throughout the book, but one that you spend especially the first half on extensively is this disconnect between modern concepts and categories and also the modern state. And then pre-modern discourses and the context of Muslim imperial sovereignty from where many of these discourses come from. So, you know, concepts like racism, racialization, etc.",
      "spent a lot of time, I think this book is really helpful for just as an introduction and perhaps more than an introduction on some key debates happening in race studies today or on this category of race. But I wanted you to speak about this key theme that you especially spend a lot",
      "problem or conundrum that goes throughout the book, but especially you spent a lot of time in the first half on this conundum. Could you speak a bit about how you wrestled with this problem of modern categories, pre-modern texts, modern states, pre-, modern empires and so on? With great difficulty. I guess that's the only way to answer it. So in some... I guess you could divide this book into two parts or two aspects in one sense. One is",
      "One is a review of existing scholarship on these questions, especially on... There's a chapter I think on, I call it background on race and racism where I just sort of summarize some of the debates about race and races and sort of scholarly debates. And in a lot of ways that was... In some ways it's because when I write books,",
      "be kind of a one-stop shop shopping you know where you can go and pick this book up and it won't assume that you know anything. It won't assuming have any background so it'll take you through everything you need to know in order just to discuss the topic or to answer a set of questions, in this case about Islam blackness. So I had this chapter on race and racism you know some of the debates like when does",
      "or a modern concept? Is race real or social construct this debate? What does it mean to be racism? How do you define when someone's racist, these things. So I think these are kind of and I kind of give the main schools of thought on this. I'm not qualified to weigh in any meaningful way but what you can see in these debates is exactly what you're discussing which",
      "it is for people to ask these questions and try to answer them in a world in which race and racism are so definitive and dominant that it's really hard to be able to talk about the past without imposing your views on it or sort of the importance of race and",
      "sort of try to push back against that and say that we don't want to impose ourselves on the past, then you end up kind of making the opposite mistake which is that you ignore elements in the past that are maybe more continuities into the present about things like race and identity and the role of the body and phenotype and how we judge one another. So it's sort of agonizing and sometimes scholars will point this out",
      "is that sometimes these debates go back and forth so much that terms kind of lose their meaning, where you'll say that, well, Aristotle talked about certain people looking a certain way or having a certain character genetically or in terms of their descent from a community or their nation. And that's like race. And therefore, because it's involved in notions of judgment",
      "the notions of judgment and justification that it's sort of racism. And then other scholars will be like, look, you know, these or people say, well, you race is not just about the body. It's just about kind of creation of indelible inalterable categories in a power dynamic. And therefore, Muslims can Muslim can be a race. Christian can be",
      "race, right? That it's sort of something that's not really just about your body anymore. And then like people say well if that's what you're the claim you're making and why do we talk about race and not just other types of chauvinism or bigotry or something like that, right so what makes racism special? So you see like these terms get argued about so much that sometimes they almost kind of just evaporate or come apart. And it's not because people are",
      "i don't know it's not because they're being pedantic or because they are being uh you know light light uh super superficial about it. It's more that there's, they care so much and there's so much uh there's just so much at stake that you know it just um it just drives these debates into like I don't how to express it. Just sort of it just sort of drives them over and over again over the same ground",
      "And people are kind of loath to surrender ground because of what they think it means in terms of its implications for modern moral judgments. So, it's really hard to do and it requires a lot of... I mean from a scholar it requires, a lot from a reader it requires the scholar and the reader to really be willing to step outside things in their own worlds",
      "world that are almost unavoidable, you know, or a kind of unsurpassable. So but I, you",
      "like it really depends kind of how charitable you're willing to be and kind of, how far you're going to step away from current discussions around this. And I say if you consider this type of statement to be anti-Black then it is anti- Black. If you're wiling to look past that than it isn't anti-black. So it's really almost how much the reader is willing to give on some of these topics. Another key category that you critique in the early part of the book",
      "as you're trying to really destabilize some of the commonplace ways in which the question of slavery is talked about, in relation to Arab slave trade etc. One key category that perhaps brings this whole discussion together is what you call Arab Islamic Slavery and you show the kind of confluence of discourses ranging from Orientalism",
      "Afro-Centrism that have gone into the making of this category, Arab Islamic Slavery. And you do a masterful job of critiquing this and really showing that this whole narrative of there being some kind of opposition between the Arab Muslim slaver and the Black African slave, that this kind of a neat narrative of putting these two categories this neatly is very problematic. Could you tell us a bit about what are the different forms",
      "forms of discourses that have gone into the making of this idea of Arab Islamic slavery. And why is it so problematic, this idea just juxtaposing and neatly separating something called the Arab Muslim slaver and the Black African slave? Yeah, this was a chapter that I mean, I really...I say I got into it. People get into every chapter in their books, I suppose. But I really felt like",
      "I really felt like I was uncovering a lot of stuff that I couldn't believe I was coming across. And, you know, you mentioned this notion of Arab Islamic slavery as problematic. And I think that's a great way to put it, except that it's not problematic in the sense of, you want to complicate a text or something.",
      "and drives and justifies really important policies in the world today, right? So it's very germane. Of course people have done a very good work on this from a couple of angles already probably in terms of just this notion of the Arab Islamic slave trade Dalia Gubara's article on this and Nathaniel Matthews has written on this",
      "of course ali mazroui rahimallah he really kind of laid the field out i think in terms of challenging these ideas um but uh what i did i think this chapter which was a contribution was to look at where these the kind of what are the feed the streams that feed into the current discourse around",
      "you know, that Muslim slash Arab slash Islam is an anti-Black slaving thing. Right? And that it's a kind of predatory colonial presence in the quote unquote real Black Africa. Right.",
      "slave trade, right? The idea that the Barbary pirates, that British and French and Irish and American and Italian sailors and seafarers are terrified for several centuries, justifiably terrified of being captured by Muslim pirates operating off the coasts of today, what's the name, Morocco and Algeria and Tunisia. And what's interesting about this is it becomes a genre",
      "write about their experience in captivity, kind of in a place like Algiers, right? British or Irish or Americans. But then by the time you get to the early 1700s, the power dynamic has really changed where by that time because of the kind of power of the Royal Navy and things like that, now the Barbary pirates have mainly been cowed. And in fact at that point until",
      "until the late 1800s, the real danger is actually to Muslim vessels being captured and enslaved by European ships. And there are Muslims from North Africa being taken as captives and slaves to be sold in Italian ports like Naples and Genoa into the late 18th century. So while people are debating abolition and stuff like that in Brazil,",
      "Muslims being brought and sold as slaves on the coast of Italian markets. But what I think it's really, what's important to in this case is that what starts out as a real fear and a reality kind of morphs into a kind of genre cultural genre where writing about your captivity and the fear of the Barbary Muslim Moorish slaver right which always has a couple",
      "couple of things. Like there's a fear of the, there's the Moor who is sometimes black, sometimes swarthy Arab. And then sometimes the Mooris slavery will have put like a black, you know, they'll say like a Negro slave in charge of the white slaves. So like, there you can see that as kind of British and American and Europeans are dealing with their own racialization of slavery",
      "of slavery in the new world. They're kind of projecting some of their anxieties about the fear of rebellion, the fear being at the mercy of black African slaves in their stories about Barbary captivity and a scholar named Paul Baepler wrote some really good things on this including an article and then a collection of writings he did on this, a collection",
      "is that really kind of takes on a life of its own. And you get these, for centuries, flying off the presses of France and Britain in the United States stories of Barbary captivity some of which are completely made up like they're especially stories of women being captured. And of course then you have the anxiety of your woman named the white woman who's being dominated by the kind of black or brown more",
      "Muslim and all the anxieties you can imagine around that. There's a huge anxiety of men being sodomized by the Moor or the African or the Muslim, and then this continues into pulp novels in the late 19th century and early 20th century, into board games, and",
      "Hollywood was the white man or a white woman, or both getting captured by the kind of shake, the Arab slash swarthy person who's both alluring and terrifying. And then so you have this idea of the Muslim North African as slaver. Then what happens is sort of parallel track beginning in",
      "abolition movement in britain and the united states is successful in really uh either limiting ending or demonizing the atlantic slave trade that they they switch to everything they say everything else in africa is the muhammadan state church so this divides slavery in the world basically into the kind of christian slave trade which you'd say was never christian it's a misnomer we've ended it we're wrong etc etc um now there's just",
      "Africa that remains in terms of slavery is just conceptualized as the Mohammedan slave trade, which of course it isn't. There's all sorts of non-Muslims in Africa engaging in slavery including Christians in Ethiopia in the late 19th century and early 20th century but that's neither here nor there. Then you have this idea of the heroic Europeans who are going and saving the black natives,",
      "from the evil Muslim Arab outsiders who are trying to enslave them. And this, you see in the... And this is what I thought was really interesting because I didn't realize this. Like the whole Tarzan, Edgar Wright's Bryce Burroughs novels and movies, and some of the earliest movies that are made, feature films, are Tarzan movies, are actually... The reason Tarzan's family is in Africa is to help stop Arabs enslaving Black Africans.",
      "So there's just this whole drama of the white Europeans going and saving the black Africans from the evil Arabs who are now enslaving them. Now, then what happens is this gets caught onto by different kind of political and cultural movements in particularly the United States. One is Afrocentrism, which kind of comes out of Black Nationalists",
      "of Black nationalist movements, Black nationalist movement's like the back. What Black nationalism does is in 19th and 20th century is to it's a sort of way in which diaspora Black communities in let's say the Caribbean or North America conceptualize a sense of identity and meaning and hope by locking onto a moment in real or imagined",
      "or imagined brilliant African past, right? Whether it's like Ethiopia or the kind of in the case of Nation of Islam and the Moorish Science Temple, like kind of the black North African black Islam, right, African Islam. And kind of seeing that as their place of belonging.",
      "One aspect of this is while those groups like the Nation of Islam and War Science Temple, for example will find meaning in African Islam. Another kind of movement that emerges in the mid early to mid 20th century in the United States takes exact opposite approach which is it sees",
      "adopts and identifies with this notion of Islam and Arabs as outsiders who are oppressing Black Africans. And you see it a little bit, a little but W.E.B. Du Bois sort of alludes to it. You see it more in the writings, maybe crystallizes most in the writing of Chancellor Williams. In 1971 he writes a book called The Destruction of Black Civilization",
      "Black Civilization. And then he's a professor, a history professor and then again John Henry Clarkson kind of takes over this mantle. And what this Afrocentric idea says is that you know first of all civilization human civilization kind of originates or in Africa they sort of and you see this in the writings of people like Sheikh Anta Diop",
      "Antedil in, you know, Francophone writing the Senegalese polymath whose writing is translated later into English where, you now, the idea that kind of Egypt is not a Mediterranean sort of ancient Egypt and it's brilliant. It's not a mediterranean or Semitic or kind of white or Arab or whatever, you not kind of European or Asian expression second African power. And it's part of an African heritage which continues to influence",
      "influence Africa for many centuries. Now, while for someone like Diop sees that brilliance continue into things like the Islamic scholarship of Timbuktu and the madrasas of Senegal, right? He sees that as African. This Afrocentric view of people like Chancellor Williams sees Islam as an occupying outside force. So in some ways it",
      "The centrist view of Afrocentrism in the United States is allied ideologically with that idea of kind of the European idea of Islam and Muslims as slavers, and as victimizing the wonderful innocent black Africans. So someone like Chancellor Williams and that Afrocentric view is an ally of that because what it says is yes,",
      "the um the arabs colonized and the muslims colonized africa just like the europeans did in fact what they did was even worse right and this is where you get the idea that the kind of arab islamic slave trade quote unquote is was worse and more destructive to africa than the european side and you can see why this is useful to kind of um citizens or protect you know people who believe in",
      "What this does is it sort of shifts the blame. It creates another antagonist, another kind of evildoer in the shape of the Arab Muslim slaver. And it makes them even more guilty of the crimes of violating Africa. And unlike alleged, you know, unlike the Europeans who repented and Americans who repent for this, allegedly the Muslims have not done this and continue to do it right. So now so this this kind of Chancellor Williams Afrocentrism",
      "Afrocentrism then is also very useful to kind of political conservatives in America and Europe because they also get on this idea of we're not, you know it's not really the West that's guilty of the crime of slavery. Yes, we did it but we were wrong and Muslims have done it way worse and they never said, they never apologized. And then what I thought was most shocking,",
      "to see how clear the links are, was how this whole narrative is then adopted by pro-Israel public diplomacy. So in Israel and American supporters of Israel engaging Hasbara. Hasbora is Hebrew for essentially pro-israel public diplomats. It's not like a conspiratorial term. This is used by people who engage in this. They use this term, Hasbura.",
      "Through things like funding films, through things like political advocacy, think tanks, pro-Israel groups in the United States and Israel will build on and spin and foment this idea of Arabs are anti-Black, Arabs are slavers in Africa.",
      "world or global South, or kind of colonized people solidarity against. So it prevents Africans and Arabs, right? Essentially from having solidarity because kind of this narrative says that Arabs are predatory and Muslims are predatore towards Africans. And the second thing is what it says is that it's not, it's",
      "It's actually Arabs and Muslims who are the real racists, and kind of unrepentant racists. So that's what I thought was really interesting in this chapter. And one thing that just stunned me, you know, this guy Charles Jacobs, who is this very active American abolitionist, he started a group called American Anti-Slavery Group in, I think,",
      "And he would do all this work, you know, fighting slavery in South Sudan during the Sudanese Civil War. This is the same guy who started this group called CAMERA, I think Center for Accuracy and Middle East Reporting, which is a group that essentially just goes after anybody in the American academy or media who criticizes Israel.",
      "So it's an incredibly aggressive Zionist organization that aims to basically cow any criticism of Israel in the public sphere in the United States. It did, for example, it funded the movie about Joseph Massad in Columbia University. And I saw that that summer – I think it was the summer of 2021 – he gave – Charles Jacobs gave a presentation and in it he's talking about his anti-slavery.",
      "about his anti-slavery work but he's he directly conflates the cause of slavery in the modern world with Islam. He says everywhere in the world that there is slavery it's done by Muslims and everywhere in a world where there isn't slavery, it's Muslims enslaving Black people right so you see like this the strand the consistent thread of this person's career",
      "anybody who criticizes Israel or Israeli policies. And that's the central threat in his career, but his main activities in the last three decades have been abolitionism. But that abolition is only focused on in which there's slavery between Arabs slash Muslims and Black people.",
      "completely the idea of slavery with Islam and slaves with black Africans being enslaved by Muslims. So this was really interesting to me. Terrific. One other key theme that comes up repeatedly in the book is this idea, we will come to the Quran and Hadith and your discussion of legal traditions and Sufi traditions in a moment but you constantly talk about this idea of black not corresponding",
      "corresponding to phenotype in Islam and Islamic thought. So hence this idea of anti-blackness is perhaps anachronistic, but you also show in the book early on that there are certain Near Eastern traditions or the influence of Galen and other Greek or Roman traditions because of which they were ideas such as climate influencing a person's temperament and features",
      "authoritative sources of Islamic thought such as Ibn Khaldun's thoughts, etc. So can you talk about this tension that you capture early on before you even come to the Qur'an and hadith about this idea of black not exactly corresponding to a phenotype but yet these notions of blackness corresponding to certain kinds of human traits still being there in Muslim intellectual discourses? Yeah, I mean this is oh boy this is complicated",
      "so and this is a lot of this as well study so i'm not claiming to have you know discovered all this right um this has been discussed by scholars in several fields one is that uh the idea that first of all the idea from outside of sub-saharan africa africa south sahara",
      "people look like of a certain kind of black phenotype this goes back very very long time i mean essentially as early as we have early complex societies like ancient egypt and mesopotamia we have them depicting people who come from africa south sahara and their depictions are today you know you would look at them and it would use oh this is obviously someone",
      "Greek art and Roman art and ancient Egyptian art, Mesopotamian art, et cetera, et. It's true in Tang and Song China in their descriptions of people that they consider to be African, some of whom are African or some of them were actually from Southeast Asia. They just conflate all this group together or they kind of consider it one group. But what's really interesting is there's a very stable image of what a Black African looks like whether you're",
      "whether you're in Egypt or in Rome, or in China, or Iraq, or Jerusalem, whatever. In the ancient to late antique period. By the way there's so many interesting things we could discuss and I talk about this in my book which is for example why would somebody",
      "person with black ink. I mean, I've never met anybody who actually has black skin. Right? I've ever actually met anyone who has white skin right but so why are we why our ancient Egyptian for ancient Egyptian artists, for example painting people from Nubia in black ink and people from Syria in essentially ivory almost white ink and then paying themselves in red ochre",
      "ochre ink? I mean, did they not have other colors? Like why, why did, why didn't somebody decide to call people black or white red? I think these are very weird questions if you think about it. And there's a, you know, I don't know if there's actually a real answer for this. I give some theories but I don' t know so it's amazing how huge questions",
      "how some, you know, we don't seem to stop to think about them a lot. And then when we do, we actually can't find an answer because it's impossible for us to answer them or we don' have the information. But yeah, so what's interesting is that you are more pertinent to what you asked is that in the kind of Greco-Roman world very clear understandings of why people look different. It has to do with climate. It",
      "right, kind of Galenic and environmental ideas. And you have this idea that the kind of middle area, the kind Mediterranean world into the sort of Middle East is the moderate environment. And therefore, that's where you get people with the best features and the best temperaments.",
      "into away from virtue, into vice. So you have the idea of the kind of African as hot emotional sexual macrophilic, macro phallic sorry. You get the idea that Northern European has drunk irrational stupid big blonde haired always fighting right? But these groups also have their virtues so",
      "European might be stupid and drunk, but he's also very brave. The African might be kind of emotional and hot, but they're also quick-witted and wise. Now what happens then is when you combine this Greco-Roman tradition with the biblical tradition is you get two things. One, you have by really the 500s of the Common Era, whether it's in",
      "writings of church fathers like Saint Augustine or is it um or Saint Jerome or Origen or in the Babylonian Talmud and Palestinian Talmud you have essentially the idea of known as the curse of Ham idea the idea that Noah's son Ham dishonored his father",
      "be slaves to his brethren and or made them black, and that those descendants inhabit Africa. So you get the idea of the Black African is sort of sexual, appetitive, hot, sinful, boiling in sin, condemned to slavery, condemned",
      "and to serve the more moderate, more perfect Christian, Semitic, European, Mediterranean world. And Muslims inherit this by the way. This is all part of the tradition that Muslims inherit. The third aspect which I think is very important in distinguishing some other traditions from the Islamic tradition",
      "from the Islamic tradition, which is in the early Christian tradition. You have a very clear mixing and they blend completely the idea of the black African phenotype and sin. Blackness of skin and blackness of sin are mixed together very quickly really by the second century third century of the common era and that will exist in the Western in kind of Western Christian tradition",
      "Christian tradition, to the extent that you know there's a story in the Acts of the Apostles of what's called the baptism of an Ethiopian. So when an Ethiopian comes to the apostles I think it's usually Philip and he's baptized and sort of immersed in water and he comes out uh you know in some early texts sort of luminous and brights and you could think of that as",
      "very clearly phrased in whiteness. And what you see in medieval European art is that it comes out looking not like a guy from Palestine, but looking like an almost cherubic white European. And that idea is really influential in the Western Christian tradition. Now, Islamic tradition inherits all of this. It inherits",
      "with a few exceptions. One is that although the curse of Ham idea is widely parroted and kind of very neatly packaged in the Islamic tradition, and is upheld by many Muslim scholars, major Muslim scholars like Ibn al-Jawzi died 1200, like Ibin Khaldun died 1405 or 1406, like Asyuti Jalal ad-Din Asyuthi died 1505,",
      "other figures, a Damascus in the 1300s. They completely reject the curse of Ham idea they say this is scripturally inauthentic. This violates the contradicts that the hadiths that we consider authoritative on how human beings got their different phenotypes and also they say it goes against what we consider to be the scientific understanding of phenotype which is environmental so both from like",
      "both from like a scriptural kind of Islamic criticism perspective and also from a kind of pre-modern Near Eastern scientific tradition. They reject the notion because of him, but the second thing which is more specific specifically what you asked about which is very very important and also very subtle is that Islamic tradition at a scholarly level is generally and I say generally because there are some exceptions",
      "tradition being one of them. The Islamic legal and ethical traditions are very clear in distinguishing blackness as phenotype from blackness is sin, metaphorical blackness and physical blackness are clearly delineated to the end. A great example of this is in the case of the Quranic phrases that talk for example about how on",
      "This will be day. Right? So on the Day of Judgment, faces will be whitened and faces will blackened. And you know, the faces of the believers will be white and the faces that the unbelievers will be blacked in. And Muslim exegetes are very clear this is not about looking at this world. This is not being kind of European or Arab-looking versus being African-looking. This has unrelated to phenotype in this world",
      "in this world. Absolutely unrelated. And when you get, and this is true for Arab scholars and Persian scholars writing, it's true for African, West African scholars writing in the 1800s and the 1900s and 20th century when they do discussions of these ayahs, these verses of the Quran. And just another example which someone sent me the other day, which I did not include in my book, which",
      "uh 1070 of the common era he talks about how um when you die when you're washing a body the face will oftentimes turn dark like blacken and he says this has nothing this is just about blood pooling in the body it has nothing to do with sin right so there's this you know repeated an insistent distinction between metaphorical whiteness",
      "nobility, blackness in terms of ignobility and whiteness and blackness is our phenotype in this world. Wonderful. You've already started to touch on this but the next theme I wanted to talk about was which really is the bulk of the book. In talking about how blackness",
      "and then on the legal traditions as well, you make a very concerted effort throughout these discussions to argue and to convince your reader that one ought not to jump to the conclusion that seemingly anti-Black discourses were indeed that, anti- Black. But instead we should look at the sincerity of these authors,",
      "way contextualize discourse according to its own context but going much beyond that, to really reflect on the question of what did these categories mean to the people of that world and to really deflect deeply on the sincerity of purpose behind some of these writings that might be seen problematic for modern sensibilities. And I thought that was a very interesting and important kind of an ethical framing as an author that you presented",
      "that he presented, that we ought to take seriously the sincerity of these authors from the pre-modern past. So with that said, there are a number of examples that one can talk about. What I would like to do is perhaps have you choose a couple of examples. There's an example of the Raisin Hadith. You've already talked about the Quran and the question of blackness. There is the whole hadith about the exchange of one slave with two slaves. And then, of course, Rumi's memoirs",
      "Rumi's meditations that could be seen as anti-Black, etc. So I will just have you perhaps choose a couple of your own examples, whatever two examples that you want to choose and talk about this key theme that one should not look at these texts from modern expectations of racism. And if that is the only lens with which we would look at the pre-modern past, we will go awry in terms of our readings. So maybe take a couple",
      "about how you make this larger argument about taking seriously these texts, these authors on their own terms and give them the sincerity of purpose as readers. Yeah, I mean, I think I would start by... I mean really, I just don't want to get disguised.",
      "Well, first I would say like we really need to watch out for our own motivations and our own assumptions. And I don't mean that in a kind of – you know, we need to be careful scholars or like almost pleading the point or something.",
      "misrepresenting the past. We're misreading, we are mischaracterizing people in the past or even in the present. I give a couple of examples of this in the book where for example one scholar is talking about how this Mauritanian scholar who's describing his trip in the mid-20th century from Mauritania by car to eventually Saudi Arabia through essentially the lands of the Sahel",
      "lands of this hell. At one point, the scholar whose name is Muhammad Habib Shankriti who died in 1973 I think he talks about how he sees this group of Africans near Bamako in Mali and he says that they're sort of like cattle, they're blacks, they don't really wear a lot of clothing and I've even heard they're cannibals. The author says",
      "the author says, look at this anti-Blackness. And that completely misreads what this person's saying, Shankleti is saying, because you're not understanding his worldview, right? So when you look at medieval Muslim geographers or early modern Muslim geographors, even let's say scholars of the Sokoto Caliphate in the 18th and 19th centuries",
      "talk about pagan Africans as naked cannibals. They're like animals, they're closer to animals than humans. The people writing that are black African. They would see themselves as Black. They will be identified as other people's Black. Other people is Black. Uh, they are surrounded by other Black African Muslims. They are not being anti-Black. They were being anti Pagan right? And that's exactly what Shankleti is. He's an heir to that tradition. So he does this whole trip",
      "trip through a land of people who he, other Muslims we would all racialize as black. And he loves the Muslims he meet. He says oh they're wonderful. Oh I had this great dinner with this. Oh i had this wonderful discussion with this person. Oh and they hosted me and there's such nice people. All these people are Black Africans and he has nothing but praise for them. The people he characterizes in the way I mentioned earlier",
      "And, you know, so not to see the world through his eyes, not to read his text with an understanding of how he saw the world, but only to look at it with our suspicions. I think not only, you",
      "Baghdad, a guy named Ibn Butlan who died in 1066 and his description of different types of slaves. And what Ibn butlan is talking about is how if you basically take people from different backgrounds like a Persian and an African and you kind of have these people breed interbreed for several generations, you'll no longer have a Persian, you will no longer having Africa, you have something else right so that where people are from,",
      "that really only applies for the first generation until this person intermarries with somebody else, right? Somehow, the scholar asserts in their translation of this text that Ibn Bahlon is talking about purifying the Black slaves' race by having them mate with Persian slaves. But it's literally not in the text.",
      "there. It's not intimated in the text, it's not literally in the context. So it's just 100% eisegesis, right? Just people inserting their own suspicions into a text. And this happens surprisingly often when scholars today who I think are kind of laudably concerned with combating racism and discrimination and things like that but they're so suspicious of the past and these actors and these figures in the past",
      "that they really read things into their words that are definitely not there. Okay, so that's I think one important example. Some of the other cases you mentioned like in let's say... So it's very interesting. The rays and head of hadith you mentioned",
      "these kind of discussions about, oh, Islam is Islam anti-black or not. And basically the Hadith it's in Sahih Bukhari, it's the major hadith collections that the prophet says that you should obey your commander even if a black slave basically right? Or it's a mutilated slave. So the idea is in the context of military being on military command but it's understood as meaning civilian government as well",
      "well the idea is if somebody's in charge you obey them even if they're socially your your notion of who's socially better off and i know where on the social ladder is immaterial you obey the person who's in church right um uh now one version which is interesting it's actually not the most reliable version and i think there could be a case for kind of dismissing it just in terms of it being a minority version of that but one version says you know obey",
      "obey your commander even if an African or Ethiopian slave whose head is like a raisin. And this kind of takes the discussion to another level because you have this idea of comparison to food,",
      "looking kind of raisin is like a little fruit. And what are you trying to say about this? I mean, uh, this kind of thing is really see it as sort of objectifying, you know, it's really objectifying and insulting to people today. And I'm not debating that. I'm just saying that's, you Know, people read this today in a spirit. It's very surprising to a lot of people. Uh, so what I thought was interesting about this was to look at how it was viewed over time. So what we would do you say what you see is that if you're looking at commentators",
      "and scholars looking at the Sadiq in like the 900s, and 10 hundreds of 1100s. In Persian lands and Arab speaking lands in Central Asia they're very you know, they're just very frank about it. They're like oh, it's because a Ethiopian person skin is dark colored like a raisin and their hair is really tightly coiled and kind of looks... It's like the texture of like wrinkly texture of a reason",
      "of the raisin surface is like the texture of their hair so it's just simply saying um you know uh they're an ethiopian who has a color and a hair texture of a raisin and they don't really get into it beyond that it's not just saying this isn't the prophet is just describing something through assimilation and then what happens in the really that the 1200s onward again in kind of the middle eastern egypt syria ottoman world",
      "and into South Asia as well, is it takes on a much more pejorative tone. From really the time of the 1100s and 1200 scholars like Inouye ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, other scholars in South Asia, what's the guy? Abu Hassan al-Sindi who was originally from Sindh but dies around 1770. He spends a lot of his life in the Hejaz.",
      "of jazz, they say that raisins or their heads are small like raisins because they're stupid. They're kind of demeaned. They are sort of denigrated. So you really get a lot more negativity right into that. And I think that's an important change but what I want to highlight is",
      "really seeing it as, they're just seeing it in the form of description. Whereas really after the 1100 and 1200s you see very clear anti-Black racist ideas permeating this scholarly discussion. Then what I found was interesting was to try and find African scholars about this Hadith. And there you see, this is what I've found is very interesting, is you see figures like Osman Dönfadio died 1817, the founder of the Sokoto Caliphate, his son Muhammad Bello",
      "Almanbello, who died 1837 I think his successor and a noted scholar in his own right they will cite this hadith putting versions with the raisin in it and they just don't, they're just using it as an example. They'll write to their commanders in the field and say remember soldiers obey your commanders even if he's Ethiopian slave whose head looks like a raisin. And there's no sense of they're not kind of angsting over this or giving no evidence of feeling that",
      "feeling that they're being objectified or they're objectifying somebody. Similarly, an Ethiopian Muslim scholar who wrote a massive commentary on Sahih Muslim, I think he died in 20... Oh boy, 2019 maybe? Sheikh Muhammad Amin Harari. He's from Ethiopia. He wrote a commentary on",
      "where he brings together earlier Muslim scholars discussing it and also talks about, you know, the place of Ethiopia in kind of the world of Arabia and the dawn of Islam. But again, there's no... You get no sense that he in any way feels that this is demeaning to Ethiopians or to himself. So I think that was very interesting. And it raises the question, which is,",
      "I'm not going to tell a reader that this hadith is anti-Black. And I'm, not going tell them what their reactions should be or if they should be offended or not offended. But I think it's very important to say that scholars who were then and are today racialized as Black by others and by their own societies did not find this hadit to be problematic at all. And i think that's very",
      "Maybe the other example I would give in terms of, you mentioned sort of sincerity several times. And I think maybe this is where that idea comes in the most, that you really have to kind of look at what somebody's trying to do with a story and what it means to them. Is the role of this... It's kind of like the story I started with about the Busserin Saint in the 700s",
      "who's the blackness disappears from his face and he looks like the moon. You see a lot of stories like this, you see a in collections like Helya Teraulia of Abinu Amilus Bahani who died 1038, you'll see it in the Safwa to Safwa of Ibn al-Jawzi died 1200, you will see it other collections as well and you see it even the writings of Jalal ad-Din Rumi who died 1273 and his Masnavi",
      "over and over again is the same uh there's a black saint black slave who kind of has an encounter with the prophet mystical encounter with a prophet or who is possessed of true understanding of god's nature right who is a locus of truth and inspiration in this world",
      "blackness will disappear from them. But this is very important. It doesn't say it disappears to them and they look like, you know, Brad Pitt or they look Max von Sydow or they looked like a European guy. Their face looks like the moon. And this is really important because you have to think about what the image of the moon does in the Sufi tradition. First of all, it's associated with the Prophet Muhammad. The Prophet Muhammad is like the Moon. So",
      "they are, they become a prophetic exemplar. They become a kind of someone who is acceded to the path of the prophet and similarly in the kind of cosmological metaphysical cosmological cosmology of Sufism, the moon is the lowest level of the lowest",
      "beyond which is the divine, right? So to become like the moon is to transcend the world of corruption, transcend our world of change and to enter kind of the realm of truth. And so this language is very important when we think about it. We can't just look at this story as being, oh, this guy became a saint and then he stopped being black because blackness was bad.",
      "and simplistic reading of a story which is clearly doing much more. The next question I want to ask you has to do with, perhaps I will bring together two chapters, two very profitable, immensely detailed complex chapters so it's kind of an unfair question but in the interest of time I was wondering if we could compare your discussion of Maliki discourses on customs",
      "on custom and especially to be more specific, on kafaa or suitability of marriage. With Hanafi legal discussions in South Asia on the question of caste there is a very interesting comparison that one can make of those two chapters, of those sort of intellectual traditions that you examined really thoroughly. If we compare the two what do we learn about this whole I guess the whole theme",
      "between the ideal of egalitarianism that you get from the Quran, that all tribes are only there so that people get to know each other, that the closest in God's eyes is the most pious and so on. But on the other hand, there are hierarchies and there is lived realities of hierarchies or hierarchies in legal discourses. So that tension between hierarchy and egalitarianity, how could we think about that tension if we compare Maliki law on Kafa'a",
      "legal discourses on caste in South Asia. Okay, yeah. I mean this is... This is a... Yeah, this was a... For me, I just... It's obvious I learned a lot from it but it was like a really profound exploration for me. I felt like I was answering... I was sort of delving into questions I had had a lot, I had for a long time which I found fascinating",
      "I found fascinating. So the first part is that, you know, the kind of entry point into this is that you have these very specific Maliki fiqh texts, for example, which is written by a scholar who dies in basically in Libya in 1394, I believe, or in the 1500s from around the same region. And essentially",
      "You know, it's OK to you know, you shouldn't look at and you're not related to, you know because you might be tempted. But it's okay to look at a black woman or an old woman because they're not attractive right? That's one type of thing. Then you'll have in Maliki law in North Africa particularly in places like from Marrakesh to Fez and into what's today Algeria.",
      "1900s, opinions by maybe the majority of Malick jurists that would say things like if you agree to marry a woman she turns out to be black is that grounds for annulling the marriage? And then the majority opinion would be yes it is. Or is it sufficient grounds to reject a groom that he is black? The majority answer would be",
      "And then you have in the same Maliki school, not only the opinion of Malik who did not consider blackness to be a defect of any sort, the founder of the school. But in the writings of major Maliki scholars like Al-Qurtubi died 1273 or Sheikh Ahmed Zarruq I think he died about 1214.",
      "12, 1493 if I'm not mistaken from North Africa. They'll say no this is what do you mean? The prophet said Muslims are equal in their blood and as you mentioned Shirela that the Quran says that the most noble in God's eyes is the most pious and that Arabs have no virtue over non-Arabs except in piety etc. We have all this evidence people what are you talking about? How can you say these things?",
      "the response of that majority Maliki school, which said things like blackness is a defect in marriage. They'll say, yeah, what you're saying is correct. The prophet did say this. The Koran did say but and this is ironic, right? Because usually when today, when you hear discussions about things like where people say things like, oh, the Koran needs to be read in its own context. This was dealing issues of its own time. These are arguments that were made for like, you know, more quote unquote progressive or liberal reading.",
      "liberal reading, right? In this case the scholars who are saying we need to think of blackness as a defect or a fault they'll say yeah the prophet said this but this was really to break the back of kind of jahiliyyah and pre-Islamic ignorance and arrogance and tribalism and that worked and that was for its own time. But now you know we have to obey a major maxim of Islamic law which nobody disputes which is",
      "Or to custom, right? When you don't have any kind of clear evidence from the scriptural text of the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet or clear indications from the founders of your school, you defer to local custom. And in our societies, being Black is seen as unattractive in a woman.",
      "idea that ironically the thing today which everyone wants to advocate for, which is that Muslims should forget about the Quran and just kind of go with custom. In this case it's actually being used to argue for anti-Black view whereas the people who are calling for you know scriptural dictates are true regardless time and place these are the people",
      "interesting because you see how custom gets discussed in the maliki school right so uh there's a couple of responses to these followers this majority that is arguing that we need to respect custom and part of custom is seeing blackness as unattractive or undesirable scholars like ahmed zaruk will say sheikh hamad mostly known as a sufi but has also wrote legal commentaries well same thing it's like look uh yeah you know you",
      "might think that black women are unattractive, but there's also really attractive black women. And you might think older women are un-attractive but there is also really attract old women so why don't you just focus on someone's attractiveness and not saying this group of people as a group is unattracted or not? Similarly other scholars like Al Adawi in Egypt in the 1700s, a major scholar, legal scholar will say",
      "Okay, yes. We're supposed to defer to custom but custom changes and just because you writing in North Africa in the 1500s have some weird thing about how you don't find black women attractive that's not true for other people like they might find them very attractive so let's not fossilize your specific custom and make it definitive for everybody. Okay, so that's the sort of Maliki approach",
      "And then there was one word kind of thing, which for me really tied into or made me think about caste in South Asia, which is something that as a scholar whose death date I have not yet been able to find. And I have looked everywhere I possibly could. This scholar named Abdulaziz bin Ali from the Sousse Valley in Morocco. And he has the discussion, which I find fascinating.",
      "if somebody comes and tells you that, you know, it doesn't matter. The prophet said everybody's equal piety is the only important thing, et cetera, et Cetera. Okay. You go marry your daughter to a black guy money where your mouth is. And he tells us story. He says there was a guy who was very respected. He was wealthy. He leader of a clan of people. Um, he was pious. Everyone admired him. Uh,",
      "whether he used to be a slave or whether his family used to the slaves. But, a noble family agreed to marry their daughter to him and he says that family, that woman's family was subjected to abuse for years after that, right? And so what Abd al-Aziz bin Ali of Sous is asking is okay you have these ideals",
      "But what about the social costs? What about social realities? Like we're Muslim jurists, we're in charge of guiding people but we also have to deal with social realities. And if we're gonna tell someone to follow ideals but that ends up costing their family too dearly in terms of trauma or abuse or something, have we really done the right thing? Have we really",
      "of to what extent could pre-modern states or pre- modern legal systems really engineer society? Or, to what extend were they just in a position to kind of make changes along the margins. Right? I think that's a really important question. This got me interested in the question of caste amongst Muslims in South Asia because I was thinking about where... What's an example of something where",
      "it's a kind of omnipresent, weighty social reality that is very hard to escape. That has mingled with Islamic legal tradition in such a way that you have a significant percentage of Muslim scholars validating this social view, in this case caste right?",
      "right while there's still a minority or at least a vocal group of people saying this is un-Islamic yet this social reality is so ubiquitous and has so much power that one has to answer this question of whether or not even if you fight against it what is the cost going to be? So, I started to think about and look into the question of caste amongst Muslims in South Asia which i thought was really",
      "was really this was really interesting to me um and you know you've written actually about the shirely and i think i cite your book in this about this question of things like widow remarriage or the remarriage of someone who is a divorcee or a widow in among south asian muslims and how uh even highest muslim's like shaa ismaila shaheed who you write about that 1831",
      "It really took them a long time and they really had to get pushed before they would do things like acknowledge that it was good for a widow to remarry, right? Where they were able to break away from the kind of domination of South Asian tradition around them and embrace an Islamic ideal.",
      "on those things that were close to them and, you know, close to sort of family and women folk and stuff. It was tough for them to do. So I thought that was really interesting questions. And the reason I kind of wanted to look at this, I'm tempted to say as like a proxy for questions of anti-Blackness, but I don't know if proxy is a good word.",
      "a kind of similar case is because we, there was a lot more, it's a lot fleshed out by Muslim scholars in South Asia. And they kind of talk about it in a way that gives it more body than the discussion that I had seen amongst Maliki scholars in Northwest Africa around blackness. And so what you see is again, the scholars who essentially validated let's just to be",
      "Let's just to be for simplicity sake. Forms of caste discrimination who validated these and saw these as Islamically legitimate, they did so I'm just going to say for the sake of simplicity if people want to they can read that book and get more detail on it but in effect, it's again custom,",
      "jurists deferring to custom. Then you have, and that's really the majority position. I mean for a long time, people who come out against this whether it's the scholar El Bilgrami who died around 1590 who was talking about widow remarriage or this guy Mullah Samira Deen with his book The Full Moon of the Heedless in",
      "in Bengal in the 1800s, or figures like Maulana Suleiman and Nedwi at Idad in 1953, or other figures like this in kind of 20th century and 21st century India and Pakistan. It's really only in the kind of modern period with a kind of revival of an Islamic revival that you have people",
      "south asia really taking strong stands against uh kind of deference to caste and saying things like you know islam ends all this these are hindu traditions we can't accept them etc etc now what again the people that i found most interesting were not the people who are the sort of staunch defenders of we respect these castes um these casts some sensibilities and they're islamic legitimate or the people were saying these are totally islamically illegitimate",
      "illegitimate. What I was interested in is the people like, to a certain extent, Ashraf Ali Tanvi, I think he died in 1943 from Deobund or Sheikh Yunus Janpuri who we think died just a few years ago 2017. I think",
      "They acknowledged that the kind of argumentation for the legitimacy of caste sensibility amongst Muslims was weak. They acknowledge that. They acknowledged at the most important thing in picking a spouse was that person's piety, right? But at the same time someone like Yunus John Puri talks about what happens when you have marriage between castes. He says over and over again I see these love marriages people come",
      "And it doesn't work out. Your families can't get along, right? Practically speaking, you're, it doesn'T make marriage an abode of peace and harmony. Marriage becomes a place of conflict and tension. And so that made me think about if you'RE able to sort of step out of just this language of being racist or not racist, black or anti-black or against anti-Blackness",
      "against anti-blackness right that uh what happens right when you have and i talked to imams in america i don't mention them by name in the book but i i discussed so they didn't want to you know put them on the spot but you know when youhave in the u.s the case for example of a muslim family in chicago from south asia their daughter marries an black muslim from chicago",
      "And that couple then goes into the imam's office to do marriage counseling. Or even more than that, they go into the Imam's office talk about getting married and that imam talks about potential problems they're going to have. To what extent are those discussions or those problems just about racism?",
      "That anti-Black racism is extremely widespread in the world and extremely widespread within the Muslim community, and extremely wide spread in the Muslim Community in America. So no one's going to debate that. But if we just make that, if we stop the conversation there, we forget that this is also a marriage between two people from very different backgrounds. And that also has it you know, that if that Imam is to say I recommend you to don't get married",
      "don't get married, or I caution you against this, or i warn you about the problems you're going to face. Some of those are legitimate concerns right? These are two people just like if someone...if you have you know two white converts Muslims and one of them is from the Kennedy family and one other is from a family who's just learned to read and has never been to college or anything like that and has ever had any money there also gonna be problems between these couples. That's gonna be a challenge for them so",
      "So I thought, you know, I really wanted to explore the idea of how do you like. You have on kind of one end of a spectrum social concerns about class expectation, family background, culture, language and on the other end of the spectrum just have pure and simple racism sort of imagine these two ends of the Spectrum filling in towards one another at certain point there you're going to get like a middle muddy gray area",
      "hard to navigate that ground and figure out how one should act, what one's priorities should be. Terrific! So as we conclude our conversation, Jack could you perhaps take a step back and explain or describe for our listeners? What is the sort of larger take-home point that you would want readers to take from this book conceptually politically ethically etc because",
      "is a book that straddles all these spheres quite seamlessly. What are the one or two major take-home points that you would want readers to go away with after they read this book? Okay, yeah. I mean, boy, I could talk for like another hour just about this but I don't want to probably have stuff to do. One thing I would say is that what blackness or whiteness or phenotype or color means in history",
      "history differs tremendously. Just for an example, one of the things I did in this book was try to figure out people who live in Africa south of Sahara and think of themselves as Black or racialized by other people as Black, how do they use the word Black in their language? In a lot of sub-Saharan African languages,",
      "skin and say my skin is black they would use the word black and that would be a totally neutral it would be it would not be pejorative at all to say that but then they might also have a phrase in their language like someone is black hearted you know a negative pejorated metaphor but there's no link between blackness as a color descriptor and blackness",
      "you know we have people saying things like, you know, we need to stop things like blacklisting or you know uh you know. We should stop using phrases like blacklists because they're kind of racially inflected because for us race is and kind of Blackness and whiteness and language have become so inextricably bound up together with power",
      "a knot that cannot be untangled right but that doesn't mean that's true for other people. For other people in other societies they might actually be able to think about color and description and metaphor on completely different tracks similarly just the last example of this first point I make is that oftentimes there's this association, this idea that slavery and African-ness are linked when you talk about blackness you're talking about Africa but actually",
      "But actually, it's probably much more accurate in world history to talk about blackness and slavery being linked without any necessary link to Africa at all. And I'll just give you one example. A medieval Scandinavian poem called the Rigstula, which was written anywhere from the 10 hundreds and the 13 hundreds, right? Talks about, um, you know, the origin of different social classes in Scandinavia. The first, you",
      "was like reddish and red haired. And the first slave was black and black haired These people, the slaves in Scandinavian society were Celtic. They were German. They Were other Scandinavians. They Were Slavic. None of them looked any different from your average Scandinavian person. And none of them were in any way considered Black same thing by the way with Anglo Saxon texts from like the nine hundreds and ten hundreds they'll talk about the Black Welsh. The Welsh look just like everybody else in that area right? So",
      "blackness and even physical blackness can be imputed to a slave or to a lower other has no necessary actual link to how they look or it's african this is very important i think another important point to make which is we really need to think that other people in other times in the world the relationship between blackness as a descriptor of color blackness metaphor blackness is linked",
      "The second point I would make is that, yeah, I mean, I would just say that the Islamic tradition is heir to a tradition of anti-Black racism which comes from the Greco-Roman tradition, which comes through the biblical tradition. Muslims adopt that. But that very prominent voices within that tradition, whether it's in law, in geography, in scripture, in commentary, in Sufism, et cetera, et",
      "etc, very prominent voices throughout the centuries reject this and really push the idea that for Muslims, the only thing that matters determines your value is your faith and your deeds. The last point I would make, and maybe most political point I",
      "maybe like classical liberal, you know, I don't, I think people should be free to make choices unless they're, you and one of the things I talked about in the last chapter of the book is this idea of when can discrimination be legitimate? Like so when if you're dating or you're talking about your romantic life or who are you attracted to? When is your discrimination in your own case legitimate or not? So",
      "So if someone says, I'm not attracted to black men or I'm that attracted to the black women. Is that a racist thing? Or is that just that person's opinion and let's say it is a racist things how do you change what someone's attracted to? So I discussed this at length in different theories about it but what I thought was really interesting as I was doing research for this I came across a dissertation written by a British, Black British philosopher named",
      "Nathaniel Adams Tobias Coleman and his dissertation was called The Duty to Miscegenate. And I started to read it, and I really said you know I don't agree with this. I'm a liberal. I don t like the idea that we have some kind of duty to blend. And when I finished reading the dissertation,",
      "he doesn't, he's not so crude as to say that we have like a moral obligation to go and copulate with people of other races. But what he says is that the, you know, we, the majority, the kind of white majority of a society like the UK or the United States, we have an obligation to seek the society. And he takes this phrase from John Stuart Mill, seek the",
      "our social ladder, right? We have an obligation to seek their society because only by purposefully and like with a commitment to intermingle with those people and to become familiar with them that you can undo this racial dynamic, the racial power dynamic of our societies. And then I really thought about the work Muhammad alayhi salam had tried",
      "to mix up, sort of equate the Prophet's edict with what a modern state would do. Because I think in a kind of Halakian sense, there are different species that you can't think about what the Prophet was very limited capacities to police and implement rules in a pre-modern state. You can't",
      "was he arranged marriages for certain prominent people. He said, you noble Arab women are going to marry this black former slave. You noble Arab woman are going married this Persian former slave, right? And he engineered these marriages with people who he knew could cope with it in order to show a model for how to proceed as Muslims. So that's kind of where I end the book is saying that",
      "One of the idols of our world is the idol of whiteness and white phenotype, white standards of beauty. And that we have to smash this idol. People suffer for this idol they change their bodies, they hate the way they look, they straighten their hair, they get their eyelids operated on right? We need to smash",
      "to seek out the society of others and to cross the racial and kind of communal ethnic divides that divide, let's say, the Muslim community in America, South Asian or Arab immigrants on one hand and African-American Muslims on the other. The people who are powerful and rich and have privilege in those, in that dynamic, have to seek",
      "by Professor Jonathan Brown, published by One World Press in 2022. Thank you so much, Jack, for your generosity of your time and for your extensive and really brilliant answers to these difficult questions because it's very hard to summarize these intensely complicated and layered chapters of this book. And thanks so much for writing this book that is bound to spark some excellent conversations, debates in multiple fields",
      "the accessibility of this text really competes fiercely with its complexity. Thank you so much for coming again on New Books Network, and thank you for your time. Shir Ali, it is I who thank you, and I am very honored. Thank You. So this was my conversation with Professor Jonathan Brown about his wonderful new book Islam in Blackness. I hope you enjoyed this episode of your favorite podcast, New Books and Islamic Studies that is NBIS which operates online through the New Books network which is NBN",
      "I hope you will join us next time for another fresh episode of New Books and Islamic Studies. Until then, this is your host, Sher Ali Tareen signing off. Take care, stay well, and keep listening to New Books in Islamic Studies!"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - One Day International Conf_Zhk2coTq9DQ&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748667196.opus",
    "text": [
      "show this very late and now that you have joined us i will go straight up to you because i am sure i would like you to finish on time for you as well and please go ahead we don't need an introduction for jonathan ac brown and i would",
      "yeah i think i don't know i think there was i think you i think You guys think I'm in California but I'm uh I'm on the east coast so that's why i think we had a mix up with the time but anyway hamdulillah no big deal um so thanks for inviting me to speak to you i wish i could come there in person but just wasn't possible",
      "I'm going to try and give a paper. This is also not my area of expertise, but it's something I've done research on. But I mean, I'm not like a history of science scholar, but",
      "who've were familiar with this um with this subject uh and i i was as i was doing this you know kind of thinking about what i was going to say and going through my notes and stuff i kept thinking about this this phrase in english you know we we've seen this movie before so you know if if you're being asked about something and it's sort of like uh you know something similar has happened in the past or you can you know",
      "like some political drama or something. We've seen this movie before. That's how I feel a lot about these discussions about religion and science. It's really people having debates about where they should locate the center of their epistemologies,",
      "where they derive their morals and what they think is important. Should their focus be on God and the metaphysical, or should it be on kind of the material world? And that kind of debate just happens in one of the ways it happens is through this ongoing discussion of quote unquote religion science. And of course, the reason why I think it's good to put quotes around this is because people talk about, oh,",
      "science or is there a contradiction between religion and science? I mean, that's like saying, is there an contradiction between one thing that's really hard to define and another thing that it really depends how you define the two things. And if you define them in such a way that you want to have a clash, then you can. And",
      "been for several decades now. I mean, the whole kind of religion versus science thing is really more of a popular intellectual idea that you see in kind of amongst non-scholars because in the actual history of science, the idea that there's a clash between history and religion is as I said, kind of preposterous",
      "concepts are in world history. And the notion of a class thesis is really a product of late 19th century British and American writers, and of course, the influence they have in let's say places like British India, right? Where British South Asia where you have lots of debates around evolution,",
      "that are in some ways like debates between Muslims and different types of missionaries or European intellectuals, that are basically kind of the Muslims in South Asia interacting with this kind of British-American clash thinking in the late 19th century. The two names that are the most... There's a couple of names that",
      "two that are probably the most well-known are two American scholars, John William Draper who died in 1882 and Andrew Dixon White who died at 1918. I think White was actually the president of Cornell University, so they're both pretty well respected intellectuals. They both wrote large books about the clash between science and religion which",
      "kind of just anti-Catholic books. What it really meant is that Protestant culture and rationality of Britain in America in the late 19th century were in a clash with what they understood as Catholic religion, and they could have thrown in Muslims there as well, but it's really anti-catholic writing. This is where this whole idea of a clash between science and religion comes from, and where it's",
      "And I'll just, a couple of points which I think are worth keeping in mind. This clash thesis essentializes animosity between religion and science that has not only not always been the case but at crucial times and in crucial areas has been the opposite, right? So it actually has been an opposite of animosity. It's been productive partnership for example",
      "was a crucial period in modern scientific discovery in Britain, especially in Britain and France. In the 18th century there were no deists so no single deist contributed to scientific advance. So if you look at like the scientific advances of the 18-century in Western Europe, the advances in this were not done by rationalists",
      "you know, a distant God that had no interaction with the world and just kind of the idea that God is the clockmaker who just kind creates the clock of the universe and then sets it going. And then has nothing to do with anymore. So these deists who were, you know these critics of religion who are supposedly so rational and scientific they were actually not the ones who provided any of these scientific advancements",
      "contrast, it was extremely committed Christians who did. So it was only extremely committed Christian who led to these scientific advances in the 18th century. Names known to all of us from history, from the history of early modern and modern science belong to profoundly religious people. For example, Descartes died 1650. Blaise Pascal died 1662. These are two Frenchmen. Robert Boyle died 1691, British. Michael Faraday died",
      "He died 1863, British. Lord Kelvin died 1907, also British. So these are all extremely committed Christians. These are not just Christians who are religious in a general sense. They are more religious than the average – far more religious",
      "He was such an important scientist. There's a unit of measurement named after him, Pascal. Robert Boyle, we have a whole law in physics from this guy about the relationship between gas and pressure and volume. Michael Faraday, also a unit. There was a unit named after himself. Lord Kelvin, also another unit of measurement. These measurements and rules are named after people who were extremely devout Christians.",
      "For some, like Blaise Pascal, the intense study of the natural world was in part encouraged because they saw the transcendental realm as beyond reason. So what does that mean? For someone like Pascal, he actually acknowledges that Christianity is irrational. But what he says is that your faith and metaphysical issues aren't supposed to be rational.",
      "In fact, the fact that they're irrational gives them a bigger claim to truth. Now I don't want to get into whether that's true or not. I don t think that s true as a Muslim but we re not interested in presenting my own views here. I m talking about these figures right? So for Pascal one of the reasons he could engage in extremely kind of empirical rational examination of the world around him was because this world is the abode",
      "of reason. The other world, the akhira, the unseen realm is the abode of irrationality for him. So in some ways you could say well the reason why these committed Christians are engaging in profound and unprecedented or kind of epochal scientific research is because they've like the realm of the physical world has been secularized",
      "But that's not necessarily true for all of them at all. Religiosity and scriptural fideism or kind of faithfulness to the claims about the truth of scripture, the biblical scripture, this did not mean that one had to abandon reason beyond the realm of experimentation.",
      "of belief in the literal truth of scripture or that biblical scripture contained accurate reports about events that really happened. For example, Robert Boyle, the British scholar who died in 1691 I mentioned, he wrote a book called The Reconcilableness of Reason and Religion in which he argued that God can violate any of his laws if he wants. And he said the example",
      "sense is discovering, literally discovering laws of nature to the point that some of them are named after him. But also saying that God can violate these laws anytime he chooses and did so in the case of miracles. All this makes me think of I think a really interesting quote by the scholar Stanley Jackie who notes that whenever a scientist or philosopher worked out a scientific methodology",
      "to have the inference that there exists a transcendental factor, i.e., God or the creator, the results are potentially disastrous for science, right? So what this scholar is saying, Stanley Jack, is that it's actually very unproductive. It tends to be in history extremely unproduective for scholars to be kind of atheistic",
      "It's like the idea that there's something transcendent out there, a creator or God, something metaphysical, some metaphysical reality. That ends up almost being like a really important, you know, it exerts this really important gravitational pull on scientists.",
      "not the ones who historically have made really important or landmark discoveries in science. The second point I wanted to make is, little that we hear about today or in recent history is new regarding this debate around religion and science. For example, I mean, I'm going to focus on biblical stories but a lot of these things you could easily apply to Islamic",
      "to Islamic tradition as well. For example, the notion of that, you know, oh, nowadays people have an understanding of science and scripture, and so they can realize how stupid stories in the Bible are and the kind of mockery of them. This goes back to the very first responses of Roman intellectuals to Christianity. For",
      "He mocked the biblical story of the flood and the idea that there's this ark, it has two every animal. He just made fun of this in the same way that someone like Voltaire would poke fun at it in the 1700s and people make fun of it today. Another early critic of Christianity, a third century scholar named Porphyry. Porphyr was actually the senior disciple of the famous philosopher Plotinus who died around 270 of the Common Era.",
      "whose writings became so influential in the Islamic world with influencing scholars like Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. So Porphyry actually also writes a polemic against Christianity in the third century, and I'll just quote a story directly from him which is actually preserved— his original book wasn't preserved but we have snippets of it preserved",
      "the writings of St. Augustine. So Porphyry wrote, what are we to believe concerning Jonah? Eunice, what do we to belief considering concerning Jonah who is said to have been three days in the whale's belly? The thing is utterly improbable and incredible that a man swallowed with his clothes on should have existed inside of fish. If however, the story is figurative please explain the meaning of it. Right so he's making fun of this idea",
      "swallowed by a whale for three days. The same type of mockery you'd hear from somebody today, some kind of skeptic or scientifically inclined person. Of course it's funny that I think in June 2021 so about two years ago there was a lobster diver, so a guy diving for lobsters off the coast of Massachusetts here",
      "by a humpback whale. And he estimated he was swallowed for about a minute or so before the whale spat him out and he survived and told the story. So, I mean, it's funny that people make fun of these stories and they don't allow that some of these things actually might have occurred. Similarly, the famous doctor, Roman doctor who's originally from Bergama, which is today, well, Pergamum, which today Bergama in Northwest Turkey, Galen, the",
      "the famous physician, he also attacked Christians for saying that God could create a bull out of ashes. I'm not sure where this came from but it's a notion that you could-that God could take a bunch of ashes and create like an animal out of it. He made fun of this and he said, you know, Christians are stupid for not following the Greek idea that God would never attempt the impossible so God doesn't do things that are naturally impossible",
      "that's something God could do. Similarly, when you tell a really new atheist proponent today about the argument from order so that you say how can there be no creator if our world and our universe runs according to these exact scientific laws and our",
      "How can you explain that? How can it be random and what are the chances of this occurring? What someone like Richard Dawkins would say is that, well, we don't know how many universes didn't come into existence. So we don' t know how may times things happened and it failed. All we know is that we happen to live in one that succeeded. They would just say that yeah, it is perfectly ordered but that doesn't mean",
      "Which is funny because this is exactly the same argument that, you know, in the second and first century BCE was made by Epicurean philosophers. And later by the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume. So they say that the Epicureans and Hume, they just said that the world is a random result of random occurrence.",
      "It just happens to be that it seems to be ordered in the way that we see it today. But that doesn't mean that they're actually rules. It doesn't even mean, it doesn't means that there is some rule maker or creator. It just means that look this is the way the world is. We might think it's ordered but that doesn' t necessarily mean that it was created by anybody. So even this debate you can see goes back 2,200 years. Finally something that's pretty well known",
      "for the sake of comprehensiveness, is this idea that we read the story of the creation of the world in seven days and like in the story Genesis in the Bible or that's alluded to as well on the Quran. And you know, this is physically impossible and this is ridiculous. Well I mean again scholars never really took this literally right? So religious scholars Muslim or Christian didn't take",
      "in the Western tradition. St. Augustine died 430 of the Common Era. He has a whole book on, it's called The Literal Reading of Genesis where he says very clearly the Genesis story is not literal, right? The Genesis story",
      "have days until you have the sun and the rotation of the sun, so how can you talk about creation in a unit that didn't even exist at the time? So he says very clearly this story is figurative. It's not meant to be taken literally. All right. The third and final point I'll make is that... Sorry, I just want to make sure no one's sending me any messages. That the consequences",
      "of an observation or a discovery, its consequences in this big debate about is this for religion or against religion? Is this an attack on religion or in support of religion? It really depends on perspective and context. And it's amazing to see how a certain scientific quote unquote scientific fact can mean one thing",
      "another time period so nothing is in and of itself like evidence for or against the truth of a religious claim uh for example sir isaac newton the famous um you know british scientist who died in 1727 he argued that comets were secondary causes sent by god to replenish planetary motion so we said",
      "planets, the kind of orbit of planets. But his idea, he couldn't really explain comets because they kind of came in, seemed to come in randomly. And so what he said is that this is God sending in these comets to replenish the motion of these planets. Now it's funny, Leibniz, a German scholar who was contemporary of Isaac Newton,",
      "was belittling god that this i this argument of newton was sort of insulting to god because why would god need to rely on secondary causation like why would God create a system that wasn't perfect that he would then have to kind of send something into to rectify uh imperfections or flaws that had developed in that system so Leibniz criticizes you know Newton uses comets to kind",
      "involvement in creation. Leibniz said, you're insulting God by saying God has to be involved in creation and then later or into the upkeep of creation. And then later this French a century later, this French scholar and astronomer named Pierre Simon Laplace who died in 1827 he argued, he has this argument that planetary orbits are self-correcting so that they don't actually deteriorate that if they appear",
      "kind of fix themselves, repair themselves. He said, see, we don't need Newton's comets anymore. My scheme doesn't require God. So one case you have a guy, you know, one scholar saying comets show, you another scholar saying that's an insult to God. And then finally, a third scholar saying we don'",
      "and what the role of comets is in creation. You can see that what it means to different people at different times is very different. Some people who are more fideistic or more religious than others. The last thing I'll say is the example of fossils is another one, right? So the study of fossils particularly in the 1700s was used by so the discovery of like these kind of what appeared to be bones or something of",
      "or something of species that don't exist anymore. This was originally used by scientists who were anti-Aristotelian, so they didn't like Aristotelan science. They were kind of practitioners of new modern scientific method and so what they use is they said, ha ha Aristotle has this argument that forms were eternal, that the world is made up of matter",
      "that are eternal, like human beings or a form. Or dogs are a form, or horses are a forms. But what they says is according to Aristotle, forms are eternal so you can't have a form that comes into existence or a forum that goes out of existence and becomes extinct. So they said, ah look our modern scientific methods are better than Aristotelian the Aristotilian methods had been embraced by the Catholic church and things like that. This then ironically becomes",
      "is a big crisis for deists, for these kind of people who believe in just God who creates the universe and then has nothing and creates it like a clock that runs on its own and has no interaction with humanity. There's no revelation. There are prayers being answered or anything like that. So their problem is that they couldn't explain evolution",
      "the death of species and changes in species according to their ideas. So it ends up being something that becomes a problem, like a bump that critics of religion have to deal with until Charles Darwin, one of his writings says that evolution is a type of secondary causation. Evolution is sort of God creates a system",
      "um you know uh that's how evolution can actually still be part of god god's function because it's just kind of a mechanism of secondary causation meanwhile there's this religious cleric who's like a you know minister and a professor at cambridge his name is alan sedgwick who died in 1873. and he argued that pro that fossils were proof of a god",
      "So, for example, he says, look, fossils are actually proof that God is still involved in creation. Because generally at his time, atheists were arguing that all creations has existed eternally. So they had kind of re-embraced this Aristotelian idea that species exists eternally in history.",
      "through evolution is actually proof that God is involved in the world. So it's not this God who creates things and then has nothing to do with creation. It's actually a God who's continuously involved in so you can see here, just the study of fossils sometimes is used as a cudgel to attack religion. Sometimes it's used by religious scholars to bolster their claims. So sometimes it's",
      "meanings based on one's perspective. So I'll just summarize in the end by saying that, you know, this notion of a class between religion and science ignores the extremely important fact that for at least one century, maybe the most important century in terms of modern scientific discoveries,",
      "were actually extremely committed and devout Christians. And second, that modern criticisms of religion from a rational or scientific perspective are just repetitions of criticisms that have been going on for 2000 years or more. And finally, what a certain scientific fact or discovery means, whether it's something",
      "it is seen as being in favor of religious claims or against religious claims, this can really shift based on time and century and generation or people's perspectives. And a discovery can be taken to mean different things based on the perspective of people who view it. Okay. Thanks very much for inviting me. And I'm going to go pass out now because I've reached the limit",
      "limit of my ability to concentrate. So I hope that this talk was useful and I won't answer any questions because I probably don't know enough to the questions so unfortunately you have to get someone who's a bigger expert than me although there's a lot of good resources out there. So thanks very much Khudaafas everybody, sorry I couldn't be there in person. Thank you so much please",
      "Please, a round of applause for Dr. Jonathan A.C. Braun. He especially joined us. It is quite late at his place and we appreciate your participation at this hour at your place and really appreciate you insightful speech. Although I did want to ask you a question but as it's really late, I'll let you go please. Oh no, you can ask me one question maybe I know the answer. We went right away towards your speech",
      "was a rollover question when uh professor kopeski was also giving his speech and coincidentally the question still remains the question is regarding the philosophy of miracles if i have to understand it correctly you mentioned uh the biblical stance of of on on basically the miracles are they able to uh is it possible to take them literally or or is it should we take it in some other sense because i've not been able to understand what really exactly yeah i mean the the um",
      "um the position of uh muslims on a song tradition on miracles i'm trying to think if i can add a file uh i can send a file to you is this is this omar who's speaking is this Omar Farooq say yes okay so I'm going to email you an article I wrote about this issue and",
      "and then you can uh give it to this you can just send it to your audience maybe um and it will have like it'll get into this like much more in depth but I would just say from the beginning that you know there's so many different perspectives that Muslims and I'm not just talking about you know what tazza light or Islamic modernist I'm talking",
      "There's a lot of different perspectives they've had on miracles. Some of them allowing for certain kinds of miracles, but not ones that would be things that are physically impossible or violate just basic laws of reason. So there's one that allows for miracles,",
      "The second approach would be to say that... So, I mean an example of that would be like you can... Like let's say God could grant someone knowledge or something. Someone knowledge that they didn't have before. Or God could make water increase in volume or something right?",
      "but that God could not, for example make somebody go back in time or make a part bigger than a whole. So did a miracle couldn't be something that would like kind of violate fundamental rules of nature or of logic?",
      "like even Abul Qasim al-Khoshayri, the famous Sufi who died 1072 of the common era. You can see this in the article I sent to you guys. They accept miracles, right? They just say that there's certain kinds of miracles that, you know, that they're kind of, there's limits to what God, kind of miracles",
      "yes, God can do miracles or prophets can do Miracles or Saints can do miracle or whatever but that they're not actually violations of the rules of nature because there are just examples of something happening according to those rules that we don't understand right so um you know what is a rule of Nature right and we don t for all we know there's not some rule of gravity",
      "And we observe something happening a lot of times, and then we say, okay, well, it seems like every time I drop something, it falls. Therefore, if I drop somebody, it Falls therefore you know but in fact there could be some instances in which you draw something, and it doesn't fall. We just haven't observed that yet so this is something that is argued by kind of some Islamic modernists like Sir Sayyed Ahmed Khan especially who died 1798 from founder of Aligarh University.",
      "Muhammad University in Al-Aqar. So he argues that these things are laws of nature, they can occur but they're in fact just instances of a law of nature that we don't understand yet and the third approach is kind of maybe more typical standard Muslim response, Sunni response especially is to say that God can do whatever He wants so there are no laws in the sense that restricts God",
      "that there's Ada or custom general rules by which things function. So the Ada is that if I take a, you know, I drop a ball, it's going to fall on the ground. That's Ada. And in fact, if we're going to make plans for playing a game or building a bridge or doing anything, that's how we function. We follow Ada. We",
      "So if I go up to somebody and I say, you know, you're a no good son of a motherless goat or something like that to his face. The person is going to get offended. Right. That's also either right. So maybe someone wouldn't be offended. But the general custom of things is if you go up, somebody insult them like that, they're going to be offended. So there's other in the natural world, other than the social world. And that's fine. It's this is to follow these rules and take them as as kind of generally binding is simply to do what",
      "to do what God has commanded us in the Qur'an, which is that we look at sunnah nallahi fil kaun, that we",
      "God can make a sinful, evil person do a miracle. There can be anything. Anything can happen because we have no right to constrain God's power or to say that anything is possible or impossible for God. So that's the kind of general Sunni rule. And in that case you can obviously see that there's no problem with Quranic miracles.",
      "Muslim scholar that I know of would ever say there was a problem with Quranic miracles because then that would be to remove themselves from the pale of the religion. Is that helpful? Absolutely helpful. Thank you so much. This was Dr. Jonathan A.C. Brown. So thank you so",
      "maybe in the literal sense if I'm to understand it correctly. Thank you so much. Yeah, I mean yeah, you could take them some of them are, I means when it says like Jesus healed brought the dead to life, I guess you could this figuratively. I don't know if anyone has done that or not. That's an interesting question. I never thought about that. Okay, sound like everybody Khuda hafiz. I hope I get to see you all in Pakistan at some point. Thank You so much sir. Thanks so much please a round of applause for Dr. Brown"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Palestine and the Quest fo_G1f3nMIN7i0&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748679884.opus",
    "text": [
      "Thank you very much for the IHRC for inviting me. It's a great honor to be with Leila and Jonathan and everyone else who made the effort of coming this evening. I'm glad you found a place, which was a good beginning for me. Try some simulations and get me into the right mood of exploration",
      "of exploration. What I would like to do in the 20 minutes that I have is really try and associate the new book I've written with the situation in Gaza or more precisely, with the Western perceptions of what goes on in Gaza, reactions to what goes",
      "possible scenarios for the future as much as I could in 20 minutes and I know the Chair will promise to give me five minutes warning because this topic can require probably a much longer than 20 minutes but I will try to be concise.",
      "the world we are in uh in relations to the israeli genocide of the people of gaza which continues today the complicity of the united states and britain in this genocide the international silence of the political elites about its genocide",
      "to the atrocities committed by Israel and before that, by the Zionist movement against the Palestinians. In the book I decided to try and understand the validity and solidity of the lobby for Israeli Zionism both in Britain and United States. It's one of the oldest lobbies in the world",
      "already in the United States it's more than 100 years old. In Britain, it already exists for 150 years. There isn't any other lobby for a similar cause that exists not only for so many years but so many after supposedly what the lobby was working for has materialized and we think that conundrum",
      "How come the state of Israel invests so much in advocacy and lobbying to convince the world that it's a legitimate state? Not that its policies are legitimate, or not that certain aspects of its history are valid. But that the very existence of Israel, the very idea of the Zionist project is still valid. And the fact that they have to invest",
      "So much money, so much power, so many intimidation tells you that they know themselves that it's not working. The persuasion is not working what works undoubtedly is intimidation, timidity, rivalry of this work there's no doubt about it. They are able to either intimidate political and financial elites who support the state or",
      "are able to seduce them with financial or strategic dividends. But it's very clear that when it comes to what really the advocacy is trying to do, which is to gain moral validity for the project they are failing year after year since they started in this country",
      "and then the United States after the end of the First World War. And nonetheless, this is a conundrum not just because they are still trying to do it which shows that they have real problems with it. It is also quite incredible on the other side of the coin how the Palestinians are still there surviving with such an international coalition",
      "that supports the idea that they should not be in their own home country and that their homeland should become a European Jewish state instead of their homeland. And yet, they are there, they're fighting, they resilient, and the balance of power hasn't changed. There's still very small community",
      "and huge international, powerful coalition. And it started already at the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century when there was a kind of triangle or three pillars that supported the idea that Palestine should become a Zionist European state without anyone in Palestine being aware",
      "that their fate is being discussed by so many powerful people outside of Palestine. In the great event we had organized by memo a few weeks ago, Professor Radha Karmi who joined us on the panel said she was thinking about her grandfather in his village near Jenin sitting at the time when",
      "around the world were already discussing the possibility that Palestine would be emptied from its native indigenous people and would be replaced by Jewish settlers from Europe. And she said, how could he have been aware of this? There was no way for him to know that he, his children, and his grandchildren are going to be victims of such a project. And as I say it began very early in the triangle",
      "did not take into account the Palestinians themselves. One pillar, one leg of the triangle was a certain stream in evangelical Christianity that saw the building of a Jewish state in Palestine as religious imperative that would precipitate the second coming of the Messiah and resurrection",
      "and therefore the Jews had to return, this would be an indication that the millennium is coming to an end in a different kind of theological period. It begins with the history of evangelical Christianity. And these were not just scholars or theologians. There were a lot of laymen connected to this style of theology that held very powerful positions",
      "positions, both in the United States and Britain. Positions such as prime ministers, presidents, presidents of supreme courts in America who really took this not just as a political strategic imperialist project but also as a religious one. So that was one thing. The second one was at this time what people would find very new I think.",
      "of the Jewish communities in the United States and Britain were fearful that anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe would push hundreds of thousands of Jews into Britain and the United states. This was the last thing they wanted, they already made it in Britain for many centuries, they've already made in the US for 50 or 70 years",
      "waves of poor Jews coming from Eastern Europe to either Britain or the United States. So they supported Zionism mainly to prevent their arrival in their own home lands and that was a second pillar, again I'm talking about the elite of the Anglo-American Jewish communities were very powerful as well. The third group where either people in Britain before",
      "the Second World War or Americans after the Second world war who had imperial interests and designs that included Palestine. When I say include Palestine it means either in the age of colonialism before the second world war was properly integrating physically Palestine into the British Empire but after the second",
      "physically areas into the American empire, but indirectly. So Israel became a very important center for American imperialism in the Arab world and further afield in West Asia. So if you take imperialism, the new or old one, you take Jewish elites in the west who do not want their brothers and sisters to be with them",
      "in their own home countries, and very powerful evangelical Christians. And you look at all these three powerful lobbies and you fuse them into one powerful lobby together, you can understand how what probably some people would have found impossible. In no time a Jewish state was created through the ruination of Palestine",
      "and partial delimitations of the Palestinian people. Now, the Palestinians were still there after the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, and the Zionist movement we continued to try and fulfill through the State of Israel. The main impulse of the Zionists project which was a classical settler-Colonian project",
      "with as few Palestinians in it as possible. And through the book, I show how the lobby had to adapt itself to the new methods Israel was using after 1948 to achieve its basic goal of having the land without the people. After 1967 when Israel occupied the whole of Palestine, the whole historical Palestine which it didn't do in 1948,",
      "In 1967, it occupied the whole of historical Pakistan. That is Israel, West Anglia and Gaza Strip. It was impossible to repeat what Israel had done in 1948. They massively and ethnically cleansed half of the Palestinians which is what they did in 48. So in 67 when we didn't have the option of repeating the act of 1948",
      "of trying to have the land without people. And this was by enclaving the people, not expelling them but imprisoning them in mega prison in part of the West Bank and one big mega prison with a Gaza Strip. And they hoped that this kind of control and oppression would A be accepted by the west which it did through the very powerful governments",
      "powerful governments that they were using with the political elites in Britain and the United States, and that it would be powerful enough to dissuade the Palestinians from trying to rebel against living in these two mega-prisons in the West Bank. But the Palestinians did resist. First in the first Intifada in 1987 then came the second Intifadla in 2000",
      "the more secular and left-and-center Palestinian liberation movement was not delivering the goods, and some of its leaders were even going alongside with this idea of an open prison. Palestinians moved to give their support and chance to the more political Islamic groups in Hamas and Islam Jihad and other movements, and they already were the ones who were leading a second uprising. Israel reacted brutally against",
      "against the second uprising in West Bank and had a sense that it could continue with good lobbying and advocacy to brutally oppress the Palestinians in the West Bank, to dissuade them from going to a third uprising. And to certain extent again because the lobby was so solid, so natural, so old they succeeded not with the civil society but",
      "but with the political elites of the West who gave them immunity for policies that violated every international law we know, with regard to the people of the Western Bank and the Gaza Strip. And at the same time as we know they increased the Judaization of the White Bank, increasing the number of settlers in the White bank today up to 700,000. The Gaza Stip was a problem. They even didn't succeed",
      "in persuading enough Jewish settlers to go to the Gaza Strip. All in all, at the peak of the Jewish colonization of Gaza there were a few thousand Jews in the Gaza strip where there were already 600,000 Jews in West Bank. There's something about Gaza that is resilient and resistant like no other part of Palestine. God knows why but this is true. This is a fact. And they forced the Israelis to take out the settlers",
      "that could not protect them. Of course, the Israelis hoped and there was especially in Merced, Israelis in particular, the architect of the withdrawal from Gaza, Ariel Sharon, hoped that taking out if you want the wardens, the jailers from the prison he could deal with the prison from the outside without worrying what would happen to the settlers. And indeed as we know at the moment the settlers were going out",
      "the democratically elected Hamas government, the Israelis with the help of Britain and United States punished the Gaza Strip by imposing an inhuman siege on the Strip. And Hamas reacted with long chains. The Israelis for 17 years until the 7th of October 2023 four times",
      "bombarded Gaza from the land, the sea and the air. Especially from the air using horrific weapons of destruction against the people of Gaza. Now with every wave of Israeli attack on Gaza because the people were unwilling to live under a system of mega jails that Israel thought was a good alternative",
      "with every such way, the brutality and dehumanization of Israeli ex increased exponentially. And we thought okay despite the advocacy, despite the law, despite effectiveness and longevity probably now that elites of the West would say enough is enough.",
      "2014 was, before 2023, 2014 was in any respect one of the worst crimes against humanity committed by anyone in a second, in the first decades on 21st century. And there was it didn't move at all the governments of United States or the EU or Britain to change their basic policy towards Israel and when this did not work",
      "If this did not work, the Israelis decided to... going from one mentality to another because you can summarize it by saying that the Israelis were using power to impose their will on the Palestinians for the last 120 years with the help of international community and failed so they thought if it didn't work with power we need to use more power.",
      "And that's what happened when the Israeli electorate chose a government, that actually its philosophy is that the other governments failed in defeating the Palestinians because it was not brutal enough and were not using power. That was the message the Israeli electoral sent to the world. They're choosing now a government that believes",
      "international law, or international public. We don't care because we are messianic, we have gone outside, doesn't matter why each one of them has his own explanation but the result was even more brutal and I can forget it when they ask why did Hamas burst into this operation on 7th October? It's amazing how nobody in the media, and",
      "of how brutal the Israeli oppression towards the Palestinians was from the day that new government in Israel was elected in November 2022 and the 7th of October. If you read the newspapers here in Britain, you will think that out of the blue, the 7 th of October came as a brutal attack on the Israelis in the south. As if nothing happened between November 22 and October 23. And here I'm coming to the point",
      "I'm coming to the end. Will this unimaginable brutality that we thought in 2014 was the worst, nothing compares to the first time. The genocide in Gaza has moved not only civil society, this was to be explained but for the first",
      "by symbolic acts of solidarity. It moved the international legal tribunals, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court for the first time to regard Israel as a possible guilty party in war crimes and crimes against humanity but this because these tribunas are very political, don't let me say it is not an objective professional legal tribunal",
      "But they are political and until recently when it came to Israel, the politics was to go with the elites of the West. And not deal with Israel thoroughly through international law. The first time they decided to eat what the civil societies around the world want their governments to do with Israel given its brutality on the ground which is sanctions and framing Israeli actions as genocide",
      "genocide and calling its leaders as criminals that should be tried by international tribunals. This is a symbolic call to the government, we are now listening to the people and not just your cynical interests when it comes to Israel. That's why I think it's so important that these procedures were taking place even if they don't succeed in stopping terrorism",
      "in stopping the genocide, they will be remembered in history as important landmarks of the beginning of change and the failure of the lobby in its most important power cases. The governments, the financial elites, the cultural elites,",
      "I think that we are beginning to see the weakening of this support and efficiency of this lobby. And therefore, I do think that even in this dark moment, and although this is not news for tomorrow or the day after,",
      "of the next generations of politicians, media people, academics in countries that so far provided immunity to the Israeli regime should result that the next generation will be far more aware morally and consciously of their duty not to be complicit with a crime that Israel commits",
      "role and their own accountability for what happened thank you",
      "roedd hynny'n dda iawn ac yn diweddar ar y llyfr o gofid hanesol, gobeithio bod pob peth yn gallu gael gwell hyd yn oed mewn adeg gwyddon. Hoffwn ofyn i Leila symud ymlaen. Diolch i chi i bawb am fod yn yma. Salam a chroeso i chi. Dioli i'r Cymru Ddiddordeb Islami a pawb sydd wedi gweithio ar yr digwyddiad hwn",
      "for hosting this important discussion. I'm honored to be here with you all, Dr. Ilan Pape who's been telling the truth about what happened to the Palestinian people in 1948. The planned and coordinated campaign of ethnic cleansing intended to remove them from their land by any means for decades and for that history will vindicate him because he is a truth teller. He's a truth",
      "He's told the truth for so long despite the consequences, with principle and integrity. And he has challenged an entire society that has come together to bury the truth of the Meqba which has been inflicted on the Palestinian people for 76 years. Today is the 259th straight day of Israel's war on Gaza. Every single day, Israel is inflicting horrors in Gaza beyond our imagination and comprehension.",
      "And despite the valiant and courageous efforts of journalists, both professional journalists in Gaza as well as citizen journalists using cell phones we don't even know a fraction of the crimes that the Israeli military has inflicted and is inflicting on the people of Gaza. It will take time for them to be revealed and some of them we may never know. Now the media is important in telling us these crimes",
      "these crimes and uncovering these crimes but also in shaping the narrative. The narrative starts with the media, the media and journalism is often referred to as the first draft of history. The way that the Nakba was covered up and concealed and the way that you know the valiant courageous and important efforts of people like Dr. Ilan Pape he's undoing",
      "that was shaped long ago. And, that's why it's important for us to put into words how the media is failing monumentally so that we can hold them accountable and we can undo the narratives that are being shaped in real time so that it doesn't take us decades to undo these narratives. Every day Israel inflicts horrors on Hafezah but if they were happening anywhere else in the world",
      "Breaking news alerts sent directly to our phones. Signaling that these deaths, these atrocities are unacceptable. But when the media and in particular the Western media declines to cover the horrors the way it would if they were inflicted against any other people be they Israelis or Ukrainians for example It signals that Palestinian death is expected. It's accepted.",
      "Palestinian death just as it did before October 7. The vast majority of those killed during the last 259 days, I think of that number and its incomprehensible to me are women and children and elderly. Israel has broken all manner of record in this genocide of Palestinians. The most children killed in conflict zones around the world since 2019 by",
      "a very long time ago, months ago. The most journalists killed in any conflict of decades, in fact 75% of journalists killed at 2023 were killed in Gotham. That too was achieved months ago, a record number of aid workers killed the bombing of less than the most destructive this century by some accounts surpassing even the bombs dropped over Dresden, Hamburg and London combined during World War II.",
      "Israel has destroyed every university in Gaza, and so many schools and mosques and bakeries and hospitals. They've attacked water stations, fishing boats, aid convoys, children getting water, adults lining up for flour, people burying their dead, grandmothers waving white flags, holding the hands of their grandchildren. They sniped children in the head, executed men point blank as their wives and children watched.",
      "Israel has destroyed everything that gives and sustains life in a place. It hasn't even left the dead in peace, as it bulldozed over graveyards and dug up the bodies of the dead repeatedly.\" I think about my own grandfather who was displaced from his home by Israel, his home in 1948, lived all around the Arab world until he was only getting US citizenship that allowed him to go back to Gaza because that's where he wanted to die",
      "He died in 2019 and I think about what has come of his body. I think of Hind Rajab, a six year old girl whose voice pleading to be saved was heard around the world. Imagine if Hind Rajb was anywhere else in the world? I think abut the detained Palestinians who were tortured to death. Surgeries of children done on dinner tables with no anesthesia",
      "and the syzum Palestinians eating grass an animal feed drinking dirty water and on and on there is simply no sense of this in the media that we consume day-in and day-out no sense at the scope of the killing even though it is so widespread that people who survived earlier attacks are being killed months later and yet the coverage of the mass killing of destructive",
      "perhaps even surpassing the failure of the lead-up to the Iraq war. Now, of course there are exceptions. There are exceptions in some of the Western media outlets I'm discussing whether it be CNN or The Washington Post or even The New York Times or The Guardian and there's exceptions. Um...there are people within those newsrooms who are working very hard to do good work and tell the stories that need to be told but by and large these outlets have framed",
      "have framed the narrative in a way that is destructive and unforgivable, for which they must be held accountable. They have failed in their duty to inform the public about what Israel has inflicted on Gaza, and in many cases, the fact that they themselves, these media outlets, have abetted the Israeli government and military in spreading their propagandistic talking points, which are intended to justify the destruction of the land",
      "One of the daily horrors happening in Gaza that simply has not been covered at the tone and tenor and scale that it deserves is the fact we don't even know the real number of Palestinians killed by Israel. Just today, I believe at least 75 Palestinians were killed. Every day we see what feels like an endless stream of social media videos and reports of dozens, at least, killed by Israelis yet the official number goes up only so much",
      "And this is exactly what Israel intended when it destroyed the infrastructure tasked with keeping count of the dead and killed the people doing it, and targeted the hospitals and other healthcare facilities tracking the death. The media has also failed in adequately covering Israel's clear and deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war against the people of Qasem. People including dozens of children have died of starvation",
      "and yet the media has barely skipped the surface of this crisis. A US poll found that even though, this was when it was taken, the number was 30 thousand more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis since October half of Americans didn't know which side had lost more lives. That speaks so much to this monumental failure. All we ask of journalists",
      "I have been for decades, is to do your jobs. That's all we say, do your job. Don't do any favors to Palestinians, don't be biased towards Palestinians but bias towards the truth. Be professional, hold power to account, tell the truth.\" The truth is that this did not start on October 7th. In fact last year was one of the deadliest years for Palestinians",
      "before October 7th, in the framing of October 7 as the beginning of the conflict is a reflection of the media's normalization of Palestinian killing and oppression which we are expected to accept. In the unstated but clear hierarchy of life that places a higher value on Jewish Israeli life than it does Palestinian life. It is as simple as that. As a friend of mine put it at",
      "at the beginning of all this. I used to think it was ignorance, but it's not. It's racism.\" Now, this lack of context about the occupation is actually formalized in some cases. The Intercept website reported about a leaked New York Times memo which revealed that there are words",
      "Occupied territories, ethnic cleansing, genocide, refugee camps. Even the word Palestine. A spokesperson said issuing guidance like this is to ensure accuracy, consistency and nuance. They frame their bias as nuance and accuracy. These are words that are accepted even by the international community, by human rights organizations, by experts",
      "experts. These are words enshrined in international law, they're not bias or opinion. This was a classic the New York Times recently rather than saying Palestinian land and the West Bank said land long used by Palestinians. Every day there's a new one. There is a pattern of Western media reporting as fact",
      "as facts, unverified sensationalistic allegations that are shaping this narrative. And what this essentially amounts to is laundering stories from the Israeli PR machine through the media. So from the beginning on October 7th Israel sought to portray Hamas as ISIS even naming them Hamas-ISIS which never took off to their great dismay. That official state narrative included disseminating",
      "very specific inflammatory details that turned out to be false. Now, if you portray your enemy as the most barbaric, savage, vicious entity possible, you can justify the most barbaring, vicious, savage crimes against your enemy. So they were told... We were told by the media in particular that Hamas-led fighters beheaded babies, put them in ovens,",
      "carried out a campaign of weaponized mass rape. These tropes based on the portrayal of the Arab Muslim, the Palestinian as a savage rapist who would burn babies alive and put them in ovens were disseminated by every single mainstream media outlet imaginable including ones here in Britain including The New York Times which on December 28th published",
      "published a front page article called Screams Without Words, How Hamas Weaponized Raid on October 7th. And every single source in that piece has been found to have lied, their testimony debunked and yet that piece remains un-corrected on the New York Times website. So much misinformation is reported as fact, the Israeli narrative not questioned",
      "Israeli military and government officials are given endless time on TV to scout their propaganda. The Israeli narrative has taken us back, while anything stated by Palestinians is viewed with suspicion, including the death toll. We saw this being repeated by politicians for President Biden on down. He claimed he saw photos of beheaded babies. He's still claiming to have seen things he's never seen.",
      "to dispute that claim. He claimed the death numbers by the Palestinian Ministry of Health were unreliable, and then later a State Department official testified in Congress that it was in fact an undercount. There were also verifiably false stories that came out around the first attack against al-Shifa. We're at a place now, we're at this genocide in which there are multiple rounds of attacks against hospitals, in which they claim that a calendar had the names of Hamas fighters.",
      "There circulated a video of an Israeli actress who claimed she was a nurse in al-Shifa and that Hamas is using it as a base. There's this circular nature to this disinformation. When the State Department was pressed to provide evidence at Al-Shiba, Gaza's largest hospital being used by Hamas fighters, the State department spokesperson pointed to news reports but news reports are based on unverified unsubstantiated claims by Israeli US officials",
      "This is all too reminiscent of reporting that preceded the Iraq war for which US news organizations later had to apologize. Israel has claimed over the years, that hospitals have been used by fighters in 2008, 2012 and 2014. None of those claims were ever substantiated or verified. US media organizations also adopt Israeli language and framing at the beginning of Israel's military campaign",
      "They referred to the Palestinian Ministry of Health as such. And then once the Israeli official state narrative held that it should be called the Hamas-run Ministry of health, you saw them all running with it. Now one important thing to note and I only have five more minutes and I have a lot more to say about the media coverage so hopefully we'll come up in the Q&A is that never has the media been burned so much by its source i.e., the Israeli military",
      "use it over and over and if a source lies to you repeatedly do you keep using them are they still credible the israeli military in 2021 told media organizations that it was going to do a ground invasion into gaza they all ran with it and then they admitted that in fact this was a war tactic in order to mislead uh hamas fighters and have",
      "including the US media, about how Shirin Abu-Athma, the legendary Palestinian Al Jazeera journalist was killed. Even disseminating a fake video claiming that she was killed in crossfire by Palestinian fighters. There is still so much more to say as I mentioned but hopefully there will be time and Q&A but you are all consumers of news so you all know,",
      "that absolves Israel of any responsibility in the headlines, where it's like a riddle trying to figure out who is responsible for this. The BBC saying the 12-year old Gazan girl who lost her whole family overnight, how did she lose her family? Who made her lose her familly? Or the famous New York Times special about people killed in Gaza simply called Lives Ended in Gaza.",
      "Palestinians are bearing the brunt of lawlessness in Gaza as fighting at At-Shefa continues. This was referring to a massacre perpetrated by the State of Israel at At Shefa Hospital. Or putting the word manmade when discussing the famine in quotes, as if it's not verifiably a man made famine. There is not a failure of crops in Huzna. Israel decided to cut off food and water from Huzan",
      "Or NPR calling it a low-intensity phase of the war when an entire Palestinian family was eliminated. You also see the use of emotive language like massacre, horrific and slaughter only used when discussing the killing of Israelis never when it comes to the killing",
      "Philip tweeting, don't look away about the fabricated story of beheaded Israeli babies and yet these same anchors stay silent about the killing of more than 15,000 Palestinian children. You see Palestinians coming on the news and being treated as if they're officials. Palestinians who've lost family, who are analysts, who were experts being grilled that's when the accountability interview comes not when they're actually talking to Israeli government officials",
      "Now I want, just like Dr. Pappé, I wanna end on a note of hope which is that although I spent much of my time talking about the Western media, that's not all we have. We have Al Jazeera, we have the courageous efforts of journalists on the ground in Gaza and due to their courageous essential efforts, we know what's happening in Gaza",
      "of my colleagues who actually see the humanity in Palestinian journalists, say that they've learned a new way of doing journalism seeing them at work. And we also have people like Montez, like Bissan, like Plessy and people who use their platforms on social media to tell the world what's happening. So these Western media sources that used to have a monopoly on reporting, on shaping the narrative no longer do. You see Gen Z kind of rejecting",
      "kind of rejecting mainstream media due to that. And what I want to leave you with is this one note, which is just ask how many of you are still following what's happening in Huzza day-to-day? Okay thank you. This is a self selected group because you're here but... I know it can be very difficult to see these images and very difficult",
      "to continue to bear witness. Please don't look away, encourage others to keep looking and watching. My program Fault Lines came out today with a feature length documentary called The Night Won't End it's on YouTube please watch it. The Night won't end is a documentary about Gaza working with girls in Gaza. Please watch it, please share it, and please don't go away thank you.",
      "Diolch, Dr Ariad, am gyfrif gwybod sut mae cyfnodau'r cyfan wedi bod yn ffaeliad cadastroffig. Er ei fod yna ddim sylw arall, efallai y byddwn i'n credu ei fod yn gwneud ei swydd mewn ffordd,",
      "mae'r pethau eraill wedi cael eu cymryd i'r farn. Ond fel y dywedwch, rydyn ni yn byw mewn byd newydd o ddigidol media ac efallai bod hynny wedi gwneud gwahaniaeth heno. Gobeithio y bydd gennym gyfle i ofyn am y materion hyn yn y Q&A felly diolch.",
      "I actually have no idea why I'm on this panel. I googled Israel-Palestine on the way here, that's basically how little I know about the issue and actually that might be useful because I am a completely ignorant white guy on this issue. Basically when I was growing up",
      "I actually didn't know Israel was a new country. I thought it always existed, like from the time of the Bible and so when I was in grade school me and my friends would horse tanks and stuff like that we'd read about the Makurba tank and make fun of how the Israelis had killed all these dirty Arabs and they were just like these amazing fighters. I had no idea this was... And then I'd see pictures on the news from I guess the first of Defath although I didn't what it was you'd see these kids throwing rocks",
      "I thought they were random people throwing rocks for some reason. I had no idea why this was happening to me. So, I thought Israel had always existed into college. When I became Muslim, I was in college and even then I didn't know anything about the topic. People weren't talking about Israel or Palestine. I was like, I don't really care about this issue. And then I saw this documentary called The People and the Land. I don' think anyone's ever seen this documentary. It was made about the first Intifada",
      "father and I was in shock. I was crying, I couldn't believe what was happening, I could not believe that my country was supporting this, making it possible with money, diplomatic support. I wasn't shocked. I started to write letters to the university newspaper.",
      "I published a letter to the editor in The Washington Post in 1998 or something. Really, I was so angry. I couldn't believe it. And I actually really believed that if you take like a random American...I don't know what British it is...if you take a random american and you actually tell them what's happening they will be absolutely outraged. Absolutely outraged! That's why the lobby is so important because it keeps people from talking about this.",
      "My only expertise, or my only insight that I have to offer is just as somebody who's kind of gone through this process of learning about this topic and then being a professor and seeing how the environment has changed especially on campuses but around this topic from the late 90s when it first became aware of it until today. Now if we-if it were 10 years ago, if it were 20 years ago I would never in a trillion years have accepted to come to this event. This event wouldn't have happened",
      "Like five people in the audience. I would be out of a job immediately upon leaving this event. It would just, I'd have like a heart attack on my way here. All sorts of things from anxiety. So how did this change? I'm actually completely relaxed right now. You know what, I'm gonna say a couple controversial things that are not up here. Why not? I am against apartheid.",
      "I'm against ethnic cleansing. I'm against killing children, I'm aginst killing non-combatants, I am against genocide. So these are like...I actually feel that the other side on this topic has a position that is difficult to defend. I am very comfortable with saying the things that I have said and will happily say them in front of anybody and don't care.",
      "If the government is good, they can try and make that argument. Someone wants to say ethnic cleansing's good, then you make that argue be my guest. But so much has changed on this issue. That I can sit up here completely relaxed, it's not just because I'm a tenured professor. I mean even junior professors who don't have tenure in the United States actually have been speaking out on this issues. Because the situation, the discourse around it has really changed. So I want to talk quickly about why at least in my opinion, why does this change?",
      "There's a couple of factors which I want to go through. The first one, and this is weird really weird but I think it is important though, the Iraq war. Why was the Iraq War an important factor? Okay, I'll tell you why. Actually, you know who explained... No actually I'm not asking your question but I appreciate you offering me an answer right? The answer comes from a man who really knows how to make appointments. Donald Trump! Former President Donald Trump. That guy can communicate.",
      "I'm not a Trump supporter, just to be clear. During the presidential debates people would say you know, intelligent sources say that Vladimir Putin is something and then Trump would say give me the same intelligence sources who told you about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? And of course everyone says oh okay fair enough we've got good points. When I was in college in the late 90s if you were having a debate and someone said well the CIA says something, that was it, the debate was over what am I gonna say? Do I know more than they say? Okay fine you're right",
      "you're right, debate's over. The Iraq war showed us that all these high and mighty organs of expertise in the US government and kind of power elite can be completely wrong about something. And this really became clear not only in the fact there was absolutely no weapons of mass destruction but also around 2006-2007 when the Iraq war started to go",
      "There was a fascinating opening in American society for new voices on quote unquote what's happening in the Middle East. We've heard from, quote, the experts now let's hear from other people. Let's hear other, there is an opening from other points of view and around exactly this time two professors John Mearsheimer and I think it was Michael Wald? Stephen Wald wrote their book On The Lobby.",
      "a long form article and then a book came out. And for the first time talked about openly what you were not allowed to talk about, everybody knew about it but no one was allowed to talking about it which was at Israel level. And they detailed those activities, they made statements that sort of worked against American interests. And so now the unspoken had been spoken exactly at the time when there was this opening for new ideas about what was happening in quote the Middle East right?",
      "Well, at the same time Benjamin Netanyahu becomes prime minister again. And Benjamin Netanayhu did more has done more for the pro-Palestine movement than any and I hate to say this because there are esteemed authors in our presence but you know the guy opens his mouth and does more for",
      "Because he made the Israel-Powell issue into a partisan issue in the United States. Before it was an issue of bipartisan agreement, it still is to a great extent but not to the extent that it used to be because the people who hate Benjamin Netanyahu more than anyone else in the world are liberal American Jews. The precise kind of constituency",
      "that funds and supports the Israel lobby in the United States. It's one of the main supporters, not only, but one of their main supporters. So you can imagine an educated Jewish American in New York, maybe a lawyer or doctor who is a liberal Zionist, they believe in Israel but they want a two state solution or something like that right? Benjamin Netanyahu is a growing",
      "growing painful thorn in their side because he represents religious Zionism, rightward shift in the Israeli politics not wanting to have a two-seat solution and he is getting closer and closer to the Republican Party so there's a couple of instances during the Obama presidency where he really made it clear he didn't like Obama he kind of insulted Obama publicly",
      "Obama publicly, these are diplomatic protocol faux pas. And so you see people like Thomas Friedman, New York Times contributor right? Who had previously never written anything critical of Israel starts writing things critical of israel not because they're criticizing the israelis as a apartheid system or israeli state or etc etc because they didn't like Benjamin Netanyahu and you still",
      "the senior, whatchamacallit, Democrat in the Senate, US Senate gave a speech about maybe one or two months ago. A speech on the, in the well of the Senate saying Benjamin Netanyahu has to go. I mean this is really, this was a really strong statement something that you would never hear from an American certainly Democratic senator from New York, the most senior Jew in the American government making this statement that Benjamin",
      "the symbol of everything that kind of liberal zionists in america don't like so that he opens a door to increased criticism in the uh 2014 another major event 2014-2015 which is the beginning of the black lives matter protest movement",
      "had two important impacts regarding this issue. I'm just focusing on the Israel-Palestine issue. One, it opened up general criticism of law enforcement and security states. Before, I remember when Leila and I would give talks or something about civil liberties or entrapment or the rights of Muslims who've been accused of terrorism in 2010 to 2011, you'd go into a room",
      "and you're forming your blood. It was terrifying, not just that you were terrified of the police or FBI but you just feel like everybody thought you were crazy. It's like you're talking wearing a tin foil hat or something because what do you mean? How could the FBI do something wrong? How can the government be trying to kill people, innocent people? How are they going to arrest innocent people. Suddenly Black Lives Matter movement, you see video after video after",
      "I mean, it's not like you're going to be able to do that. You can't just say, well, we have a lot of people who are in the same situation as us and they're all different.",
      "do you think American police shoot random black people for no reason? I would say, of course not. They have to do something wrong. It's police, they don't just shoot random people. And then my wife would be like, what are you talking about? My father-in-law would tell me, argue with me but I would said, I don't believe this. Then I saw one video, two videos, three videos, four videos, five videos and I'd say oh my god actually they are shooting random black from over here. So really you start having criticism of American security",
      "security statement. Two, there's solidarity between the Palestine movement and Black Lives Matter. So people in the Black Lives matter movement who have credibility in the US start to speak up on behalf of Palestine and give that issue credibility right? And by the way you can still see this today if you look at what for example makes",
      "They're nervous about Muslim and Arab voters in Michigan. They're really nervous about black voters in places like North Carolina because leaders in the different black churches have made it clear how absolutely disgusted they are with the Biden administration's policies towards what Israel is doing in Gaza. The last important point, and I want to try to give as much of my time",
      "to the Q&A, because I don't want to take your time away from you all. But the last really important point was the election of Donald J Trump. Talk about expanding a range of thinkable thoughts. That man drove like a dump truck through that range and expanded it enormously. Imagine this, when he was elected in 2016",
      "a hijab-wearing Somali Muslim woman elected to House of Representatives, Ilhan Omar. You had a pro-BDS Palestinian Muslim woman, elected to Congress. If you would ask me in 2010 if this was possible, if you asked me in 2013 is this possible? I would have said, I don't know maybe like 30 years, 40 years, maybe never. This man Donald Trump made the impossible possible",
      "Someone like Bernie Sanders, in that same election cycle made socialism which had previously been outside. If you're American and talk about socialism well that's pretty weird. What are you like Russian? Soviet person or something like that? Suddenly, socialism is cool people are going to Bernie rallies. So you can see in that election cycle this huge expansion of",
      "expansion of especially the left spectrum of American political possible. What is possibly in the American political world? And again, in that space is a space for advocacy for Palestine. That leads us to where we are right now which is... You should get one of these in general for our conversations. One minute.",
      "So that's my wife, by the way. In case you're wondering why I'm saying that. OK so the cat is out of the bag. This was what Misael and I were talking about earlier. The cat is outta the bag now when after what happened on October 7th happened, after these student protests, you have let's say really powerful Americans get on steroids like the black men.",
      "I'm not going to give jobs to people who...",
      "profile sign statements, signed letters. If you're the whole lobby is supposed to work in an unspoken way. People are supposed to be intimidated and no one's supposed to know why. No one's suppose to... if you have a lobby where you're saying hey public service announcement if you make this type of statement we're not going to give you a job and by the way it's anti-submitted to say that I'm controlling the economy or something. It doesn't make any sense. You're making public statements",
      "saying you're not going to, you and your friends are gonna conspire not to give me a job if I make the public statement. And you're saying this publicly. Everybody knows what's going on. Now it can be debated. If people like this, if the American population likes this perspective, okay they can support it. If they don't like it now it's out in the open to be discussed. And I think that is a very important term of evidence. Thank you very much.",
      "Diolch yn fawr iawn Jonathan am hynny.",
      "Rydyn ni'n ceisio cymryd ystod o amser. Pwy sydd gennym i gael ei gyflawni? 8-10, 8-13? 8am? Iawn, felly mae gennym 40 munud. Felly rydyn yn ceisgoi gwneud rhwng bobl a gofynnir cwestiynau ar-lein. Fy nesaf, byddaf wedi cael fy nghoriad atoch chi.",
      "Mae'n debyg, mae cymaint ohonynt yn cael eu rhoi i'r panel. Felly byddwn i'n gofyn i chi wneud cwestiynau bach ac rwy'n mynd i ofyn am tri o'ch gilydd ar gyfer eich prifysgol neu'ch cyfan fel cyfan.",
      "I see today is that the revisionist Zionism is dominant and they want to be their own boss now. How do you see that tension playing out? Thank you for that question. I'll take a second question.",
      "that i i know um be saying that always you know the attack the hamas attack was something that they've done knowing exactly what will come after is this something that uh",
      "yn sefyll fel bod nhw'n ymdrin, dim byd oedd yn digwydd. Ac maen nhw angen gwneud rhywbeth, symudi rhywfaint. Mae hynny ddim yn bwysig i mi ond rydyn ni'n gweld yr adroddiadau a'r hyn sydd yn dig�yr. Rwy'n mynd at gwestiwn tair o rywle o'r ôl. Iawn, rydym ni'nghwyso'n dda iawn am y cyfryngau Cweddol. Beth am reagion cyfryงau mewn Llywodraeth?",
      "Okay, so I think we can direct Dr. Laila. But let's start with Professor Pappi with the first question about Zionism. His phone is full of miracles.",
      "Okay, you're right. It's a very good question that you are asking There is a certain quid pro quo between American imperialism and",
      "and Israeli policy. For instance, it was very clear to the lobby that they had to be very careful when they influence American policy in the Middle East as a whole. It's kind of an unwritten agreement actually was written on a small paper between President Ford",
      "for non-American interference in what Israel is doing in Palestine, mainly the West Bank regardless of whether they would condemn it publicly but that they wouldn't do anything effective to stop the Judaization and so on. Israel will try not to undermine the American interests in the Arab world. Now this particular government I think you're absolutely right, this particular",
      "to a certain part of American politics, has no connection with the Democratic Party whatsoever. They are connected to Christian Zionist what is called the Tea Party in the Republican Party. So for a certain American that probably are part of the base of Trump this government",
      "you know, coming to your question. Are they kind of making life more complicated? For the Democrats and anyone else who is a bit more reasonable I suppose you are absolutely right. Put it this way for the most sober and I don't use it in a positive way the most sober part of American imperialism is the military industry",
      "industry and the financial investment. They're not dealing with Israel as a messianic thing or a Christian thing, they dealt with Israel for many years as a bonanza, something that brings money and dividends, financial dividends, strategic dividends. I think the 7th of October but not before,",
      "ki se je vprašal, je izvedel Izrael za te ljudi od nasilja do zdravstva. To ni nekaj zelo dobrih novice za Mednjegovino. Mislim o tem, da armobaristika pripada svoje voze na Zagrebi in ne Izraela. Za prvič, niso Zagrebci povzročili holokost, ko so poslužili voze.",
      "And secondly, there is no... I don't know if you know it but the way the Israelis trade on arms with America does not always benefit the military industry in the United States in terms of its profits. Straight deals with Saudi Arabia or with African countries or South East Asian countries are much more beneficial or are much profitable for the American people.",
      "If I widen the context of your question, in the long run this is one, it's not the only exclusive. It's one of the processes that would contribute to the end of Israel because Israel needs everything. It needs its Jewish communities in the world and they're losing them. Israel needs the governments and are losing some of the governments. Israel",
      "in jih še preživijo, ne ker so se naredili moralni prostor, ampak ker ni zelo dobro. Najboljši predstav je Elbit in Elsint. Tudi američani žalosti izvršajo milijarde dolare za investicije v Izrael. Niso to delali, ker so bili človekami srednjih kompetencij na palestinskem stranu.",
      "Ker ni to boljša odločna stvar, da se inživimo. Mislim, da bi morali pogledati na to kot... In vseeno z njo. Če Izrael bo izbival s kristijanskim zionistom kot glasbeno področje, a nekaj malih delov ljudskih oblasti po celem svetu, je tudi ne samo pomembno, da ne bo lahko moralno mogla se omeniti, mislim, že takrat bo tega številno, financiranje in strategije",
      "načrtovno, zelo drugi faktori morajo tudi se dogoditi. Ampak mislim, da je to ena izmislilnih indikatorjev, ki mi povedo, da bomo v medijnem času začeli videti trgnega razvoja pravzapravstva v Palestini. Vsak takrat prišlo do liberacije in dekolonizacije. Zdaj je težko videti, ker se vidimo zelo mroče,",
      "Vsak dan je bil najboljši v srpskem režimu. Ne samo moramo misliti, ampak moramo biti človek transformacije. Nismo obzirniki, a smo človeka. Če bi se dobro razumeli... Prvič, zelo je precej težko razumevati, da ne vedemo dovolj o resnih planih in tako daleko.",
      "what is very clear that there's so much that we don't know on the way the Israeli army behaved on the 7th of October in a very cynical and cruel way, in order I don't what? In order for Netanyahu to stay in power. In order to create distraction from this civil war that was imploding inside Israel. And I'm sure this could not have been predicted by Hamas",
      "by the Hamas. And I think, you know, I remember this people have just to listen to people, you now? The leaders of the Hamass and leaders of other Palestinian national liberation who were not part of the political Islamic group they always said we are at a stage where we're fighting for freedom and liberation. The next generation will decide what it's going to do. We are trying to survive and to exist.",
      "ki se počutijo, da bi želeli završiti zdajše. Zelo je pomembno to poslušati. Ljudje so nekako obsežni v razgovoru o tem, kako bi palestinjski decolonizacij izgledal na budenost in za to, da ljudje bojo svojih naredilnikov.",
      "every day, wherever they are in historical Palestine, are under existential danger and people are not willing to be under such a threat without responding to such a danger.",
      "I just, obviously I don't know what Hamas expected but I just want to point out that this is a very racist and dehumanizing trope. That the social-cultural Israel side often deploys against Palestinians that they don't care if thousands of their own people die. It's obviously meant to again portray them as these savage barbaric people who",
      "thirsty and just want to see their people die, to maintain their own power. I've seen that. It doesn't make any sense. And the reality is Hamas leaders themselves have had their own children killed like we saw a few months ago with the children of Ismail Hania for example so you know they're not like aliens that came from outer space who themselves are insulated from everything that's happening in Lebanon right? So I would",
      "that I've seen a lot and I think is deployed for this purpose, but I also think no one expected this. Like eight months later all these insane death toll later, I don't think anyone expected just the sheer violence unleashed by Israel and almost no pushback from its allies in the West including the US. In fact some people believe",
      "that if it was Donald Trump who was in office at least the liberals, the democrats there'd be a lot more pushback to the US's kind of unfettered support and Israel wouldn't have been able to continue for this long or inflict as much damage. As far as the question about Arab media I don't follow like every Arab media outlet as closely but we all know that you know the majority",
      "Palestinian outlets in Gaza or some for sort of regional outlets. Unfortunately, I think some of the lack of solidarity and support from the media industry particularly Western media of these journalists is because deep down they don't consider them colleagues, they don' t consider them professional journalists. Obviously Israel often smears these journalists as armed fighters, as Hamas. They make this very",
      "very inflammatory and always unsubstantiated claims about these reporters when they kill them or when they killed their family members. So we saw with the son of Al Jazeera, Gaza Bureau Chief a few months ago when he killed his son Hamza and Hamza's colleague Mustafa Gureya in a third journalist, they said oh Hamza was a member of Islamic Jihad",
      "Hamas, but before that they said oh they were carrying a fighter in their car. Before that I said oh, they were using their drone for military purposes the story just kept changing and changing and of course when they made the claims That they were members of armed groups never substantiated, never provided any evidence The media kind of uncritically regurgitates it and publishes it And then it just goes away no one ever actually asks for hard evidence. I just wanted to end on this one note which is",
      "which is, you know these journalists in Gaza are portrayed as being kind of unprofessional or being allied, propagandistic or allied with certain groups or whatever it is. They having worked for them the last five months on our documentary in Gaza they're some of the most professional committed resilient journalists I've known and their committed to the truth at least someone that I work with I can't obviously speak for all of them but just to give you a quick example",
      "with a journalist about the field execution that took place in December. And I was asking him about some of the work and reporting he did on it, and he talked about interviewing some eyewitnesses and survivors, and I said what about the neighbor? He said the neighbor heard something but he didn't see it with his own eyes so I didn't interview him. That kind of standard is simply not met",
      "on things like the Screams Without Words New York Times article I wrote that has been thoroughly debunked and yet still remains on the website, where they interviewed alleged witnesses to acts of rape who changed their stories over and over again. People who just completely fabricated accounts. They've never asked them for evidence. They have never been asked back up their claims or anything like that so...",
      "All this to say that they're very professional and their professionalism in many cases exceeds that of the reporting I've seen elsewhere. Thank you for that. Okay, so the lady in front there?",
      "Is there still something that we can call Muslim Brotherhood as a nation standing together? Is there an Arab national community if you like, international community or are those things on their own from Iran?",
      "Israel and the Arab regimes, the history of that because Israel itself agrees it has this massive international vacuum etc but there has to be a study done I think deeply uh to investigate the relationship of the various Arab regimes which allowed them to exist and actually had secret agreements and relationships which go back to the beginning of creation. A lot of that stuff hasn't come out. I know certain academics are like Dr. Eddie Potter and others",
      "and others, and there's been a lot of disclosures or certain types of documents which indicate relationship with Sudan back in the 50s with Israel, with various parties with Israel. Lebanon was different, Syria etc. Saudi even so this could be an interesting like new venture for you perhaps?",
      "So I'll take a third question, maybe one from the back. Anybody in the back? Nobody in the background went to sleep. Can't believe it. OK. Gentleman here.",
      "we as individuals can do the counter some of those lobbying efforts and all this so i'm gonna let jonathan take that final question first okay yeah you realize i have like no expertise on this topic right now yeah i know but i can't make sure",
      "Because they're already running. I mean, but they have this defense that the Palestinian Authority does things and that they...I mean, they just go in any time they want to kill someone, they go in and kill somebody. They wanna harass people, they harass people. But then they don't have responsibility for it because their...what's happening? The microphone or actually the shut up?",
      "It's not like they're not controlling it. And they put in settlers, you know, settlers can go and do whatever they want. So I mean, at least annexation would make them finally have to... There wouldn't be any pro forma avoidance of responsibility. So maybe that's actually a... I don't know, I'm not an expert on this topic but that might be something to think about. That's something other people will know more about than I do.",
      "Arab regimes and Muslim solidarity?",
      "something that's top of mind for the people of Gaza who very much feel abandoned. They talk about the US as well and the role of the US, but it's primarily... I mean, it never fails where are the Arabs? Over and over again. Again, I'm not an expert on this, but I think obviously Israel is a big reason why the Arab world is in the state that it is with these kind",
      "with these kind of non-democratic regimes, let's just say being empowered and supported by the world's powers in order to maintain Israel's power. And the reality is we know that this doesn't reflect public opinion in the Arab world. This has always been a case where people want to protest, they want to speak out but you know",
      "In Egypt, a couple of students posted, why don't we have student protests? They were so inspired by the encampments in the United States. The next thing they knew they were arrested and no one has seen them since then. So we know there's a price to pay for speaking out in these countries. People know what their red lines are. And you know, we saw what happened with the Arab Spring right? Those efforts to be able to express themselves politically",
      "themselves politically were completely thwarted and there were these counter revolutions everywhere so um i don't know i think it's up to us in countries where we can do something we can speak out and we can organize and you can criticize the media you know to kind of lead the way and hope that one by one um you know some of these countries change and people can have their voices back",
      "Yes, first of all the question I think you're right it's a very important topic there are several as you said yourself academics working on some of them. Avi Shlain in his book The Iron Wall has covered certain connections",
      "with the Hashemites and later on with various Arab regimes. A book came out recently by Mahmoud Muharrab on certain connections as well. This crypto diplomacy of Israel has been covered, but you are absolutely right I don't think there is, as far as I know, there's no comprehensive one. It was definitely part of a strategy Israel was employing to what they call crypto diplomacy",
      "of crypto diplomacy is to sow dissent in the Arab world, but also build a kind of alliances that as we saw during the warning attack from Iran Jordan was helping Israel to take down some of these drones. So definitely it's a good topic. I just want to say something before I go to third question on being alone and so on",
      "I think there is a far more global network supporting the Palestinians than ever before. So, I don't think it's true to say that they are alone. They're not alone. You know, I dunno if people know but there are encampments in Japan and South Korea. If you would think that Japan and south Korea will have people who demonstrated for the Palestinians, you wouldn't think about it. There is what I call Global Palestine",
      "global Palestine. There is definitely a network of minorities, indigenous people, countries in the global south, in the Muslim world maybe not in the Arab world because what Laila was saying but in the Muslims there are movements and although the Arab World is the same Algeria is taking a very clear position on Palestine we should mention it and very different from Morocco unfortunately so it's a dynamic coalition",
      "koalicija, ki je kakšna. Ne imamo palestinskega vodnjevstva, ki lahko izolujejo ta zelo pomemben solidaritet. Potrebno je palestinski liberacijski glasbosti, ki ne ve, kar se s tem počne. Nekaj drugače, črveno potrobo je tako veliko in tako drastica, da smo se nisli dovolj prihodni",
      "je vznikal zelo pozitivni energij, ki ga odvaja Palestina. Zato sem govoril o ICJ in ICC, ki so zelo pomembne oblasti, ki bi nam pomagali. Svetljiva vprašanja o izolaciji... Ne želim jih izolati. Vsak razumem, kaj seveda. Zdaj sem videl na njihove plani. Izolacija teh političnih partij",
      "structure that the Oslo Accord has built. Area C is where supposedly Israel is ruling directly, area B Israel controls together with the PA, the West Bank and area A which is 16% of the West bank is ruled directly by the Palestinian Authority. The first step the Israelis will do and they are going to do is to annex area C and then they move the Palestinians from area C,",
      "by the Israelis. The media doesn't report it, nobody is interested in West Bank everybody's talking about Gaza so the Israelis can do what they want in the West Bank. They've already started ethnically cleansing Palestinians from area C to area B. Whole villages were already ethnically in the south of the mountain and from the Jordan Valley which is area C into area B",
      "... in vsega od njihoveh. In to je resnična, če se povezamo s tem, da je zgodba oziroma križa za glasbeno smrljevno razvoj bilo predstavljeno na masakrami in številnim slušalcima. To ni samo lep pridruženje ljudi. Mislim, da bi morali to precej zelo serijno izmeniti in nadalje govoriti o...",
      "Je to zelo pomembno. Vse je preveč, da je tudi vznik za zionizem kot kolonijski družben. Da bi želeli ljudje dovoljstviti v Palestini. Želel bi jih poškodil in izrazil. Ne bom ga demoniziral.",
      "da bi lahko naredili, da jih vrnemo na avtoški in lorijski in jih počutimo na drugi stran. Milijarde palestinjske ni se nekaj od toga, ki je tudi takrat zgodilo genocida. Ne ker so imeli nekakšno DNA o genocidu. Genocida je največji metod izmenjanja srednjeg kolonijskega družbe.",
      "16th and 17th century, and therefore the white settlers could have easily genocided the Native Americans and the First Nations in Canada and the indigenous people of Australia and New Zealand. It's a bit more difficult to do it in the 20th century 21st century but as we can see it is being done. So I think you should pay attention to Israel's policies in West Bank",
      "Vesni bank, ker mislim, da je to druga staja. Ne rečem, da se ne lahko prevenimo. Če vas vprašam kaj lahko urejemo, lahko zelo lahko. Zato pa lahko povedamo, da ta naš agenda je tudi. Kaj kot kar imamo, moramo pravzaprav objaviti in pripravljati, če ni to skrbno. Ker smo dobro delali. Potrebno je bolj.",
      "In tudi, če lahko govorim, je naša novega listu neodložnih kandidatov za življenje v juli. V njihovem skupinu so Palestini na svojem agendam. Počakajte za imena teh kandidatov in poslušalcev v konciliaciji, da jih podporovali. To bi bilo veliko podobno tomu, kar ste povedali o BDS-u",
      "members of Congress coming to the Democratic Party. We have a similar trend now in Britain. Look for those independent and ask, if not in your constituency, ask people to support them. Even five voices like this in the House of Parliament would be another important landmark in turning Israel into a pariah state and contributing to the liberation of Palestine. Thank you.",
      "Just to take the Chair's prerogative and ask a question of my own to Professor Pape. Do you think that the Israelis are going to push the people of Gaza very shortly into the Sinai? How likely do you think",
      "je to nekaj, kar se preizpravlja iz Izraela. Izraelska govornica je imela veliko konferenc, kjer je delala način za zgodbo o judaščinih",
      "the Judaization of Gaza. It was attended by the Minister of National Security, and then Finance Minister, and by important members of Knesset. And it was a very detailed kind of program. And includes massive expulsion. They claim they already have the agreement",
      "za razstavo s američanskimi republiki, z donorami. To je velika oblast na LRH, na egyptskem stranu. Zelo pomembno se pove, kako veliko vzgovorjo ljudje o izraelskih policijah in jih bi lahko uspevali upravljati. Je tudi bolj problematikna, da bi ga tako nazvala, izraemske politične države",
      "They are not contemplating a huge ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza, but they are hoping that the situation would persuade quite a lot of people. They are quoting a number which I'm afraid is correct, that all of these 300,000 Palestinians have left the Gaza Strip and they are",
      "It's an ethnic cleansing, but I think you were talking about something more intentional and systematic. So they believe that their military actions would downsize the number of people in Gaza. But they are not dealing with destination. They're not saying where should they go? It's like an individual choice of people. Yes, so I think if it's up to them, but hopefully it's not just up to... By the way, we were so interested",
      "ki sem se spomislil, da so tudi prekazali o razstavljanju ljudskih oblasti v zelo delovitem Lebanonu. Izraelska armija počne začeti atakirati lepo v Zelenovo in bo še vedno pokazala Hizballa na polnju bitane.",
      "jezera, ker jih mislimo. Zdaj Izraeli začnejo na norju v rivu Litani, ki je nekaj naturalnih obrokov Biblije. To je ta čas, kako se to preprati, da bi bilo zgodno. Ampak zgodna je, ker moramo osredotiti te fanatike in šešnji izraelski lideri, ki imajo mladost,",
      "and we just hope that this is another red line of the world would say no, this is too much. But we've said it before, we can only hope that the more extreme and unimaginable things they are doing, the more we're likely to have allies in our campaign in places where up to now we didn't have any allies.",
      "cyngor, y cymdeithas mawr, yr academiaidd mawr. Oherwydd rydych chi'n cadw'r un peth arall sydd angen ei weld a gweld ac i gydlyddu er mwyn gallu ymuno â ni. Diolch am hynny.",
      "yn ymwneud â'r cyfnod. Roedd Profesor Brown wedi dweud rhywbeth am ei brofiad o fynyddu ac mae'n deimlo i mi, nifer o flyneddion yn ôl pan roeddwn i'n blant ifanc yn yr Undeigydd a chyflwyno ar Berkley, roedd hi'n ystod",
      "and Vietnam War, a lot of us went through exactly the sort of thing that you expressed. We didn't really believe that the establishment and system is capable of the crimes which was committed in Vietnam or indeed it will support the apartheid or be involved in the racism so that awakening is something I have experienced",
      "it's almost like deja vu, you know seeing the decay. Now I personally don't want the current university students and the community will come back in another 50 years time be in my position looking at you know say hey we doing that again so I think is very important to recognize",
      "or in the power. We were conned, we were sort of led to believe pressurized through all sorts of things and the people who were involved at that time some end up being Clinton and others you know and selling out the whole idea I think we need to sort of make sure this time around",
      "doesn't really care for every citizen, it cares really for that 1%. And is all being geared to actually support that 1%, which includes arm industry and so forth. If we don't address it on that way, we are gonna see it over and over next generation the following generation, and we will see deja vu after deja vu. I think we need to address it",
      "dyn cynigol oed, nid yn cynigog, ond realist ac ymwybodol. Felly rydw i'n ffurfio bod angen i ni gael hyn i fynd i ben. Rwy'n gobeithio eich bod chi wedi mwynhau fi a dangos markaeth o gyffrediniaeth at ein gwahanol panel."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Podcast_ The Coddling Of T_zS5Oz7ycxmA&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748649182.opus",
    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Welcome back to the Muslim Matters podcast where we discuss everything under the sun that affects Muslims, such as faith, local and global politics, social media, sex education, civil rights, and family matters, all coming from a traditional orthodox perspective. Subscribe to our podcast and follow us online on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram on our handle, Muslim MatterS. And check out our site daily",
      "check out our site daily at muslimmatters.org. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh, and welcome to the Muslim Matters podcast. I am your host Zainab bint Yunus. Today's episode is about a touchy topic, the portrayal of Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi wasallam, particularly in light of the Hamline University controversy, which we'll explain in a little bit more detail in a bit.",
      "A.C. Brown, who is Al-Waleed ibn Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Dr. Brown is a Muslim academic with a rich list of publications including the books Misquoting Muhammad, The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy, Slavery in Islam, and Islam and Blackness. He has published articles in the fields of Hadith, Islamic Law, Salafism, Sufism, Arabic Lexical Theory, and Pre-Islamic Poetry,",
      "Law and is also the Director of Research at the Yaqeen Institute. Dr. Brown, welcome to the podcast. As-salamu alaykum. Thanks for inviting me. All right, Hamline University controversy. Is it art history or Islamophobia? So just to set the stage for the listeners, what happened at Hamline",
      "depictions of the religious figure, Rasulullah s.a.w., despite her class being focused on Islamic art. So she's a global slash art history teacher and she did provide warnings in advance that she was going to present images that might make students uncomfortable, specifically images of religious figures such as Rasulallah s.e.w. And it was all meant to be in a very respectful spirit, spirit of academia. Again, art history.",
      "specifically Muslim history. And to be clear, I believe this was illustrations of Rasulullah created by medieval Muslim Persian artists. Now unfortunately the Muslims in that class chose not to leave and then became very upset at this display of the images. They went and complained and although the professor did apologize for any offense taken or",
      "She still lost her job. And there came from that just tons of media controversy over this, you know, debates amongst Muslims in particular. And while this is one specific incident that happened recently, this issue of portraying Rasulullah has come up in a variety of contexts over I don't know last couple",
      "Just your brief take on this and then specifically starting off with this whole issue of depicting Rasulullah, how have Muslims historically dealt with this? How has it played out in our history? How does it play out now? Yeah. Okay, so I mean, I'll answer that question. But I think first is the kind of we need to kind of disentangle three different",
      "three different issues that confront us with this Hamlet controversy. The first one is what Muslims slash Americans should expect from university education, higher education, secular higher education and to what extent should Muslims expect to be presented with material",
      "that comes from outside their faith positions as Muslims and whether or not they should demand that, or accept it, et cetera. That's the first question. The second question is what do students do? Or anyone who feels offended or slighted how do they deal with that in this day and age especially in higher education? And the third question is the one you talked about which is how to Muslims...",
      "to muslims well actually there's really two questions or one is like what is the islamic position on depicting the prophet alayhi salam reviewing pictures of him and second and you know maybe more a theoretical one for purposes of muslim living in the west or even globally right is how do muslim deal with diversity within their own tradition when thinking about what is like",
      "what is acceptable or not acceptable for Muslims. So if you say that, I mean, you can just imagine, right? If you say it would be inaccurate for a professor to say that in Islam homosexual relationships are permitted, that would be an inaccurate position in the sense that the vast majority of Muslims throughout history would not have said this was allowed",
      "There are some Muslims today who say it is. And, you know, Muslims have done this whether or not that was allowed or not did it in the past. So the question is like, you should, you Know, should Muslims accept a representation of that diversity in somebody talking about their religious tradition? So these are a number of questions. So you talk, you asked first about the issue of depicting the Prophet. The so there's not really specific rulings",
      "There are in the last couple of decades, but I mean prior to essentially the late 20th century as far as I know. Muslim scholars didn't really talk about depicting the Prophet. There's two reasons for that because they dealt with this issue essentially under two other issues. One was whether you can depict any creature with souls.",
      "but definitely any creature that has a soul. This is based on Hadiths, you know, very well authenticated Hadith in Sahih Bukhari and other collections of one in which the Prophet, peace be upon him, doesn't... Aisha has a curtain that has like an image on it, some surah, some picture on it. And the Prophet sort of doesn't want to go into her chamber with this on the door. It says, you",
      "house that has either a surah, like an image or dogs in it. The second one is the Prophet says that if you...the people who make images, who kind of create things with surah and this is usually understood as either a picture painting, a tapestry, a sculpture what's called relief sort of a sculpture that's kind of little bit of three-dimensional",
      "has depth to it, but is also kind of affixed to a wall or some kind of backing that these are all understood as surah. That anybody who makes these surahs on the day of judgment, they will be asked to breathe life into these things that they thought they created, right? So these are the main sort of fiqh anchors for the rulings that would say... And this is, you know,",
      "not create a depiction of anything with a soul, whether it's a picture, painting, wall hanging, sculpture, et cetera, et",
      "about churches in Ethiopia. By the way, this is also very interesting because it shows you how aware people in the Hejaz were of kind of life and custom in Ethiopia just across the Red Sea. So what they talk about is how there were these churches or sort of shrines to saints. What would happen is a holy saint, Christian saint would die",
      "And the Prophet says, initially this was to kind of commemorate the person and place them on a pedestal as an exemplar, right? Someone who you should imitate and admire. A place of honor basically. Yeah, exactly. And then he sort of approves of this but then what happens is that it kind of turns into an icon that people start to use in worship, right? So you see that there's almost like the picture is not bad in and of itself",
      "And it's the fact that it's a slippery slope to sort of worship of an icon or incorporation of icons. Essentially, it's directly to shirk. Yeah, exactly right. Or slippery slope, right? So but I mean, that painting, that hadith doesn't detract from those other hadiths I mentioned which are pretty clear prohibitions. Now there were a couple of interesting dissenting opinions. One is from a scholar named Al-Qasim bin Muhammad. I think he died around 750 of the common era and what he says",
      "that it's only makruh or disliked to have a picture or image that's in like a wall hanging, or on furniture or something. Another scholar, a tafsir scholar, he dies I think in 987 common era, so 377 Hijri. His name is Abu Ali al-Farisi. In his tafsiri, he talks about how images are only prohibited if they're going to lead",
      "You can imagine if you have an image. I get it, yeah, yeah. If you're going to just imagine like you have a statue of something really stupid like- To Mickey Mouse? Yeah, Alvin and the Chipmunks or something. I mean, I guess you could worship Alvin. I'm trying to think of something even worse. Let's say you have... I'm going to get in big trouble for this. Let'S say you Have a sculpture of a butt or something like that at the rear end. Chances are someone is not going to worship a butt statue but then again there's some pretty weird temples on the world so we never know. So that's his opinion",
      "So that's his opinion. And then Al-Qurtubi, the famous jurist, and we all know his tafsir. I think he died in 1272 Common Era. He's originally from Spain, but he settles in Upper Egypt. And so in the Quran you have this story of Sulaiman alayhi salam kind of in the court of Suleiman, he has jinn that are basically making surahs for him. They're making statues and images for him, suddenly statues.",
      "So what Kortovi says is that this fact shows that making these things in and of themselves is not prohibited, it's not kind of wrong in and out itself. Now, what happens in the late 19th and early 20th century is that people like Muhammad Abduh who dies in 1905 famous Islamic modernist scholar Mufti of Egypt he writes a series",
      "was on artistic representation where he basically argues that, he kind of goes back to some of those dissenting opinions I talked about and that idea of the slippery slope. And he says that the prohibition on depicting images is only if there is a risk of them becoming idols. Today no one is going to... If you have a statue of Ramsey's or statue of King Tut",
      "is going to go and start worshiping that. That's what he said. So basically, he kind of... Well, that's pretty relevant to his context too, yeah. Okay, so then now I'm just giving you opinions. Now the second issue that this falls under or depicting the Prophet would fall under is insulting the Prophet, peace be upon him. And there it's very clear. It's very clearly clear that Muslims are not allowed to insult the Prophet even slightly insult the prophet, peace by Allah. And if you do so",
      "you do so, then you're not... You essentially cease being a Muslim because you're insulting, you're belittling the person who you rely on to bring you God's revelation and explain that revelation. Okay. So that's not really debated. So what happens when there's the question of this movie, The Message in 1977, the famous movie, probably we've all seen it. It's about",
      "Muslim scholars, especially I think Majma' al-Fiqh al-Islami in Mecca the Islamic Fiqh Academy they give a fatwa that you can't depict the Prophet or the leading companions like the four rightly guided caliphs because there's a risk of belittling them. There's almost nothing you can do that would give due justice to these people so in effect you're going to be belittlling them.",
      "Okay. But I mean, so that but again, that really comes under the rubric of insulting not under the book of depiction because when you have something like a film or a photograph although there is debate about photographs but generally the opinion is it's not creating a surah an image because you're just capturing light right? You're not actually making anything. You're just capture light that's bouncing off something in on film. Reflection of something Allah has already created. Exactly yeah. So okay.",
      "That's the legal one. So there's really, you know, not if someone says that Islamic law prohibits the depiction of living things or certainly human beings, that's a pretty good generalization. Yes, there's going to be some dissenting opinion on this, but certainly in Sunni Islam, this is by far and away the majority position. Okay. Now, that being said, right? You have two other things you need to take into account.",
      "you need to take into account. One is that Muslim artists, and especially they're generally in the pre-modern period, Muslim artists are like other artists producing works of art for patrons. So how do they make a living? Some rich person, a nobleman or ruler or something says, you know, you're such a great artist to produce some wonderful picture and I'm going to sponsor you and you're going to praise me or something",
      "go back, I mean you go back to like the palaces of the Umayyad some of the surviving palaces like the palace of Hisham that's Khurbet al-Mafjar and you see they have straight up statues of the caliph like holding a sword of women with cleavage showing all sorts of stuff right? They have statues, they have paintings etc. So you know like Mel Brooks says in History of the World Part 1 it's good to be the king you can do whatever you want",
      "to have a statue, you can have a statute. Is it halal? No, but what does anyone know? But who cares? Yeah. Okay. So now what happens in terms of the depiction of the prophet, alayhi salatu wa sallam, there's a little bit of debate about are some of the early Umayyad coins depicting the prophet? I don't think they are. I think they're depicting",
      "Very clear, clear image. We have something that's not debated. It's an image of a painting of the Prophet Muhammad.",
      "a vizier and scholar, Rashid ad-Din who died in 1318 of the common era. And there's numerous pictures of the prophet, alayhi salam, in this compendium. And they're all very, you know, these are very respectful pictures, right? And he looks kind of like a, he looks sort of like Mongol person. I mean that was just the artistic style so it doesn't even look Arab. And this is very typical for painting in the kind of Persianate area whether it's the Ottoman Empire Iran",
      "North India, Central Asia from roughly the 1300s to the 1600s and 1700s is that the kind of artistic style is that everybody basically looks Chinese or Mongol. So it's sort of silly. I mean you're not actually trying to represent the person accurately. Of course. And in this picture his face is completely unveiled he looks like",
      "Then what happens is in the kind of 1400s and 1500s, you have this move towards having these halos like kind of fiery halos around. Oh, is that when the flame veil kind of kicks in? Yeah, exactly. And then in the 16th century in Iran, they begin this tradition of having actually like a hijab, like a veil over the prophet's face.",
      "They would have also like flame halos around their head. So that becomes an artistic style. And I should also add that, and I'm not actually sure how this happens. Someone who's more knowledgeable than me needs to explain this. But in the Shiite tradition in Iran, somehow they don't seem to have any problem depicting the prophet.",
      "centuries. But in the 19th century, you have these incredible pictures that depict like the day of judgment happening and you just see everybody like martyrs and people getting judged and the prophet and the imams it's really intense. And then but today in Iran they I don't mean someone again, someone else explain this, but they really don't seem to mind at all because I remember a few years ago and someone should find this on the internet, I think they actually had an official competition",
      "Iran to see who could do the most accurate depiction of the Prophet, alayhi salam, based on like the dahlia and the shama'il and the hadiths that describe him. So it was actually almost like a sketch artist. But in Iran you can walk down the street and you'll see for sale pictures and rugs with images of wall hangings with images",
      "So this is very normal to see in Iran.",
      "Islamic history for Fanzis. So, you know, very casually but you know these things come up so you're generally aware like oh yeah this happened is it had no, but did it happen to Muslims do it and they do it in good faith yes. And one of the things that struck out for me in this whole university. I'll say scandal issue is that the students, I think the MSA student said something along the lines of like we never heard of this before we'd never seen it before.",
      "of course, like non-university educated as well who are also very unaware of this and they assume that any portrayal of Rasulullah is automatically insulting and offensive. And I guess that leads to the next issue of there have been many times that illustrations of Rasullullah have been weaponized against Muslims by Islamophobes so things that come to mind are you know, the Danish cartoons the whole Charlie Hebdo",
      "Charlie Hebdo issue, Pamela Geller and her whole like oh draw the prophet cartoon challenge or something it was quite a few years ago in the States. And obviously those incidents evoked significant agitation from Muslims across the world and rightfully so because you know the gira that we have for our messenger sallallahu alayhi wa sallam",
      "what would you like to essentially tell muslim students or muslims generally like the difference between these two scenarios really so i mean first i just want to add that you know these images like the ilkhan vizier the jamiya tawarikh image and the ones produced in the ottoman empire in central asia these are all produced by sunnis so i want to be clear like this is not just um a shiite thing it becomes",
      "Iran, Safavid Iran and post until today. But a lot of this is done by Sunnis, by Sunni rulers patronizing Sunni artists. Okay. Now that doesn't mean it make it right or wrong. I'm just saying that we can't just say that everything is done Shia. Right. So the second thing I'd say is that this brings us to that first issue I brought up which is like really what are we dealing with when it comes to university education?",
      "education. Okay, so first of all just from the perspective of a university or college they're not beholden to following the dictates of the Sharia right? Now that's because first of al,l the vast majority of students aren't Muslim second of all there's tremendous diversity amongst students even if most students are Muslim like you can't expect",
      "sort of accept as just by without any kind of evidence why Muslim sensibility should be indulged. The second thing is that so, you know, if they're teaching the history of art or history of Islamic civilization, they are just going to do that from their whatever perspective that professor has now that professor could claim to be quote unquote objective and I'm just telling you what happened, quote unquote.",
      "of argument because everybody has an agenda. Everybody has a point of view, but if somebody says I'm going to show you really famous pieces of Islamic art or for example let's take that... I remember when I was teaching in University of Washington Muslim students would come up to me and complain in my Islamic civilization class like why are you talking about the disputes amongst the companions after the death of the prophet? And",
      "Abu Bakr being the caliph. And I said, like, this is... I mean, nobody debates this. Like no Muslim scholar debates this so you can say that you think we should have a certain perspective but then I asked this Muslim student and I said okay, so you're telling me I should do this but there's let's say there's Shiite Muslim students in the class and they're going to come and say to me why are you saying that it's not totally clear that Ali should have been the caliph or something? Which Muslim student am I supposed to listen to? Who gets to define",
      "I can give them the majority position, but then if I'm going to be a good scholar, I'm also tell them these dissenting positions. Or OK, so let's just say I'm teaching Fick. So I'm gonna teach in the majority of this and I'm in the minority position. I'm telling them what the evidence are. I mean, you see what? I think the stronger position is. I will allow them to have their opinion. OK, but they're still going to exposed to the majority minority position that allowed some kind of depiction now. That's even sorry to cut you off. But yes, outside even of a secular",
      "of a secular academic setting. This is standard for, I would say pretty much any filth class that will say unless you're sticking to just your Madhab but even then within a Madhab there are diverse opinions and they will be discussion of those opinions and why they came about and so on and so forth. There's no way really to hide all the other perspectives. Exactly right? So then of course if you're talking about I'm going to teach a class on Islamic history",
      "So I'm Muslim. I teach a class on Islamic history. I love Islamic history, I value it, I think of it positively right? But you can't ignore things that are there that you might not like, they don't go along with what you think should have happened. So even if I think there never should've been a depiction of the Prophet Muhammad, there were and they were produced by very reverent Muslim scholars. Now people ask me like,",
      "reverent Muslim scholars if they produce these pictures, which violated the clear dictates of the Sharia. Well, guess what? There's a lot of variety in the world and people can have a lot opinion. So there's this actually one Sufi scholar in the 900s. He talks about how you should look at pictures of saints or pious figures like the prophet in order to orient yourself towards them,",
      "I remember reading this last semester because my students asked me about it. You know, these kind of Javanese shadow puppets that are famous from Indonesia? So they don't have like the Islamic art museums in Kuala Lumpur and Indonesia and Malaysia, Indonesia. They don't actually have these in the Islamic Art Museums but these are actually kind of... They were prominent parts of Muslim court performances where they would perform these religious stories using these. And it's funny",
      "going back to like the 1600s and 1700s we have reports about scholars asking being like how are you allowed to have these things because these are depicting of your depicting people and you're creating these images. And it's this famous story is that this one kind of Sufi scholar responds to that jurist and says, You know, you're missing the point. That's not the issue with the issue is do you understand the meaning of the story?",
      "the kind of highest and spiritually enlightening meaning of the story. Now, what you'll notice about both the stories I just told you, both this Sufi scholar from the 900s and these...the person in the late medieval period talking about the Javanese shadow puppets is neither of them actually addressed the issue, right? Neither of them say why they're allowing you to draw a picture of a person when the prophet clearly said you're not allowed to do that. So look, people are complicated",
      "That doesn't mean that they're not pious. It doesn't meant that they weren't... They were clearly revering the Prophet, right? So these images... I mean, Imam Shadi al-Masri had a really good point about this when he's talking about this Hamlin thing. He said, you know, these are beautiful pictures and there's that professor showed so it's entirely possible that somebody who doesn't know anything about Islam or even someone who doesn' like Islam would see these and be like, these",
      "increase that likelihood of them inclining towards Muslims and Islam. So these are a million, a light year away from the Charlie Hebdo pictures or the Danish cartoon pictures, right? Which are just insulting. Now that gets to another question, which is people say, Professor Brown, do you show pictures of these pictures of the prophet in your class? I definitely show the pictures from Rashida Deen and these pictures from the Ottoman period",
      "art. So I show them on my Islamic art in my Islamic Art lecture, right? But also if you're dealing with a class on Islamophobia and I teach classes on Islamaphobia or Islam in the West, you'll also show the pictures from Charlie Hebdo because people mean... You can't just say like there's an really insulting picture of the prophet and just trust me on it. It's really insulting, right. These are... You have to know what you're doing. You got to lay out the facts essentially no matter how distasteful and not horrible.",
      "And similarly, like this is the same thing Muslim scholars did. Like for example, the Quran says like these, the unbelievers are saying X about the prophet. They say he's a pope. They they're getting this from some other person who's giving this information, right? They say, et cetera, et-cetera. So even if you were to read the Quran, you're literally reciting and repeating insults directed at the prophet. It's very interesting when you look at especially in the Hanafi school of law",
      "school of law, when they talk about instances in which non-Muslims like Vimis living under Muslim rule, if they insult the prophet in the Hanafi school of that's not a... That is not automatically like a death penalty offense or it's actually up to the ruler to decide what to do with the person. Why? Because that person by not being Muslim so the Quran allows them",
      "Surah At-Tawbah. It allows them, if they pay the jizya, they can continue being Christian or Jewish or Zoroastrian or whatever. But there, if you're, if your life is a liar or he's crazy or our information about him is unreliable, all of these are insults, right? So what Abu Hanifa and his school say is like their religious belief which they have been Quranically allowed to keep",
      "to keep is more insulting than what they've said about the prophet. Interesting. That tracks, basically. Yeah, their kufr and their refusal to believe is a much bigger insult than them saying some sentence that some insult about the Prophet, right? So I think it's important to remember that even if you were to just recite",
      "an insult about the prophet, right? Even if you were to just talk about how Muslim scholars dealt with non-Muslims and people insulting the prophet. You're going to repeat and find this material repeated so you can't like any serious study of the past even if it's done from a purely Muslim perspective like in a medrassa is going to",
      "Like, for example, in Hadith, the science of Hadith. You're allowed to repeat and reproduce forged Hadiths if your purpose is to identify them as forgery. And to talk about the issue of forged Hadaths. Right? You don't just say there are forged Hadeths out there. We can't say what they are. We cannot give you examples because it's insolent. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. What these students were asking for... Of course, the funny thing is this was an online class.",
      "some student, the students are like sitting there looking at their computers. The professor on their syllabus wrote that there's going to be images of religious figures. This, the professor gave them a trigger warning, told them if you want, you can leave the room, look, turn the, you know, turn screen off or whatever. Yeah. They didn't do it. I don't know. Maybe they weren't paying attention, which is probably the case with most students. Right. But yeah. And then this, if you, if",
      "Minnesota press conference, she's outraged that she was forced to see a picture of the Prophet Muhammad. Well, first of all, I mean, I've showed these pictures in my class. It didn't even occur to me to give a trigger warning because I don't know. That's going to tie into like the next side tangent that I'm going to bring up because this relates to me, to the coddling of the American mind.",
      "So continue with your point, though. Go on.",
      "are on the side that people shouldn't be coddled. They need to be exposed to different opinions and that, you know, an idea or a speech or an image can't really harm you. I mean, when you talk about harming students, him hearing something that upsets them or comes from a different perspective, if you say that's harm, then you end up in a situation where nobody can talk about anything that might upset anybody else. And in the end,",
      "And in the end, why are you even in school to learn anything? Yeah. In the end you essentially can't say anything because anything you say could potentially be harmful to somebody and you have a very diverse community. And by the way, nobody there's no notion that someone has to objectively demonstrate that they've been harmed in this, in this way of thinking. Right. So all I have to do is say that I'm harmed and everyone has to accept that. So this is it leads to it's like a reductio ad absurdum. You reach the point where essentially no one would be able to communicate",
      "able to communicate or express any ideas. And then education certainly becomes impossible. Now, somebody could say, oh wait Professor Brown but you know we have a chance Muslims have a chances to kind of promote their values and to bring American society further in line with what we think how we think humans should act which is that we think human should venerate profits. We think that they should not depict them right? So if we can get we can make it so",
      "you know, American universities do not ever show pictures of the Prophet Muhammad or never allow anything bad to be said about the Prophet Mohammed. Would that not be a good development? Would we have not done, you know Amr bin Maruf and joining right in our society more broadly? Okay, fair enough, right? I accept that, right but there's, I'd say there's two problems with that. You know, in fact, I'm not even going to go into the first one. I'll just say the second problem is even",
      "Even from that, taking that perspective as the only correct one. I would say that what do you do then about diversity within your own tradition? Let's say we're never going to... Again, let's say America suddenly became a Muslim country. The Sharia is applied. Everybody's Muslim in the country. There'd still be, I think, a reason to show the Charlie Hebdo cartoons",
      "cartoons, because here you're like, look, this is what other people are saying about the prophet. They said something we're saying about Muslims. How do we deal with this? How do understand it? So you're not talking about then what your in-group is producing or saying some of us produce this image. These are other people outside who are producing from another place or producing these images and you kind of have to understand them in order to understand what you're up against. The second thing I'd say is again, even if everybody's following the Sharia, everybody's Muslim, right?",
      "everybody's Muslim, right? You still have dissenting opinions within the Islamic tradition on the issue of depiction. And you still have Muslims who are producing these images in the medieval period. So you would have to be saying that we're just not going to deal with our own history at all and we're going to pretend it didn't happen. And I think that is foolish because Islamic history is a repository of wisdom. Even when people",
      "those mistakes, how they justify those mistakes. How does justifications... What are their weaknesses? So you really by shutting off even our own history from ourselves we're doing ourselves a disservice and especially if you're showing pictures that nobody on earth could possibly say these pictures are insulting the prophet. They aren't absolutely reverential pictures. Okay. If it's a good point or an interesting point that he made about even showing the Charlie Hebdo",
      "support this, we don't like it. But I will support because it's freedom of speech, we support their right to be able to do that, which is a different discussion entirely in my perspective. But for Muslims, in educational settings and academia, as you said, like this is a setting where you were supposed to learn where we're supposed to be exposed to information for greater benefit, like why else are you there? Right. And",
      "not just American Muslim mind, but the Muslim mind in general and particularly within an academic setting. As Muslims, whether in the real world or academia, we do need to be more resilient. And just because we're uncomfortable doesn't make something automatically Islamophobic. And I think very unfortunately slapping this incident with the Islamophobia label will actually negatively affect other cases of",
      "of real Islamophobia, whether it's on campus or off. You know, it would be very different if this instructor had no real purpose, not even to be like, oh, this is what people have an example of how people have portrayed the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam but in an insulting way at the end. But really, if it was just like, hey guys look at this kind of thing, you know? Yeah, I... This is a real tragedy. This whole thing is a tragedy and so some people have written about how we have to understand",
      "the Hamlet incident, and it bends the background of kind of anti-Black racism and Islamophobia in the Twin Cities, especially against Somalis. Yeah, I was going to bring that up. That's fine. I completely accept that, right? But here's the problem. By picking this... People say, well, this was a straw that broke the camel's back. Okay. But by picking this issue, which is so clearly not Islamophobic, even the university has now issued the president and the board of trustees as issues. Yes,",
      "Yes, I saw that. Just like last night or today or yesterday, I can't remember when. Saying we were wrong in using the word Islamophobia. Like this is not Islamophobic what this professor did. So by doing this and by essentially like what Care Minnesota was arguing was essentially that all of American society and certainly higher education has to abide by Muslim sensibilities about art and depiction. And it's kind of ridiculous",
      "Which is ridiculous given the wider discussions and societal issues. Like this is really not it. This is not the mountain to, or not even the mountain, but the molehill to claim as a mountain to die on. Yeah. And it is, it's just, I mean, it feeds exactly into what the kind of Islamophobic right-wing talking points are, which is Muslims are going to make you follow their religion, right? That's essentially what Care Minnesota is asking. They're saying everybody has to abide by Muslim sentimentality",
      "by Muslim sensibilities on this issue. Even if you don't believe them. The National ended up coming out and saying, forget what we said before or like what Care Minnesota said. Actually no, this was wrong. This is the wrong reaction to have. And yet it just really feeds into as you said already existing Islamophobic narratives. It's treating ourselves in the foot. It just goes to show that people aren't going to take us seriously crying wolf basically. And then look at all the coverage this issue has gotten",
      "issue has gotten in the kind of respectable centrist media, in civil liberties media, and then right-wing Islamophobic media. They're all saying the same thing. They all basically say this is ridiculous. This is an insane situation. It's untenable. It unjustifiable. And the Islamophobic perspective is see look how awful Muslims are",
      "Muslims are, the kind of more sense or more sympathetic perspective is, yeah, these students had it rough. But this is really unacceptable because this totally compromises academic freedom. So what you end up having is Muslims look like, you know, the Muslim who called tried Islamophobia. And instead of instead of these students saying, OK, here are like ABC things that have happened to us in the Twin Cities or on campus where we were treated badly because we're Muslim or we were treat badly because",
      "We were trying to, et cetera, et Cetera. Right. Instead of doing that, which would have been really good arguments for people doing something about Islamophobia or anti-black racism or something, they end up saying something where even if you listen to the students and care Minnesota's presentation, this is they don't talk about it. They talk about racism and anti blackness when they talk about how people are opposing the university president who is herself African American.",
      "American, right? But they don't... It's not drawn to actual examples of how it relates. What they're talking about is this 100% religious issue. It is 100%. This is against our religion. If you do it, it's Islamophobic. They don't say people are being racist against us. They didn't say that. Yeah, and I think it's very important for Muslim in general to again be aware of this because how this was handled and how we choose to handle similar situations in the future",
      "in the future is really going to inform very strongly how we are dealt with elsewhere. And I mean, I'm in school and I have conversations about Islamophobia on a fairly regular basis because I'm going to be going into something similar to social work, you know, community work. These discussions come up a lot but there's a massive, massive difference between again identifying real Islamophobia versus while I'm uncomfortable or this goes against Islam in some way now I'm",
      "And this is where that bit about resilience and not being coddled really comes in. Like if you're in a particular class, you know what the curriculum is, you don't get these warnings? What are you going to do in the real world where you cannot impose? And as you said, even in an ideal Muslim state, we cannot impose certain things upon non-Muslims",
      "non-Muslims. And it's just an unhealthy take all around because it does us a disservice by putting us in an even weaker position than we already generally are as Muslim minorities in the West, and particularly within an academic context. And unfortunately there's lots of Islamophobia and Orientalism",
      "difficult to call out even when they're explicit and clear. So, to see something like this, to claim it to be Islamophobia when it really wasn't... And then I really feel for the professor unfortunately who got fired over this because it does impact her really negatively. Imagine how she feels now about these Muslim students! She's launched a lawsuit against the university I believe but all i can think about is this was really bad anti-Dawah.",
      "Yeah, it's really depressing. It's sort of... I mean the one group that is very reliably supported Muslims and tried to fight against Islamophobia in the US is professors in academia and the Care Minnesota basically made an enemy out of those people or antagonized those people and made it very hard for them to align their work as scholars",
      "as scholars and supporting Muslims. Any final words on this before we sign off? I mean, I would just say that one of the things I've noticed about Muslims discussing this stuff online is, as usual, people need to have higher standards for the way they think about the world around them and sort of process information. The kind of stuff that if I remember, I wrote and I said online like,",
      "you know, insulting to Muslims. And people said, how can you say it's okay to depict the prophet? I didn't say that. They were going to say, how do you show the Charlie Hebdo photos? That wasn't even in the picture. I didn' t say that and the professor didn't show them. So, you know people need to like have just a modicum, the absolute bare minimum of ability",
      "analyze it and then respond. It was like a theater of idiocy. Yes, in so many ways. I know some of this is just the nature of online social media and stuff but I think a lot of Muslims show up on that and express themselves. If they want to live up to the standards of their tradition and not embarrass themselves in front of others, they should really have higher standards for",
      "That's the valuable takeaway from this entire discussion is that, as you had pointed out in significant detail within our own tradition, there is so much diversity and it's not offensive. And so much of what has happened boils down to that complete ignorance of our own traditional. And then not only do we look like fools to the non-Muslims but we're betraying our own traditions in so many ways.",
      "There was neither offense intended, nor could it possibly be construed as such. It again, just harmful to our own cause betrays our tradition in so many ways and is a symptom of the expectation that we are to be coddled and catered to at every step of the way. And that's just not how life is going to work whether",
      "listeners benefited from this discussion as much as I did. Jazakallah khair for your time, really appreciate it. I know you're quite busy and you've got classes coming up so just want to tell you thank you again for joining us and having this great conversation. My pleasure. Assalamualaikum. Waalaikumsalam wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.",
      "Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next one inshaAllah. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Problem Solvers_ not Probl_fHgWbcXh7sE&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748673857.opus",
    "text": [
      "Rwy'n dod yma i roi cyflwyniad at un person rwy'r hyn yn ei chyfathrebu fel athro, Prof Jonathan Brown. Felly rydw i wedi clywed, prof Jonathan, bod gennych chi gyngor am fywyd ifanc sydd wedi tyfu yma mewn yr Unigoliaid. Fodd bynnag heddiw rydych chi'n ddigon llwyddiannus o gyrraedd Washington DC efallai. Mae Prof Jonathan brown yma â ni heddiwr. Fydd yn rhannu rhywbeth am fod yn",
      "I'm not saying young man, young Muslim men in the community should be cautioned and responsibility contained.",
      "I was once a teenager. Like you guys, right? Oh, this kid got out of tune. Yeah, I was one teenager and I lived in a different place. I wasn't Muslim also so my life is pretty much not helpful to you but",
      "There's something I've thought about a lot since there was a lot of debates about masculinity and what it means to be a man, then there's this guy Andrew Tate, and then there are Muslims on Twitter. And they talk about being manly and all that stuff. A lot of that stuff is not actually very useful. It's mostly people who are just kind of insecure and don't know how to deal with the world.",
      "I'm going to tell you what I've learned about being a man. And I've learnt a lot of it from being Muslim, and I've learn a lot from the example of the Fulal Laws of Islam. And this is...I actually think a lot about...I remember one time I was in Paris, and there was a young man talking to an Iranian businessman",
      "You have to be a cost you have to become an income center not a cost center He said he said you have the problem solver not a problem cause And everything way is mentioning this as he just got rid of his business partner. He said it was a cost that are not He was a problem causer not a problems all for some reason I remember this from this per era Persian Muslim man, I'll leave you later because really being",
      "Resolving other people's problems. Resolvin' issues that people have. That's what a man does, right? It's easy and cowardly to cause problems. It's hard to solve them. That is what a men does. A man is like a source of positivity in the world not a source or negativity in the word for those people around you.",
      "I actually think it might be hard to be a woman. I've never been a woman, but I think it's tough man. I'll be honest. I thank God every day that I am not a woman It really is tough man they have periods They have childbirth We could go on for a lot of problems that women deal with in this society and other societies etc",
      "etc. etc. But there is one thing that's hard about being a man and that is you have to carry weight for other people, you know? That's what you have do when you become... You're still young right but I want you think about this because I'm glad I learned this when I was relatively young. I wish someone had told me when I even younger but it's very useful advice. When you are a man, you become husband, inshallah, you",
      "You're going to have to carry the weight of other people. People are gonna yell at you, people are gonna treat you badly, people will ask you to do stuff, they'll ruin your life. You want to sit down and eat a sandwich or watch the game or whatever but you can't do that. You gotta fix the light bulb, you got to help somebody do homework, you gotta listen to someone's problems. When you become a man, your life isn't about what you want.",
      "Your life is about helping other people. It's about helping your wife, it's about help your kids, it' s about helping friends, it is about help community. I want you to remember that. It is a very important lesson. Again, it really easy to be selfish. It really easy cause problems. It easy to cause drama. It hard to solve these things and that what you should try to do. This is what the prophet did. He didn't cause problem for other people he solved their problems. He didnt caused problems for his wife. He solved her problems.",
      "I want you to keep this in mind. This is my advice to you. It's probably the most useful thing I can think of telling young, whatever teenagers. How old are you people? 12? My kids are younger than me. I actually don't know anything about kids. I only know about my own kids so since they're not your age, I don't actually know how old they are.",
      "Yeah, and you know what? Also don't do drugs. Drugs are really... Seriously they don't help get anything out of it. They don't make you more creative. They just make an idiot. And also alcohol. Don't drink alcohol. It's not going to make your life any better. Trust me. Okay. Any questions?"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Q_A session - Is there any_cNw9CXQRgn4&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748676365.opus",
    "text": [
      "We read a lot of Quran, but we don't know what we're reading. Is there a benefit because there's a misnomer that there is no benefit? Or very little benefit? Is it sufficient with the lack of academics or is it sufficient just to read the Quran even though",
      "they may not know what they're reading. Is that sufficient for these type of individuals, that may not be well educated? So any of the panelists can address a question. Dr Brown? I mean my answer might not be the right answer. I think that the Quran is the word of God",
      "And you know, in my travels I've met lots of Muslims who didn't know Arabic but who memorized huge chunks of the Qur'an and it meant a huge amount to them. I remember one guy who was like a boat driver in Mali just sitting here listening to him reciting the Qur-an and then I recited the Qur-'an he recited",
      "tell how much this meant to him and i'm 99 sure he didn't know arabic so i think that uh you know my answer would be of course there's huge value in this when you're reciting the word of god and it's me this means something just just the that action you know will give you blessings and what god will you know illuminate you and open your heart i think so uh that'd be my answer",
      "One of the panelists would like to add to the question, insha'Allah, to the answer of Dr. Brown in regards to benefits for just reading the Quran and not necessarily knowing the meaning. I would say the Prophet has answered the question",
      "Abdullah bin Mas'ud narrated, he said, Anyone who reads a harf, whether it's translated as a letter, a word, most commonly translated as the letter. He has a good deed and the Prophet never said, He says, he who reads it recites it shall receive a Hasana",
      "and folded and flipped one hasana has ten until how many hasanat a person can receive from reading one page of the Quran al-kareem, ta'iyyah so as we mentioned there's value in it. It is the word of Allah Azawajal no doubt I would just like to add that every single Muslim doesn't have to know Arabic and learn Arabic Every Muslim doesn t have to be scholar or serious student of knowledge",
      "learn the basic rudimental fundamental things of the religion. The basics according to their intellect, according to the time and in a place. The Basics! Other than that a person works, a person, a sister or brother whatever the case may be I'm a layman Muslim but I love to read the Quran and when I read the Qur'an I'm spiritually invigorated",
      "tafsir and asbab nuzul but I know that this is Allah's words these are Allah's word and a person enjoys and finds sweetness and taste in their ibadah so biddenu la ilaha illallah it should be a balance seek knowledge if you can read hadiths,read books of tafseer that have been simplified and summarized for the layman Muslim in many languages but at the same time making tasbih making dhikr reading the words of Allah without the proper meaning",
      "a tremendous reward. But that doesn't mean that you just throw yourself to ibadah, dhikr, dhakir, dhirak, without no type of basic fiqh and what's meant by basic fiqi is not halal haram, shafi'i maliki this and that. No! Basic understanding and basic comprehension and whenever there's knowledge inshaAllah light is not far behind and whenever it is ignorance darkness for surely is there so therefore every single Muslim has learned the basics",
      "the basics of his or her religion, and it's always gonna be good and more positive if you can add upon the basics. And Allah knows best. In addition to that is extremely important too that we recognize our academic level as well so because someone is proficient in reading the Quran or someone recites Quran better than another person, that doesn't necessarily give their person",
      "explanation or their own tafsir of the Qur'an. So at the same time we have to know our place and we know that the Prophet sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam said, you know read and elevate right? And to recite with a melody just like he used to recite in this world because your place in paradise will be the last verse that you read so there are many benefits",
      "but there are greater benefits to actually understand the Qur'an. This is just part of our development as believers."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Slavery and Islam A Conver_8ng5KMmoVbM&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW3SBwkJsAkBhyohjO8%3D_1748654952.opus",
    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Welcome respected listeners, respected viewers who are joining us once again on another amazing fantastic interview here at the",
      "interview here at the Islamic Literature Society. We bring you some amazing interviews with authors on amazing and interesting topics. Now, the Islamic literature society was founded in 2019 with the aim of promoting fostering and developing a heightened appreciation for authors and literary works of classical and contemporary scholarship. Now we achieve this through a number of different ways. We have book clubs,",
      "And the most interesting and the most direct way of developing this relationship with our books and our respected author is through these interviews, alhamdulillah. So today we have a very special guest and the topic is one that you do not want to miss out. What we have with us today inshaAllah is the book titled Slavery & Islam and it is written by Jonathan A.C Brown who's with us",
      "Jonathan A.C. Brown is a professor of Islamic studies at the Al-Walid Ibn Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and mashallah Doctor has written a number of different books, I have a few of them with me here we've got Misquoting Muhammad which you'll get the author's opinions on as well and also about Hadith, Muhammad's legacy",
      "modern world so alhamdulillah there's a number of things there so let us begin by bringing in the sheikh okay doctor assalamu alaikum how are you i'm um good and i'm really happy to see you and meet you in online and i've been invited to be in this podcast masha'allah you look very relaxed today i must say sir",
      "So I always, I mean, I'm usually pretty relaxed except when I get upset about stuff. Okay, good. Which means you're not upset today? Not yet. Not yet? Okay, Good. All right Shaykh let's start off inshaAllah if we can start by a simple question about your journey through Islamic learning. Alright Mashallah you've authored a number of different books so could you tell us how you got to where you are today please?",
      "Sorry, I was looking at something going on outside. Okay, it's fine. Sorry my kid is just wandering around but he's... Yeah, so Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem. Alaykum thanks for inviting me. I apologize you caught me at a weird time on my site. My beard trimmer broke. So I can't stand having like a long beard. It just really itches me. If it gets longer than maybe week and half or two weeks",
      "half or two weeks i just shaved my beard and then grow it back so i that's why i don't have any kind of beard right now you're a bunch bigger beard than me okay uh you look pretty good in the back of your book the picture in the backyard yeah yeah i mean i like the and the impression is called tahresh short got short beard iranian guy beard designer stubble as my friend said calls it okay so uh the um yeah well",
      "Sorry, this is kind of repeating stuff I've said in other places. But you asked me the question so I'll do my best to answer it. So I mean, I became Muslim when I was in college and university. I was about 19 years old, I think. And I really, I become Muslim through reading books of Muhammad Assad, The Road to Mecca, his Tafsir of the Quran. So, I came really through a modernist window",
      "Faisal Rahman and things like that. And I, so that was it was actually not until I was in graduate school that I actually someone you know the idea that you could go and meet like Muslim scholars today and you know traditional online study with them like they were previously they just sort of been somebody like",
      "obsolete things of the past. So when I went to Egypt in 2000, 2001 for a year to learn Arabic, I started to attend the Daruss and Azhar, the open Daruss. And then I really started to do that more in 2003, in the summer of 2003.",
      "Yeah, I think so. I can't remember now. Something like that. 2002 or 2003. And then after that, I would go back every summer for at least a month. And in 2006, I went for about eight months and did private studies with very intensive private studies scholars in hadith and fayyafqan rasool, fayyyafqin grammar and arudh and things like that",
      "But the, you know that but that was really I mean I never did what you what you did for example. I never didn't went and did like intensive, you full curriculum studies so for me my Islamic learning traditional Islamic learning is there's a few things that I have like to teach. But it was really it's not something that I would ever boast about as being something",
      "something substantial. I mean, it just, I would say it gave me enough skill to be able to kind of navigate things generally and then also to know when I needed help to understand things. So I think that's the more important thing. So in a lot of ways, I think my work as a scholar in the US has been to try and kind of integrate classical, you know, kind of Islamic learning and Western learning",
      "Why did you pick such a topic? Yeah, well I don't know. I mean most...I guess most Muslims, I'm not sure. I can certainly tell you that when I was in college...actually I remember very clearly, I mentioned this in the book which is that I remember being at home reading Muhammad Asad's translation of the Qur'an and coming across, I think it's in Surah An-Nahl",
      "what is it? يَدْرُبَ اللَّهُ مَثَلًا رَجُلٌ رزقناه رزكا حسن I think عبد المملوك لا يقتر على الشيء and then, I can't really probably mixing the order up there but the Quran talks about slave-owned who doesn't have any he can't do anything. And it's sort of",
      "It's actually just mentioning, it's using a slave and a free person as a parable for some, for like a false God that doesn't have any power. And then like actual God who has power as far as I understand it. Right? So what I was shocked by, like wait a second, you can't just mention slavery. You know, you have to say slavery is wrong and how can you just talk about it and not even say that right now.",
      "confused, but I sort of just moved on. I guess I swept it under the carpet. But I think that's probably the position that a lot of Muslims are in globally, probably. Maybe less so in some parts of the world than others, but maybe globally is they come across these references to slavery and the Quran or the Sunnah of the Prophet or Islamic law or something. You don't really know what sense to make of it because not only does their religion seem",
      "and endorsing this thing that anybody in the world today would know is a grotesque, horrific evil. But also sometimes it's not even presented as any kind of moral problem. It's just sort of mentioned offhand. So I think a lot of people maybe this was an issue of concern but it's something we come across in our daily lives so it wasn't maybe a huge concern. But I did eventually mean to write about it. But then when the ISIS thing happened,",
      "was like 2014 or 15. And there was that kind of enslavement of Yazidi girls and things. So, this was in the newspaper everywhere. I think this caused a big crisis of faith for a lot of Muslims because not only did they see this being done but also ISIS was like wait what are you guys so confused about? The Quran talks about this is allowed in the Sharia. This is what the Prophet did. What do you objecting to? Muslims didn't really have an answer, a really convincing answer",
      "for how to respond to this. So that really made me want to write about this, and eventually I wrote a book about it. Yeah, Mashali, you addressed the issue of ISIS to the latter part of your book. In the opening chapter in the introduction, you actually address the moral question, can we actually talk about slavery? In particular, you address yourself when you talk about",
      "You mean, what can we talk about slavery? Like is there such a thing as slavery defined transhistorically or what is the big question that's behind this issue? In the sense that you know, there's a consensus about slavery being wrong and it's an evil in nature. Can we actually talk about it in that perspective? Yeah I think that well I think this is certainly the case in the US. I think might be a little bit less than the UK but probably fairly similar",
      "is really the place where this is the clearest, I mean, the strongest manifestation of this phenomenon. But I call it kind of the slavery conundrum which is that the abolitionist consensus, which is the sort of global abolitionist consents, which says that slavery is a gross intrinsic evil throughout space and time. So you know, slavery was wrong today, it was wrong 100 years ago, it's wrong 1,000 years ago or 2,000",
      "And that's axiomatic, right? You cannot question that. If you do, I mean, you're a monster. I mean imagine just going in and being like well slavery is not that bad or it was okay back then. I would really be pilloried. The second sort of...I talk about the slavery conundrum as basically being that there are three maxims or three axioms that you can't question but also you can t hold them all",
      "can't hold them all at the same time, right? So you can't actually question any of these or they, you can only do it at a great cost. But also you cannot actually hold all these three things at the so the first one is slavery as a gross intrinsic evil across space and time. The second one is that all slavery is slavery. So there's no like good slavery, bad slavery, okay, slavery, light slavery, heavy slavery,",
      "oh, the slavery in ISIS is not that bad or something. Just imagine saying it's not that and what the reaction would be. Yeah, of course, yeah. So you can't make internal distinctions within slavery. Slavery is absolutely intrinsic evil throughout space and time. All slavery, anytime the word is used, absolutely intrinsic people throughout space",
      "on us, right? So I mean for Muslims it's obvious in the sense that we look to the Quran and Sunnah for moral guidance or spiritual guidance. If you're Americans would say we looked at the constitution of United States for guidance Christians would look to Jesus and the New Testament Jews, the Old Testament Buddhists to Buddhist literature Hindus to Hindu literature people who are philosophers to philosophical literature And all of these traditions",
      "traditions right so there's every single religious or every single major religious and every single philosophical tradition that i know of um either defended uh condoned slavery or thought it was just completely normal until the earliest the absolute earliest the late 1600s okay so if you're going to say that you know um slavery is a gross intrinsic evil throughout space time",
      "If somebody is defending or involved in, or condoning that they're like a more, they're morally compromised person. Right? So they can't, you know, imagine somebody coming into public life today and saying, well, I, you would never, you this person would never be allowed to be in public life. So the same thing for our past, right? If these people are defending it, then why are we look, I mean, do you take moral guidance from people who defended slavery? We thought it was fine. Would you ever get moral",
      "get moral or spiritual advice from those people. But the problem is that the entirety of the human heritage prior to at the earliest, the late 1600s was guilty of this. The sort of statue issue is actually a really good case of this where people will come out and say we want to take down the statue of this guy in Bristol",
      "because they were involved in slavery. Like those people are logically, they're totally correct. Logically, according to the logic of this slavery conundrum, they are 100% correct. Sure. Slavery is a gross and intrinsic evil throughout space and time. It's history's greatest crime, right? No moral person, no person with any moral sense could ever be involved in this or support it. Yeah. Or defend it. So if they did, you absolutely should not have a statue of this person. I mean, that's ridiculous.",
      "I mean, that's ridiculous. That's like having a statue of Hitler. Right? So that's a totally logical conclusion. Okay. And then the people who come up and say, well, yeah, but you know, it's more complicated. No, it is not. Then what are you trying to say? Why is it more complicated? Oh, back then it wasn't clear. Wait, so back then slavery wasn't evil? Like a smart intelligent person shouldn't have realized it wasn t evil? It s like oh,",
      "It's like, oh well yeah. So they have to start fudging and waffling because the logic of slavery is a gross intrinsic evil throughout space and time all slavery is slavery. The logical conclusion is if somebody's involved in that, they are history. I mean, they should never be turned to for moral authority. They should never celebrated but the problem is as conservative British people would tell you these are our heroes right? These are the people we look to",
      "you know, darkest hour and, uh, you know never surrender and all that stuff. Right? And these are the people we turn to Thomas Jefferson, right? The guy who said all men are created equal endowed with certain inalienable rights life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right. That I'm amazing human being with a brilliant person but who had a slave and had children with her, with his slave concubine and those children were slaves et cetera, et cetera",
      "George Washington, father of the United States of America. By the way, this idea that he somehow hated slavery deep down is utter hooey. There's a book that came out just recently about a year ago. It's a great book called Never Caught. It was about this slave woman named Ona Judge who she fled from the Washingtons when they were in Philadelphia and they spent the rest of their lives hunting or trying to hunt her down. I mean, they never gave up trying to get back,",
      "So they were not some kind of, you know. Closet abolitionists or something. But I mean, go but go. I mean I live in Washington. I live In Washington DC which is named after him. I imagine the sheer number of things you'd have to pull down. How would American identity function? So that's the slavery conundrum is that we actually hold positions three positions that none of which you can really question. People do question them",
      "do question them, they say we should take down the statues. But that's very controversial until relatively recently that would have just been laughed out of the room. So this brings me to another question because we're talking about slavery through history as you mentioned. You also discuss in the first chapter of your book the definition of slavery and that chapter goes on quite a bit. I mean it's almost like you struggle in defining slavery",
      "So can we address that topic? Can we come to an agreement on what we are actually talking about? Yeah. So let me just say that first, the reason why these positions or these axiomatic positions exist is because of the nature of how abolitionism was kind of debated and eventually triumphed, right? Which is that when abolitionists were pushing for slaveholders",
      "for the end of slavery, people who are either slaveholders or supportive of slaveholding industries or laws, they'd say things like you're right. Certain terms of slavery are horrific but that's not what we're doing. Our slavery is okay or slavery in India is okay so that was one of the first responses sort of rebuttals that kind of pro-slavery",
      "So they had to shut that door and just say that, no, no. This is this is something that if something is slavery, it is inherently evil. It's not discussed. It'S not negotiable. One of the other actually responses of pro-slavery people would be to actually push back on the definition of slavery in essence because what they'd say like in the 1830s you saw this in some very prominent kind of defenses of slavery",
      "say that, well look okay you know look at your industrial workers in New York or Chicago or London. I mean these people are treated horribly they die in these poor houses it's a crime in England it's actually a crime to leave work not do not show up to work you can be put in prison for that so you know but my slaves they're cared for and",
      "they're fed, they're housed. We take care of them when they're sick. I'm not saying that's true. I mean, if you want to talk about who's being treated badly then your workers are much worse off. So that's why the abolitionists had to focus on the legal institution of slavery. They didn't want to make it about conditions or who's",
      "of not being free or being property. But you can see in this example, kind of one of the tensions which is what is... In one society we can come up with a very like in America United States slavery is status of not been free. Or enrollment law it's a status of now being free and also being property or medieval and early modern European law",
      "European law, it's being property of somebody. So you can think about slavery as not being free, legal status and not being fee, legal statu of being property but the other approach is to think about slave ry as a condition that it's about the way you're treated. And so until kind of 1926 when there was this convention or national convention signed to end slave trade basically slavery becomes",
      "Basically, slavery becomes illegal. And then that is gradually ratified and accepted until 19, you know, essentially 1960s when every country had abolished slavery legally at least. Okay. From after that, you get more of a move towards kind of slavery as a condition, right? Because once you say, once there's no longer something called slavery, it's easy. There's no slavery anymore. Okay, fine. It's gone. Finito.",
      "happens if you're treating the person exactly the same way? They're just not technically a slave. So there is, instead of saying slaves are property, it was slaves are treated like property or slaves are people who are paid only subsistence wages and don't have control of their labor. And especially this is a big thing they're coerced so a big definition, especially in what's called new abolitionism since the 1990s I guess modern day slavery is the idea that it's coerce labor",
      "Now, we can... So in any particular society or even in a civilization you might be able to come up with a very good definition of slavery because you have kind of maybe a clear understanding of freedom what freedom means, what property means. But the problem is that things like freedom and property are so vague that if you try to think about them trans-historically and globally they stop having any meaning, right? So if you say, what is free? Like, are you free",
      "free janae what can you do you know can you can you walk outside naked no you can't so you're not free you you can do everything you can, anything you want except what's illegal okay that's free but then slaves can also do whatever they want i mean if a slave is sitting in their room like after work and they are twiddling their thumbs they can throw their thumbs this way or they can put all their",
      "for what the law and their owner says. So freedom and slavery aren't two diametrically opposed things, they're just two different levels of restriction. And where that level is depends on or where the distinction is depends your particular society in your particular time. But you try to think of it when even when some scholars were very skeptical about this but who tried to insist that there's like kind of a minimum rights that all humans agree on that free people have Suzanne Meyers",
      "Suzanne Myers says this in her great essay on definition of slavery. She actually can't, she says surely there's a number of rights that we agree everybody has if they're free but she doesn't say what the rights are because they're not, actually I don't think there are agreed upon rights and you could say well let's say I can't you know a slave owner can like kill their slave with no consequences. First of all most slave systems",
      "for example, you can't just kill your slave. You can't even really hurt them seriously. And that's true for a lot of systems of slavery in the world. But let's say Roman law until around 200-300 AD at least theoretically a father could kill their children his children with no legal consequences. Free children.",
      "children, right? He could kill his, let's say niece. It's called patria potestas, the power of head of the family. So if you're going to say well slavery is kind of defined by in a situation where someone can just kill you with no consequences that's not going to help you in the case of Roman law because in Roman law",
      "a free person, to your child. So clearly there is an issue here or there's a problem here of defining slavery so it depends on which lens or which geographical location where you're defining it from so that's obviously a problem. Let's be specific right? It's not necessarily a problem I mean for example religious studies as a field there's no agreed upon definition of religion",
      "But that's not a problem because, you know, here's the problem. I think in a lot of ways slavery and terrorism are kind of conceptual concepts that are useful to compare because there's actually no agreed upon definition of terrorism. Yeah. But like the reason that's a problem is that if you're in religious studies and you say that, you want to write an article about Jedi religion, like no one's going to say you're a bad person for doing that.",
      "Whereas if you get labeled, if you're kind of stamped with the label of does slavery or is terrorist, that's it. You're morally obliterated. That's a moral condemnation. So I think there's a problem when there's concept that you want to use transhistorically throughout space and time to label things, with the effect of labeling things as evil. But you actually don't have a definition for it because what you're really doing is",
      "is things that look like slavery to you or that you want to call slavery, you end up stamping with that. Whereas things that don't look like delivery to you, or that You don't want to cause slavery, uh, don't get that condemnation. So that's why I think it's a problem. Especially in these two topics that you mentioned slavery and terrorism, there's consequences to that. So one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighters. It does your choice will have consequence in the real world. Um, so that brings me",
      "So that builds me to my next question then. Is it fair to use the word slavery in the Islamic context? I mean, in Arabic there's obviously different words for it, as you've mentioned in your book. But is it fair translate that as slavery then because then the Western audience, the Western definition and apply that on Islam and we've just completely started off on a wrong footed. I think that's a complicated question",
      "I think you have to think about, to what extent should your answer be really governed by an attempt to control reaction versus in a attempt to kind of be accurate? The irony is that Islamic civilization and Western European civilization",
      "European civilization are siblings. I mean, they come from Semitic sources and at least they're highly influenced by Greco-Roman tradition. A lot of Islamic law on slavery is not from the Quran. It's not even Sunnah of the Prophet. It's just existing tradition in the Near East in the 700s, 600 or 700s.",
      "And some of those things are from like Roman and Near Eastern law. And Muslim scholars, they acknowledge I mean, they didn't acknowledge those origins but they basically realized that this some of these laws were not rooted in their tradition in Islamic scripture. But the bottom line is that legally speaking, you know, Islamic law on slavery is very similar it's in the same conversation as European. You're talking about freedom",
      "You're talking about a binary of free and slave. In other parts of the world, like Southeast Asia, there's not two categories. There are many, many categories, many levels of subservience and subordination dependence more like a web one scholar calls it's more like A Web of Dependence, not Two Layers or Hierarchy. But hang on let me just finish. Strictly speaking from Islamic legal Western legal definitions they're fairly similar.",
      "I would say that the real issue comes in that the way that slavery is practiced in the Americas, you know, after in the European colonization of the colonization in the Americans was pretty unprecedented in terms of its scale and severity. In world history. And it was also fairly quickly almost everywhere in the America's racialized",
      "is racialized. So it becomes slave status, certain races are slaves or enslavable and certain are not. And so you get kind of a mixture of real brutality, huge scale and racialization, very simplistic uniform racialization that is pretty freaky.",
      "So when we look at, let's say the people who start objecting to slavery even beginning with people like Bartolome de las Casas in the 16th century and then people, let us say enlightenment figures like Condorcet and Diderot and Montesquieu and Voltaire. They are responding really to the Atlantic slave trade.",
      "You know, they're responding to two things. One is the really like the shocking horror of the Middle Passage. And two, what they consider just like a lot of them consider to be really stupid justification, the kind of racial justification they saw as laughable.",
      "pre-Atlantic slave trade, slave systems. There wasn't this massive scale there wasn't kind of grotesque racial justification and in general I know that is something not true always but I would say in general",
      "as brutal as they could be and were often, they often were in the Americas. So I think that's why is it when we... It's not just by the way, that's not to say that slaves in various times and place in world history were not treated absolutely horrifically and as bad if not worse than some awful plantation in Brazil or South Carolina.",
      "some of the ways that slaves are treated in the Roman Empire is just mind-numbingly horrible. But I'd say, in general, you didn't have the kind of shocking scale and boldness or brazenness of the Atlantic slave trade. And it's the use of slaves in the Americas because really shocking to people. So that's why I think a lot",
      "I think a lot of the kind of abolitionism really picks up steam in the 1700s. It's because what they're looking at is really tough to defend. I mean, it's not like here's this guy who's from another village that we grabbed on a raid and he's part of the family, speaks the same language as us. Eventually we free him after a couple years. He becomes our business partner.",
      "partner, you know that would be much more of a representation of slavery in a lot of parts of the world than America. So it's very different. The problem is when we start talking about – not just can we say Islamists should really talk about there being slavery in Islam? Is that when slavery in the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade is your ussel, the kind of thing from which you're analogizing. Most things in world history, most instances",
      "of slavery in world history are not going to be accurately, or not going appear accurately in your mind. Yeah. If you start talking about them as slavery. I wanted to go back to the Qur'an or to the Sunnah and there are certain concepts, certain principles laid out for us in the Qurans with regards to, you know, slavery or rikr, to be more accurate that actually reflect",
      "slavery in Islam. Things like al-mukatiba, you talk about that slave getting his own freedom. Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la in the Quran as well when we commit certain sins as expiations kafara for our sins, we are told in first place to free a slave so we can see the mindset what Allah Subhanahu wa ta-Ala is telling us and how we should behave towards slavery. That is very different",
      "transatlantic slavery that you were discussing, right? Yeah definitely. I mean we have to remember that it's like in North America British colonies in North American there is for a lot of times and a lot the colonies you could not manumit your own slave. This was actually a big debate in places like Virginia about whether or not people should be allowed to free their own slaves whereas in Islamic law",
      "law and Islamic society, manumission is encouraged to the point that a lot of legal rules that are otherwise pretty firm you get exceptions to in terms when you get to be remunerated. The fact that if we have a contract, if I make a mistake and I say something wrong in the contract or I make",
      "I'm angry if I don't mean something that doesn't become legally binding. In freeing slaves, it's generally legally binding so if you say, if you're my slave and I say okay good job today, you've worked really hard go get some rest, you're free to go get som rest but I say you're a free boom! I didn't mean you're literally free to do something else right now, boom you're",
      "because of this idea that, the law giver God wants freedom. He looks expectantly towards freedom and this is actually goes back all the way to a very early report or the prophet, that you know, God wants Freedom right? So the Quran and Sunnah I mean,",
      "religious scriptures or legal documents in world history. I can't think of anyone that is as obsessed with emancipation as the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet. It's really like the idea of tying, freeing slaves to expiating sins. The Quran is the first time we see this.",
      "the Quran, you see it numerous times. But where you see a lot is in hadiths and that you free a slave when there's an eclipse. You free a slaves if you hit your slave and cause them to bleed, you should free them. If they want to do a contract where they buy their own freedom on installments as in the Quran you should do that.",
      "you know, you're encouraged to marry your slaves for your slave women and then marry them. You're encouraging me over and over and I mean what's funny right is it's not only in reliable hadiths but if you look in forged hadith they're in probably the longest hadith i've ever seen in my life is this forged hadit which is allegedly a sermon the prophet gave which is just pages and pages of pages and it's sometimes at some time in the 800s or the common era",
      "even in the Forge Hadiths, you're told to free slaves. Like in a weird, like freeing slaves becomes a way of like quantifying rewards. So if you do, if you walk to the mosque, every step you take is like freeING a slave. So freeINGa slave becomes the way you kind of... The unit by which you measure reward. And so what the point about this is that even if people would say well Muslims maybe they cry on the sunnah",
      "maybe the Qur'an and Sunnah are about emancipation, but then Muslims betrayed that. What's interesting is somebody was out there making up all these hadiths during the high point of Islamic civilization to free slaves. Even more explicit and stronger admonitions or exhortations to free slave than you'd find in the Qurana and the Sunnah, the actual authentic Sunnah.",
      "And so it depends. Obviously, Islamic civilization is a long time over a long period of space or wide area. But in general, it seems like if you were to average everything out, probably the average amount of time that somebody was enslaved in Islamic civilization about seven or eight years and then they'd be manumitted. Yeah.",
      "Islamic civilization takes in so many slaves from Eastern Europe, from Turkish steppes, from India, from Sub-Saharan Africa is because they're constantly freeing slaves. So they don't have a reproducing labor pool, right? They're constantly having to buy more slaves to replace the ones they freed. Yeah, so that's interesting.",
      "to look at slavery from an islam perspective um as a solution to the realities of the world that when we look at Islam, we look in the Quran it's not book of philosophy or just set of instructions. It's actually dealing with real life problems so when we looked at the example of alcohol and alcohol was widespread and it was removed over four phases it took a long time to get out of the system interest it wasn't the last instruction you know to be made harm it took",
      "that out of the system likewise when it comes to slavery was such a huge problem that you know the prophet and the quran and the sunnah did gradually slowly so he just kept making it more and more and confining it more but we don't see your final instruction that it's haram but what we do see is this narrowing and narrowing itself down is that fair analysis yeah i mean that's certainly one approach that",
      "and others. Here's my problem with that argument is that it would have been really easy, by the way this is one of the same things that like Christians tried to argue this in the 1800s and people who are pro-slavery or just not abolitionists debating abolitionists in the US",
      "why didn't Jesus get rid of slavery? Well, it was too much part of the system. It wasn't possible. So what you're saying, what about Jesus makes you think that like read the New Testament? What about this guy makes you thing that he cares about what people think or what's possible or impossible? I mean, they got the guy was crucified right because he he didn't care about change challenging the system in the Christian view, right?",
      "these opponents of abolitionists said like are you saying why didn't jesus just say look i know it's not possible right now but slavery is absolutely wrong you should get rid of him he never said that why didn t he say that why did anybody say this why didn bouddha say this? why didn Aristotle say this, why didn St Augustine say this etc. nobody said this so",
      "Islam got rid of things like idolatry. There was no negotiating that was a big part of life in Arabia too. I think the main reason is that slavery wasn't thought about as a moral problem it was basically",
      "basically a feature of political and economic life, right? So most slaves were captives. They're people that are captured in conflicts. And what do you do with the prisoner? You either let them go or you ransom them and then let them",
      "as a slave, like those are your options. Right? I mean so you don't have like a government that has these big prisoners of war camps, you know, you don' t have that. So it's, you basically if you have prisoners, you essentially distribute them into the society and if people want to ransom them, that's fine back to their families and make money or if they want to free them, then that's Fine but the other thing is too is to keep them as labor",
      "So that's kind of a political element. The second one is economic, which is that how do human beings... I mean, Aristotle has this brilliant observation and I think it's in his politics where he says that there'll be slavery until looms move themselves. Loom's like a thing for weaving cloth. Until they move themselves, those are going to be slaves,",
      "prior to the discovery, well, you know, essentially of hydraulic, maybe a little bit of hydraulic power but then really steam power in the late 1700s, mid to late 1700. And then eventually fossil fuels. Humans, if you want something built or made or done or you have to get another human or an animal to move it and when you no longer need humans and animals to do that, then you don't have to worry about that anymore.",
      "I mean, those things become unnecessary and they're also not efficient. What would you rather have? A car that is run by an internal combustion engine or one of those rickshaws or the Fred Splintstone car? Or a horse cart with the whole world full of horse poop or whatever feeding your horse and having to put your horse somewhere and your horse getting sick and all this stuff. The point is that",
      "The point is that slavery was part of the way people understood basic economic existence of human beings. That's why you don't, and this is a very important point. There's no until essentially until the late 1600s as far as I know there's nobody or no society and I don't even think anybody who came out and said",
      "said slavery as an institution should be abolished. Because it wouldn't have been, it would have been sort of nontensical. It would be like saying let's abolish walking or let's any kind of engine. Like it doesn't, it was economically inconceivable.",
      "definition as well, wouldn't it? So like you mentioned in the book, the topic of labor or physical slavery, economical slavery and so on. I mean we don't call it slavery but it's not far off from- Well, if you want to think about slavery as somebody who is essentially working for free. They're working for you for free",
      "this is another important thing which you would often get confused about when they think, think about slavery in the Americas and they think people in the fields working and the sort of very raw like back-breaking labor. But not only is this that's actually not true for the America there was also lots of different other kinds of labor but in world history let's say the Mediterranean world of Rome and the Islamic world most slaves are domestic workers. They're like",
      "They're in the house. They're taking care of kids. They are cooking, they're doing errands and a lot of times they're skilled workers. They re carpenters, they re rope makers. Someone would buy a slave not to do stuff for them but to go out and be hired to do something and then they're essentially like investment so you they're basically making revenue that they then bring back to you. That's how by the way when slaves are doing this mukhatabha",
      "So they're going out and making money, and they're making extra money for themselves that they then put into buying their own freedom from their master. So Mukantaba only really makes sense when you think about a slave who is actually out there in society earning money. Now the difference is they are not keeping that money for",
      "funneling it mostly to their owner so um i can't remember the original original question but what was the original question yeah kind of gone off track okay i think i remember but basically like yeah so the idea is that human society the way that it functions was that there was this need for labor",
      "And that the solution to this was, well, put it this way. You could have a society where everybody worked out in the fields and did stuff. But here's the thing. If you get rich enough, why should you do that when you can pay someone, when you",
      "they're people who are sold by their families. There are people who were sold by the parents, they abandoned their parents, They're sold by clan leader, right? They give themselves in slavery because they're so poor and desperate that you know, et cetera, et-cetera. So there's all sorts of people at the bottom of society who have, who end up in a situation where they are working for somebody else. For the only thing to get in return is essentially",
      "living, you know they're supported to live. They're not paid money for that, they're not payed wages. And doctor do we find in early Islamic history, do we finds movements amongst slaves where they try to fight their owners or run away or they actually formed unions and caused some kind of a movement for the freedom? Well yeah so I mean yes I'll answer that question but",
      "But I would first let me say that. You know, the all of civilization, right? The idea that you have a group of people who live together with a surplus of division of labor, surplus food so that people can engage in other activities besides subsistence farming and stuff like that. And eventually you get an elite who do things like write music and write books and start universities.",
      "universities and do whatever other people do. All of elite culture rests on labor done by others, right? At certain times in history that labor is done a lot of it by people who are slaves. And at certain times of the history, it's done by people not technically slaves. Now if you want to say",
      "should we talk about as slaves or not? That's another debate. But the point is that high culture, elite culture civilization is built on some people doing work so that other people don't have to do that work. So then let me say another point which is very important, which is that one of the things",
      "and just Muslims by essentially consensus in the very early period of Islam. I mean, essentially this time of the Companion. One of the things that they do is that they... They do not allow selling your children to slavery. They do NOT allow enslaving someone for debt which is by the way one of the main ways that again even more than selling someone as a relative or being captured",
      "history in most places is debt right because you're indebted to somebody that slavery prohibited an Islamic law it doesn't mean that it doesn t appear sometimes in Islamic civilization but it's prohibited in the Sharia. You can't give yourself as a slave, you can't do yourself as this layer so the Quran and the Sunnah and the Shariah very quickly closed every door all the main doors into slavery were closed except for capture",
      "capture. Well, two things capture in warfare. So capturing non-Muslims outside the abode of Islam, like you can't go and, you know, there's like a Jewish and a Christian guy living in Cairo. You can't be like, Oh, you're my slave now. Right. They're dhimmi's they can't But if you go and you fight a war against, you",
      "Except unless the father is the owner, then that case, the child is free. The mother will be freed upon his death. The child is not only is free but also legitimate and has the same social status as a child born of a free wife. This is unprecedented in certainly the Near East. I don't know about world history. For example, it's Thomas Jefferson's kids. Sally Hemingway. They were slaves.",
      "slaves they were black and they were slaves based on american law so in it's not if he were a muslim those children would be free and they would be like potentially the next president that would be the equivalent of you know george w bush jr right full-time carrying the carrying the bush name the fact that their mother was a slave woman would have been like only if there",
      "insult them or something they'd say this we would have no impact on their standing yeah in society um so those are big changes that islamic they come with the quran the son of the prophet and sharia okay uh the other question you asked i can't remember the question you said i was going to answer now i forgot um i was just asking if there were any major movements amongst the slaves oh yeah",
      "slave rebellions, especially the big one in the late 9th century, mid to late 9 centuries. The Zanj rebellion in southern Iraq which was pretty you know it's very uns... I mean it was a big rebellion and went on for a few decades but this is important right? This is really, I think this is really important to human minds. These Zanjs rebellion, those Zanjis were not fighting to end slavery they just didn't want to be slaves",
      "So the people they capture, they made into slaves. Okay. The tables. Same thing with Spartacus. Like you go watch SpartacUS, the movie with Kirk Douglas. He's this one scene where he's like we're going to fight until all the slaves are free. That's not what Spartacuses did. They also took their own slaves. These pre-modern slave rebellions are not abolitionist rebellions. They're not people who were fighting against the idea of slavery. They just don't want to be slaves. Right right.",
      "So, yeah, they're pretty limited in Islamic civilization. The Zanj Rebellion being maybe the only really big one. There's a few others. One I think is now Nigeria in the early 1800s. But the reason why they don't happen is that unlike the Americas where you'd be happy in Haiti with things like Nat Turner Rebellions in the United States",
      "other examples as well the bahia rebellion in um in brazil in the 1860s i think i can't remember exactly maybe the 1830s i don't want to but here we're going b h p a h i a i think there's a really good article on yakin about that by the way it's a wonderful article so",
      "couple of reasons one is that the you don't have like kind of what's called plantation or gang sometimes it's called gang slavery okay we're in the u.s where you have these a lot of slaves working on a plantation with a relatively small number of white owners or overseers okay um and by the way they got this i mean i'm not i don't want to engage in pop psychology or something but i've seen this discussed elsewhere i think one of the some of the real reasons for",
      "like American psychosis around guns, around fear, around crime. Same thing you sort of see in South Africa especially in the kind of 1990s literature like books by Coetzee and other things like that is there's this pathological fear of the slaves are going to rebel because there's so many of them",
      "And if you don't basically destroy their self-esteem, atomize their families, keep them illiterate, destroy their own self esteem, religiously convince them that this is supposed to happen to them. Terrify them, kill them if they do anything wrong. If you don t have a total reign of terror over these people the fear is that they are going to rise up and there's a lot of them. They're concentrated. They can talk to each other",
      "And that's, but in Islamic civilization, that's not really the case because people are mostly domestic slaves. A lot of them are in urban centers where they're just like, let's say you're in Baghdad. My jadiyah gonna go talk to your jadiya and I'm going to go talk his jadiiya. Remember also probably it seems like the majority of slaves that were brought into Islamic civilization were females",
      "So they're not being used for domestic work, or sorry, for agricultural labor. They've been used for a domestic work and they also have such a high rate of integration into society because of the emancipation? Or sorry, manumission right? In America one of the reasons why I think you have a real movement towards abolition in the Americas",
      "is the same reason you have this rebellion, is that there's no hope for these people. If you're Black in the Americas, if you're a slave, you don't have any hope of not being a slave. And if you somehow are freed or you're born free or something, you're permanently... You have a target on your back. You're always an enslavable person.",
      "even if you're free. Someone's just going to grab you and take you, right? And there is no... the only way to live in any sense of security is to end the whole system whereas in Islamic civilization that's not the case, right. If you're... I mean first of all, you're probably gonna get freed in a couple years at which point you can either stay if you become Muslim or you like it there or you can go back to your family wherever you know,",
      "wherever you came from or something else. The second reason is that you're not, you're integrated. You're not with a bunch of other people living in a slave compound on a plantation. Whereas if you can get the kind of guns and stuff, you can rebel like you're one or two people in a household that is right next to another household with one or, you know, it's very, it sort of, you are totally dispersed in this society. Sure. Third reason is",
      "If you're if you're freed, you're not you're like a regular person. I mean, you can't tell the difference between that person and a free person on the streets of Baghdad or the streets Of Cairo so you could walk down the streets in Cairo and you could see a guy who's looks African Maybe they're a slave maybe they're freed slaves Maybe they are the son of the Sultan with his African slave woman And he is like the second most powerful man in the city You have no idea",
      "Your phenotype, your face, the way you look isn't going to control what you're gonna be seen as in this society. So that's why I think there is not really an indigenous move for abolition the way we see it in America because there wasn't really a impetus for it, there wasn' t really a drive for it. There wasn't a need for it",
      "This brings us to nearly the end of the discussion on this book. But before we do that, do you have any just general on this topic? Any concluding comments? Are you going to do a part two to this book or are you done with the subject? Well I mean I'd love to do it second edition and just stuff more material in but that's... The paperback has more material. I stuffed more stuff on ram more material and stuff. I've got your hard back unfortunately.",
      "No, I think that was... I tried to make the book really comprehensive. I tried it kind of one-stop shopping that you could get this and it would have kind of... There's a few things I didn't discuss. I wish I had discussed the aura of Jadiyah which is really interesting topic. One of my students I hope is gonna do her dissertation on that. The other thing is no yeah so",
      "No, yeah. So I think that... I'm not gonna write another book on that for sure maybe an article or something but there I am writing now this essay for Yaqeen on is Islam anti-black? There's obviously the issue of blackness and slavery overlap to some extent in Islamic civilization not as much as they do obviously in the West or in the Americas so it's more about there's overlap there.",
      "think that you know like the previous topic like it was it was kind of um brought up by my questions i was asked so people this obviously has been in the news a lot last couple years so um i wanted to try to answer some of the questions that i'd been asked and that i have myself on this topic so that's who will be but it's getting so long that i'm wondering if i should just publish it as a as a short book we'll see maybe i'll publish it",
      "short book because it's getting to be quite lengthy. Yeah, that would be interesting. Doctor, if we put the book aside just for a second one of the other aims and objectives of the Islamic Literacy Society here is to encourage people to write books as well and articles and so on and so forth. So question why did you decide to take or undergo a PhD and you completed that? You're a professor now",
      "that you're a professor now. What was the goal behind that? Well, I mean first of all, I want to say sometimes people especially Muslims go look Muslims are hard on themselves. Muslims are wonderful people. I have to say even they get in their debates and arguments and especially in the UK it gets so fierce sometimes like",
      "I don't want to mention the names, but they're just like... You see these videos. You're like, guys, it's so intense. But in general, Muslims have really good akhlaq and they really love knowledge. The fact that I'm a nerd. I mean, I'm an egghead. The idea that somebody would want me to talk to me is normal people. Americans don't ever want",
      "Americans don't ever want to talk to me, you know? So I mean the non-Muslims. Right. So my point is that, um, you Know Muslims are really intellectual intellectual culture and that means a lot of Muslims They really want to learn they really want think they want to live a life with the mind And sometimes they think that that means that they should kind of do academic degrees in Western universities You know graduate degrees. I think everybody should go to university but uh, and that's not that's necessarily true I mean you can you know",
      "You know, you can live a very advanced life of the mind as and even become an expert in things without going and getting a master's or PhD in a subject. Sure. So I think that's first of all, you know, don't people shouldn't always just think that they should, you",
      "a very satisfying lack of mind. Second, that Western universities are not the place to learn about Islam if you're a Muslim without it. If you want to learn from Muslim scholars, that's it. That's the issue. That is the end of that discussion. If interested in Islamic history or specific areas of law as an idea or anthropology, if you are interested",
      "If you're interested in thinking about Islamic history, Islamic civilization as something that you want to study not as a part of your religion but as a subject of history or something then Western universities are good places to go. But Muslims in the West should not assume that this is not didn't seem to be much",
      "in the US, they somehow think you're supposed to take classes on Islam. I would tell most Muslim students don't take classes with me or with any professors and Islamic service, Islamic studies because they're not going to give you what you want. So if somebody wanted to do a PhD, what value does it add? So somebody who's involved in dawah, somebody is involved in mainstream discussing argumentation",
      "argumentation, presentation, so on and so forth. What would a PhD add to them? Not necessarily anything. I mean, look, a PhD is mostly an exercise in discipline and putting up with BS. It's really about discipline. It doesn't require a lot of intelligence. It",
      "sister-in-law outside i don't know um but the uh so you know i don'T think it necessarily adds much i think if you're if you'RE really interested in a topic if there's if you can if you CAN'T if YOU REALLY want to study something IN DEPTH then a phd is a great thing TO DO okay uh BUT ACADEMIA IS ITS OWN GUILD IT'S ITS",
      "your mind in ways that you don't expect. And for a lot of Muslims, it's destructive. It's not an instructive process. I think that you should think really hard about it. I... I think most Muslims who go into academia thinking about sort of Islamic stuff ends up they get chewed up chewed into meat and spat out. That's pretty blunt and brutal guys. No no, I would say that without",
      "say that without i mean without a without hesitation and i look at the people that i went into kind of cohort but i went in too and a lot of them are i don't know what they're i mean they look at me now as an extremist oh wow so then they can think about that i mean i'm i'm from in the academy i'm an islamic extremist well that's uh right i'm like a lunatic",
      "who's borderline not fit for polite company so what we're saying is that university or higher education in that sense would water you down melt you away yeah I mean it's like people",
      "it's very clear in our religion you are supposed to be around people who are good Muslims if you want to be a certain way go around people like that, if you go around a bunch of people who were X you're gonna end up like X. That's it literally humans are a social animal right so You know they think that you're going to go into this environment and it's not going to affect you is naive Now if you have I'd say this if Muslims if",
      "if you have a good training in Islamic sciences, if you really strong personality then I think it's something you can do. But otherwise there are a lot of people that they can't deal with it. So I think that that's an important thing to keep in mind. But I would say also that no, I mean, I don't think... And I think a lot",
      "if you want to be a professor. Now, obviously in economics or finance or computer there's all these other fields where this doesn't necessarily kind of in the humanities. PhD is it takes a lot of time, it takes energy and if you're rich and don't have to work then you can do that. If you have a wife and kids who are or you have husband and kids don't mind doing this okay go for it but",
      "But otherwise, it's a professional degree. And academia is not exactly teeming with jobs. So someone who says like I want to become a professor and work in a university, you have to know that that is – you're going to have to excel. You're going be the best if you want a shot at getting a job. It's a brutal job market. I never planned on being a professor. My grandparents – two of my grandparents were professors.",
      "My mom was a professor for a long time. But I never intended to, I always thought it was sort of a pathetic job. I don't know. I could attempt for it. I dunno why, but I always though I was going to be like a lawyer or something and then I just kept following this track and eventually I realized that being- You've become a professor? Yeah, but i never consciously made that decision. Okay. It's funny because there's nothing else I can do. Like, I mean,",
      "other i mean god forbid that we have some kind of social meltdown because i would be completely helpless in any other thing anything better make a great lawyer hopefully i don't know so anyway that's the that's my advice i don' t know if that's advice you were looking for but no learning is wonderful reading is wonderful discussing is wonderful but there's all sorts of ways to do this that don't involve um okay involved getting a degree",
      "Stay with us. Don't go away. We'll just conclude the interview, inshallah. So respected listeners, alhamdulillah, we've had a great hour together. Myself and Jonathan, we have gone through this book, Slavery and Islam, and we've touched on some really sensitive subjects here. Great benefit. I'd just like to take you, show you the website, right? So if you want to find further information on this interview,",
      "Here we are, the Islamic Literature Society. That's the homepage. There's lots of books there and people contribute their reviews to these books. You can find this all here on the homepage, you've got the About Us book reviews right here, journal, and you will find this particular video under the section of videos. There is lots of other discussions here with a recent upload, lots of different interviews so please do that. We have a reading club as well.",
      "There's lots of benefit to be taken. There is a special section for membership so you'll get some exclusive rights, you can join us on that as well. There we go, you see the actual Slavery and Islam there on your screens, masha'Allah five star I must say. Okay, alhamdulillah. So respected viewers like to thank you all very much for joining us on this programme do join us for another upcoming interview on an amazing book",
      "on an amazing book with another author inshallah so don't go too far away leave us your comments under the videos don't forget to like the video as well and hopefully we'll see you all very very soon thank you very much",
      "وقل غير مخلوق كلام مليكنا بذلك دانا الأتقياء وأفصحوا"
    ]
  },
  {
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    "text": [
      "uh so i'm like everybody uh the small man rahim sorry while you were talking i was just trying to solve this rubik's cube you know it's just the kind of thing i do in my free time for your information i never managed to solve the rubix cube and even though i would like watch videos on how to do it i some to be seem to be unable to do so uh why any if you have any advice about solving rubik cubes you can email me my email online okay uh thanks for inviting me um",
      "So, yeah, I this book. I did not intend to write this book actually I wrote a book on slavery and Islam, and then I wrote that book and some you know bunch of people would keep asking me it's like oh he should write a book I guess lawmen race or something and I said no i'm not crazy i'm Not gonna do that for those of you who don't live in the United States, you may not be aware of like a lot of the sensitivity around this stuff but",
      "about that might not be viewed very positively by many. And I didn't know anything, I don't know any about the race so I didn t or I didn' t know anything about it so I wasn't going to do that but then you know something well in some ways I think there were some questions in my slavery and Islam book that were lingering in my mind about",
      "but I don't need to get into them right now. But I would say, sorry, I have to make my computer do not disturb focus. Okay. So yeah, so the real reason was, so I was sitting around minding my own business. It was the summer of 2020, I think. Yeah, summer of 2021.",
      "Yeah, summer 2020. So that was... It's the season of COVID. Yeah, it was peak COVID, you know? There I was outside contemplating nature, enjoying not having to do anything and going to kids' birthday parties. That was a good time in life. And then there was this debate. So there's an academic list called Research Africa, which I'm not on, but there was a debate on this about the issue of Islam and blackness.",
      "Islam and blackness now what I didn't realize at the time I mean some of you may have heard this but there's there's sort of this theory that Islam as a religion is like added scriptural Foundation anti-black uh so that's that's something one here sometimes when you talk to specific groups like Black Hebrew Israelites or if you're you know sometimes like",
      "this or something but uh I didn't realize it was actually an academic Theory I mean there's there's actually professors in the United States you know who are professional respected historians who write academically that Islam is added scriptural Foundation anti-black like in the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad it's anti-block so uh there was a debate about that going on in this listserv and people kept forwarding me emails you know forwarding",
      "They knew I'd written a lot about Hadith. And so they asked me questions, what about this Hadith? What about that Hadith? And I didn't really know about the topic. So I was like, oh, OK, I'll look into it and get back to you. And of course, I didn' do that. I put it on the back burner and went back to whatever I was doing outside contemplating nature and planting flowers and all these things like that. And then in December of 2020, I started just like, I really got to get back",
      "to research it and you know, you find um...you look at one hadith and you see an issue. And then you realize I have to look at this other issue and you have to realize you can't answer that without answering another question. Suddenly these questions I got asked started growing into a bigger research project and eventually it became beyond just a chapter, beyond an article. It started to become a whole book. It was very quickly going to be a whole",
      "Now, alhamdulillah, you know, I should – I dedicated this book to some of my professors. But I really probably should have dedicated it to archive.org because the amount of stuff you can find online – I mean, subhanAllah, really, you knew this book was written at a time when, I mean I wasn't traveling and it was hard even to get books from the library but you could get so much stuff online. So I was able to research until, you",
      "and uh so yeah that was how that's why I wrote the book to kind of answer these this bigger question of you know is Islam anti-black uh short answer no it's not but um you know how do you actually address a lot of the questions people have that do come up in this discussion so that was the point of the book and I think I answered it pretty comprehensively now uh to be clear right there are books on this issue before uh by",
      "by good scholars. I mean, if not directly, then very... Not tangentially but there are books that might not deal with that topic directly but deal with a very close or very topics close to it or adjacent to it. Books like Islam and the Black American by Sherman Jackson, books like The Negro and Arab Islamic Conscience by Abdullah Hamid Ali, books beyond Bilal",
      "Biyan Bilal by Mustafa Briggs, books like Blackness in Islam by Dawood Walid, another book by Ahmed Boubarek. I forget the title. So there's a lot of actually black Muslim scholars in the US and Britain. There's Abdul Haq Ashanti's book Defining Legends. So",
      "material and try and find the answers to specific questions. But what I found is that although these books were really good, they didn't answer some specific questions a lot of the specific questions that I was being asked, they did not have answers too. So my book is kind of both trying to like amalgamate the existing scholarship on this but then also add you know fill in the gaps that had not been answered before. So I guess I should just go over the book",
      "quickly and I wrote out this list a handy list of what's in the book um okay so there's all this book is I mean the topic is really interesting um not the least of which because because there's the questions that one has to answer before one can even start talking about Islamic blackness are significant and surprisingly un",
      "studied or at least not studied definitively. So for example, just to give you an example like when did people start calling people black and white? Like who came up with that idea? Why did people come up with the idea of calling certain people black when I at least have never actually met a person with actual black skin right? Why do people start",
      "has white skin, right? Or why people call someone red. I've never met anybody who actually has red skin. So how do these conventions develop? These are just some basic questions that are really hard to find answers to if there even are answers. And then of course the links of what is racism? What are the different schools of thought about how you define",
      "different schools of thought about how you define blackness is it about uh body is it About Culture or is it a political condition right so there's all these huge debates and so I tried to sort of summarize these um discussions about race racism different conceptions of Blackness I know I'm not qualified to to kind of weigh in say one or the other but I wanted to provide for The Reader kind of a summary of these different kind of discourses and show people well you know so they could go into",
      "So they could go into this and know what it means. What are the different meanings of saying something is racist? Or what are the difference debates about what blackness is, and contestations around that? Okay. One of the things I found most interesting was the varied relationships, incredible variety of relationships there can be between the idea of let's say the metaphoric meaning of black",
      "metaphorical whiteness, a metaphor of black and white. And how these function as descriptors. So if I say like this Rubik's cube has like black lines on it right? That's just the color. I'm not making a judgment. I mean, I'm just saying that's a black color, right? Okay. By the way then there's a big debate about what actually different cultures define as black is a color but we don't even get into that.",
      "on the Rubik's Cube, that's not... I'm just describing your color. If I say that somebody is oh this guy's black or this guy is white, I could just be describing them but there's also at least in the United States and in other different contexts really depending on the context, there could be a lot of social value judgments going on there, a lot",
      "And then we have, of course the idea of black and white as a metaphor. If I say this is a Black day that's not a good thing or if I say you're Black hearted that's no a good think. Or if I someone's a White knight or something that's supposedly a good things right? So there's kind of this question of metaphor and what is the relationship between these black and whites descriptors versus black and whiteness metaphor",
      "incredible variety of relationships. That really surprised me. I'll just give you a few examples. So sometimes the kind of metaphor and descriptor fuse together, and I think that's what's happened in the United States where you can't... And this isn't my judgment. I mean,",
      "can't use black and white as a descriptor without also having that understood as, as a statement about meta, about race and power in society. Like so metaphor and political value and physical description like, and social state statements these are all just become fused. So you can't if I say, I mean uh, if I uh, say for example um, you know there's this thing",
      "or black hat and white hat, you know about who has access to computer programs. So people would see this as racist that somehow automatically gets us into discussions of race in America and this idea that white is good and black is bad and therefore white Americans are good and Black Americans are bad. And so in order to combat racism in America we actually have to undo the way we use language and remove kind of excise",
      "the use of black and white metaphorically in language to promote racial equality in America. So that's one case, and that's a very particular case. And I think it's very hard for Americans to think outside of that. That's why discussions around this topic are so heated and stressful in the United States. Okay. Another thing is that when kind of black as a color descriptor or as a descriptor of a body",
      "and black-and-white as metaphor can coexist without any tension, and without necessarily even any relationship. And this is one of the questions I had when I started this book, which I was extremely surprised there were not very good studies on. I was very shocked about this, which is what in languages spoken in Africa south of the Sahara, how do people describe their own skin color?",
      "skin color uh and then what is the relationship for example if you live in um let's just say you know um let'S SAY YOU LIVE IN UM YOU KNOW DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO RIGHT AND YOU HOW WOULD YOU HOW JUST AN AVERAGE PERSON OF A SPEAKER OF A SPEAKER OF A LANGUAGE IN THAT COUNTRY HOW WERE THEY DESCRIBE THEIR SKIN TONE AND DID WITH THAT WORD ALSO HAVE METAPHORIC MEANING",
      "metaphoric meaning and metaphorical value? That was my question. And so I did my best to get answers to this, looking at the sources I could. And what I found was really interesting, which is that in almost all the languages that I surveyed, which it's not everything but it's a lot of languages spoken in Africa south of Sahara, people could say about skin color,",
      "And that would have no normative valence, right? So that would not have any positive or negative connotation. It would just be description. And remember the vast majority of the people around them would also be described in that way. So they're describing themselves and everyone around them, right. But they could also in that same language use that same word black to say something like you're black hearted, or this is a black day.",
      "connection between them so the fact that it was black was used metaphorically negatively sometimes white would use metaphorically negative too but we won't negatively to get into that but the fact is people could use black as a negative metaphor and as a color descriptor didn't mean there was any connection between the two in fact, there was no connection between those two. And finally you had situations in which the metaphoric meaning of Blackness can dominate so much that even",
      "even kind of absorbs the body you know in a way that is uh very bizarre disconcerting right and I'll give you an example in this famous uh Norse epic called the rigsdula which was written between the 900s and the 1300s we don't know when it's a story of one of the things it does it tells the story of like the origin of the different social classes",
      "Lord or kind of free nobleman who was born had white skin and blonde hair. And then the first farmer, a free farmer who was borne, you know, had kind of ruddy skin and red hair.",
      "the slave slaves in scandinavian society were other scandinavians or they were celts from scotland or ireland or there are slobs from like what's now northern russia i mean not none of these people really look that different from other scandanabians and they're definitely not you know noticeably darker in skin tone",
      "or that those people speaking that language would call Black. Similarly, you see the same thing in 9th and 10th century Anglo-Saxon poetry and riddle books that will talk about the Black Welsh as opposed to a blonde haired English Anglo- Saxons. So the Welsh are black and we're with English and Saxons are white or red or something or blonde but they don't look different right? I mean",
      "Certainly, Welsh people aren't – you wouldn't think of them as noticeably darker in reality. So what happens – and in fact, you see similarly Norse literature will say from the same time period, you cannot tell slaves by their looks. They're actually even saying that slaves look the same as other people. How do you explain this? How do",
      "The reality is that in this case, the idea of saying something as black as negative or lower is almost eating. It's like consuming the language of physical description and the point is not really that the slaves are physically black but that they are other, that there are lower and other and it becomes a marker of the kind of the otherness and the lowliness",
      "or those Welsh people, the other in this case. So that was really interesting to learn about and it just shows you how you really have to be flexible in reading any society or culture or discourses use of language as of color as a physical description, as color as metaphor when it's doing one, when it is doing the other, when",
      "oppose uh views that might come from one's own Society or your own society that that just don't do that does not do justice to the tremendous variety of relationships that occur in world history okay so uh then I'll just give a brief description some of the you know major points of the book I talk about you know why there we have this idea that um you know in",
      "define their value. Their value is defined by their piety, and even we have lots of examples of people in the time of the Prophet alayhi salatu wa sallam or the early Islamic period, the time the Companions saying you know blackness is not something bad for us so we don't consider this to be a bad thing but on the other hand you also have very early examples from the Sira, from early Islamic history, from the time",
      "where people are insulted for being black. So when the famous case, when Bilal after the Mecca is conquered by the Muslims and Bilal goes to give the adhan from on the Kaaba and the Quraysh who are not yet Muslim, the leadership of the Quraysh they say, you know, they just have this gharab, this like crow, this black crow to do this that's the only person they have to do",
      "And so how do you, how does this work? Like is blackness an insult in Arabia at the time of the prophet or is it not an insult? It's got, you know, it seems to be people are saying both. And the way to understand this is to understand that it's blackness is not an",
      "described as black uh amir bin al-ass um allah says muhammad uh safwan bin umayya even omar was described as this it's debated but he you're described as such right uh you've never heard i mean you'll never i don't think anyone's ever heard you know safwan or amar bin el has being insulted because they're black but the reason is",
      "of the Quraysh and that's what defined they were protected. That was their define, their status if their mothers or their grandmothers or whatever were Ethiopian it doesn't matter because your mother's identity doesn't affect your standing in a society where it's your patrolling identity that defines you and what your tribe is but when you have someone who is an outsider like let's say Bilal",
      "a slave from Ethiopia, the person will lock onto that outsider mark. It's like, oh, you're Black. Interesting case. Bidal had trouble getting married because the people didn't want to marry him considering he was not a member of the Quraysh tribe, of the linked associated clans or even an Arabian tribe who had even more trouble. If we're going by stories about reports",
      "of trouble who had double the amount of problems getting married as below salman al-fadasy and he's he's persian is i mean definitely not black he's never called that right he had even more trouble both in the metro because they were outsiders so they're outsiders and when it was when when they wanted to make fun of some man they'd say some man like tell us your ancestry who's your tribal answer you'd say you didn't have any you'd",
      "son of Islam but the point is that so for him they went after his genealogy for Bilal it was his like color as a marker of outsider but nobody talked about I'm gonna be in the losses color or Safwan bin Umayya's color because they were not outsiders they were Quraysh elites okay another thing that was really important and this comes up you know in the Quran you have this idea of black and white used metaphorically but also physically so",
      "if on the day of judgment, there will be, you know, right? So you'll, there'll be some faces that are blackened and some faces who didn't do good deeds. Their faces will be white and people who are disbelievers who didn' t do good needs their face will be blacken or it'll talk about how when the Quraysh when they're told about the birth of a daughter, their face is blackened becomes blackened",
      "Because it's talking about the face, to read it as a physical description. But of course that's not how Muslim scholars ever understood it. It was always understood metaphorically. And in fact, in early Arabic, black and white are not really used as color, as physical descriptors for people. They're used metaphorically, if you're gonna use a black-white binary, it's going to be about noble ignoble good bad metaphor. Even if it's",
      "talking about a face or a forehead, right? A white forehead is like a noble person. Even though we're talking about someone's body, it's not actually talking about color. It's a metaphor. When in very early Arabic, if you want to talk about people's... If you want different skin colors, you will either use a binary of red and black. And most scholars will say that Arabs consider themselves",
      "Or you'll see a tripartite division of red, white and black. And in that division... So when the Prophet, peace be upon him, is talked about being white, that doesn't mean he looks like David Bowie or something like that, or Ed Sheeran or something. He means he is a light-skinned Arab. But the actual really light-skin people that we'd see in Northern Syria or Anatolia",
      "or Anatolia, or something like that. They would call reds, red people, right? Okay, so that's very important to understand that the Quranic language is not about physicality, even though sometimes it can be used in a context that is physical, like the face or the body. Another... Have I gone... How much time do you need?",
      "i'll just i have a few more minutes i'll do i'll finish this sure okay so uh now one of the other things that makes it very difficult to talk about this issue is that in early islamic history there's a very early and sudden kind of dramatic shift in how muslims and their society thinks",
      "Ethiopia is their neighbor. It's not just a neighbor, it's a respected neighbor. I mean when Muslims go to Ethiopia to seek safety that's not an unknown place for them. That's a place where one, it is just across the Red Sea and two they speak a language very close to Arabic. It is as close to arabic as what's being spoken in Syria and Palestine and Iraq at the time. And also there's a lot of commerce between",
      "And there's a lot of Ethiopians in the hijab. That's why we see, there's so many words in the Quran that are Ethiopic in origin like injil or words like minbar, the thing you, the pulpit you send. There's an Ethiopic word, right? The Prophet, peace be upon him, there is probably at least eight or nine hadiths very well attested hadith where the prophet specifically uses Ethiopian words. Like they'll say oh this is an Ethiopian word that means this. So this is",
      "the Ethiopians are very close and respected neighbors of Arabs. And it's interesting that people think, well what about all the Ethiopian slaves? Yeah there were Ethiopian who were slaves in Hejaz but the largest group so of the slaves in Arabia Northern Arabia at the time and Western Arabia at The Time of the Prophet, the largest groups were actually just other Arabs.",
      "the Ethiopians and then Persians, which is very interesting. So this idea that kind of black, you know, all the slaves were black Ethiopian is just not true. In fact, they were the not even the largest group. All right. But what happens when Muslims move out of Arabia in the 630s and 640s? Remember after the time of Ali,",
      "the capital from medina to kufa after that the capital moves to damascus and then eventually to baghdad right but there's the arabia is left behind it is history there is no people are interested in the hejaz because of mecca and medina but there is not interest that is not where anything important is happening from that point on essentially in islamic history right uh everything all",
      "All the ideas, all the thinkers, they're all in or almost all of them are in the kind of Nile to Oxus area of Khorasan, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, et cetera, et Sarah. Right for many, many centuries. So they're just their Muslim focus moves completely into the kind what we think of as like the Middle East and more northern Middle East. Right? And Africa and Ethiopia becomes a foreign place",
      "in place and when muslims start to encounter uh slaves black slaves brought from africa after that in the early 700s they're not being brought from ethiopia they're being brought either the what's the coast today of like kenya and tanzania brought from inland it's called zange people from zang or they're",
      "like the Nile Valley area, right? So they're being confronted by people who are really different looking even from Ethiopians and that they see as very foreign and also totally uprooted. And it's interesting Al-Jahid, the famous writer author he dies at 255 I think 868 of the common era, famous literature poet, thinker historian",
      "historian from Basra, who is himself very dark skinned. Like he would be called black. He was called black um he writes a book about the virtues of um of Black people and one thing he talks about is like look you people say you know treat these slaves that come from Africa like they're idiots they they're stupid they don't know anything and he says look the people you bring as slaves",
      "some genius from India. So he says, we know for example that Indians have all these sciences and mathematics but the Indians who were brought as slaves to Basra don't know these sciences but that's just because those people were like some fisherman who was out and got captured and he got brought here or some farmer in a valley in inland Kenya is captured and brought or something like that. That person is... And he says",
      "you know, develop sciences and skills and all these things. We just don't those aren't the people that are that we're encountering. Okay. The other major change that happens is that when Muslims kind of move out into the greater Middle East, in fact take over the greater middle east and the kind of near eastern world of Persia Byzantium is that they come into contact and immediately absorb the Greco Roman and biblical traditions",
      "traditions, Greco-Roman biblical and Persian traditions. And these traditions have a lot of really profound anti-blackness in them. And I'm not trying to... That's not true for about everything about those traditions. They're not specifically guiltier than other people. I'm just saying that there's elements in those traditions that were not really as present in the kind of Arabian world",
      "One example is the idea of the curse of Ham, that something that's in the Bible and the Old Testament. It's then developed in rabbinic thought in the Talmuds, in the thinking of people like St. Augustine or Jewish and Christian thought in",
      "slavery and or blackness, and that those people live in Africa. So they're cursed. They live in African. They are cursed to be Black and to be slaves or some mixture of that. Muslims absorb this. Some Muslim scholars like Ibn al-Jawzi, like Suyuti, like Dhammachakli, they reject it. They say there's no basis for this. This is not a reliable source. It goes against what we know were taught in the Quran and Sunnah of the Prophet. But this really has",
      "is has a it is widely accepted in Islamic not only just some popular tradition but Islamic scholarly tradition as well even though there's major Muslim scholars who reject that um yeah and yep okay um another thing that I thought was really interesting that uh and I have a chapter on this",
      "Islam is anti-Black. Where does this come from? Why are we having this discussion? Because, I mean, a huge population of Muslims in the world live in Africa, south of Sahara and are phenotypically Black. They would think of themselves as such. People in the United States would call them described as Black. So how is it that Islam is Anti-Black if all these Muslims are Black? How does this",
      "up and uh the the reasons as often is the case are mostly political right in a sense that but there's one first you have this idea of an association between Islam and slavery the idea that Islam is a slave or religion where does this come from in part this comes from the experience of British",
      "from the 1500s to the early 1700s when they are captured very frequently by Muslim pirates operating from the Barbary Coast, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia who capture these people and do raids. They do raids on Iceland. They did raids on Ireland in the 1600s and they capture a lot of people as slaves. But that really kind of dies down by the 1700s. In fact,",
      "In fact, by the 1700s, because things like the British Royal Navy become very powerful at that point. It's more it's more the case that European ships are capturing Muslims and bringing them as slaves to Italy or to France. So but that idea of Muslims as enslavers continues. In fact it becomes a basis for whole genre of novel writing in the 1800s and 1900s in the 20th century even have like board games",
      "like board games and lots of movies. There's a whole, one of the early major genres of movies in Hollywood is this sheikh genre where some white person, a man or a woman or both get captured by Arabs who are slavers. And then some drama ensues. You can see this even in movies made today. If you see the, not today, but in the 1980s, Never Say Never Again,",
      "Jackie Chan's, I love this movie, Operation Condor, otherwise known as Armor of God 2. Or you can see it in movies like Taken with Liam Neeson, the idea that Arabs are these like... There's a lot about... I have a whole list and a whole appendix in the book that deal with this. So that's one reason. Then the second kind of... That's one root of this idea that Islam is anti-Black and Islam enslaves Black people. The second",
      "The second is the idea that when the abolitionist movement in Europe, in Britain, especially in the United States, after they've successfully ended the slave trade, transatlantic slave trade. They decide that everything else all other slavery in Africa is what they call Mohammedan slavery.",
      "trades within lots of different circuits inside Africa that have nothing to do with Muslims. But everything that is not a Christian slave trade, where they say it's not really Christian, they'll say that's a mistaken association. But Islam and Mohammedans, they're the ones who do the real slavery. So that becomes a big point of discussion. And of course, later on becomes very appealing",
      "exonerate themselves from the sins of the transatlantic slave trade. Because what they'll say is like, look, yes, we used to enslave Africans but we realize it's wrong, we stopped it. But Muslims kept doing it and even to this day, they don't understand it's right. That's what those say. So it becomes a way to not only shift attention but also kind of exonerated oneself and said that the real guilty parties are Muslims. And then this becomes very convenient for",
      "for not only kind of a Western supremacist political vision. So, a lot of American conservatives you'll see articles like the National Review or other conservative publications will frequently talk about Muslim slavery or Islamic slavery and say that's the real slavery, not what we Europeans did because yeah, we did it, we repented but Muslims never did. And then also this gets seized on",
      "root of this, which is and I This is true. This is just I can't. This can be demonstrated amply right? Which is actually Hasbara basically Israeli foreign policy, Israeli public diplomacy takes this and really runs with it because And you see a lot of the movies that are playing up this idea of Muslims as anti-black as Muslims as slavers",
      "israeli productions they're um uh a lot of the kind of islamophobia discourse which has been demonstrated to be funded by different christian and jewish zionist organizations in the united states and israel they're the ones who really uh promote this idea of anti-black",
      "African Arab solidarity so it sort of is a way as a wedge in what you might call like third world Solidarity right that um you you use you tell you know people live in Africa South Sahara that your how can you be allied with or have common interests with these arrows and Muslims when um they're there they they have and are still enslaving you",
      "for a cusp or a discourse, or kind of Israeli public diplomacy is that it again, shifts the blame and the burden of racism. So it says we Israelis are not racist. The racist people are the Palestinians look how they call in their dialects, how they called black people Abid, how do they call them slaves? Right? They're the real racists. We're not the racists there's a lot of other stuff I talk about in the book but I will",
      "either leave you to read the book or answer questions about it. Thank you, Dr. Brown. Sorry, Dr Sammy, can I interject? Yes, go ahead. Okay, great. Thank",
      "A lot of what I was reading to him, he was not able to relate to it personally. As I was read your book, I remember distinctly when I was growing up in Saudi Arabia my best friend was from Sudan. From first grade until 12th grade we were literally attached at the hip and when I came to the United States for college I realized for the first time there was a shift in my head",
      "my head that my friend for the last 12 years was a black girl. Until that time, she was my Sudanese friend because in Saudi Arabia people were divided into various nationalities it was not a black and white construct. It was like well you're Sudanese and your Lebanese and you're Jordanian and you are Palestinian and so on and so forth especially if you went to like a private Arab school. You're absolutely right in saying that your environmental conditioning",
      "conditioning can definitely shape what you see. And for the first time, it dawned on me I'm like, oh well now my friend was no longer Sudanese she was black. So I was wondering about something you mentioned actually you started answering the question that I wanted to ask you which is where is this claim coming from in terms of Islam as anti-black and who stated",
      "stated political reasons, but all the reasons that you stated are pretty recent in terms of the slave trade and everything else. But I'm just wondering, have you come across in your research anyone suggesting anything from the scripture or anything from hadith or from Quran that they attribute to this claim? You know,",
      "or something from the Sira, or something that would suggest that Islam is inherently anti-Black? Yeah. Okay. Well, first of all, thank you for reading the book. But two things. I mean, I think people tend to be pardoned upon very black and white about this. So either they say racism, we don't have racism in the Muslim world, it's ridiculous. That's not true.",
      "true, right? So anti-Blackness is a huge problem in the entire world basically or certainly kind of the kind of global north and even South Asia, the Middle East. Anti-Black is a big problem. That's an important discussion. I'm happy to talk about it but people tend to go to one extreme or the other and say well this doesn't happen",
      "happen or it's really a serious problem. The fact of the matter is, and there are examples I give in the book like Anwar Sadat and Mohammed Saroor Saban. Mohammed Saroor Saban is from the Hejaz. He becomes the finance minister in Saudi Arabia. He's very influential. He was a mentor of Malcolm X, he was a",
      "first head, a very talented dynamic person who was like he was considered black in Saudi Arabia and would be considered black America. So Mohammed, I think in 1979 if I'm not mistaken, like Mohammed Saroos Abban could not have achieved what he achieved if he lived in the United States or in Europe there's no debate about that okay so clearly anti-black racism",
      "in europe is a lot worse than in saudi arabia right so but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist inside arabia so there's this there's really interesting because if you read in malcolm x's writing about his mentor you know he has his so muhammad malcolm access daughters their middle name i think is saban i'm pretty sure it's either sarur or savannah",
      "His daughter's middle name is after Mohammed Saroos Abban. That's how much Malcolm X respected him. And he says, you know, look at the beauty of Islam. This guy came from a slave background and became the finance minister of Saudi Arabia. But the funny thing, the irony is Mohammed Sarooz Abban was not a former slave and his family were not slaves. Mohammed Saroon Abban's family came from Yemen and they just happened to be dark skinned but they were never...but the whole idea",
      "whole idea right so there's obviously there's this people were going around saying oh well mr sabania his family slaves like you know they're sort of take try to take him down a notch but it wasn't true i mean that the funny but even even malcolm x was saying this for him it was a point of pride in kind of the color blindness of islam but it actually the fact that there is actually this rumor out there means that there's that's a way to attack somebody",
      "the president of egypt so that could not have become the president united states okay uh he's very dark skinned his mother was from sudan um but that doesn't mean that so if you read in heichel's autumn of fury and michael knew to that very well he says so that was obsessed with skin color like he was his his dark skin color was a huge insecurity for him",
      "So, you know, it's not either or. You can have anti-Black racism in societies, but it doesn't mean it's as bad or anywhere near as bad as it might be in another place. Okay. The other thing you asked about is kind of pre-modern discussions or... Yeah. So one of the things is that there's a lot of very nasty anti- Black hadiths. Now these hadith are forgeries. They're forgeries and a lot",
      "Muslim scholars like ibn al-Jawzi or Ibn Khaym al-jauzia say very clear, this hadith is forged. They will say if you find a Hadith where the Prophet is insulting a tribe or an ethnicity or a nation that Hadith is by definition forged because the prophet can't say what it's not possible for him to say these things about a group of people because people are judged independently so uh or individually so",
      "but you still find lots of in, not mainstay Hadith collections, but lots of Hadith collection. You'll find that these are really nasty anti-black hadits like don't marry a Zanj because they're disfigured. They're like a corrupt disfigure person or the black person if they get hungry, they steal something when they get full, they fornicate, they do zina. I mean, you see this in lots of books now those hadiths",
      "Now, those hadiths are, as I said, they're forgeries. They were identified by forgeries, as forgeries by Muslim scholars, but they're still out there and they're floating around and sometimes Muslim scholars will cite them. So you can see how these ideas are kind of permeating society, whether it's in Egypt or Morocco or Iraq or India. Okay. Thank you, Jack, for your presentation and thank you, Yasmeen, for",
      "I do have a series of questions regarding the three words that have been used in your books, actually in the titles. Islam, slavery and blackness. And I'm trying to come up with the relationship because you did mention in your presentation that slavery was not connected to blackness Ammar ibn Yasir was slave as well as Bilal was slave Salman al-Farsi was slave",
      "slaves who were not, who are just captured or they became. I mean Zaid ibn Haritha, who is considered one of the closest Sahabi to the Prophet he himself was purchased by the wife of the prophet of course and it wasn't about skin color, it was about different tradition so I'm wondering my first question, it's a three-pronged question, where did the slavery part become connected",
      "and probably from your former, previous book about Islam and slavery. How did it become a problem associated with Islam? You know, slavery where you did argue in your new book that there is a different connotation and different understanding of this particular thing within the context of Islam. So I'm trying to get you to connect the three. And of course the third is Islam and Blackness which is your most recent book",
      "most recent book. And again, where did it come? Where did it originate? You did allude to the fact that Muslims absorb some of the traditions or the Greco Roman Persian tradition but principally from the textual perspective you did say now that most of these are forgeries but are there any evidence where others could connect?",
      "between physical attributes and the metaphoric part of this, because actually when you go it's still metaphoric. I mean we call someone black is not actually black he's just dark skinned. And we say someone white is not actualy what? He's just fair-skinned but somehow people just used to say this is why this is black this is so on. So in Islam was this use, was it consciously used when for example Abu Dharr told",
      "Bilal, I don't know. I'm sure this hadith was authentic. And then the Prophet actually reprimanded him for saying that. Can you comment on all these together? The hadith where Abu Dharr insults somebody is not... The versions of the hadith that are sahih there's no evidence that it's Bilal and there's",
      "based on their mother. There's another much less reliable hadith that talks about Blackness and slavery, but it's not very reliable. The one that the Hadith people know about doesn't mention Blackness, it doesn't mentioned Bilal. People meld this all together. It's a really interesting question because if you were to go to Baghdad in 10 hundred or",
      "or Cairo in 10,000 or Cordoba in 900. Or Syria in 1300 and you were just to go and grab someone says where's a slave? And it was like that guy is a slave and you just grabbed that person and looked at them they were most likely to be either Slavic or Persian or Turkic or maybe Indian. So they were not actually",
      "actually like if you were to I mean think about it like in English the word slave we don't say like African for slave we say slave which comes from the word Slav the slot that's how closely after like the 10 hundreds in England in European languages uh Western European language that's How Closely slavic people and slaves were associated that",
      "stop you being used even the ottomans were like that right most of their slave trade yeah i mean their slaves were the mostly would be turkic or europeans or various sorts right um so uh yeah that's that's very that's so that's really it's bizarre that but then here's and same thing",
      "right by the time you get to the like 900 and 10 hundreds and 1100s and 1200s if if you say like i saw you know a2 abdan like i or i kind of mahu aswad like there was a black person with him that means that person's a slave so aswed black means slave in let's say a book written in 1200s in",
      "in Isfahan or something like that. They became synonymous, these two words? Yeah. They don't become synonymous. They become very closely correlated which is really weird because that's not the majority of slaves in those areas so not even close. How did that happen? I think one of the best explanations",
      "is what some scholars have talked about as the idea of somatic distance, somatic meaning like having to do with the body. So if you were in the streets of Baghdad in 10-100, you would see a lot of different kinds of people. You'd see Turkic people, you'd see Persian people,",
      "like kind of not that different from one another right they're not that difference from one other um you can think like today in modern day turkey uh turkey today is made up of people who came from a lot of different places and there's a lot different kind of looks in turkey so to speak right but you know like it's all they're",
      "let's say Southern Mali. Today, what's Southern Maly or Ghana? And you bring them and you put them in Baghdad that year, 10-100. That person is going to look dramatically different from the sort of general somatic phenotypic range. And so one reason, one theory is that there's just like a really striking somatic distance. Now, one could say, wait a second, but",
      "typically black people who were in baghdad who are not slaves but actually i don't think that's necessarily true i think that if you look as far as i can tell most a muslim living in baghd it doesn't they don't really have experience seeing african people who are non-slaves until like black africans and who are nazis until the like 1200s 1100 or 1200 even a little bit afterwards right so they uh they don t know",
      "know really about the existence. First of all, there's not a lot of Muslims, not a, not, a lot people in Africa south of Sahara by that time had converted to Islam. Not a lot those people had done things like done Hajj, not alone. A lot of them had not come and set up trading entrepots in Baghdad and Cairo and stuff after the 12th or 1300s it is very common but I think in that crucial period where like the kind of language conventions of classical Arabic are being formed",
      "David Gellman, Ph.D.: And so I think that's one of the things that we need to be thinking about is how do we get this right and what are some of these things that are being done in order for us to be able to make a difference in our lives. David Gellencourt Haysom, Phd.: So i'm going to go ahead and start with my first question, which is, what do you see as the most important thing that has been done in your life, especially when you're at work, because it's not just the job or the career.",
      "At some point in an area between Morocco and Iraq, basically. The situation flips. So instead of black meaning slave. Slave is used to mean black. So if you look at most spoken Arabic dialects. Egypt isn't Egyptian Arabic is an exception. But from Mauritania to Syria.",
      "those dialects will, at least at some social register, have the word for Black African people be the word of slave. That's like the inverse of what it was before. I don't know how that happened or why. What about Timbuktu? It was a great Islamic empire and they were very proud",
      "proud and they were themselves obviously not considered Abid, not considered slaves. They were considered some of the most honorable people isn't that correct? Not just across Africa but beyond. Yeah but I mean Timbuktu people assumed that everybody in Timbuku was like so Timbkutu is...I mean first of all it doesn't really become a big deal until the 1300s you know maybe the 1200-1300",
      "the 1200s, 1300s. So before that there's not a lot of exposure that people have in the greater kind of Middle East to Sub-Saharan African Muslim scholarship or Muslim pilgrims or Muslim scholars and Muslim merchants from there. This second like Timbuktu itself is divided between what they call black and white people.",
      "White people means Berbers and Arabs, people of Berber and Arab descent. Usually they're associated with pastoral nomadism. So like the Fulani would be called oftentimes called white or red because they're nomadic. And then the blacks would be other groups like Songhai speakers, Malinke, all the other groups",
      "different cultures Wangara and they were associated with agriculture and these groups like coexisted and mingled an intermarried and stuff in um in place like Timbuktu or other areas near there but so first of all um it's not clear we actually don't know what these people looked like so here's the here's",
      "You could still look phenotypically black because your mom or your mom and your mom's mom and dad's mom were all Black African slave concubines. This idea of Black and white in Timbuktu has no link to what you actually looked like. It was not insulting, it was not looked down upon by people just simply because you have dark skin.",
      "No, not if your standing is based on your family or your reputation. It's not based on skin color. Yasmeen? Thank you for explaining that. I remember in 2018 my kids' Islamic school",
      "Islamic school had a Black History Month dedicated and there were all these projects. And because it was an Islamic school, a lot of families actually objected saying that we should not recognize Black History month because we're Muslims and we do not... We should not observe this month",
      "virtue of the fact that we observed this month in a way would tell the community that somehow we differentiate and there was this huge debate in school between parents um who were for it and against it inevitably they continued uh with the programming i was one of the advocates of the program but as a pa as a parent but you know this reminds me and and this is where I'd like for you to comment",
      "Dr. Brown is, you know, when Malcolm X came back from hedge, before he was assassinated, he continued to hold talks and topics. And of course his position changed in these personal view of black and white changed after hedge,",
      "We're all sort of equal and Islam does not differentiate between Black and non-Black, it's inherently not against Black. But we in America have issues that deal specifically with the Black community. And therefore I'm still going to rally for those causes.",
      "of Sharia where the jurisprudence of reality, the kind of takes us in that direction. So my question to you is what is the right way for Muslims to observe the reality of this racial",
      "racial underpinning that exists in the world? Do we need to be ostriches about it and just say, well no no our dean does not recognize this and therefore we're just gonna not address it or do we say, yes our Dean inherently does not accept these kinds of divisions. However understanding our reality that we need",
      "so that we can address the issues that are associated with Blackness and anti-Blackness. So I'm just curious about how you address this issue in your book. Yeah, I mean, I think that... You know, you have to understand... Listen, I'm almost certainly not going to get an award for wokeness at any point. What can I say? But I think it's important",
      "important to you know, you have to understand why discussions are happening and what people are asking for. And not get caught up in kind of the Europe I'm not saying yours but like one's own drama so when you people talk about Black History Month that has to do with black people in America people whose answers were brought as slaves from Africa",
      "used as slave labor and treated awfully. And then after that, subjected to pretty insane regime of legal and then structural racism that's with us today to this day. So I mean, one of the things that was denied them was any kind of pride or any sense of continuity of tradition, any sense",
      "you know, like if someone were to say, like, would you don't you think it's good that we celebrate these people and that we talk about what they've accomplished and what their ancestors accomplished and I think we'd all say yeah, that's actually really important. So I think that it's important to kind of be able to separate between one's own dramas which might",
      "dramas which might have nothing to do like you know someone coming from egypt or from turkey might just legitimately be like i don't understand why i've i'm involved in this has nothing to with me right okay fair enough but now you're in the us and you know like you're gonna do don't you want to participate in this or do you you know you want it to stay in society well but also you know sometimes let's face it right uh muslims are arabs or turks or whatever you know whoever you insert the group right",
      "When they're objecting to Black History Month in America, in a lot of ways, they also have contempt for black people. I think that's true and then they need to fess up to that. So yeah, I think it's just important to realize what's really going on behind the discussions, whether it's what's going on",
      "And then also what's going on in our own hearts about, you know, where are we really objecting to? Sometimes it's stuff that maybe is not so valuable or not so worthy. The second... I forgot the second part of your question. What was it about? Oh, just how should we as a Muslim community address equality?",
      "anti-blackness is a serious problem in the world right think about um it's so serious that it even it sort of it even taints things that are just adjacent to like the black body right so how many i mean how many women or how you know people are considered unattractive",
      "is like less, that's less attractive than you have like nine, like, you know, soft hair. Right? So people are like ironing their hair. Or, you Know, etc, etc. Like this or the idea of, you k someone being I mean what's really interesting i kind of black Turk white Turk discourse. I can't believe it. That alone is fascinating to talk about right so like the way in which anti-blackness It's so pervasive that it even infects discourse and values",
      "and values in society that actually has nothing to do with actual people from Africa, just things that are adjacent to that. This is an idol. This",
      "and like east asians a lot of times will do this kind of thing or it's very common um like there's all this idolatry idealization idolatary of the white body of whiteness as his standard of beauty like that's a tagut like we need to smash that that needs to be smashed like that said that's that's as vile and destructive in fact more violent destructive",
      "was in arabia at the time of the prophet alayhi salam so you know we need to take affirmative steps against this and i you know um thing is like you know you can things i mean these are just my ideas and i mean i'm not like a social i'mnota don't want to say social worker i'mnoi'm not somebody who's like qualified to come up with social engineering projects or something but",
      "the suburb of Northern Virginia, where basically no black people live. There might be some like people from Sudan or something like that, or Somalia but there's basically when you walk on the streets, you're not gonna see really any black people unless they work here right? But there's mosques in the Washington DC area which are Black American mosques. We don't go there I mean, there could be a partnership between our mosque and that mosque",
      "And like we could share funds and do common events and things like that, and dinners and all this stuff. Like that could be a way to seek out the society of one another and to kind of break down these barriers that divide society in America, for example.",
      "a few pages in the book what can you tell us about the role of of the zionist movement or israel and or imperialist powers um with concrete examples is it just a fragment of our imagination that they try to deceive it or are there real effort on their part in order to stick islam or at least uh sully islam with the problem of racism or slavery or anti-blackness",
      "blackness? Yeah. I just want to make sure I get this guy's name right, so I don't want to say it wrong. Oh yeah. Okay. So I mean like the you know, I even say in the book, like it's, you know I can see how somebody responds to this and be like oh, you're like some kind of protocols of elders of Zion nonsense you're talking but it is not. I mean",
      "undeniable. I mean, it's even talked about by scholars who are not in this field. So the first thing to remember is that Islamophobia industry as Nathan Lean calls it and I think accurately calls it right? This is an industry that was founded and funded by Zionism whether it's kind of Israeli political and religious Zionism",
      "religious Zionism or Christian evangelical Zionism, which are also obviously pro-Israel. These groups funded from the 1990s have been the main funders of the Islamophobia industry, the idea of equating Islam with terrorism, associating Muslims with being foreigners who were unassimilatable",
      "who are unassimilatable, et cetera, et. This has been well studied by people like Nathan Lean, by people the New America Foundation with its Fear Incorporated, Wajahat Ali and people that did this. Fear Incorparated 1, Fear Incorprated 2 you can go see this. It's also in my book. I mean it's been well established. The role of the Jonathan Institute in Israel founded",
      "associating Palestinian resistance with first calling it terrorism, then associating with Soviets, then associated with Islamism. The idea of associating Islam and terrorism, and then saying that this is a global challenge that we all face right now just Israelis has been a very clear motif and strategy in Zionist or Hasbara discourse from the 1980s.",
      "So has the idea of associating Islam with slavery and associating some with anti-blackness. That's just, and here's a good example. Okay so there's this guy named Charles Jacobs he used to be a financier or like a consultant. He founded I think in the 1990s, I can't remember exactly but he founded a...I can't read the exact name it's like Anti Slavery International or something. I can' t remember that it's an anti-slavery new abolitionist organization",
      "that focused on, like in Sudan, freeing and redeeming South Sudanese slaves who'd been enslaved in Northern Sudan during the conflict in the 1990s and et cetera. Now this guy, Charles Jacobs is the founder of CAMRA. What is it? Center for Accuracy and Middle East Reporting or something.",
      "This organization to this day, all it does is attack and attempt to vilify anybody in American media or academia or American society who says anything critical about Israel. That's its only focus. He was also involved in funding the major pro-Zionist documentaries.",
      "The single, the strand that connects everything in this guy's career is pro-Israel activism. That's actually really vicious. Like I don't mean he just goes and says Israel's nice look at their they have really good hummus and stuff. I mean devoted to identifying attacking and trying to destroy the public reputations of anybody who criticized Israel United States. That his main career right? Then he has this abolitionist organization",
      "That's what he's publicly well-known for. Now, I'm not doubting. I don't doubt that he is sincere. I think people may well have been wronged. I'm just saying, I don' t doubt that. You can go listen to this. It was from Turkey. Not this summer but last summer.",
      "I remember being in my hotel room and just listening to it late at night, listening to the Facebook discussion he had. It's incredible. Just to give you an idea, there are five countries in the world today where there is slavery. In every case, the slavers are Muslim",
      "of all that's just not true like that's every NGO, Office of International Labor in the UN. Every organization deals with modern day slavery none of them will say that every place where there is modern day slave it's being done by Muslims. That's patently untrue but that's his view if you listen to his discussions about slavery over and",
      "again it's the idea that islam drives people to be slavers muslims have never repented for this right whereas we white western people we've repented like they've never and everywhere where there's slavery it's being done by muslim that's what he says explicitly and i have all this in my book like notes from his discussion so that's like a perfect example and you can let me just look",
      "kind of commentator came, I think it was maybe a year or two ago. I can't remember when it happened, but he said, you know, he sometimes says like relatively pro-Palestinian things which in America, it doesn't really mean much. That's just sort of treating Palestinians like they're human beings is controversial. You should see the attacks on him in Israeli newspapers, in Jerusalem Post and other things. And of course online where they'll say Mark Lamont Hill, how can you say that?",
      "men is um arabs and muslims are racist look at how palestinians talk about black people etc etc like the second any there's any notion of um solidarity between like kind of civil rights civil liberties activism anti-racism between arab muslim arab slash muslim and um blacks in the west",
      "the attacks will come immediately and they'll always originate from uh either israeli think tanks or publications or from explicitly zionist individuals or organizations to say how can you do that american black people ah black lives matter people how can u be allowing muslims to be to stand on the same platform with you don't you know how they feel about don't",
      "Once you know what you're looking for, the evidence is overwhelming. Two more questions, five minutes each. Go ahead, Daxmi. Okay. So just two questions. Towards the end of your book, there was one chapter that addressed I think he used the word the conundrum of Maliki law or something to that effect where",
      "where you cited some examples about the position of, certain examples of Maliki law and how there may have been some provision given to anti-blackness perhaps or maybe that's how I understood that chapter. Where do you think that comes from? I mean, I'm not an expert on Maliki Law but it's certainly the most benign",
      "been known to me after Henefielaw and I was very interested to read about that. And then finally, I think if... And maybe this could be the closing question that you can answer later but if you wanted to have sort of a takeaway, a very important takeaway from your book",
      "what would that be for you? Thank you. Yeah, well first of all somebody sent me a message saying that Rubik's cubes are solved by algorithms. Yeah thanks a lot buddy I know that I can't solve the algorithms okay so that's not helpful comment whoever sent this message I know who it is you know who you are too it's my friends but i just want him to know that his comment is not helpful",
      "helpful. So yeah, the Maliki so it is really bizarre right because you know like a school of law is sort of like almost the only you know except for Shafiis in West Africa or East Africa all people all Muslims like south in the Sahel and South Sahara are Maliki right? So that's how can the Malik school lobby Andy black but it's literally this",
      "Okay. So, but you know, so there are a few Maliki books of law like and et cetera. There's basically one other book that say things like, you know who can you look at? Like don't look at men. Don't look",
      "you know a woman who's like old or who's black you know because the idea being like they're not attractive they're now uh or you'll see things like in is very common in historically maliki law in let's say morocco with today historically morocca that you'll",
      "and they turn out to be black, you can basically annul the marriage. That kind of thing. Where does this come from? First of all, about the first point about attractiveness, yeah, the people who wrote this stuff... Most of those people are essentially from what's today Libya in Tunisia, and they're writing from like the 1300s to 1500s. Those people",
      "people are like I mean they have very they have their society was permeated by anti-black racism right so that's just a fact that's why they wrote that right so there's no way to explain that um other than the fact that they they're literally saying a black woman is unattractive now what's interesting is the responses to that so major scholars who are much more famous and",
      "along in their commentaries and say things like, and this is stuff written by Sheikh Ahmed Zarouk, the famous Sufi who died around 1500 of the common era. They'll say, this statement is inaccurate because there are Black women who are really attractive and there are older women who",
      "And some scholars will just say straight up, this is an incorrect... They'll say, this should not be said. Why? Because if you live in an area where everybody is phenotypically Black, then that's the... Of course, these are your peers. This is your community. These people aren't... When you're... These are people you're going to marry and they're attracted to you. You might be attracted to other people too, but this doesn't make any sense",
      "It doesn't make any sense. And one of the things that people say is, look, you write from your own perspective. Okay, listen, you're from Libya in 1500. You have this view. But don't take your view and cement it into kind of petrified into a fic book because that's wrong because this fic book will not apply. First of all, it's incorrect. Second of all",
      "totally useless to Muslims in other areas. This is marginal, these are marginal opinions that haven't been adopted by really... They're not marginal but this is not true they're not marginalized these are in Maliki fiqh books that you study if you go to Cairo and you study Maliki law you will read these books. And it's really like you can see the example I mean you can black Muslims from America will talk about you can",
      "and like going to Egypt to learn Maliki law. And then you come across this reading and they're like, oh, it's really painful. It was very hurtful. The second case about the marriage that kind of defaults in marriage, it is very interesting because in some ways it's ironic because people are always like, Islamic law, it Syria, it taking these crazy Arabian ideas or the 700s. So trying to oppose it on America man, all these other people why can't we just change with the times?",
      "changed with the times. Actually, Islamic law, Sharia is extremely deferential to custom. One of the major one of the five main maxims of Islamic jurisprudence and legal thought is an interpretation is al-azamu hakimah. Custom is dispositive. Custom",
      "determined by custom. They say this, it's very clear, right? Now one of the problems is that sometimes you have customs that are horrible. So if you... Imagine this, imagine you're in a society where people think of like people who are really light skinned don't think that people who were darker skinned are suitable marriage partners for their daughters. And this one scholar",
      "There was this chief that he lived in the kind of today would be like the hinterland of Casablanca. Either he or his family had been slaves. We don't even know what color they were, but either he or His family had Benchley's at some point and we assume from this that it means that he was also dark skinned and he was very successful, very wealthy guy, and he wanted to marry this woman from a noble family and eventually her family agreed",
      "and her family was abused. Like they were insulted for decades, like for years and years, they took abuse for this that they had let their daughter marry this guy. And the jurist is saying like, you know, it's really tough at some point you think yourself, like, is it worth it? If you're going to get this kind of abuse then is it really worth pushing back against custom to make a point that people are determined by their character or not by their skin color?",
      "not by their skin color. So you kind of understand like jurists are dealing with reality, they have to deal with like American courts, I mean the stuff that happened in family law courts in America, judges are constantly dealing with people who are huge jerks, who are awful human beings, awful to their children, awful for their spouses and it would be great if a judge just come and be like, I'm going to change you, I am going to changes his eye but they can't, they don't have the time,",
      "certain extent. So you can see this in fatwas and in legal discussions by Muslim scholars who are writing the Fez and its hinterlands from the 1500s to the 1900s, they're weighing this especially on the issue of blackness and marriage. It's really a lot of tension. And so amongst Maliki scholars, you basically see sort of three positions. One is look, the Sharia tells us to defer to custom, especially in things like marriage. Like what makes a good husband in America?",
      "husband in America what makes a good husband in Turkey like you're like yes I mean your family if you want to get married like your family has every right to be like let's say you know a guy who has no job no education and spends all his day like sitting on the side of the road you know playing with sticks okay like he they have every right should be like yes man I don't think you should marry this person he might be a wonderful person",
      "not going to be provide for you. He's not, he's not you're not gonna be able to converse with him etc etc right so there's we people with the best of intentions have all sorts of requirements for marriage that are socially embedded right now sometimes those things can be haram like if they say I won't let you deal with this guy because you know I don't know like you know",
      "insert some kind of stupid idea right the problem is that um so a lot of muslim scholars one maliki position is like look we're supposed to defer to culture if part of that custom is that blackness is seen as negative in a marriage partner like we're just that's just reality we have to defer it the second approach is basically the opposite which says and this is like major scholars like malik himself held the second position other huge malaki scholars",
      "scholars like Al-Qurtubi, Qadi Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi, the famous tafsir scholar. They'll say no this is absolutely unacceptable because the Quran says you know the most noble in God's eyes amongst you is the most pious and the hadith of the prophet like Muslims blood are equal okay so they basically say this is racist and this is unacceptable you cannot indulge this",
      "The third position is interesting. It's basically kind of like the first one, but it's nuanced. So it says, look, we agree culture is dispositive, like you defer to custom, but your weird custom and fez or wherever you are is not art. So don't, your fatwas about this are not, this might be fine in your community, but in other communities that don't have these views, your law is irrelevant. Your fatwas are irrelevant.",
      "irrelevant. So this is another thing you position, you see amongst Maliki scholars. Jack, we got only three minutes left. If you would like people to have a conclusion out of reading or skimming your book, what will be the main conclusions? What will be",
      "i mean discussions around notions of like blackness whiteness race color you know these are there's a huge diversity of in this dis in human experience about these things and you should not especially americans not everybody in the world in the past or the present thinks about these thing like americans do so don't read everything through your perspective like be open to other people's perspectives",
      "The second is that the teachings of not only the society of the Prophet, but also the teachings in the Quran are not completely black. These are teachings that are against the idea of defining somebody by their appearance or by their race.",
      "heritage of anti-black racism in Islamic tradition and that comes from very specific region that comes it's there for very specific reasons it's pervasive and it has to be Muslim scholars have some Muslim Scholars major Muslim scholars Have always been fighting against this but it's a it's like always been an uphill battle and it only by continuing that today will we",
      "smash this kind of pervasive problem of anti-Black racism in the Muslim world and in other places as well. That was just what I would say. Thank you so much, Jack, for being with us. And thank you, Yasmin, for taking part in this. This has been a fascinating and very fruitful discussion. And I hope people will have the opportunity to actually get the book and read it. It has a lot of good ideas and also thought provoking. Yeah, very applicable to our time.",
      "Salman Rushdieq, Ph.D.: So just remind everybody our next book discussion will be on the 26th of this month to build up the moons are perfect when his latest book. Salman Rushtiq, PhD, On his theory of Islamic financing which would be also a good discussion because it relates to the current economic situation Thank you very much and I will see you next time so money."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Slavery in Islam_ Intervie_FneC3OYkh2U&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748656555.opus",
    "text": [
      "Assalamu alaikum, you guys. To everyone who are watching us here in the Study Islamica page in Brazil we are delighted today to receive our guest professor Jonatha A.C Browne to talk about a subject that many of you have been asking from since the beginning of our page 10 years ago so we are right now with a specialist on Islamic history and Islamic studies who has been writing",
      "from those subjects since decades from now. So Professor Jonathan C Brown is someone who has contributed to the development of Islamic studies in United States of America, and so we are now presenting him to a Brazilian audience on a subject that is very relevant in our country, that is the history of slavery because Brazil like United States",
      "a country built on the basis of slave labor and enslaved labor that come brought right here from Africa. So we have a very mixed race society here in Brazil. I, for example, am from black heritage and also Portuguese heritage so the majority of people here in",
      "in what relates to this experience. So today I'm here with Professor Jonathan A. C. Brown, professor welcome and my first question to you is that I have read your book Islam and Slavery it's a very fascinating narrative and construction of the history of slavery in Islam and what made me",
      "they can't define what slavery is. Because if you compare, like you did in your book the life of an Ottoman officer, like a grand vizier who was called in popular culture and writing history as a slave and someone who came all the way from Guinea to the plantation system in South United States",
      "But there is no actually an equivalence on both situations. How can we define slavery and the work of the historian on defining slavery? Okay, well, assalamu alaikum everybody and thanks very much for inviting me, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. It's really an honor to know that my work has been used by people. So these questions... I wrote this book in a lot of ways you know to answer these questions myself",
      "questions myself and to help out audiences who have precisely these questions. I mean, I would say that there's a fundamental question in the academic study of slavery in world history, and that is how do you define slavery? Which it's kind of bizarre... It's weird because you have a field that studying something but then trying to figure",
      "thing actually is that it's studying. And you can imagine what that means, is that if you don't really know exactly what you're studying then you don t know exactly What goes into that study or versus what s outside of that study? This is not a big problem. I mean for example the study of religion in the Western Academy there's no agreed upon definition of religion. Somebody might think that Brazilian football is a type of religion things like that right but okay",
      "Okay, that's fine. The differences with slavery is that if something is slavery then it is morally evil in modern Western discourse versus if it's not slavery then can be discussed you know maybe it's good maybe it bad maybe it okay but when you label something as slavery becomes morally condemned so the problem with a field that doesn't really have an agreed upon consistent definition for slavery and world history",
      "you have a risk of going around throughout world history and sort of stamping things with moral condemnation when those things might actually not be very similar to one another. So I think that's the main issue we have here. There has been a couple of, now again, I mean, we also have to be clear here right? So if we want to say define slavery in the Americas, that's very easy to do.",
      "to 19th century in America. Okay, that's relatively easy. It's one European tradition, Roman law tradition, Christianity, et cetera, etara. You have indigenous people in America as you have Africans who are brought it's a very contained conversation. That's not too difficult if you want to talk about let's say slavery and Islamic civilization. You of the Sharia, you have kind of the traditions of Christianity and Roman law and Judaism feeding into this okay again relatively contained discussion",
      "discussion. The problem happens when you try and talk about slavery throughout history, right? So what happens with, uh, and what I argue in my book is that when Western scholars talk about slave throughout history and throughout the world, what they're basically doing is taking what they recognize as slavery from the Western European Atlantic tradition, and then going around the world and looking for things that look like that,",
      "slavery and then stamping it with that mark of evil. The problem is though, right? That how do they actually define slavery? They would say for example there's a couple of different definitions one is kind of slavery is when someone is property uh one might also say slavery is When someone's not free one might all just say slavery Is when someone Is in a position of compulsion where they're compelled or the coerced to do something",
      "repayment under the threat of violence. The problem with these concepts are that they're very abstract, right? So what does it mean to be property? Property just means again in Western legal tradition you might have a pretty good idea of what it means to be but if you want to go throughout human history and say what does property mean, it basically means somebody has right to something. But I mean that could mean lots of different things, right so for example",
      "uh, for example in, uh, in many medieval and even early modern China people would like leave. And when they were writing their will, They would write in the will that I leave my wife to so-and-so some person, right? So does that mean your wife is property cause you're leaving her in your will? I mean, there's a lot of questions that come up in world history about what exactly property is same thing if you want to talk about freedom, what is freedom? I Mean, freedom is, you know, the ability to do what you want except what you're not allowed to do.",
      "But that's like, I mean, what's the difference between a slave and a free person? A free person can do what they want except what they're not allowed to do. And a slave can do whatever they want, except what their not allowed by their master right? So where exactly line is between free and slave in terms of what freedom they have is going to differ depending on place and time and context. So it becomes really hard to define in world history what slavery is. So the problem is that what you have is kind",
      "of especially western scholars saying that anytime somebody is not free, anytime somebody has property, anytime something exists under coercion in a coerced labor situation they're a slave. The problem is that it's very difficult to consistently apply these in world history so for example if you say that you know anytime someone",
      "history are coerced to work i mean if you go a lot of the for example new abolitionist definitions when people talk about how like workers in the in the gulf and then kata or saudi arabia our places are slaves if you take that definition okay you can have that definition if you want to call that slavery but if you takethat and you project it backward in history i mean my you know like not only the the slaves are in brazil would be slaves but also the workers and the owners and the wives of the owners of the plantations would also be slaves so like",
      "slaves. So like these definitions, if you project them backward in time they end up sucking up lots of people that we would not want to go back in time and say there are slaves. We think of them as free. Similarly um if you say that you know anybody is uh slavery's when someone's property or not free then as you said before the whole senior administration",
      "of moral evil similar to somebody who's working on a sugar plantation in brazil in 1700 and being whipped and their babies are taken away from them and they die and they're just thrown into the water in the garbage i mean to say these two things are similar that's just not accurate right but if you just say anytime slavery is some is someone being unfree or property you end up unable to distinguish between these two conditions so",
      "of you who are working for some kind of summary on this, right? Is that we have to be very careful because the way we talk about slavery today, we think of it as this kind of trans-historical moral evil. And every time something is labeled as slavery, it's evil. But what we end up doing then is taking a lot of different relationships, some which are not nearly as bad as others and some of which are at all probably, and labeling them all according to our judgment about slavery in the Americas like in Brazil or the United States,",
      "which we justifiably condemn, but it's not really accurate to characterize lots of other examples of this... of different relationships in human history and say that they are the same either morally or even in terms of their other features as what we saw in the Americas. Yeah, and I doubt that even many people that are in the field of Islamic studies start to have is",
      "When did slavery in Islam begin? Because some, even Muslims apologetics they try to portray the image that oh, Islam came and abolished slavery at any forms. And because it's a moral evil. And if it is a moral",
      "that is evil and it's allowed by religion. So what is the difference between the many and various forms of slavery? And when did the slavery begin in this history of Islam and Islamic civilization? Did it start with the Prophet, for example? Many people cannot divide when something is called Islamic slavery or Arab slave trade",
      "have existed in previous time on those lands. For example, we have the Arab slave trade in Egypt but slavery never ended in Egypt before Islam and when you can call it Islamic slavery just because people started to speak Arabic or they converted to Islam? Or for example, the Visigoths were a kingdom based upon slavery",
      "They brought many Slavs from Northern Europe and other areas of Russia to work on the fields, on the Visigothic kingdom. So when did the slavery that was practiced there on the Iberian Peninsula suddenly turn into Islamic slavery? So this is the question. When did it begin and when we started to call something Islamic slavery. Yeah.",
      "Okay, so it's a very important thing to remember is that nobody... So all civilizations that we know of. So having just talked about the problems of defining slavery, we could roughly say that sort of this situation and things that we think about as slavery, somebody being subordinated to another person, somebody having like dramatically less rights than another person",
      "and another person under their control, something like that. We'll just call this slavery. So every civilization in world history and most societies in world have had slaves. And no society that had slaves which again are most societies and every civilization of human history none of these ever suggested or even considered the possibility of abolishing slavery until the 1700s.",
      "Right. And really until the late 1700s and really until kind of the 1800s, right? So this is really important to keep this in mind because a lot of times there's this idea that Muslims, it never occurred to them to abolish slavery. And then the Europeans, they became enlightened and they realized slavery was wrong and they abolished slavery.",
      "of slavery this is a very inaccurate very very inaccurate narrative i mean first of all as i said before think about this no society that had slaves thought about abolishing slavery until the 1700s what else is happening in the 1700's in britain and in the northern british territories northern britain colonies of america which became the united states what happened there before anywhere else",
      "industrialization, but enormous wealth developed by industrialization in a way that didn't require slaves. In fact, it required workers, right? Free workers. So the two places in the world, British Great Britain and British colonies in North America, the first places in",
      "rid of slavery as an institution. That's not a coincidence, right? That's no a coincidence. Humans before hadn't done this. This had not occurred to anybody. It would be like saying if you went back to the 1200 or 500 AD and said let's get rid of school or something it wouldn't make sense. Think about this imagine in 100 years we have AI",
      "you don't need to memorize things anymore because you have like an AI device in your mind, which immediately it's like a Siri in your mine. And if you remember something, it just draws it from the internet or something. I would look back and be like, huh? It's so weird that people had school when they memorized things. But imagine for us, it's inconceivable to imagine a world where learning doesn't involve memorization of things. So that's really important",
      "possibility of not having slavery as Aristotle actually says in his book on politics he's an extremely prescient statement he says they'll be slaves until looms looms are like the things that uh minwal in Arabic it's like when you weave cloth on the loom it's Like uh you see these things it's just like this big machine for weaving he says until these move themselves there will be slaves which actually is what happened right now then when",
      "anymore. So I think it's very important because, uh, it really takes a lot of this sort of the question of enlightenment or moral awakening. It just kind of takes us out of the equation and really doesn't start. We stopped kind of blaming people for not being the first to abolish slavery and giving people rewards meant, you know, plaudits or pats on the back for being the",
      "Islamic slavery. Okay, so the Mediterranean and kind of Near Eastern world into which Islam comes is a world in which slavery is very important part of the economy in places like the Roman Empire and Persia, cities like Rome in you know, the first century CE about one third of the population of Rome is the city itself is slave. So slaves are a big part of",
      "Islam. Slavery was much less important, there were slaves everywhere but they were not that many of them and they were really a big part of the society. They weren't economically essential like in Brazil or the United States. There were people who would help you kind of like servants right? And mostly they were captured in raids and most of the biggest group of slaves in Arabia at the time of the Prophet were actually other Arabs",
      "And then the second largest group would be Ethiopians. And then, the third largest group probably Persians. Again people mostly captured on raids or bought from slave dealers but they were not really that important in their economy. Okay so when Islam comes, the Quran and Sunnah of the Prophet make certain very dramatic changes to the institution of slavery that exists in Arabia",
      "Arabia and then as Islam spreads out in the Muslim, you know, the area controlled by Muslims. One is that it gets rid of the Quran, the Sunnah get rid of debt slavery. So debt slavery was in world history probably the main way route into slavery. I borrow money. I can't pay back the person I owe money to so I have become",
      "that person is not to pay the debt it's to pay interest on the debt in fact so it's very hard to get out of that because I can't really work to pay back the initial debt i'm always working just to pay for the interest on that. So Islam gets rid of debt slavery, Islam gets what's called self-dedition giving yourself into slavery people might say that doesn't make sense why would someone give themselves into slavery well you know imagine",
      "of us or like zombie apocalypse, Mad Max type movies. Imagine if there's like you're in a Mad Max situation, you're wandering around the wilderness, you don't know, you are terrified how many money you're trying to take care of your kids. You suddenly come across this city with walls and it's safe and you say let me in please, please let me and they say OK, you can come in but you're going to be our slave. You'd say OK no problem, no problems, let me end right so we value freedom of course",
      "have basic security. And so a lot of times in human history, whether it's medieval Europe or the ancient kingdom of Israel or ancient Near East, people would give themselves into slavery. They would give their children into slavery So Islam prohibits that as well In fact, the only way you can become a slave in Islamic law is by being a non-Muslim outside the Muslim state who is captured in warfare Or Muslims can just buy a slave from somebody else",
      "somebody else but if you to become a slave you have a non-muslim outside the abode of islam captured in warfare so one of the things that is that the quran this one would do is that they restrict the ways into slavery to this one route which is uh capture of non-Muslims outside the boat of Islam then the second thing that they do that the Quran this one to do is create enormous incentives to free slaves and this might seem obvious",
      "freeing slaves is good, but in fact this is not obvious right into world history. If you look at other texts, ancient texts like the Bible or Roman law or something they might have occasional encouragement to manumit slaves or to free slaves but the Quran is quite obsessive about this and it brings them up numerous times. It ties it to not only that it's a deed done by believers, but it's also a deed you have to do if you commit certain sins,",
      "accidentally and or in addition to paying the person's family and compensating for them for the death you also have to free a slave so there's a lot of uh freeing slaves is tied to the expiation of sins and uh the sunnah of the prophet makes it extremely clear the rewards you receive from for freeing slave so in fact if you look at the quran and the sunna of the",
      "texts that are so obsessed with emancipation, that make clear the impetus for emancipatio. One could say well why don't they ban slavery? As I said before, banning slavery was really not conceivable until the period of industrialization. Finally, another feature of slavery under Islamic civilization is that instead of having slave",
      "male slave owners having sex with their female slaves and then the child is illegitimate or the child as a slave, or illegitimately and a slave. Right? And kind of excluded from the family or whatever in Islamic law from the very beginning if a male has a child with his female slave one he can't sell the female slave after that two the female say becomes free after he dies and three most importantly the child born of that union",
      "union is a free Muslim in good social standing. So that person is the same standing as someone born of the free wife. And so you look at, for example, the Abbasid Caliphs most of the Abasid Caligraphs are they're born from slave women and almost all the Ottoman Sultans I think maybe except one or two almost all",
      "say in America, like Thomas Jefferson, the third president. He had children with his female slave and those children were slaves when they were considered black and they were a lower class people who are never going to be part of the elite in the United States. Eventually he freed them but if Thomas Jefferson or Muslim in America where Muslim society at that time,",
      "Adams, the second president of the United States. His child John Quincy Adams became the President later on so you could have had Thomas Jefferson's child born from his slave woman who looks like a mixture between an English guy and some kind of African person right? So maybe he has darker skin that person could have been the president as well right? That's the big difference between Islamic slavery and slavery in other parts of the world. Obviously there is a lot",
      "slavery in islamic civilization because islamics relations are a big place over many centuries but i'd say that there are few characteristics that you can find pretty much everywhere one is this extreme inc extreme encouragement to free slaves almost obsession with freeing slaves so even if you have a slave you'll always be freeing them maybe you'd buy another one but you're constantly be freeying them right the second one is",
      "slave woman and her owner is free and in good social standing. And the third is that what this creates is what the famous African historian Ali Mazroui called ascending miscegenation, ascending Miscegenatio. So whereas within the US like with Thomas Jefferson if you have a child between a white slave owner and his black slave",
      "into the black population. So it's not white and it's, it's free. Whereas in Islamic civilization, the child born of that union would go up into the free population and the kind of social socially recognized unproblematic, right? So there's not the way you look doesn't determine what you, what your standing is because if let's say you're walking down the streets of Cairo in 1500 and you see a guy who has really dark skin,",
      "skin that could be a slave or it could be the son of the ruler of the country with his black female slaves. And the guy is like one of the most powerful people in the country. So what it means is that there's not really a, and sometimes people ask like, well why isn't there an abolition movement in Islamic civilization? Like there was in Brazil or in the United States or anything like that amongst the slave population. Why wasn't there kind of a lot of slave rebellions",
      "slave rebellions like in Bahia or in Jamaica, or other places. And I think the reason is that people didn't really feel... Why do slaves rebel? They rebel one if they're being treated really terribly. Two, they rebel if there's a lot of them and they are together like in a plantation situation. So there's not that many white people. Once you kind of overpower those white people",
      "you actually might have success in rebellion. And third, you have to have no hope, right? This has to be the option of this rebellion or fleeing has to better than anything else you can hope for. Whereas an Islamic civilization in general, you did not have these big plantations. Slaves are mostly used for like domestic work. Like imagine you have a maid in your house that person's a slave maybe and then they're not all in one place",
      "I'd say in general, this is a big generalization but I'd saying general they were in Islamic civilization did not have treatment as severe as you had in the Caribbean and the Americas. In the 1500s to the 1800s which are really sort of unprecedented violence we can talk more about that if you want. And third, if you're a slave in Islamic civilizations",
      "Islamic civilization, you had a really good chance of being freed in a few years. And after that, you weren't going to be like a black person who people treated badly or a black someone tried to enslave after that. You were a person who was like anyone else who looked like a lot of other people around you and could go and become a businessman or whatever you wanted to do or be married and have",
      "the incentives for these kind of rebellions or to have like an indigenous abolitionist movement. Yeah, and this is amazing. One term that you have used that amazed me was ascending miscegenation because here in Brazil everyone is mixed race basically despite the image that people have",
      "In Brazil, the majority of the population is black or maybe it's white. No, we Brazilians have mixed heritage. For example in a family you can be Black Jew and Native American so it is very common feature here in Brazil but this idea of ascending through miscegenation is a unique feature in Islamic slave experience",
      "experience. So this is tied to the idea of you being born of a mother that comes from a slave origin, or even a father because we have the Delhi Sultanate and even Ottoman Empire where the sultan married his daughter to actually a slave man so through this miscegenation you can be born in ascension. And many people, even in polemics that they write about Islam",
      "Islam, they talk every time about the sexual slavery that women in this world of Islamic slavery. There is this thing called sexual slavery, that the slavery is bound to sexuality. This is something real or it's made up? What is a misinterpretation? How can we explain this to the audience professor?",
      "In world history in general, and this is quite well established by scholarship. Slaves were always vulnerable. I mean generally vulnerable right? So if you're a woman, you're going to be sexually vulnerable to your male owner or males in the family who control you. That was pretty unsurprising. The idea that",
      "maybe not legally, but no one was really going to stop the owner or the owner's son or the owners brother or whatever from having sex with her. They were in a position of vulnerability. This is pretty well established in world history that this is a feature of just generally these kind of relationships and what the difference between Islamic law and kind of the practice in Islamic civilization and most other places as far as I know is that",
      "one it was very clear uh who was allowed to have sex with this person so you can't have a man cannot have sex his brother's slave or his son's slave, or his wife's slave right he could have sex only with his own slave that's it. Right? So anything else not allowed second um the second the man has sex with that slave the woman becomes his slave concubine his suriya",
      "suriya. And if she even has a miscarriage, she gets pregnant and has a",
      "in um in the americas right or certainly united states which is what becomes the united states or even in roman law or jewish law prior to islam was that you know he just sort of oh we're not supposed to happen no we would never do this of course it's happening constantly and then the children born of these relationships are just being going down into the slave population",
      "but they are also free black people or whatever. So what happens is that in Islamic law, this relationship is structured and the children born of this relationship are free and treated the same as children born regular relationships. So I think that's an important feature I already discussed. But some people might say, well why does Islamic law",
      "law acknowledge the legitimacy of sex with slaves or for female slaves and you know that's that's a kind of a moral objection uh one hears a lot and it's you know it's understandable moral objection i think um the answer to that is that um it was just given the given the social reality and legal reality of slavery in world history",
      "the possibility of. The owner having sex with his female slave was like very high and it was either going to be legal or illegal, either is gonna be kind of protected or not protected. I think that's uh, the, this, the answer Sharia took was to make it legal and to then structure it and protect the child born from that, uh, that union what's interesting is um,",
      "The Christians and Jews who are interacting with Muslims from the very early period, from this 700s into the medieval Muslim period. They actually don't allow sex with slave women. They don't it. The children born of these are not legitimate and they're not free or at least not automatically. And this is actually something that they will criticize Muslims for which",
      "Muslims for, which is interesting. But you can see kind of the result. You can see maybe compare the results, right? So on the one hand, you have Christian and Jewish traditions, which are not allowing this. They say it's not allowed. We don't accept it. Of course, it happens anyway. But",
      "become someone you can't sell, who becomes free when you die and the child is legitimate and free. And so in the end in Islamic civilization lots of great scholars, lots of poets, lots rulers are the results, the products of these relationships between owners and their female slaves whereas if those had been Christian or Jewish societies even in the Muslim world",
      "and they would not have been legitimate. Yeah, it's an amazing thing to look at because every time the subject of Islamic slavery is covered in myth and like I will say bigotry from projection a Freudian way of looking at things like projecting the experience that we have on South America or Europe into the Muslim world but a special feature",
      "on Islamic civilization and its experience with slavery is really did any Muslim thinker, theologian or any other person of intellect inside of Islamic civilization never thought about the end of slavery or like in abolition movement? Because here in Brazil we have a very famous guy. His name is Luiz Gama",
      "is Luis Gama. He was a son of Muslim women, enslaved Muslim women from African origin and his father was a slave owner so when he was a child his father sold him into the slave market, so he was sold and some historians even say that this was something that contributed to",
      "his mother participated in the slave revolt on Bahia, the famous Revolta dos Malês that happened here in Brazil. His mother was like she acted like an agent sending a message in Arabic to people to plan the revolt. Her name was Luiza Mahim. So and when he grew up,",
      "of the African people here in Brazil, a very famous abolitionist here inside of the country. So really inside of whole Islamic land since the beginning of Islam in seventh century Arabia did never this occur to any scholar? To abolish slavery at all or not? No but I think you have to look at kind of...",
      "The Bahia Rebellion was 1835, was it? Yeah. It is in the... Yeah. 1830s... 1835. Yeah. Okay. I hope I'm correct. I can't remember exactly. I mean, you have to think about what's happened by that time. I know if you look, you can see a map where it shows you every... In fast motion,",
      "single slave ship that goes from Africa to the Americas, from 1500 to 18-something. The vast majority go to Brazil and the Caribbean. North America was like a sideshow compared to Brazil which is really the most populated by slaves. Slavery continues there the longest until 1880s.",
      "So, you have the huge population of people who are brought from Africa. Right? Sometimes from oftentimes they can find people of the same ethnic group and the same religion. And there are a huge number of them. There's relatively few white people who were owning them or overseeing them.",
      "factor, which is that the violence of the Atlantic slave trade, not only the actual trade across the ocean but the treatment in the Caribbean and South America and places that are an extension of that like South Carolina is absolutely shocking. I don't mean it's shocking to us. It is. It was shocking to people at the time. So the people who start to write against the non-slaves like the white people will start to",
      "start to protest against slavery in the late 1600s, 1689, 1690, early 1700s. These are all people who have direct experience with the slave trade. They're shocked, absolutely shocked. I mean this stuff if you read there's this one slave overseer later plantation owner in Jamaica who actually kept a journal thousands of pages of journal. What he did to slaves and wrote about",
      "and wrote about is absolutely shocking. Absolutely shocking. I mean, and I'm saying this as a guy, I'm pretty cynical guy. I don't really get surprised. I was shocked. I had devices, special devices to hold the slave's mouth open so you could put feces human feces into their mouth. It's unbelievable. Unbelievable. And they did this because",
      "because there were so many slaves and so few white people overseeing them. White people were terrified. The only way they could assure the obedience of these slaves was to brutalize them. You go to the actual slave trade, the Transatlantic Middle Passage. There were dozens and dozens and thousands of mutinies, of rebellions by the slaves on the ships.",
      "I've never seen anything like this in Islamic history. You have a few rebellions, like the Zand revolt and the 800s here and there. But just the level of violence in the trade, in the actual trans movement of slaves to the market, and in the treatment, I've",
      "that approximates or that approaches the middle passage and the cruelty of slavery in especially Caribbean and South America. So I think that's why, and again this guy Will what was his name? Luis Gama. Luis Gema right so and then he identifies himself with this population that's identified",
      "that's identifiable. There was no, I mean if you go to like Cairo in 1700 or let's say Cairo and 1830 at his time or Mecca in 1830, there's no real population that you can identify with. There are slaves in Cairo obviously probably about five to 15% of the population were slaves in cairo or in Mecca at the time in the Hejaz but they were okay. You had slaves from all over.",
      "You had African slaves, you had Indian slaves. Who are other slaves? The mothers of all the elites are Circassian slave women or Greek slave women. So the mothers of the elite are slaves. Instead of one group of people who are these oppressed exploited laborers who are racially identifiable, you have lots of different races",
      "different races at different levels in the society that are not concentrated in one way where they're being exploited all together right some slave owners might have treated like their slaves like garbage and Cairo or in Mecca but they weren't in a position where they could group together and have a rebellion and then or even be a group that someone would kind of lobby on behalf right there was just one there wasn't that sense of shared identity so I think that's a big difference",
      "difference, you know, to the point where some people say, you what should we do reparations for slaves in Islamic civilization? And I say kind of sort of as a joke. But I think it's also a good point, which is if you want to be able to identify descendants of slaves in, let's say Egypt go to the richest people in Egypt, the ones who are the lightest skin give them money because their grandmothers for multiple generations were Circassian or",
      "or Turkic, or Greek slave women. That's how they look like that. They're the elite. So you want to give them money? You can go ahead. But I mean... My point is it's a very different situation than you have in the Americas where it's very easy. In the US, you can easily tell who's the descendants of slaves. Easily. Right? You know what I'm saying? You could date this with your eyes and that would be accurate. Unless somebody guys like, hey, I'm from Nigeria. I just moved here. But everyone else",
      "everyone else you know some of one of their ancestors were a slave at least so these two situations are not comparable and i think one of the problems is that um you know people who are concerned about racial justice or equity or reparations these are our fine laudable concerns i support these uh these agenda but if",
      "replicate them everywhere else in the world. It doesn't work because people have very different histories that differ greatly from the American tradition of slavery. Yeah, it's indeed a very big feature and I was reading a book published by a Senegalese historian his name was Tidiani Ndiani he wrote",
      "a book called in French, Le Genocide Violé, where he said that Islamic slavery was greater in number to anything that Europeans have done. And I don't know how he came about with this calculation because the enslavement of African people never stopped it even after the fall of the Roman Empire",
      "The Medals kept coming to North Africa and then the medieval kingdoms of Spain also kept coming. Vikings came to North African, but he told this. And the main argument that he and other people have been presenting is that the reason you didn't find thousands or dozens of black descendant people in Middle East today",
      "is because every single man that was brought to the Arabic-speaking world was castrated. Yeah, this is ridiculous. I mean these statements are insane. I think there's a lot to address there but first of all in Islamic civilization slaves came from three or four main groups and kind of in order it's basically Persians",
      "basically Persians, Persians and Turks, Slavs. And probably that's the majority. The majority is together kind of Persians Turks and Slav. And then Africans so Africans from South Sahara, and also Indians right? So those are the main populations. So if we just talk about slavery in Africa there's a lot of questions",
      "questions we have to start answering, right? So first of all, what is Africa like if I take a slave from I capture someone in what's today let's say Nigeria and I take them to Marrakesh in Morocco am I taking them out of Africa or is that still in Africa so I mean first of",
      "we talk about you know slavery in africa we're talking about black africans people that we would today racialize as black being taken out of there to somewhere else we don't know maybe it's north africa maybe it is somewhere else okay let's say we are talking about that um it's very hard to calculate numbers but i'd say based on my estimates and this is a real generalization",
      "700 to about, let's say 1850. Taken out of what we just called Africa somewhere else. So from 700 to 1850, about 12 to 15 million. The European slave trade and when I talked about roughly 1500 to roughly 1850 right? They have the transatlantic slavery database says",
      "database says that it's between 10 and 12 million. So, between 10 to 12 million people over a period of three centuries, 3 1⁄2 centuries. What we talked about before is in Islamic history let's say about 11 or 12 centuries you have 12 to 15 million. In the transatlantic European slave trade you have 10 to12 million in 3 1½ centuries so I think maybe four times more intensive",
      "And also based on racialization, based on notions of cultural superiority and resulting in colonialism and all sorts of other stuff. Okay. Now we have to... So if you wanted to say that Muslims took more slaves out of Africa than Europeans, maybe they did. But it's also... They did so over many more centuries.",
      "more centuries so it's much it's like three to four times less intense second point which is and this is a point you made very well which is why did we talk about european slavery why are we saying 1500 to 1800 i mean romans were taking slaves from buying slaves from egypt from nubia or ethiopia in zero bc we love to talk about westerners we talk",
      "All the buildings look like Roman temples. So we love to claim the accomplishments of Roman civilization, but why don't we accept the negative deeds as well? Right? So why don'Twe talk about the European slave trade over 2,000 years? Yep. As opposed to just three and a half centuries. So We don't know the actual numbers. The third question... The third real question this brings up is who is",
      "is where are the boundaries of all this i mean the um a lot of the muslims or arabs who are engaged in the slave trade in africa are one they're black right they they're we we would see them today we'd say they're Black they would look at themselves and say they' re Black okay their grandfather might be Arab",
      "born in zanzibar they look like everybody else okay second they're going inland and like europeans i'm not you know i'm trying to remove any moral blame from europeans but the fact is it's not like european slave traders portuguese slave traders were going inland in west africa and doing raids they didn't want to do that kind of stuff they would buy everyone knows they would go buy stuff",
      "you know, sometimes they're doing raids. But a lot of times they're just going and buying slaves from people who are selling their own people or someone else that they raided from other African groups. So if we're gonna talk about, you know who's involved in this slave trade? We all know that this is involving as well people who were inside this thing we're calling Africa. So I think that in both the case of European slavery and the quote unquote Muslim slave trade. So when you take all these points together it shows how complicated these questions are",
      "these questions are and how really when we're talking about them what we're really talking about is people who are like you know fans of western civilization they're western supremacists or something like that saying yeah we did slavery but we're not that bad we're sorry we apologize",
      "they're real it's really it's not about numbers or people suffering or reality in history or really understanding any of these things it's just about being able to feel a sense of superiority moral superiority today i think that's very important yeah yeah and also a last question um uh in my own country in our own history we have a very graphic feature of",
      "slavery, there is punishment. For example sometimes I read on magazines and news that in Indonesia someone was caught doing something like a sexual offense or crime and such a person was lashing. And the people think about",
      "two meters and someone weeping him with like Indiana Jones. Yeah, yeah. Weep very big and the person screaming and blood come... And when it's actually something that is even less severe than Brazilian mothers do to their children inside homes.",
      "on the mind of Brazilian people, because we have experienced slavery here. We have people in camera that have died in the 90s that were actually slaves and they talk about slavery when they were in their 20s, that they were actually slave beaten and everything. So in Islamic civilization and especially on Islamic law where do",
      "beating and the punishment in slavery entered? And is it that the master allowed to do when slavery was practicing, is the master allow to do anything with this labor and beating and cutting maybe his hand or something for a bad deed like Something like that. It's just allowed in Islamic law or something like that",
      "Well, first of all, Islamic civilization is a very broad phenomenon over many centuries. So you have to think that there are all sorts of possibilities for what actually happens. Some owners were probably really brutal. Some ones are probably very fair or kind. You just have to keep in mind that there's going to be a lot of variety. Certainly in Islamic history generally when they talk about whipping",
      "of whipping or lashing they're usually referring to what's it's almost like uh you got you know what a riding crop is i don't know if you have one here i have a lot of horses it's like um it's not like the",
      "the cat of nine tails you see in the British ships or the kind of 12 years a slave. And you also have to think about what's going on here. And I mean, generally slave owners, their slaves are their property and they want that property to be productive but they don't have... You may wanna punish somebody or make an example but you don't want to injure your slave because that slave might die very easily of infection or something.",
      "So, I mean, like these the last are generally this like it's called the salt, which is like a kind of a like a riding crop. Right. Just as an example. OK, so in Islamic law, the rule would be generally that you could you could discipline your slave in a way that was reasonable and similar to how you would discipline your child.",
      "The slave and the child are essentially at the same level. They're both kind of under your control, you're dependent, then you could discipline them. But if you did something, you caused injury, you cause serious injury,",
      "the injury this is a lot we have lots of examples of this in Islamic history um so and then if you did something like you cut off the slave's ear, you cut their nose off, you castrate things like that uh you would be the slave would be freed automatically. Like the big judge or whoever was in charge of the legal system would free that slave because that was the responsibility of",
      "back to the son of the prophet alayhi salam and their early community um so uh and just as an example like in this one i think fourth century greek preacher gregory nazianzus and i think also john chrysostom if i'm not mistaken these two famous greek byzantine preachers",
      "talking about, you know, don't treat your slaves badly. You know, Don't lash them more than 30 or 40 times so that number just an example of that was the maximum like in the Hanafi school of law which is very widespread school of Law. That was like the maximum punishment even a judge could give to somebody was like 30 or forty lashes. So you can imagine that you know these Byzantine creatures urging their flocks to treat their slaves",
      "beneficently were saying don't go over 30 or 40 lashes that was the maximum that you would get even if you're a criminal being punished in like a hanafi court for example so i think that gives you a sense of that in general the use of corporal punishment in the islamic legal system and what was considered reasonable in terms of what someone could do to their own slave",
      "let's say, third or fourth or fifth century Constantinople. That may be a good comparison. Professor, I would like to thank you for your time that you disposed it to our Brazilian audience. We have been recording for more than an hour right now and was in amazing conversation with someone who is specialist on the subject. It's open variety of pointings",
      "of pointings, of view on the same subject. And I would like to invite all my followers on the Study Islamica page to buy the books of Professor Jonathan H. Brown especially those who talk about this subject of slavery that is Islam and blackness and slavery in Islam it's a very nice...and I have read those book and they are very well written",
      "and amazing stuff. So Alhamdulillah, Professor I give the time to you to now talk to the audience and make your final considerations Well, I mean I'm happy I'm really happy to speak to you it's a part of the world I've never been to and I've",
      "link to your page so I can look at it and see what it's like. See if I can understand anything, and hopefully we'll get to meet in person at some point inshallah. InshaAllah. Feel welcome. Brazil is a very nice country and we have a lot of Islamic history here. So thank you professor for your time. Assalamualaikum. Waalaikumsalam warahmatullahi"
    ]
  },
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    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - South Asia in Islamic Thou_mGNovPewOEg&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748685468.opus",
    "text": [
      "So hello everyone, salaam. Namaste and welcome to today's event with Professor Jonathan Brown of Georgetown University. The topic of today's is South Asian Islamic thought and I have invited a very senior academic",
      "who is quite familiar with Professor Brown's work as well as the department's work at Georgetown. So he is going to give you a formal introduction of Professor Brown and of the team so welcome Dr Mazam Siddiqi sir, and please start. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Dr Jonathan Brown",
      "Waleed bin Talal, Chair of Islamic Civilization at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. And he has been an... Georgetown has been his alma mater and he was an undergraduate here in that I think 2000 to 2004. And since I am-",
      "My wife was 2003 or something, but I was 2000. Yeah and so it so happens that I have lived in Washington since 1984 and I was at the University of California Berkeley and so even though my field is comparative linguistics",
      "the same area as Dr. Brown and that's why it gives me great pleasure, and I have heard a lot about him and he is such a young and promising scholar already has produced so many books and written so many articles and in order to be a student of civilization and religion you have to know several languages",
      "knows Urdu and I think you are a little bit of very, very small. But do you also know a little Turkish? I'm sure yeah yeah and so he has written several books but iIm going to mention only three here canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim the formation and function of the Sunni Hadith Canon and number two",
      "and number two hadiths muhammad's legacy in the medieval and modern world and number three muhammad a very short introduction and professor brown got his phd from one of the premier institutions not only",
      "the Department of Islamic Studies and Civilization at the University of Chicago has had many distinguished professors. And I can think of late Professor Hodgson, who wrote a three volume book on the history civilization all aspects of Islam in the context of world history",
      "So he was unfortunately not there when Professor Brown was attending University of Chicago. And also I can think of Professor Fazlur Rahman who joined University of Chicago in the late 50s because he was in Pakistan during the regime of General Ayub Khan and he was hounded",
      "hounded out from Pakistan by the orthodox ulama of Pakistan and he has written many books. And one of his book which is very famous, Islam a very short book and so also so many other distinguished scholars. Very briefly speaking about South Asia or I should say",
      "Indian subcontinent and Islam. So I'll give you very brief outlines, hallmarks during the contact between India and the world of Islam.",
      "I feel cool breeze from India. And then the contact with India of the Islamic world, not only the Arab, I mean, not the Arab world it predates the advent of Islam and the contract between the Gulf States and the Malabar coast so we have",
      "The first mosque that was built in India dates back to 726 and that mosque is still there and has been continuously used in Kerala. And then after that, let me take you to the contact with the Umayyad Caliphate Muhammad",
      "caliphate, Muhammad bin Qasim the young general conquered Sindh and Multan. And after that the other high point is the contact with the medieval world great civilizations Greek uh and then later on Alexandria which was also Greek and Roman and the ancient civilizations Iran and",
      "and Turan, and Sumeria, and India. So India is known for its science mathematics so the numbering system was taken from India by the Arabs at Dar al-Hikmah, the house of wisdom that was established by Harun Rashid",
      "were used by the Arabs and developed the science of mathematics, algebra and other sciences. And they called it in Arabic Hindsah which means they are acknowledging the origin of numbers to India whereas the Europeans who received the numbering system from the Arabs they call it the Arabic numerals",
      "After that, we have the contact between the Turanians and Iranians. The invasion of Mahmoud Ghaznavi and then the histories after Mahmood Ghaznabi is quite well known to you. And let me also mention a very famous name Abu Rehan al-Biruni who spent 13 years in India",
      "a lot of years and he wrote an encyclopedic book on India. It is literally an encylopedia called, very long title but in English it is called the Book of India in which she talks about history, anthropology, languages, philosophy, cultures and all that. And after that we have so many other dynasties until we come to the Mughal dynasty",
      "and since after that you know the history of Islam during the Mughal period, and then the British come. And after that, so I think I have given you enough background, the contact between India and the Indians of continent and the Islamic world. So let's give it back to Professor Jonathan Browne.",
      "um everybody uh i'm really happy to be here and you know I in my thanks for inviting me and for showing up. I think a lot of times if I could go back and kind of redo my career, I would focus on South Asian history.",
      "It's easier than saying South Asia. But of course, I mean kind of the whole of a subcontinent. I'm not politically pushing for support of India or the modern Asian state of India over some other country to make it that clear. Yeah, I think it's just such an interesting part of Islamic history. I mean, I'm really interested in sort of India and Islamic history,",
      "I'm interested in pre-Islamic India. I mean, it's not that I'm not not interested in it but I'm really interested in kind of South Asia as part of the Islamic world and I think one of the reasons I'm very interested is because you have a situation which Muslims are a minority at the most if you take sort of South Asian as a whole kind of max out about 1 quarter of the population I think",
      "And they have a lot of different relationships to the people around them, to the context they're in. They are traders like on the Malabar Coast as Professor Zika was saying. They're traders at first then their... I'll remove this. Then there raiders coming from the North",
      "north uh from the northwest under the you know well first they're kind of conquerors during the time of um muhammad al-qasim in sin then their kind of raiders under the the khaznavids to sort of set up camp in afghanistan and later on in the punjab and then they come and settle as rulers from uh",
      "know around 1192 onward and then they gradually basically blend in with the indigenous population and become you know fully part of Indian history right so this idea of Muslims as foreigners or outsiders is you know it might be true at the very beginning in a sense that their merchants",
      "and create a kind of composite society, composite civilization. And you can see this with the various states of, you know, the kind of successor states of the Delhi Sultanate. And then you of course see it most clearly with the Mughals. If you're interested I recommend reading Richard Eaton's relatively new book called India in the Persianate Age which is a fascinating excellent review from a great guy",
      "from a great, great scholar knows all the regional languages that are important to know. And he's just a terrific scholar in general Richard Eaton's India and the Persianate Age. And what he shows is that is it kind of the idea of Persianate culture is a culture that is a period in Indian history that kind of between the Delhi Sultanate and they kind of 1830s and 1840s when the British really started",
      "starts to enforce their authority, they're called cultural and colonial authority. It's a period in which Persian language, Persian literature, Persian sensibilities become a medium for everybody in India to communicate and express themselves whether they're Muslim, whether there are various types of Hindu, whether they are et cetera so anything you can imagine Zoroastrian. So the person becomes this kind of religiously neutral language",
      "and aesthetics, and scholarship that flourishes under this period of Muslim rule in India. And what he also shows is it all these Muslim states from the time of the Delhi Sultanate onward are not foreign states right? They're Muslims ruling",
      "as Indian rulers. So the way they show themselves on coins, the way legitimize themselves, where they structure their states, where to structure their alliances, they are just there Indian rulers like Indian rulers were acting a thousand years before them and he shows that the Mughal Empire especially after the time of Akbar is really in a lot of ways Rajputs",
      "even genetically, I mean by the time you get to like someone like Shah Jahan or Aurangzeb these people are like half or two or three-fourths Rajput. You know i mean they're um the language they speak at home when they're yelling at their kids and stuff is dialect of essentially north Indian right? So uh and that they create this composite artistic style, a composite political style,",
      "court culture, everything literature. And that's really fascinating because you have how do you live as Muslims? As a minority first as kind of traders then as rulers who are at home in that land with its language, with its culture and then of course what really interests me is",
      "then they start to have to live as subjects of the British. First, maybe they're just accepting their protection or working with them, then they're maybe a little bit more dependent on them than a little more dependent upon them and then finally very clearly the British are in charge. How do you make sense of that as a Muslim? Then kind of the british start to be a little but more forceful about things like missionary activity,",
      "creating a kind of upper class and anglicized angle phone, upper-class. How do Muslims make sense of that? How does it make sense for modernity in a lot of ways? One of the reasons I really like Islam in South Asia as a subject is because these are the first people who the first Muslims who come face to face with the challenge of modernity. The challenge of majority that is for them also the challenge",
      "So I think that's really, in a lot of ways Islamic thought since 1800 is a repetition or rehashing the discussions that Indian Muslims are having from around 1800. They're the first people to have these discussions and they create all the germs of this discussion and then everybody else just sort of rehashes it over and over again. And so that's why I really find it fascinating",
      "I really find it fascinating. So, this is not my expertise. When I was invited to give this presentation, I said, you know what? I don't really know what to talk about. It's not my expertize but I do my best to learn about it and I take Indian Muslim scholarship very seriously. And that's not because I'm some kind of sensitive charitable person.",
      "who has dipped even a finger into Indian Islamic scholarship, immediately takes it very seriously because these people are not jokes. They are no joke whatsoever. Just as a brief statement, I mean, a brief introduction, right? If you want to find the best writings on Hadith commentary, Hanafi law, some of the best writing",
      "some of the best writings on Islamic theology from the 1800s through the 20th century until today, you're talking about Indian scholars. In terms of volume, in terms of quality. I remember I wrote this book on Islam and slavery, and I looked at all the different Hadith commentaries on the Hadith involved. And it's interesting, and you see the same ideas coming up over and over again.",
      "over and over again. And then I read Mufti Taqi Usmani's Takmilat Fatah al-Mulhim on Sahih Muslim, and he just took everything to the next level. You see this over and ever again with Mufty Taqi Uthmani with his writing is that he'll always take the conversation to another level of quality and comprehensiveness.",
      "the golden ages of the past, you're talking about somebody who's participating in that tradition and moving it forward and building on it in a way that's completely organically continuation of that past. And that someone who is alive today right? So you can imagine the figures like Shamsuddin Adhim Abadi, Mohammed Zakaria Kandahlawi, Zafar Ahmed Osmani,",
      "Allahumma Zayza Muhammad, Ashraf Ali Tanvi, Anwar Shah Kashmiri. I mean these figures are immense scholars and they're incredible scholars, incredible. So this is a book I've been reading and I got this in the Darat al-Ma'araf Al Uthmaniyah in Hyderabad. One of my favorite intellectual pilgrimages was to go to actually",
      "at the Ma'araf al-Uthmaniya, at Osmania University in Hyderabad and visit that place where so many great Islamic texts were edited and published for the first time. And I bought a lot of books there, of course, and I got them bound in the Chandi Chowk district in Delhi with a very nice little Muslim book binder shop. And then I went and had meals with them and they're a wonderful family.",
      "Nuzhat al-Khawater of Abdulhayyad Hassani, of Nadwa. And it's a early mid 20th century Muslim scholar who does a history of all the ulama and kind of leading figures political literary intellectual figures of Islam in South Asia up till I think the early 20th Century. So if you look here, you can see sorry for my horrible handwriting",
      "horrible handwriting. So this is actually by Hijri century, and this is really interesting because you can kind of see the volume of Muslim intellectual activity. Okay so Volume 7 at the top is essentially...this is rough but basically the 1800s into the 1900s of the Common Era right? So you can think of that the time of",
      "Shah Abdulaziz Adeloui died 1825. You think of, you know, Fadlallah Al-Azim Abadi, sorry, Al Khair Abadi and Shah Ismail al-Shaheed and the kind of founders of Deoband and Ferenghi Mahal in the top volume. Then you go below that, you're basically into the 1700s of the common era so you have... Sorry I'm holding this up it's sort of unstable but I'll do my best. The 1700s which is",
      "which is, you know of course Shah Wali Allah Dehlawi and the figures of revival and reform in India 1700s. You go down to volume five it's just roughly the 1600s. They can think of figures like Abdul Haqqa Dehlawi who died I think in 1642 or 1052 Hijri around 1642 of the common era. And then below that is the 1500s volume four",
      "And you can see these are luminous. And then below that, volume 3 is into the 1500s. And you could see there's a real kind of drop in volume. Wait, so let me think here. No, no, no. So OK, I'm sorry. So volume 4 would be the 1500. Volume 5 is the 1600. Volume 6 is the 1700. Volume 8 is 1800.",
      "So volume four in the 1500s, you see it's still pretty high volume. But then you get into volume three in the 1400s common era. Then we're going back in time. Right? So things are kind of getting smaller and smaller, kind of the beginning of the tree as it starts to blossom. And then before that into the 1300s and before that, into the 1200s. And before that is not really a thing.",
      "But you see, it's really in the 1500s that you have the explosion of intellectual activity. And a lot of that is I think because of the kind of blossoming of the Mughal state. But I think this is really interesting cause you just see the sheer volume of Muslim intellectual activity now what's really interesting for me and I'd say this",
      "I say this in no way to detract from the piety or sincerity or value of any part of the Muslim world. And I also see this as a huge fan of Islam and West Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa. But if you look at compare Islamic scholarship in India and Islamic scholarship is Sub-saharan African, let's say the kind of West African world Timbuktu and Mali there are a lot of ways",
      "ways their histories are parallel in the sense that you get early trade contact, you get to the beginning of conversion of some rulers and courts in sub-Saharan Africa in the early ten hundreds. You get kind of the rise of Muslims, very wealthy Muslim states in the 1200s, 1300s, 1400s, 1500s like the great big empires like Mali and Songhai. And",
      "And the famous pilgrimage of King Mansa Musa from Mali when he goes in the 1300s to do his Hajj. A Muslim scholar from the Hejaz actually goes back to Mali with him and he's really stunned by the quality of Maliki jurists, like he says you know the scholars here really know what they're doing these aren't some country bumpkins who don't know anything",
      "scholarship there. So the kind of quality of Islamic scholarship in Sub-Saharan Africa is very high from an early period, in terms of Maliki law and one thing they write a lot of his praise of the Prophet. Just endless volumes of praising the prophet. It's incredible devotion but what's really interesting is I do not think there is a single commentary on Hadith written",
      "in Africa, in sort of West Africa, South of the Sahara as far as I know. There's some written in like Ethiopia, Somalia region but that's it's a very different you compare that to South Asia where I mean you get to the point in the 1700s and 1800s where any scholar worth his salt would write a commentary on Sahih Bukhari or Sahih Muslim just as they it's like you have to do it",
      "you know, something you have to have on your resume. So the very that and what's really interesting is there are a few books from by West African Muslim scholars that are used in the rest of the Muslim world, a very small number. If you look at the number of books that are considered authoritative references by Indian scholars, they're used throughout the Muslim",
      "a large number. So first of all, again I am not in any way saying that the Arab world is the standard by which things are measured but I'm just talking about let's look at sort of the spread you know we'll look at the Arab World or the Ottoman World there's just examples of things spreading to other places if you go to a bookstore in Cairo or Istanbul either this year or 100 years ago",
      "you'll find books like, Allahumma Sayyidina Muhammad, Al-Mubarak Furi's or Mubarak Puri's commentary on the collection of Tirmidhi. You'll see Zachariah Kandahloui's commentary On the Muwata of Malik. You will see some of the earliest books printed in Islamic theology and a printing press include Abdelhakim al-Siyya al-Kuti",
      "17th century Indian scholar, C.L. Kuti's commentary on the Aqidah of Anasafi. You'll see Allahumma sallallahu alayhi wa sallam you'll see the Masharaka-al-Anwar of a Sahgani. A Sahgany died in 1252. One of the earliest Muslim scholars from India who travels to Baghdad and he does a very authoritative copy of Sahih Bukhari. He writes his own hadith collection called the Masharak-al Anwar which is very popular",
      "is very popular throughout the Muslim world. So I'm just trying to think of other examples,. Oh, of course, the Fatawa al-Hindiya, right? The Fatawa Al-Alamgiri that's commissioned by Emperor Aurangzeb in late 1600s. This book is called the Fatawal Hindia, Indian fatwa.",
      "This is a book that is cited and by Hanafi scholars in the Ottoman world. An incredible book to this day, an incredible resource for understanding the Hanafi school of law. And I could go on and on about works written by Indian scholars that are really authoritative and widespread around the Islamic world. OK. So here's interesting questions.",
      "interesting questions uh why is this uh why are there such a kind of intense and voluminous production of muslim scholarship in in south asia especially from essentially the 1400s onward and i would say that from my my theory i mean probably other people have already talked about this but I'm not a specialist who's doing my best right. I think is there's a",
      "there's a huge number of very powerful and wealthy Muslim states that emerge after the Delhi Sultanate. So, the Delhi sultanate is very interesting, right? As I said it kind of emerges around 1200 in Delhi. And by the time you get to... There's a series of different dynasties in the Delhi Sultana as you know, you can all go read about that if you don't already know about it but by the it kind starts to fall apart in the mid 1300s, late 1300s",
      "1300s. And then of course, Tamerlane comes in the late 1300s and saxe Delhi, that's very traumatic event. But really, in a lot of ways, the scene of Muslim South Asia is already established. So the Delhi Sultanate expands significantly southward into the Deccan Plateau. When you look at sort of the Mughal conquest of India does not go that much farther beyond",
      "beyond what the Delhi Sultanate had conquered. And when Tamerlane comes and sacks Delhi, the successor states to the Delhi Sultana are really impressive states right? You have the Qutb Shahi dynasty in Golconda,",
      "The Adil Shahis in Bijapur. You have the Ahmed Nagar, you have the Bahmanis in Daulatabad and you have this rise of Gujarat especially in the 1400s. And what's interesting is although Tamerlane comes and causes political chaos and it's very traumatic in terms of the number of lives lost, the 1400 in India is actually a time of incredible cultural",
      "efflorescence. So Tamerlane's legacy is, I mean not that your history is made by people like Tamerlan alone right but if you think about the 1400s sort of the aftermath of Tamerlae it's a time of incredible productivity and growth and uh and that's really interesting right so and then when the the Mughals come to power a lot of their time through the 1600s is just spent conquering",
      "as well as of course, states like the Rajputs. So that's why I think when you look at Islam in India in the 1400s onward, you're looking at a number of really powerful rich committed Muslim States that are very interested in patronizing Muslim scholarship and you can see just the extent to which places like Daulatabad under the Bahmanis or Bijapur or Ahmed Nagar",
      "Ahmed Nagar or Golconda in the 1400s, just creating madrasas. Every time a big scholar comes let's build this guy a madrassa, right? After Tamerlane invasion, Jaunpur becomes a really important center in what now I think it would be Bihar if I'm not mistaken, correct me if I am wrong. Jaunpour becomes a major center- Eastern Europe. Oh, Eastern Europe, okay thanks.",
      "So a lot of scholars who flee Delhi when Tamerlane invades go to Jaunpur, where they are received under the Sharqi dynasty supported given medrases built for them. I mean, I'll say this it's not unique in Islamic history by any stretch but Muslim rulers in India really honored their ulama They really honored them and they patronize them and he supported them. And so you have immense...",
      "of law and but, of course they love Sufism you know. They love Sufiism and you all know this right so you know the extent to which they honored and followed Sufi saints. So you had whereas in a place like West Africa, you have I think a couple of centers that are very wealthy like Timbuktu or Gao. In South Asia, you'll have you know half a dozen maybe a dozen such places",
      "such places that are just poor. And this is another thing which you realize, is the extent to which South Asia was the land of... How do I say this? It was like a land of milk and honey or something. It was a land, it was like El Dorado. It's from Muslim scholars, if you see this in the 1400s and 1500s,",
      "as a Muslim scholar. And what you start seeing is, especially in the 1400s, scholars from Baghdad, from Aleppo, from Cairo, from the Hejaz, from Yemen, moving to India, to places like Gujarat, toplaces like Dalai Lama, to place like John poor too and becoming extremely wealthy and kind of secure. I mean this is where they go to get their tenure track job",
      "And so you can see in the kind of the streams of influence on Indian Islam, there is Yemen and Hejaz to Gujarat. Especially after the Safavids conquer Iran after 1501, there's an exodus because the Safaids forcibly convert Iran to Shiism. And so a lot of Sunni ulama flee Safavid",
      "flee staffed lands some of them go through central asia samarkand bukhara right harat into india some of the come to the persian gulf to gujarat and there's a huge influx so you have the legacy of mamluk scholarship mamluk era scholarship from egypt in the hejaz going to gujrat you have",
      "Georgiani, Sadriddin of Teftizani in the late 1300s coming their students are coming into India through Central Asia right down to the south and so you have kind of Hanafism Hanafi school of law Maturidi and Ashri school of theology coming from the north. You have Shafi school of Law coming from The kind of Indian Ocean direction And finding homes in all these new Muslim states which is I think and you can see like as you go through",
      "go through the, as you read through the Nuzhat al-Khawater, you see the names change of where scholars go. Where are the scholarly centers? You know, of course Delhi is important then Jaunpur becomes really important in the 1400s. Daulatabad and Malwa under the Bahmanis, Bijapur, Ahmednagar, Gujarat a place called Sambal especially during the Mughal period. The areas around Delhi become very important I think it's called the Dawab how do",
      "How do you say this in Urdu? Anybody know it? Yes,. So places like Bilgram, Sambal later. Western UP. Yeah exactly. Then later Kandla, Deoban right so these places become very important as Delhi becomes a center of power",
      "of power, right? Okay. Now, all right. Yeah, I think I covered this. Okay and what's also very interesting is you see from the 1400s onward a really extensive and strong connection of Indian ulema and the Hejaz. Of course that this is partially through doing the Hajj, right so they",
      "It's not like Indian ulema are the only Muslims in the world to do Hajj. Of course, a lot of people do Hajji but they seem to do it in a larger number and I think it was arguably easier to do this is just my theory off top of my head because you basically go to Gujarat and then you get on a boat and you go to Mecca. And that trade route as was mentioned in the introduction",
      "the time of Christ. I mean, you're talking about that kind of a Hellenistic period when Greek navigators figure out that they can just go straight across. They don't have to go along the land. They can just goes straight across from the Bab al-Mandab and end up in India. And they could use the monsoon winds to do this. So this is our well traveled route. And what you see is that in a lot of ways, the Hejaz becomes in some ways a location of Indian Muslim scholarship",
      "muslim scholarship in the 1400s you have figures like uh muhammad bin ahmed nahwali from i guess the place is nahuala in gujarat does anyone know that place yeah he dies in about about 1600 of the common era maybe 1590 of the comment of 59 coming here so he and his father both go to the hijaz and they become such establishments",
      "There's actually to this day, one of the doors I think of the mosque in Mecca is actually called the Bab of Nahawala if i'm not mistaken. But I have to check that out so I just need to check it. Ibn Hajar Haithami who was a huge Shafi scholar originally from Egypt he settles in Meccan, huge influential Shafii scholar in Egypt he dies about 1567 the common era. His job his salary is paid",
      "in a madrasa that is founded and funded by Sultan Mahmoud of Gujarat. There's this symbiotic relationship between the Hejaz, especially the Gujarats but not just Gujarati. Indian scholars from throughout India will travel there. And what was really interesting is from the 1400s 1500s onward, this constant pattern of Muslim of Indian scholars",
      "scholars going and studying in the Hejaz. And what's interesting, I think this certainly explains their expertise in hadith is that they bring the intensive tradition of hadith scholarship from the Hejazz to India in the 1500s but really especially in the 1600s with Abdul Haq al-Dihlawi and then in the 1700s with Shah Wali Allah and his tradition right? So if India becomes",
      "the place where hadith are studied in essence after the 1700s because of this, it kind of inherits this strong maybe... I don't know. No one really has ever explained how this happened but somehow hijaz in 1500 becomes this dynamic place for the study of hadith. All right and by the way what's really interesting",
      "I think I talked about this already. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, I just want to make sure I'm not missing anything. Okay, so what's really interesting is not just the way in which India kind of is heir to this Hejaz-y study of Hadith but also has this element of revival and reform even from an early period. Now, in terms of history of Islamic thought",
      "thought people usually use the term revival and reform for the 1700s so the movements like sha wali allah in india sanani in yemen sakoto caliphate in what's now northern nigeria uh the wahhabi movement in central arabia so these movements in the 1700 are talked about as a period of revival and",
      "in India actually before, even in the 1500s. Even in the 15 hundreds which is very interesting and it clearly comes from the Hejaz. It clearly comes to the Hejazz just to give you an example. And I think he's also a great example because you can kind of just like people talk about kind of like team Aurangzeb or team Dara Shakur like which side are you on? You can see those two sort of teams back into the 1500 already right?",
      "sort of team, let's just call it maybe a more accretionist or more interested in affirming dialogue with Indian tradition versus a more orthodox stringent approach to Islamic law and practice. You can see this in the 1500s. One of my students is doing",
      "is doing his paper on this and I hope he publishes it. There's a figure called the Abdel Nabi al-Gongohi who is essentially contemporary with Akbar because he's Akbar's tutor, and then he serves as the Sadr like the main kind of Shaykh Islam in the local court for many years until eventually he falls out of favor with Akbar and he is exiled but what's very interesting about",
      "about Abdel Nabi al-Gungohi is he wrote a book called Sunnah Al-Huda Fi Mutabiatal Mustafa. So the sunna of guidance in following the chosen one, the Prophet Muhammad. And he wrote it in Arabic and I don't think it's been published but we found a manuscript of it. It's a very interesting book. It essentially a book of the fiqh of ibadah of different worship fasting praying Hajj things like that",
      "praying, Hajj, things like that. And that's done with reference to Hadith. Now that's not unusual. This is not, he's not the first person to do this but what's really interesting is the way that he talks about the Hijaz in his understanding of Islam and repeatedly in the book, he criticizes various practices in India that he sees as bid'ah, as unacceptable heresy",
      "acceptable heresy. And his reference for that is the practice of the Hijaz and the scholars of the hijaz. So it's really interesting that he's, so one thing he talks about, he says that, for example let's say that the khateeb leaning on a cane, on a wooden cane is, it's sunnah and how do we know this? This is the practise of the ulama of the Haramain of Mecca Medina",
      "he says the two rakahs and you all can tell me if this is actually something that's done in india i don't know uh two rakas prayed at night where you read ayat al-kursi does anyone do this then we never heard of this okay maybe the nevi got his way here he says this has no basis in any hadith from the prophet and the arabs don't do it so i know",
      "He's saying basically the Arabs are, should be our reference point. He says Juma is fard and again maybe someone can tell me about this I should probably have looked this up before I talked to you but there's a debate about whether or not especially in the Hanafi school whether or",
      "there's some debate about whether it can happen with like a non unjust leader or kind of a non-legitimate Muslim ruler. He says Jummah is far, this requirement until the day of judgment and doesn't matter if the ruler is just or not just and way we know this, the way we notice that the ulama of the Haramain they do not pray Dhuhr on Friday right? They pray Jumma and that's it. They don't pray Juma and then pray Duhur in case that Jumaa wasn't valid",
      "And then this is really interesting. He says, any practice that's allowed to its mubah it's allowed but did you have the kind of ignorant people they start to think that it's required or it's part of a sunnah it becomes prohibited and by the way, this is a kind of foreshadowing the debate over the maulid",
      "over the Mawla, where the Deobandi say there's nothing wrong with honoring the prophet of course and his birthday. But if people start getting to the point where they think this is something you have to do, this as part of Islamic practice then you ban it because you don't want people to get that this is this sort of slippery slope into altering what is actually required versus not required. Versus the Barelvis who say look, if there's anything wrong with doing it and if it's a good thing to do then people should do it",
      "people should do it. But you see here with Abdu'l-Nabi Gungohi in the 1500s, already this idea of we need to... This thing is because... The fact that people start thinking it's required or good or part of their sona, that is a reason to prohibit it. All right. And I could go into other examples but I won't of figures in the 15 hundreds and 1600s in India who start to do things like",
      "one figure, Allahumma salli wa ta'ala Muhammad is Abdus Salam al-Diwi in the 1600s who would break with the main ruling of the Hanafi school if he felt that that ruling did not follow the usool of the Hanafi school. So this is interesting. He's getting to the point of being what's called a mujtahid in the Madhhab. He doesn't go by what the kind of established rule of the Madhhab is. If he feels like that rule is not true to the Madhdhab's own",
      "Madhhab's own principle. Then in the next century, the 1700s of course you get figures like Shah Wali Allah Dehlawi and others who are willing to even break with go outside the Hanafi madhab break with every madhab and consider themselves to be mujtahids who can move between madhhabs based on following hadiths okay I don't know how much longer i'm supposed to talk for I forgot",
      "Well, you can continue for another 10 minutes. Okay. Now it's interesting to compare that sort of we'll call it more... It's not just orthodox right? Because being a Hanafi someone like Abdul Haqq al-Dahlawi in the 1600s he says very clearly in some of his books",
      "books you know you follow the medheb you follow one of the four medhebs and that's what you do. You don't question that, this is how to be a rightly guided Muslim right? There's nothing wrong with just being a regular good old-fashioned Hanafi, Maturidi, Naqshbandi Sufis or something like that. That's perfectly fine but someone like Adin Nabi Gengohi",
      "even pushing further than that. It's saying that, you know, we need to always be examining our practice and comparing it to the sunnah of the Prophet. For him, that's best understood through the practice of the ulama of Mecca and Medina. Now on the other hand, you have this more... I don't want to call it syncretic right because i don't think that someone like Dara Shukoh or",
      "or Chishti Sufi scholars in India are somehow heretical. I don't think that they don't care about Islam, or that they are interested in some kind of hybrid watered down version of Islam that's mixed with Hinduism. Or it's you know, I think that there very committed Muslims but they're really interested and they're willing to think about elements of the Indian religious traditions that are aiming at the same",
      "the same point or aiming at the same objective as uh the mystical traditions of islam and this is why when people talk about you know da shako has you know or as appears like um mirza mazhar jana jinan and people like that in delhi in the 1700s that they're somehow um you know accept indian religion or except hinduism i think that's inaccurate",
      "They accept the monotheistic mystical strain that talks about seeking union with the divine and the one. Right? That they see that as the same conversation that Muslims, that the Sufi tradition in Islam has especially the kind of Ibn Arabi tradition but that doesn't mean that they think that it's makes perfect sense to worship an idol or a god",
      "worship an idol or to have a temple that has statues of this, that and the other. It's not about affirming Hinduism as a family of religions. It is about them being interested in specific strain within Hinduism, monotheistic element, non-dualistic monotheism. I think Aditya Vedanta is the term in Hindu tradition. You see this with",
      "with figures like Dar al-Shukoh when he commissions something called Multaqal Abhur, the meeting of the seas, the confluence of the Seas where he looks at the Hindu mystic tradition, monotheistic mystic and Islamic mystical traditions and shows comparison and similarities in their concepts and vocabulary. And then with his Sira Al Asrar or Secrets of Secrets which is a translation and commentary",
      "commentary on the Upanishads, which is very interesting. One scholar... I recommend reading a book on this. It's called The Emperor Who Never Was by Supriya Gandhi. It was a good book and it's very readable and informative about Darsukul. And she talks about in some ways this... The Siddharth Swar is like a commentary on",
      "from the perspective of the Upanishads or a commentary on the Upanishad through the Quran. So it's a really interesting text, but again this is not... The Upanishad are not representative of the entirety of Indian religious tradition right? It's very specific element of it or extreme strain of it. But what I found really interesting as a way that some Muslim scholars",
      "tradition, try to reconcile the kind of Abrahamic sacred history, the Abrahamic understanding of history and creation with the Indic one. So one scholar Abdurrahman Chishti dies in 1638 he incorporates Indian sacred history into Islamic an Islamic sacred historical timeline. And what he does is through talking about sort of Indian sages",
      "sages and avatars are like prophets sent to the jinn, right? So India before was populated by humans is populated by jinn. And so a lot of the drama that takes place in kind of the Indian historical pre-time is actually a drama not with humans but with jinn and sort of prophet sent to jinn which is really interesting. So that's I think a really creative way",
      "creative way for Muslim scholars to try and reconcile different timelines or cosmological timelines, which I think was important work to do. Let me see if there's anything I'm leaving out. No, I think that's it. Yeah, I guess that's... There's so much more to talk about but those were the points",
      "were the points i had to discuss today so i'm happy to i guess you know your comments i don't know how many questions i'll be able to answer but maybe i'd love to hear your opinions well thank you very much it was very informative and very enlightening uh unfortunately we don't have a big crowd so i am sure there won't be much many questions but uh",
      "moderate the... Rafa Dwey is still here. Oh, I think he just left. No, he's going to leave soon. Yeah, he told me so you just entertain the questions. I'm sure... I have a question. Yes. Go ahead. Actually before that I would like to mention just a few things. So Shibli Nomani, you know the great scholar and",
      "and he has written so much on different aspects of Islamic thought. And also a very distinguished professor from Aligan Muslim University, Professor Abdulaziz Maimani who was the father of my dear friend Muhammad Umar Maiman most of many",
      "Most of many of you are familiar with him. So I thought that I should mention these two names and also there was during the British period some Muslim scholars preferred not to live in India so they migrated to Makkah especially and Abul Kalam Azad's father was one of them,",
      "So that's why Abu al-Kalam Azad was born in Makkah and Haji Imdadullah of the Deoband school. And so I think very fascinating, extremely fascinating lecture and the breadth of his professor Jonathan Browne's knowledge was amazing. And to know all these things dates and all that.",
      "and we have so many things in common, and we can maybe meet sometime since I live here. I would love to. Right? So thank you. Okay, thank you Mazenbhai. Those who want to ask questions they can either put their name in the chat box or raise your digital hand. I see Haris Azmi already has asked for it, so Haris go ahead ask a question please. Well thank you so much,",
      "very informative and very extensive, Kharija. And it's you know, very, very enlightening. My question is very specific and I just wanted to know what can you share about the Emperor Aurangzeb? Because he's one of those characters that is very much vilified in modern Indian history. And anything that you can share that throws light on his character or personality would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.",
      "I really recommend reading the relatively new book on him by Audrey Truschke. Her last name is kind of hard to spell, I think it's T-R-U-S-C-H-K-E. It's called Aurangzeb. It''s a very good book and it's relatively short and accessible. And I think that you know... The way in which South Asian history",
      "has been politicized is very unfortunate because it's just designed to, it's sort of self-defeating and it's designed to make kind of a healthy view of the world around you impossible in a lot of ways. I think going back to the British or the British in order to kind of justify their presence they portrayed,",
      "So Indian history is basically this kind of ancient India was this land of wisdom on the sort of Sanskritic wisdom. And then there's sort of the dark ages of Muslim rule, and now we British are here to return you to enlightenment and things like that. So the British had a vested interest in portraying the period of Persianate age that Richard Eaton talks about as being one of darkness and violence intolerance",
      "tolerance. But of course, it was really under the British that these lines, communal lines are solidified even in the 19th and 20th century and exploited as a divide-and-conquer method. So in that narrative",
      "narrative, Aurangzeb is the sort of... He screws up because he's too Muslim. The way that you are successful in India is when you're not really Muslim. So in order to be successful and Muslim in India, you have to be not really more Muslim. That's kind of the message that the Aurangazeb lesson is supposed to give in a modern Indian narrative. And if you take it into BJP Indian nationalist",
      "Another one of the worst, these horrible Muslim rulers who destroy temples and treat Hindus badly, et cetera. But that's just not an accurate understanding of Aurangzeb. Aurangazeb was a Indian ruler. So he's Muslim but he's Indian right? So he has some temples destroyed, he builds some temples. He takes away land from some temples, he endows some temples and Richard Eaton has talked about this extensively as so does Audrey Truchk which is that Muslim rulers",
      "rulers in Indian history, doing things like destroying temples or supporting them was political. Were political actions. If someone's your friend you support their temple. If somebody is your enemy you destroy their temple it doesn't matter if they're Hindu or Muslim right? Then the issue of to what extent did he kind of turn away from the tolerant legacy of Akbar and Shah Jahan",
      "and Shah Jahan. I don't think that's really, during the time of Aurangzeb he spent most of his career campaigning in the Deccan trying to expand mobile rule. And arguably his biggest mistake was doing that and not kind of tending to the core areas",
      "sure that his sons were going to be effective rulers after him. But by his time, a lot of the things like the burgeoning Maratha power, these groups had already started to rebel against the Mughals. So there wasn't he imposed the jizya and stuff. Yeah maybe that was a bad decision but from I think in his calculation this",
      "make some people happy and the people that was going to upset were already upset at him. So he didn't really, I think it was sort of maybe it was a bad decision but i don't think it kind of one that was made out of irrational fanaticism. I think this is a calculation and this is the same kind of decision that any ruler in South Asia would be presented with and he was acting like a south Asian ruler and Richard Eaton talks about this in his book",
      "his book in India and the Persian age was a great example. He goes back to the, to the ten hundreds and he shows how differently Indian we think historically about say Mahmood Ghazna's invasion of India versus invasions of some parts of the Deccan into other parts like around kind of Bengal right?",
      "So why is it that one of them is from the outside and one of those inside? It only makes sense if you already have this idea that there's a historical thing called India, that has boundaries and borders. But the fact of the matter is people are fighting against each other and conquering each other into destroying this and supporting that. And it's only if we decide that being Muslim or not make somebody Indian or not, that those lines start taking shape around what is India, what isn't.",
      "So I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. And these histories of Orings, and it's shocking. Sorry, I'm taking a long time to answer this question. Yeah, can you answer please? Yeah, we just say it's shocked when you look at the...I can't believe some of the stuff I read by Indian scholars like Hindu-Indian scholars on Middle East, the history of the middle ages India. The stuff they write is",
      "If I wrote that about anybody, I would be fired. It would be so horrifically intolerant the way they talk. Things like it's not conceivable that anybody would actually convert to Islam out of free will. I've literally seen that written in academic publications by Indian scholars. Who is intolerant here? I don't know what to say except that that way of telling history is backwards.",
      "I would never accept it. Thank you. Sayyed Hussain, you're next. You mentioned the Hejaz as the center of learning a lot. What about Jamia al-Hassan? That has any influence on Indian scholars? And the second question is another Alim al Ghazali also is verified.",
      "he's, you know, asharī. His work had already been superseded by other later scholars. As a Sufi, you probably his most influential book is the Ihya al-Umaddin which does get discussed and I remember there's one scholar who brings a copy of it, I think even in like part of it's in Ghazali's own hand to India in the 1500s and that's really treasured but",
      "I'd say if you look in terms of India and the 1400s, 1600s, 1700s, the scholars from the Sufi tradition who are really paid attention to a lot more. Suhruwardi, he died I think 1245 in Iraq. Rumi especially in the 1600s and 1700s Muslim scholars love writing commentaries on Rumi, Masnavi. Of course, Ibn Arabi is very influential.",
      "So, because Ali it's not that he is not important. It's just that in a lot of ways his work had been superseded by people like Ibn Arabi and Rumi and later figures. All right thank you. There was a question from Sayyid Hassan but i think he has left so I'm gonna skip that next one is Iram Gul. You have couple of questions you want to go ahead? And after that will be Dr Abdul Jabbar and Monoji Chatterjee.",
      "Yeah, thank you. I want to ask why scholars in India wrote commentaries of books of hadiths? Whether it was needed or some other reason was there? Professor Brown request to keep a shot please. Yeah um You know i don't know why they did i think that's that's a really good question uh because",
      "Because other people in the Muslim world didn't, from the same time did not do that. And it's not that they were any more or less Muslim. I think they just got... They really got... I don't know. I this genre of writing became really valued and important. It was their way of honoring the prophet, I think. That's one theory.",
      "one theory it's just that was their way of honoring the prophet right thank you uh abdul jabbar yes thank you a great presentation i didn't know a lot of history about islam i came from very briefly i would like to kind of you talked about everything happened in the north i come from a rural coastal part",
      "as a 100% Muslim, I always wondered about how this came about. Do you have an insight into the spread of Islamic traditions in other parts of India? Because there's something I always wonder about it. How come? Yeah, I don't know. Richard Eaton has a great book called The Rise of Islam on the Bengal Frontier which I recommend reading.",
      "I think there's a lot of different theories about why conversion to Islam happens at various points. There are some theories that lower caste people become Muslim because it's sort of a way of escaping that and entering into a more, not egalitarian but a more egalitarian community. Of course the irony is then that Muslims basically recreate the caste system internally within Islam with things like PAK and NAPAK and things like that",
      "What's very interesting is the areas where you have the most intensive conversion or comprehensive conversion to Islam in the population, in Bengal and Punjab are outside the areas of the kind of Hindu caste, sort of Brahminic tradition. So the areas that are within this sort of... Because like Hindu Brahmins in the 1500s",
      "the 1500s or something, if they would go to Bengal, they'd have to like purify themselves when they came back because this was... It's like you went outside of the borders of your world. So the places where there's the most intensive conversion to Islam are the places that were not really within the Hindu religious universe before and I wonder, I don't know the answer about whether or not there's some elements in Tamil Nadu that are similar to that but I don' t know but I would look at Richard Eaton's book on",
      "and Shivaji's son, and so on. But that was a time when India was not India. It was a series of the Mughal empire had got too big. It couldn't be controlled centrally. He spent more than half his life trying to control other parts of the country and so one. And the narrative that we see is you could explain that narrative in more than one way. And then which has now becoming the definitive nationalist narrative is this Hindu versus Muslim thing but it's actually a regional conflict",
      "the regional conflict that was taking place at the time. There were Muslims in Shivaji's armies, there were Muslims and the Guru's armies so it was not Muslim versus Sikh or Muslim versus Hindu, It was Punjabi versus the center, it was Maharashtrian versus the Center and over centralization of the country was RMZ's great failure and it paved directly paved the way for the coming of the British and in particular because the Mughal Raj had disintegrated to the point where when",
      "when the battle of Plassey took place. It was not Mir Jaffa who betrayed Siraj-ud-Dullah, it was a Mughal emperor. This was a vassal of the Mughals Emperor fighting a foreign power and the Mughal Emperor sent him no aid whatsoever and Bengal was lost. And it was the richest part of the country at that time. So it was regional conflict which has been going on for a long, long time. The one thing if anything that came good from the British rule, it is the idea that we as people had to rise together",
      "And that is indeed what happened during the Great Uprising in 1857. It was the first time that we actually rose together against it, common people not some Maharajas and Sultans or any of that, common-people ordinary soldiers of all communities rose together, against a foreign invader. Yeah I think it's you know...I'm not Indian um",
      "I know that's sort of a stupid thing to say, but I mean, I really and I don't see how anytime if you try to apply a really simplistic lens to such a complicated place. I can't see How that ends up leading into something good? I mean you have to have a view that is going to be a little bit more permissive and flexible otherwise. I just don't know how this such a deep and broad universe can be managed",
      "be managed. And, you know, I would what's really interesting is the extent to which when the Europeans first like the Portuguese first came and the British first came to India in the 1500s and stuff they encountered these some of the states on the coast they had canon making technology that was way better than the Portuguese it's really",
      "they were exceptionally good arms makers. And then even when you look at the kind of history, the British takeover from roughly 1757 to around 1800, it was a really close call. I mean if there had been one or two decisions made differently by rulers of the great states of India in the 1700s, the East India Company would have been cast",
      "company would have been cast into the sea. And that, you know, the British had really unmatched fighting skills when they came but then the different Indian states learned these from their French advisors and they were as... They really gave the British army run for its money over and over again. And it was like a close call. You know one or two things had happened differently and it would be in very different history. So I think even this... Yeah sorry?",
      "but at no stage during that time between 1757 and 1800 did the various Indian rulers, bless them rise together. So the British were able to fight in Bengal separately then they took Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan separately. At no point do these people communicate the first time we did that and we almost won in 1857. That was a very close call indeed and could have gone either way. But that was the first-time we had something called a sense of a nation.",
      "Yeah, I think that's totally correct. If they had just been one or two slight differences in who was aligned with who in the 1770s or 1880s it would have been game over for the British and South Asia. Right. Thank you. That was the last question. Razibai, back to you. Well so I guess everybody is happy now with the questions and responses.",
      "Well, we don't have that many questions. So can you show me the next slide? Okay. So thank you very much, Professor Jonathan Brown. It is really very informative and very enlightening lecture. And I hope that most of our audience has learned a lot coming lecture",
      "is from Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. And though we stand with this but I'm not so sure about the speaker's health last night he called me that he is having high fever and with the corona epidemic there i just wish him well and hope that he recovers and he doesn't have it so he will be the next speaker uh but in case",
      "have some emergency speaker coming to our coming Saturday."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Sunnah of Allah_2HoxsinG1vo&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748652954.opus",
    "text": [
      "There's a belief that creation is fundamentally flawed, it's corrupted. And then we're confronted with that corruption, we're confronts with that injustice and the fact of that corruption and that injustice creates barriers to believing in God because why would God allow this to happen? Now from the perspective of Muslim, this is not a mystery at all. People die.",
      "Noble people die horrible deaths. Noble people died stupid deaths. Their bookcases fall over on them, they get run over by a donkey cart. People you love die and they take from you for no reason that you can see. Little children die. They die in horrible ways. They dying bomb attacks. They died drowning. We lose the people we love.",
      "This is Sunnah of Allah for life. This is the sunna of God in the world.",
      "So, you can get upset at God. You can say what kind of God would do this. You could say you hate God. But you were never deceived. God has made His sunnah very clear to us in this world. You get diseases. You lose stability and use parts of your body. Eventually your mind becomes weak if you're blessed enough to live a long life. Otherwise you may die young.",
      "The good die, evil people see the triumph. It's like Game of Thrones. This is Sunnah Allah-ul-A'la. No one has ever said anything other than this. Where have you ever seen any evidence other than that? If you've seen evidence other then that, you saw it in a storybook or a movie or something like that. That's not reality. That was the reality of Sunnah-ul Al-Ala. And as Muslims we accept that.",
      "We accept that. This is not a crisis. This isn't a broken world. This the world that God created. This world was a blessing, a ni'mah. It's the rahmah from God. The very fact that we exist, that we ever have a moment of consciousness, that's the Rahmah form God. That people we love, them being around us before they're taken from us, that is a gift from God, that He never had to give. He gave out His mercy and generosity.",
      "1. These things get taken away. This is the beauty of life, it gets taken away from us. And its wrong to be unduly attached to these things because if you do, you are ignoring the Sunnah of Allah in this world. Why is not a problem for Muslims? Because if we see in front of us a side of scale that seems way down so much",
      "whose good is rewarded, or is met with harm and pain in this world. That person will be doubly rewarded in the afterlife because they didn't receive a reward for their good deeds in this life. So the aftera is the other side of that scale where things balance out. And we know from the Quran that",
      "wrong his servants in any way. In one hadith, the Prophet, in a certain lesson of the Prophet says, La yathnahu allaha allah min khakir ala God does not wrong anyone from His creation. This is a principle, an absolute principle. So you have questions, you know, my neighbor, he doesn't seem to be religious but he's",
      "What's going to happen to him after he dies? You don't have to worry. God does not wrong anybody. Everybody will receive what they deserve in the afterlife. You do not have to be worried about that, ever. Someone come in and say well what about this situation? There is no question, there are debates. God will not wrong anyone. It doesn't matter what permutation of reward you have to come up with He will not want anybody. This is a fact in our religion.",
      "I remember when I was in Egypt, soon after I became Muslim. And there was a man who was telling this story about these Sahaba, his companions of the Prophet, who died on a plague. Who died on the plague, Ta'umun. It came during the time of the prophet or during the times of the Companions. I remember thinking it seems so weird. These people are such important people they're part of this great drama",
      "You know, in a drama people don't just die of the plague. You don't have someone who's a great warrior and a great pious figure and a pillar of your Muslim community and a...pillar of the religion itself and then they just die out of plague. It doesn't make any sense. Doesn't make sense if you're reading a story but it makes sense because that's the sunnah of Allah in this world. And I was very interested in that moment. I was like, the khatib didn't have any problem telling his story and the other people around me did it bad on my level.",
      "It was only me who was concerned. I realized that because of my cultural background, going to the United States where you're constantly taught this world is a broken world and this is basically something crucial in Christianity which is why does Jesus have to come and redeem people's sins? Because he has to... He is the other side of the scale. In this world his blood comes and cleans the world of its filth. It prepares for corruption.",
      "Muslims, there is no corruption in this world. There is nothing wrong with it. This is the Sunnah of God. And if you see something that seems unfair, that seems unjust done by God in this role, it's because the counterweight is in the afterlife. The counterweight isn't after life. I always think it's very interesting when we look at books on Christian theology, there's a huge discussion about why bad things happen to good people?",
      "How do we explain the existence of evil in this world? How to explain the existance of injustice? If you go to the bookstore, you'll find lots and lots of books about this. Coping with laws, why bad things happen to good people. In Muslim books of theology there's like two lines. Actually one of the lines we heard today is very... God does not ask about what he does. You should not ask God why he has this.",
      "Al-Dhun mustahilun fi haqqi Allahi sa'ala",
      "The answer is yes, by definition. It is impossible that it's not fair. God does not get asked. People get asked about what they do. And then oftentimes in books of Muslim theology there'll just be that ayah and then there'll be verses of poetry, beautiful verses of written by a Muslim scholar in the 1200s who heard about the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258. How many Muslim scholars died? If you look at biographical exchanges of Muslim scholars",
      "some scholars there's always people like 656 66.66 that's 12 for the eight common era why is everyone telling me they all died in the seizure in the south of baghdad so many great scholars so many books destroyed so many buildings destroyed so much alien lost what did this scholar write and his poetry said",
      "He says, don't leave aside any objections. This is not for you to object. Nor do you have the ability to command the movements of the heavenly bodies.",
      "God about what he does. For the person who seeks to wade into the depths of the ocean will perish. Leave aside objection, it's not for you to object. Nor is it just like we don't have the ability to command that in your bodies. Don't ask God why he does what he",
      "in a Muslim discussion about why bad things happen to good people, why great cities are destroyed and illness lost. Because it is impossible for God to be unjust. And this world isn't an ordered and just place under his command. Things that seem unjust will find their reward in half-life. Is that okay?"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Talking with Teachers Podc_mlJfuF2RZGY&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748664540.opus",
    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh.",
      "We want to start by speaking a little bit about his bio, and then we'll bring him up to the screen. As many of us know, Dr. Jonathan Brown is the Al-Waleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He received his BA in History from Georgetown University in 2000, and his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2006.",
      "in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, et cetera. You know there are many different places well traveled individual. He has many book publications some of them are very central to my own teaching and he has multiple published articles in areas or fields including Hadith science Islamic law, Salafism, Sufism Arabic lexical theory",
      "lexical theory, pre-Islamic poetry among other things. So Dr. Jonathan Brown is an important scholar in the English language and the English speaking societies and we like to welcome him on right now. So, Dr. Jonathon Brown, salam aleikum wa rahmatullah really nice to have you with us today. Wa alaikumsalam wa rahmato Allahi wa barakatuhu thanks for inviting me.",
      "Alhamdulillah, of course it's a pleasure and an honor to have you. As I stated personally that I utilize multiple works of yours in a number of my classes that teaches at Tuna but before talking about that actually wanted to speak a little bit about yourself. You know I think that most of us know you as an academic,",
      "your sort of journey overall. So who is Jonathan Brown? Who is Jonathan brown? I mean, you're such a fitna. I mean inviting someone to talk about yourself tell us who you are. I guess you asked me... I'm just answering the question. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Rahim.",
      "I'm a Muslim. I'm, uh, scholar. Um, although you know it's really interesting when you were talking, I was like thinking about this and I was trying to talk about this maybe it's like a distraction but i think it's actually maybe more core than I thought. I mean a lot of times I, you know, there are these people do these online criticisms of people and some of those people who are criticized are me and sometimes they'll be like John",
      "Jonathan Brown called himself a Muslim scholar, but he only studied for like a year in Egypt and stuff like that. And I was like, yeah, you mean that's... I'm completely unqualified to be a faqih. I'm totally unqualified. I have a jaza to teach a few books, a few small books. So I don't really",
      "really like i don't understand to be like oh how can he be muslims go i've never i've ever claimed that uh i would never it would be it would an idiotic claim and it would been absurd claim right um i'm a scholar in the sense that i am someone who studies the world or studies history and studies the word around me etc etc but my training is primarily",
      "Islamic traditional sciences to know how to make my way around when I need help, when I don't understand something. So when you say who am I? When I say I'm a scholar, I don t mean I m like an alim. I mean that I m someone who seeks knowledge and who tries to answer questions and in doing so help myself and others to understand.",
      "You're definitely a scholar. I mean, there's no doubt about that from anyone who actually reads any of the books that you publish. The issue of what you are not is not really what I'm concerned with. I'm like, okay, family background, how did you come to be what you",
      "you know what put you on the path of uh the academy? You know it was just like a spur-of-the moment idea. Was this something that you were sort of being grown to do by your parents or others around you those are the sort of things I'm concerned with, you know of course there's always going to be criticisms or those who critique us about certain things and say you're not this you're",
      "But on another sense, I think the attitude, the appropriate attitude to have is that it comes with the territory. Once you start to put your ideas out front and center, then you have to expect that they're going to be those who don't like some of your opinions and ideas. So really again, I",
      "contributed a great amount of important insights to the Muslim community, and to the world even I would say because some of your books not all of them are translated into more than one language. So yeah it's more about what is your family like? Who are your parents? I'm also not an Olympic gymnast. There's a lot of things I'm not you're right it'd be kind",
      "to talk about stuff I'm not. I'm a professional fencer, for example. So you know what I'm saying? I like your comedy, your jokes because even in your bio, the bio mentioned on Georgetown that you appeared on ESPN but you've never watched it. Yeah, I am a funny guy. That I will say. I am definitely a very funny guy and I would love to hang out with myself.",
      "with myself. That would be really wonderful. It's funny, I'll tell you this question. My parents, my mom, my mother died in 2010. My father died 2016. I don't have any cousins. One of my aunts I was really close to died in I think 2016 as well. And my sisters, they",
      "you know, they live with their families. They live far away and they have their own lives and stuff. One thing I think is I've reflected on is that, you know I don't see like a lot of my friends from my early life that they've all moved away. And ironically, I live in kind of Washington DC area which is where I grew up but I'm maybe the only person of my friend's that grew up here that is still here.",
      "So the point of what I'm trying to make is that it's very hard for me to remember my life. I don't know if anyone else has this problem, but when you don't have people to remind you of things like, oh, I remember the time when you did this or I remember a time when mom did that. We don't really talk about that with. Things just sort of just like my memory, it just vanishes. It's like there's nothing that I can't. I actually can't remember what like a day was like in my childhood. You know,",
      "I just have flashbacks. So what did your parents do? Were they both professors? Yeah, so the irony is although I'm saying this right my obviously my parents had a huge impact on me and you know I loved my parents very much and they were... especially my mother had a really big impact on",
      "sort of just this leftover of kind of mid-1990s America before I was Muslim. But anyway, yeah, so my family, my parents were... My mother grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. Her father was a professor at Yale. He was a Professor of Chemistry, Physical Chemistry. So he had PhD in physics and chemistry. And her mother,",
      "my grandmother was a historian of science. She taught at Albertus Magnus College, which is I think it was an all girls college, I think in New Haven because Yale was not co-ed until 1977. And she had her PhD from Oxford. She did a PhD in history of science and she wrote a couple of books on British science in the 1700s, 1800s. One book on Mary Somerville who's a famous female",
      "female scientists in that period. And then, yeah, so my mom, my dad grew up in basically Oneonta, New York, which is apparently an upstate New York. I've never been there. But his father was a as I discovered after my dad died and found this material,",
      "Orthodox Jewish. And his parents were Lithuanian immigrants, Lithuanians and Jewish immigrants who came to and settled eventually in Northern Ohio a place called Warren, Ohio. And my great grandfather was actually the head of the synagogue there apparently. I've never been to Warren, Ohio. Actually, I have been to warren ohio randomly one time on the way to Chicago. I stopped to go to the bathroom there. But anyway",
      "But anyway, he and his siblings, his brother, my great uncle was actually a very famous war correspondent named Cecil Brown. He actually has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. You can go and see it. Yeah, Cecil brown. And they all changed their name.",
      "their religion completely. And my grandfather, my father's father married my grandmother who was from this very snooty patrician English family, WASP family in Ohio. Actually that her family, her father's family had founded Cleveland, Ohio. So she was a descendant of Moses Cleveland, the founder of Cleveland, but they were quite wealthy. But during the Great Depression,",
      "Not because of the depression, because they got swindled out of it by their accountant or something. But my grandmother, I remember when she was very old, I mean, she would talk about this, but when she got really old and had strokes and stuff and would sometimes have... She would think she was back in like the 30s or the 40s, which is actually really interesting because she would tell me go to this store in New York and here's a nickel",
      "machine and get me this sandwich from the machine like it was it was really interesting from a historian's perspective to hear her basically go back and like reliving these moments but one of the things she would do is she would start to cry because she remembers her mother had polio she couldn't walk her brother had curvature of the spine and so he was never really a healthy person and he died in his 30s and uh but she would remember that time when they went",
      "to when she had to go out and work in a library to make money, to support her mom and her brother. And she would try when she ever had these memories. So she ended up getting married very late because of that. Um, and my grandfather, my dad's dad, they're both from Warren and Ashtabula Ohio, and he really loved her and he kept pursuing her. And finally she agreed. And then, uh, my",
      "He eventually became an owner of lots of newspapers and radio stations through the Northeast, and was a very successful businessman. And so then my father went to this boarding school place called Kent which is oddly where Sheikh Hamza Yusuf's dad taught. So if my dad were alive I could ask him if he had had Hamza Yousef's dad as his teacher.",
      "But I don't know. Obviously, he's not alive anymore. So I can't... So you found out that information after he passed away? Yeah, exactly. Because I was talking to Sheikh Hamza about this and he mentioned it. I was like, my God, my dad went to Kent. Then he went from Kent, he went to Yale. And then that's where he met... It's interesting. My dad, it was... I never talked to him about this.",
      "I don't know if he even was conscious of it, but my dad's mother was very, very, Very snooty. I mean in one way she was extremely snooty But in one ways she was a very open-minded for example, she never batted an eyelid that I became Muslim So she wasn't kind of closed minded and traditional in that sense But she was very conscious of her background of her like Nassab you know that she had this illustrious ancestry",
      "talked was like this mid-atlantic you sounded like you're watching a 1940s movie where they're in some high society party and someone's like, oh would you like some champagne? She would speak like that even when she was old. But she married this guy who had basically abandoned his background but he was still Jew so her marriage is sort of controversial",
      "Her dad, Oren Cleveland was basically kind of a gambler waste troll who left them and went off. And just, and she didn't really have much relationship with him. And so she was like the strong person in her family. So she just did whatever she wants. She eventually married my grandfather. He had also basically been a band, Ben of didn't, I'm not denied, but Ben like kind of forsaken by his parents because his parents were really hardcore Orthodox Jews",
      "their son was like, you know, I'm not Jewish anymore. I'm doing a marrying this Christian woman. I don't know what happened, but they didn't cut, didn't have a relationship after that. So my dad, I think only once saw his dad's parents and my dad's mother's parents had died. He met his grand, his mother's father once. And, but her, her mom was like polio when she died relatively young as well. So",
      "white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. And in some ways I think it was like a compensation for his mother compensating for her loss of status and his dad trying to get as far away from his background as he could. So my dad ended up... My dad was almost the most WASPy guy I know. Actually reminds me a lot of Donald Trump not in the sense that my dad was very smart intelligent nice person",
      "nice person uh but the just like the way they they kind of naturally assume the world just rotates around them like their like everything in the world has to kind of make sense to them or it's just or it just kind of not worth considering so my dad went to is this like boring should i be talking about this no okay so then um",
      "Yale. And there he met my mother who was back like with her dad, you know, in vacations and stuff. And my mom, Mashallah, was very, very attractive. I mean, objectively speaking, obviously I'm not, you So she, she was like, he really liked her a lot. He pursued her for a while. Eventually she agreed to marry him and they got married in 1968 that he graduated.",
      "They both graduated from college in 1966. And then my, I went into so much detail. This is crazy. So then, okay, so my mother, okay. So that's when my dad, he was really active against the Vietnam War in college and he was also very active against segregation. So in the summers in college, he would go to St. Augustine Florida and do things like register black voters",
      "And he would stay in these like black neighborhoods in St. Augustine and other cities, and with like, and he would do like this voter registration I'm not sure what they what he was doing but that's what he did.",
      "that got published. But then some of those articles actually got entered into the congressional record, the U.S. congressional record. So you can... In fact, one of the epigraphs at the beginning of one of my books, I think it was a slavery book, I actually have a quote there. Yeah, so there's... It's really interesting. He was kind of a... It was not like he was too young to...",
      "It was too early for him to be a hippie, but he was really into kind of social activism. And then he went to – he wanted to be journalist, so he got a master's in communications from Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania.",
      "when he got married to my mom in 1968. And my mom very nicely went with him, they got sent to Chad. So Chad like today is probably pretty rough place. Chad in the 1960s was like super rough I mean they were living out in the middle of nowhere teaching English and like teaching people how to chicken farm They were chicken farmers and then they came back. I think that's when he went to Annenberg School for Communications but at",
      "By that time, the Vietnam War was over. And then he I don't know why he did this, but then he went to Harvard Business School and then he worked for the World Bank. And it's interesting because like everyone when I lived in Egypt and it was like around 2000 2001, I were talking my dad on the phone saying, you know, I see so much poverty here around me. Like, I don' t know how to deal with it. Like a really upsetting. I don´t know what to do. Like I don ´t know how",
      "it and i said how did you deal with it and he said that's why i worked at the world bank i mean it was interesting because i never knew why my dad had done that but i think he was really affected by his time in chad and he really wanted to work in development work um so he went to work eventually but didn't eventually become the professor you're saying so after all this or no no this is my my dad was not a professor my dad works whole career at the royal bank as like a manager and like division chief and these things like that",
      "that um yeah so that's why but it's funny because my dad like i mean although he was working in development world bank people especially back then you got paid a lot of money uh so uh he worked there his whole career and that's where we lived in washington dc because he was based at the royal bank here in washina dc and then um although we he got sent to senegal one of his first jobs he made the first resident representative",
      "And so we went to live for the first part of my life. We lived in San Diego and then we came back to, uh, to, Washington DC. So, um, yeah, my dad was, it's interesting cause he was, um... He was very, very principled about certain things like he, uh what it was is absolutely unacceptable",
      "unaccepting of any racism or discrimination. And I remember because when I was getting married to my wife, her dad at the time was under house arrest and he had this big case against him by the US government accusing of being like a essentially terrorist money launderer, et cetera, et Sarah Samuel Ariane if any of you in the audience want to look it up, you can see this stuff. And so when I wanted to get married to Layla,",
      "I gotta tell my dad, you know. I gotta let him know. He needs his permission but like I mean I wanted to like let him no. I felt like should let him this was kind of... Is it causing a big problem for you? Be part of his life, you now and I told them and he said, I'll never forget he said if you don't marry her because of this, I will never talk to you again. Right so he's like if you didn't marry here because of these, I would never talk",
      "you know, the idea that you don't treat people differently because they're being persecuted by the government or something. Right? So there's that one. You mentioned earlier you mentioned that a lot of your relatives decided to abandon their religion so I'm assuming they were Jews. Oh okay, so then my dad was raised Christian by his mom. So his mom was like this very again, sort of snooty high society white Anglo-Saxon Protestant",
      "Episcopalian woman, right? And part of being a proper human being was being Episcopean and going to church and everything. So my dad went to church his whole life every Sunday. And we were raised Christian. We went to Church every Sunday, Episcopian Church, All Saints Church in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Me and my sisters, we were all acolytes so we did the little kids who carry the cross and they wear like the white robe, white top",
      "white top and there's like a red gown you can see you know it's like the imagine these british cathedral choirs and stuff exactly like that right so we would do in fact i went all the way up through the the entire course of acolyte so i would to the point when you the most senior acolytes will help the minister prepare communion and uh so uh i did that it's also how i learned that i was definitely going",
      "and like when they got we got a chance as an athlete you got the first crack at the communion line the communion goblet and i was like way i really took the biggest chugs i could have out of that thing how over here is it um probably i'm just guessing from nine to probably 15 9 to 15 or 16 yeah there are many kids nine years old drink the wine oh yeah",
      "So, I mean you get like one sip but you-you-you. I would try and take a big-big one. So then yeah so but okay so then my mom's family they came from Texas. So both of my parents are from Texas one my dad was my mom is dad is from Texarkana which is right on the Texas Arkansas border. My mom's mom was from Mahea Texas which is sort of between Dallas and Houston I think it's",
      "kind of middle of nowhere. Both places are, they both ended up at university of Austin and that's where they met and they got married. My, they, they came from very religious families, Presbyterian Texas, Presbiterian families, but they both completely rejected that they thought it was hokum. They thought it",
      "that like there would be one time, someone in their house came down and was like I saw Jesus an image of Jesus on the wall. And it was like oh praise me to Jesus! You know, I don't want to make fun of them. They're all like praise me you know whatever. And then my grandmother went and saw that it was actually a reflection of this picture in the hallway on the other wall. So that was sort of her science disproves all this stuff amendment. And so they both became scientists",
      "And so they were very anti-religion. They had very strong Texas accents, which I find funny. My father worked in Boston and California and Hawaii during World War II. He was made part of the army to develop sonar for submarines. After that he went to teach at Yale after being in Boston during the war.",
      "always very conscious of being Texan, but being in the North. They were really had very strong Texan identities. They we're always insulting the north. They where always like talking about the war of Northern aggression. They taught us that the civil war was about states rights, et cetera, et Cetera. Like they have very strict, they are very emphatic about this. Um and then uh so he they had a bunch of kids mashallah um although only my mother got married",
      "Only my mother got married. Only my mom had kids. So, my mother went to Bryn Mawr which is a girls university, all girls university in Philadelphia and her sister also went to Brin Mawar one of her sisters and they were super first wave or second wave feminists I don't know they weren't kind of radical feminists but like their mother extremely",
      "extremely upset about opportunities being offered women, being offered to men that were not offered to women. So that was something they had a major concern of theirs throughout their lives and my mother then went she went to the Peace Corps with my dad so we went to Chad, she learned French, she'd learned all these different Chadean languages, a couple of them and then she wanted to be an anthropologist because she had been at Bryn Mawr and she'd",
      "She loved studying Native Americans. She loved all this stuff, and so she went to University of Cambridge in England to do cultural anthropology, and then she wrote her dissertation on Chad because she kind of used her time there to extend it into field work. She wrote a dissertation. She one book in French. She read a couple articles, but she taught for awhile as like a visiting professor at American University here in Washington DC.",
      "And it's interesting, though, because she didn't like you know I always remember my mom not working right. She was always at home with us. She took care of us and she would one time or like once a year she would go away for like a month on some trip to do development work because she you know is interesting that I thought that she had consciously not wanted to go into academia but had wanted to do this development work. But when she died as going through all her stuff",
      "stuff and I found that she was constantly applying to jobs. But, you know, because she was based in D.C., there's only a few jobs she could get. But I think she always wanted to be a professor but because it just wasn't really an opportunity, she ended up doing development work. And in Chad, she worked in Cameroon, she did some in Yemen and she would basically advise companies on like how to... She ended up in the later part of her career making a gob",
      "she worked for ExxonMobil. And because ExxomMobil was drilling for oil and chat, they need to figure out how you... If you're buying this land, how do you compensate people properly? How do they understand land ownership? How how do give them things that's actually be useful for them that not going to be just destructive for their lives? So she worked a lot and she made like a bunch of money doing that. But that was after I had already gone off to college so it was later in her life.",
      "There's a lot of diversity there. I mean, a lot experience, a diversity even somewhat ideological and I wonder if like or imagine that some of that diversity even in your family played a role in the way did you actually write because we come talking about for instance, the real books and we actually haven't spoken about okay, even your conversion like when did you become Muslim? How did it even come about? You know but what I wanted to make was that",
      "that one thing I love about your writing is that you appeal to conservative mindset compared to progressive mindset. So, you quote from multiple sources and you actually consult multiple ideological people of different ideological backgrounds. Yeah, this I learned definitely from my mom. One of the things",
      "you know, as anthropologists like she was all about trying to understand people's perspective. So she was really and I think this for her was the kind of the biggest argument against religion quote unquote for her because it was like if you get in someone's mindset everybody's religion is true from their point of view right? So if you are able to inhabit someone else's view completely and authentically",
      "and authentically, you don't really know how to judge what's correct. So you just kind of end up being agnostic. And that was my mom's perspective. Although once or twice, she would oddly only talk about this when she was drunk, which didn't happen that often. My dad was always blotto drunk because I guess this is like what all white Anglo-Saxon prostitutes people do. But he was... My mom...",
      "during grad school talking to her and she would kind of get like a few drinks in her. And then I would start to discuss religion with her, and then she would say you know I acknowledge there's the one God, there's The Creator and Revelation. When she was not drunk, her identity as anthropologist",
      "It was like an armor around her and she would never kind of loosen that. She would never really, you couldn't really discourse with her about stuff. Okay. Yeah. So here we come, what's the win?",
      "in my family, I think. But it's weird because we would go to church but then I think because my mom was so against religion, I don't know what happened. Imagine she basically had a talk with my dad and I was basically like not in the house, right? So we would got to church and then nothing that God was not mentioned any other time. So it was like a really weird... It didn't make a lot of sense. So my sisters were just completely irreligious",
      "And I was very, I really believed in God. I didn't understand anything about Christianity. Like I went through Sunday school, I got confirmed everything like but I was just like, understanding this. I learned, I understood Christianity much better later on, like in grad school studying it as like, you know, from perspective of studying history of religions. But as a Christian, I just had, I was like, I believe in God",
      "mom and I wanted, I was worried she was going to go to hell. So I remember like one time taking the communion wafer so you could do things. You can either take a sip of the wine which of course is what I did but or you could dip the wafer in the wine. And so what I said is that I took an extra wafer and I kind of snuck it and dipped it in the",
      "which is kind of making me cry. I never thought about this, but it's a funny thing to do. Yeah, but I was reasonable, right? Yeah. I probably was like maybe 10 or something or 11 how old I was. Then I was very close to my mom and I love my parents very much. They were very good people",
      "They were really loving. They kind of showered us with love. They were very principled. My dad, I remember one time I was like... I started saying something bad about this girl in my class and he said... He's like, why would you ever want to hurt somebody? I was",
      "with somebody like this. That always sticks with me. My mother was just someone who loved learning and she taught me, I think that the thing I learned the most from her one is to really try and see things from other people's perspectives because it doesn't really... Let's say you're writing a book on asharis versus atharis or something. It doesn't... You sit there and make fun of asharies and they think this stupid thing.",
      "a stupid thing. They don't actually think that. What they think is sophisticated because nobody thinks stupid stuff to themselves, right? So... If you want to understand someone's position, if you want argue against it, you have to understand it accurately, listen to what they're saying, really figure out what they think and then you can evaluate it, right? So that I learned from her and from her I also learned",
      "to learn that, you know, the world around you is full of stuff to explore. And, you never being bored doesn't make sense. There's always something to learn about. Let's say you're sitting in a room and there's nothing to do. You could look around you and think, oh, I wonder what this wall is made of? What's the ratio between the wall and the ceiling? The world is always full of knowledge for you to learn.",
      "knowledge for you to learn. And every person you meet is a person to learn about their life, their stories, something to learn so I learned this from her and okay, so then I went to... I feel like I'm taking all this time. So I went high school my dad went to boarding school he said, you're going to boarding schools but he didn't want me to go to these Northeastern boarding schools there's a school in California which I really liked called Thatcher and you're gonna go to this school it's near Ohio",
      "It's someplace called Ojai, California Where Sheikh Hamza went to high school He went to High School at Ojai Valley School The competitor of Thatcher In Ojai No one knows about Ojai California I mean this is like the weirdest Parallel between my life and his life He went To Ojai valley school I went to Thatcher Thatcher is I think Without argument a better school But he might disagree with me So then",
      "And it was a very, I mean, I had a great time. But it was very kind of California progressive crystal power, whatever makes you feel, whatever is good, love one another, very liberal progressive values that you're taught. So I didn't really... I wasn't being led on any path religiously. Although I remember because the",
      "I remember because the school is like on the edge of a national park. So, I would... And we would ride horses. So I would go riding all the time and train horses and do like horse shoeing and horse... Especially training young horses. I love doing that. And so I would out into the mountains by myself or on the horse and just kind of search for meaning in nature in a way, I guess. Agreed. Because I started to really have",
      "really have a lot of anxiety uh you know i guess me all teenagers have this but i had a lot i was like what is the point of my life what's the meaning of life what why i'm gonna die one day what what is how am i supposed to mean anything what how am I supposed to how is my existence supposed to",
      "So I didn't know the place at all. Uh, so I went to Washington DC to Georgetown, but by the time I went college, I was really thirsty, thirsting for knowledge, thirst thing to learn and seeking definitely seeking truth. And I always told myself, you know, I, if I learned the truth, I will follow it, whatever it is. And uh, so when I got to Georgetown they have a re they still have a theology requirement. You have to take two classes in theology.",
      "from the perspective of Muslims. You're going to now step into the shoes of a Muslim.\" And we read Muhammad Asad's Road to Mecca, we have Muhammad Asid's translation of the Quran, we read books by Fazlur Rahman and the road in Mecca just blew me away. It was melded with my mind perfectly. By the end of the semester it was weird because I remember sitting",
      "this is actually what I believe. Like, when I was sitting in those church pews and like I believed in God but I didn't really understand anything else about what I was being taught, like this is what I believed. This is what i was believing you know? And so when I went to the end of the semester, I went with the teacher, the professor, and I said you know like, I think I believe this. Like what does that mean? Does that mean a Muslim? And she said that's a choice you have to make, you know it's your choice",
      "your choice and so that summer i thought a lot about it um and how old were you then i was 18 and then turning 19. oh really okay yeah okay so when i became muslim i was 19 i think uh and then i the sec so i started my sophomore year of college",
      "And I went there and I kind of was really shy. I was like, um, like I kind want to like, I want to become Muslim. And uh, of course people came and helped me. And, um that was ever since then I was yeah, that's the best decision in my life. Right. But look at you now, you're full professor at Georgetown University right? Yeah so... It's interesting because",
      "when you ask who am I, in one way, I'm a Muslim whose everything I've done as a scholar has been answering my questions that I had as a Muslim. Every book I've written, every article I've read, it's always, I want to know this as a Islam. I need to answer this question. But one could also look at my life and say, look at this guy's mom, look",
      "their professors, look at how he's raised. He's very academic. I mean, someone could have looked at me and probably said, oh, this guy is going to be an academic. But I never thought about that. I never though I would be an academics. I thought it would be like a lawyer or something. I though being a professor was sort of like a loser job. I don't know why I thought that. And actually recently just talking with my sisters, I was like listen, I always thought being a Professor was like a looser job. Even when I was in grad school, I had trouble admitting",
      "I don't know where that came from. And then they said, you know, probably because our grandparents, my mom's parents were so negative about everything. They were just, we're always, they never said anything good about anything. So probably I just associated negativity with being a professor because they were very negative and maybe that's why. So but I mean, I'm so grateful to be a professor now, obviously. So somebody could say, no, go ahead. Someone could say like this,",
      "say like this guy's career is because he's muslim it's just true and this guy his career is Because of how he was raised which is also true yeah yeah i think that you know that makes sense it makes sense to me you know and and I think that again um I appreciate quite a bit about many things that you write and like myself I mean most of what I know about Islam",
      "I know about Islam originates from like Arabic sources. Because most, even still now, most of the books that I read are usually in Arabic and so I'm not as well versed in English literature with respect to Islam as you would be or a lot of other people are. But when I do look for something in English, you're actually one of the first people I look at. You hear a lot",
      "not only because I enjoy your writing or that a lot of the information is available, but because I respect the fact that you are willing to deal with a lot controversial topics that I generally have an interest in as well. But perhaps for different reasons. For me it's, I would say that not so much about trying to find answers for myself, but if I try to answer for my students",
      "for my students, because I know that not getting certain answers is going to cause a crisis of faith. So, I mean, so you have like misquoting Muhammad, Francis was going, Muhammad is like extremely valuable work. I mean all the books you get that slavery, slavery in Islam. I have a few books in front of me actually from this up from from misquoted Muhammad typically when I one of the courses that teaches family law, I actually utilize the section about the hitting birds right",
      "hitting birds right from here you know what and so i for this for the students um in the slavery in islam we typically go over the section on consent and concubinage you know because all definitely want our sisters to get a proper understanding of that issue and i try to help them work through uh try to um understand you know",
      "ideas. And sometimes I get tempted to send you a text or send you something like that. I probably know this book better than you do. Yeah, I get really frustrated because there's some stupid mistakes in it and it makes me really upset. You know, I just...I get so upset about mistakes in my books and I try to...you know, unfortunately publishers they don't...you can't just sort of make a new edition every time",
      "There's some mistakes in that book that really drive me crazy. It's hard for me to feel any joy about it. I think that it has to be expected. I mean, you know, it's definitely a challenge once you're published and when somebody discovers your mistake and hopefully people do it with good spirit, with sense of goodwill, right? Highlight those types of things as opposed to all these guys are fraud. Look at this. So so I think",
      "I think that because we might make a mistake or because we have made mistakes, that in itself shouldn't be reason not to publish and not to write. And I think the wrong attitude is that some people's attitudes are like, well, you know, if I'm afraid that if I publish there will be too much criticism therefore I won't publish it.",
      "world or the community overall, you know. So I mean, I'm here to like, actually I've taught Intro to Islam. I've utilized your Muhammad brief introduction. You know, so I've used a lot of your material over the years and but again, the basic point is that when I typically try to look for something in English where students who are not very good at Arabic, you",
      "There's a very short list of Muslim academics that I actually do consult or rather, I try to refer students to because in my experience, you know, I mean, you don't have some bad experience with certain Muslim academics. You know, so I can imagine the only thing they should, you not actually promote them right up to either our students or the general public. Yeah, I completely understand that.",
      "But yeah, but I mean are you interested in speaking a little bit about any of your books? Even the most recent one that came out was Islam and Blackness. So is there anything you want to talk by me, the thesis of any of my books that perhaps people may not be aware of? Well let's take that one for instance since I mentioned it. Islam and blackness.",
      "What were you looking for in your writing?",
      "questions about this. And so I was like, okay, I'll try and answer it. And eventually as through the process of trying to answer it, and of course looking at books like your book and Sherman Jacks' book and Dawood Waleed's books and people like that, right? And Abul Haq Ashanti's books. And we started trying to get this material together, figure out when people hadn't answered a question, tried to improve fill cracks add on to stuff. So that's really kind of trying",
      "doing so also to understand things that you know, that like might be difficult, you know might actually say hey this does seem anti-black. How did this happen? Or how do you make sense of it or what why is so I think a lot of the stuff that is maybe a constant theme in my books is one to show the diversity of Islamic tradition not for the purposes of saying that like oh, you can't say Islam says X because",
      "because Muslims say more than one thing, right? That's not what I'm trying to do. But like the point is that if you have, for example, let's say there's a certain Hadith and then in their commentaries, certain scholars will say like racist stuff about this, right, that they're also huge scholars who are saying no, that's wrong, right so that Muslim scholars will always be some scholars",
      "major leading scholars who are pointing out exactly the same thing that someone else is trying to point out today, right? So these critiques are not new and they've already been addressed. And if Muslims, if the majority position amongst Muslim scholars is wrong or is debatable today, well there is a huge it's not just like one guy but there was like a camp of scholars some of them major scholars who said the opposite, right, who anticipated this discussion.",
      "discussion. So that's one thing I think is a pretty consistent theme in my work. The second one is... My wife's calling me, hang on. Just send her a message. The",
      "we need to think about actually what is slavery? When we talk about morality and history, what are we doing? What are our assumptions in our kind of modern Western global Western society? And some of those assumptions are very problematic. So I also try to kind of engage in self-reflection about the very questions we're asking. How are the questions prejudiced? How do they presume certain things that are highly problematic? Right. So",
      "Yeah, exactly. I can see that. Definitely. Now in this particular series that I've been trying to put together relationship to what we call talking with teachers, I wanted to try to have my guests speak about one or perhaps more individual that they consider to be important for the public",
      "to know about, whether it be persons from the past or present. It could be related to scholarship or religiosity, whatever it may be. Just important people that are not very well known but have important ideas or have important contributions that you believe would be very useful for the average person. You mentioned someone before.",
      "Yeah. Who is Haifa Khalafullah?",
      "I was so thirsty for knowledge. And I didn't know because when I learned about Islam, initially it was really through kind of like Fazlur Rahman, Muhammad Abduh, like a very kind of modernist, Islamic modernist perspective. So I didn'y really you know, I sort of thought about like ulema are like these people in the past and then they'd be kind of become like defunct or they're kind of this class today but they're all kind of idiots and they need to be reformed, right? So that was really my perspective",
      "perspective. And when I was a sophomore, I think the second semester of my sophomore year, there was a class being offered. I looked in the course catalog and it was called Islamic Law and Society taught by Haifa Khalafallah. And she at that time was a PhD student in the history department. Although she would be called a mature student. She was significantly older than other students. So she had been earlier on had been a journalist",
      "world and especially writing about petroleum journalism, also politics, and writing in Arabic and English. And then she was Egyptian so she had gone started to go and listen to the lectures of Sheikh Muhammad Al Ghazali Rahimullah. The famous Egyptian writer died I think in 1996 I believe. So she got really into Islamic thought",
      "and kind of understanding Islam. And she decided to go do a PhD at Georgetown in the history department to do this. And so, she was teaching this class as a PhD student, and she was doing her dissertation on the books of Sheikh Muhammad al-Ghazali. And... So, she taught this class, it was like part of talking about her research, right? And what I found so interesting about Haifa",
      "she really introduced me to the idea of Islamic thought as a living thing, right? That Islamic thought isn't something that's in the past that you're sort of dissecting and something that has to be updated. Like we kind of modern Westerners, you know, we have only like, it's sort of Islamic modernism is the only way to think about Islam. Like she showed me the world of Muhammad al-Ghazali who's like a living alum, like a scholar who's dealing with the tradition",
      "with the tradition in a creative way, right? So he's like a living example of this. And one of the first... And then so she also told me, she's like, you need to go learn Arabic. Like, you needs to go and learn Arabic well, you go to Egypt. And so that I applied for this program called CASA, Center for Arabic Study Abroad in Cairo, 12 month intensive program. And I went from 2000-2001. And she also",
      "lectures of Sheikh Ali Juma in Cairo, right? So she says, go. I'm going to give you introduction to him and you go to him take classes with him, go to his classes. And so when I went in 2000, I began to attend his lectures and then continue to do so for the next couple of years as I would go back to Egypt for a month sometime at a time, sometimes one month, sometimes six months, sometimes eight months.",
      "was eight months um so and it was really like that was when i realized that you know yes there are a lot of dumb or them up but that's because there's a lot everybody right so i mean any university you know or like you say you go to some kind of mid mid-range university or something probably not a lot",
      "kind of a science or tradition by its mediocrities you judge by it's excellent representatives right so when you go and you meet people who are really great scholars then you're like whoa these people I'm the little nobody and these guys like I said oh I'm western I have critical thinking skills and then they just demolish you not only do they demolish but they also memorized",
      "like a Quran, Hadith. And they're just like, cite this verse, cite that book, cite hadith, cite poetry. I mean not only do they have a huge kind of massive database. Yeah, it's likely to acknowledge but they also have extremely critical minds and effective reasoning. So then I really learned wow these are the people that I need to learn from. This is where I want to learn. Then that introduced you to me to the idea of Islamic thought as a living thing that exists today",
      "exists today. And so it was really through Haifa that I was exposed to this, and I was always grateful to her, always be grateful to Her for this. Yeah, Rajat. That's really interesting because like, um, I don't think I've ever mentioned this publicly but often when I think about the whole Iftikhar tradition, the tradition of fatwa, a tradition, it seems to support this idea of the sort of living Islamic tradition in other words that we often don't",
      "think about fatawa is being part of the overall corpus of Islamic law, you know, tradition. You know in the sense that it can be taken as a source for normative sort of adoption right? But it's like okay all circumstances, you now the fatwa is going to be based upon circumstance whereas you have the which are these are the ideal situations you're gonna apply these you know but when you try to sort of",
      "to sort of, I guess you'd say codify a school or codify some type of statutory system of rules. It seems to me that Islam is somewhat resistant to that because of the Fatwa tradition and of course Islamic law is only one aspect of Islam to begin with but of course we have our virtual absentees",
      "have created, et cetera. All those other things as well. It's an important reflection that I just had just by listening to what you said about her. So I'm definitely going to look into her works and so I saw one book, Ghazali. Yeah, she wrote a book on her it was probably her dissertation. I don't think she, you know, I haven't been in touch with her recently maybe a few years ago I emailed this or I should be in touch",
      "I mean, I'm very indebted to her. I dedicated my Islam and Blackness book to three people, to Maisa Malfurqi, to Haifa Khalafallah, and then to my advisor in grad school, Wadad Al-Qadi. They really were important, obviously, people in my life. But yeah, when she...",
      "I mean, it's like when you're learning to read, you know, you're looking up every fourth word or something. It was actually Muhammad al-Ghazali's Sunnah nabawiyya bayn ahlul fiqh wa ahl al-hadith, the prophetic sunnah between the scholars of law and fiqah and scholars of hadith. And that... Like, I read a lot of his books. And he was really one of the... Again, maybe my second entryway into Islam. Right. That's the Sheikh Muhammad al Ghizat? Yeah, exactly.",
      "exactly. I also have a seerah, it's an important work. Yeah, masha'Allah. Is there anything else that you'd like to add before we close today? Anything that you feel that the audience should know or some general direction, advice, or anything like that? I don't know. I mean, yeah, like, you know,",
      "try to leave the lesson that I learned from my mother, which is that the world is a fascinating place and there's always chances to learn. And don't be cynical. Don't be lazy. Don' t let laziness... Don't out of laziness be dismissive of learning. Always be open to learn",
      "don't ever dismiss somebody because of where they're from or that they disagree with you, but always take their arguments seriously and see they might be speaking the truth. They might benefit you in knowledge or in faith or in anything. So that's what I guess my lesson would be. Beautiful, beautiful. Dr. Jonathan Brown, thank you for being with us today. May Allah bless you. And hopefully this won't be the last time that we have a conversation like this",
      "conversation like this. Perhaps it'll be something a little bit more robust in the future, but inshallah I definitely appreciate you taking time out of your time. JazakAllah khair. I'm just very honored and I hope it's useful for somebody. Insha'Allah. Assalamu alaikum. So we hope that the rest of you enjoyed this particular episode. Look forward to seeing you in the",
      "Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh. Hopefully you enjoyed that episode. Don't forget to subscribe to our channel here on YouTube and Spotify. Looking forward to seeing you in the next episode, God willing. Peace. Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - The State of Hadith Studie_kGwmofDEvvg&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748671691.opus",
    "text": [
      "Sure, welcome again. Okay, bismillah. Hi everyone, welcome once again to our session in which we've started at the Ilayat on the International Speaker Series. Today I am very grateful that a good friend of mine and colleague and wonderful academic Professor Jonathan Brown who most of you probably already know but if you don't I'm going to go through the bio not that it's necessary but i just think that that's what we ought to do",
      "what we ought to do. So Professor Brown is the Al-Walid bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Services at Georgetown and he did his BA in history at Georgetown University, and then got a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Chicago. He's the publisher of many books and many works of which more recent some of you may know on his works on hadith and more particularly on Rasul Sallam so Muhammad short introduction but",
      "Professor Brown has indulged in works in regards to Islam and slavery, and Islam and blackness. Which I think was supposed to come out this year or has come out of this year? I'm not too sure. This year has been a very difficult one. I mean it's out! The book is physically out. I don't know when it's going to go into stores but I mean... It's like physically exists now. Okay fantastic. So what we're going to do today is we're gonna cover some of these topics as a way of interacting with professor brown",
      "Brown. What we'll do is have a 40-minute session in which Professor Brown and I will have a conversation so you guys can listen attentively, and then we'll open up the last 20 minutes for a Q&A if that's okay. Once again thank you very much everyone for being here. I really appreciate it on a personal level that so many of us are willing to share and partake in the study of Ilm. It's something that is part of our tradition and culture and i hope that this continues and I'm really grateful that Professor Brown has chosen to be the first speaker of this semester",
      "of this semester in terms of this session so thank you very much professor brown and salam alaikum all right so let's let's begin so one of the interesting things that i found in terms",
      "and so forth, but you chose the route of academia. And you chose that you wanted to be an academic. What I want you to know is what was your choices very early on in your life about going down that direction? Yeah, it's actually a really interesting way to put it. So I became Muslim when I was 19. Basically, I started to learn about Islam",
      "first year of college. So I was, you know, 18 and then that summer I thought a lot about it. And when I went back to school in the fall became Muslim, you now I formally become with some good like October that year. So, uh, I learned how to song through hang on is there any voice that my computer's from house computer?",
      "I'm not going to be like a diva. We're on mute, so it's probably you. Really? Well, what if I should do? Maybe I should just reduce the volume of my computer. Sorry this is not very interesting but maybe I'll try this. Hello can you hear me? Yeah. Okay yeah so... So when I learned about Islam,",
      "books of Fazlur Rahman and Muhammad Asad. We read in that class I took on Islam when i was a freshman, we read you know Fazl-ur-Rahman's book on Islam, we red Muhammad Asads translation of the Quran, and we read Muhammad Asada Road to Mecca. And so Muhammad Asaad is you know um in some ways quote unquote conservative you know i think he'd probably be considered",
      "politically conservative today in the sense of being you know an islamist um but he was in terms of his like theology and his fifth he was or more even in his theology i think he was very quote-unquote liberal right so he was his law might not have been actually his fit might have been he was like sometimes sort of been described as zahiri um i'm just gonna reduce",
      "Okay, so maybe this will help. So in terms of his fiqh it was like more maybe not so maybe a little bit but where I think he was really kind of unorthodox for lack of better word is in his theology, his opinions on jinn, his opinion on you know things like punishment",
      "a lot of these he was sort of a very almost like an extreme early muazzalite i think but my point about all this is when I learned about Islam, I learned it really from essentially Islamic modernist perspective basically right and I didn't really know about traditional Islamic scholarship. When I read about it sorry and then I read the other classes",
      "who really influenced me a lot. Her name was Haifa Khalafallah. She actually dedicated my most recent book to the professor who taught me the first class on Islam, Mason and then Haifa and also my grad student advisor Wadah Al-Khadi. But so Professor Khalafalla she really, she was doing her dissertation on Muhammad al Ghazali, the scholar who died in 1996, Egyptian scholar. And you know, Muhammad al-Ghazali was also he wasn't necessarily, he wasn'a modernist but",
      "modernist, but he was really maybe kind of a manhedge. But maybe like a continuation of Mahmoud Shah al-Saud or maybe like Rashid Ridha a little bit and Sheikh Qaradawi. So it's like he was traditional in the sense that he came from the traditional,",
      "within the tradition of fiqh and Rasool but he was not you know bound to a madhab like he was a little bit more iconoclastic, more willing to go between Madhhabs or even question positions that he felt had been wrongly taken as also Sheikh Qaddafi would sometimes do right. But my point is that I didn't everything I knew about Islam I knew from either Islamic modernist",
      "reformist, slightly reformist traditional view. So I didn't actually know that like when you read books like this right? The ulema are usually it's usually like they're talked about as this bunch of idiots. They're sort of but they're either stupid or they are kind of stubborn and the need to reform. They often talk about in the past tense there's sort of like this historical... Either they're historically extinct",
      "extinct or they're essentially a relic of the past that needs, that is not has no real role in the present in their current state. If they want to be involved, they have to reform or something right? So that's really I didn't understand that you could actually go and learn from Muslim scholars in a way that would be productive so I was really when I was going to Egypt to study Arabic by the way i'm sorry if i'm like taking a long time to tell you this story but I think it's actually interesting",
      "I mean, I think it's great. So I guess what I'm trying to say is I actually didn't know you could go to Syria or Egypt and Mauritania anywhere like that and study. Like Sheikh Hamza Youssef was just kind of becoming famous. You know, I just heard him give a lecture once at a time. I didn't ever...I didn't knew anything about his life. I don't know he'd studied in Mauritanie. I did not know if he could do this stuff. Maybe I should have just done more reading or something. But so my point is that",
      "that I really, I had a very and the attitude of kind of Islamic modernist perspective really it wasn't just that's how I learned about Islam. It really influenced me in the sense that I considered the obligation to reform to be essential. And I looked at that kind of traditional Muslim world quote unquote from perspective essentially I was condescending towards it right? So when I went to Egypt to study Arabic",
      "egypt to study arabic for a full year in this program called casa which is just like basically 24 hour arabic one for 12 months in cairo my professor uh professor khalafallah said okay go when you go go to al azhar and there's a sheikh named ali jumma and you're gonna go and you know tell him i sent you and you've gotta go and",
      "I really, I couldn't speak almost no Arabic when I got there. So I was learning Arabic as I did this but I sort of get to know some of the Sheikh Ali Juma and then his senior students as well like Ahmed Zahir Salem and Sheikh Ahmad Al-Faith Rahim Allah and Sheikh Osama Sayyid Mahmoud al-Azhari and Sayed Shaltout and others.",
      "when I went, when I finished my, when iIfinished that year in Cairo. I went to apply to graduate school in the US and it didn't actually occur to me and this is, I'm sorry to give you a bad answer your question but It never actually occurred to me To go and study quote unquote traditionally because I didn't know that you could do this like I didn' t know there's something that actually I mean for me it was just obvious that I wanted to keep learning about my, I want to keep Learning about Islam. That's all I knew. I didn''t have a plan. I wasn't planning to become a professor",
      "a professor i wasn't really thinking ahead i was just knew i wanted to keep doing what i was doing and it's the only step that seemed to exist was supply to phd programs so i applied to php programs in the us went to university chicago and the first year i um uh what happened the first",
      "I said, I was like, okay, I'm going to go to Egypt and I'm just going to do this as hard rules. And I'm gonna like whatever try and benefit whatever something tell me. And so I went and I spent, I think that's somewhere about a month and a half or two months in Cairo. And. I just went every day to these open deRose and Ashar mosque with Sheikha Juma and others. And",
      "what i realized now look i actually want to be really clear i don't agree with like sheikh ali jamaah politically i don t agree with most of his students politically i completely disagree with them but you know it would be complete lie if i said that i didn't think they were extremely knowledgeable i mean there are some of the like sheik al-jumma sayyid mahmoud i really don't argue with them politically but they're",
      "most knowledgeable people i've ever met like and i just i cannot there's nothing um maybe someone like uh sheikh dadu would be some similar but just in the amount of material they have in their minds and the amount their ability to draw on it and focus it in different kind of analytical processes as just i mean i was i felt like a worm you know i felt",
      "as I was like, okay well yeah you know you in the East quote unquote you would like memorize stuff but I'm from the West quote unquote and I have an analytical reasoning right so this is literally the stuff I was thinking. Right? I mean that's actually how I was think it's kind of embarrassing to say that now but then I would be like well let me analyze this and then they would just turn me into pulp. They would just obliterate me.",
      "was the one who had failed to reason properly and they do so using these like traditional like what you would call like you know things like like they were just um really completely dismantled my view of the world, you know? Of myself and of the",
      "of PhD, I had a completely different view on the world. And before that, I'd always been embarrassed to be Muslim. I didn't want people to know I was Muslim. People would say snarky things about Islam and I'd be like, ha-ha! What I realized during that summer in Egypt was holy moly, being Muslim is not",
      "being Muslim is a massive asset. I was sitting in class and people would be reading Arabic texts, not really understanding them. And then they would not know the Quran, they wouldn't know Hadith, they didn't know poetry, they don't know fiqh, they weren't all this stuff. This was supposed to be like the pinnacle of learning about Islam. But what I realized",
      "like all that stuff was just basic it wasn't was just taken for granted amongst senior scholars in the traditional circles. Like, this was like child's play to them you know and even limited exposure to those traditional scholars had given me capacities and knowledge that I just felt like oh my god like this is actually...I have an advantage you know? This is something",
      "it has made me a better scholar than I ever would have been before right. Can I ask you a question on this? Yeah sorry go ahead do you want to ask? What i find interesting about your life journey so far, this part of it which is interesting, is that your introduction to Islam is has been ilm itself, it's been knowledge. I mean usually people will say I met a particular person, I met this guy at the mosque but your interaction from the inception has been something you read",
      "and in Islam, SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam Muhammad Asad and Fathur Rahman. And then you go to Egypt and once again, you're dealing with this meta institution who are the ulama, who are ilm based and so forth. And that seems to be how you interact with Islam which is fascinating for me because once you interact of that sort of like knowledge base, you then took it upon yourself to say, you know what? I'm not ashamed to be Muslim. In fact, I'm gonna now take this and I'm now going to defend it or not necessarily defend it but go back to academia and then say okay",
      "and then say, okay, this is how I'm going to now do that. Yeah, I mean, I'd say it's... I understand what you mean when you say defend it but I think that like it doesn't need defending because it defends itself if it's deployed properly, right? It only needs defending if the people who are talking about it have an audience that doesn't know what it is, right. Now of course, look",
      "And this is, look if you go to Uttar and you grab the first 90 people you meet they're probably gonna be stupid. Like I mean that's true by the way of if you got American University you grabbed 90 people off the campus they're not going to be the top minds at the university right? That's just statistically likely. At a place like Uttars as in Pakistan or Egypt or other places",
      "is people who are really talented usually don't go into these sciences. They go into other fields, but you know, you don't judge the Islamic sciences by the average person. You judge them by their excellence, by people who were excellent examples, right? And so that's what I was very fortunate and I stumbled into it just ass backwards or whatever they say like, I mean, I just totally stumbled into",
      "people who are amazing examples of this tradition and so that really uh what i realized is like that's this is not to be a being a good learning to be it good muslim scholar is not something that just is about islamic scholarship it's about that means being a great thinker it means being an excellent historian it means a great editor of manuscripts it means you're a great um critical reasoner it mean a great debater right so",
      "Muslim scholar, because that was also to be a good scholar in general even in the academy. And so from that point on everything I did was really trying to meet at level of excellence that I'd seen from these scholars and to... Yeah like when you write an article for Islamic law and society or something probably the premier journal on Islamic law in the West right?",
      "If you write an article, but you don't start out by saying this and you don t say. But almost everything else in my scholarship I don't think actually would be different if it were if I were Muslim or not Muslim. I think a lot of these faith inflections or faith-based elements are really",
      "products of studying early Islamic history. If you study early Islamic History, then you're going to be wrapped up in a lot of presumptions. Everybody who goes into that whether they are Muslim or not Muslim or whatever is going in with a lot presumption and reading their own worldview into history that you have to be reconstructing right? We don't actually have someone who's sitting there during the time of the Prophet writing down like today the Prophet did this and puts it in a sealed box and we pick it up",
      "and we pick it up 1400 years later. But I mean, once you get to the let's say time of the Muwatta or the sort of late second century Hijri, mid 700s of the common era at that point, I mean you have texts and like you can interpret text this way or you could interpret text that way but being Muslim or not Muslim is not gonna change... Someone who has faith doesn't read",
      "the uh mabstoot of a sarahsi and you know and say because i'm muslim i say you know like your obviously your perspective is going to influence you but the data itself the material you're looking at doesn't change for the muslim or non-muslim right so can i ask something on that yeah go ahead what's interesting is when we look at hadith literature itself that is usually muslims are very closely guarded in the hadith which is something which is instructive in their life",
      "And in regards to hadith literature in academia, I mean one of your earlier works is misquoted Muhammad. Clearly you were aware that there was some sort of misconception in the way that a hadith has been presented and so forth. In that sense do you feel that the way hadith is looked at by scholars who may not be Muslim or the infrastructure doesn't have the same level of interaction regarding the hadiths literature that the outcome in itself lends to it to being...",
      "to be yeah definitely right so you know when you're looking at hadith that's i consider that part of early islamic history um but there's a so i don't i've written i almost have written i've",
      "I don't really, I'm just not interested. For example my introduction to Hadith book, I spent a long time the whole chapter on Western methodology for the study of Islamic history and I take issue with certain things, I give my opinion on certain things but I'm not engaged in these debates because I find them to be this is essentially a theater for people, it's a theater of polemics right? This is where people basically go and one group of people are saying",
      "islam is not special islam, is not authentic. Islam is not intact. Islam blah blah blah whatever like the different things they want to say and they're just using pieces of they're putting like Mr potato head pieces together to make that argument and then other people are going in saying Islam is authentic Islam is intact Islam is special and they were doing their argument right but neither of these two groups is able to demonstrate to the other group",
      "other group that they're correct based on evidence that the other group would accept right so for me i'm not like i'm happy with people who want to do that god bless them you know etc etc but that's not how i i just find that to be and not super useful ways of time a super use of time again i have written about it in my very short introduction to the prophet i have read about it a little bit in my book on hadith but if you in my books let's say misquoting muhammad or slavery book or the islamic blackness book",
      "us no time on the issue of the authenticity question because I find it to be, look we have the Quran. There's no real debate about that. We have the basic outlines of the Prophet's life with As-Salam are evident in non-Muslim sources right? So after that like okay once you put that aside as settled then you know okay if a Muslim, if a non-muslim thinks the prophet didn't say this or i think the prophet did say this",
      "that's fine but i'm not interested what i'm interested in is how muslims understand their religion so my book misquoting muhammad i mean that the title is actually just there because the publisher thought it would make money like that so they just gave me a contract they said write a book called miss khan mohamed we don't care what's in the book this is the title right the actual title for me of the book is the subtitle which is the challenges and choices",
      "in understanding their religion over the centuries and how what challenges they face especially with modernity etc so i don't uh i don' really feel that for me at least i don''t find a lot of value in engaging in wrangling over the authenticity question on hadith. On the quran, I think it's relatively...I mean I think its settled. I don't feel the need to engage in that a lot other people have right have already done the work but the hadith stuff",
      "But the Hadith stuff, it's sort of fruitless. Can I ask you a question then? In terms of your work and your career and so forth, have you seen... Because you said you wrote Misquoting Muhammad for Muslims, and I'm assuming even the other works that you're writing, even though it's within a particular Western academic framework where it's written in English, but it is aimed for a Muslim audience who can read what you're saying or even read between the lines. It's something that they can pick up and it can empower them in a particular way when you actually are speaking to them.",
      "speaking to them. Have you found in the Muslim world, in particular, in terms of their interaction with your work how things have maybe changed where Muslims in academia in particular are now writing works on hadith and it's having an impact in the muslim world whereas usually authenticity is assumed where knowledge is coming from the Muslim World? Yeah so I would say well first of all i would say a couple of things one is",
      "you know, when Muslim scholars, you know Al Ghazali or Ibn Rushd or like Ibn Taymiyyah. Or you know when these scholars are writing, I don't think they thought of themselves as like...I'm writing for Muslims not non-Muslims but they were writing with ilm and when they say ilm, they don't say like islami,",
      "and collect, parse, reason. They see as actually universal rules. I think they were mostly correct about that. What I tried to do after I wrote my first three books is when I wrote the Misplained Mahan book what I really wanted to do was say I want to be like these guys. I want",
      "that yes, it's about the Islamic tradition. Yes, it is going to be helpful for Muslims but what I really want to do is show the world how Muslims have thought about big questions and I want people who are not Muslim to read this and say hey, I'm learning about Islam and I'm reading about the way Muslim scholars thought and stuff like that but also I wanted them to read it and say this is actually an interesting way to think about free will",
      "about free will this is an interesting way to think about um the role of law in society and to what extent law is supposed to shape society versus shaped by society or to what extend you know what is truth you know is it if your kid comes and asks you a question you tell them a lie because that's the best thing to tell them at that moment is that a betrayal of truth or not like these are these are big questions that have have vexed humans throughout history",
      "of approaching those questions. What I wanted to do was to say Muslims are involved in all these conversations and here's an example of their contribution, so in some ways I wanted try and live out or channel the confidence of a person like al-Ghazali or ibn Taymiyyah and offer that as an example",
      "Similarly with things like the slavery book, what motivated me, what drove me to write that book was a fuel for me to read that book. What I saw is incredible close-mindedness and willful ignorance that was embraced by academics. Not necessarily Muslim academics",
      "Muslim academics, period on this topic. And the public square, period, on this top. So I think that my book on slavery... It's really interesting if you want to learn about Islam and slavery but for me, the core of the book is actually the part to deal with what are the moral historical and epistemological consequences",
      "get our values and what we think about our species, and our future in our past. I think this is actually just as applicable to non-Muslims as it is Muslims. For me like that was more of a contribution to discussions around history of morality and slavery generally the Islamic part was just added on as to make what i thought was like a complete contribution",
      "contribution. Similarly, the issue of Islam and blackness like a lot of that book is designed to... Oh sorry did I interrupt you? Yeah sorry John just these two points because i find it interesting in terms of these last two books that you worked on this notion of ethics and morality something which is coming up more and more in Islamic studies by many Muslim scholars in particular trying to raise the question of the idea of ethics",
      "of the challenges we're facing just not only in regards to islam and and the lived experience but generally the sort of like fissures that exist in the world today but also trying to go back into the tradition and sort of speak about ethics and morality again are you finding that that's taking place in regards",
      "like what is the role of an academic? I mean, or take what is a role of let's say religious studies which I don't have a lot of affection for but it's a good example for this. So one argument is that academics are supposed to explain, understand and explain things that they kind of... They stand outside of what they're studying. And what they are studying is sort of by the fact",
      "being studied is sort of lesser than death. It's something that is either part of the past, it's been superseded by the present or it's superseded a better version of thinking and spirit, you know, thinking about life, the meaning of life and all this stuff right? So... And then you kind of have to be objective about that and that our job is not to teach Islam to people but to teach people",
      "to teach people how islam as a religious tradition developed etc right the other argument is this sort of activist approach which is that you actually want to teach you know the job of a professor is to teach truth to people and almost like preach to them now of course if you think about western universities",
      "can't be right i can't come out and say like i am here to tell you that we almost all do jihad like like dude yeah we can imagine that's not going to be acceptable understanding of islam right so but if i come out in say islam is just about like everybody's a good person and we need to everybody has to embrace their their own truth about like sexuality and identity and all this stuff like if i",
      "if i come out and say that wow like this is just like really good you know this is terrific so um when i s when you when people talk about like essentially doing theology in the academy you can imagine what most of that quote unquote theology or that preaching is actually going to be angled towards in terms of its content in terms",
      "about what the role of a professor is, especially what the world professor is when we talk about religious traditions. And so that I think it's an area where you see this issue of ethics and what's the role that of the scholar? And I think the problem in the Western academy is there's a lot of schizophrenia about what universities are supposed to do but what professors are supposed",
      "or you know this is a bigger issue which has a bigger issues probably in our society overall. Now, in terms of like how I think about this? I try to be very clear about when i'm doing what right so a lot of my let's say if I write a book I might write a",
      "large segments of the book just be describing historical processes and analyzing things. And these are different schools of thought that emerged, this school of thoughts at A and this school thoughts at B right? And then at the end I might say I think X and this is why I think x now i'm going to make an argument for that but in my opinion that's very clear in the book like it's very clearly that now the author is going to tell you what he thinks and he's going to",
      "leave it out or you can criticize it but it's very different from the rest of the book so that's what i try to do in my work and my writing is to be both kind of descriptive and analytical uh and able to shift perspectives for the sake of the reader and the students but then also not be afraid to give my own views um when I think it's appropriate. And this will be my final question and then we'll open up to the Q&A,",
      "than blackness. I mean, I'm sure you're aware that these subject areas were going to be controversial for an academic in this current climate but you are still willing to engage in that subject area what was it that drove you to say you know what? I find the subject very interesting I know i'm gonna get some heat from the subject area but this is what I want to put out there This is what i wanna contribute to the conversation and this is generally what I think I should be permitted to do What was the reasoning behind you winning to do that because",
      "because we both know that you have taken heat from some of these subject areas people sometimes don't understand what academics are saying um and there's we have to continuously clarify ourselves even within academic settings i mean i think that you know on a slavery topic what i actually was motivated to write the book because of heat i'd taken before i wrote the book i didn't intend",
      "And it was because of what I saw in the way that academics dealt with the topic and the way the broader American society was dealing with the issue of slavery. Like, I was so stunned by what I consider to be amazing levels of cognitive dissonance",
      "I need to explain why, I need you look into this and if i'm correct, I mean to explain Why, I think. This issue is such as you know it's such a thing right so it was more like I wanted to. I was driven to do it because of what I thought were real failings in the way that scholars and general public square discussions on this issue worked in the world that you know in the in the American America basically in the broader West and even maybe globally.",
      "So then the Blackness book really came out of, it was in some ways an extension of the slavery book. Like I had my own questions still lingering from that but also it was because of what I saw happening amongst scholars like they were scholars who are writing professional historians who are historians at really good universities in the West",
      "that Islam at a religion, like added scriptural basis was anti-black. And I was like what the heck is this? How can somebody say this about my religion right? But also here's the evidence they're giving and if I can't address that evidence then I just need to share it because what was happening was people weren't addressing the evidence Muslims or people who were defending Islam against us would just be like that's wrong",
      "tell like a essentially fairy tale about islamic history where no one was racist and everything was great etc etc and they weren't actually able to deal with the evidence that was given by these people who are arguing that islam is anti-black at a scriptural and kind of historical normative level and so i what i want to do is really go and and address all these issues comprehensively so that's what i did",
      "when you talk about getting crap like people the people who give who attack well at least attack me they don't actually read anything right like they know no one no one if someone actually reads my books and criticizes me i would be happy that'd be like that's great like i'm so honored that you read my book like that really flattered but people don't do that they just go you wrote a book and you're you're a jerk and you said this",
      "that's it like that's just the level of discussion so it's kind of stupid yeah it hurts because you'll get you know 2 000 people telling you this on twitter or something but it doesn't hurt in the sense that none of those people have actually ever read anything that i've written so i i'm like i it just sort of uh you sort of doesn't really there's no substance",
      "going to continue but I know that I don't want to take up time for everyone who's here so from my perspective, I just want to say thank you very much for engaging with some of the questions that I've asked you. I can honestly slay that I wish we had more time in which we could pick your brain a bit more but the reason why I sort of appreciate this format to some degree is often when we get scholars talking on the technicalities of the work that they do but very little off...we don't often",
      "process of what it is that they were going through while they were doing the work that we're doing. So, that was basically my intention here so thank you very much for engaging with me in that sense Jonathan I do apologize. My pleasure anytime i'm happy to come back and even in person I would love to come next time when you come down please pay us a visit and I do want to apologize as well that I may have rudely interrupted during a few occasions so I apologize for that no no it's not rude okay go ahead where are the questions let's hear questions",
      "For the Q&A section, anyone who's interested in asking Professor Brown a question please do raise your hand so that we can see it and then we will pick an order. And if you want to write your question, please feel free to do that as well. The floor is open. Okay I have to do like this, or you can see. Okay let's",
      "Okay, there's a question from Elif Yalgin. She says, As-salamu alaykum. I have a specific question. I want to hear Professor Brown's opinion about the hadith related to women being deficient in intelligence and religion. Okay, fair enough. All right, Jonathan, over to you. Okay. Why don't people ask a few questions then I can answer them? It usually takes... it's usually more efficient so that's one. What about the next one?",
      "who's next mehmet fatih arslan has his hand up that's right do you know what actually before we go to method we will probably ask a question why don't you answer this one because i think that's the last one in the written format and then we can do it like okay yeah so the hadith knock us out akhil wadeen is",
      "this. I've been doing research on this for like three years. Someone asked me this question, I was going to write something on it and like I'd spend three years of doing research in it. It's...I'll tell you why this is a...I find this really challenging okay so one argument so basically everybody knows the hadith right? So the Prophet comes out and tells these women he's preaching",
      "he's preaching, and he preaches. He goes and tells these women specifically given charity because you're not like you have deficient in your intellect and your religion. And then if someone says what about my how is this? And she said well don't you women not pray some of the times they're menstruating",
      "So that's in religion, and isn't like the testimony of one woman worth out of you know 2 women worth out. Of 1 man so that's intellect right? And there's also different versions that are kind of blend in with one another like about the prophet saying that Women are the majority of people in hellfire or that women wives",
      "lot and they're ungrateful to their husbands, which by the way is maybe one of the most accurate has one of them was accurate sentences ever included in history of humanity. Which I'm sure I'm going to get into what we were saying but he says, even if the husband's like always good as wife,",
      "makes one mistake then though I've said, never seen anything good. You've never done anything good for me right? I'm willing to bet that this has been heard by many people in the world based on what I've heard. I've never heard it myself to be very clear no one's ever spoken like this to me because you know everybody might... Anyway, you guys know what I'm saying so the point is that this is a very controversial number of reasons okay first",
      "Okay, first of all. Why is the Prophet saying that essentially menstruation is not as a nox? Nox right so why if women didn't menstruate then humans wouldn't be born. So that's like it seems weird to say that it's like a deficiency when it's clearly part",
      "like part of how God designed us and it's absolutely essential for our species. Correct? So, and there is some wording in the versions of the Hadith that I find, I haven't really like analyzed this fully but strikes me as interesting because it suggests that there's more going on in what the prophet saying than what seems he seems to be saying. But I'm not sure exactly where it is so I don't want to say anything. The second thing is that",
      "the idea of one woman's testimony being worth half a man's is clearly not about their intellect because there are all sorts of other areas in which women are intellectually just treated exactly the same as men. Even you see this with Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Khaym al-Jawziyya when they talk about this, and they say like this has nothing to do with witnessing,",
      "had to like essentially being a notary and what is considered authoritative in one society over another, you said in actual rational capacity men and women are or there's no... There could be a really smart woman and a really stupid man, a really super movement, really smart man. Like doesn't break down along gender lines. So now here's the other thing. Let's say that this Hadith had been made",
      "misinterpreted or something. Or let's say this, it's not I don't think it's true but let's see that this hadith actually was unreliable we have this revelation like oh my god we looked at the isnad and it turns out this hadid is totally unreliabIble i'm not saying this as well I want to be clear i'm just saying let's stay we saw we saw that it still wouldn't solve our problem because if you look in the like medheb's reasonings they'll frequently cite",
      "evidence for why they come with a certain rule. So even if the, let's say that hadith was either false or had been misunderstood it's already been built into baked into certain reasoning on Madhav issues. Now you could say that okay now, for example Sheikh Mohammed Said Ramadan Al-Mu'ti says in one of his books",
      "that this thing the prophet said was sort of like a joke which act actually is pretty convincing i think that actually makes sense to me because it's not clear again why you would say that menstruation is enough like it's sort of he's like almost like teasing the women a little bit he's talking to them like you know as often people would do you know when they're talking people like kind of teasing them and having fun with them a little",
      "them um but then that raises two questions one um the i mean if the prophet is at least on his joking but medheb rules were built on this joke then we have an issue which is how do we explain the prophet joking when his words are the basis for rulings so shouldn't he not be",
      "the medhebs had built rules based on a joke right so um so that i think there's like so many issues around this hadith that i it's like uh you know extremely you know and i don't want to say not but there's just a lot of like ramifications for you know going back and looking at things you have to deal with like what that would mean what's the what would the consequences of that be how would you deal with those",
      "It's such a fraught issue. And when people ask me about the Sadiq, I dread it because I don't have an easy answer, unfortunately. I just tried to give you an insight into some of the things I've found around the Saliq. Thanks for that. So Sumayya Hoja did have her hand up which I missed so I apologize for that, so Sumayyar Hoja you can go first and then Mehmet Fatih Hoja can go next and then I think that will be it for our lots.",
      "uh is mehmet factor he's also we've lost him as well so it looks like um john we have a question in the written format if you want to do you join every day up can you feel free i know i can read it yeah sure yeah so you said being muslim is not a liability but it's a massive asset in what way ways would a similar statement of being christian or jewish differ",
      "I mean, I think obviously that being believing in the God is an asset. Like, I mean so believe in, in the creator is an assay. Um, In terms of scholarship, I'd say, you know, it's, it depends. Like I think if you were to someone like Thomas Aquinas or my monodies or something like that, you they, um, embody a lot of the same strengths and traditions of excellence and",
      "excellence and the combination of memorization and analytical rigor that I think has this one line. He says,. So when thought and memory mate wondrous things are born from this. But here's the thing.",
      "thing like there's i just don't think that the islamic intellectual tradition has any peer it doesn't i mean and you see that you know um it's interesting muslims actually write about this even uh abu talib al-maqi in his qutb he writes about this he says that you're we're the only community that memorizes scripture word for",
      "to the founding of the religion. Like other traditions don't have an isnad back to revelation and the possessor of revelation, and he brings up, he talks about the Torah and he talks like the oral transmission of the rabbis but he says this does not go back to the... they can't trace this back to Moses in a way that we can trace our teachings back to Prophet. So I think that no tradition has the volume",
      "the kind of volume and high standards, general high standards that the Islamic one does as far as I know. At least not in the pre-modern world. Yeah but I mean that's in some ways yeah that's how i would answer it. Thank you let's see if there's any more questions? I'm not really good at navigating zoom to be honest with you. Anyone else someone can",
      "else someone can raise i don't see any hands rates who's going to raise a hand okay from ushark would you recommend academia in the u.s for example with a core path to gain knowledge about the faith no definitely not no no oh i i say this regularly don't know you don't learn about islam if you want to learn about your religion do not go to a u.S university i don' t know in fact you'll probably end up learning the opposite you'll",
      "go find qualified scholars in teachers and where you live or online, and then this is a way to learn. Mehmet Fatih Arslan. Okay, go for it. Thank you very much for letting me at least I guess I am not interrupted the third time right?",
      "Right? Can you hear me? Yeah, go ahead. Okay, thank you. I'm sorry for the pollution behind me because I was on my way just arrived at home. I couldn't miss this speech. So I have one comment and one question. As you already stated that you said that you are not interested in someone who is trying to force or questions for authenticity of Hadith. And I totally agree with this.",
      "even doesn't have to bother about it because it's not hadith domain to substantiate that or justify the prophet was already alive and then he said this and death and then He was really Prophet of God. This is domain of ilm al-ilahi whether you Islamic theology, whatever you name it kalam or philosophy anyways somewhere else so if someone is looking for this kind of question he has to look for somewhere else in my understanding of hadith",
      "you told that there are many academicians, especially like who are at least at a certain level of proficiency in their job and they're smearing Islam saying that well, Islam in its core anti-black or racial or I don't know. At least has a certain backbone of racial statement and Quran includes this kind of thing. My question is do you think that this is",
      "like an attempt coming from and actually, from a bad intention or coming from ignorance. Like we used to have like academicians who are non-Muslim working which we call orientalists who were really has a depth of knowledge in Islamic studies someone like Shah or Godzier but in these days you can hardly find",
      "rather than they are will, they will work on Islam in America sex gender racial statements. So do you think that is this as currency on Islamic studies like down leveling it rather than focusing on really actually what is in Islamic Studies in its essence? Yeah I think it's at least on these so I think when you look at the issues, you know,",
      "Well, like anything right. If there's a let's say there's A politician who says something you know he might have intentions but you know the regular people are following them don't know they're ignorant right so they're just ignorant and they're Just following somebody who says some great but So there's yeah There's a lot of ignorance But I think at the where these issues are generated it's definitely intentional And its sources are clear Its sources are extremely clear right It comes from",
      "basically, what you might call like Western supremacists who want to focus on Islam and slavery and Islam as oppressive to black people because it helps Western society especially America exonerate itself from or distract other people",
      "So that's one thing. The other thing is kind of some aspects of African-American society, especially Christians and then sharing actually sending that back and now like in a kind of dialogic relationship with Christians in places like Nigeria where there's this whole idea of vilifying Muslims as not part of Africa, as oppressive, as not indigenous to quote unquote Africa, right?",
      "And then the third is basically American conservatism, essentially like aggressive American conservative foreign policy. And this is simply demonstrably true Israeli foreign policy propaganda, essentially Hasbar right? Israeli foreign public diplomacy which sees us as a way to one split quote unquote third world solidarity",
      "to split kind of Arabs and Muslims away from Africans, and then say that the real people who are racist aren't the Israelis. It's the Arabs and Palestinians. They're the real racists see how much they hate black people. So this is I think I demonstrate this all very clearly in my recent book. There's a whole chapter on this. Kamal Sani Bawa.",
      "unmute unmute unmute kamal uh-oh kamal's having technical problems hey thank you maybe you can do it right or yeah okay talk go ahead yeah good day how are you doing",
      "I came late because of the time factor. So mine, I have a question based on what I have read from the Prophet and hadiths of the Prophet. I think that talks, the main idea of the talk is based on the hadith of the prophet Muhammad. Am I right? This talk today? No, this is more about my own life",
      "life and work, which is seems I it seems kind of self indulgent. But that's what they asked me to turn around. I mean, I'm just answering questions. I don't know what to do. Yes, I am very self involved, I suppose. So Kamal you may not have missed what you missed may not been as valuable as you thought so I recommend if you're interested in this, you want to know what I have to say about you can read my book Hadith Muhammad's legacy in the medieval modern world with with the red cover if you can't get a copy",
      "you can't get a copy in nigeria email me i'll send you a copy or my book misquoting muhammad and my book islam and slavery which are all i think good books okay maybe uh sorry go ahead see maybe i can share my email so that i can be able to have the repeat yeah yeah email you can just email uh give your email in the chat yeah so thank you very much",
      "Thank you very much. Maybe in the process now, I will be joining the process. I might have some questions later time. OK. Yeah, thank you that much. Ashraf? Yeah. Just a follow up on my question about studying in an academic situation because as it's very difficult to,",
      "in the modern world to gain knowledge, in terms of having access to shuyukh or more importantly, having access a specific curriculum and going through sort of a tertib of attaining knowledge. So my question I guess was how do you see as a way forward for Muslims",
      "more importantly, in terms of like passing that on or practicing that. Do you think that it's sufficient? So for example, you went, like you mentioned at the beginning of your talk, you want to be as hard and you met with people such as say Shadoud and Osama Sayyed al-Azhari and these people who they have a very research and academic rigor to them as well",
      "and they were sort of doing it ad hoc with Sheikh Ali Juma. But how is that something that can be sort of replicable and sustainable in terms of how we function as Muslims, I guess all over the world, in terms if how we take the knowledge and how we transmit that? Because it just seems to me from my experiences as well,",
      "just sort of it's just done so haphazardly and you have to do a private study here or you have, to just look into finding a good teacher there. There's no really like at an institutional level to sort of attain knowledge and then again pass it on to the next generation. I mean one i think that there actually are a lot of",
      "of sort resources you know if you live you know, if you're lucky and if you lived in Dallas for example there's Column Seminary. There are actually a lot of good institutes around the world. Darul Ulums, there is a lot really good Darul Uluums from South Africa to Canada to the UK to United States right so I think that people you know If you want to go and get like a basic grounding in Islamic sciences it",
      "there are institutions, you know. And if you can't get there then you can watch lectures online I mean it sounds like kind of stupid and old saying this but the internet has really made so many things available to us that you can uh watch lectures by really great scholars even whole lecture so even doing a whole shah of the Muwatta or the Shah of some Maliki you can",
      "know as if you were there uh yeah you can't ask questions but other people are asking questions and they're getting answered and maybe your questions are going to get answered in the process and just that that's an incredible resource now of course the issue there is a lot of stuff it's based on language definitely knowing arabic is really important for a lot a bit or urdu but certainly arabic so um but that you know then it's just a matter",
      "So I think that it's not as yeah, it's always hard to find great minds and to learn from them But that's gonna be hard no matter where you are in the world. No matter when but we have more access to them now through the internet than we We I think ever have in the past folks Unfortunately, I have to go But I if you have questions you can email me And if I don't reply then email me again, and if I know apply email me, again, don't don't",
      "email me again don't don't i might promise that you are going to ask for the emails i get a lot of emails i forget about things um okay jonathan thank you very much for your time and your energy effort we really do appreciate it inshallah i'll get to speak to you soon again in charlotte when you come to istanbul be great to have you over at the department that would be fantastic i would love to thank you thank you",
      "Thank you very much everyone for being here today. We really appreciate it and this is just the beginning of the new semester so hopefully we can continue to do that, so please pray that this is successful and thank you very",
      "uh thank you very much take care and assalamu alaikum"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Ummatics Colloquium_ Islam_HBUNxvNgUwk&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748664884.opus",
    "text": [
      "Bismillah. Okay, bismillahi r-Rahmani r- Rahim alhamdulillahi Rabbil Alameen wa asalli wa asalimu a'la min ba'ta rahmatan lil alameen. Asalamualikum everyone and welcome to a resumption of the Umatix Colloquium we were on hiatus over the summer period while there was um a conference alhamduliAllah very successful conference in Istanbul and it gives us great pleasure to welcome you all to a discussion uh with professor Jonathan Brown",
      "Dr Jimmy Jones and Dr Muhammad Khalifa who will be engaging Professor Brown's book Islam and Blackness, I should say his latest book. And so it gives me great pleasure to welcome you this morning, this afternoon or this evening as the case may be because I expect people are zooming in from various parts of the world to a discussion of Jonathan Brown's",
      "Jack, if you'll forgive me I'll address you by your first name when i'm addressing you but I should say Professor Jonathan Brown needs no introduction being from Georgetown University and having at this point published half a dozen books on various aspects of Islam and Islamic civilization. His latest book, Islam and Blackness explores the important subject of anti-blackness slavery subjects of anti blackness slavery and racism in islamic history and theology",
      "and theology. This work is significant for the purposes of the Umatics Colloquium because it engages critically with the accusation that Islam is inherently anti-black or promotes slavery. The latter shibboleth is one that Professor Brown has powerfully addressed in his last book, Slavery and Islam. I don't know how you managed to write such sort of densely researched books in such short periods",
      "So in the present work, Professor Brown argues convincingly that while anti-blackness and slavery have existed in Islamic civilization, and in the case of anti- blackness unfortunately continues to exist. They are not intrinsic to Islam's founding principles and scriptures. He shows how the Quran and hadith promote racial equality between peoples condemning both tribalism and racism. This may be seen in the Prophet Muhammad's normative practice",
      "normative practice according to which he showed esteem towards his companions regardless of their skin color and castigated those who would denigrate others because of their darker skin however professor brown also acknowledges that anti-black attitudes did take hold over time due to the influence of inherited cultural biases and social prejudices um towards outsiders that associated blackness with slavery you gave an interesting anecdote just now",
      "This takes a long time and kind of becomes established in recent centuries. So you can correct me if I'm wrong, but even as late as the 15th century an Englishman could be enslaved because he was not observing certain legal interdictions that led to that.",
      "contains some human shortcomings that must be rejected, but also powerful foundational principles of human dignity that form its cornerstone. For Ammatics and for the Ammatix Institute this book highlights the need for modern Islamic thought to reclaim Islam's egalitarian ethical teachings in order to combat enduring problems of racism. The path forward is not to reject the Islamic heritage wholesale, but to reorient that heritage towards the Qur'an and Sunnah's vision of justice and human unity.",
      "unity. I look forward to, inshallah fruitful discussion in partnership with professors Jimmy Jones and Muhammad Khalifa to think about how in an ummatic spirit we can promote anti-racism and mutual understanding between different peoples as a kind of means",
      "With that, I wish to hand it over to you Jack. You will have if that's okay 20-30 minutes to give a broader view of what you are arguing and shall be connecting back to the question of aromatics and what it means to think about this as an automatic problematic part of that expression. And then that will be followed by Professor Jimmy Jones speaking",
      "speaking, responding to your remarks for about 10-15 minutes if that's okay. Followed by Professor Mahamud Khalifa responding to remarks for roughly the same time and then you'll have the opportunity to respond to those before we open the floor to any people who have comments. Audience members attendees if you wish to comment please put your hand up and they will be noted down by us and we'll come to you around the hour",
      "hour and without further ado i should also mention of course that um we had a third discussant dr hadiza kerry abdulrahman she's recently just traveled back from nigeria and she's been a bit unwell so unfortunately she gives her sincere apologies for not being able to join but inshallah uh",
      "And I'm sure Professor Brown, Dr. Jones and Dr. Khalifa will give us a scintillating two hours. And finally, I suppose I should mention that I thank Professor Brown for making the time despite the fact that he has a flight to catch so we will conclude exactly in an hour and 40 minutes. I have a flight attached to see Jimmy Jones. So Jimmy Jones comments better be...",
      "fight so i'm not gonna like you know he can just pretty much say whatever he wants yeah this is the book uh i was talking about freedom's debt by pedigree you can see it all there if you want um yeah so basma man rahim thanks for inviting me thanks for adjusting the time for me for my incompetent scheduling uh thanks to the panelists for coming and taking their",
      "even read it who knows I'm not sure if I want something if I were a panelist I can't tell um so yeah so I mean the first thing I should say is like why you know people are like why did you write this book and that's a fair question I am uh not black as you may be able to tell from my existence but the reason why is because there was well first of all in some ways",
      "There was this one part of the book that, you know, it was a story that I actually had as an appendix in the book. That was really, in some ways very inspirational but in some way is very confusing. Just a very short version there's this, it's a story of a saint in bus right in the 700s and basically all the scholars of the city realized that the real kind",
      "real friend of God the real Saint in the city is this black slave we don't know his name he's just a black slave he's like the one who really is so they all bait they free him they buy him they free them and they they want they basically say we're going to be your students and um long story short The Saint dies while he's praying and they turn him over and as they as",
      "says the blackness vanished from his face and his face became like the moon so on one hand you have this story which is really inspirational that all these you know arab or almost all of them were arab at this point or you know free muslim scholars the leading lights of the city of bus draw um basically subordinate themselves to the person who's really the you know the lowest person on the social ladder this black slave because they realize he has the knowledge",
      "inspirational on the other hand you have this the story you know the idea that like blackness is something that disappears you see the person's goodness so black is something That's sort of bad and you and to be wished away so I was really confused by this story uh but I didn't really do anything about me just sort of thought well that's interesting maybe you'll find out about that someday but the more immediate cause for writing the book was that I think it was a summer of 20 2020",
      "um could it have been that long ago wow uh it was the summer whenever coven happened i can't remember when that was but there was this debate which I guess is actually you know I didn't know about if it's ongoing debates has been going on for some time where some it's not just a you know it's a popular debate but it's actually also some academics hold this position that Islam is like anti-black not just Muslims are racist but Islam at the level of its scripture",
      "of the Quran, the Sunnah, the Sharia is actually anti-black. So this was being debated on this one listserv and I kept getting sent questions about this debate. This hadith says this, how do you answer this question? So I sort of tried to look into this and one thing led to another in order to answer one question, I had to answer another question. I had",
      "Now, I should say that there are other books that deal with this. Very good books. Abdul Hamid Ali's, I think the Negro and Arab Islamic Consciousness. There's Sherman Jackson's book. There is there's Abul Haq Ashanti's Defining Legends, I",
      "are excellent and uh uh dowd will lead has i think two books athena mubarak has a book and um mustafa briggs has a new book beyond balal so these are all very good books and i i read them and used them but they did not address the specific issues that were being raised or some of the issues that we're raising this debate and they didn't deal with some",
      "book was to kind of bring together the best stuff that had been written on this topic so far, add, you know, fill in the gaps that hadn't been addressed and then kind of add more contextualizing information. And so that's how the book came about. Yeah. So I guess the kind of...I should start out by saying one of the things I address",
      "debate happens like so why is it that we talk about um Islam being anti-black like why is this I mean just the other day uh you know there was this article I think in a spectator in the UK about you know why don't we talk Islamic slavery um and then you'll just as often you'll see like why don' t we talk racism in the Arab world or why don''t we talk",
      "kind of people in the West who are generally not Muslim and not related to Islamic civilization. We actually do talk a lot about Islamic slavery, quote unquote, and about anti-blackness in the Arab Muslim world considering that's not like immediately relevant to us in the west but so the question is why is that? Like how did this become an issue? How is this being debated and you know academic listservs or how is it something that comes up regularly even in the public square",
      "blackness of the Arab world or the Muslim world. So I trace this back to three roots. The first is that the general Western European, especially British and American and Irish experience of what some people call the Barbary slave trade or the Barbari captivity which is from really the 1500s till the early 1700s there are Muslim pirates basically operating off",
      "you know, for out of what's today Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia who are actually like raiding and capturing British American and Italian and French sailors at sea or ships and taking people captive bringing them back to their bases as slaves where they're generally would be ransom back to families. Right? So that was a basically a money making system so this becomes a big part of kind of feature in",
      "feature in Western European cultural imagination. People write stories about their... One guy, by the way who was a captive was John Smith, one of the guys at Jamestown which my kids just learned about last year in school and I think also Daniel Defoe might have been or the character in Robinson Crusoe. I can't remember which one",
      "So there's like a lot of stories written about my time in the Barbary captivity. And so, oh, the horrors of how I was treated and the Moors and their, like the swarthy Moors, and then their Negro slaves that they have that they put in charge of us white Christians. And then you start having like, it's such a big genre that it's sort of best-selling books in French and English and in the American colonies to the point that people start writing fake ones, like forged ones.",
      "like forged ones, they become fictionalized. And it actually keeps going long after by the time you get into the mid 1700s is not really an issue anymore because things like the Royal Navy are very powerful. European navies are much more powerful at that point. It's actually a lot of times Muslims being captured by European vessels operating out of places",
      "being sold as slaves in Italy and France. So even though the tables had turned, there's still this genre of the idea that Muslims slave are capturing us. And of course, there is a lot of anxiety here because not only is the white person being captured by the Muslim, the swarthy Muslim with his even swarthier African slave but the big fear is like the white woman being captured",
      "violated slash attracted to this swarthy uh you know you can kind of put a bunch of stereotypes in there um you know muslim moorish male and then uh so this becomes actually the novels written about this there's board games written about all the way into like the mid-20th century even in films right",
      "actually about this issue. So things like Tarzan, everyone knows the Tarzan story. Why is Tarzan in Africa? Why is his family there? We'll talk about that in a second but there's this genre of movies called the sheikh genre which is about white man or white woman being captured by Arab slavers and then either escaping or fighting",
      "you know, you could have really some psychoanalysis cultural psychoanalyses of these stories because there's this is this like a rated R or PG? Or what is this rate at this colloquium? I would encourage you to use your discretion. I don't have a discretion so I'm just going to say it's there's a shoot there's an obsession with fear of being sodomized by Muslim men which",
      "uh which I don't know I'm just gonna put it out there it's really like obsessive in these stories to the point that like Muslims will we'll hear about this and they'll be like where are you getting this stuff from like we're not this is against our religion we're like no no we're obsessed so anyway uh and this goes all the way up into things like midnight Express like movies um",
      "So that's the first source is this anxiety about the Muslim slavery, enslaving us. The second thing is that after the kind of abolitionist activists in Britain and the U.S., or the Americas succeed in ending the Atlantic slave trade in essentially early 1800s their attention turns to what they see as the only other slave trade.",
      "slave trade that we did, which is sometimes called Christian slave trade but it's not really Christian because it's the right Christian thing to do. We ended that. The only other thing is what they call the Mohammedan slave trade. So that becomes the main kind of focus of abolitionist energy after the 1830s especially and here you have this clear idea emerged that now the only source of slavery in the kind",
      "in the kind of the world as they know it, kind of Afro-Eurasian world are basically Muslims. So especially Muslims, evil Arab Muslims capturing wonderful innocent noble savage native Africans who just want to dance and frolic and things like that right? So then you start having the image of the white hunter or explorer or colonist coming",
      "and saving the African, the black African victims from the evil foreign Muslim slash Arab slavers. And that's becomes a big theme cultural theme as well. As I mentioned, that's actually behind the whole Tarzan series is that Tarzan family has gone to Africa to protect the African population against the eight Arab slaver. So this becomes a huge issue",
      "And then that gets picked up by, so that's the kind of the first source is the kind",
      "Moritzstein's Temple or like the Back to Abyssinia movement, Marcus Garvey's movement, of course Nation of Islam. The idea that descendants of African slaves in America start to identify with a kind of real or mythical usually mythical or imagined African past and African present",
      "with the case of the Nation of Islam, it's sort of like a North African but still black, North African Arabian Black identity Muslim identity. In the case what emerges as some of these other Black nationalist movements like the Kemet Afrocentrist movement they identify much more with sub-Saharan African identities like Yoruba and especially",
      "different Nigerian identities. What they do is adopt this idea of the Arab Muslim slavery, and like white Christians in America see Muslims and Arabs as an enemy. They were a colonizing force that was enslaving threatening and destroying African civilization. You can see this with books like the book that came out in the 1970s,",
      "Destruction of African Civilization by Chancellor Williams. And, of course, you see the cover of the book. It's basically this kind of black African tribal warrior wearing a skirt of some kind. He's got a shield. You sort of imagine any random ethnicity you could imagine with a spear and a shield,",
      "Arab Muslim who's got like a turban on and he's with a scimitar, and he is on horse hacking down on this guy. So for this notion of Afrocentrism, Muslims in Islam are totally foreign to Africa and they're invasive colonial presence. And you can see also why this blends well within American context because it removes",
      "removes the focus of blame from white European and Americans, and puts it on Arabs slash Muslims. So people like Chancellor William Henrik Clarkson, one of his successors will say that Muslim Arab slave trade and colonial presence in Africa was worse than the European slave trade. So that kind of discourse you can see has been very blending well with conservative",
      "European and American ideas that the West is best. And like, you know, our past is not a passive sin and that we, you Know, yeah, we did slavery but we're sorry for it whereas these Muslims they've- They did it worse than us and they never apologized right? So that's the second source is kind of Afro centrist ideas in the US.",
      "to Africa, right? So especially in Nigerian politics you have some of these ideas of American Afrocentrism coming back and growing in and spreading amongst Christian Nigerian politicians. We'll start talking about Muslims as foreigners, Muslims as invaders, as oppressors of the kind of real true Africa. If you want to read about this, you can read books like Wole Syinka,",
      "Nigerian fiction writer who also wrote some non-fiction. He's a really big kind of articulator of Afrocentrism and talks about how Islam and Arabs can never really be part of Africa. Okay, then the third source is actually it's just Zionist Hasbara, basically pro-Israel public diplomacy. And I know someone would say, oh my God,",
      "you say that? That's like anti-Semitic and, no. This is just very obvious. There's no debate about this.\" So the people who are engaged in pro-Israel public diplomacy from the 1960s onward clearly articulate that they have interest in stoking this idea of Arabs slash Muslims being",
      "one, it fragments the kind of third world or colonized world solidarity against Western forces or settler colonialism. Because it says to sub-Saharan Africans your real enemy is not the white man, its Arabs and Muslims they're your real enemies. And second, it says that we Zionists are not actually racist, it's actually the Arabs who are really racist because look at all their anti black racism. So if you look at",
      "you look at I think I said this on Twitter like two days ago or something but if you look At Who writes these articles about why don't we talk about Arab Islamic slavery Arab Islamic Slaves worse than American slavery why don' t we talk About Arab Islamic blackness why don''t we talk it's these always come from two sources it's American and sort of European American and British usually West is best conservatives",
      "two sources. They will consistently, like clockwork, write about this topic. Like what's the name of the... Mark Lamont Hill for example, anytime he'll write about solidarity with Palestinians you'll immediately see either in Israeli online news outlets or just kind of pro-Israel or Israeli pundits will come out and say how can you save this Mark Lamon hill when Palestinians",
      "Palestinian Arabic is Abda's slave, right? So they immediately start to point, try to stoke the fires of or draw attention to and inflate the notion of kind of Muslim Arab anti-Black racism. So I should say that just as a rebuttal to this idea of Arab Islamic slavery, and again, I drew on other people who've done much better work on this than I have,",
      "people like Dalu Gubara and Nathaniel Matthews. They, if you want, especially Nathaniel Mathews' article is online. You can read it. It's very accessible. But they both make this argument which is look, if",
      "from the beginning. First of all, what is Islamic slavery? Is it slavery? Islamic slavery just slavery that Muslims do so anytime like let's say I'm a Christian and I'm enslaving people and then I suddenly convert to Islam and I am slaving people. Am I is this now Islamic slavery second of all on this idea that Arabs or Muslims are not part of Africa is nonsense because you have hundreds of millions of African",
      "people that we would racialize as Black, who see themselves as Black are Muslims. And there's millions and millions of people in Africa who speak Arabic and who learn to read and write Arabic. And of course, there is also this which of course is ignored by 19th century abolitionists but it's enormous intra internal to Africa slave trade that's not done by Muslims.",
      "Muslims. So at the same time as abolitionists are talking about that, the evils of the Mohammedan slave trade they're non-Muslim either Christian or people following traditional African religions in places like what's today Nigeria who are engaged in their own slave trade, who were actually enslaving people buying slaves selling slaves and of course there's also Ethiopia in the 19th century and early 20th century a Christian kingdom that is",
      "So there's all these inaccuracies that stem from stereotypes about what Islam is, about what Arabs are, about Africa is. And these are all highly inaccurate. It turns out I only have like eight minutes left which is amazing that I could talk this much. That's one of the things I talked about in the book. The rest of the book is speaking",
      "Speaking about a couple of things. One thing I found really interesting was actually just studying how we have conceptions of blackness, like where does this just think? I mean, this is a really interesting question who came up with the idea of saying that people are black or white or whatever. Right. So, I mean I've never met someone who actually has actual black skin. I don't know that someone who",
      "are really interesting and then how people depict themselves in pictures what that how that has to do with the availability of paint and ink and colors like what people um how our conceptions of color and race are linked to just things like what object or we have that we can name our color after or what how do we make paints and how can we represent ourselves oh that was really interesting uh then i talked about anti-blackness",
      "racism in Islamic civilization, I show how the Arabic culture at the time of the Prophet and the Arabian Peninsula. When you do see people speaking about blackness negatively it's not because there's anything inherently wrong with blackness, it's because in that case blackness is seen as a marker being an outsider in that tribal society. For example we'll often hear",
      "often hear about Bilal being black, but we don't hear about Amr bin al-As or Safwan bin Umayyah or other huge Quraysh figures in the Qurayshi Muslims and non-Muslims. We don't care about them being black which they are described as being black because their mothers are African. We never hear about that because it's irrelevant. They're part of the tribal elite so they're not going to be criticized. The Blackness is brought up only when you want to point out the outsider status of someone like Bilal.",
      "I then talk about, for example, someone Bilal has trouble getting married. He's an outsider. You know who has double the amount of difficulty getting married according to reports if you just look at the number of stories is actually Salman al-Farsi who is the opposite of black.",
      "that's brought up as an issue. Then I show how this is fairly well known, then Islamic civilization as Muslims spread out into the greater Mediterranean and the Eastern world they inherit a lot of the racial stereotypes not just from Greco-Roman culture but also from the biblical tradition. And I show that in the case of Islamic civilization in Islamic law, in Sufism and theology",
      "that uh when there is anti-blackness which there definitely is it's uh it's i think incidental it's not essentialist right so it's nothing about there are people who although a lot of muslims will talk about the reason you know the idea of the curse of ham which they inherit from the the greco-roman and the biblical tradition but that you know black people",
      "skin and to be enslaved because one of Noah's sons didn't behave properly towards his father. And that son's descendants are then cursed with blackness and enslavement, but there's as often I should say as often, but they're very senior huge figures in the Islamic scholarly tradition like Ibn al-Jawzi, Asyuti, Ibn Khaldun others who just completely reject this notion of the curse of Ham. They say it goes against",
      "They say it goes against the Hadith we know about, the origins of how people actually have their skin colored. It goes against their scientific ideas. So there's always voices that speak out against this. And these are very senior. These aren't marginal voices. These are some of the most prominent Muslim scholars in history.",
      "wear hijab or something because you can they're not attractive and you can look at them i show how this is just uh expressions of custom in that area and that in that maliki school of law people will other maliki scholars will say listen you might have this idea what's attractive or not but that's not how we think of attractiveness and why are you implanting your kind of customary notions of what's beautiful not beautiful in a fic book that this isn't this",
      "In Mecca from like the 1500s to at least the 1900s, there's this obsession that Ethiopian or women from the Horn of Africa, sort of Ethiopia and Somalia are considered the most beautiful women and kind of the most prized partners. So I discuss this and more in the book but I don't want to go on forever so I'll leave it there.",
      "of a very varied sort of kaleidoscope of discussions that are found in your book. Of course, I mean right towards the beginning of it you highlight that anti-blackness is in terms of Islamic civilization is incidental not essential and it should not be attributed to the Quran and the Sunnah and there are various partly geopolitical reasons for that maneuver. At this point I want",
      "I want to take the opportunity to welcome Professor Jimmy Jones, to present 10-15 minutes of comment. I also encourage people to write in questions in the Q&A box and we will try and address them once we have the discussants put in their comments.",
      "a brief sort of introduction to Professor Jamie Jones. He's a senior fellow at the Yaqeen Institute and a member of the American Academy of Religion, and an emeritus professor at Manhattanville College. He received his doctorate from Yale Divinity School, sorry, master's degree from Yale divinity school and his doctorates from Hartford Seminary. So without further ado, Professor Jones after you. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Rahim. I want",
      "I want to say that this book is a book that I like because, first of all, I'm a bibliophile. I've been a bibliophile since I was reading library books in segregated rural Virginia a long, long time ago, over 60 years ago. I just love books. That's number one. Number two, as an educator, I think this book, whether you like the book or not,",
      "Professor Brown even released a book where he's saying, how dare you write? And this is terrible for somebody white to be doing this thing. It's the kind of book that I like because it's intellectually provocative and intellectually inclusive which are intertwined. What do I mean by that? I would argue that being intellectually provocative as part of the prophetic tradition in other words",
      "beloved prophet peace be upon him was uh often taught by being intellectually provocative many of you know better than I the story about the young man who wanted to commit illegal sexual intercourse and and the Prophet asked him he said peace be Upon Him would he like to do it with his mother and other relatives this is being intellectual provocative see for me in",
      "days what we do in the classroom uh both in my courses and other courses particularly yes is to be intellectually provocative in the service of learning in the surface of understanding and i think this book does an excellent job of that and being provocative in my view pedagogically speaking is one of the things that particularly at the graduate school level also at the undergraduate level",
      "Because I think being provocative invites people in to the discussion, rather than you just walking in and say this is what's going on. And I think part of my role, and a part of rule of a professor, is to make sure that people who are at the margins for whatever reasons... When I was at Manhattan Middle College, I often taught about race and gender,",
      "saw as my role to include make sure that there were parts of the discourse in the classroom that they could relate to maybe not like but also get involved in and so that's number one i think this book uh and people who know me know that i sometimes like books when i like people for various reasons i won't get into that and so uh the second thing is that um",
      "you know, write this book? Well because I want to start back with the whole notion of Islam and religion. There's a book by Rosemary Radford-Ruther called Sexism and God Talk. And in the first part of the book she makes a very persuasive argument that all revelation is mediated through human experience. That's to say,",
      "This was an eye-opener for me because this really says that even though we get Wahi, for us as Muslims, the reality is that our beloved Prophet, peace be upon him, was a human being. And we won't get into the issue of whether he's perfect or not but was a humane in a human context and therefore subject to the cultural context",
      "and that you, I would argue to both the Christians and the Muslims in my classroom is that you don't really understand Christianity. You don't understand Islam unless you have some ability to delve into the primary language. Obviously for Muslims we should but I would say to the Christians, many of them... I was raised in a Christian context and I read the King James Version of the Bible",
      "James ye shall know the truth and a true show set you free I would argue we don't really understand unless we understand that all revelation is mediated through human experience therefore to really argue that anti-blackness in 1445 or 2023 an anti-Blackness 1400 years ago is essentially the same thing which many people do quite frankly it's just intellectually lazy there's no",
      "There's no way around it. And it leads us to places that absolutely don't make any sense at all. And I think Professor Brown has done this very, very well using language, using history in his book in terms of unpacking the reality that lots of things have happened in the last 1400 years and to label Islam, in essence, anti-Black. It just doesn't make",
      "all. I think the other way that this book is helpful is the appendix, the appendices which help us delve into the various ideas paradigms about Islam and anti-blackness depending on what you're interested in and i just love that in the book. And then there's a bibliography um the bibliography I'm I love bibliographies because",
      "Professor Brown to think about I thought some things were noticeably missing from the bibliography, from my perspective as a person who teaches about racism a lot still at the Islamic Seminary of America. One is it's Kennedy's book How To Be an Anti-racist. I think that a lot of our thinking including within and outside of the Muslim community but particularly in academia",
      "is being framed that way. And it makes a nice, nice, target for people like the governor now in Florida because of what I call the lazy intellectual thinking behind this major premise. That is to say you're either racist or anti-racist. The way I look at social justice and the way I",
      "doesn't make any sense. When I'm organizing, and I've been a community organizer in the community, I want to get those people in the middle between the two because those people often are the people who move us ahead. And so I thought that Kendi's book was missing. The other thing is that a book that I use often is Gordon Allport's older book written by white male, Gordon Allpott,",
      "I think it gives us a place to start, and Professor Brown talks about this at the end of the book. It gives us some of the impact of racism, anti-blackness on a personal level. And Professor Brown talked about a concept introduced by somebody else called the duty to miscegenate.",
      "I mean, I love this term the duty to miscegenate. I think it's one of those intellectual provocative terms.",
      "The segregation was a thing in that you could get locked up and the lovings I believe might have been put in jail at one time, but others were for interracial marriage. And so the duty to miscegenate, Professor Brown doesn't buy it all. He argues that we should at least think about giving a fair chance to people from other cultures",
      "and particularly talk about Black people, which I think is a good idea. But I think what Gordon Allport does in this book in the first couple of chapters talks about the five levels of acting out prejudice and the lowest level being anti-locution that is speaking bad about a group of people. I think one of the things we can do to combat anti-Blackness, combat prejudice is to monitor our speech, which is nothing strange to us as Muslims as we well know",
      "as we well know and as we understand that, we should make sure. And you can look at this book because my time has run out here but anyway it's five levels of acne. Our prejudice starts with anti-immaculation then it moves to avoidance, then it move to segregation and to extinction and they're interlocked. That is Allport argues that negative talk about individuals leads",
      "leads to discrimination, these two attack, these things like the Holocaust. And I buy this argument and so we should guard our tongues when we talk more so than we do in the Muslim community about anti-blackness and the like. The final thing I wanna say is there's something called racial allegiance that in the African American community in particular,",
      "we put up with people whose belief about Islam and Allah are very, very far afield of what the average Muslim worldwide would accept in terms of that. And I won't unpack that at all. The only reason that we oftentimes do this is because of racial allegiance. What I mean by this is that many of us",
      "of us who have quote done well and studied uh islam and arabic and done very well at it still cling to people in notions that are from the street right and i think this is this is very problematical in terms of a moving this project with islam forward in the united states",
      "was seen as a leader of the Muslim project, as it will. And Bilal certainly was the leader of that Muslim project in the early Muslim community and I think this sort of racial allegiance that many, I believe African Americans have pushes us to the back. I wanna disagree, I'm gonna close by disagreeing with Professor Brown on his story about the Bajra monk",
      "monk. I just read that differently, it might be different and have to do with the difference in my racial background. I don't read it as the monk who was black and turned white. For me, I read it in a Quranic context maybe. And secondly, I was a bit amazed because this is at the beginning of the book,",
      "deal of very good research spanning centuries, spanning different contexts, Chinese and other to unpack this notion that somehow blackness means bad and whiteness means good because it's not all the time in all context. And I think in that particular context, I think he misreads it there's a kind of racial allegiance that I think white people have to Black people",
      "that where they're often blacker than we are. I have a mentee who's like that, who I have to caution him about being so hard on white people. And really the final point I will say is that the notion of being the wrong phenotype, right? In this case, Professor Brown is the wrong person",
      "to be writing about Blackness, which is an outrageous concept. I have many examples of this but I want you to think about intellectual provocative people like Imam Siraj Wahadj, Sister Aisha Prime, Ubaidullah Evans and my favorite person to debate with Sherman Jackson who phenotypically are constantly in spaces",
      "in spaces where they're talking about things that black bodies aren't used to talking about and so somehow it's okay for them but not okay for Jonathan Brown why don't I stop there Professor Jones really sort of some very thought-provoking comments and i'm sure it will spin into a very engaging discussion and professor brown you'll have the opportunity inshallah to share your reflections just after we give the floor to professor",
      "Professor Muhammad Khalifa. So Dr. Khalifa, very brief introduction for you he's a professor in the Department of Educational Studies at Ohio State University and I just want to give you 10-15 minutes please feel free to share your thoughts. Thank you Dr Azmi Bismillahirrahmanirrahim",
      "I have nothing but praise for the book too. I loved reading it, I thought it was a great contribution and just to kind of jump right off and get it out of the way about whether or not Dr Jonathan Brown as a person who is socialized to take your language as a white man can write this book.",
      "think that African Americans such as myself, probably we would have never reached a state of being not slaves if it were not for white abolitionists and other white Americans who alongside Black Americans fought for the freedom of whites. I would just like to get that out of the way quickly. That doesn't mean that people don't carry biases into their writing.",
      "that people don't carry other questions into their writing. So just to get that out of the way quickly, now I do want to address whiteness a little bit in my remarks just in a minute but I'll try to keep my remarks short. I was really happy to kind of just go through this journey with Professor Brown about...I really enjoyed",
      "types of blackness, what it means anti-blackness and the such. And then brought that into histories of Islam and how anti-Blackness rose through Islam. One of the things I first thought about before reading the book was Hadith of the Raisin and what anti- Blackness meant at the advent of the Prophet when he came. There were clearly some...",
      "Maybe there are narrations out there I'm not aware of, things like follow your leader even if he's a Roman slave or follow your reader even if you say Persian slave or something like that but I haven't seen those narratives so I do. Of course, not attribute any type of bigotry to the prophet in this entire book I think did a great job of laying that out.",
      "as the Prophet, peace be upon him himself described Jahiliyyah and his people that he was trying to cleanse them of that. And as we know after the prophet left all types of Jahiliyya came back one of the questions so I was just left with a number of questions and I think that the questions you know kind of come into three broad areas so i'll just go through them really quickly when I was reading the book um I was really blown away at",
      "why should we as Muslims have to apologize for, for example, out of behaviors or no fiqh or no jurist can ever come and leave his biases at the courtroom or a message. So why should be have to defend those? I think that perhaps some of them are not... I mean, I really appreciated the nuance in the culture",
      "societies to be harmonious but i also felt that perhaps um by us trying to defend that um perhaps we have some culpability in that a little bit um so um let me just get to so one one area one broad area is anti-blackness and the entanglement with whiteness and so scholars like ralph ellison and other scholars in the modern era all kind of",
      "suggest that blackness especially post-colonial like after the colonization of european congress and imperialism that black this is has a deep entanglement with whiteness and that for example black identities were sacrificed in order to complete white identity so in other words white identities could not be described or your europe as a continent",
      "or in this same kind of like, both discursive and material behavior comes up in anti-blackness but it's impossible from a colonial way since colonization and colonial way forward to kind of describe. And especially in the current moment blackness without having almost deeply intertwined",
      "intertwined white type of whiteness with that. And I was wondering if there might be more space in the book to kind of take up whitenness, there were some aspects in which it did come out here and there. And so you know this like for example the Afro-pessimist views that you talked about which i thought was fascinating but so in other words in order to be human is to not be black right?",
      "Right. And I think it's very correct that many Afro pessimists would say like, you know, OK, these solidarities because we're talking about solidarity here.",
      "out for Kashmir, we've gone out for Burma. We've gone off all of these in the moment you kind of like get this, the famine is lifted or the war then okay those solidarities are no longer there. I guess the question around that is does it? Does it? Are African American Muslims and other Muslims in other Western countries and there's a lot of distinction doctor a good friend of mine too is Dr Jackson he",
      "here are distinct we're not seen as immigrant origin and stuff like that but it is some sort of subtractive or dehumanized view of black american muslims also needed uh in the muslim community in the current moment um there are also questions another category around epistemologies",
      "both in the current Muslim community and in the book was given to uh the treatment of people and how they may be positioned there was some attention to materiality but it was mainly about kind of this interaction between blacks and Arabs or Blacks and other Muslims or Black",
      "and Europeans. And I'm wondering, although this is definitely important, I did wonder to what extent our Black epistemologies of Black ways of being a Black knowledge that for example gave birth to places like Timbuktu but other just Black ways",
      "other words, when people show up in a space and their cultural patterns are not recognized or not normalized to what extent is that anti-blackness as well? Not just the interpersonal but the historical and the culture and epistemological. And so we're not necessarily talking about intentional but we're talking about cultural. So like for example",
      "So like I'm a scholar of education and what we would argue in an educational space is that it's not only about the interaction between teacher and student or principal and student, or principal parent. It's like okay all of this experiential and historical and contextual knowledge at these kids come to school with as you are finding in the curriculum you don't find any pedagogy you don t find any instruction. And so to what extent does the knowledge that people contain also how is that expressed through anti-blackness? Is one of the questions",
      "questions I don't know if that's clear or not um and then the last sort of question I had um a group of questions kind of are connected to power in the current moment so like um in the contemporary message for example uh does recognizing blackness or not recognize so like every message I go to uh it seems as though the expressions of Islam the announcements",
      "movements, the entire kind of culture around that space is devoid unless it is an African American or African masjid. But in masajid or cultural spaces, it seems as though the knowledge and the knowledge production, the stances, the histories heavily reflect anti-Black sentiments. And so a lot",
      "as though Muslims today, as I'm hearing them talk about race and racism, they de facto kind of go to okay there was Bilal, there was Osama, and there were other Sahabi. And then there's the verse that the best of you are those who are closest to Allah. That's like a de facto response for all of the nuances that Dr Jonathan Brown is bringing up in this book.",
      "that it is true, clear. I think it's indisputable that Islam isn't egalitarian and goes against any type of prejudice or racism or anything like that. I'm wondering what the actions of current scholars should be with this? It seems to me to be short-sighted",
      "And if to borrow from Professor Jones, intellectually lazy just to say, hey, there was Bilal and Allah says that the believers are brothers. And I think that that I shouldn't say it's intellectually lazy though. I mean, that is our faith but I don't think that's been enough to kind of shed light on the nuances there.",
      "I think that maybe it's people putting their head in the sand. I'm not sure, but I've been deeply frustrated by it. So like for example a question that I'm having is you know Dr Jackson gave a lecture about white supremacy and kufr. Is anti-blackness kufar? If people persist because i've been in many many masajid where masha'Allah ta baraka Allah imams are talking about blackness",
      "talking about blackness and they're talking about racism. And it's like the community doesn't shift, right? You still aren't marrying my daughter. I'm glad that you brought up marriage in the end part of the book. But you still not marry my daughter, I'm still not going into business with you, and I'll still have this distant relationship with you. Let's just take it up. Is anti-blackness a type of kufr? And I'm not saying that will take you outside of Islam but one of the types of kuffar.",
      "I'll end there. Jazakum Allah khair. May Allah bless you, may Allah bless the work, and may Allah allow you to continue to produce such works in defense of Islam. Baraka Allah wafiq.",
      "which you may well be interested in hearing the other panelists views on. So I want to sort of point that out, I also want to say that for all the attendees we have a whole set of questions in the Q&A which will start to address just before we do that i'm going to give the floor to Professor Browne in just a second but I did want to perhaps use my chair's prerogative for a moment and",
      "further your comments about you know is anti-blackness kufr as in so to speak like a type of which is uh as ibn abbas refers to that can be below but if we think of the hadith of the prophet um i think it was the hadif where he had you know castigated someone and insulted a slave I think because of their blackness that was something",
      "responses. You're a person who has some Jahiliyyah and Jahiliyya is a species of Qafir. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a scholar who wrote about the Qafira in the last century commented that this hadith is an indication that Iman and Jahilyyah can be present in someone just because there are elements of Jahilyyya doesn't render",
      "but that is undoubtedly an element which is antithetical to their Islamic identity. But I would love to hear Professor Brown and any Professor Jones' comments as well. So, Professor Brown, you have the floor now to just respond to anything that you've heard so far. Thanks so much for those comments. And I think that was first time. I want to write down and put on my CV",
      "put on my CV, Professor Jimmy Jones says Jonathan Brown is quote blacker than we are. I don't know if that's going to use that as a... So the Hadith of Abu Dharr people get this confused a lot. The main well-known version in Sahih Bukhari is Abu Dhahr insults somebody. We don't what? We just know he insults",
      "how slaves should be treated. There's a very, very much less well-known version that it's Bilal that Abu Dhabi insults. And so the one where he says you have Jahiliyyah in you, he insults someone but we don't know who that person is. But that's just like a detail. I realize I should have resolved that Basra and",
      "Basran saint story. I just left it there and didn't give the explanation. So, it's very interesting because when we read it like there is you know, we have our biases right? So, we say when the Blackness leaves him, we think he would maybe look like Brad Pitt or something. I'm not sure what he would look like right but it's it's",
      "idea of the blackness vanishing from a saint's face but it always says at least almost always it says the black has vanished and his face became like the moon so it's not his face become white it's now his face becomes Arab it becomes like the Moon so you have this is I have a whole chapter on this right in the Sufi tradition you have This notion of the the Black Slave as the lowest right so if The Human Voyage towards God is a voyage from the material world",
      "the kind of lowness of our animal nature higher and higher and to connect with the transcendent Divine right so that's and the boundary of the loot of the astral world is the moon so in the kind Of kind of Ptolemaic Aristotelian abyssinian Islamic philosophy we live in a sublunary World so the Moon is the boundary",
      "also of course the prophet muhammad so becoming like the moon is to become beautiful in faith it's to become transcendent right it's a transcend this earthly world and it's at the prison and the problems that we live with and the vices that plague us in this world. So you have this story of the black slave becoming like, the moon the vanishing blackness is not about remember all so adam the name adam means dark very dark",
      "dark very dark right so the human being, the Adam goes from being black dark to being like the moon like the Prophet Muhammad let transcend it. So that's you have to read these stories through the kind of language of Sufism then it makes sense if you just read it kind of from an American perspective or a modern perspective you see uh Black person turns into white person so what's up with that? I mean I think it's very important that we understand how",
      "context then we understand the meaning as opposed to just kind of reading it only through our lens of suspicion okay um uh Professor Jones talked about anti-racism and even Kennedy's book I I you know what I could not get a copy of his book uh I couldn't get from the library I couldn' t get any copy of it so",
      "read a bunch of reviews of it. I'm not criticizing the book as a fine book, but I think it represents a school of thought. It's not a new idea. I talk about this in one chapter in my book, which I think is actually very useful for people who are interested in this topic about big debates within discussions about racism, race and racism. Because there's a lot of controversy in public life in America",
      "are you telling me I'm racist just because I'm white? It's because there's two different understandings of racism, basically. The kind of classical traditional understanding is I'm racists if I say I think that you're bad because of your race or you're worse than me because of",
      "is racism doesn't matter what you believe. Racism is a system. It's a system that results in inequities based on race, and if you're part of that system, you might think there's no difference between Black people and white people. You might love Black people. Your best friend might be Black, et cetera, et",
      "not be racist, I actually have to step out and say, I am actually going to fight against the system and try and dismantle it. So what happens is you'll have someone like even Max Kennedy say, you're a racist because you're part of this system. And then that white person's like, what do you mean? I'm racist. I don't believe black people are bad, but it's because you have two different definitions of racism that are kind of going past each other. And that's why there's,",
      "there are two different definitions being used. The raisin hadith is fascinating, the Hadith in Sahih Bukhari where the Prophet says Obey your commander even if he's an Ethiopian slave whose head looks like a raisin it's very interesting because that actually is in Sahi Bukhar but that's a very rare version of that Hadith. The main version you'll see across collections is just the Prophet saying obey",
      "your commander even if they are a slave mutilated slave like a slave who's been cut uh i'd like to you know show their slaves that or something so it actually doesn't mention blackness uh so it's interesting because if you took the main version of that hadith it would actually not contain that raisin clause but let's forget about that and just look at the raising clause what I thought when I was studying this",
      "this over the centuries. So until roughly the 1200s, and again we're talking about scholars who are Arab, Persian, Central Asian, they basically say, they just treat it as a description like okay he's Ethiopian so his skin is dark like the color of a raisin and their hair is curly and it's sort of like the texture of the wrinkled texture of",
      "or Anabok color. Then after you go through the 1200s, it starts taking a nastier turn. So you start seeing people say their head is like a raisin because they're stupid and they are kind of less intelligent. You have a lot of these nasty stereotypes coming in. But what I found interesting was... And this is weird. Let's say scholars",
      "enormous amount of work. They write, for example, praise poetry about the Prophet just volumes and volumes of this stuff but they don't seem to write hadith commentaries so it's very hard to find them talking about this although you do see, for instance, the Sokoto caliphs Uthman Dunfadio and his son Muhammad Bella who were both very good scholars quote this hadith in their own writings and they don t have any anxiety about it.",
      "it they don't say like oh yeah i i don't know what to say about this i feel like insulted they just these use that they don' have any problem with it similarly a scholar who actually is ethiopian who died just a few years ago muhammad uh amin al-harari he discusses it and he's ethiopian and he doesn't um again just sort of pretty matter of fact about the hadith so i think",
      "We might be offended by this comparison, but we also have to accept the perspective of Black Muslim people who re-racialize as Black or Muslims who thought themselves as Black, who just see this as a comparison. And this is what you see a lot in Islamic thought and also just pre-modern human, even up until 1990s political correctness. The idea that I say,",
      "The idea that I say like, oh, Osama, your skin looks like – your head looks like, I don't know, like Reese's Pieces. I don' t know. I'm just trying to think of some stupid – I mean like that would sound – now people are like, Oh my God! Jonathan Brown said this. He should be canceled. No, up until relatively recently it was just totally normal to say so-and-so looks like X, right? And so we again can have our sensibilities. That's fine.",
      "And, you know, if it makes people feel better to not be compared to objects or to food or whatever, that's totally laudable and I support that. But we don't want to take this and impose it on the past and treat people in the past as somehow having failed to live up to our objective moral standards that are somehow universal. So I think that's important to keep in mind.",
      "in mind um whiteness uh we we talked about that as well yeah it's really interesting so one of the reasons i'm not like like what i mean i'm",
      "of richmond nonsense it's all just confederate and far as i'm concerned this is just confederation diet rhetoric and it's also like deeply raised anti-black racist it's uh and i don't i think it's always dressed up it's just racism dressed up in whatever modern clothes we want to give it uh white identity is entirely defined by the oppression and dispossession",
      "white food or like white culture, like that I could be down with or something. But there's just not it's not it all based on crushing other people and treating them like garbage in my opinion, or just maybe being alcoholic. I'm not sure these are so the point is that I don't support or endorse any kind of positive concept of whiteness. I think it's entirely a negative concept that exists through negative integration by othering",
      "groups. It's interesting to think about why whiteness is valued at different times throughout, and this something you find in much of the Northern hemisphere certainly kind of North of Sahara desert all the way to Japan, Europe or to Japan",
      "whiteness is valued in women because it's seen as standard a sign of elite status right, because you don't have to go out and get sunburned. So you often see like whitenest praise and dark skin denigrated but there's actually economic reasons behind that. It's because the darker person is the person who has been out in the sun having to work whereas the light-skinned woman is",
      "well how whiteness intersects with standards of beauty can change over time um whereas now whitenness is a standard of beauty not in the sense of kind of white skin and its economic value but because today if you're rich you can get a tan right so if youre really white person you would actually to look rich and successful you would you know look like donald trump or something and get a 10. uh you dont want to look pasty and horrible like me so uh where as now it's about",
      "it's about actually European phenotype, like the actual hair and eyes and the nose of a Northern kind of notional European person that becomes the standard of beauty probably because of colonialism and ongoing Western European cultural domination of the cultural sphere. Timbuktu in Black philosophy... I mean there is a lot to write",
      "to write about there but I'm just not qualified to do that. I read about this, I did my best to read about it and figure out if I could bring it into my work. I didn't feel like it had a lot of intersection. And I think one of the reasons is that sometimes the way in which people try scholars try to make kind of blackness and Islam and African philosophy",
      "philosophy and you know African-ness intersect with Islam is actually highly problematic once you look at it because people talk about Timbuktu. People talk about Ahmed Baba died 1627. Ahmed Baba was if you ask Ahmed Baba, what is your identity? He said I'm a Sinhaja Berber and there in Timbuktut at the time of Ahmed Baba there's black",
      "So his mosque, the Sankori Mosque, means the white master mosque. It's like Sayyid al-Abya, the white Master Mosque right? The Sir Whitey basically it's like the Sir White, Sir Honky Mosque if you will, right? And yet he and Timbuktu are seen as these representations of black Islam or black scholarship. Now that objection is also wrong because",
      "because we have no idea what Ahmed Baba looked like. If Ahmed Baba came to America, he would probably be considered black. Being black or white in Timbuktu had nothing to do with how you looked. It had to do it with your ethnicity was. If you're a Berber or Arab or Fulani usually, you were considered white even though you might be extremely dark skinned",
      "ethnic background it's associated with pastoralism and if you're black it means you come from uh groups like uh like Wangara sorry let me just silence my phone um uh and it's Associated with a Pastoral oh sorry with agricultural background so when we go in and we look at Timbuktu and we see black and white we see Ahmed Baba and all the things of that this is just a feast of misunderstanding for us because",
      "standing for us because one the black and white has nothing to do with how people looked two it has nothing To Do With our understanding of black and White three uh but it's hard because you don't know you know when at for example when if you have a Berber scholar in Timbuktu writing and they're talking about hadith and they see a Hadith about an Ethiopian slave and they have a commentary on it are they going to be seeing that as",
      "as talking about them or is it about somebody else in the city? It's very hard to know if you're, for example, a Mauritanian scholar or someone from Mali or Senegal or Fulani scholar like the Sokoto Caliphs were. It's really hard to tell how they saw themselves. We don't even see themselves as Black. It is very hard",
      "seeing uh people black scholars talking about themselves as sued as Black as s-word before they might talk about themselves it's like being Hausa or um uh from Borno right like um these it's very hard to know if you view themselves and view other people and we just go and say oh well they're",
      "an example of African philosophy or something. And I think that might be accurate, but it has to be approached with a lot more caution than just saying someone from Timbuktu is African and representing African tradition or something, um... Professor Brandt, unfortunately because we're a bit short on time, I wonder if... Yeah, I'm done okay. Let me just finish one more thing which is about the contemporary mosques. I mean, I don't want to say like I've been saying this for a long time, but I've",
      "should be leadership, should be seated to black Muslim. I think this is an obvious thing to do for the good of our community and for its protection and for other anti-racist reasons. And I think you have a big one. I mean, I live in Northern Virginia. You have all these mosques that are basically all like rich daisies and Arabs. That's great. Nothing wrong with rich daises and Arabs, right?",
      "But there's other mosques in the area which are like black mosques. And these two groups don't interact. And so I think they should do things like mosque partnerships where these mosques do activities together. Like Mohammed or Jimmy, if I come and talk to you, we're both Muslims, right?",
      "Dr Khalifa, Dr Jones. Inshallah we're going to turn to questions now but if you want to sort of put in additional comments please don't hesitate and so actually the earliest question is an interesting one it might be that this is really in your territory Jack more than anyone else's someone has basically given a link to a Thomson Reuters scan of fatwa given by ISIL legitimating",
      "legitimating sexual slavery in their territories. So this is obviously ISIS in recent times, and someone's saying, Is this good law? So to speak. So it's probably addressed by your book on your I tried to look at that. I pushed the link but I'm like such a bad multitasker there's no way that I could read that and think about it and pay attention stuff so I would just urge the person",
      "slavery which probably someone has made into a PDF unfortunately but right okay um the next question uh has in some sense been answered but I should also say there will be polls coming up periodically for anyone who's an attendee please do have a read of them and try to respond so over the next few minutes you might expect to see a few polls coming",
      "Gihad Hassanine, who actually is a doctoral supervisee of mine at Oxford asks in response to this point by Dr Khalifa. It's also interesting to hear all of your thoughts on the extent to which these attitudes by Muslims towards black people or African-Americans or towards non Arabs more generally are themselves influenced",
      "Arabs and black people, and the relations among these categories. Some of it seems inflected entirely through modern discourse and ignorance of Muslim history on the part of Muslims themselves. So yeah to what extent is the way in which we perceive racism in our own time a function of modern categories of thought? I don't know.",
      "I think there's a lot of answer. It depends where you are, right? So I think a lot it depends on where we think of Islam being, right. If we think about Islam as being kind of Mediterranean Arab worldy then that's certainly a bias and",
      "Muslims or the not really Muslims are like black Africans and South Asians and Southeast Asians, which is of course nonsense. So if you just go by scholarship probably South Asia has produced more Muslim scholarship in the last 200 years than anywhere else. Similarly, this one scholar in the 1300s travels from the Hejaz to Mali and he's like, the scholars here know Maliki law better than I do.",
      "And so, you know, I think that but there's there if you see scholars writing, even Egyptians, let's say, writing in the 1800s, their attitudes towards blackness and Africans are very similar to towards white people. And they're also this kind of they kind of there's a little bit of patronizing Black Muslims as they kind",
      "Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse who died in 1975 and he has some uh writing about this where he goes to he goes like Egypt and he's speaking in perfect Arabic they're like how do you know Arabic it's like I'm a Muslim scholar you know what are you what do you mean how do I know Arabic right um so uh the uh I think there is there are there is some intersection of modernity but I think most a lot",
      "have pre-modern origins in Islamic civilization. Yeah, I don't know if that answers that question. Any other questions? Are you getting these polls? These polls incidentally, just for what it's worth we did put out a poll which said to what extent is racism more generally an issue among modern Muslims so not just anti black racism within the United States",
      "States. But there are other forms of racism that I think anti-Black racism is probably the most salient globally, but I guess in perhaps attitudes of Arab superiority in certain instances or maybe South Asian superiority vis-a-vis other groups within Muslims. Yeah, it's funny. As much as I've been bagging on white people,",
      "you know white and this is all I don't even probably don't need to say this but like you know White Americans and Europeans are if they're racist they at least know they they need to like hide that or like Channel it in certain ways right whereas there's other parts of the world I'm not naming names where people were just straight up racists and they're just in in ways that are kind of terrifying um I don",
      "you go and you're just like, you know, you see stuff. And I can't believe I just saw this. I can be actually acting like this. And they don't even think it's a problem. But I understand someone acts like this and everybody is like, Oh my God, that's terrible. But no one even thinks there's a probably. I think there's also an element if I may check of the two different definitions of racism that you were talking about because it's sort of surface level racism rather than the structural form of racism. That's what Du Bois was talking about",
      "talking about that's very often maybe on display and is not shocking to those people in those cultures. But in our own context, in the West, I think that sort of deeper, structured kind of civilizational project that is reflective of contemporary racism is. One person asked about the verses of the Quran that talks about the believers on the day of judgment some people's face will be white, some people face will",
      "Okay, very interesting. It's very important to remember that when you look at Arab culture at the time of the Prophet in that kind of Quranic context, if you talk about people's phenotypes, the way they look, you either use a bipartite system which would be red and black,",
      "white being more of like a kind of Mediterranean-y look. White is sort of a more lighter skinned, Mediterranean-ly look. None of this by the way involves Northern Europeans who are just off the radar white for these people. Same way with the Romans, by the Way. For Romans that's where the idea of white comes from. People call them white as a Roman word. Albus means it's your general... Just picture like a typical Italian guy. That's white. If someone was a Northern European like Irish or British",
      "in German Romans would call that person pallidus which means pallid so they didn't even use the word white uh those people were beyond White so Arabs uh so my point is that when if you have a black-white comparison in The Time of the Prophet it's actually not about people's looks it's about noble ignoble so that's why someone will say like your white of face or may God wait in your face it means God ennoble you honor you right so and Muslim scholars talk about this without",
      "without exception, basically when they do the Tafsir of these verses. This has nothing to do with how you look about being African or Arab or whatever, or on the day of judgment, you're going to look like an African person or something. No, this is about nobility, ignobility and as Fakhar Razi says, blackness is not like any blackness in the world. This is a completely other discussion. It's not about earthly phenotype.",
      "when you're talking about the quran the context of the qur'an black and white is a metaphor about um good and bad uh red red in black is about looks or black red and white those are the ones we're talking bout looks forgive me i had my mic on mute so once again professors khalifa",
      "Christopher and Jones, if you want to chime in at any point please don't hesitate. There was a question about Professor Ben Freeman's work so I think Bernard Freeman you mean? Yes Bernard Freeman sorry the... And so does this book serve as a work of Black Islam theology? I think this is a reference to your book how does it compare or contrast with the work of Bernard Freeman?",
      "yeah uh i think bernard freeman's books more about slavery and islamic civilization uh it may be sherman jackson has books about like black theology um and theology of black suffering so i think sherman Jackson's works mine doesn't deal with that kind of stuff mine's really about causes of Blackness in Islamic civilization right I wouldn't be qualified to write the other kind",
      "binary of light and darkness. Yeah, I mean this is really interesting to think about like why is it that... And this is something that I find fascinating and if I could... I couldn't believe there's not been... That I couldn t find a study on this which is how do people who speak languages in Africa South the Sahara, how did they deal with metaphor and physical descriptor use of black and white? So what I did, I just I did as many surveys as I could and I",
      "as much research as I could on, research done in these languages. And what you find is it's very common in Africa South and Sahara for people to say, for example, what is the normal skin color of someone in your region? They would say black, right? And then they would say, do they have figures of speech like black hearted or something? And",
      "descriptor and black as metaphor. They don't see it as somehow influencing the way they see their skin color. Now you do have, for example, in Fulani dialects, Fubei dialects slaves will be talked about as darker than regular people but it's interesting in that case it's not about like the melanin content of",
      "of dirt, right? So the notion of black as lesser and white as better or light as better and dark as worse is common even in areas where you have people who are all dark skinned. All would be like racialized as black today. And who even use black to describe their own skin color but that doesn't mean that they see them... The word black as a physical descriptor as being necessarily negative. The other thing is",
      "yeah, why is that? I mean it's interesting. But then another thing you find which is fascinating is how white is understood in some to the extent we have access to this material, how pre-colonial African sub-Saharan African cultures thought about color. So for example, the Congo region and stuff,",
      "are death those are the masks of someone who's dead like an ancestor or a spirit so white is thought of as linked to death and the ancestors maybe because when people die their blood pools in their body and their face would actually look lighter colored. So it's interesting that there's this association of whiteness with afterlife or links with the ancestors, which is very different than what other people might think about whitenness.",
      "So this stuff is all fascinating and I hope people do more research on this. Just a comment about the first of the polls, which asked to what extent is racism a more general problem or modern Muslims need to grapple with? And understandably everyone said either it's a central issue that needs addressing or it's an important issue but not necessarily central so everyone recognizes",
      "um you know that it is an issue i think one in 20 out of 20 people who participated said they thought it was a low priority so i mean in general there is a recognition that this is actually quite an important issue kind of throughout the modern ummah. I wonder if any of the scholars wants to comment on the question of its role in uh you know an ummatic context,",
      "I think that if we can survive this sense of solidarity across 1.5, nearly 2 billion Muslims. You know those divisions ethnic in our own time national linguistic and racial will be a component of those to what extent do you think that that's something that needs an even can",
      "if you're not going to do business with me uh are you gonna mention bilal but you're",
      "that this is the issue for leadership in the community. And again, it's the way we conceptualize the whole problem is part of the problem and part of it. Leadership has an obligation to I believe if you're leading in a Muslim community have obligation to understand some of the things we're talking about today because in the United States of America blackness races anti-racist is front and center almost every place",
      "every place that matters like the presidential candidates talk about it. And so therefore, if you're going to be a chair of the board and run youth groups, you should understand this. I'm not necessarily talking about teaching this because I think understanding the fact that blackness now is very different from blackness even 50 years ago",
      "that we understand, that you have to come to grips with it if you're going to live in this society. And you have make some effort to be... I hate to say it like this, a pro-human because that's really what it's about. Because the notion that Black means other than human is a very real thing and something that I felt growing up in this country",
      "dismantle it but I don't uh I'll stop by you don't dismantle this by calling people racist by the way I just don't because dismantling is about starting a conversation that leads to action and calling people races doesn't start the conversation uh Osama is that I wrote that thing for you does is that getting published or just getting sent to people or what happens with that because it does deal with like Afro pessimism and Islamic civilization so so the um",
      "Professor Brown very kindly has provided sort of a brief summary of some of the key arguments in his book, and that will be published on the Omatic's website. We apologize we were supposed to send it to the members on the mailing list but inshallah it'll be on the website. Yeah yeah I want to chime in too because I really do think that Muslims today as Dr Jones is saying",
      "language that we're using to address this. And it kind of makes us seem disingenuous a little bit, you know, ever since like those proto-Islamic Black movements went on the offensive against Christianity being a white man's religion. Like 100 years ago I'm not sure that this book would have been needed as deeply needed now and it's not just the interpersonal is also the systemic to Ibrahim Kendi's work like again I'm in the field of education",
      "education, black kid does something white kid does. And after they do the same thing, uh, black kids are five times more likely to be removed from school and to be suspended in every industry you go to whether it be healthcare or whatever these are people like Dr Jack was saying who have good intentions, you know, who work in the same system? So where's Islamic response to that? Like, it's not only an interpersonal, like, okay, I, you, you called me out of my name. You, you referred to me as something black and",
      "black and yeah I mean that that is a part of it but right now like you know I think in the post-colonial moment uh or current colonial moment depending on who you ask many folks would kind of like have to move it would be required because these things like whiteness is normalized um I could use many examples from education because that's what I know Black girls coming to school talking a particular way that they talk in their churches and their communities and their homes",
      "in their homes, but they're described as loud when they get to school because there's an invisibilized marker that's not stated. It's an unstated marker of a particular noise level that suited for white girls in school. And so you have all of these kind of like new forms of anti-blackness that I think, but I don't know Dr. Jack Brown is far more capable of speaking about it, but i think that our Islamic tradition does speak to all of",
      "Unfortunately, I think that there's just a deep ignorance and it really hurts as a Muslim. I'll say this and I'll stop talking. I go to talk to superintendents across the United States have done you know education project and you know what white folks in general will come in the room they'll talk or why their data looks a particular way why students of color communities",
      "try to have a basic level conversation the same type of questions with Muslims and they immediately go into a space of denial, immediately. So I don't know the path forward. I really don't how to begin to move forward beyond where we are. I do think we're a bit stuck in the current Muslim community unfortunately. Could I like to follow up by saying that this notion",
      "This notion, the example that you use of Black kids being more expressive. I think a couple of psychologists, the psychology of Black expressiveness wrote about this years ago and I think there's something to it is absolutely true that quote African-American culture is more expressive however I mean uh the African American milieu that I grew up in was very expressive you know I went",
      "but had a sense of decorum that was not about imitating white people, right? It was about how do we present ourselves to our Black community because we were segregated at the time and how do move our race forward. And so I just want to push back a little bit Dr. Khalifa. We have to be more nuanced when we talk about these things",
      "these things because the things to me changed dramatically after the 60s for instance about what black culture is thank you for that clarification what I meant to say was that so like federal researchers both in the US Department of Education and Office of Civil Rights follow why kids are suspended for school and I was referring to regardless I'm not just talking about noise recording but anything",
      "school and white kids doing school. So research has followed that, and what they find is that even when the behaviors are exactly the same people are treated differently. I mean there's a very famous Yale child study um that happened just a few years ago in which it took these teachers and said okay watch for the bad behaviors of these kids in the classroom. They have black Latino and white kid in the class room and all of the eyes of the pre-service educators and the current educators were following Black boys around",
      "these were babies, they were two and three years old. So I guess the broader point I was making was not to kind of like slam black culture. I mean, I'm very proud of it but rather to say that there is an invisibilized norm that is deleterious and is dismissive and is marginalizing toward black ways of being that you speak of in current schools and that Muslims don't seem to have really a handle on any of that and don't see... Yeah.",
      "BarakAllahu fiqh, jazakAllah khayran. I'm a little conscious of time but I do want to maybe highlight the second poll that it asked to what extent does anti-blackness need to be addressed before ummatic solidarity can be realized? It's a very interesting series of responses because two thirds say it is the top priority or it is a top priority whereas you know 20% or so says",
      "prevent the pursuit of automatic goals while it remains unresolved so actually most people say that we we actually do need to prioritize anti-blackness as a core goal sorry um go ahead i'm going to say this and then i'm gonna do something really rude which is i'm to leave because i have to go because otherwise jimmy jones is going to be upset yes i will see jimny jones so the uh but i'm like literally just sign off",
      "I'm so sorry. I'm rude, forgive me. I'll buy you all lunch, not people in the participants but people on the panel.\" So I would say that part of the problem is it's not about... When you think about those school situations, there are differences in cultures. Right? So I could go to Egypt and I could be talking really quietly and people would say, you need to talk louder or something like this. There are different cultures and it's understandable that if you're in a culture milieu",
      "to adopt to that order if that's what Muslims should they respect or because custom is a big way of our value of how we interact with one another and how we have norms that's fine the problem is that in America like the background is always that the white quote-unquote White Orph is the the ruling one and everybody has to adopt so that think about Italians right so an Italian comes in and talks really loud they're also going to be because there's going",
      "is that they were allowed to, once they start acting like white people quote unquote, they're accepted. Black people are never accepted. They're always the other right? So that's why Afro pessimist ideas exist. It's like there's just nothing you can do if you're black. You could act like Urkel and you're still... People would be waiting for you to commit a crime or to do something bad.",
      "Muslim communities is not necessarily that there's anti-blackness, it's that we've all adopted because we're part of the modern world. We all accept white supremacy as a culture and aesthetic and everything. So successful Desis in Arabs in America, how do they act? They act like suburban white people. Their kids are whiter than I am. They were like... I don't even know. My point",
      "how we view black Muslims. It's that the pole star, like our Mecca is always the ideal of whiteness whether it's being good Muslims when it comes to the government and not having political opinions or being good Muslim about how we dress and Americanizing until I think that's a problem because if we just continue to reinforce the idea of white norms as the elite",
      "elite we don't allow a culture to emerge that has like an elite culture that is actually diverse but let me ask you this is the arab and desi uh hogging of public muslim space in america is that how did how is that related to what okay i mean because there are people who made it in because they're like engineers and lawyers and they work for google or whatever and things like that",
      "Jack, I know you have to leave but leave that statement that Daisy are whiter than you. You leave that in Virginia don't bring it to the MW. Okay guys, I'll see you soon. Thanks so much for doing this. I appreciate everybody sorry I have to go. No problem. Jazakum Allah khair Professor Jonathan Brown for really a wonderful sort of contribution. I would like to leave this to your discretion Dr. Khalifa and Dr. Jones in the sense that there are some questions still",
      "If you have the time, another 10 minutes or so I'm happy for us to sort of address some of those. And if you wanted to respond specifically to some of the comments that Jack made.",
      "an important and valuable topic. And I'm sure that after having read Jack's book, you have a lot to reflect on. I mean, I wanted to ask something on the tail end of the comments that you were making. One of the points that some of the literature on race now highlights is when we're talking about whiteness,",
      "Khalid, it is a sort of you could say a civilizational attitude that comes out of Europe and I think it's in that spirit that Jack was making those last comments. And it's not spare the press for your remarks seem to be sort of directed as well that in order for Muslims in North America and this will be true in other places as well but in order put Muslims in north America to make it they basically have",
      "to assimilate to a culture which embodies that kind of anti-black racism in very subtle ways, um which as uh Professor Jones sort of highlights you know perhaps as a counterpoint to what I've just said. That actually the 1960s and that you know that momentary transition was significant enough for us to now disaggregate the notion of white supremacy from US culture",
      "you know, as a necessary relationship. And I feel that Muslims, particularly immigrant Muslims in the United States have a way to go before they recognize the significant advantage that they have accrued by associating with the establishment and in the ways that Professor Brown commented. So I don't know if you want to add anything to this",
      "anything to this? Because I really would love to learn from you in this regard. And we, of course, also have some questions that are being articulated in the chat and the Q&A which I would love your thoughts on. I'll yield it to you Dr. Jones but I will say that this has been an impediment for true solidarity actually. How can you expect to withhold aspects of brotherhood",
      "brotherhood or community solidarity and for someone else to be, to deliver their full like akua, their full rights. And so it is something that has been very surface level I think the conversations that have happened in the Muslim community but I think we can ignore too how many of the younger folks...",
      "professor at Ohio State and on college campus a lot of young Muslims are like very very fervently against white supremacy but I'm not really willing to take up what uh immigrant supremacy you know looks like in um in a public Muslim space like in an MSA or like in the mosque or Islamic organization",
      "is from East Africa and East Africans who are many are as dark as me themselves have a term for people like me that they use among themselves but in the pub in the non-Muslim public space there that uh their very solid solidarity with blackness because that's the current currency in the moment now uh but in like their own misogyny spaces this term is used quite frequently but",
      "You're talking about East Africans of Indian heritage specifically? No, I'm talking about African heritage. Which is even more complex. So what I'd say about this is that the classroom and the street are different. I actually got into higher education because I didn't want to be enveloped by the street as it were. When I first started working",
      "started working as the executive director of Black Coalition of Greater New Haven our our mantra was the freedom of black people is responsibility of black I think Dr Khalifa is saying the same thing but my point about this is that you really uh it's one thing to talk about it again in the classroom everything is up for grabs right you can talk about anything but when I'm trying",
      "as Dr. Khalifa said, dismantle immigrant supremacy, I need to act and I need develop models of acting that to me need two points. One is consciousness raising about what it is. And again how we name it isn't very important right? And two strategies for dismantling it. And this is hard tedious work but it needs to be done.",
      "I think, I mean, I should just clarify for sort of audience members who are maybe attending from Europe where the immigrant Muslims are the underclass. So in a sense there is no equivalent to the indigenous underclass that the African American Muslim community reflects or represents. When I went to London and I was shocked that Pakistanis were the black people of educational system.",
      "the first time years long time ago, first time I went as being a private of 60s and to see Pakistanis being talked about the exact same way black people were is the way Dr. Khalifa talked about and being seen as sexual predators as well. Right? Yeah, it's quite sort of striking because of course South Asians are in my experience at least for five years",
      "And it's a very different demographic that came to the UK. But unfortunately, in some respects, it continues to persist, we continue to have those sorts of structural problems. I wanted to ask a question which sort of arose in the chat.",
      "There are some questions and again, we are coming up to time so I'm a bit conscious of that. So this is from someone called Rabia Brown. Is it possible that the Muslims who seem to react with denial to talk of racism are from different ancestral and national origins and are simply coming from a very different context?",
      "uh respective to us-born uh muslims um okay a simple straightforward question yes i i would say yes but we're not talking about in our questions and that critique we're",
      "like almost 20 years ago and other books have been written since. And it's really not gotten, it's A, not gotten the discourse it needs to kind of be in the current moment. Like Dr. Jack Brown said, leadership implications for Ms. Agit, for example. And two, very little if any action has happened because of it. There are some outliers like Iman in Chicago and other institutions. Yaqeen, I think is an outlier, but generally.",
      "generally. Just for people who aren't familiar with the US context, we're speaking about Dr. Sherman Jackson's book Islam and the Black American Towards a Third Resurrection published by Oxford University Press I want to see around 2004 but maybe a bit later than that. The question is... I have to stick in here because every few years Abdul-Hakim, Chairman Jackson and I have this debate about the book. I think the book as",
      "as Dr. Cleaver points out, is very instructive to all of us living in the United States, both what Dr. Jackson called the Black Americans with a capital B and the so-called immigrants. I think its major shortcoming, as far as I'm concerned, is that—and I wrote a brief piece about this in Islamic Horizon—from the back of the bus to the back",
      "I love Sherman Jackson, really. I do. I just think that wasn't a useful framing because if I'm immigrant, the camel jockey and all this kind of stuff we're not even talking about. We're talking mainly Daisy. It's just his overall framing and the message to us",
      "not Black Americans was a good one. But phrases like that, if I'm Daisy and I'm not Daisy would feel might be a turnoff. Actually we were in the conference with on, I think it was on Warwick v. Muhammad at Yale a few years back. And there was a conference where just about every segment of the Muslim community or what I call the big A's represented but I heard a complaint from younger",
      "from younger Daisy people in particular about phraseology like that in the book. And this is my point about how you start conversations, that if you're gonna start conversation like that, it's you gotta work harder and so language is so very important as something that goes before action",
      "that you want ought to be in language, that is again intellectually provocative and inclusive. And I don't think terms like better the intellectual provocative for sure but inclusive not. No it's important food for thought because these are fraught areas of discourse as well and they need to tread carefully to get the results that we really want",
      "And, inshallah we can sort of in some respects. We have to be careful not to antagonize people who are our partners in this journey. So I did want to highlight a comment from Huda Sharif which is coming from a South Asian perspective because you know my parents are from Bangladesh originally so i'm south asian but perhaps haven't highlighted",
      "which is it would be surprising perhaps to white Europeans and Americans to realize that South Asians can actually be more racist and anti-black. I mean, in fact, Hodei's arguing that they are some of the most racist and antiblack societies on the earth, which I think those are relative judgments. And you know,",
      "in the Hindu caste system. As someone who has lived for a period in Bangladesh and seen at close quarters, particularly from the older generation, sometimes people talk about the way in which you'll forgive a grandparent for making these kind of racist remarks but I've heard members of that generation basically saying that Muslims should never marry people of African descent even if they're Muslim right? And",
      "religious people because they just cannot countenance in their minds that such people could be people we can marry. And I'm sure this is a conversation I had in Bangladesh, I'm so that sort of conversation is something which has been transported to the new world and of course to Europe as well by immigrants. So that's something that we need to be very conscious of and that's precisely the point that Dr Mohamed Khalifa you were talking about earlier",
      "There's another perhaps comment, and I don't know if you have access to the questions and comments. But if there are any in particular that you would like to highlight please feel free to identify them. But perhaps I will do the... I'll read this as the last comment potentially a question. I think it would be interesting so this is from Asmaa Abid",
      "I think it would be interesting to elaborate on racism as an act of rebellion against Allah in a similar vein to the way Iblis refused to bow to Adam because he believed himself to be made of better matter. Racism is at its core, at its cores to live according to your own imaginary hierarchical power structure that has real and harmful effects on different communities depending on the context you live in.",
      "If you internalize the American Sharia of white supremacy, it is shirk which is kind of reflective of what Dr. Khalif was saying earlier. Perhaps that's a good note on which to conclude our session but jazakum Allah khairan to of course Jack who's now absent but... Can I say one more thing before we close? Please.",
      "I think there are no women's voices here. And I think that has to be said, because this is a problem and you find racism and sexism as twins often in these spaces. And there was an attempt to include the woman that she got sick with. Also, I was gonna say this about the bibliography as well. If we're going to move forward",
      "how these two are intertwined has to be understood and women's voices about these issues, the broader issue of anti-Blackness and racism pressures have to be part of the conversation for obvious reasons. I'm sorry bringing this up so late but I meant to in my first response but didn't. Absolutely. Jazakumullah Khairn for highlighting this is something of course we highlighted right at the beginning which is very unfortunately our sole female panelist",
      "service needs to be paid for it and paid to it i'm talking about this talk is cheap um we need to really in our in the institutions that we have provide opportunities where female scholars can come and you know educate us inshallah and we pray to allah that we are granted the taufeeq to do that as a community as a whole as as institutions as well",
      "Jazakumullah khairan Dr. Jones, Dr Khalifa for really an enlightening two hours of reflection and of course to Jonathan Browne for writing the book that gave us the excuse to reflect collectively with that. May Allah bless you for inviting me thank you and Dr Jones it's really an honor and a pleasure to have you both and inshallah we'll see you in future Ummatic sessions",
      "will be in touch with you. But Jazakumullah khairan and thank you finally to all the attendees who stuck with us for the full two hours, we still have 27 of you there so Jazakuma Khayran and we look forward to seeing you in roughly a month's time when we will be advertising another colloquium uh still to be sort of confirmed. With that I wish you all farewell Subhanaka Allahu bihamdika"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Western Historical Critica_Sxyo_bmJMGo&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748665672.opus",
    "text": [
      "Rahman Rahim, thanks for inviting me. Awesome. I was going to actually ask you introduce me with the video of me with The Earth To Roll music of me doing archery at Karima Foundation but then I realized that would take too much time and it's too self-absorbed so i'm gonna this is i'm going to try and do i have an hour right or 40 minutes i have 40 minutes. I'm going",
      "Also, if you want I don't know if there's a way for you to share files with the listeners or something or people who signed up. But I can actually send people this PowerPoint show so they have the information in the PowerPoint show. If you want, I can do that now or I can get later awesome whatever you think is best. We have all of the emails of all the sign the people who've signed up so what you can",
      "everybody. And maybe if I could ask Dr. Wehmer later as well to send his slides and then I can send them. So you want to send them later or now? Well, I'm going to send it later. OK, then that's I'll do it later, OK. So this presentation in this lecture is going to explain kind of where the Western view of how we think about history and religion comes from. And since the Western civilization",
      "global Western civilization, right? It's globally influential. This is kind of in some ways it answers the question why is it that we quote unquote we i.e people in the modern world when we think about religion and history and a certain way do we think of it in a certain sense? Why are there certain suspicions? Why",
      "which I think is accurate. It's not an attempt to brainwash you, right? The purpose is to explain how what a lot of people think just is the way the world is naturally is actually not natural, right. Our modern global Western view towards history and religion is the result",
      "universal. So it relies on certain experiences, certain presumptions and then sometimes it enforces those presumptions on other situations where they're not accurate, where they end up with inaccurate results. Okay so let me just get this thing out of my... ah what did I do? Did that go away? No we can see the PowerPoint. Oh you can still see it?",
      "Okay, that's good. Interesting. Well we'll see what happens when I press this button. Nothing happened but it first this button, let me try. Okay, there we go did something just happen? Yes yes. All right so uh it's important to remember why and how Western European and American scholars began to study the Islamic tradition you see here on the right is a poster from early 20th century French Algeria.",
      "French, actually not just a colony. It was actually considered part of France between 1830 and 1962. And this is a poster the French government put up. It says, aren't you beautiful? Aren't you pretty? Take off your veil, right? So it's very important to think about the link between all the Western study of Islam",
      "in some ways like well-behaved or polite, well- behaved, well trained Muslims. We can think of the same project today in the shape of progressive Islam that kind of really was kicked into high gear after 9 11. The idea of kind of the depoliticized, de radicalize, depolitical kind of compliant Muslim citizen. So one of the main routes that Western",
      "routes that Western scholars took into the study, they kind of brought them into contact with Muslim tradition and Muslims was through colonialism. Whether it was the French in North Africa, the Dutch in Southeast Asia after the 1600s, the British in India in the 1700s and onward. This was a main way that these scholars came into contact Islamic legal heritage partially because they were oftentimes in charge or trying to shape legal systems that utilize part",
      "And they had to kind of understand the local customs like Sufi orders and things like that in order to deal with the local populations. But also because it allowed them to try and shape how their local populations understood Islam in order make them non-threatening, nonpolitical colonial subjects. Another major route was through diplomatics, i.e., essentially the relationship",
      "had with the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. The idea of studying Turkish and learning about Islam was a way of dealing with this Ottoman neighbor and competitor they had. And finally, the most important for our purposes. So in a lot of ways, things like if you were going to study Islamic law in the late medieval or early modern period or Ottoman history or something like that, it would be the first two",
      "looking at the first two routes in. But when you talk about the origins of Islam, uh, the Quran, Hadith, the origins Islamic law, the early Islamic period, it's really an extension of biblical studies. So basically, and this is very important because what we'll see is that our Western scholars had a certain experience in the study of the Bible and the biblical tradition and the classical heritage of Greece and Rome. And then when they did is",
      "basically took that kind of cookie cutter approach and just applied it to other, the first one of the first things they did with it is like oh well let's do this to the Islamic tradition so we can understand that as well. I also have this notion of the study of world languages. This is an interesting point which I don't want to spend too much time on but which I wanted to bring up just briefly which is that there was beginning in the 1500s a",
      "an interest in Western universities, in the study of world languages, especially biblical languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Arabic. There was this idea that you could kind of reconstruct this human Adamic language like the original language of Adam. And so there was actually a real interest in the origins of languages and that's one of the first things you see actually the British scholars and administrators in India in the late 1700s",
      "1700s, people like Warren. I think William Jones was one of them. That's where the British scholars started to do things like try and reconstruct ancient Sanskrit and things like that. That was a similar enterprise to what German and French and British scholars engaged with in terms of Islamic tradition but it was in kind of Sanskritic Indian tradition. And also it was this idea",
      "language of human civilization and sort of trying to find origins of human civilizations. So that's another important one, but this also had not necessarily colonial aspects to it, but definitely an era of superiority. So although some figures like Jones, like William Muir who died in 1905 famous,",
      "one of the first Orientalists to do that. He was a really senior and important figure in the British East India Company, and then in the post-1857 rebellion British administration. So there was a lot of overlap between colonial administration and these scholars, but also part of it was maybe a better intentioned,",
      "jungles and dark recesses of the globe that Europeans were going to go and kind of apply their... You can think of Indiana Jones in this sense, like the idea that kind of Indiana goes somewhere and kind figures out the real history of a certain place and rescues the natives who are being oppressed or something like that. The idea that you're going to buy shedding light,",
      "or just generally the attitude towards the Muslim world, which is that we are just trying to liberate these Muslims from their tradition, from their past. If we can explain to them that they have misunderstood their religion or what the actual origins of their religion are, they will be liberated as we were liberated. This is very important. Right. So Westerners aren't doing this because they are racist or something like",
      "But it's the idea that we were imprisoned by our tradition. We were imprisoned and so we want to liberate other people, but it definitely has a paternalistic light. And there was actually I've been trying maybe an hour this morning trying to find I couldn't find that. I can't remember who said it. I think it's Voltaire, the famous French kind of literature in Thinker and historian. He died in 1778 and he wrote about how, you know,",
      "Muslims didn't really understand the life of the Prophet or the Quran until Westerners did studies of it. This idea that people don't understand their own tradition until Westerns come along and study it and explain it to them, that's a very important notion here.",
      "raising their hands or looking confused but i can't do that so i'm just going to keep going okay historical critical method or the htm this is what's the term that's generally used to talk about the way that historians and by that you could mean you know historians of anything of history of scripture of religion i'm Just pouring the coffee I made for myself which I didn't get done in time uh",
      "important principles, parts of it. The main idea is that through interrogation of sources, of historical sources, texts from the past fragments of relics, archeological ruins, artifacts we can as the great German historian and kind of father of modern history Leopold von Ranke who died in 1886 he said, the job of a historian is to find out what really happened so you're gonna... We have suspicion towards",
      "previous historians. So pre-modern historians, the people who wrote, you know, the chronicle of this or the guy who was the court historian of King Henry VIII or Ibn Kathir or some medieval Indian historian or anything like that, we're very critical of them. The default is that we're suspicious of them, that they are trying to mislead us, that",
      "correct tools to these sources and using what we understand about how history works and how humanity works, we can reconstruct the past and figure out what really happened. What were the origins of a religion or a dynasty or people or a language? Now, but it's very important that this notion that the default is suspicion, right? It's a historical critical method. The fundamental thing",
      "things told to you about the past. That's the founding stone of this approach, but this is very important. They're critical of certain things and towards certain people. This is where the bias comes in, which I'm going to talk about later. They are critical about certain things",
      "report, right? A Persian woman, Iranian woman says, you know, I can't stand the hijab. I just want to be free and express myself. And here's the other report. An Iranian woman said, I like wearing the hijabi. This is part of my religion and an important part of faith. It makes me feel protected and ennobled. Which one do you think a Westerner will",
      "even need to answer that question. You know the answer, right? So there's certain... you can see where our biases... although both of those reports are entirely possible, right people say both of these things. You can hear them with your own ears saying these things but one of them is going to be treated with suspicion and one of it is not. A couple of really important principles and maybe these were sort of the foundation stones or the Western foundation pillars of the Western historical critical method. The first one is called uniformitarianism. This",
      "word. It's a scholar named, I think William von Leyden came up with it in the 1950s. There's another term as well called the principle of analogy but we'll go with this one. What this says is that essentially people are always the same. Cultures may differ, languages may differ hairstyles can change interest rates fluctuate things like that but basically people are",
      "they're self-centered, they're short sighted. They're forgetful. It's a cynical look at human nature and the assumption that there is a human nature, and it's always the same. The second is the concept of anachronism. Anachronisms are the idea of things being out of place in time. So imagine if you saw a report that said",
      "You know, when John F. Kennedy was trying to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis, he, the first thing he did is he reached in his pocket, grabbed his mobile phone and called his brother to try and discuss some option. Immediately you know this report is unreliable or something's wrong with it because cell phones didn't exist in 1960s, right? So that's something that's out of place in time, an anachronism. And finally, the principle of dissimilarity.",
      "this says is that you are, if something goes against what you it's, it's kind of like in court when you one of the things that you can use as an exemption to the hearsay restriction. Like normally you shouldn't be allowed to testify about things that other people say, but one of them is statements made against interest. So if you say something that doesn't serve your interest, then it's accepted in court. Similar, this is very similar, right?",
      "This is very similar, right? So you accept the report if it doesn't seem to say what the powerful people wanted to say. So if someone were making up a story, why would they include this report? It goes against what they're trying to do.",
      "If you found that in some document, you'd probably think it was true because that's not what Christians would be making up. Okay? So that's a principle of dissimilarity. Now we'll go into these origins. By the way, Austin, can you tell me when we have like 10 minutes left?",
      "The origins of the historical critical method explain the biases we'll go into. So, the first or the kind of first stream that goes into it is the Renaissance rediscovery of the classics right here. The classics I mean the Greco Roman heritage a renaissance of course is a period you know roughly from the late 1300s to the to the through the 1500s in places like Italy France England and what becomes Germany etc etc.",
      "Age of Discovery. We know about that. Europeans discovered the Americas and then lots of other places, and third is the Protestant Reformation, which we all know about. It started in 1517, usually as a date given when the Saxon monk Martin Luther begins his protests against the Catholic Church. All right. Okay, first we're going to rediscovery of the Greco-Roman past. This",
      "Awesome asked me to do this and I got 40 minutes. So it's quite a challenge. Sense of historical distance. This is very important. Look at this picture, right? This was actually taken from a church in Germany. I took this in the church in Tübingen. I don't know if you can see this but this... The glare is really annoying on this picture but I don' t know if we can see thi s. This i s a picture of the crucifixion of Jesus, right now. The figure is there. This guy here is wearing medieval armor. These people are dressed like",
      "medieval German peasants and the background looks like Germany, rural Germany. That's not how people dressed in Palestine in the first century AD and it's not what the area looked like. This is important because medieval Europeans thought about themselves as continuities of the Roman past. When you think about things like the Holy Roman Empire",
      "holy roman empire and that wasn't because there wasn't some weird claim they were making like they honestly thought they were a continuation of the roman tradition um they were continuation of there was no break so when we talk about the middle ages the dark ages that's a post-renaissance notion notion that there's this interme inter intermediary period where there's like a break between kind of enlightenment and rediscovery in the present and then the ancient past in the middle is the",
      "In the middle is the Dark Ages. That's our perspective. That' a post-Renaissance perspective.",
      "Rotterdam, but he lived in London. He lived all over the not in London, but in England, all over kind of European intellectual scene. What they understood is when they went back and actually recovered early manuscripts of Roman writers like Cicero or Livy or Pliny that the medieval Latin of the church and of medieval Europe was like a kind of decadent",
      "decadent and decayed version of Latin. It was not the pure original Latin of figures like Cicero, the great Roman orator in statesmen who died in 43 BC. They realized that there's this great distance between them and the classical past. So figures like St. Augustine, who died at 430, and a whole medieval intellectual tradition created a continuity between the classics of Aristotle and Plato on the one hand",
      "Plato on the one hand, Christianity on the other hand, and the medieval kind of Germanic presence. So there was a continuity. All these things were melded together to classical philosophical tradition, Christianity, kind of Germany, roughly speaking, Germanic culture. These were all blended together seamlessly in one continuity. What these figures like Petrarch realized was that no, that's not the case. People like Cicero, Augusta, and Plato,",
      "not believe in God. They were not Christians, right? This synthesis actually was made of discordant elements and thinking about somebody like Cicero and admiring him was to admire someone who's a pagan that existed before Christianity. So they realized what they came up with, they sort of started to feel what Nietzsche calls the pathos of historical distance.",
      "there was a break between them and the past that they wanted to reconnect with. And that was the past of the Greco-Roman tradition. People like, so in the Renaissance, remember that term means rebirth. It's the rediscovery, the rebirth of the classical Greco Roman tradition that Europeans in France and Italy, especially in the 1300s and 1400s and 1500s are able to reconnect",
      "And another one is Byzantine scholars fleeing Ottoman expansion in Anatolia and coming to Europe. So that actually gives these Europeans access to works of Aristotle and Plato and all sorts of other classical figures that they had not previously had.",
      "In a lot of ways, our modernity is a rebirth of the Greco-Roman worldview with the addition of an important element which we'll talk about progress. The idea of progress. Greeks and Romans didn't think of the world as changing. They didn't that history began and ended. The world for them was eternal in a lot",
      "There was no sense of decline. History was just circular, you know? The Wheel of Fortune is not just a TV show. That was the concept that sometimes this groups up, sometimes that groups up. Sometimes this guy fails, sometimes this guy succeeds but nothing changes in history it just repeats. No up, no down right? In general. One important concept that they rediscovered in this process was the notion of an unchanging human nature and a good example",
      "the great, sometimes called the father of history. He was originally from Helikarnassus, modern day Bodrum in Turkey. If you want to go there, you can go there in the summer and go clubbing and then go and try and find where you think Herodotus' house was or something. He died in, I believe about 420 BCE, although he lived in Athens. And he wrote a history of the Persian Wars, which is an amazing book. I recommend reading it. But one of the things he says,",
      "and it becomes very clear in his book, is that people don't change. And that actually allows you to figure out what's true and false in stories about the past. For example, the story of the Trojan War. Everyone knows the story Trojan war, right? So Paris gets promised Helen because he has to pick between these three goddesses about who's most beautiful one of them promises him Helen. He goes to Sparta, steals Helen from her husband, her rightful husband Menelaus takes her back to Troy. The Greeks get all pissed off.",
      "They go to Troy and they fight a 10 year war to get back Helen. Right now, what Herodotus says is I don't think Helen ever went to Troy. He thinks that basically on the way that she got lost, she ended up in Egypt, et cetera, et",
      "Prince stole, they would say, yeah, actually I probably should give you back the wife. Yeah. And I'm not going to fight a 10 year war and destroy my city because of this. It doesn't make sense. This doesn't mean people don't act this way. Very important concept. People don't",
      "is above things. People like St. Augustine, historians like Gregory of Tours in the 6th century, the Venerable Bede in the 7th century. He died 735. I think Gregory Tours died 570 around. These are kind of great medieval Christians or people like John of Salisbury in the 12th and 13th century in England. These were figures who were part of history. They were writing about the history of Christendom",
      "Christendom that they were part of. So there was a progress that they weren't looking back on things with a sense of detachment and superiority, but they were a part of the world that they described as a narrative of Christian civilization. Whereas classical historians are not just like Herodotus, but also figures like Polybius who died around 135 BC.",
      "Polybius. He says a historian's job is to sometimes criticize his friends and praise his enemies. A historian is above things, right? The historian is about things and the historian's jobs to figure out what actually happened and explain why, and then just show how lessons can be learned from that. Right. So that the, a figure like Cicero, right, is looked back on. And I think of Cicereo as the ultimate kind of cocktail party guest",
      "cocktail party guest. You guys are probably mostly Muslim, so you haven't gone to a lot of cocktail parties. But if you just imagine a figure I call him the tipsy Nigel, you can imagine like this British scholar who's got like a cocktail and saying, Oh, you know, I've gotten back from Kenya, I was visiting the Maasai and things like that. And, you",
      "stupid and religion and organized anything. Nothing has any meaning, right? Uh, religion church is all kind of a joke. You go there and maybe you're polite when you're there, but you make jokes about religion. That's very much the perspective of someone like Cicero. Uh, he says at one in one, um, line in one of his dialogues, he said that he never understood how to Roman augers augurs are people who read the release birds and you see what,",
      "kind of read the fates from that. He says he never understands how two Roman augurs can talk to each other without laughing, but that's a big part of Roman public life so he would never go out and make fun of this publicly. Publicly, he venerates Roman tradition, but privately, he's not making fun of his stuff. This is an important persona",
      "skepticism about metaphysics. This is very important. The classical or the kind of medieval Western European tradition is both because it's grounded in the Christian scriptures and in the teachings of Aristotle and Plato, these are both traditions that make very strong claims about metaphysics, about what the nature of reality beyond our senses is.",
      "whether you're Christian or whether you are Plato, a Platonic tradition. They have very strong assertions about the nature of reality with a capital R in this now and in the afterlife and before etc., etc. Whereas there's this whole tradition in Greco-Roman philosophy called the skeptical tradition. A great example is Sextus Empiricus who dies in around 200 AD of the Common Era. His work is rediscovered in the 1600s and 1700s becomes very influential in Europe",
      "very influential in Europe, which is basically saying, look, humans can't actually know anything. We can't know anything about morality. We don't know what's right and wrong in Athens. It's just what people in Athens think is right and",
      "world. And this is a very important, another theme that's picked up is the notion of the skepticism about metaphysical claims and myths and beliefs. And instead of focus on the material world, the material word becomes the only thing you can really know about. And it really influential figure is Lucretius who's a Roman philosopher dies in 55 BC. He wrote a poem called De rerum natura",
      "Aram Natura, On the Nature of Things. It's translated into English. You can read it. Extremely influential. For example, Marx wrote his thesis on this guy, Karl Marx. That might tell you something. He thinks religion is ridiculous. He things Greek myths are ridiculous. The only thing you can know is the material world around you. And this notion of focus on the material World and also the scientific method of people like Aristotle is picked up in the 16th century especially in the Italian city of Padua",
      "And that's really the beginning of kind of modern science, modern Western science is actually a rediscovery of Aristotelian seeds of the kind of scientific method of hypothesis and proving and experiment.",
      "Lorenzo Valla, we'll talk about him in a second and Erasmus as well. You know what? I should have actually... Let me tell you something. This is very important. I forgot about it. We talked about his sense of historical distance. One of the things you notice when you have a sense of historic distance is how things have changed. And that's very, very,",
      "donation of Constantine, which allegedly was made by the Emperor Constantine who converted to Christianity. And I think he died in 337 if I'm not mistaken at the Common Era and it writes this will which essentially gives like a huge amount of temporal power and control over land to the church. And this is like a major pillar of kind of the papal and the church claim to temporal power. What Lorenzo Valla realizes",
      "together or existing research that had already been done, but he puts it together. And is that some of the words in this document are Latin words that were not in use at the time of Constantine. They were only in use centuries later. So what he says is this is a forgery by seeing how anachronism, by looking at anachronicism, you can prove forgery and show change in a textual tradition. Erasmus does",
      "only one verse in the New Testament, in 1 John, I think verses 5 through 7, that talks about the Trinity. Jesus says there are three that bear the testimony in heaven, God the Father, God, the Son and the Holy Ghost, I thinks is the actual text. It's called the Yohanan comma. And what Erasmus did is by collecting the earliest Greek manuscripts of the New",
      "earliest manuscripts don't have this verse in it. These are actually added in later. Other things, by the way, the story you might see in like the Bible movies when people want to stone a prostitute and Jesus comes out and says, let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Also Erasmus says this is added in as well. Very interesting. So this notion of going back to the original sources",
      "through your mastery of the study of language. So, I mean, think about this. That's a huge blow against the textual integrity of the biblical tradition. Okay, second really important kind of thread that goes into the cloth of the historical critical method is the age of discovery. This is very important and I want you to imagine. Think about how blown your mind would be",
      "two new continents, right? People always thought that the world just had this big ocean on the back. The globe is the world we know of and then there's this just big ocean in the back and nothing's there. And then everything that matters is where we are. And they discovered that's not true. There's two new continent. And this is very important because it really explodes the biblical... Not only the Bible of the... Sorry, the geography of... Not necessarily the Bible but of the church and of church teachings",
      "teachings, but also like the genealogy of humanity. So if you know, the story of the children of Noah, so, you know Shem's children populate the Middle East and Ham is populated Africa and Japheth's children, populate that kind of Northern realm. What who's in the Americas? Like how does that happen? How does that fit into this world? And then these people",
      "people who live there, like how do you okay if you live in Africa or Asia or Europe, like you could have heard of Christianity. Like in theory you could be exposed to these prophets and this kind of biblical world that we all know about but what about these other people? How do we make sense of what they believe and how are supposed to judge them because they're completely cut off from us. They have a totally different history. They're not exposed to the Bible and all those things so what does that mean about",
      "the notion of truth. A famous figure in this case is a French scholar named Isaac de la Peyrere, who wrote a book called The Pre-Adamites. And he basically says, look, the story of the Bible of Adam and Noah and all this stuff is actually not a global story. This is a story of a specific area that's not actually the story",
      "from the Bible. He says, look in the story of Cain and Abel and Adam and stuff after Cain kills Abel he goes off and marries these other people. Who are those other people? If Adam is the first man and these are the only people in the world who are these other",
      "flood. It was a local flood that just destroyed the area that Noah was in. A new cosmology, think about in the 17th century Galileo's discovery of using rudimentary telescopes being able to see the moons of Jupiter rotating and this idea of the Copernican idea of heliocentrism that the earth is not the center of the cosmos but in fact it rotates around",
      "cosmology that both Muslims and Western European Christian or Christian Europe had used. A new perspective on new peoples, this idea of that if you're going to say that, and again for Muslims this isn't really a difficulty because we have the notion of the people of Ahl al-Fatrah and that God sends prophets to everybody in the world and that there are some people who live in times and places when prophecy is weakened or vanished but for Europeans they had",
      "had this really difficult time making sense of how to judge these Native American tribes that they come across because how can they be faulted for not being Christian? How can I be faulting for not been Christian? And then, of course, you'll note that they often have sensible moral systems. They actually have developed societies and they have morality and there's things that are very even noble and admirable about them",
      "about them. And here you kind of combine this with the discovery, rediscovery of the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition and then you have this reemphasis on the idea that the real way humans know truth is not through scripture, not through revelation but through their minds. That's where both the American savage who's never had exposure to prophecy",
      "whatever philosopher, whether that's before or after Christianity, they all access truth through their mind. And so the human mind can realize that there is only one God and that there's right and wrong and what right and right is made of. And you see this writing especially in the 1600s with a group of writers, especially in England known as the deists people like John Toland who had this idea, you've been exposed to it",
      "that, you know, yes, there is a God, but God kind of creates the world and sets it in motion and doesn't engage in prophecy. There's not like a, you don't have to grasp this truth about God. And that's combined with the idea that, okay, well what happens is humans have this innate rational ability to know God and to know what's right and wrong,",
      "case of Christianity, the Roman culture comes and perverts and corrupts Christian teachings. The real rational philosophical teachings of Christianity perverts them in terms it into this product of Roman superstition. In a lot of ways, the medieval religious culture of Europe is a product of these forces that are corrupting and perverting our actual philosophical innate understanding of what",
      "of what the real truth is, which is that there's just this God that we should worship and that we have these basic moral things about not stealing, not killing. But that's all grasped by reason. Can I come in and say could you 10 minutes? Yeah, I will do my level best. I think this is... I'll do my best. Okay. So Protestant Reformation. Very important. End of the church control of interpretation.",
      "So after the Protestant Reformation, with the fact that all these princes and states in Germany and some people in France and England basically say we're not under control of the Catholic Church anymore. We're going to engage our own interpretation of the Bible. And we're no longer confined to what the Catholic church says is the canon of the New Testament or the Old Testament. They discovered, for example, there's all these other gospels",
      "by the early church fathers, like the gospel of Thomas and the gospel",
      "ends up with is a concept of the Bible as a product of a specific time and worldview, not primarily a vessel of truth. Again, go back and think about that notion of the",
      "holy land right it's not uh it's nothing that has truth for all time this is important if martin luther you can see on the right he has this idea that if you're no longer if the church no longer defines the correct understanding of scripture of the bible how do you know you read the bible properly well you know what because the holy spirit is inside you and the holy",
      "Anybody can say they have the Holy Spirit inside them, right? There's no way to check people's understanding. But this continues with the, for example, the Quaker Church, which was founded in the 1600s, the Society of Friends. And here, there are actually some of the most critical, the most skeptical figures about the textual integrity of the Bible. So go back and think about Erasmus' criticism of the New Testament.",
      "some early Quakers engage in even more serious criticism of the New Testament, showing how there's lots of elements of the text which were altered over time, which are unreliable. But it doesn't matter because if you're a Quaker, your real connection to Christ and your real",
      "demoted. And if you combine that with criticism of the scripture and this notion that it kind of comes out at a specific time, uh, you can see that there's this movement away from scripture. Calvin, another founding figure of the Protestant tradition, John Calvin in, um, uh...in Geneva, he again says, you know, we can't-we don't- we shouldn't read the Bible from the perspective of Aristotelian philosophy or",
      "as it was in its own context. You read it, you know, as it is supposed to be understood by its original audience. All right. What does this result in? This results in Germany and just the kind of main place where it happens also England and France but mostly in Germany in the 1700s and 1800s with certain developments. If you take the idea that truth from outside of scripture so truth comes from reason",
      "truth comes from uh yeah so primarily from reason the locality of scripture the corruption of scripture over time gives you the result that the bible is no longer the font of truth the bible an interesting document but the real it can inspire you make you feel good but the Real sources of truth are outside it and this you see in the writing of a very famous his family was Jewish but he was his family converted to Christianity although he was later declared",
      "a heretic, Benedict Spinoza who lived in Amsterdam and died in 1677. If you want to read it, a fascinating book by him very influential read the Theological Political Treatise which is available in English. Another really important development is having figured all this stuff out. It gives you this enormous sense of superiority and kind of confidence. So there's this famous",
      "famous, he's a scholar of classical literature, F.A. Wolf, a German scholar. And in 1795, he publishes this study of the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer. And what he says is there was no Homer. There was no, the person who wrote the Odyssey and the person wrote the Iiliad was not the same person. And again, how does he do that? He says that the textual style,",
      "previous scholars. So going back to like the second century BC in places like Alexandria, Greek scholars had known that there were certain elements in the Odyssey that had been changed or needed to be reread or they were inappropriate or something, but it never occurred to them. They would never...they never had the confidence or the sense of arrogance I guess you might say to say oh so there's no one author. Like it's just this sense of based on your conclusions",
      "based on your conclusions to question and undermine or to call into doubt and reject serious like tenets of your cultural and religious tradition. Another figure is a German scholar named Hermann Remarres, who actually these fragments were published after he died because they were very controversial in his time, but they kind of sowed seeds that became much more accepted in the 1800s. And he writes",
      "Jesus was made up by the disciples. They thought the world was about to end, when it didn't they had to kind of touch up details of his life that a lot of things like the miracles they say Jesus did were just their own misperceptions or their own inventions. If you are in a situation where now the Bible as a text even Christian doctrine over",
      "uh doctrine over time has been called into question what does this mean if you're christian well this the way this is navigated is primarily by a move away from the idea of the historical jesus the actual details of early church history the actual you know details of church teachings that's not really important what's really important is the kind of spirit of jesus it's not about the bible it's about what kind of person does this make you but",
      "of Christianity. This you can see in the works of an important historian, theologian named Johann Semmler, a German. Very important. Remember for most of Western European history theology, the study of the Bible and theology is the most important thing. That's like ilm for them right? Just like in Islam it's just that you know the basic is study of Quran, Sunnah of the Prophet, the Sharia, Theology, Kalam right? That's the most",
      "thing. Things are completely inverted. Theology is now the object of study, it's a thing you examine scientifically as a historian. Now history is the main study and everything else in your tradition becomes an objective study of history and historians. You can look at figures like Edward Gibbon who wrote his famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. If you want to read this I really recommend you read it. It's three",
      "read it. It's three fat volumes. The first volume and a half are really, I think the most important part, but it is an incredibly interesting read. It can see in him a kind of revival of a Ciceronian Greco-Roman historian. Things like miracles he doesn't believe in using things like the principle of uniformitarianism",
      "principle of anachronism, right? Principle of dissimilarity. Why for example does he believe that Allahumma sallallahu alayhi wa sallam like in Tacitus is a second century Roman historian. He has a story of you know Christian involvement in fires or something and the fires in Rome during the time of Nero. He believes it. Why? He says look",
      "He says, look, why would you make this up? People wouldn't make this. If he were a Christian post-Christianity, post-Constantine scholar, you're not going to have Christians fingered as the culprits in this fire. Whereas so he uses principle of dissimilarity there and this notion that human nature, that's how you can tell what happened in the past because people in the",
      "are self-centered. It's a very cynical view towards history, it is evident in Edward Gibbon. Kind of a supercilious haughty sense that he's above everything, that everything is kind of silly in the world and the historian looks and surveys this with a sense of amusement in a way. That study of the material world and skepticism about dogmatic claims, skepticism",
      "into what is maybe best understood as a kind of crass materialism. So it's really interesting, a lot of the most important scientific figures of the 1600s and the 1700s are super pious Christians. People like Blaise Pascal died 1662, people like Robert Boyle, right? People like Bernoulli. These people are not just Christian, they're super pius Christians.",
      "of other people around them. In fact, in the 1700s there's no real atheists or deists who are major scientists. The major scientists are all really Christian. Why is that? It's interesting. How does that work? What they do is they say look our belief is not subject to reason but this world is totally subject to reasoning and observation so",
      "which has no relation to their belief. Now, that could have continued but what ends up happening is instead of having a veneration for the other or the, instead of getting a veneration for the unseen and an interest in this world you get the idea that the unseen is stupid and doesn't exist and all it matters is this world. That's the crass materialism you see written by figures like Denis Diderot,",
      "in the 18th century and people like Voltaire as well. Finally, really important thing, the idea of progress. I cannot emphasize this enough. Human beings, whether they're Muslim or European or whatever did not think about the world in terms of progress prior to the Renaissance. It's really only in the 1500s and 1600s and then it becomes much more pronounced in the 1800s. The idea that things are getting better",
      "things are getting better. And this is very, very important. This is in some ways the God of the secular humanists, is the progress of the human race itself. The God of secular humanist today is progress and the idea that the future is going to be better. Think about like the Star Trek view of history, that we're slowly getting better and we're proceeding to a point where eventually will be this enlightened race",
      "the idea that through knowledge and scientific discovery around us, you can control the world. You can make the world subservient to you and learn everything and kind of transcend conflict, transcend war, et cetera, et",
      "And then I'll be done. An example of how this actually works in the study of the Islamic tradition. Now, if you guys remember a couple years ago is there's the Birmingham Quran debate. There are these pages from a Musaf that were in the Birmingham University Library and there was carbon testing down on them and the carbon testing put them between 668 and 645. The first... Some people were saying this was actually like during",
      "during the time of the early caliphates. Okay, now this is actually an article written by a Western scholar who teaches at University of Notre Dame named Gabriel Said Reynolds. I think his family's Lebanese Christian and I want you to think about this right? The idea here is when does the Quran originate so prior to this",
      "this, a lot of historians who are really skeptical of Islamic history said that the Quran was a later construct that was put together in like the 700s or even 800s of the common era. Things like this radiocarbon dating and a lot other early Qur'anic pages that have been found really put a rest to this. But now look what happens. The fact that the date is 560",
      "568 to 645. Gabriel Said Reynolds writes, the upshot of all these early dates is that the Quran may very well date earlier than Uthman, perhaps much earlier. What does that mean? It may be time to rethink the story of the Quran's origins including the traditional date of Muhammad's career. So I want you to think about this, right? What is the Muslim claim? The Muslim claim is that",
      "is that the Quran comes from the time of the prophet. So 610 to 632, and then around 650, the Caliph Uthman promulgates the official version of the Quran. So, 610-650. That's the claim. Now, think about this. Why is that so hard to believe? You can believe that and still be an atheist. You can say, this was all made up, Muhammad wrote it himself, someone else wrote it, I don't know. You",
      "You can be an atheist. You can deny it's divine revelation. You know, it just that can't be accepted either has to be a lot later or now if we get these dates oh, it must come from earlier in fact maybe comes from before the life of the prophet here is a quote from or I wrote this one of my articles I just pasted it here for you on for you to see a number of scholars who have interest",
      "author Tom Holland, have stated that the carbon dating of the Birmingham Quran pages suggests that the Quran actually predates the life of Muhammad. In fact, he argues it suggests that Quran dates from a good deal before Muhammad's career. Just think about this, right? What these people are saying is either the Quran is much later invention or it comes from before what we think Islam's origins are, but it can't come from the time that Muslim say it comes",
      "is that unacceptable to these people? And this is why you have to understand the psychology, the mindset that comes out of it, the historical critical method and its origins. There is... Orthodoxy is a later creation. So whatever the religion officially says is not the original story. It's a later recreation. You discover the original history by going back, looking at early texts, using the principle of uniformitarianism, using",
      "anachronism, right? Using a principle of dissimilarity. And then you figure out what the real story is. So whatever Islam says, whatever Muslims are saying can't be true. It can't because that's not how religions work. You're going to go and uncover the real origins. So what that means is there's just this refusal to accept that the Muslim narrative about the Quran's",
      "you can deny the prophet of Muhammad, all these things. All the Muslims are saying is the Quran comes from the mid-7th century. That's it. But that's just unacceptable to some Western scholars who really are controlled and whose kind of worldview is suffused by the historical critical method and its origins. Okay, that's all I will say to you. Jazakallah khair.",
      "I don't know how long it went over, but anyway. You know, I think we're good. I think what we'll do is we'll... I hope Dr. Yaqub doesn't mind this and Dr. Wayman. We'll take about 20 minutes for specific Q&A with your whatever because there's a few questions and answers and stuff. Okay, I guess a good question and one I think a sister did sort of come up with. I'm going to take her question and slightly switch it up so I'll put it here. She asks, Is there a difference between the principle of disseminarity and objectivity?",
      "ac rwy'n credu bod fy ngyrfa o'r ôl yma wedyn, pan fyddwch chi'n sôn am uniformatriaeth a llesiant ac anachronaidd a phopethau hynny ddim yn golygu mor ddewel. Maen nhw'n clywed fel hanes da. Maent yn cofio eu bod yn gwneud gwaith mewn llawer o'u ffordd. Dwi ddim cyntaf os byddwch yn edrych arnyn nhw a meddyliwch, iawn, gallai hynna weithio ac efallai fod yr hanes sy'n dod allan yn eithaf onest ac yn wirioneddol.",
      "What is the equivalent of them in the Islamic tradition, if there is anything? Yeah. So Muslims actually have a very similar rule and you can find it in, let's just say books like Khatib Baghdadi's writings in the 10 hundreds. You can see this very clearly which is that one of the ways you know a report any historical report hadith or whatever, anything. And one of",
      "that if it had actually happened, many more people would have transmitted it. Right? So... Omubadbalwa, right? That's a good... If there is a spaceship comes down over High Wycombe today and only lights flashing and zapping people and stuff like that and only Don Wacky reports this, then that's not possible. This is",
      "other people would have seen it, right? Or big wacky. Big wacky too. These are other people I met in high school. So that's a sensible rule, right, but here's the problem, right. The problem is when you combine that with an obsession with the idea that orthodoxy is created and",
      "like the official version of their religion's history so for example um why are muslim scholars so skeptical of the story of the satanic verses for example like called the iad in his kitab ishifat kadya died 544 1149 in the common era great scholar he says look this story is only transmitted by very few one main chain transmission uh if",
      "So imagine the prophet actually changes the revelation. So Shaitan comes, like what are his enemies sitting around? They're sitting around being like you're making this up. Someone's telling you about this. You're getting this from some other source. This is poetry, etc., etc., This is a main criticism they have is to attack the Quran and where it's coming from. And then you just have one kind of very narrow report about this if this had happened, It would be massively transmitted",
      "But Western scholars say, they kind of take the opposite approach. They say, if Muslims believe the Quran is a word of God, why would they make this story up? If they didn't make this history up it has to be true because it makes Islam look bad. But here's the problem. God knows how he will do stuff. Okay. God know that he will just think about your own life. Sometimes you have to tell a story and someone's like,",
      "why did the guy do that? You're like, I don't know why he did that. I'm not sure why I did this. Or when you're explaining to your wife why you didn't get something at the store. I don' t know. I can't remember. Well, you were in that aisle. Why didn't you get it? It's inconceivable. It's unconceivable that you wouldn't have done this. Look, people are complicated. Just for example, there is a story in the Sira of Ibn Ishaq. And I'm going to tell you this just FYI, Muslim scholars said this story is complete nonsense.",
      "complete nonsense. It gets excised from Ibn Hisham's version of Ibn Ishaq's seerah because it is total hooey. But here is the story. The story is that Salman al-Farsi, this is in like Ibn Hishaq official seerat that he wrote under the patronage of the Abbasid caliph. Salman says before I came to Medina I was traveling around the Middle East looking for the true religion and this guy tells me go to this bush",
      "in Syria. There are these two bushes and there's a wise man who lives in the bush, and once a year he runs from one bush to the other bush. You got to go get him and ask him what's the true religion? So Salman does this. He goes finds the guy. The guy runs between the bushes. He says hey what's a true religion. The guys say okay listen, go to Medina because there's going to be a prophet there that's where you need to go. And then the Prophet hears the story, alayhi salam hears the here's the story allegedly from some man who says you know who that was? That was Jesus",
      "That was Jesus. So that means, according to this story, Jesus is living in a bush in Syria in like 610 Common Era. Does that make does that accord with any notion of Islam? There's no religion, not Christianity, not Islam. Nobody believes this. What the heck is going on? So why would this be? I mean, so wait a second. Why would Muslims make this up? It must be true then. Except no one's going to believe that story.",
      "But why would it be in the book? Because Lord knows why he will make things up sometimes. What, how can we go and get into their head and know that maybe there was like one guy in the Caleb's quote is like, God, you know, even as Hawk just put this story in there. This I really liked this story. You know, I own these bushes. If you do this, my sky, my real estate is going to skyrocket. Who knows why? It's a ludicrous story. So that my point is you don't know this, but if you combine this principle of dissimilarity,",
      "dissimilarity, if you stick with it like with dogmatic fierce ferocity and you combine it with constant skepticism of the official story, it can lead you astray. Does that answer that person's question? I think it does. No, it does, it doesn't. I think answers this brother's question as well is exclusive to the West these HCM principles could you share if there are some analogous principles analogous maybe even they emerged in traditional Islamic scholarship and you did because you're not beholden to any of these single principles the way you mentioned in a dogmatic sense",
      "sense. Yeah, I mean it's very interesting because Muslim scholars will use this a lot in things like not just in historical reports but in things about fiqh like you know if you lock someone up for three days, if someone says they're bankrupt and they don't have any money to pay a debt and then you stick them in jail for three years, it's like if that person is like a rich person who's used to being comfortable and they still say they don t have any",
      "So they're actually Muslims are constantly using this idea of kind of that there are general ways that people act, but they wouldn't say they're universal. They'd say that they often are very based on culture and based on class, which I think is actually a lot more accurate, a lot More like it's very difficult for example from four people in the West understand Like why a Muslim would like why would you die? Because someone insults with the Prophet like why don't you go and like risk your life",
      "who killed salman taysir in pakistan like why would this guy do that isn't it doesn't make sense because guess what people are different you know they're motivated by different things like they're not not everybody is you know like an urban american or urban english man in the 21st century that's just not how the world works uh yeah so another thing but i would say it's important to keep in mind that muslim scholars when it comes to hadiths there's an issue which is that um",
      "prophets are not subject to normal rules. So if I say, guys, I just had a dream and God told me that you know, you guys should do this. I'd be like, that's great. Thank you. If someone's a prophet they actually can have revelation. They can see the future. They",
      "a lot of the normal rules of historical critical method no longer apply to that person. Right, because and then like that whole notion of uniformitarianism if I'm saying it correctly. That's gone flying out the window now. So you know why does the prophet for example unable to lie about God? Because if he could lie about god it's inconceivable that prophecy would function. Right right. But I mean",
      "I mean, just the other day, this is controversial. But I was just reading a book that Qadiyyat's son wrote about his father, the guy who wrote the Kitab al-Shifaq. He says that this guy said that there was this saint in Lendalus and he was in the desert. And he sees this big meal of bread and milk and water is made for him in the",
      "scholar that qadiyat is talking about it's not called the odd himself but the scholar he's talking about he doesn't believe this story so that's not true because even the prophet alayhi salam and the companions of the prophets didn't get this kind of treatment they didn't when they were hungry they suffered suddenly like you know massive meals weren't brought for them so i'm not saying that this scholar is right or wrong i'm just saying that you can see muslim scholars will constantly be using this notion of",
      "as a tool of discernment in reports about the past. Okay, so you brought forward an example of the HCMN application and how it failed. So that was Gabriel Saeed Reynolds talking about the Birmingham Manuscript. Now there's quite a few instances, and obviously one of them is slightly more prominent than others which was Dr Shadi Al-Masri had a debate with somebody about the Believer's Hypothesis but I want to... because okay i'll give another example of HCM",
      "claim she is in the traditional narrative, it is fabricated because Hisham ibn Urwa narrates it. Here's Mudallis. They all come something about Iraq and Iraq is a big problem. It's not in the Motta of Imam Malik so why isn't it being mentioned in Medina? So what I'm doing is they're putting forward these different fragments of evidence. Yeah so the general you know the idea is there's this report, it's fairly widespread",
      "It's in Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim and other books like that. Aisha was, Radhi Allah wa ta'ala Anha was nine when the Prophet consummated his marriage with her. Now this really disturbs people. This disturbs me, right? I mean, I would love it if this hadith was unreliable and we're not to worry about it because basically if you live in most parts of the world today, this story is going to creep you out, right, and I've met Muslims who are literally like",
      "who are literally like, I cannot accept the story. If it's either I'm not Muslim anymore or I reject this story, I'm going to reject the story because otherwise I can't be Muslim. Like that's how strong their reaction is to this, right? Now here's the thing. Nobody ever talked about this, so nobody, the Prophet's enemies that are sitting around in Mecca and Medina like oh what's this Zayd Zaynab thing? We know",
      "They're trying to use his life against him. Even his married life against Him. Even when you look at early polemics like John of Damascus and early non-Muslims or Christian polemicists writing about against Islam, they'll talk about the Prophet's age of marriage to Aisha but they don't mention her age. They say he became obsessed with Aisha and he had this vision of his dream of her and he used revelation to get her. But they don' t talk about her age It's not until",
      "not until so interestingly uh the first i found one in 1905 was the first instance but then actually somebody mentioned to me and i saw this that mirza khalam ahmed in the late uh i think in the seven in the 1890s also addresses this so in the 18th but the same thing basically the late 19th century is when this starts to become a big deal i mean it becomes a deal at all why is that because prior to that time",
      "that time in Britain and America, for example, people were marrying young girls all the time because people didn't care about age. Like it didn't matter. Think about this. If your kid wasn't in school and there's not like first grade, second grade or first year, third year, second year, everyone's just kids just running around. Hey, that kid looks big. That kid looks small. Like the small kid is going to play with a small kids. A big kid's going to pay the biggest, like you don't even know what age they are. It doesn't matter if somebody goes through puberty and another person doesn't go to puberty.",
      "puberty. You don't sit there and be like, wait, but they're both 14. I don't understand. So this idea of thinking about people's age is really a product of the modern state. And it's the school system, public schooling, everybody being sorted by age, putting with their age peers. This is a very new way to think about human society. So prior to this, if you went and you saw a really nubile, attractive girl",
      "Maybe I would like to marry her. And someone's, what does it matter if she's 13 or 18? The point is that's of no importance to people, right? There's a lot of stuff written on this in a good book by Starrett called American Child Bride. You can read if you're interested in this. So my point is imagine that 1,400 years of people trying to attack the prophet's personality and they never bring up Aisha's age until now suddenly",
      "Until now, suddenly we've discovered the Hadith is made up because we feel this need. We feel this needs but here's the thing I said, I talked about historical critical method is suspicious towards certain things and certain people, but not other things. Imagine this, here's a Hadith. The Prophet went outside one day and had some dates with him and then got on his camel.",
      "I mean, in theory you could be critical of that. But if you're critical of it, if you don't have anything to build on, there's no background against which to be critical because you have everything. There's no reason to be political about this report. The prophet went out and ate the dates and got on his camel. Here's the problem. That story about Aisha's age is the same. That was unremarkable. It was unmemorable.",
      "It was unremarkable. There was, where's the evidence? Like let's say other reports, the prophet, Oh, here we go. He wrote a treaty. This is going to be a big debate wasting. I thought the prophet can't write. What do you mean he wrote a treatise? This is Muslim scholars would debate this right or the prophet said,",
      "the Prophet, you know, oh, he said Abu Bakr should be the caliph after me or Ali should be we're going to debate this. Right? There's the things that people debated. They didn't debate this nobody was there's no like dispute over Aisha's age that we know of if there were then you could say maybe yeah so one group is kind of gonna write make this hadith up because they're trying to spin some message about Aisha or about the Prophet but there's",
      "debates. Is there? I'll tell you, so I read Joshua Little. Something Little. I feel bad. I'm forgetting because I actually think he's a nice guy. I mean, I think his name is... I feel",
      "It's Joshua Little. Yeah, Joshua Little, okay. I don't feel that bad. So I laud him for his overall work and I said this to him in messages private messages you know, I disagree with certain presumptions he has which are presumptions of historical critical method so for example his argument is that Hisham bin Urwa is a problematic narrator so let's actually forget about Hishams bin Urwas reports there's still a report in Sahih Muslim",
      "Sahih Muslim that goes from Abdurazak Sanani to Ma'ar bin Rashid, to Zuhri, to Orwa bin Zubair about his aunt Aisha talking about her own age. So that's a sahih chain of transmission which does not involve and again this is just saying I was nine years old when the Prophet married me. And again if you had a sound, a one chain of",
      "whose work is in general also reliable. A lot of Western historians, by the way, a lot of western historians like John Anthony, they actually accept the report of Isha's age. This is not all that orientalists think this. There are some scholars who don't agree with the report and some do agree with it. If you have a sound change",
      "a sound chain transmission that says the prophet got on his camel one day and ate some dates no one's going to dispute that what's the difference between this isha report and something about eating dates and getting on a camel from for most of islamic history until essentially the last century this was the same these were the same level of unremarkability whatever now it becomes an issue so if only now we're having an issue doesn't that raise suspicions",
      "something that should be debated. But here's why, okay? If you could find some reason, some conflict in which this was manufactured, then you'd have grounds for criticizing the reliability of the Hadith. But there's no conflict. So what Little says is that there was a Zoroastrian,",
      "you shouldn't marry a girl before she's nine. Okay? And then in this 10th century Shiite collection called the Yusul al-Kafi of Al-Quleini, who dies 940 of the Common Era, okay? It has a report attributed to Jafar as-Sadiq where he talks about",
      "Like about not marrying girls who are younger than nine, not the problem. Like you shouldn't marry girls on younger than five. Younger than nine. Okay. So what's that? That argument means that there's this debate where Shiites are trying to say stuff about like purity and being nine. And so Muslims, Sunni Muslims make up this report of Aisha being nine I mean,",
      "Okay, but here's the problem. And I asked him this question. I said, what's the... Why do you accept the report in Kulaini's Usula Kafi? Like, Kulani died in 9... You know, this guy is living in the late 800s, early 900s of the common era. Why... I mean, this report about Aisha definitely goes back a lot earlier. I mean if you're saying Hisham bin Orwa made it up let's just say he made it Up. This guy is Living in the early mid 700s So",
      "So, I mean, that's a lot earlier. And you're telling me that there's another book in the early 900s that now I'm supposed to use as like evidence? But I thought the whole problem with Islamic sources is they're late. People can make things up. Like why didn't this guy make stuff up? Right? Or how about this?",
      "But then the report from Kulaini is just accepted because what? Because it goes along with our argument. Then the second problem is, imagine this. Let's say and I don't want anyone to misquote me and then do another thing where poor Asim gets in trouble because of something I say. So but imagine this, imagine that the prophet actually is influenced by Zoroastrian law.",
      "Like imagine that, you know, like there's Christian ideas and Jewish ideas and Zoroastrian ideas floating around Arabia. He says, oh, there's a Zoroasterian law that you can marry girls at nine. I think I should marry Aisha. But just imagine that what's the what's so I mean, that's OK, fine. That's what happened. Why does that mean that the story about Aisha is made up? Maybe like the fact that Muslims are influenced by the world around them.",
      "Right. So my point is that there's all sorts of ways to interpret this evidence that does not come up with this conclusion that the story about Aisha's age is made up again. I actually wish the story",
      "you're constantly going to be changing your view of the world. Like there's no, you know, you're not actually following anything true. You're just following a manufactured product that's designed to please current consumers. So again, if someone has, if there's an existing dispute or a good reason to criticize a hadith, I don't think any Muslim scholar has a problem with that. But coming with a relatively recent social anxiety and saying that this should make us go back",
      "from 1400 years ago that was a bad argument on this principle of dissimilarity i just think are there instances where so so um other instances where hadith is probably beneficial for islam if it were true and the muslim scholars still came out and said actually that's fabricated yeah tons of course like you know um the hadith of the hidden jewel",
      "I mean, Ibn Arabi likes this hadith. He says he has this evidence for it through Kashf that Allah says that I was a hidden jewel and I wanted to be known so I created the world and it knew me. It's a really interesting idea. Maybe it's true but there's no isnad for it. There's no isnad for it at all. Mulla Ali al-Qari who died in 1606 1410-1606 he says",
      "he thinks, he kind of comes up with evidence that has similar meaning but that hadith definitely is no isnad for it. You know like the idea you know um technology even in China how many times have we cited this? It's a weak hadith I mean maybe it's not forgery but it's a week hadith uh there are so many examples and like ibn Taymiyyah says he's a great line he says you know look there's lots of things can be true it doesn't mean that the prophet said it like",
      "said it like something can be great thing to say doesn't mean the prophet necessarily said it and it can be also really good you don't have to say you don' t have to forget about it just because the Prophet didn't say it at least that's fine no that's okay so I'll finish with a couple of questions and then maybe I'll bring everybody else in for the final rundown um this is I think quite interesting question I don't know if this person knows you I don'",
      "extent and potentially how is Jack, i.e., Dr Jonathan Brown's critique of HCM shared by other scholars within Western academia? Can he or others share any writings on the matter?\" I think that's an interesting question like this. How dominant is this HCM as an idea even within the secular... Because you mentioned even Sean Anthony and people like that except the hadith of Sayyidah Akshah. He says he's inclined to accept it. I don't think he fully accepts it but he definitely is inclined to",
      "it's a tough i don't you don't find this very often because people who it's like saying are there a lot of muslims who reject the authenticity of the quran or something no there's not because that's not what muslim tend to think right so if you come from western historical background uh you this is like",
      "citizen of the global Western society, it's your cultural background in a lot of ways. So it's very rare to find people questioning it. You do see it sometimes from maybe more pious, more like practicing Christians will talk about it in a kind of defense of their own tradition. So that's where you'll see it, like more kind of seminarian scholars, Christian scholars will usually sometimes be a little more skeptical about some of these things."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - What are Hadith_ With Prof_p1tuy8m9hrk&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748667905.opus",
    "text": [
      "Well, hello everyone and welcome to Blogging Theology. Today I am delighted to talk to Jonathan Browne. You are most welcome sir. Thank you for inviting me. I'm happy to be here. As-salamu alaykum. Wa-alaykum as-salaam. Now Professor Jonathan A C Brown is an American Muslim scholar of Islamic studies. He is the Al Waleed bin Talid Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School",
      "in the school of foreign service at georgetown university and jonathan has very kindly agreed today to tell us about hadith now he has published a critically acclaimed book entitled hadith muhammad's legacy in the medieval and modern world and that's now into its second edition with additional chapters i really recommend this book as an excellent introduction",
      "to the book below if you want to get your own copy. So perhaps we can begin by asking some basic questions, Jonathan. What are hadith? Well, yeah, funny you should ask. The... so hadiths are reports about things that the Prophet Muhammad said or did, or things that were done in his presence and that he did not object to.",
      "not object to, right? So the assumption being that if somebody did something in his presence like ate a certain kind of food and he didn't say don't eat that or you shouldn't eat it's acceptable to eat that thing. So even things done in his presents are useful. Now sometimes people talk about the Quran and Hadith as these two foundational scriptures of Islam and in a way that's correct in the sense that you can go and get the Quran off a shelf",
      "Quran off a shelf, it's in a book and you can go and get books of Hadith and look at them and their texts and things like that. But I think to more accurate to think about the foundations of Islam being the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet, the Sunna of the prophet as you nnab being his authoritative precedent if the word tative precedent to the Prophet Muhammad is upon him. So there the sunnah is as Muslim scholars have",
      "scholars have long written, I was just reading actually in the works of Shah Wali Allah, the famous Indian scholar who died in 1762. His definition which as I hadn't seen earlier is the sunnah of the Prophet is the infallible application of the Book of God. It's the Qur'an lived out and applied by the Prophet Muhammad. And that's why the Qur-an talks about sending down al kitab wal hikmah",
      "the book and the wisdom, the wisdom being the sunnah in a sense that God inspires the prophet with wisdom to apply the Qur'an's message in his life. And then sunnah can take the form of adding to the Qur-an for example, adding rules like you know, the Qur-'an says we can't eat basically you can't let's say pigs whereas the sunna adds that we can",
      "that have canines, that are predators. So you can't eat lion meat or something like that. The sunnah clarifies and explains the Qur'an. So the Qur-an says that the thief male or female cut off their hand as an exemplary punishment for what they've done but we know from the Sunnah of the Prophet that this only applies to items that are above a certain value in which there aren't certain things like foodstuffs",
      "like that and also that the thief has to admit that they did this if they just if they deny that they thought it was theirs then you won't have that punishment. It would drop down to a discretionary punishment. If you're interested in this, you can link to my article in Yaqeen about stoning and hand cutting which I think is a very important article. So, you know, this is sort of the irony of people who are kind of Quran only or only want to understand Islam through the Quran",
      "you would be left with having to punish any thief for stealing a pen, you'd have to cut their hand off. Whereas this is absolutely not the understanding of Islamic law. And that explanation and clarification comes from the Sunnah of the Prophet. The Sunnah",
      "the message of the Qur'an. Now, the relationship between the Sunnah and Hadith is sometimes people get confused about this. The Hadith are a way of knowing about the Sunna of the Prophet. You can think really about Muslim scholars thought about the sunnah in three or four ways, and they didn't talk about this so much as more my classification but I think it's useful and I think its accurate. First, they thought about it you know as hadiths right? So if you wanted to",
      "precedent how he acted what he said how he lived what his judgments were what principles you live by right how we understood the quran you could just go back and collect as many reports about things he said and did and things that were done in his presence as possible and then sort of like building a puzzle try and figure out okay which piece um fits with which you know what something he said it was a general rule versus something he says it was for a specific situation or",
      "later on, right? Or what's something he said that applies to one group of people and not to another group of People. Something he said maybe he was saying in a hyperbolic way like he's preaching to people so he's using kind of exaggerated language versus something where he is being very legally specific almost like a lawyer speaking. And of course then as I'm sure we'll discuss there's the challenge of figuring out whether or not these reports are actually things the prophet said or not",
      "on but let's assume you could authenticate them all. You would have a bunch of pieces of a puzzle and then you'd be trying to fit these pieces of the puzzle together, and this is in fact what one of the main ways that Muslim scholars, all Muslim scholars understood the sunnah. The second way is to think about the sunna as a kind of method of problem solving, a way of thinking, if you think about maybe like the letter of the law versus",
      "How would the Prophet deal with this situation? And you can see this very clearly, for example, in the practice of the early Muslim caliphs like Abu Bakr and Omar. Especially Omar because he did so much legislating that he would find a situation and he wouldn't quote the prophet but he would come up with a rule that he thought best implemented. This is what the prophet would do in the situation. So, for",
      "example he suggested when muslims started to encounter lots of non-muslims outside of arabia you know uh he was like you know he said i would discourage um muslim men from wearing marrying non-Muslim women because this is you can see like wait you know we were allowed to do this but now it seems like there's going to be a problem of Muslim women not having enough men to marry so we discouraged this so that was you know you could see him sort of how would the prophet have acted in",
      "actually find a lot of hadiths from the very senior companions of the Prophet. Sometimes just because they died, you know Abu Bakr died only two years after the Prophet's death but people like Omar Ali, we've lived for a long time after the prophet don't see as many narrations from them nowhere near as many as you see from younger companions like Ibn Abbas, Ibn Omar, Anas bin Malik, Aisha right",
      "right um because the those senior companions they sort of lived the prophet sunnah and carried it on not by remembering to do things he said but by like his personality had actually sort of imprinted on theirs like they had been shaped by their years with him by their many many years with them in constant contact with him so you know one way you think about this one is hadiths now the second way is kind of a method of problem solving the third one would be",
      "Third one would be a practice of a pious community that, you know, the Muslim community that is built by Muhammad in Medina. Actually it's practice its way of doing things. When you go into the mosque, what do you do? When you're standing for prayer, what are you do, where are you stand? How far apart do you stand how does the prayer I mean actually describing to somebody exactly how to do a prayer is kind of hard. You know first you raise your hands up to this part of your hand and you put them down here. It's kind of",
      "kind of hard it's a lot easier to show somebody how to pray so the son of the prophet as something that is just kind of practiced by the muslim community um and of course this is very as you see this in all the muslin schools of law they all talk about this but it's especially prominent in the maliki school of law i'm just going to say absolutely it is a really important uh quote from your book that i mentioned he said contrary to popular opinion",
      "bulk of islamic law does not come from the quran but from hadith um this is really remarkable and you've already alluded to the way uh hadith in a sense qualify uh the rulings on cutting of thieves hands but there are many other examples so he so what is it great bulk of his of israelic law comes from the the president or the prophet and his teaching and so on uh definitely i mean if you if you were to kind of look at just proportion of the details of islamic well i mean a very small",
      "a very small portion would come from the quran i mean the qur'an doesn't isn't really a book of law i mean one scholar had been an amir salani in the 1700s and he counted about 80 to 100 verses in the qura'n that deal with with legal issues uh i think imam afi talked about something like actually i'm gonna misquote it so i'm just going to forget about that but um",
      "prayers, how you pray. I mean these are basic parts of the religion that are not really either explicitly or mentioned at all in the Qur'an. So yeah definitely and then this hadiths are a huge you know maybe like if you're thinking about it content you know portions let's say of the sharia uh very small portion would come from the Quran and a big chunk would come",
      "there are certain hadiths that Muslim scholars kind of all agree are reliably traceable back to the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him. There's certain hadits that are not really reliable or not as reliable but were really important for law and that their main strength of those hadith isn't really that you could find a chain transmission that goes back to The Prophet narrated by all reliable people who met each other etc., has lots of corroboration,",
      "make a hadith sahih or sound but its strength really comes from its communal practice uh for example i mean this is just an obvious example but um there's you'll find in books of law or hadith the murderer does not inherit right so if you if somebody murders their dad quranically speaking your son will automatically inherit from their father right it doesn't matter if the father doesn't like them he can't there's nothing he can do",
      "nothing you can do but let's say oh i'd like to get some money so i'm gonna kill my dad and get inherited if you murder somebody you can't inherit from that person and um there's not really a reliable hadith about this but you find in books of hadith and books of law that the prophet said the murderer does not inherit the strength of that hadith is really that it's been this is you know all muslim scholars agree on this you know this",
      "practice. So you see here like a blending of Hadith and communal practice, then of course, a huge chunk of Islamic law comes from either the opinions of the companions or the Prophet or from and from and or from legal reasoning based on the Quran based on this one other profit based on early Muslim community, either through analogical reasoning. So, you know, women don't have to breastfeed when they're",
      "um you know when they're uh sorry you don't have to fast if you're traveling oh you don' t and your you don''t have to fasten if you''re sick therefore you don ''t have the fast if your breastfeeding so this is an analogical reason or uh you know and then of course other types of um reasoning like um kind of what are the aims of the sharia what are its objectives um if we don't want to have any evidence from the quran or the son of the prophet or the early muslim community you know can we just sort of reason on our own to think about what would",
      "what would fulfill the aims of the Sharia. So these are all different sources of Islamic law, but definitely hadiths are a major source. Okay. A natural question to ask is how did Muslim scholars detect forgeries? Because I've heard that particularly in the early centuries it was like a veritable industry of pumping out forged hadith to justify certain practices or certain political agendas or certain sectarian rivalries.",
      "how did uh hadith scholars the ulama the muslim scholars actually go about detecting these uh these problems these forgeries yeah so i mean there's a the quran gets written down very early so the qur'an gets written downa i mean in an official form by 650 of the common era i mean so you're talking within two decades of the death of the prophet and there's not really any debate about what the contents of the qura'n is if there's",
      "alternative version of the Qur'an that's out there, that people are citing or something. Now you could... People can argue till the cows come home about what the Qur-an means but as a source it's sort of bounded and set in stone so to speak. The hadiths are very different and all those notions of sunnah that I talked about are very",
      "as a way of problem solving is that it's, as I said, really kind of allows you to carry the spirit of the law into situations where the letter of the lies a little bit doesn't seem to apply. It's not giving you a clear answer on the other problem with that is that this, you know, spirit of all reasoning can be, can kinda get out of hand. So you say, well, if, you, if I'm allowed to not fast because of hardship, well you know it's hard to drink coffee during Ramadan.",
      "terrible if I don't drink coffee. And so, I kind of feel like that's sort of what God wants in this situation and then that's not a very good argument, right? Or with communal practice it's really sometimes especially as you get farther and farther away from Medina of the Prophet's time in space and time, what Muslims do, Muslim communal practice can become very dirty,",
      "In my Muslim country, you know, men go out and play backgammon and drink shisha and smoke shisha. And women sit at home and cook. So that's the way Islam should be. Well, that's not the way it necessarily should be, that just one particular country, right? So custom also can be corrupted. With Hadith, the problem was is a great way to get a really fine detailed description of things",
      "prophet said and did. The problem is that, well one as I said you have to kind of feel it fit the pieces together but also it becomes extremely clear in the time of the successors so essentially by six, the late 600s that lots of hadith are being forged and this makes, sometimes it can be mistakes right? So some somebody would think they remember",
      "it's another companion saying something right or sometimes somebody could just get confused and mix two hadiths together and those are not necessarily forge i mean they are in effect forgeries in the sense that there was something they probably didn't say but they're they're unintentional they're byproducts of just uh the process of humans remembering and transmitting information uh but then you have intentional forgeries that was done remember muslims you know within the first 140 years",
      "40 years of Islamic history, Muslims fight three civil wars. Three major civil wars! In addition they spread from the Hejaz to Spain and India. And you know all the different cultures and religions and foods and clothings they encounter and people are starting to become Muslim in North Africa and India and all these places. And of course they're bringing their own traditions,",
      "so you have political disputes sectarian disputes cultural disputes legal disputes etc etc and what better way to advance your cause or your ideas than by saying that the prophet of god said this or something like that. So there's a huge, huge engine of forgery that just starts chugging especially in the early 700s and that really keeps chuggin hard through the 800s and even into the 900s of the common era as I think when",
      "so muslim scholars have a challenge how do you sort out what's authentic great and particularly the words of the prophet and what's uh what's for forgery i'm happy to talk more about that unless you want no i'm just saying i just think because the role of this word isn't a bit of technical jargon here uh what is the isnad and and the problem with forged is as well but this idea of having a reliable transmission from person to person known people who could have met each other did meet each other who were known to be reliable",
      "known to be reliable, and so on. There were various kind of checks that were made weren't there? To see if this hadith in its alleged authenticity really was authentic. And this has became quite a serious academic scholarly pursuit, Hadith criticism you can call it. And that produced ultimately these amazing what are called Sahih collections, Bukhari famously, and Muslim as well which are the gold standard of hadiths today",
      "uh today which everyone now looks to for you know really solidly reliable hadiths um but that came quite late didn't it i mean it was almost controversial these sahih collections before that they there weren't these side collections there were all sorts of different kinds of eddies yeah um so you'd i think a good way to think about this is that you know muslims",
      "class. So amongst the companions, there's companions who are seen as particularly knowledgeable Aisha, Zaid ibn Thabit, Omar right? Ibn Abbas, Mas'ud, Ali bin Abi Talib these are companion to really look to for their understanding of the Qurans and of the Prophet. And then they teach the next generation of scholars in Medina like Saeed ibn Musayyib, Nafiq",
      "um in kufa people like uh ibrahim and nakai right shahabi al-hamiri in egypt in yemen in syria there's an then you should have had the second third generations really have these very clear scholarly figures emerge and they're all presented with this problem which is okay we have a huge problem",
      "saying to the prophet what isn't and there's you can kind of think of a couple different ways to solve this uh one is maybe the way that emerges really clearly in kufa especially around the thinking of scholar named abu hanifa who dies at 150 767 of the common year which is to say that you know in kuffar you know i remember also",
      "internet, you know, there's not some book of Hadiths. You can go to the library in Kufa and check out right? And there's no, if you're in Kuffah, the way you know about Islam is because a bunch of Muslims showed up while they built the city of Kufo right outside of Hira in Iraq. And the Muslims who happened to settle there are the ones who tell you about Islam. And if they remember certain things that prophet said, and they forget other things, and the guy in Egypt, the companions in Egypt remember certain thing the prophet said and don't remember other things. You're going to have kind of two different versions of Islam in a way.",
      "different but that's one of the reasons we have different schools of law is because you have this early um plurality of remembering what the son of the prophet is so that someone like abu hanifa and kufra he's saying okay look we there's certain hadiths that we have here and some of them really lay down clear principles uh you know really clear principles like um the prophet saying that the person who benefits from something is also liable for it or the person",
      "from that seems like a principle and so when he comes across the hadith it doesn't seem to fit with that principle or they seem to contradict it contradict it uh abu hanifa he might not say i don't think the prophet said this but he just doesn't think this is representative of the son of the prophets so they try to kind of look at the quran and look at their hadiths that they feel are kind of reliable in kufa",
      "terms and then those rules are definitive. And if you come across a hadith that seems to conflict with those, you just sort of dismiss it as probably not something the Prophet said. It doesn't make sense in the system they've established. Other scholars who were actually more concerned with theology which is this group called the Mu'attazilites which emerged in the kind of mid-to late…mid 700s especially in Basra and Baghdad later on in Baghdad.",
      "They're much more influenced by kind of theological discussions coming out of the Greco-Roman Near Eastern world, of Christian theology, of Jewish theology, or Greco Roman philosophy where you have certain ways. How do you get certainty in life? You get certainty through sense perception. You get a certainty to the first principles of reason. You can get certainty just unambiguous uncontested transmission like I've never been to China. I don't know if you've been to",
      "but uh i mean i'm prepared to say that china exists although i've never actually seen it right there's a we are just we've just been bombarded with so much transmitted evidence that we don't we don' doubt this so they're much more concerned these more tesla is much more concern with like these debating with you know christians or jews and coming up with a way of sort of rooting islam in epistemological",
      "certain and that are not going to carry any doubt. So they're very skeptical of somebody coming in saying, you know, so-and-so told me that someone said the Prophet said this like, ah, that doesn't that's like for them it's like a game of telephone now they understand the son of the prophet is essential. They understand what has lights or Muslim right? These are not people who are, you insane heretic for something ready but they they were saying look, this is not really gonna cut it. This is not",
      "law you can get something from these rules but what they say is if you really want to know that the prophet said something it has to agree with the quran it has agreed with the established sunnah as we know it it has degree with first principles of reason as we understand them and this is a big deal big difference or has to be agreed upon by everybody and here is where you uh will get to the third group the sort of third approach which",
      "So this approach ends up being the Sunni approach, the approach that produces those Hadith collections that you talked about like Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. And what this group says, and it's forms around figures like Abdullah ibn al-Mubarak in Khorasan, Malik in Medina, Ibn Hanbal in Iraq, Sufiyana Thawri",
      "in Kufa, what this group approach says is, look, here's a problem with these two approaches prior to this. Which is that they both are setting up sort of standards for deciding what the prophet said or didn't say that are too much the creation of their own worldview. Right? So they're putting their own minds in a way",
      "minds in a way their own minds in the position of being the judge of what the prophet said or didn't say yeah there's a problem here right which and this is a really good I mean they have a good point right if imagine this if I if I tell you that um there's more women in Paradise than men hmm or let me let me make it easier for you if I Tell You That There's More Men In Paradise Than Women",
      "sexist like that doesn't seem fair you know Islam's not sexist I don't think that's fair but actually you have no idea and I haven't I mean you have No Idea like if someone's a prophet of God and God tells them information that comes from the unseen what I mean for all we know there are more men or more women in Paradise rather than we don't know I mean we can say like this seems sexist or not but that's just us talking about what our values are so the problem is that there's certain it you know if we were to generally like sit around and evaluate",
      "evaluate things we hear, we could talk about notions of fairness or justice. But really when it comes to things that are from the unseen, we actually don't know the answers. We don't what the unseen is, right? So reason is starting to get humbled here. Second, if for example, if I say well hadith can't contradict the Qur'an – that makes sense by the way! All Muslim scholars agree on this but here's the problem and",
      "a difference between contradiction and explanation if i say that um you know the quran says that carrion dead animals has been prohibited for you that's what the qur'an says now we then define hadith that the muslim companion to the prophet find a dead whale washed up on the beach of the red sea and did they eat from the meat of this whale and then they come back and tell the prophet they did this and he doesn't object to it this is fine",
      "contradicts the Quran. But nobody actually rejects this hadith. They see this as an explanation, ah, the Quran is talking about land animals not sea animals and in fact we have other hadith that also talk about the contents of the ocean being pure to eat. So what's the difference between contradiction and explanation? How do you know when something is contrary to the Quran versus explaining or creating an exception to a Qur'anic rule or expanding a Quraniq rule?",
      "The second, so they would say to someone like the Kufans, someone like Abu Hanifa, look we understand you have these principles that you've derived from Hadiths and these actually might be good principles. But you're rejecting this Hadith because you think it violates your principle but actually it just might be an exception to your principle. It might just be an exceptional situation the Prophet is making to this rule.",
      "objection they had, and this is more kind of to the Moitazalites. The Moitzalites for example were very confident in the ability of human reason to come to knowledge about God and to come into knowledge about right and wrong independent of revelation. Now, the problem is that as Stanley Fish, a literary scholar said, you know, reason always comes from somewhere. Reason isn't… maybe there's some basic fundamental things like the rule",
      "contradiction, A can't be a and not a at the same time in the same way. Okay, that maybe everyone can agree on but other kinds of reason are really kind of culturally rooted or rooted in a certain tradition. So for example, the Mu'attazilites were really they couldn't accept hadiths that talked about God moving around. Right? So this one verse this one hadith in Sahih Muslim and Sahih Bukhari and other books says God is very late at night. God comes down to the lowest heavens and he listens",
      "the prayers of those who are awake at night praying, right? Monteslights just could not. They had this sentiment apoplectic fits because God's moving around. What do you mean God's moved? If God's move around that means God is in a body. That means God's over here and he's not over here. So what is this shape? What is the shape of God? What does God's body look like? How does God move around? Does he have like a scooter or you know, what is it? What's going on? I mean, they couldn't accept",
      "that because they came they had been so much so influenced by the kind of greco-roman tradition of uh of theology and of course philosophy yeah that talked about um let's say boethius talking about divine simplicity that god can't be you know god can t be composite because something that's composite can come into parts then those parts could exist separate from him and then you have things that are not god that are eternal or the idea of motion in the aristotelian cosmos",
      "cosmos. The prime mover, or in the kind of theistic world God is outside of creation. Anything inside of creation, inside the sphere of the fixed stars is part of the world of change of time, right? And something can't move around unless it's inside that world. You",
      "side of the fear of this sphere that stars because that's like another, another realm. But God can't be moving around, because that means he'd be part of our world in effect. Now, um, okay, fair enough, much has lights but what's all that got to do with Islam? I mean, you go back and you read, let's say the Old Testament, and it's talking about God walking and God doing that. I'm not saying that that's accurate. But my point is that clearly, you know, if you want to talk about like kind",
      "talking at least talking about god in a language that is anthropomorphically inflected at least uh metaphorically or figuratively so and then the early sunni said to them what has lights by the way you guys are not consistent because look you're muslims do you believe in the quran we believe in",
      "i think it's sort of right god and his angels come in ranks they come in so God's coming in ranks with the angel the montezlai say yeah but that's figurative it's the power of god is coming he said okay that's figure why don't you do a figurative interpretation for that hadith that you reject maybe it's not god's you know uh coming down maybe it' s god's mercy coming down",
      "scholars, they'd say that it's not actually God coming down. It's the mercy of God or the knowledge of God approach to us. So, they were saying if you look, you're willing to interpret the Qur'an figuratively when it seems to go against your ideas of reason but you're not… But when it comes to Hadith, you just throw it out. Why? So what the early Sunnis proposed is if we want to figure out",
      "we are saying that, we're recognizing that human reason is a liability here. It means taking, it means sort of giving too much power to your own culture, to your understanding of reason, to you background assumptions. So let's try and take reason out of the equation and let's just look at transmission. Let's see okay where did this material, who narrated this? Where did you get this hadith? Where",
      "let's look at these people. Let's look what they transmit. If so and so, if Paul is narrating from his teacher and he narrates ABC things then the other students in this teacher also narrate ABC from this teacher. Now it seems like these guys are all narrating the same thing so you know they might be reliable but let's say one student narrates FG",
      "FG LMNOP also from the teacher. And that student only studied with that teacher for three months or something, whereas you study with him for 10 years. Whoa, wait a second. This this student is claiming things from the teachers that are not corroborated by the other students. So once you start looking at what somebody narrates from their teacher, it's a corroborator by other students of those teachers. You can start decide, Is that person reliable transmitter? Once you've decided they're a reliable transmitter,",
      "from this person, from another person. And we say, this person met that person. They lived at the same time in the same city. They said I heard this from that guy or that girl then these people become reliable transmitters and through a process of evaluating the reliability of transmitters, and then looking for corroboration or the lack of corroborations reports, we can decide what are reliable hadiths to profit and what aren't. And so that was the method that was developed really in the Hejaz",
      "and Iraq, and Khorasan in the essentially late 700s to early 800s. And then really perfected in the mid-800s by scholars like al-Bukhari and Muslim and their students. They produced a set of collections that were fairly quickly appreciated although not every collection was appreciated and valued in the same way at the same time",
      "But especially Bukhari and Muslim books really came to be seen as the pinnacle of the critical rigor of this process, and seen as most stringent in terms of what authenticating with the Prophet said. Yeah, your PhD is actually on that very subject isn't it? The Sahih collections of Bukkari and Muslims which… Yeah yeah how they attained that position. Which is well worth getting and can be purchased by way on this whole subject",
      "whole subject that jonathan just mentioned i do recommend uh his acclaimed book hadith muhammad's legacy in the medieval and modern world which i said before i will link to below it's really worth reading um just something that really interests me in that book i've just mentioned um i often hear by the way that particularly from christian missionaries for some reason not sure why though we have no hadith",
      "your book you mentioned that we now have things called sahifa or sahifas apostrophe s if you add the english plural which are kind of these small notebooks um and there's a fascinating story here i think where um i got a friend of mine who happens to be a muslim scholar in the hanufi tradition he said when i spoke to him about this that um that the ideas used to be passed on but our past on orally",
      "then in your book you mentioned that in the 20th century um an actual small notebook that ultimately uh traces its um the words back to abu hurairah the companion of the prophet was actually physically discovered and the contents of that actually are the same as the orally transmitted hadiths that my muslim scholarly friend knew",
      "opportunity, perhaps a rare one to confirm corroborate the reliability or accuracy of oral tradition in handing down these cities. But could you just say a bit more about these Sahifa what they are and why? And that particular discovery in the 20th century? Yeah. So well, you're partially right, I guess in some ways, I'm going to deflate some of your balloon but I think you're generally on",
      "is that, you know. So first of all the writing materials that the early Muslims had are very primitive and they're not very permanent I mean things like a parchment and papyrus were very expensive sometimes it would write on essentially like the bark of palm trees you can kind of cut into sections uh and other sources as well so",
      "to write things down and a lot of this material, you know there's a lot movement, a lot change, early material doesn't really survive. We have some pages most often from the Qur'an that come extremely early from maybe even the lifetime of the companions or the prophet, definitely from the lifetimes of the companion probably certain pages of the Qur-an but when it comes to hadiths we have… There are certain hadith collections",
      "collections that have we actually so there's two questions here right? So one is when are hadith written down in a more systematic way and the second question would be how reliable or how reliable, or how confident can we be that a later book claiming to be accessing those early written collections is actually act. Is it is that is that a sound claim? Yeah okay",
      "yeah okay so uh in terms of muslims writing stuff down um they we know they're writing small things down because at least as far as we can tell they're talking about like a letter that the prophet let's say wrote to the people of yemen he writes a letter then it can that contains rulings about compensation payments for injuries and that letter is then transmitted",
      "his son right there's other reports that are that claim to be the sahifahs sort of notebooks that are basically written i mean you can imagine imagine just like imagine you have one piece of parchment okay you have sheet of parchment which is actually you know you can wash and like this these things are pretty rugged as long as you don't let it rot or something like that so you could imagine like a companion of the prophet and his son or children writing down things that prophets said on this rules he said",
      "rules he said. And then this actually being handed down in a family. A good example of this is the Sahif of Amr ibn Shu'ayb, which goes ultimately back to the companion Abdullah bin Hamar ibn al-Has from the Quraysh. In some hadith collections like the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal you actually see a quotation of this sahifa almost in its entirety. It's just a bunch",
      "rules and sometimes they're not even connected it's like rule rule um so uh clearly from what we can tell muslims start to write things down very early but these are very limited writings they're",
      "for about two or three years he mostly is hearing other hadiths from companies hearing from other companions things that the prophet said and there are reports that he actually is also collecting and copying these sahifas that he can find right now um we have uh one such sahifa the sahih of hammam ibn al-munabbi",
      "written version we have one that can be dated back to the early 800s right so let's say that would be about 70 years or so after hammam's death i see um maybe it's the way but if you can date it back to that original um now that's not surprising right because if you want a book to survive anything to survive uh you have to i mean you can either put it in like a vacuum whatever seal",
      "sealed bag or something, right? But I mean eventually it's going to get worn down into pieces and so especially if you people are using it. So you need to recopy it. Yeah. Uh so that gets us to the...so we sorry sorry we have actual physical pages of hadith collections or of people's written compilations of hadit from the mid 700s, from the late 700s,from the 800s. Right. Really",
      "700 is probably the earliest actual physical copies of things we have that have survived. Now, in the time of the younger successor so around let's say the early 700s successors like Azuhri Sa'id bin Abi Uruba start to write down hadith more systematically. So now they're actually writing down more things they hear",
      "to write down a lot of their hadiths that they hear. They're not just trusting that they're remembering them, it's not just sahifa from their family, they're actually trying to collect and compile but again they have very small amounts of material maybe uh their scrolls are about like you could carry it in their saddlebags on their camel would be no problem to do that whereas by the time you get to Ibn Hanbal um in the mid 800s i mean his library of hadith is",
      "by that time, by the way, by late 700s Muslims have gotten paper. The technology of paper which is cheap and you can write as much stuff as you want right it's not you don't just have like a small amount of papyrus or a small amout of parchment that you can ride on okay so we have texts from the late 700 in actually the text themselves dating back to the",
      "back from the 700s but very limited now um then the the final question is if you have later books later actual physical copies you can date to like the 10 hundreds or something for the 900s um or the late 800s to what extent can you be confident that they're actually reproducing things from earlier uh there you know you have to look at",
      "14, if I'm not mistaken. Where he's looked at a lot of these early Mus'annafaq books which are basically books organized by topic. The Mus'annafa Abd al-Zaqsanani who died around 827 of the common era. Ibn Abi Shaybah in the 40s of the Seerah of Ibn Ishaq and what he's done by looking at all these different sources",
      "sources and sort of saying okay these people are claiming to narrate from a common link and they all serve narrating the same thing and then these other people also narrating from an earlier generation they all kind of agree and then you start looking you're seeing look here's uh here's a version of the report that has you know the content has let's say A B and C in it and it's transmitted along certain paths and there's another version that",
      "you don't see a on this path over here so you're seeing that the contents of reports are really consistent with the chains that they're getting transmitted by so and then maybe also some of those transmitters are saying things like for example azuhri or his student uh like his students um",
      "or I don't understand what he meant by this. Or they'll transmit something that disagrees with what they think the correct idea is. So why would somebody make up something and then say, like, I don' t understand what you mean by this? Or I don''t... This is what he said. I don ''t know what the word means.\" Or it actually disagrees of my opinion. So all these things together that I mentioned gave Motzke a sense of confidence that you could date specific reports not necessarily the entire Hadid corpus",
      "But if you start just looking at individual reports, you could start to date them back to the late 600s of the common era, kind of the time that they're actually still companions of the Prophet alive. And so that I think is the it doesn't necessarily it doesn' t help you say that Sahih Bukhari is 100% accurate or the Muwatta of Malik is 100 percent accurate.",
      "Muslim scholars were able to accurately transmit material from the very early period. And by the way, what's interesting is that a lot of times when they are let's say when errors or misinformation or forgeries are entering into this sometimes it's well, Muslim scholars are aware of it and sometimes they were not necessarily",
      "not necessarily averse to it i'll explain that in really quickly right so for you to say that for somebody to say you know is everything inside bukhari true did the prophet say everything is inside well i mean the answer is no but the question is wrong right the question",
      "narrated by different chains of transmission, and they might differ in details. You know, one says the prophet prayed two prayer cycles before he did this. The other one said the prophet prayed the two prayer cycle after he did it. Which one is correct? Is you know, they might all have authentic change of transmission. Is somebody just misremembering something or both of them actually remembering something but they were on different occasions",
      "someone in the change on mission get confused. So, um, Bukhari himself will like talk about this and later scholars we'll talk about but you can't in one sense they can't both be true in a sort of digital sense of like, you know, either right or wrong. But they're all like, they're definitely giving you the most accurate possible picture of what people remember about the prophet's sayings and his actions.",
      "second thing is that a lot of these reports that people are very suspicious about and you can i mean if you got a if you gave the list of the hadiths that you know could did people get up did people got upset about being in let's say sahih bukhari or say muslim you could pretty much say that they all come from certain chapters of those books they all go through chapters about the beginning of time",
      "on things about like campaigns of the Prophet, things that happen out on campaign. The virtues of people like such and such a person is so good because of this right? And those are topics as far as we can trace back to science of Sunni Hadith criticism. Sunni hadith scholars were saying, hadiths that deal with law, ahkam, halal and haram how you worship, how you fast what you can eat or you can drink right",
      "right? What they saw is the core areas of the religion. They were very strict about the standards for this. They said on other issues, like the virtues of people, what happens at the end of time, what happened to the beginning of time? You know, the rewards you get for certain actions, et cetera, et Cetera manners do as you make, right? You invocations you make. They say we're lax about this because they didn't see this as core issues and you know, okay,",
      "okay, Moses was so great that he did this. We know Moses is great already. He's a prophet. You know, was he this great or that great? I mean, it doesn't, it sort of doesn't matter. Um, you know, uh, the prophet said that it's really good to teach your children good manners. We don't want to change anything. You think, you're teaching your child good manners gets you this reward in the day of judgment as opposed to that reward. That's a sort of not really a big deal for them because it's all, it's not changing anything that they don't already know. So",
      "So that's where a lot of the sometimes not so much in like Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, but certainly in the other collections. A lot of them material that people find problematic is actually in subject matters, subject areas that Muslim hadith critics themselves were admittedly lax about because they didn't see it as detrimental. They didn't seem themselves as betraying some of the prophet in doing this. OK, that's very helpful. But perhaps finally,",
      "Perhaps finally, my final question as we are, as you've been discussing this for nearly an hour now is to do with the Western historical critical method. You mentioned briefly how Motski, this very esteemed German scholar who just died a couple of years ago, hugely influential figure, a Western scholar, non-Muslim I think, I assume he was non-muslim. But in terms of historical critical methods which is distinct and separate from the Muslim hadith critical method",
      "method what assumptions does the western historical method make about the world and about god and how does this impact on western discussions about the historical reliability of hadith because it tends to produce quite different conclusions i think in terms of uh what is and isn't accepted in the hadith so if you want to share with your audience there's on yakin institute.org",
      "I added material as well. I think it's called Blind Spots, if you look up kind of on your institute something called blind spots. It's essentially the chapter of my hadith book on historical critical method that I actually also add material to sort of like an enhanced chapter and this will be good for your readers or your viewers if they want to learn more about this. The way that you know if you think about how we in a kind of modern west",
      "true and false about religion. This is not an objective methodology, you know? Human beings don't drop out of the womb and automatically view the world the way a French person views the world today, right? Or that American person views it well. These are specific traditions they come from. And if you look back at the way that Western scholars approach not just their own religion but also Islam",
      "shaped by the specific experience of Western Europe with Christianity and the classical Greco-Roman tradition, essentially from the Renaissance until the modern period. Just briefly, I mean a few things that are really important are there... The discovery in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, that there are a lot of Gospels that had totally different understandings",
      "message that didn't make it into kind of the official Christian corpus. Second, that the early church, Christian Church introduced a lot of ideas that were not present in the earliest material we can date back to let's say, the Christian community or Jesus or you know, etc., etc. Right?",
      "that the Old Testament itself had was not a product of, you know, let's say the five books of Moses were not written by Moses. But in fact, we're the product of multiple authors in different contexts with different aims. Yeah. So a couple of assumptions just that we can talk about quickly and I think your viewers would benefit from reading The Blind Spots article. I think if they're interested in this, yeah, it just do it. And I think these are the ones that kind of end up being the most",
      "being the most influential in the way Western scholars talk about Islam today, not all Western scholars, some Western scholars is that there is this absolute conviction that religion change. So what the original Christianity, the original message of Jesus was not what eventually ended up being expressed in the four canonical gospels of the new Testament. Right?",
      "article of faith by the late 1700s and early 1800s amongst Western academic scholars of religion. And then later on, even by pious believers in those religions in some ways. Not all them but some of them right? This idea that orthodoxy is a historical creation and then orthodox goes back",
      "like it wanted history yeah create a sacred history yeah uh that scriptures can't be intact because the bible is not intact so you know no other scripture you know just scriptures are are doctored they're forged to go through changes orthodoxy's a later creation it goes retro back projects its own vision of the religion and history onto the past and so let's assume this is the case",
      "the case for islam um now there may be aspects of this that are true i mean there's this is a big discussion i mean it's clearly aspects of different schools of islamic theology that are later developments and not necessarily identifiable in the earliest period so you mentioned the mutazilites who said were muslims and obviously they're uh influenced by hellenistic philosophy",
      "Presumably that doesn't go back to the original community. Yeah, exactly. Precisely. This is what they were criticized for right now. However, this ends up with kind of bizarre situations where I you know if you remember a few years ago when the Birmingham library or university found these pages of most types of chronic pages they had and they carbon dated back to like the time of Abu Bakr.",
      "saw some of these scholars like i think gabriel saeed reynolds is one of them the great skeptical scholar at notre dame he's like this can't be right uh this must be later right um and then some it came out that actually the range of dates was could be it could have been as early as like the 550s or something like before the life of the prophet yeah then gabe was like but it couldn't be from the 500 so wait a second",
      "earlier than the prophet why not from the prophet's lifetime i mean why is that such a great look you can think you know non-muslim scholar we're talking to you don't have to believe muhammad was a prophet you can believe he was a total fraud you can be made up the whole quran right you know that's your opinion but what's so crazy about saying that the quran comes from his time i mean",
      "it to the extreme but not the obvious thing which is well maybe it came from his own lifetime why not you know yeah there's just this obsession with that or you know things like you know you have um just the other day it's really funny i mean around the time that uh that the us pulled out of afghanistan and i think it was august or september of this year",
      "leaves afghanistan in middle of night you know it's like bbc headline right if you go back a couple of years the onion onion comic comedy newspaper has a headline from i think is 2019 u.s leaves afganistan and middle of the night so over uh so what uh you know how do you know something is made up like",
      "up something based on historical facts but sometimes it's not clear what comes first the historical fact or somebody imitating historical factor so a good example of this is um like the in that when the quake i think his name's thomas nailer or something this quaker uh kind of leader in britain in the 1600s he enters i think the city of bristol and",
      "fronds in front of his father so okay what if you were um okay that's according to um according to like the way western scholars think about islam and islamic scripture right uh what that would mean is that they that guy's followers then wrote something in the bible that talked about jesus entering jerusalem",
      "Jerusalem, riding a donkey with people throwing palm fronds in front of him. So they would go back and doctor scripture to make it sort of prefigure or presage this leader's entrance into Bristol in the city in the 1600s. But of course that's ludicrous because we know that whatever the authenticity of the Bible is, it definitely comes from way earlier than the 1600",
      "I forget his last name. I think it's Naila. If I'm wrong, you can correct it in the box underneath or whatever, which is that what he's doing is he's acting out scripture. Yes. So like in the case of Hadiths, there's a Hadith that talks about the Prophet talking about the black banners will come from the east, like the kind of the Mehdi, the Messiah will come, the Messianic figure will come",
      "Now, the Abbasid caliphate, the abbasid revolution started in Khorasan and their colors, their banners were black. Their uniforms are black. The Abbasids all wore black right? So what scholars Western scholars would say is that this hadith was invented to kind of legitimize the Abasid movement as like this messianic movement bringing justice and filling the world with justice as it had been done before.",
      "justice as it had been filled with injustice okay that's possible but it's also possible like this quaker fellow in in the 1600s in britain that there's an existing hadith that talks about black banners coming from course on that maybe the prophet actually said and so the ambassadors are like hey like uh what color we're gonna wear like i know well we'll wear black because of this head even",
      "movement in part around that hadith so which comes first you know the chicken or the egg or that's not a good example because that's a conundrum but which comes First the scripture or The Imitation or the reality creating Scripture or Scripture shaping reality in the Western kind of presumption or bias is that scripture and religion is always being doctored to fit to the present for this yeah it's very kind of skeptical suspicious",
      "methodology that's never quite taking, you know, if a prophet actually is a prophet and predicts things in the future from an Islamic point of view, that's kind of automatically discounted because hey we're suspicious Westerners and we don't believe that God acts in the world anyway. And there aren't real prophets that God speaks through and make actual predictions that actually come true. So there's a whole worldview here which is suspicious looking for ulterior motives,",
      "you know retrofitting narratives and it's a very kind of conspiratorial um i mean i would say i would",
      "is going to do things like prophesy, right? They're going to say they'll come a day when X happens. Right. So let's sit and if they did that and that there are these prophecies they made that are known in the community, it's entirely possible that the Abbasids I'd say would shape or tailor literally tailor their clothing to fit that prophecy. Right? So even we're not even asking, I'm not asking at non-Muslim scholars all accept prophets and all except revelation.",
      "of it no but you know sometimes the skepticism goes beyond even what's called for by their uh their own premises their own uh sort of starting points to the point where sometimes it becomes more insane to believe what they're proposing than just to believe that like the prophet actually said something like the profit clearly said something in 23 years of being a problem he didn't just sit there and not say anything",
      "essentially every hadith cannot be is cannot be assumed to be true i mean i don't understand like what you know you want me to believe that all this stuff was made up you know or as in my i wrote an article about this i think it's on my web page about tom holland and he's in the shade of oh yes lord right where he has this idea that the five daily prayers actually comes from zoroastrianism",
      "a zoroastrian guy talking about how their astring converts still like to drink after they become muslim okay so i mean tom holland's a british historian almost must be very respectful towards bishop historians however uh your debate with him which you can see online i think it's even on youtube or something absolutely hilarious and the way you kind of unpicked and demonstrated the really extreme lengths he goes to avoid the obvious",
      "the obvious um is almost i always find it almost funny because i mean yeah the fact of the matter is like look we the quran says that islam is building on existing religious traditions it literally says that right so it's i mean why is it that crazy to think that muslims have these five daily prayers i mean maybe they got who knows where it came from but the point is this is what god and the prophet commands",
      "have to be made up later on why does everything have to come from like some zoroastrian conspiracy in the 700s yeah you know i mean it's interesting yeah i know we talked um uh tom holland he he's very respectful to people like tom wright uh former bishop of durham and a very ultra conservative christian scholar i mean he's a great christian scholarly um uh tomb raul nt right so he's kind of he is very kind of accepting and sympathetic towards that",
      "spots and there's other articles, and I'll link to those below. But also want to mention one of my favorite books which is this misquoting Muhammad the challenge in choices of interpreting the Prophet's legacy, which also covers all of these subjects had the Hadith community that a crown and well so much material how many going to but this is a really excellent general book introduction to Islam for the general reader. So I recommend that very much as well.",
      "So in conclusion, Jonathan, is there anything you want to just say in summary before we conclude? I mean, I'm grateful for your work. I follow it. I enjoy it. And thank you. Keep doing what you do. People like me enjoy and benefit from it. Inshallah. Well, thank you for your incredible work. Oh, I always ask – well, I try and always remember to ask the scholars I have on, are you working on anything particularly now or have you just produced any work that we might – Yeah, I just finished a book. Actually, I am just doing the last read-through right now of",
      "now of uh islam and blackness which is kind of a coda to my previous work book islam in slavery yeah and uh slavery and islam sorry slavery islam then it's some blackness and then after that i have to finish the book that i had sitting on the back burner which is almost done been on the",
      "legal reform and legal reform right so it's basically about how muslims conceptually and institutionally deal with instances in which their kind of law body of law and expectations of justice don't match up that's nothing good well so that book on islam and blackness is that due out imminently is that to be published this year yeah i'll submit it in you know once i'm done literally the pile of paper right behind my computer once i've done reading that i'll send an email",
      "send an email to the publisher and then they'll get it out whenever probably i think in the fall is my guess okay interesting i look forward to that well once again thank you so much sir and um uh as always say until next time and thank you very much for your expertise today"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr_ Jonathan AC Brown - Why Do We Need Hadith_ Dou_s7I6UdpYaq4&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748657845.opus",
    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah. The most authentic and verified texts for Muslims after the Qur'an are the books of hadith. They're foundational to how we understand Islam and its practice. But if the Qurán is complete, and perfect, why do we even need the hadith to begin with? How can we be certain that the Prophet ﷺ actually said something? And what should we do if one of his narrations, peace be upon him, is deemed to be less than authentic?",
      "of Islamic Civilization at Georgetown University, and he's the editor in chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Law. Dr Brown has authored several books including Misquoting Muhammad, The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy. Enjoy the episode. Dr Jonathan Brown, Assalamu alaikum and welcome to Double Take for the first time Marayad. Waalaikumsalama wa rahmatullah wa barakatuhu. Yes thank you for inviting me",
      "inviting me and thank you for being very patient with my bizarre scheduling problems. You've always been very generous to me, so I'm appreciative. Inshallah it'll be very worth it by the end of this episode. Dr Jonathan in Surah Al-An'am Allah says that the word of your Lord is complete in its truth and justice",
      "and justice that no one can change his words he is the all-hearing and the all knowing the quran is the word of allah subhanahu wa ta'ala as taught to us through the prophet sallallaahu alaihi wasalam and it's the foundation of how we understand our religion but we often hear that islam is built on two primary sources the qur'an and the hadith the hadithe as i understand it is the recorded words and actions",
      "really basic what is hadith and if we have the quran and the qur'an is complete do we really need the hadith yeah um well this man rahim you know this is uh like a fundamental question that muslim scholars have always acknowledged and dealt with since the beginning of of the revelation of essentially the the death of the prophet",
      "and uh there's so there's uh you could sort of start with a two axioms or two fixed um certainties that muslims have always had since the beginning of our tradition uh the first is that the the quran is the revelation right so if not for the qur'an there would be no there would",
      "of everything. It's like the epicenter of guidance, right? So the Prophet, his job is to deliver the message of the Qur'an, so his job doesn't exist separately from the Qur-an. It is to delive the message in the Qur-'an. And then you have things in the Quran, like the Quran saying that it is. The Quran elucidates all things.",
      "is where God says, we've not omitted anything from this book. So the Quran has it's complete. It contains complete guidance. It containes complete guidance so that's one certainty like one fixed point and so you'll by the way, it's interesting. You'll see, you know, all of Muhammad, like you'll see Imam al-Shafi in the Umm he talks about how",
      "there's every hadith, he sees this is like let's say caused by this verse of the Quran or that verse of Quran. So even all the hadits are sort of generated by Quranic revelations you know they kind of come out of them either by literally that was the circumstance that led to Prophet Isa to say this or like that's the idea also the basis behind that this hadith is a branch of or ramification of",
      "Or you have sayings like in Abu Mu'aym al-Isbahani's Hilyatul Awliya, Ibn Abbas' quote is saying, You know, Jami' ulum fil Qur'an. Oh, I think it's in Hilya tul Awliyai. Jami', jami' ulu'mi fil Qurraan walakin takasiru anha afhamu rijaal Right? So all knowledge, all scientists are in the Quran but it's like human minds that don't see that right so that's why you'll see like if there's someone who's a",
      "who's like especially a muslim scholar who's been um kind of what it's called like majdub they've been almost granted by god right so that god is like enlightened their hearts they'll you'll have instances where they're like there'll be a saint one of god saints who are like they'll look at their hand and they it's like they're reading the quran on their hand or like",
      "just where they can like read revelation so like they can look at the quran and they can see everything in it so there's this idea and it goes back to this certainty that like the qur'an says it has not omitted anything so there go back to these two points one, the Qur'an is the foundation of the sort of fount of guidance and it contains all guidance right? It contains all knowledge that humans need but on the other hand what's the other",
      "It's not debatable. Muslim scholars have never debated it, which is that there are things that we know are part of our religion that are not explicitly mentioned in the Quran. I mean, Imam al-Shafi'i's favorite example? Five daily prayers, right? So there's no point in the Qur'an does it say, there are five daily prayers. There's the Fajr prayer and the Dhuhr prayer and",
      "You bow down and then you put your head on the ground, right? So this is all explained through the son of the prophet. So unless you're going to say that we don't actually... That's not really part of our religion. It's not wirklich core to our religion, it's sort of some extra thing. Unless you're gonna say that about the five daily prayers both in their number, their timing and their actual physical manifestation. Unless they're gonna to say, that that's not part of a religion. You have to say there are things that are essentially part of",
      "of our religion that are not explicitly mentioned in the Qur'an. And if you take these two things together, so they're both certainties, you have to reconcile them and then what you get is the idea that the kind of seed of all knowledge is in the Quran, the seed of guidance is in The Qur'aan but that the Prophet, nurtures it or expands it or adds to it, explains it through his sunnah.",
      "his Sunnah, right? So his tradition, his explanation, his guidance. So the Sunna as Shah Wali Allah, the famous Indian scholar who died 1762 of the common era, as he says that the Sunnah of the Prophet is an infallible explanation of the Book of God. It's the book of God lived and explained by an infalible actor who's guided by God. So Dr Jonathan you're saying that there are two non-negotiables if you're a Muslim, you got to believe in both",
      "I believe in both fundamentally. Question, what is a world without the Hadith? If we just had the Quran and just followed the Quran? Yeah it's funny so like there's you know we don't really there's some reports that there are these some early Muslims who don't accept Hadith but it's sort of hard to tell because like for example Imam Ash-Shafi will talk about",
      "at all, but we don't really know who these people are. We don't have their writings. Allegedly early Harajites didn't accept Hadith. I just don't find...I don't believe that because we actually have some early Harjite writings and they do accept Hadit. So there's some... It's like you know it's sort of like some people say, I don't know, it's like Donald Trump was like, There are some people who say this? I don' t know. It's allegedly there were some people said this, but I don''t think we actually know who they are and I don ''t think they actually existed right?",
      "Even the people who are like the rationalists that Imam al-Shafi was debating with, like Mu'tazilites or another group that Ahl al-Sunnah will call Jahmis. They might have theological differences with the Ahl ul Sunnah Jama'at. They they might have debates over to what extent you could accept, you should accept hadiths in theology. But nobody thought that you didn't accept hadits. I mean it would be... It was just an incomprehensible statement",
      "incomprehensible state, um, incomprehensible arguments. The debate was what do you need? What kind of evidence do you to accept Hadith? Uh, but to answer your question more, more specifically, the only time that you get people who say we don't accept Hadid at all is actually in the essentially early 20th century with some, a group called the Ahl al-Quran, the people of the Quran",
      "their arguments don't really work because what they do is either the ones who are kind of really honest, they'll say yeah like five prayers we don't have any basis for them. They just say we don t and once you say that no one, no other Muslim is really going to accept you right? That's like if you're not playing toward the Qibla with in the way that you see Muslims pray like you might disagree you might be a Maliki and you have your hands at your show your size or you know humbly and had them above",
      "done. Or you might be, if not Sharia and Shia and combine your Doha and Asa prayers every day. But I've been to Iran. I prayed in Iran. Everyone was basically praying the same way. So if you say that's not really a part of religion, you're just out of the community. No one is going to accept you. The second thing is what you see is that the Ahl al-Quran, especially this one movement, it's kind",
      "certain groups of people. They're called the Parvezia movement. Some of you, like me, people who are like Parbezis. They follow the writing of this guy Ghulam Parvez, I think he died in 1985. He was a Pakistani intellectual. And they'll say we only follow the Quran but then you read his writings and it's full of stuff about the seerah of the Prophet so I'm kind of confused. You know, you can't... Like the seerer of the prophet, the life of the",
      "is hadith that's how you know about it there's no other way so if i was to summarize uh dr jonathan sorry um if i also summarize the role of the hadith then you were saying that they're two fundamental pillars of understanding our religion there's a quran and there's the sunnah um and the sunna or the the hadits if i'm hearing you correctly",
      "it is practicing our religion. It's a prescription on how to follow the religion. Have I understood that correctly? Yeah, but those are basically the same thing. The sense that we follow... The religion we follow is the teachings of the Qur'an. So by explaining the Qur-an, we know what our religion is. Yeah, as you mentioned, the Qur-'an doesn't mention five daily prayers",
      "prayers um but the hadith does so how do you jump from from one to the other there is some interpretation or explanation so the quran tells us to follow the prophet alayhi salam right the qur'an tells us that he's goodly exemplar he tells us he doesn't speak from his own desires it tells us said you know uh whatever he commands us",
      "go and vacuum the car or something like that, vacuum out the car. And then I say anything you don't understand just ask your brother about how to vacuum the",
      "of the brothers to listen to the other brother who's going to tell him what to do. So that's basically what, what the Quran does. The Quran gives guidance and then part of that guidance is to listen too. The explanations of the messenger of God. And so there that's where, that's why we're authorized to, that' s why we are required to follow the sunnah of the prophet. By the way all Muslims acknowledge this right? So there's not really a debate about this. Yeah I just as a simple Muslim, I just want to understand the role of the hadith",
      "of the Hadith, and I think that's relatively clear now. Well, I would say this, so we've talked about the Sunnah, so the Sunna is like this, it's the authoritative precedence of the Prophet Muhammad, and it's infallible interpretation of the Qur'an. Now the question is how do you know what the Sunnah is? And the Sunnat is basically known through three ways. One is through hadits which are reports",
      "prophet said, things the prophet did, things that were done in his presence and that he didn't object to. So his actions, his deeds, his words, his affirmations, those are hadiths. And then the second source of the sunnah is essentially traditions of reasoning. So the early companions when they leave Arabia",
      "And they come across new traditions and clothing. And practices and communities and technologies and stuff like that. And you have to figure out how do we act? How does God want us to act? A lot of times, especially if you see this with Omar bin al-Khattab or Ali or Uthman. Or other senior companions. Ibn Mas'ud, Aisha. They'll come to rulings. They don't actually cite the prophet.",
      "But they spent decades with him and they learned how to think like him. So it's like the example I always give is, you know, my parents for the life of me could not tell you maybe more than two or three things that my mom, like actually quote things my mother said to me but my whole way of dealing with life, I learned from my mom. Like, how do we solve a problem? Like let's say, you're cooking and you burn something and how do you fix it right? So all this, like the way my personality was shaped by her",
      "shaped by her. So the personalities, the problem solving of these early, especially the senior companions is actually, is shaped by the sunnah of the prophet. So they're like walking sunnah machines essentially, right? That's why, especially in some books of early books of Islamic law and things like that, they'll talk about the sunna of the Prophet and the Khulafa al-Rashideen or they'll talked about the Sunnah of The Prophet and The Early Muslims. Why are they talking about the son of the early Muslims? It makes sense",
      "Muslims, it makes sense. Because for them the sunnah of the early Muslims is actually an extension of the sunna of the Prophet. Now the early muslims can disagree on stuff but they're all like using this method of reasoning they learned from the prophet so that's a second way about knowing the Sunnah is through this tradition of problem solving that their senior companions learn from the Prophet The third way in knowing the sunnah is communal practice. So how Muslims",
      "Probably, you know, I'm a convert. I learned to pray from a book. But probably, Muhammad, you learn to pray like other older people, like your parents or your brothers, your family, someone like so there's you actually become kind of acculturated into a community that has its own practices. And so that's how the early Muslims another way they knew the Sunnah is just the way that the early Muslim practiced and transmitted that in their kind of living tradition. We're saying, OK, there are three sources to the Sunna we're focusing today on Hadiths",
      "Hadiths and I wanted to talk about the authenticity of hadith. You've obviously covered this topic very, very extensively. I hear about weak hadith all the time. I here there are different levels of hadits assuming I haven't gone through the College of Hadith at one of the universities help me understand how to navigate this space? How do I know that the Prophet actually did something or said something? Yeah. Well, okay. First of all, it's important remember that hadiths",
      "Hadiths are, they're reports about the things that the Prophet said or did. So they're a piece of data that goes into a bigger machine. What Muslim scholars have always done and by the way, the Prophet's own companions did this. We have reports of them doing exactly what we're talking about, which is the Prophet s words are put into like a bigger system",
      "And that system includes the Quran, right? It includes other things we know the Prophet said. It includes his sunnah through communal practice. It means it includes his Sunnah through traditions of reasoning and problem solving that we talked about. And so any specific hadith is going to fit into a bigger framework.",
      "prevent us having to deal with problematic hadiths? No, this is what Muslim scholars have always done. There's no debate about this, right? So that's the first thing to remember is that any hadith like even if you're entirely positive the Prophet said this thing it doesn't necessarily mean it has to be put into a bigger system. So for example from all evidence we have we know that the Prophet",
      "If it's Ashura, which is basically a continuation of Jewish Passover celebration in the Hejaz. If it is Ashura then those people who have already eaten today should fast for the rest of the day and those people that have not eaten just keep fasting. This and other Hadiths suggest, I mean it doesn't suggest, the Prophet is saying to fast Ashura but we don't consider it obligatory to fast",
      "Ashura because we know from other hadiths and from the communal practice of the Muslims that after the fast of Ramadan was revealed in the Quran, that becomes obligatory fast for Muslims. And Ashura is just if you want to, you can fast it. Right? So either it was required and then that gets replaced by the Ramadan fast or it was just never required. And it was like, for example,",
      "Oh, you're like dehydrated. You should drink Gatorade. That might mean me saying I recommend you do this or it could be me ordering you to do this. So you would only know that if you understood the context, understood the way people speak amongst friends or in a certain speech community.",
      "the only thing people really need to drink is water. And then you take that, like that... Then you say but he's also saying you should drink Gatorade so then it's like okay maybe this is for some people they should drink gatorade? So then you can start figuring out what does he mean by this? The difference here is professor that I can ask you and i can sit down and understand the context that you're kind of ordering or asking me about the Gatorades with the Prophet,",
      "Muslim, I have to go and check the context. When did he say that? Why did he said that? How did he says it? Who did you say it to? Is there kind of like a cheat sheet? No, you don't have to do that. Okay, help me navigate this space because my biggest fear is hearing something on the minbar or hearing it in a circle and not knowing whether or not it's true. Like how do I decipher what's true and what's not? Yeah well okay,",
      "First of all, you don't need to go figure this out because you have 1400 years of Muslim scholarship that's done that. That's what schools of law are. That is what the Muzahib are. The Muzhahib traditions of people who have figured out how a specific Hadith should be understood and the extent to which Muslims disagree about let's say do you...",
      "I mean, like in the Maliki... For example, the Prophet, alayhi salam says, you know if you go into a guy, if you come to Jummah and the Khateeb is giving the khutbah pray to Raqa and then sit down. Now in the maliki school of law, you don't do that. You just go into the Jumma and you sit down now. The Malikis they don't deny that hadith. They say no, the prophet said this but he was talking to that guy specifically it wasn't a general rule",
      "How do we know that? Because from the general Sunnah of the Prophet and early Muslim community, that kind of practice communal practice people wouldn't go in pray to Raqqa and then sit down. So there's you can see there's a difference so in the Hanbali school You would pray to raqqah and then Sit Down In the Maliki school you just sit down and actually both of them they don't disagree about the hadith They just disagree about how you understand it. So you don't need to go and figure this stuff out for yourself because you have",
      "1400 years of Muslim scholarship that has already done that. If I was to ask you to summarize how someone might figure out if something is authentic or not, what that process would look like? How do you do it for example? Yeah, I mean for me, once you know Arabic and stuff like that, or Urdu, you can find this information in books",
      "But even you can look on, I mean, it's people make fun of like Sheikh Google and stuff like that. But actually if you just look for stuff online, even in English, you can usually find pretty good explanations, right? So the what you would do, what I would do is I would talk to a scholar that I respect. So that's why there's a principle that Muslim scholars cite",
      "which is that the lay Muslim has no madhhab. What does that mean? They don't mean that the lame Muslim just does whatever, what they mean is that their, the lay muslim isn't sitting around being like I'm a Hanbali, I'm this or sometimes they'll say madhab al-ammi madhabal mufti right? That the madhab of the lay Muslims",
      "says. So, they Muslims are not qualified to go and engage in this problem-solving process I talked about. They're supposed to go to people who are specialized in this. Just like if my leg starts hurting, I don't know what the heck is wrong with my leg. I go to someone who's trained on how to deal with people's bodies. It's called a doctor. Same thing. We should turn to scholars",
      "scholars who we respect. So what would you say the key factors to the authenticity of a hadith are? Like when I'm looking, what am I looking for? This early Muslim Hadith scholar Shua'ba ibn al-Hajjaj who dies around 773, I think he's from Basra right? He says three quarters of the hadits I've come across or forgeries. Three quarters!",
      "150 years after the death of the Prophet, there's like an ocean of forged hadiths. Forged or mistaken errant hadith and so Muslim scholars have to figure out how to sort this out. So one uh there are two general methods they use right? One is to say um look uh the Quran we know kind of the message of the Quran",
      "And if this hadith seems to be saying something that contradicts that message or goes against it, then we're not going to take it. That makes sense in theory. The problem is that if that hadith could be explaining something in the Quran that you haven't understood properly. So the Quran says you're prohibited from eating metta, like dead animals, carrion.",
      "So if you find a hadith where the companions of the Prophet eat from this dead whale, which is washed up on the beach. So the Prophet said that he didn't object to them eating this whale from the ocean. It was dead on the Beach. So you could say, oh, this contradicts the Quran so this can't be something the Prophet has said. Or is it saying that the prohibition on carrion is only land animals and not sea animals?",
      "another hadith of the Prophet where he says, you know, the ocean is pure and its dead are pure. So the problem is it's really hard to tell the difference between contradiction and explanation sometimes. It's very hard so we need to be careful about whether or not we think something's contradicting the Quran when it might actually be explaining it or it might be something that we don't have a capacity",
      "developed a method where you look at the transmission of the hadith, you see okay is this transmission corroborated by other transmissions? Is the person who's narrating it generally when they narrate things do other people narrate the same thing right or somebody saying ah that guy is the only person who narrated this from his teacher or her teacher therefore this is suspect right so they start to engage in transmission criticism and then",
      "So that's the method they use. Now, so in theory, right? What would make a hadith sound sahih could be if there is a trustworthy transmitter who heard directly from another trustworthy transmitter, who heard direct from another trust worthy transmitter back to the Prophet. That now that's Sahih isn't it but unless it's like a very strong isn't or unless",
      "controversial issue that the hadith is dealing with. What would really make it sound is if there's multiple narrations, like you can imagine a tree branching out like that. That's what makes something really strong in the tree branch and now it's called shuhra or like something being well known or widespread. So that's the sort of general rule. Now, the bulk of the important hadits in law...",
      "How do you do wudu? What makes water dirty so that you can't use it for wuduu, right? These hadiths are not actually going to... Usually don't meet that like totally trustworthy person from totally trustworthy people. From totally trustworthy persons back to the Prophet. They don't, are you saying they don't mean it? They don t but what they're backed up, what makes them sound or what's called in this case good or hasan is that",
      "widely transmitted, right? So they're like really widely transmitted or They're acted on by lots of Muslims. So with those hadiths that are like the kind of a lot of the major Hadith for Islamic law for like Sharia Buying selling marriage divorce stuff like that. They're actually their main Kind of the main argument or the main evidence for their reliability is their widespread transmission and",
      "by Muslim scholars. So you're saying there's been centuries of work done by scholars way before us who would listen to all of these hadiths and categorize them into different categories in terms of Sahih, Hassan etc., and they would generally use three criteria one would be how trustworthy the narrator was and then the chain of narration all the way to the Prophet that would",
      "the hadith is narrated several times or multiple times to the extent that it can be considered very reliable and the third one is that there's a consensus about the practice of of that hadith if i'm not mistaken so they're three kind of general and and so what happens then professor if someone comes out",
      "methodology. However, most of your hadiths come from someone like Abu Hurairah and then he starts questioning the character of Abu Hurayrah. So first of all, Abu Hurayer doesn't narrate very many hadith that are not narrated by other companions so this idea that somehow you can find if you get rid of the Hadith of Abu hurayra or you've gotten rid of all this problematic corpus",
      "narrate a lot of hadith that are not narrated by other companions. What happens in the 700s and 800s is there's a debate between what would become like the Shafi'i and Hanbali schools of law, and what will become the Hanafi school of law. And one of the debates they have is whether or not the Hadiths of Abu Hurairah are kind of legally binding.",
      "Hadith that the Hanafis, early Hanafies they didn't kind of take them as evidence in legal discussions because they thought that you know they're like Abu Huraira didn't understand this material well enough right so he wasn't like a faqih. He wasn't a jurist like someone like Omar bin al-Khattab or Aisha was right or Ibn Mas'ud. So",
      "And then other scholars disagreed with them about that. Now, the point is that Abu Huraira becomes... And then there's another issue which is a lot of the Shiite attacks on Sunni hadiths are also based on what they do is they'll go in and find this like intra-Sunni or intra-Sunni debates over Abu Hurayrah and then they'll start kind of inflating that, blowing that up and making it say, look, even Sunnis don't trust Abu Hurayerah.",
      "So there's an attempt to like kind of use that as a wedge to argue against Sunni understandings of the sunnah of the Prophet.",
      "the Prophet would say, you spoke about seeking some support from a scholar following a school of thought that's already digested a lot of the hadiths to help interpret the Qur'an. What if I'm sitting there and on the minbar, the Shaykh is saying something like a very big bold statement, the hadits of the Prophet where the Prophet says",
      "I was ordered to kill everyone until they say, La ilaha illallah. To fight everybody. Yeah. Or fight everybody, yeah. So I hear that big bold statement. There are many in our religion that you hear about. Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam actually said that. And as a layman, I want to know the level of authenticity, the context, but I just don't know the process.",
      "but that will take me in a loop. Well, I mean there's no way around asking people if you don't know you have to ask people who know right? There's no replacement for expertise. There's just nothing you can do about that. But what I would say is that hadiths are actually a very good example of the process that Muslim scholars go through which is",
      "Right. Which is, you know, that hadith is if you look at its change of transmission, it's very sound hadith. There's no debate about amongst Muslims. They don't debate that the Prophet said this. The Prophet said Alayhi salam But when you put into that system, that bigger system right? So we know from the Quran that for example, Muslims fight or conquer non-Muslims like",
      "non-Muslims like Jews or Christians or Zoroastrians or whatever, right? So they don't have to. They can continue practicing their religion and they pay jizya, right? So right there that hadith doesn't apply, so we know that you don't need to fight people until they say la ilaha illallah because at least for the people of the book who practice other religions and the Prophet included says treat Zoroasterians like you treat people in the book and then Muslim scholars extended",
      "the Hindus and Buddhists, everybody they met. That these people continue practicing their religion. They just pay a jizya tax. Then you look at other narrations of this hadith. So there's different narrations in the hadith and you see some narration, Sunan Nasa'i says, So it doesn't say I've been commanded to fight the people until they say there's no God but God and Muhammad is messenger of God.",
      "command to fight the polytheists. It's like, ah this is interesting because who is the group that... The only group that the Muslims actually fight until they become Muslim is the polythiest Arabs in Arabia. That's the only group. Other groups every other group Muslims encounter in history They just allow them to continue practicing their religion. They don't care. They just say okay you guys keep practicing religion pay jizya it's fine So when you look at the like you put the sadiqh in the context of the Quran",
      "You put this hadith in the context of other narrations of that hadith. So you look at other instances of the sunnah, the prophet and then you understand what the Prophet meant by this right? And that's actually what Islamic law says as well. So there's no way like unfortunately I wish like I wish and actually this is something that I'm working on still work. I've been working on it for like I don't know how many years now like seven years now or something is we're doing a translation of the six books. We've done ibn Majid.",
      "We've done most of Tirmidhi. We've half of Bukhari, so this is going to be online. But the crucial thing about this is every hadith has an explanation for it. If a hadith is not really controversial, you know, it won't have an explanation. But if there's anything about that hadith that's hard to understand then it will provide",
      "like an essay that discusses this issue. I look forward to seeing it. JazakAllah khair for your efforts. I'm going to ask you one final question, 30 seconds or less and then we'll wrap up. Dr. Jonathan Brown my nine-year-old niece knocks on your door and says I understand how important the Quran is but how do I understand",
      "That the Prophet, alayhi salatu wasalam, is a mercy to humanity. To the world. And the hadiths are an extremely important way to know about this person. Right? To know what they're teaching and who they were. So if you believe that God wants us to know",
      "him, then there has to be a way. It has to some way and hadiths are one of those main ways. I would also say to your niece, your nine-year old niece which is like look you're going to go to school or they're gonna go the mosque and someone's gonna say this hadith and you're gonna be shocked or confused right? That's completely normal because imagine that someone comes and tells me",
      "tells me, you know, your uncle said this thing. You know, this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life. And now I'm so shocked that he said that. Like how could he say that about me or something? Or something I did. It's like you have to take that in context, right? First of all, did your uncle actually really say this? That's the first thing you have find out. The second thing is if he said this, what is the context? How does that fit into his overall personality, his overall teachings, right",
      "all teachings, right? And so when I always tell my students or people who come and ask me like, oh what do I do when I hear hadith that I don't understand or that shocks me? The first thing I say is you don't have to have an opinion. You don't need to look into this. And then you can ask scholars you respect. You can look it up online for all we know. There's a lot of great resources online",
      "resources online right so and that those are both you know terrific ways for at least finding out some information you know um but a lot of people feel like they're kind of getting beaten like hadiths or like rocks they get thrown at them and they don't know how to handle that uh and they feel bad if they don' t like kind of immediately submit to them. But that's not what we're taught to do as Muslims, right? We're taught",
      "Muslims don't believe things. That's why I'm Muslim. I'm not required to believe stuff without evidence. I don't have to change my life or accept a belief without some kind of evidence. So, you know, if someone tells you a piece of information, you ask them like, where did you learn this? This is what the ibn Abdul-Bawadik said. You know, the first foundation of, you",
      "people can't answer that. The second thing is, how does this fit into the bigger system of our religion, of our values, of the teachings of God and his prophet? And if that person can't give you the answer, then I would just not listen to them. And I would look for somebody who can give me the answer. Either a scholarly respect or you can find it in books or something like that. There's all sorts of resources. Professor Jonathan Brown, Jazakallah khair. This is your first episode on Double Take, inshallah first of many.",
      "Allah first of many I appreciate your time and inshallah see you next time thanks for inviting me"
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      "When I first started studying as in my graduate school, my PhD. I really actually came to that study as sort of like a very skeptical Muslim or kind of modernist Muslim and it wasn't until I started to go to Egypt and study with Shuyukh in Azhar mosque and other places",
      "that I realized that a lot of my arrogance and presuppositions about how Muslims weren't critical thinkers, and they just memorized things, and hadn't answered the great questions in the modern world. These were just completely mistaken. And it was only through studying with this shiuch that over years and months and years of just being repeatedly,",
      "I would have some super snarky answer to some question and they would just demonstrate immediately that it wasn't the Islamic tradition that needed to be corrected. It was my own arrogance. And so, I really kind of learned a lesson. And as I went back to graduate school and attended my classes where I started to realize that what I was learning from traditional Muslim scholars",
      "better scholar of Islamic history from a Western perspective. And I had spent all these years being a Muslim in college and in graduate school, wondering oh people are not gonna respect me because I'm Muslim? Am I not going to get a job because I am Muslim? And I began to realize that being Muslim was actually a huge asset. And learning from the Islamic tradition wasn't sort of going back into the past of scholarship",
      "it was actually pushing me into the future. And I had a tremendous respect for the Islamic tradition. And so one of things that I've tried to do as a professor and as an author is try and make this tradition available to people in the West"
    ]
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    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr Jonathan Brown_ Life_ Times and Teachings of Pr_xME9ND_LqZE&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748693756.opus",
    "text": [
      "Thanks for coming. Thank me for coming and so everybody did the reading which is great",
      "What we're going to do in the next couple of days is, well today we are going to talk about the context around the life of the Prophet and we're gonna, depending on how much time we have either talk about what's called historical critical issues around the Life of the Prophets or we'll talk about Eve criticism depending on",
      "are really there for your background we're not going to spend you know some of the readings will look at but we're gonna have you know the readings are kind of they're there for you to have a background for our discussions. Our discussions will be about other issues particularly I think you know we could sort of sit around and talk about life-to-profit for a couple days which would",
      "that we're in regarding issues about Islam and Muslims. I think that it's much more useful to focus on particular issues in the life of the prophet, and then kind of see how we build on those and deal with issues of controversy that are put in our face all the time as Muslims or as people who are interested in religion and are interested",
      "across time so uh we'll talk about things like blasphemy we'll talked about notions of authority we'll talks about how you deal with how the prophet dealt with religious difference and building bridges across communities and we'll",
      "And so that's what we focus on these issues and not so much just like a man this year the province of this I'm in this year. The profit is and then that up okay first let's look at Still don't feel like there's this is not it What is this is nothing justice to these pictures This thing is a little dim though like about the recording",
      "about the recording. My voice is even, pictures are the important thing not my ear. Yeah that was it there. That's a way to go, that's the way to do it man. Okay does anyone know what this is? This is an isopia so the Ottomans, inshallah, not a destructive people decided instead of destroying these mosaics let's just plaster over the mosaic so that's what they did and of course some of them have been uncovered since",
      "since 1924. And this is one of Mary and Jesus, I'm not sure what, there's lots of images of Jesus different kind of stylistic images. This is a, I know this is Jesus as a child then there's like the image of Christ Pantocrator which I love that word he's like universal king but this is you can see from a standard",
      "Mary, I think it's Theotokos. Mary the carrier of God and the person who is bearing God as a child. Okay. And the reason I bring this up is because in order to understand the life of the prophet you have to understand",
      "It's a, well I think it had a bit of history about this periodization. Until really the 1960s and 70s, study of... The kind of study of the ancient world and Islam were completely different areas. So people would study Greco, you know, the classics, classic, classics of Ancient Greece and Rome, and they would study from the time",
      "ancient Greece of Homer, classical Greece of Aristotle and Aristophanes and Plato. And then they would go up to the Roman period at the end of the Roman revolution from around 100 BC to around the time of birth of Christ when Rome goes from being public to quote unquote empire. Then they were studying kind of the period",
      "period of Antonine Rome in the 100s to the early 200s, a big common era. And then they would have interest in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. If you're ever interested in a really great read that'll take you about 10 years depending on your... It's good bedtime reading. It will really improve your vocabulary and you'll learn a lot. The Decline and Fall of the",
      "it's one of the most fascinating and sort of foundational works in modern history. A lot of, when you read it, you sort of see not only the way in which the subject that this historian is studying, Naaman, The Roman Empire, how it influences him as a writer, how he is trying to revive and is almost channeling the great Roman historians like Tacitus and Ammianus Marcellinus but then how",
      "that also informs the way historians write today. And what you see is, and this is actually very informative, that historians are deeply influenced by what they write about. And that's important to keep in mind. Historians are not... They don't stand outside of history. They are very much part of history Anyway, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbons. Fascinating book. It'll take you a couple years to read unless you're sort of goodwill hunting",
      "goodwill hunting, smart. In which case you should be teaching this class not me. But then Islam was another issue. Islam was studied I mentioned this in my book on Hadith which you've all read but the study of Islam in the West comes out of three channels",
      "Sorry, people sending me messages of grievance. The first comes through three channels. One is two are deeply colonial. So one is when the British basically",
      "basically begin to exercise actual administrative and military control in India, in the 1750s after the Battle of Plessy in 1757. They actually become administrators of several provinces of the Mughal Empire. And by this is fascinating they actually are in charge of running Sharia courts in the Mugha empire so you have something fascinating that arrives called Anglo-Muhammadan law if you're ever interested in this it's fascinating we can talk about but one of things",
      "They actually, the official language of British administration in India until the early to mid 1800s was Persian. And British judges had to preside over Sharia courts and administer Sharia. So they had to basically start understanding these people that they were governing. They had to understand their law, they had",
      "some of the beginning of the study of South Asian religion, Islam in South Asia, South Asian languages, Sanskrit, Persian. This comes through the efforts of British administrators in the late 1700s. One of the director generals of the East India Company was Warren Hastings. Another person whose last name was Jones. I forget his first name. In addition to being administrators they were also often scholars",
      "often scholars, who pioneered the Western study of languages and linguistics in religion in South Asia. So this is sort of matched by French study of Islam and Muslim culture, sort of the ways of the natives of Muslims in North Africa because this was from 1830 onwards. Algeria was invaded",
      "invaded and occupied by the French, and in fact it was considered to be part of France. It was actually a province of France, and by the way hundreds and hundreds of thousands of European settlers, settler colonialists came from France and other European countries to settle in Algeria, of course displacing and killing hundreds of thousand if not millions of Algerians local population so for the French engage",
      "Islam and Muslims for the same exact reason who are these people were governing? What are their traditions how do they think about law? The second venue is diplomatics, and this is especially in the case in the from roughly the 1830s through the end of the 19th century an early 20th century when Western countries like Europe Belgium",
      "Britain, Germany are increasingly involved with the Ottoman Empire at a diplomatic level and needed to have people who understood Ottoman politics, understood the internal geographical forces of the Ottoman empire and the political forces that they shaped. So that's the second route. The third route is really an extension of essentially biblical studies",
      "We have to remember that until roughly the mid-1800s, Western universities like Oxford founded in the mid 1200's. Cambridge just a few decades later. The Sorbonne, mid 1200s.",
      "seminaries in the sense that, I mean they weren't literally called seminaries but the study of anything. Scholarship was religious scholarship. There wasn't secular scholarship and religious scholarship If you went to Oxford University in 1290 or 1390 or 1490 or 1590 you were going to learn to study the Bible",
      "to study christian theology you were going to learn the tools you needed to do that so are you going to learning latin grammar latin rhetoric and uh the basics of logic of basically aristotelian logic and along with that i was called the trivium along with it you might also have moral philosophy and then you'd have the quadrivium the four other subjects music astronomy mathematics and",
      "I think geometry is the fourth one, if I'm not mistaken. You can just look up the quadrivium. It's easy. So this was studying the rhetoric of Cicero, studying the logic of Boethius' translation of Porphyry's Isagoge, the introduction to Aristotle's categories. This was how you learn basic logic,",
      "how to use rhetorical language in Latin. Beginning in the 1200s, and just a little bit, you started having also the study of Greek in Western universities, and that really didn't pick up until the 1400s. My point being is that biblical studies was the only... That was studies. There wasn't a theology department.",
      "Everything was added on to that later on. Now, what happens in beginning in the Renaissance is what could be eventually led to the historical critical study of the Bible. The idea that you're going to go back and try and reconstitute the original form of a biblical text, that you are going to think about it in its own environment,",
      "that you think about it more as a product of its own time than as an expression of universal truth. Universal truth by the 1700s came to be seen as something that the mind and philosophers could attain, and that the Bible was an expression",
      "part of what led to kind of the, in effect, marginalization of the biblical text in the greater search for truth is that by going back and finding early manuscripts of the new testament, the old testament, seeing how the old testament changed over time, seeing the new testament was formed and discovering new non-canonical gospels. Part of what emerged by the late 1700s was a notion",
      "becomes a very important crucial assumption in the Western study of religion period, which is that religions are not born fully formed. Scripture isn't born intact. Scripture is built up over time. It's shaped. It doctored. It altered. Parts are hidden. Part are taken out. Things are added and the theology or the dogma of a religion",
      "of a religion is also built over time, and that the orthodoxy isn't the original version. The orthodoxie is a later kind of in effect a conspiracy that hides and shuts away the earlier heterodox elements. So you can see this as early as the writings of Voltaire for example who died 1778.",
      "idea that there's all these early Christian writings which don't share the orthodox positions of the Catholic Church or the Christian church after the 300s of the Common Era. So this is sort of part of what leads to the gradual secularization of European scholarship and European thinking about truth because the Bible ceases",
      "ceases to be an intact vehicle vessel of truth and starts to become a historical product that is there's primarily meaningful in its own time and can only be mined for meaning later on because it corroborates things that we know to be meaningful in our from reason so Jesus for example stops to be by the time you get",
      "in the universities of Germany and France and England. Jesus is no longer important because he's a... How did that happen? Okay. Jesus no longer is important because of the details of Jesus' life, because he said this or he did that. He's important because",
      "It's the Christ of spirit, not the Christ Of history that matters So there's a long way to go To the point where The original point I was making Which is that what happens By the late 1700s And especially in the mid 1800s Is that European Scholars, especially in The universities of Germany, the great Universities of Germany like Tübingen Heidelberg That",
      "are reformed and strengthened by what's called the reforms of Alexander von Humboldt in the mid to late 1800s. They simply assume that they've studied the biblical tradition, and now let's go and study other traditions. And they assume that other traditions function in exactly the same way. And there's a fascinating... The records of this",
      "conference of Western scholars, Orientalists in the early 1900s. And this German scholar gets up and says we have now brought in lights to the forests of India and to the jungles of Africa. So the colonial endeavor is paired with the scholarly endeavor of uncovering the origins of other people's religions just as Europeans that uncovered",
      "religion, they would now do this for other people's religion. And that would not only help those people understand why they act the way they do and teach them truth but it would also be part of this greater European study of everything in a categorization of all knowledge."
    ]
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  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Dr Jonathan Brown Part1_wEqOR0IXxDk&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748652327.opus",
    "text": [
      "Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Rahim. Okay, so they also asked me to talk about stewardship which is a very very broad topic So I have a lot of room in Which to operate? So I've picked two aspects for the topic of stewardship and Islamic civilization The first aspect of stewardship Is that I'll be addressing its challenge",
      "addressing its challenge. I'm going to be talking about the challenges of stewardship. The second aspect is that I'll be speaking from the perspective of Muslim scholars and Muslim scholarly tradition. So, my guess is most people in the room are Muslims so this is pretty much normal for us. So anyway, um, the overall question I want to address is a compound one. The challenges of shepherding a community through the sea of culture,",
      "impossible to resist, and resistible depending on how hard one is willing to try. And finally about the choice of when and how hard to try.\" I'm going to read that again. The challenge of shepherding a community through the sea of culture, a sea that is at once enriching and destructive, impossible to resists, and resistable depending on what hard one's willing to do and finally about when and",
      "I'm trying very quickly, make my point. I have quotation marks here. Make my point! Stewardship is a challenge for two main reasons. First because the ulema are instructed to respect custom as long it does not violate the Sharia. The ulemas have been instructed to respects customs and culture as long as it does no violate the sharia but the ambiguities inherent in the derivation of Islamic law from its scriptural sources",
      "have sometimes made it hard to know when something is violating the Sharia or not. So, the ambiguity inherent in the derivation of Islamic law from its scriptural sources as well as the cultural prejudice have sometimes make it hard for us to know if something is violated the Shariah. And particularly here I'll be talking about the questions of caste and race in Islamic marriage norms. Caste and race and Islamic marriage norm. Second because the ulama need to respect custom",
      "respect custom, this is the second challenge. The ulama need to, it's not that they've been commanded to respect custom. They need to respect customs. They needs to respect customers for a couple of reasons. The first is a reason of principle namely that the Quran and the Sunnah command us. The Quran and sunnah have commanded the ulama to respect customer and also for two reasons of practicality so the first reason or principal the second two are",
      "The ulama, one, the ulama don't want to drive people away. They don't wanna drive you away from Islam and two because pre-modern normative institutions did not have the capacity to turn the aircraft carrier of culture. Cultures like an aircraft carrier, premodern institutions just do not have a capacity to change it in any really meaningful way or its very hard to take a long time. I also wanna make sure to state before I go on",
      "Obviously, though culture is an aircraft carrier, Islam and Muslims are not simply paddle boarders run over by it. And I read an article that said paddle boarding is popular in the UK now. Is that true? I don't even know what it is. So Islam and Muslim are not simple paddle boarder to get run over",
      "and in world historically significant ways. Islam has been a force that has affected enormous cultural change. Just a few quick examples, there's lots of examples but a few ones. Of course with the spread of Muslim state and gradual conversion to Islam we can see the consumption of alcohol drop dramatically. This is actually about 15 years old, this data is about 15 year from the World Health Organization",
      "but this is more recent data which shows the same thing, but I like this map better. You can see here the areas in which less than 2.5 liters of alcohol per person are drunk. There's a pointer here. Basically the Muslim majority populations. Balkans not doing too well. Soviet Central Asia. By the way that shows the power of modern states. Modern states can change culture.",
      "Look at post-Soviet Central Asia. I've never met people, I've encountered alcohol ingestion like I encountered in Kyrgyzstan in 1997 when I went there. No, 1995. I was a teenager and as a teenage American of course my main interest was the acquisition and consumption of alcohol so I was very interested in that and I observed this. You can see, so look at the, by the way this is what I call the booze belt",
      "Booze belt. There's whales. The very tip of the dragon's nose or whatever, the booze belt Okay and even after, even with populations that had notionally converted to Islam already there could still be dramatic cultural change as reform movements have striven to inculcate religious observation and religious observance more deeply in the culture This could be done by stick as opposed to carrot For example",
      "For example, the Padre Wars in Sumatra in the early 1800s, in which very eager religious students sought to convince local Muslim, notionally Muslim populations, to pray more regularly and also combated widespread popular vices like gambling, cockfighting. I saw a cockpit today at that place. Where was that? St. Fagans. Yeah, apparently this was they built buildings for cockfighter.",
      "fighting. So they've sought to prevent widespread and popular devices like gambling, cockfighting, and selling fellow Muslims into slavery. The reasons I picked this as an example is I wanted something where all the audience was going to be able to cheer for the deeper inculcation of religious norms that are making you cheer for it by saying if they're stopping people from selling other Muslims into",
      "By non-compulsory means, for example the Suwarian tradition of Islamic teaching and proselytizing in West Africa named after the 16th century scholar Haj Salim Suwari worked on grassroots education and persuasion avoiding political entanglements and seeing education and piety as a primary means to building a Muslim community. Another actually very good example is the Tablighi Jamaat movement which is probably",
      "very well represented in the UK, founded in 1927 to educate Muslims. By here I mean notionally Muslim people who are notionally Muslims but who didn't for example know the Shahada they didn't know how to say there's no God without Muhammad as a messenger of God. They didn't knew how to pray. They don't know anything about their religion. To educate Muslims in North India on the basics of Islamic belief and practice and it's now one of the biggest and most influential Muslim movements in",
      "and civilizational trends, and look at Muslim scholars as stewards of the Sharia on a smaller scale. At real instances of challenge and controversy. I want to open with a few illustrative vignettes because first they're illustrative and second their vignette which means that there are I think entertaining. The first one Tuanco Imam Bonjol who was one of the main figures in the Padre Wars",
      "the Padre Wars. After his movement started to help educate, quote unquote, educate the local Muslim population by force a lot of the time in northern Sumatra, he then turned against the Dutch. So he was also kind of an anti-Dutch, kind of anti-colonial figure. Ibn Battuta. You guys all know about Ibn Batuta, right? The most famous traveler",
      "So he knew a good resort town when he saw one. He worked as a Sharia court judge in the Maldives for several years, actually. Okay. As a judge in The Maldivs in the mid-1300s, this is in his own words. He, quote, strove with all my might to establish the rule of law to get rid of, quote bad customs like requiring divorced women to stay in the house of their former husbands until she married again.",
      "according to him one of the local customs is if a woman got divorced she would stay in her former husband's house until she remarried he was trying to stop that. The second one is he wanted women to start covering their breasts apparently they did not cover their breasts so uh he could all, they would just wear sarong you know like lungi and",
      "But they would not listen to him otherwise. So you can see, he's just like, people, this is completely against the Sharia. You guys are Muslims. You can't walk around topless. Then I was doing this talk and I said to myself, wait a second. Do women still walk around in the Maldives? Has this actually changed? I've never heard of this but I've",
      "And of course, I forgot that the Maldives is like a tourist destination. So it said, you know, the tourism ministry says it is absolutely prohibited for women to do topless sunbathing. So I guess that culture has changed. You can see. But then this is really interesting. I found this. This is actually a 16th century Portuguese drawing, anonymous Portuguese painting of the inhabitants of the Maltese.",
      "Maldives. So this is about 150, 200 years after Ibn Battuta. Looky here. Well, I mean, his aura is not covered either. And she's definitely not. It was interesting to try and find some kind of corroboration for this. So I found this, the wonders of Google.",
      "All right. So he couldn't, he could not get people to change. He couldn't get women to wear tops. It's like being at a hotel pool in France. Sorry I figured out that I'm in Britain and need to dig into the French if that's okay? All right, the second example here I don't have any pictures unfortunately. The second example is Berber à l'oie. These are fascinating.",
      "Al-Waah is the plural. So these are these boards that apparently were agreements between Berber tribes that were Muslim but we're not so interested in a lot of the details of the Sharia and so basically Muslim scholars who trying to instruct them would kind of come up with these agreements they were like compromise agreements about what rules are you going to follow how we gonna deal with certain issues",
      "oldest one we know of is from 1498, from Agadir in what's now I think Morocco. Who can tell me where that is? Okay good. For example there's some not so dramatic cases for example in the Sousse Valley of Morocco one of the alwah says that instead of needing two witnesses to notarize a document you just need",
      "What happened is the ulema dealing with these alwah, they would go outside the Maliki school of law and they would take like okay we're gonna take a Hanafi ruling here. We're going to take a Shafi'i ruling here to really try and just find the best way to kind of tailor make the sharia as flexible as possible for you. And as long as the ruling doesn't go outside outer bounds of the shariah, we will basically come to some kind of compromise so you're still following the shariat. More example, more dramatic examples",
      "dramatic example the Masmuda Berbers they had a tradition which was if you someone who is an alcoholic they would get their house burned out so if you drank a lot of alcohol your house got burned down this is not acceptable in this this is no unknown opinion in the Sharia let's put it that way okay but they really kind of went back to some Hadiths about potentially allegedly someone burnt",
      "At one point, the prophet made an allusion to the imagery of burning someone's house down if they did something wrong. Although he never did it and never commanded it done. But just like kind of the image of that. And they said OK we're going to accept this. So if you are a multi-time drinker is like alcoholic, you got your house burned down. Why compromise? Why this kind of compromise? As Alwazani, a famous Moroccan scholar who died in 1923",
      "1923, notes the Bani Muhy from the Beit Yasun tribe, a Berber tribe. They actually held a funeral for the Sharia. They got a bunch of fiqh books and they dug a grave and they put them in the grave and covered it up with dirt and said this is the Shariah we're burying the Shariat. We want nothing to do with it right? So they realized that they didn't want",
      "to the point where they rejected Islam. And they could do so in very dramatic ways. Third example, so the first example was the Ibn Battuta and the topless women. The second example, the Berber al-Wah. The third example staying in Northwest Africa, in Morocco, what's today kind of a Morocco Mauritania area. We're going to look at the question of jurists and the question race and marriage now.",
      "One jurist is discussing this issue about whether or not someone, a man in this case right? A man being from one of his ancestors. One of his patrilineal ancestors was a slave. So somebody's father and grandfather and also the person may be we don't know exactly but the person maybe like phenotypically black very dark skinned. And what happened was he was actually really powerful guy. He was a chief",
      "He was a chief. And he proposed marriage to the daughter of a very well-known family from very good lineage, descendants of the prophet. And the family agreed. He had a big celebration and then people insulted and kind of teased this woman's family for years and years and",
      "like a descendant of the slave, or black slave. So here's the question is being of slave descent or being phenotypically black, is that considered a defect in marriage? Is that considered something that makes somebody inappropriate as a marriage partner? Now the position of Malik, the actual founder of the Maliki school was that it means nothing. The Maliki School is the most egalitarian",
      "when it comes to issues of kafaa or marriage suitability. All the Muslims are the same. But, so Malik said, he specifically said blackness is not an eeb. This is not like a defect in marriage. It's not a reason to see someone as not suitable for you in marriage but by the time of like the 1500s and 1600s especially North Africa",
      "in the main position of the Maliki school that, in fact, it was valid grounds for discrimination in marriage. Why? Because the Sharia commands Muslims to respect custom as long as it doesn't violate the Shariah. And what they said is I mean this doesn't technically violate Shari'a we'll discuss this later.",
      "for the majority of Maliki scholars in North Africa, this did not violate the Sharia and so they accepted this. But you could... Why? When people came up to them and said, um, for example, what about Malik's opinion? What about all the Hadith in which the Prophet says that Arabs and non-Arabs are equal and that blacks people and white people, black people and red people basically what today would be white people",
      "only distinguish from one another in terms of their piety and their deeds. One great scholar from the 1600s says is, if you think this, go marry your daughter to the descendant of a slave. And the guy's like, OK. And this is very interesting. I want to be clear just so none of you come away from this talk with a bad impression. In Islamic civilization in general, and this is a very accurate generalization. It's a generalization but it's a very",
      "Slave descent doesn't mean anything. So let's say you have your fear if your mother is a slave, it doesn't me anything at all. And if your father or your patrilineal ancestors were slaves, it also doesn't have any meaning. Once you become a free person, you basically just enter into the Muslim society like everybody else. And many of the early Muslim scholars, great Muslim scholars",
      "The list goes on and on. Are either themselves freed slaves, or their fathers were freed slaves? Or their grandfathers are freed slaves. The second thing that's true in general Islamic civilization is it slavery is not racialized by phenotype. So you wouldn't know someone was a slave from the way they look. One of the main reasons for this is a lot of people's mothers were slaves. So most of the Abbasid caliphs, their mothers were slave women.",
      "almost all of the Ottoman sultans, their mothers were slave women. Unlike let's say slavery in the United States and other places in Western Europe if your mother is a slave and you tell your mother that she is a slaved of her father and they have children, you are born free, you're the same standing as a freeborn child, you totally legitimate and it's part of... It's as if you were born from your father's wife right? So there's absolutely no social",
      "social stigma attached to being the son of a concubine. The weird thing about Northwest Africa is it doesn't follow this rule, I've not found anyone who can explain this to me except to tell me Mauritania's a weird place that's all they say. Mauritanias are weird place it's not just Mauritanieh, it's Mauritiania and Morocco and kind of into of course the border between these things is colonial",
      "unusual in Islamic history. One, they really care about descent from slaves. If you're patrilineally descended from a slave it's like ugh, the social stigma. Two, dark skin was associated with that. Again if you went to a street in Cairo and let's say 1500 and you saw someone of really dark skin they could be a slave. They could be someone who is the son of the governor",
      "and their mother is an African slave woman. Just as an example for this, even in Morocco, the great Sultan Maula Ismail who died in 1727, he's considered the founder of modern Morocco, his mother was African. So when Europeans talked about it, Europeans were so scared of him because he was such a powerful ruler, and they described it. We're really confused because this guy looked like African dust.",
      "Ibn Tushfin, the founder of the Al-Murabit state and other great Moroccan, North African, and Andalusian dynasty. You can see some of their buildings have still survived in places like Marrakesh, the Al Murabits,. They were founded by a guy named Yusef Ibn Tusfin whose mother also was an African slave woman. He was also very, very dark skinned. So it's not if your father side is really prestigious",
      "It doesn't really affect you, but that descent if your father's side is descended from slaves in northwest Africa This is a huge stigma and again. This is very unusual an Islamic civilization By the way I also want to say that there's a lot of scholars in the Maliki school who continued with Malik's original opinion people like Al-Qurtubi You guys have read his tafsir people like the al Qadi Abu Bakr al-Arabi who died about 1146? The court to be died 1272 and",
      "and others stuck with Malik's original opinion. They said, al-Muslimun, the hadith says, al-'muslimun tataka'fa adima'uhum, right? Muslims, their blood is the same. Their blood is equal. But you can see, remember that story of the chief, the god, the chief who marries into this good family. If you're a Muslim scholar",
      "You're trying to act as a steward, if you will. What do you tell somebody? Yes, Muslims are equal. But if the wife's family is going to get mocked for years and years, can you advise the marriage go ahead? Should you? That's a really interesting question. What is your duty as a",
      "The case of caste in Hanafi law in South Asia. I'll discuss this a little bit more at the end, but you want to trust me for a second. People have lots of debate saying what do you mean there's no caste in Islam? How can you say this? These are political debates. This is a political issue. This really like for example Muslims will say we don't have castes in distinction to Hindus. This goes back by the way all the way to",
      "Al Biruni, 1048. The famous Central Asian Muslim polymath scholar, scientist historian in his amazing Tahqiq Mahfil Hind Description of India. Has anyone read it? Anyone here from South Asian background? A few people. You should read this book. It's been translated into English. So one of the things he says is one of main differences between Islam and the religions of India",
      "birth determines who you can marry. And these groups don't intermarry, and it's based on your profession and your function in life. And there's also the rules of ritual purity around eating with people of different castes and things like that. And he says, in Islam we don't have this. He said, this is one of the major obstacles between our tradition and their tradition. But culture is an aircraft carrier, and when Muslims go into settle in India",
      "settle in India, two things happen. One, the Muslims who settled there coming from Central Asia and also from the Arabian Gulf area like into the kind of Malabar coast they start to get influenced by local traditions. That's one way. The second way is Muslims who are people who are converting to Islam in South Asia bring with them caste sensibilities. In fact sometimes whole castes will just convert to Islam as a caste",
      "So you have basically arising next to what we'll call Hindu caste structure, you have something amongst Muslims. There's a lot of debate among sociologists, Muslim sociologist included is this can we call it caste? Is it different than caste? What the general opinion I'd say is that it's not as strict as castes in Hinduism where you have these very strict notions",
      "of not eating with other people and not touching them, and not letting them come into mosques. But it's very clear that the hierarchy in... The sense of hierarchy in Muslim society in South Asia is much more intense than it is in any other part of the Muslim world. And there's clear kind of parallelisms and also let's say seepage acculturation with majority Hindu traditions. It's a very political issue because",
      "because Muslims still to this day will show themselves as, our religion is superior to Hinduism. One of the reasons is we don't have caste. And then by the way you'll see let's say some kind of hardcore Hindu nationalists or will also agree with them why? Because if you're a minority caste in India, you can get essentially preferential treatment. You get affirmative action. Become a scheduled cast and they don't want Muslims. Muslims are in India a lot of them",
      "poor, underprivileged groups. So this is actually a group of part of the population that would be ideal candidate to be a scheduled caste but how does sort of Hindu nationalist get around admitting Muslims into this group and say Muslims don't have castes? So you have a weird situation where kind of Muslim nationalists and Hindu nationalists are both agreeing that Muslims don�t have caste. But in reality as I said you see features about concerns about intermarriage",
      "in Islam and South Asia that you do not see or with much greater intensity than you see anywhere else in the Islamic world. Okay, but I'll just... The story I want, the vignette I wanna tell you is this scholar named Sheikh Yunus Al-Junpuri who's one of the scholars I think in Mazhar al-Uloom in North India. He died in 2017, just a few years ago",
      "says in some of his writings, he says I don't advise marriage between castes. And even what he means is I don�t even advise marriage from someone like Saharanpur and Jhonpur, even cities that are relatively close to one another. He says I've seen these quote unquote love marriages they don't work out. There's too much tension it's not worth it. It's very interesting so on the one hand you could say there's no caste",
      "no caste in Islam. The most important, like the prophet says if a man comes to you someone comes to and you approve their religion and their character then marry your daughter to them or else there will be great fitna on the land, there'll be great strife in the land. So we know that piety, like Quran says in akramakum enda Allahi atkaakum the most noble in God's eyes is the most pious amongst you.",
      "So piety is obviously very important, but Yunus Adjun Putur or Himmoh Allah here is saying yeah, but still practically speaking if you cross some of these boundaries it's going to be practically very difficult for you just to manage your relationship."
    ]
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    "text": [
      "So in order to understand why, how culture is influencing Islamic norms we have to look at the role of custom and Islamic law. It's very interesting it's kind of an aside or a tangent but it's a very interesting one I think. The role of Custom in Islamic Law. The Role of Urf and Ada so Urf means custom",
      "which means what's known to be right. also means custom or the way things are done there for all intents and purposes, they're synonyms. But I'll use the word, which means custom. One of the main five main maxims of Islamic law one of the five. One of five main maximums of islamic law is. Custom is dispositive.",
      "what does dispositive mean it's a weird word a dispositive means it disposes of things it means all things being equal this settles the issue it obviously you know doesn't settle all issues but all things be equal custom is going to settle the issue custom is empowered in islamic law",
      "God sees human custom as having inherent value. This is very interesting. Why? God created you in peoples and tribes and nations for what purpose? So that you may come to know one another. Our differences, the differences in our language and our color are, Quranically these are signs of God.",
      "The differences in our languages, and our colors, in our nations, in out tribes, in are cousins, are signs of God. There is inherent value in these differences. It's like the beauty of color fish in the sea. These are signs have got. The second, and this probably that leads I mean I'm not I don't know if it's because of this but the Quran",
      "the Prophet empower custom. Right? For example, the Quran says for men if you're going to divorce your wife either either you keep your woman according to what's known to be correct, what's customary or you send them away in a goodly way. Either you keep them and treat them correctly according to",
      "Right? The Quran over and over talks about ma'ruf. The sunnah of the Prophet, over and ove talks about Ma'rufi. When... So here's direct commands for ma'roof in the Quran. Divorce, spousal obligations when Hind, the wife of Abu Sufyan comes to the Prophet and asks him, she's like listen, Abu Sufyan is not a very generous guy",
      "He's not a very generous guy. He's giving me enough money to buy stuff. What should I do? The prophet says, go take from him his money what is maruf, what's known by custom. So for example, this is not accurate from my life but let's say my wife could take money from my wallet. By the way, this really interesting. Sharia is very class conscious. Not in a bad way.",
      "It's classes of conscience because class is real. If I married my wife, and let's say my wife was from a super rich family, and we get married she's like okay when are we going to go to you know St. Bart's for Christmas vacation? What are you talking about? What is St. Barts? You know what she says I want to take $100 in your wallet because that's what I used to debt get from my parents. This is not accurate for my wife just be clear. So that's very different so if",
      "that's okay i understand it but if i'm from a class where no you know you take five dollars for your dad's wallet or maybe nothing this is actually the source of major what are the two major sources for tension in marriage according to uh experts money and there's kids in the room but you could say it yes money and money and you know what this is what i heard from experts",
      "You know, you remember Sherman Jackson? Dr. Jackson. He says he talked to one who was talking to this divorce lawyer not for his own life but just like, you know, he's talking to someone professionally and he said, you now what's been the best thing in your business? And she said Hollywood. Hollywood expectations of marriage are a huge cause of divorce. There is another interesting cultural change how people get their culture",
      "their culture is affected by the pervasive influence of Hollywood. OK, so things like spousal obligations. What are these obligations of a husband? What are the obligations of wife? They are determined by custom. Does the guy help out doing the dishes or not? Some places in the world they don't. Some places they do. Should the woman bring in money as well",
      "well as take care of children. Some places this is expected culturally, some places it's not expected culturally. There are no Quranic rules or Sunnah rules that say you shall work or something. This is based on custom. It's commanded by the Prophet, by the Qur'an and the Sunnah to be taken from custom. So one way is direct empowerment of custom because human culture has inherent value.",
      "The reason that Qasim is this positive, is that human freedom has inherent value. This is very interesting. I know it sounds like one of these 1990s talks about how Islam and democracy are compatible, how Muslims invented ice cream or something like that. I'm not doing one of those things. Islam values freedom. Okay? So we can make a poster about this. Islam Values Freedom!",
      "Al-asl, the default, the presumption in actions is permissibility. It's called al-ibaha al-asliya. Al-asa fil asha al-iba'a. There's two things where it's not true. In worship. Can I worship God like this? Can I do my prayer like this instead of praying like this No. In Worship, it's prohibited unless you have evidence that's permitted. Also sexual relationships",
      "When is sex allowed? It's only allowed when it's permissible, when you have evidence permissible. Otherwise, it's prohibited. So except for worship and sexual relationships, the presumption with anything is that it's permitted until you have proof. Until you have evidences prohibited. Indulging custom is your obligation because custom is presumptively allowed. Everybody with me?",
      "Human conventions have inherent value. Human freedom has inherent value, and the third reason custom is dispositive is as I said before culture is an aircraft carrier. Pre-modern institutions do not have the capacity to affect massive cultural change over a short period of time. By the way, and I've been thinking about this over and over again, in modern world,",
      "have the capacity to affect change. I was thinking about this, if I had my computer I could show you this. Finally I got pictures of something that I've wanted for years. A dog meat restaurant! My Chinese TA got it from her dad. So in southern China especially, dog meat has for centuries been a small but important part of the diet and she showed me the dog meat",
      "who set trends in culture through film and music, and all these other trends. By the way I like dogs don't get me wrong. I can't eat dogs because it's haram but what's the difference between a dog and another animal? They're are they're all animals so my point is that the reason we feel certain ways about dogs is because of cultural tradition. Other places you can see even within a period of a few decades this kind",
      "change taking place. But pre-modern societies do not have the capacity to affect cultural change with that rapidity. By the way, this is even modern states had their limits. This is really interesting and when I did my last sabbatical before than what I did, I did first year law school at Georgetown. It's so interesting. Took a class on family law. Fascinating. And it's always funny because people you know because I'm like Muslim quote unquote Muslim scholar sometimes",
      "that I give them marriage advice. First thing I say is, I advise you don't get in any fights with your wife. That's how I advise her. Do whatever she says. You'll be happy. It's really interesting because people have these expectations of the way courts work. They think that oh, I'm going to go to court. I'm gonna tell them that my wife is... She's really mean and she yells at the kids.",
      "about this. They deal with all these insane people day in and day out. If they're going to sit there, you think they're gonna care about someone's behavior? They care about basic violations of the law. They do not have the time and the capacity to shepherd people through marital discord. Even though by the way it's really interesting if you look at the stated aims of family law courts in places like the United States probably in Great Britain as well",
      "as well. They have these lofty ideals like best interests of the child, they'll always be trying to support the best interest of the children but it's very hard and imagine any state going in and trying to make sure that every single childs' best interests are being advanced. They cannot avoid deferring to parents on these things. They basically farm this work out to parents.",
      "favoring our arbitration in divorce and family child custody cases because they do not, even modern states with all their bureaucracy, with all of their computers, with their tax revenue, do not have the capacity to manage all of the family legal drama. It has to be essentially as much of it as possible has to left to the couple or to the family to resolve. Okay so we can look at the role",
      "we can look at the role of a custom in the sharia and god's law you have custom that is directly commanded by the quran or the son of the prophet we looked at two examples of that another major role is filling in the details where principles have been given by the koran or the hadith of the profit uh you could think about this way as the custom is like contouring the contact sources of islamic law where are the shariah like meet society the way those pieces fit together",
      "those pieces fit together is contoured by custom. So for example, in sales, so things like what is a condition that is understood? For example when you go and you let's say you go to a restaurant and you order this happened to me the other day in London people, the worst waffle I've ever had! And I'm not being picky, I'm",
      "I'll eat a waffle. This was inedible. But of course, I'm so conflict-averse. There's no way to... That's why that's my wife's job. I give it to her and she complains. But I couldn't... I just couldn't. But if I said... Here's the question. If I said this waffle, I can't eat it, what would the restaurant do? Would they say, well tough toenails man. You ordered a waffle we gave you a waffle? What would they do? They would immediately take it back and give me another waffle right even though like maybe",
      "waffle. They would still give me a new, they would give me something else or they'd give me another waffle right? That's just custom but let's say I go you know I don't know I go buy a car and he drives there I don' like this car it's not good enough probably not going to be that easy right so there's different like there's if you're going to supermarket I donno maybe they would take back half eaten apple I think they probably would but you can imagine there is also different understandings about what",
      "what type of thing you're buying, where, what's the value. In fact, kind of what's customarily known about what's expected or not in terms of transactions. So these kinds of things are legally binded. So if I go into a restaurant in the United States, this is interesting. I learned this in my class with this civil law class. If I go to a restaurant and order a hamburger, I eat the hamburger, then I get the check. It's like $1,000.",
      "What the hell is this? And they say, you didn't look at the menu. This is the greatest hamburger on earth. It says right here $1,000. I was like, I'm sorry. I didn't even look at this. You know, I just saw a burger. Actually that's a valid defense because it's so uncustomary to have a hamburger for $1. So these are customs legally binding. When I go into a court, not me, God forbid, someone goes into a",
      "goes into court starts complaining about the way his wife's acting what is and is not acceptable behavior both in Islamic Court and a let's say American Court this is determined by custom these are legally binding rules haters and thefts this is really interesting example so one of the things that in Islamic law if you're gonna have the HUD punishment for theft which is essentially impossible to happen if you interested in reading about this I wrote a great article as if I must say so myself called stoning",
      "in the Sharia. You can see it, find it online. It's a great article. One of the things, in order for someone to have the high punishment for theft be carried out is that they have to have taken something that isn't what's called hirs. Hirs means a secure location. The reason I bring this up is just a really interesting case where even in the kind of most severe type of legal case you can imagine, custom is dispositive. What determines whether something is a secure",
      "This is interesting. I'm trying to think of an example. Let's take this room. Actually, I always wondered this. If I put something in here, can I expect it to be safe in this classroom? What do you think? You think so? Wow! Welsh people are very good citizens.",
      "So I definitely not where I live, but if I were to present will put something in my office locked office in you know a drawer of my office or something that would definitely be considered his All right But this is based on custom Then so you have kind of the con you have a legal principle like the haters rule comes from hadith",
      "But defining what that term is comes from custom. Then you have legal reasoning that's done kind of, you don't have any clear indication from the Quran, no clear indication for the son or the prophet. It's Muslim scholars operating on more abstract legal principles like preventing harm or something like that or seeking justice. Things like movement in prayer. I think this is the Hanafi school too, right? So if you, what breaks your prayer? If I'm praying",
      "and I do this. Does that break my prayer? So let's say I do the same thing. What if I do it again? What if you do this? What If I do This? Okay. This is an interesting question. Any Maulanas who want to opine can. Okay, so I'm in prayer.",
      "And prayer. I'm not doing it twice, I'm just showing you the movement. Does that break prayer? The photo hasn't reached there yet and we're still trying to decide. So I would say no, that's my opinion. What am I doing? I'm silencing my phone because it's ringing right so I'm going to silence my phone. Now 20 years before a smartphone someone might say what the heck is that guy doing? This is ridiculous.",
      "This is ridiculous. But when you have smartphones, everybody knows he has a smartphone. He's silencing his phone because they don't want to disturb the prayer. It's not a dramatic movement. So you can see custom is even things like in your worship, custom can influence them. And the last example is this one I love. It'a fatwa from Imam al-Ghazali. Damages in the bath. This is like the Turkish bath thing, not bathtub at school. So go into the bath, this guy comes and asks me, there's someone in the",
      "made a huge amount of lather like they took the soap and everyone like this and they get like it's like you know Peter Sellers movie or something just lather everywhere it's going all over the floor so someone comes in Peter Sellars mover will be falls over injures themselves who is liable for the damages so the general rule is determined by custom",
      "If, as Ali says, if the guy in the bathtub is just, you know, soaping up like everyone does and there's a guy coming around squeegeeing stuff like that. And this guy just happens to come in and slip. That's too bad. No one's liable. It's just unfortunate for him. But if this guy was putting weight making way more lather than it's customarily usual and it was going all over the floor and he wasn't concerned about that and the guy slipped on that then the guy who was making all the lather is liable based on",
      "It's based on custom. It's also really important to think about custom on kind of a spectrum of rulings, so there are certain types of rulngs that are based in like Quranic or Hadith very clear statements and nusous that are not going to change with customs. So alcohol I hear that Wales is the binge drinking capital of the UK",
      "Anybody? Okay. I heard Cardiff is the binge-drinking capital of Wales, and I heard that street that I was on is the binged drinking capital of Cardiff. It doesn't matter if you're a Muslim who lives in the binge drinking capital or the binge drink capital alcohol is not halal for you. Doesn't change. There's some things where",
      "Things where rule the rulings change based on time and custom because of The role of custom in Sharia, and there's no clear indication so for example What is what constitutes respectable clothing? I don't mean what constitutes your outer your outer is always the same for a man It's your navel to your knee right but for example could I come in to this lecture wearing Nothing, but like a bath towel around my waist that went from my navel too many",
      "my navel to my knee. Could I give this lecture like that? My hour is covered, people. What are you complaining about? This is not respectable. This is something that would give me maruah. Like, I wouldn't be considered an honorable person. This could detract from my...I wouldn't accept it as a witness. Someone could say that you shouldn't marry this guy. You know, I won't advise you employ him or something like that. So it has real impacts. And then there's things like a middle tier between these two.",
      "to, between things where it's never going to change and where does change. Where it's an area of disputes because sometimes it's not clear whether the hadith or the Quranic verse is meant for all time or only when a certain situation is obtained. A good example this is women's mosque access. Women's mosque axis. So there are the famous hadith of the prophet,,, in Sahih Bukhari, where he says",
      "Masaj Allah, right? Do not prevent the female servants of God from going to the mosque of God. Very clear, right? That is a very clear indication. Do not Prevent women from going into the Mosque. And Omar bin al-Khattab's wife, this is also in Sahih Bukhari, she has asked, do you go to the Mosques? He says yes and Omar my husband would not dream of preventing me but then few years later also in sahih bukhari Aisha is asked, the Prophet's wife is asked",
      "she comments on this hadith. She says, if he were alive today, the prophet would live today, I don't think he would allow people to go because of how society has changed. So it's really interesting in that one example you can see that there is room to both say no, women's mosque access is a right, it should not be prohibited, look at what Omar's wife said but you could also take Aisha's ruling and say listen, she's saying that as if society changes, if things get more dangerous, if it's unsafe, if people are disrespectful to women",
      "disrespectful to women, then you should limit mosque access. And by the way, it's really interesting. So all of Southeast Asia is pretty much Shafi'i school of law. So is the Malabar coast of India. I asked students of mine, some of them from Southeast Asia and some of the Malibu coasts, what are the differences between Shafism and Shafii School of Law in these two places? In Southeast Asia, women go into mosques, walk around",
      "going to work, whatever. Going in and out of the mosque. In places like Kerala women don't go to the mosque it's very you can see like the influence of I don't know South Asian kind of Islamic norms on that even though it's a same school of law like the Hanafis in South Asia also the Shafi'is you don't really have mosque attendance by women The last point I want to make is",
      "How do Muslim scholars deal with these challenges? What are their concerns as stewards? The first real factor is, as I said, the real limitations on pre-modern institutions to change culture. Pre-modern institution including state institutions to changed culture. You have to choose your fights. Sometimes it's impossible to change things.",
      "And one of my friends, he actually is a Muslim who lives in the UK. I'll give him a shout out. When we were in college, he said sin is like a badly fit carpet. You push it down to one place, it's just going to pop up somewhere else. So at a certain point you just say we're going to push it here, we're gonna push it there, it will pop over there and we can't do anything about it. The Sharia envisions this challenge and builds in the concept of private sphere versus public sphere.",
      "sphere. And there's an amazing story about this. Omar bin al-Khattab is walking, during his caliphate, is walking down the streets of Medina and he hears an absolute house party going on behind the walls of a house. He climbs over the walls to see what was happening in the house.",
      "says, what about the Prophet's command to respect Sattar? Covering people up. Not to publicize sins. And what about that fact that the Quran says if you go into people's houses then go in through the door. Right? Seek permission before you enter. He said, you violated these three things. Omar says, you're right. Goes out, nothing happens. So there's an understanding",
      "there's an understanding that we have satsr, we don't go and uncover people's private sins. I'm not talking about somebody who's beating their spouse and the spouse is suffering and you don't say anything about it. If someone's being harmed, that's a different issue. But if someone's just engaging in sinful behavior, you know, I know some guy goes home every night and drinks himself silly at his house. I am not going to publicize this because it's destructive for the Muslim community. It's destructive",
      "know about all these sins going on. Sins are gonna happen, doubts are gonna to happen, infidelity or unfaithfulness into your religion is gonna happen but this should be done in the private sphere not in the public sphere where it becomes destructive. Sometimes this can cause disagreement about when discomfort or misconduct",
      "the famous Shappi scholar of Cairo who died in 1505, he was very upset because there was a brothel that was open right next to the mosque in his neighborhood. And he gave fatwas, this brothel must be closed. Every time he gave the fatwa, senior scholars would say, no, no don't do anything. It's not because the senior scholars like the brothel it just that there is this is going to cause two people are gonna commit sins, it's happening here, it is not going to stop.",
      "you, us making a big deal about it is going to be more problematic. So sometimes it's impossible to change everything. Sin is like a badly fit carpet. The second major concern Muslim scholars had in this regard is they want to minimize friction, minimize disputes, minimize violence. There's a famous Andalusian scholar, Abu Sa'id al-Lubbi, Maliki scholar who died in 1381.",
      "It's praiseworthy for jurists to find means for legally justifying infractions that have become customary. I want to say this again, it is praiseworthy of legal justifying in fractions that have been customary think about the example of the Berber Alwa if you can keep these people within the fold of Islam prevent them from having some weird thing where they bury fiqh books and say they're burying the sharia right",
      "If you can do that by making the Sharia as wide as possible, as expansive as possible to bring them into that tent, you should do that. As Imam Ash-Shafi said, When situations get tight and constrained, the Shariah becomes expansive. The last case is the hardest.",
      "Both sides of a debate have compelling evidence. So, for example, the case of race and dissent from slavery in Maliki marriage law in Northwest Africa. I want to go back to the story that this guy was a powerful chief of a tribe. He was a really rich and powerful man. And when he married this woman, his standing did not prevent her family from being mocked by people.",
      "And as I said, there are many Maliki scholars. The stars, the champions, the greatest names of the Maliki school of law stuck with Malik's principle. Race, descent does not matter in marriage. But what became the majority position, especially in Northwest Africa, said custom is too strong. You have to respect custom. And in this case, what are you going to advise people?",
      "Are you going to advise people to engage in marriage where there's going to be major strife for their family? I'm not going to say what the right answer or wrong answer is because, first of all, I'm a non-racist. Second of all this is a conundrum. That's the point. This is a condom. It's easy just to be principled it's easy to say I'm Not racist and things like that but what do you do when taking these stances has a real social cost and it's interesting also looking at issues of tribe in Arabia",
      "in Arabia, Abdulaziz bin Baz,, the former Mufti of Saudi Arabia. I think he died in 1999 if I'm not mistaken. He was from a non-tribal family like a low status family in Nejd, not from one of the big tribes. So he was not sort of like invested. You know, he's not defending the system but he supported in general... Well that's not true.",
      "in the Najdi society as un-Islamic. But he said, if you're not willing, if your situation where it's going to cost you and your family too much to go through like a marriage where you married between tribes of different levels or between someone who is not from a tribe and a tribe, so don't do it. You can do it if you want. This is allowed. This not a kind of valid form of discrimination in the Sharia. But if the cost is going to be too high for you, don't",
      "of caste in Islam, kind of marriage in South Asia, Islamic law in South Aja is to if you look at the last 100 or so years Muslim scholars in south asia have been increasingly critical of castes. They've said this is un-Islamic all these rules about caste are not uh you know they have no basis in our religion etc etc meanwhile by the way almost every muslim",
      "Every Muslim scholar that I've come across in Hanafi law and South Asia supported the kind of discrimination, like inter-caste discrimination amongst Muslims. They supported this based on Muslim rules of kafah, suitability, and marriage. The last 150 years have seen a move against this for two reasons. One, for lack of a better word, Salafi impulse. People like to criticize Salafis but one thing they don't put up with is",
      "they don't put up with is local culture. In this case, I mean, I feel bad bagging stuff. They don't like caste. The second is kind of Islamist activism, Muslim solidarity against the British, kind of pan-Islamic solidarity trying to mobilize society including by the way Hindus as well against colonial powers. These type of groups like the Jama'at Islamiyah also are very anti-caste",
      "anti-caste discrimination. So the last 100 or 150 years has seen a real push against what had long been the majority position about Hanafi marriage law and caste in Islam in South Asia, but I'll leave you with the quandary of Imam Yunus Jalampuri, where he said, you can have all the ideas you want, you",
      "et cetera, et cetera. But I've seen these love marriages over and over again. If it's between castes in between casts, it's not going to work out. These are real cultural differences. Cultural differences of what is when the rubber meets the road in a marriage this is what causes disputes. So it's an example of the challenges of stewardship in Islamic civilization. Thanks very much."
    ]
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    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum, my name is Professor Jonathan Brown. I'm a professor at Georgetown University normally but this is my second time teaching at TISA, teaching a class on Hadith and the Sunnah of the Prophet. And I have enjoyed myself this time, I enjoyed myself last time. I find this quality of students to be very high. I think actually we just did presentations today. I've never seen this high level of presentation from any other Muslim institution I've studied with it in fact even",
      "with grad students. In non-Muslim institutions, this is probably the highest level of quality presentation that I've ever seen. They're presenting their final papers. So you have at TESA students who come in with a really good Islamic knowledge already, very strong commitment as Muslims but also they are interested in kind of thinking critically above and beyond the way that most Muslim institutions of learning function in this country or even globally so I think that's really valuable",
      "from the students and I find their questions to be amongst the best I've had. And they also work hard, they do all the readings, they pepper me with questions. Yeah, they're really interesting students. Some of them are looking at Hadith from the perspective of machine learning and AI. Others are studying topics that I've always wanted to learn about and they've gone done really good research on. So I'm really impressed",
      "teach and to learn from students like this. So I think that the fact it's really enriching for me as a professor means that it's testament to the overall high quality of the selection of the student administration. I've taught so much on this topic at other Muslim institutions in the U.S. and globally, I've talked on this top in my university, Georgetown University but I think",
      "had the most in-depth discussions I've ever had and we really got lost in the material. And, um...I kept telling students that I thought this was so interesting and hoping they did too. They have very high standards! And I think they were enjoying it as well."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/EP028 Dr_ Jonathan Brown on the life_ works and le_T5oJsalNRxw&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748691822.opus",
    "text": [
      "Hello and welcome to episode 28 of the Abbasid History Podcast, an audio platform to examine pre-modern Islamic Islamist history and a global medieval past. We are sponsored by IHRC Bookshop. Listeners get",
      "15% discount on all purchases. Visit IHRCbookshop at shop.ihrc.org and use discount code AHP15 at checkout. Terms and conditions apply, contact IHRC Bookshop for details. We are also sponsored by Turath Publishing. Buy now an introduction to Sahih al-Bukhari by Mustafa al-Azami. Listeners get a 15%",
      "and use discount code POD15 at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Contact Turat Publishing for details. I'm your host, Al-Hassan, a PhD student at the School of Oriental African Studies in London. Now on to the show. Considered by Sunni Muslims as the second most authentic book after the Qur'an, Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari's collection of the Prophet's sayings and traditions or hadith holds an esteemed station in Sunni scholasticism.",
      "To discuss with me the life, works and legacy of Al-Bukhari is Dr. Jonathan Brown. Dr. Brown is the Al-Walid bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University's PhD title. And first book was The Canonization of Al Bukhara al Muslim, the Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon. Welcome Dr.",
      "Hey, how are you doing? Al-Bukhari was born in 810 Qamunera in present day Uzbekistan almost 60 years after the Abbasid revolution just after the passing of the fabled Caliph Harun al-Rashid and the start of the fourth fitna civil war between his two sons Al-Amin and Al-Ma'mun. What do we know about his socio-political and cultural context and what impact would it have on his formation as a scholar?",
      "as a scholar? Well, first of all, I'm a big fan. So I'm really honored to be on and it's nice to meet you know talk to you in person. You're doing this interview like 15 years too late. I wrote this book so long ago. I've had to go back and reread sections there's nothing worse than realizing you're not going to be able to give a good presentation of something that you actually wrote but I've also been translating Sahin Bukhari with like a commentary",
      "like a commentary and I'm about, about halfway through the book. And so in some ways my contact with Muhammad Ismail Bukhari is more intimate now than it ever was, but also, but it's more like with his actual book than with, you know, the study I did from many years ago, but all anyway, so I'll do my best to answer your questions. In some ways I feel like his political content social context has no impact on him.",
      "on him. I mean, I know a lot of...I think a lot people who've experienced engaging with Islamic thought know this which is that in a lot ways these people sort of almost like disembodied brains that float around through time and space. They interact with this life of the mind and this kind of diachronic republic of letters where they're commenting on someone 100 years before them and another 1,000 miles away",
      "them than what's going on around them. I mean, in some ways you'd read Sahih Bukhari or almost any other book and I'd say maybe most books written by Muslim scholars, you wouldn't actually know what their context is at all from the book. For example, the Fatawa al-Hindiya or the Fatawah al-Amgiri. You read this and you might not...you wouldn't even know it was written in India. In some ways, Sahih",
      "And in a lot of ways, I think Bukhari was more contextually embedded than other authors. But in some ways he's not at all contextually imbedded. So when we think about context and the kind of Western history, we think political concept or what was so-and-so ruler doing or are not doing? That stuff I don't think mattered to Bukhar at all. I think it had very little influence on his work. I",
      "work was the very specific theological and legal debates going on with other Muslim scholars at the time. And Sahih Bukhari, it's like reading a... I mean, I don't want to insult the book by saying this, but it's almost like reading really snarky hipster movie review or something where there's all these illusions to something that just happened in some other movie reviewer who",
      "get referred to by their name, but anybody. So if you were reading that movie review in exactly that month and exactly that year, you would know, oh my God, he just went there. He just said this. He what the heck is going on here? I mean, what is he talking about? Why is he writing this? So Sahih Bukhari is a book that if you read it, and also Bukhar's other books",
      "ball or inside cricket or something for UK people. He's engaging in all these different debates that he never talks about explicitly, or very rarely talked about explicitly. And it's only the kind of generation of commentators after him who sort of try to delve into this and figure out what is he talking about here? Why does he say this? Why is he saying that? But the book is still very elliptical, very cryptic. So that's not even",
      "sexual embedding is a much more theological and legal debate. You know, the kind of two biggest things, right? Are starting with the least less significant one is the debate between the Ahl al-Sunnah wal Jama'ah, right so Bukhari in some of his books talks about the Ahla Sunna His student Atirmidhi in his Sunan uses the phrase I think it's the earliest use of the phrase that anyone knows of Atirmidi uses the phrases Ahl Al-Sunna wal Jamaa The people of the sunnah and the collective",
      "that Bukhari identifies with, the kind of initial core of what the Ahl al-Hadith that later matures into and splits into the Shafi school of law and the Hanbali school. And so there's a debate between them and what they would call the people of opinion or rational argumentation in law.",
      "This is the one group that his school of thought, his network of peers is opposed to and is always debating. And you see this in his Sahih. He very politely refers to Abu Hanifa as a certain person. I don't think he ever says Abu Hanifah's name exactly. But in another one of his books, it's a refutation of the Hanafi position on not raising your hands",
      "bowing to raise your hands in prayer. He has a whole book against that, and he talks about, I mean, in very severe language about a person—I'll read you because it's really shocking. He says the rebuttal of him, this person, him who rejected raising the hands to the head before bowing in prayer and misleads the non-Arabs, the ajam, on this issue, turning his back on the sunnah of the prophet and those who have followed him.",
      "followed him. He says that this person, which is Abu Hanifa, did it quote out of the constructive rancor of his heart, breaking with the practice of the messenger of God, disparaging what he transmitted out of arrogance and enmity for the people of the Sunnah, for heretical innovation in religion has tarnished his flesh, bones, and mind and made him revel in the non-Arabs diluted celebration",
      "Masha'Allah, very polite person. Rahimahullah. But this, he could not constrain himself here. He had to, he couldn't contain himself. He gave his opinion. That's a debate over whether you raise your hands or not in prayer. And if you, those of you listening think how can that be a serious debate? That's such a silly thing. Well, two things. One, Muslims take how you pray, how you worship God very, very, seriously and they're extremely conservative about this because this is how God and the Prophet taught them to pray",
      "them to pray. And second, it's not really about that particular issue. It's about what it means for your view on the sources of law. So for someone like Bukhari, although Hanafis would disagree with this and I think they have a point, I don't think that Bukharis should have been so hostile towards this, but Bukhaari would see this as an indication that you reject hadiths from the Prophet as the most authoritative way to know what his sunnah is.",
      "his sunnah is, what his precedent is. So that's one thing. The first big debate is kind of against the Kufan school of law basically becomes the Hanafis and the second big debate",
      "who are very pious Muslims, but they believe more in a kind of a rational God, in a God that can be understood rationally and that theology and beliefs about God have to be reasoned and accessible to reason. So they would believe in free will because at least more Teslites would because how can God punish you for something",
      "They would believe, for example, that God is just, that he's constrained by reason and justice. They believe in the ability of reason to understand right and wrong in the world independent of revelation. The Jahmis, what would be called Jahmis, although they don't refer to themselves like this,",
      "against what the sort of nascent Sunni community, they, the Jahmis are really people like Bishr al-Murisi, Ibn Abi Juwad. These people really led this effort. They were even arguably even more rationalist, but ironically in the sense that some of them didn't apparently didn't believe in free will at all. Like they almost had a mechanistic view of creation that like God was so rational, right? Or so, you know,",
      "that we can't even think of choice in the world. The world has to run mechanistically. What happens is this sort of Muslim rationalist camp gets very close to the Abbasid caliphs during the reign of al-Ma'mun, and toward the end of his reign he institutes this policy of basically bringing in Muslim scholars and asking them to say that the Quran",
      "continued under his successor al-Mu'tasim and then under his successors al-Wa'fiq. And it seems like also some of the, they also forced other positions on scholars like denying what's called ru'ya tul baari so denying that you would see God on the day of judgment. And from a Muslim rationalist perspective that makes sense because the idea... You can't think about God as something that can be seen as being in a body, as being visible, like God has to be completely",
      "cannot be talked about in an anthropomorphic way at all. And whereas the Sunnis said, you know, well there's all these hadiths where the prophet talks about on the day of judgment you'll see God like you're looking up at the full moon or you'll appear before God without any barrier between you and him. So of course we have to remember why they're doing this it's not just that they're trying to be jerks although they were jerks in this case working with the man",
      "the poor Sunni scholars, you know, they're engaged in a lot of debates with other religious and philosophical traditions in the Near East, especially Christians. And if the Quran talks about Jesus as, that Jesus is a word from his Lord. And it's eternal. And so a Christian would say, I told you, look, Gospel of John, beginning there was the Word and the Word was God",
      "and the word was God, and the Word is with God. So we agree with you. Jesus is the eternal Word of God. The Mu'tazila it seems like said no, no, the words of God are not eternal they're created. The Quran is created. It seems that might be why they were so intent on promoting this position but for the Sunnis especially the teacher of Bukhari Ahmed ibn Hanbo",
      "alarming for two reasons. One, because they didn't believe that humans should engage in kind of speculative theology to begin with so you shouldn't be thinking about like oh what's the nature of God's speech? You know what's is it created or not created or what you know? They said no no you just God tells you uh what he wants you to know and you just say we hear and we obey. Human brains are",
      "The second reason is it seems like this also really threatened the Koran's social place. There's this one very interesting episode where this early Hanafi, Mu'tazilite scholar Ibn Abban in the early 800s, he's a judge and there's a case between a Muslim and a Jewish person. And the judge asks the Muslim to swear by these words in the Korans",
      "Jewish litigant says, you know, I don't accept this oath because he's just swearing by this created thing. You guys think the Quran is created? So it was almost like this threatening the Quran's place. And also as Abul Hasan al-Ashri talks about in his works, he says, about a century later, he that this is really similar to saying that the Quran has called it bashar, right? It's just the word of a person. It is too close",
      "sensibilities. So they really opposed this. So those were the big issues that influenced Bukhari's life intellectually, and also influenced his life practically speaking because he at various points in his life is driven from places because someone doesn't like his particular view on something like this, on these issues of the nature of God's speech. So it",
      "to collect hadith, including to the Levant and Egypt, and died in 870 Common Era in his country of birth. Give our listeners an overview of his life before we look at his works and legacy. Yeah, so Bukhari is kind of going along that same theme of how weird and elusive context can be when you're looking",
      "is from Bukhara, but he's really not from there. I mean, he spends almost his entire life on the road studying and teaching and writing. So Bukharah is only a place where he grows up and goes there at the end of his life. That's it pretty much. He's from a wealthy family one of his great-great grandfather or something converted to Islam. He was almost certainly Zoroastrian before that.",
      "according to al-Istakhri, writing about a century later, they were speaking Sogdian, which is an Iranian language but not Persian. Bukhari's student Muslim bin al-Hajjaj from Nishapur would be speaking Persian. But when Bukharis mom was yelling at him and telling him to eat his porridge or whatever she was probably yelling at them in Sogdiyan. In one narration of Sahih Bukhairi there",
      "There is a thing where he actually uses a Persian word. It's extremely rare. I mean, when I say context is elusive to these people, I mean these are people who are either speaking Persian or language close to it like Sogdian and that's what language they yell at their kids in. And then when they stub their toe and curse and stuff, they curse in Sogdian. But their whole life intellectually is in Arabic",
      "else in the world besides Arabic language. And very, very rarely do you see them ever break into or even acknowledge Persian or any other language. So this really interesting place and one point is saying Bukhari in one narration of Sahih Bukhar he says use the word ham like also or like in Persian ham on this like this and that but otherwise you just don't have",
      "So he grows up in Bukhara. He does hajj at 16. So he's studying, obviously, he learns Arabic. He learns with the local scholars of Bukharah. His family is a wealthy landowning family. Dehkan is what they're called, Persian for kind of landowners. And he, according to his secretary later on in life, he supported himself by rental income from property his family owned and he would get about 500 dirhams a month",
      "500 silver coins a month. And I think that would be about, you know, according to what I know about, I don't know, a live chicken was three dirhams. So you can calculate how many live chickens you can buy a month that, I mean, he could live comfortably, right? But so he basically was able to study and do whatever he wanted in his life",
      "Also, he rented out shops in Nishapur and he had like a shop that he rented. That's how he made his money. So he travels first throughout one of Transoxiana and Khorasan region, the major cities of Khorasan, Balkh, Marv, Nishpura. Then he goes to Northern Iran to Ray, the great commercial sort of entrepot of Ray where there is modern day Tehran, where there's a bunch of kind of network of very influential Hadith scholars, the Razi clan",
      "Abou Hazem al-Razi, Ibn Wara. He of course goes to Baghdad, the navel of the world, the center of the World where he meets and studies with one of his main teachers, Ahmed ibn Hanbal, the Center of the Sunni network at that time, maybe the center or gravity of the sunni school of thought as it's taking shape. And he studies with Ibn Hanball",
      "Ibn Hanbal, he studies with Yahya ibn Ma'in, another major hadith critic in Baghdad. He goes to Wasit, Kufa, Basra in southern Iraq and Basra he studies the famous Hadith scholar Ali ibn al-Madini who was one of the scholars who caved in in the Inquisition. I would have caved too. First day in there I would've said where do I sign? But these guys were really tough but Ali ib Madini",
      "But Ali Medini, he's one of the people who caved in. But Bukhari had immense respect for him. He said, I never considered myself small except before Ali Emelian Medini. This guy is a great Hadith scholar. He went to Mecca, obviously, for Hajj. He studied with al-Humaydi there, also Medina. He",
      "So he spends about five years toward the end of his life in Nishapur. And that's where he teaches one of the people who become one of his most influential students, Muslim Ibn al-Hajjaj in Nisapuri.",
      "the famous Sunan as well. So then Nishapur, there's a one, there is a really big Hadith scholar in Nishpura named Muhammad ibn Yahya al-Dhahli and he's older than Bukhari. He dies around the same time but he's much older than Bakar so he actually managed to study with some people that Bukhar was not able to meet like Abderzak Sunani in Yemen. And it seems like because when you have a figure like Bukkari,",
      "have to look back at the earliest sources to figure out what's his history before you get a lot of stories spun around him. And it seems like something happens between Duhli and Bukhari, and it seems that Duhlil does not have a hard time dealing with people being",
      "and he turns again against and drives out Muslim as well, or at least doesn't drive him out but kind of alienates him from a lot of people in Mishapur. Later on the story is that Dhul-Hali didn't like Bukhari's position on the nature of the Quran. And I should say this very quickly so Bukhar had a very reasonable position which is that the Quran is",
      "which is exactly what Sunni should say. But someone said, okay, well when you recite the Quran or when you write the Quran, what about the sound that comes out of your mouth or the ink on the paper? And Bukhari said, well those are created because human actions are created. This was another Sunni position, which is that God creates people's actions. So when I lift my hand up, no God is creating that action right? So this seemed completely reasonable, right? Obviously when I say, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raqam",
      "you know, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Rahim. Alhamdulillahi Rabbil alameen. Like that, the actual sound coming out of my mouth, the vibrations in the air are created. Or when I write that with a pen, the ink and the paper is created. There was a kind of extremist, extreme part, extreme faction of the Ahl al-Hadith. George Moctese calls them the ultra conservatives. I like the term uber Sunnis. Uber Sunni is like they had like a rock band or something, you know? Like some tattoos. I don't know. They were extremely,",
      "extremely hard. So their position would end up being rejected. So Bukhari was actually, if you go back and look in books of Aqidah in the 900s, Bukharis were completely correct. This is exactly what everyone always says that the Quran is eternal but when I recite it in the world that is a created sound. They said no, no, just saying that even the sound or",
      "Bukhari interestingly wrote a book rebutting them and in it he says you don't understand the position of Ahmed ibn Hanbal. He's write this book within 15 years of the death of Ahmed Ibn Hanball, and he says You know, I study with Ahmed ibin Hanbal but I can tell you you don' t understand his diqlut medhebihi, the exactness of his position on this And he's basically saying you don''t understand what you're talking about You're attributing all these opinions to Ahmad ibn hanbal and that he would say this that the other and he didn't say this What I'm saying is correct. But anyway, he's driven from",
      "he's driven from Nishapur by Duhli. Later on, it's because Duhili doesn't like his position on the wording of the Quran, created wording of The Quran. But it seems like their earlier version is that Duhlil said when I went to Mecca, I saw Bukhari and he was hanging out with a guy who believed in free will. And that was unacceptable. So then he goes to Bukharah back",
      "emir of the Tahir dynasty, he got him Khalid bin Ahmed, I think his name is. He has at his court, he kind of has a coterie of Sunni Hadeeth scholars whom he's cultivating. By this time, the mihna is over, right? So the mihma doesn't affect Bukhari. The mihma is kind of over by this time. And Sunni scholars are sort of in ascendance, the caliphs and the local courts really want to have a lot, you know,",
      "Sunni scholars and patronize them and enjoy their support. So this Tahir-e-Amir in Bukhara has a bunch of scholars that he's kind of patronizing and helping them write their books and things, and he asked Bukhar to give private reading of his works to the Tahir e-Amirs' sons, so his own sons. And Bukha says, I don't do that kind of thing. I'm not going to give your kids special treatment.",
      "really moving thing that's attributed to him where he says, you know, uh, he's on the road, you traveling around Khorasan. He says, the earth has become too narrow for me. And he sort of almost like there's no place for him anymore. And his poem is on the Road to Samarkand, the other great city of Trans-Oxiana and he dies near the city in a place called Khartank which is now part of Samarkhand",
      "You can go visit his grave today. He dies in 256 or 870 of the common year, around 60 years old. Al-Bukhari is best known for his Sahih collection. Before we look at that in detail, describe to us his other works. Yeah, so Bukhara actually wrote a number of works and a lot of them have survived. Unlike a lot",
      "scholars, like for example Muslim. Very few of his works have survived. So Bukhari when he's in Mecca and Medina, his first writings are about collecting the sayings of companions of the Prophet. And then he starts writing a book called the Tariq al-Kabir which is a collection that ends up being about 12,300 entries of it's a biographical dictionary of Hadith transmitters.",
      "It's kind of placing them in the network of Hadid transmission, who met who, who narrated to who, when did someone live? What was their name? Maybe some information about them. Maybe a rating about whether they're reliable or not. And actually this is the book that Bukhari is originally known for. So it's really only until let's say before the kind of nine twenties or nine thirties.",
      "He's only known for his Tariq al-Kabir. The first kind of written response to him by Ibn Abi Hatim al-Razi died 938, I think. He wrote a kind of rebuttal or criticism of the Tariqu al-Qibir. That's the first book that gets talked about.",
      "through at least the 1300s. He wrote these rebuttals of, the rebuttal about the criticisms on his position on the wording of the Quran. He write that rebutal of the Hanafi position on not raising your hand in prayer, he wrote a rebuttle of the Hannafi position that you don't have to recite the Fatiha if the Imam leading the prayer recites it. You don't",
      "he wrote a small book of weak Hadith transmitters. So those are the works he's known for. Yeah, okay. So Sahih Bukhari is an incredible book. I mean it's a kind of book where you look at it and you just say oof that's the reaction I have with it oof, I don't know this book is too much it's just a mammoth accomplishment first of all it's huge",
      "I mean, it's a good 1.5 times bigger than the next biggest Hadith collection of the six books. I mean it's really big book and it's comprehensive in its scope. It's basically the gospel according to Bukhari. It is the world and Islam according to Bakrari everything in it. I",
      "It's got extensive discussions of Islamic theology, which by the way you don't find in a lot of other books. Let's say the six books. You don't found a lot theological discussions. It has history. It had sections on how you transmit Hadiths. It as sections essentially on hermeneutics legal and theological hermoneutics. It's comprehensive so the book is not actually a Hadith collection",
      "a hadith collection, unlike let's say the collection of At-Tirmidhi or Musnad Ahmed ibn Hanbal or Sahih Muslim. It's basically Bukhari's opinion on all these issues I just talked about and the evidence he gives are the hadiths. So the book is his opinions on all things and his opinions were expressed in the chapter titles",
      "His subchapter titles, sometimes little mini essays where he's basically very elliptically, sometimes clearly, sometimes not clearly giving you a discussion on a certain topic where he is going to promote his position and criticize others. And then the hadiths in the subchapter, in the Bab, those are the actual evidence. So that is the Zahir. I mean it is an incredibly... It's all inspiring book.",
      "book. I will say this about this, it's awe-inspiring and anybody who doesn't think that, I don't care if you think this stuff is all made up or if you thought Bokhari was deluded. If you look at this book and you are not incredibly impressed then you haven't really looked at it, then you're just reading a page or something. I don t think it s possible for someone to look at the book and not be dumbstruck by the intricacy. He will narrate oftentimes mostly",
      "mostly multiple versions of a hadith in the book at different points in the books to make different points. And the number of narrations he includes is amazing. I mean, he will sometimes have exactly the same hadith with exactly the change transmission but just changed the teacher that he hears it from directly like he's just trying to show you the breadth of his narration that he has command of. I",
      "I should also say that this is the first book of its kind in the sense that it was the first",
      "was that only included Sahih Hadiths. So if you look, let's say the Musnad of Ahmed bin Hanbal, Bukhari's teacher, it has lots of hadiths in there that have unreliable chains of transmission. Now they might be in there because they're the best thing the author could find on that topic. They might be",
      "for that, they sort of strengthen one another. Or maybe it's on a topic that's not super important like some extra prayer you can say at nighttime to get something specific from God. This is an invocation you can or litany. So these were not really considered to be important issues. But Bukhari's book is not like that. Although he doesn't have an introduction to the book. Muslim has",
      "introduction. We only know about what he intended from reports attributed to him and then from actually reading the book itself. But Bukhari and Muslim are the first people who write books where they say that, they don't say this but in effect what they're saying is we don't care if a certain hadith is important in law, we don t care if it's got a lot of other isnads",
      "an isnad, a chain of transmission that we think meets our standards of authenticity. It's not going in the book. So the interesting thing about let's say Sahih Bukhari Muslim is that if you're looking for a lot of important hadiths about law just basic hadith about Islamic law, you will not find them in Bukharian Muslims books. They're not in there because those, a lot",
      "It just means that their reliability doesn't come from single chains of transmission. So these are the first books to do that, and this actually is a big controversy. And I think we might talk about that later when we talk about the reception of the books. There has been continued doubts cast on how authentic are the traditions recorded in al-Bukhari's Sahih. What are broader considerations and premises that should be borne in mind?",
      "in mind when trying to reconcile these views and where should listeners go next to learn more about al-Bukhari and his works? Yeah, well I mean I think the first thing which I think is very interesting that the first responses to Sahih Bukhara and to Sahi Muslim are negative they're from other Hadith scholars other Sunni scholars especially that network of clan of scholars in Ray",
      "Abu Zuhra al-Razi, Abu Hatim al-Raizi, Ibn Warah. They are not happy with these books. But they're not for the reasons you might think. They're upset about two things. They say one, no one's done this before and these are conservative people. They don't do things that no one has done before. Just the idea let's say of criticizing Hadith transmitters, they had to really make arguments that this was a legitimate activity",
      "And it wasn't like backbiting and slander. So they're very conservative about, you know, they don't just start writing a new type of book because, you",
      "oh, you want to use this hadith in an argument against me. But I just looked at this book of Sahih Hadiths and this hadit is not in there. So I don't think you all really think this hadid is reliable. So they were concerned that Bukhari Muslims books were going to give the impression that if a hadith was not in their books, it was not sahih. And so, in fact, Muslim Bukharis, it's attributed to him by in the work of Ibn Adi about 100 years later.",
      "100 years later that he said there are lots of hadiths that are sahih that are not in my book i didn't put everything that i think is sahih and they're in my books i just put the hadits that i",
      "are, that they have come to consensus on as sahih. So they're really forced to defend themselves against this accusation and it's really only maybe half a century after their deaths that Sunni scholars really embrace their books and see them as incredible accomplishments that need to be studied and modeled and become role models for later books. Well I mean there's two things",
      "One is the criticism of Bukhari and Muslim by Muslim scholars, which starts early and doesn't stop. And the second one is how we would say what's authentic and not. Those are two different issues. As I said, when we talk about kind of criticism of Bahraini Muslims books or let's just talk about Bukharis book. The first thing to know is that Muslim scholars have always criticized these books.",
      "they not only are they criticized early on, but they're criticized by people who admire the books. For example, Ismaili, who died in 381 or 991 of the Common Era, just off the top of my head. He's a Hadith scholar from Georgian, kind of south eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. And he has an you know, he's an early scholar of Bukhari works. You know,",
      "God, don't humiliate me on the day of judgment by kind of punishing my father for his unbelief and for his idolatry. And Ismaili says this can't really be reliable because Abraham knew that God was going to punish his father for polytheism. And he knows that the father deserves this. And it's not possible for him to consider",
      "sort of push back against things that he thinks are theologically problematic in Sahih Bukhari, although Ismaili is a Sunni, right? Just like Bukhar. He's just a little bit more maybe rationalist about theological matters. There's a lot more criticism by the way of hadiths and in Sahi Muslim but in his Kitab al-Maudu'at, his book of Forge Hadith Ibn Al-Jawzi who dies 1201 of the common era has one",
      "there and two hadiths from Sahih Bukhari. And Ibn Hazm died 1064. He has a little treatise on, there's two hadits from Bukharis and two Hadiths are Muslims that he thinks cannot be accepted. The one in Bukhairi is the narration of Shurik of the prophets going to have having the Miraj, the miraculous trip to heaven when he was a child. He doesn't say this contradicts what we know about",
      "And there's two in Sahih Muslim, I think. One is about Muawiyah saying when he converts to Islam, one of the conditions is that the prophet has to marry his daughter Umm Habibah. But the prophet had already been married to her like for years. And the second one is yeah, I mean, I don't know if you've read it, but I think that's I think it's just one actually in each book, if I'm not mistaken. Also, there's criticism of the Hadith in Sahi Bukhari",
      "Adam in paradise. Adam was 60 arms tall, like 60 cubits tall. And this is mentioned by Ibn Khayyam al-Jawziyah who died at 1351 in his Manar al-Munif on Forge Hadiths. And it's Ibn Hajar al-'Askalani discusses that he doesn't say it's forged but he just says I don't know how to resolve this problem because it says Adam was",
      "buildings, like the houses of Ad and Thamud that are carved into the rock of Wadi al-Qura in the Hejaz. And the doors are the same size as our doors. So it doesn't make sense that they're shrinking. But he just says, I don't know. I've not found anything that resolves this, but he doesn't have given an opinion about whether it's reliable or not. You'll find a lot of Sunni scholars would say that Hadith is an example of a forged Hadith. The Hanafis are... Although eventually they acknowledge",
      "and write lots of commentaries on Sahih Bukhari, especially in India. You know, any scholar worth their salt in the 1700s, 1600s, 1700s is going to write a commentary on either Sahih or Muslim. But they you'll still see, for example, one scholar, Ibn Abi al-Wafa al-Qurashi who dies in about 1375. He's from Cairo. He has this section in one of his books where he just goes off on Bukharian Muslims. He says these books, they get way too much praise",
      "And Bukhari, you know, has this hadith of the one I just mentioned about the trip to Jerusalem. A Muslim has this Hadith about God created the earth on a Saturday when Saturday is the seventh day of the week and the Quran says that God created Earth in six days. And then he tells a story which is also actually comes from an earlier Hanafi scholar named As-Sarakhsi, the famous jurist and legal theoretician died around 1096 of the common era. In As-sarakhsis Mabsoot",
      "is Mubsut, he has a story where Bukhari allegedly is in Bukharah and he's asked about this question about people who drink milk from the same goat. And he says if you drink milk form the same goate you become a milk sibling with the other person that drank milk from that goat which is a ridiculous opinion okay? And all the Abu Hafs al Kabir the great Hanafi scholar of the city says this is ridiculous and Bukhaari kind of gets driven out of town. This story is not true and later Hanafi scholars",
      "Hanafi scholars like Abdelhaïd Lakhnaoui, who died in 1887, the great Hanafi scholar from Lucknow. He says that this story is made up. But you see it repeated in some Hanafi sources. I think not only are they kind of maybe trying to get back a little bit against Bukhari, who had disagreed so vehemently with the founder of the Hanafi school on law, but also",
      "there should be this division of labor between the Hadith scholars and the jurists. And that Hadith scholar's job is to basically process and authenticate Hadiths, but then not to get involved in giving legal opinions or trying to figure out how to interpret those Hadith. And you see this attributed to Abu Hanifa and other early scholars that, you know, the Hadath scholars are the pharmacists and the jurists are the doctors. The pharmacists just make",
      "prescribe it and how to use it. So I think that's also trying to make this point, which you see often in the polemics between kind of more juristically inclined people and more maybe hadith-inclined people all the way up until Salafi versus Medhabi debates today. It's really important to keep in mind that these scholars all criticized Sahih Bukhari, but they're talking about one or two or three hadiths in Sahih",
      "of the books. Now, a scholar named Dara Kutni, a great Hadith scholar from Baghdad who died in 995 of the Qaman era, he wrote a book where he criticized about 217 Hadiths. 78 of them were from Bukhari and 36 of them weren't Bukharis and Muslims' books. But these criticisms are extremely arcane, detailed criticisms of specifics in the chains of transmission. They have nothing to do with the contents of the Hadith.",
      "and saying that meaning can't be accepted. Muslim scholars do that, but it's a very small number of hadiths in the books. And it's not controversial to do that until the early modern period, and really until the 19th and 20th centuries. Because at that point, criticizing Bukhari Muslims who are seen as sort of like the exemplars",
      "is seen as a way, a means or presents a danger of delegitimizing Islamic tradition as a whole. And I remember a scholar saying this when I was in grad school, Muslim scholar told me this. He said, you know, if you reject Abu Huraira as a transmitter, you reject Sahih Bukhari. If you reject Bukharis, you rejected Sharia. Now, in one sense that's not true at all like Bukhaari had, I think Abu Hurayra has about 446",
      "six narrations in Sahih Bukhari, maybe if I'm not mistaken. So you could have Sahih and just take out the narration of Abu Hurairah if you wanted. Certainly the Sharia is not based on Sahih. No school of law or theology started by their founder picking up Sahih, and saying okay well let's figure out what the Shari'a is. What the scholar meant when they said that is the methodology that Bukhar represents,",
      "an authentic representation of the sunnah, the prophet. If you can't do that, you lose your religion. And this, by the way, is something that was said in debates between the Mu'tazilites and the Sunnis even going back to the late 700s. One debate by this guy Omar bin Habib in the Abbasid court is a Sunni scholar who dies on 204 or 820 of the common era. He's debating with some Mu'tizilites",
      "court of the Caleb. And there, the Mo'tazilites are criticizing the narrations from Abu Hurairah saying Abu Hurayrah is not reliable and Omar bin Habib says if you don't trust the companions of the Prophet, you don t have a link to the Prophet. You do not have a way of transmitting the Sharia from the Prophet if you can t trust the Companions. Now, the difference between let s say the juristic school of let's just say the Hanafis in this case and the early Sunnis, the Ahlus Sunnah Jama'at",
      "one wanted to lose the Sharia, but someone like the Ahl al-Ra'i would say we believe that the Sunnah of the Prophet is transmitted through hadiths that are consistent, reasonable fit into a system of analogy and legal reasoning. That's how you know the Sunna of the prophet whereas the early Ahl as-Sunni they said no, no this legal reasoning you're talking about should not have a primary role in",
      "role in preserving and understanding the sunnah. Basically, you go back, you collect all the hadiths you can, and then you put these pieces together, and that composite image is going to give you the best image, the best understanding of the sunna of the Prophet. So they weren't really diametrically opposed to one another. They just had differing visions about the best way to preserve and understand the sunnia. But the point that that scholar was making",
      "jurist or hadith scholar, that Sahih Bukhari by the modern period comes to represent that ability, that success, that Muslim success in preserving the sunnah of the Prophet. And if you challenge him and the consensus around him as the acme of the hadith critical process, that you endanger the entire tradition. So you kind",
      "of consensus about what the prophet said and did, even a core of things that he said and",
      "So that's why in the modern period, Bukhari and Muslim become such beyond criticism. The criticism of them is sort of seen as semi-heretical. So I think that when we talk about criticism of Bukharim Muslim, I think on the one hand there's the question of kind of Muslims – the idea that Muslims are engaged in this constant process of reevaluation and study. And that never stops. Like Imam al-Shafi'i said, no book is complete except the Book of God.",
      "except the book of God. No book is free of error and no book is immune to criticism, but the issue around criticizing Bukhari Muslim or Salih Bukharis especially in a modern period is sensitive because Bukhairi becomes like a symbol of Islamic tradition and criticizing it is seen as an attack on the integrity of that tradition, especially because",
      "premises outside epistemologies, whether it's kind of a Western influenced Islamic modernism or a kind of Western Orientalist criticism. So that's why in the modern period there's a lot more sensitivity about criticizing Sahih Bukhari than there was 400 years ago. Now one of the questions was what does Dr. Brown think about Hadiths and Sahih",
      "I mean, I don't want to put down the person who asked the question. But I think it's like the question is, the way it's conceived is based on false premises. First of all, there are all sorts of things in Bukhari.",
      "different narrations of the same event. So he'll include three different narration of, let's say, the Prophet, peace be upon him, giving his speech telling Muslims what to do when they arrive in Mecca for their Hajj should they leave this state of pilgrimage after they do the Umrah until Hajj starts again or not? Or what exactly did he say to them? Like there are different narratons. They all have the same general idea but he says",
      "He says the wording is different. So those things can't all be true. The prophet said one of those things or he didn't. Now, by true, you mean are these different narrations representing kind of different aspects or different manifestations of a certain event that happened? Certain moment in life of the prophet and that that moment is true again, I think really depends on your premises.",
      "they had a problem with a report of the prophet that describes his miraculous journey to Jerusalem occurring when he was a child. That is a fair criticism, right? Because we know that from many other reports that are agreed upon with consensus that the Isra'il al-Malraj happened when the prophet was an adult after he's a prophet. So if you have a",
      "Maybe there's an error in one of the transmitters said. And by the way, I mean if you read Fath al-Bari ibn Hajar Al Asqalani or any other hadith commentary, there are, I'm just going to guess probably 20 or 30 instances in Sahih Bukhari where Ibn Hajr who is a devoted Sunni scholar right? Who was not radical, who was not maverick in anyway he'll say this narration",
      "this narration is mistaken. There's a mistake in this narration. There has to be an error, maybe one of the transmitters got confused because it says something that we know is not reliable. In every instance that I know of in Sahih Bukhari, that is a one narration of several narrations. So the Sahih has many narrations about the Asra and Miraj, and one of them has this problem",
      "There are other things where it's maybe expanding the circle of criticism outward. Someone says, I have a problem with this hadith. For example, the age of Aisha when she gets married. The prophet consummated his marriage to Aisha",
      "in it about Aisha saying she was nine years old when the Prophet consummated his marriage to her. Again, what are our premises? I understand that this hadith makes people uncomfortable because we live in a time and in societies where we consider nine-year-olds to be children who were not sexual beings and that it's sort of morally and legally disgusting",
      "relationship, even a consensual one with someone who's nine years old. And by the way, people would say that a nine-year-old couldn't consent to begin with because they're not an adult. But those are our premises. But does have nothing to do with the rest of human history, right? So we know from the Quran that the enemies of the prophet looked at his sex life for ways to undermine his claims",
      "The divorce of Zayd and Zaynab, and the Prophet's marriage to Zayna. This is referred to in the Quran, and he's attacked for this How could you marry somebody who was the wife of your adopted son? And the Koran then talks about the true nature of adoption the polemics whether it's from Christians in the Middle East or Christians in Europe for 1,300 years are full of Discussions with the prophet sex life",
      "It's one of the main ways that enemies of Islam, critics of Islam polemics against Islam attack the prophet's legitimacy. None of them talk about the age of Aisha until the year 1905 is the first instance where you see a book say, hey, the Prophet married this girl who was really young. Why? Because nobody cared about that before because people in the United States were marrying 12-year olds and 10-year old and 13-year",
      "like Georgia was, like, 10 years old. So and even in the UK. So what are our premises? Like, for example, there's another hadith. Ibn Taymiyyah criticizes Bukhari's book for this too. He says there's a hadith where the prophet marries Maymuna, the aunt of Ibn Abbas, when he's muhrim, when she's in a state of pilgrimage. This is problematic. And there's, you know, Muslim scholars discuss this stuff. I don't want to get into the details. But,",
      "line to this criticism or not. But things like that, things where you're talking about when the Isra and the Maraj happened, these are criticisms that were the premises come from within the Islamic tradition. Like the criticism in Sahih Muslim of the Hadith that says that God created the turba, the dirt on Saturday. Well, the Quran says God created",
      "Quran. And it's agreed upon by Sunni Hadith scholars, you go back to any book of Hadith criticism till the 10 hundreds of the common era as far back as the 10 hundredths, you'll see the rule is always the same if hadith contradicts the Qur'an, if it contradicts established sunnah, if contradicts first principles of reason, if a contradict consensus, it can't be something that Prophet said. Now, of course, you have to be willing to look at ways to reconcile this right so someone could say oh, the Qur-an says that dead animals are prohibited",
      "but the prophet allowed people to eat a dead whale that was on the beach. Look, it's contradicting the Quran. No, it is not contradicting in the Quran It's specifying the Quran by saying that the Qur'an's commandment about dead animals has to do with land animals, not animals in the sea But my point is that the idea that you reject a hadith because it contradicts the Quran unambiguously this is not controversial All Muslims agree with this as far as I know",
      "But one, how quick are you to do this? Are you willing to think about ways that you can reconcile this hadith with the Quran or with other aspects of the sunnah or with reason? A lot of modern criticism of the hadith tradition or Sahih Bukhari is based on a unwillingness to grant any charity at all to attributions to the Prophet. And it just dismisses them out of hand because they don't immediately accord",
      "with your tastes or your predilections of the world. And then it becomes even more problematic when the premises that you're using to judge, or the criteria, the criterion of probity that you are using to Judge the reliability of Hadith is not based in any way in the Islamic tradition at all. So when someone comes and says,",
      "on changes in human society that have happened in the last hundred years. And no one is saying, like, I don't know any Muslim scholars who think that someone has to marry their nine-year-old daughter or something. In fact, it's entirely legitimate, entirely legitimate and has been done in many Muslim countries with complete compliance with the Sharia, that a government can say we're going to restrict marriage age and say that you were not going to register marriages with people until let's say they are 18 or 16. This is fine. This",
      "that are permissible for the muslim or the benefit of the muslin community. That's completely fine but to then go back in time and say that because of our changes in economics and society we're going to say that something attributed to the prophet could never have happened when no one said that even the prophet's biggest enemies, no one ever brought this up for 1400 years either 1300 years that is a criticism I think that kind of anachronism",
      "is, first of all, it's from a scholarly perspective, it' absurd because there's no way that any historian worth their salt would say that we're going to decide what story is probable or improbable in the past based on what our values are today. And from more of a sort of confessional perspective,",
      "what you think happened in the life of your prophet based on changes every couple of years to what people think is appropriate in our time and place. I think the question of criticizing Hadith, as I say Bukhari, is really any of that discussion should start with what are people's premises? What are the basis for the criticisms they're making? So that would be my answer. You are the author of Misquoting Muhammad, The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy.",
      "slavery and Islam, and other works. What are the current projects that listeners can anticipate? Okay, well I've been working on one book for a couple years now maybe five or six years. It's mostly done but I can never get around to finishing it. It is called The Justice in Islamic Law History of Madhalim Courts and Legal Reform which is really kind of a book about what do Muslims",
      "Muslims do when they feel there's a conflict between or kind of a mismatch between their bodies of law and the expectations of justice. So that's how do Muslims handle it institutionally, how they handle it theoretically? That book is mostly done but I just can't get around to finishing it because other stuff keeps coming up. The slavery book I wrote because of the ISIS thing and I'm now almost done with",
      "discussion around Islam and racism, and especially anti-blackness. And I am looking at kind of Islamic law and scripture and how one answers this question. Short answer, Islam is not anti-Black. That's the short answer. But you get to read the book for more details on it. Dr. Brown, thank you for being a guest on Abbasid History Podcast."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Explanation of Quranic verse 4 34 by Dr Jonathan B_DYcehQ0N2Yk&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748695135.opus",
    "text": [
      "That's how we interact with each other in language. But when you have a text like the Quran that is always read through the sunnah of the Prophet, you have to look at what the sunna of the prophet is telling you to understand the intended meaning of the text and in that case",
      "The intended meaning of God's words is not necessarily the one that's closest to the evident meaning. It is the one, that is best supported by the evidence of the other verses of the Quran, of the Sunnah of the Prophet, our understanding of the overall teachings of Islam. This is what tells us the intended meaning in the Quran. And so when we read that verse that I mentioned, the verse 434",
      "The Prophet never struck anybody with his hand",
      "and the prophet says do not strike the female servants of god and then uh omar comes to the prophet depending on the version of the hadith comes to The Prophet and says you know the women in medina are not they're very they they're kind of overcoming their husbands you know they're like forceful in their personalities they're not like the women",
      "He says, The best of you will not strike your wives. And in Sahih Bukhari the Prophet says, Let none of you strike his wife like he'd strike a slave and then go and sleep with her at the end of the day.",
      "And in his final sermon, his final khutbah at Hajj What is one of the things the Prophet says? He says, fear God as concerns your wives Because you have taken them as a trust from God They're in your trust And he says only if they do commit what's called Fahisha Mubayyina An egregious inappropriate behavior",
      "Egregious Fahisha Then strike them But what only strikes them Darbat Ghayr Mubarrih In a way that leaves no mark That causes no harm So that's the sunnah of the prophet Through which we read this verse And through which Every Islamic school of thought Would read this vers Which is why",
      "In the various schools of law And even now A lot of you are students here You know How Complicated fiqh is You know how many Different opinions Like for example In the Hanafi madhab You can have You know Zahir riwaya And you have The opinion of Abi Hanifa You have the opinion Of Abu Yusuf You havethe opinion Of Muhammad bin Hassan Shabani You havethepinionof Zafar Bin Hudhayl You have all these opinions So Fiqh Is very complicated",
      "But across the different meth-hebs, there's this same theme over and over again. You can only strike your wife lightly in a way that causes no harm. If you cause her harm, you're liable for the dia, you are liable to compensate her for injuries. And according to every school except the Hanafi school,",
      "If a wife goes to a judge and says my husband's beating me And there's witnesses or evidence that the husband's Beating her or the husband confesses The judge can do what's called Tafrik He can end the marriage legally And the wife will get to keep her mahr And the husband has to pay her nafaka Until her iddah ends And the marriage is over And this is What I found very interesting In my research That if you look at sharia court Information about sharia courts",
      "Sharia courts whether it's in you know Iran and the 900s or Andalusia and the nine hundreds or Syria on the 1300s or You know Jenny and Mali in the 1900s or Zanzibar in the nineteen hundreds or Yemen in the night mid 20th century Or Egypt in the 1920s. You always see the same thing Husband our wife goes to the court says my husband is beating me if there's evidence that he's beating her like",
      "he's beating her like physically if there's witnesses if the husband confesses judge would uh do end the marriage if the woman wants she'll end the marriagd she keeps her dowry she gets maintenance and the husband if there is injury has to pay to compensate the answer and this is for example in the hanafi realm of palestine in the 17th century",
      "and the judge says you have to pay husband, you have your wife three gold coins because this is the dia for teeth. So it's very interesting because in the tradition of American law and British law, it's only in a very late 19th century or in the 20th century that a husband can ever have to",
      "to married women aren't allowed to own property and they and there's something called in law tort immunity where the husband is actually immune from any case that his wife brings against him that he harmed her it's impossible for him to be liable financially to her but in Islamic tradition since the very beginning since the life of the Prophet lay satsalam part of the Sharia was that just because you're married to somebody doesn't mean if you injure them you don't have to pay for",
      "have to pay for it you can't be held accountable before the law you're always held accountable in a Sharia and the shariah if you harm anybody your health accountable doesn't matter if they're your wife or your husband"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Exposing Prof Jonathan Brown_ Edip Yuksel_ShKvvxgccK4&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748694366.opus",
    "text": [
      "What is Islam? What are the sources of Islam?",
      "Let's listen first to him and you will hear very important things if you are studying in Middle Eastern studies, religious studies. You better listen to this as a student it is your responsibility not to be fooled by frauds.",
      "people who are in faculties of Middle Eastern Studies, they're there not because they have honest sincere interest in knowledge and truth. They are there for political reasons. They're utilized for some other interests. And this gentleman I'm talking is one case but",
      "some very important information. You should not be manipulated by them if you are a seeker of the truth, be wary of them they're frauds, they have sold their souls. Of course they talk better than I do English is their mother tongue, they are fluent and sometimes they pronounce Arabic pretty well when they talk you think",
      "and they escape from discussing this issue, debating face to face with those people who they marginalize. And I'm margin, I am in the margin, so happy to be in margin. I didn't sell myself to these establishment. I will share with you some documents, some facts, and it is an exposition",
      "Middle Eastern studies on religion, Islam and Christianity feel free to contact me and invite me to your university I am ready to face any of those pretentious guys. Okay? And he's this guy I'm talking about he's referring to my work he's dismissing it but he's very good calculating murderer. He is getting away with all those lies",
      "those lies and he is hired for the sheer of keeping the so-called Muslim world in darkness, in superstitions, in backwardness. That is his job. He's paid for that. Some of them have other duties they are paid indirectly by other forces some CIA hires many of these people",
      "I know these people. I'm not sure about this guy, but I know 100% he's serving the interests of Saudi Arabia, this guy. And the interest of Saudi Arabian and military industrial complex and other oil companies is to keep backward. To keep backward, backward but submissive so that they can be milked like cows",
      "like cows. That is his job, he's hired specifically for that because he looks much smarter than what he's promoting. He's promoting hadith and sunnah which is filled with filth, with lies, with contradictions, with pedophilia, with misogyny, with superstitions, with contradiction, with so many insults to Prophet Muhammad",
      "So much country, pile of garbage. But he wants Muslim world to like flies rotate around this pile of Garbage and pick some food Some proteins from that toxic smelly stinky garbage His job is dead. He's paid for that",
      "the video that I will be sharing with you, he's calculating and he is dismissive of this great book. In fact some of the work here a few page could be a doctorate dissertation for any in a decent university. Just look at the introduction where I compare",
      "In the beginning I compare on some verses, some translations, the common translations to my translation and about 15 verses is sample. And but he picks one issue and distorts it and then dismisses the whole entire work. Why? In order to promote hadith garbage which is really practiced",
      "practiced put in action by ISIS. ISIS put the Sunni religion in action. Mullahs are putting the Shiite religion inaction, ISIS is the one that Sunni religions justify slavery, ISIS also justifies concubines did it pedophilia hadith books sunni",
      "Exactly. Killing anyone who rejects their religion is Murtad, Sunni, all Sunnis sex. Or stoning people to death, all for sex. Burying women alive in black sacks, all sunni sex.",
      "Other than that, all three sects women must cover their faces even. No identity. Slave, pure slave of men and hell is filled with woman but prisons are prison filled with man the history filled with dictators",
      "It murders men, but somehow justice will be the other way around in God's universe. When we go to God, well majority of hell will be women and women will be right now in the world in the category of dogs which needs to be kept away and even black dogs should be killed according to Hadiths and pigs and donkeys",
      "donkeys and women. If they pass in front of your prayer, your prayer is nullified. This books. Prophet Muhammad was a pedophile according to these books he is inviting us the Muslim world to rotate around the garbage pile toxic garbage stinky garbage pile",
      "He's a good fly. Maybe he considers himself bee. He will find some nectars there, maybe some flowers will be flourishing among this garbage pile of from Ibni Filan from Abu Filan narrations. Okay let's listen to this guy and he is here Jonathan Brown.",
      "He is slick, beautiful English. When he talks Arabic you think oh he knows a lot but either he's an idiot or he's and impostor his job is to deceive so called Muslim world Sunni and Shiite world to keep them backward to keep in barbaric shape",
      "milked by progressive pro-rights countries, powerful countries imperialistic countries. That's the job or they become subservient of the dictators and sultans because they are ignorant they become ra'aya. They in fact they're called Ra'aya anyway he is um holds the Alwaleid bin Talal chair",
      "civilization at Georgetown University. That is his job! And I will share with you some, let's listen to him and then I will show you this one and my letter to Texas University at Austin 20 years ago and maybe Michigan Law Review very briefly. This is from Professor",
      "This is the only law review that doesn't have footnotes. The only law of you by Robert Williams, he's a great guy. In fact I took many years ago 20 some years ago my gosh Indian law from him and the law of indigenous people yep vampires anemone",
      "Anonymous talks about some professors. And Paul Graves, 2006 where they were going to... This is my translation but they delayed. Why? Why did they postpone it? Why was it canceled?",
      "to University of Austin, Texas though the head of the committee which was going to hire he was the one who invited me because he knew my work that I would be great asset as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and then upon his insistence it was Professor Kurzman",
      "Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, the University of Texas at Austin. And guess what happened? He told me exactly why I'm marginalized, why this guy is hired. Let's listen to him and I will tell you my story and more interesting things about my father's experience with Saudi Arabia, the head of the snake in the Middle East.",
      "I hope it will change. Saudi Arabia, by the way, doesn't mean always be like that. I hope they will decide to change instead of promoting this backward oppressive made up false religion and turn back to the teaching of the Quran which enlightens, which frees humans",
      "And this is something that Muslim scholars understood very early on in Islam.",
      "Oh! They are very intelligent wisdoms. Look, look, look!",
      "to govern the sunnah what do they mean by that they mean that you have to understand the quran through this one what a shame basically insulted the qur'an the qura is god's book according to him of course i proved that the qurans word of god mathematically and i have challenged atheists all around the world i have discussed his issue with top atheists in the united states",
      "They lost the arguments, the debate. You may check. In fact I have discussed this with top religious clergymen in Turkey, Professor Süleyman Ateş. Twice he escaped from the studio. He couldn't engage in Socratic dialogue because he got used to just telling any stories about God and people listen without questioning. And he is also making up",
      "stupid remark about God, about Muhammad and no one questioning because he pronounced Arabic pretty well. He's fluent, well-grown, a handsome guy. And he is also titled professor. If he was doing these kind of things in physics, physical sciences, well it wouldn't fly in labs, in tests but you can make up any kind of lies",
      "like Catholic priests do, that's fine. If you belong to that group of religious fanatics, bigots, you will accept it. Go different churches, different mosques, different sects, different orders they all tell different stories about God and somehow people over there take it exactly as the word of God. All contradicting,",
      "send each other to hell in the name of God. Ask him how does he know that the Quran is word of God? What is the proof? Let's say two chapters at the end of the Quran, I bet he doesn't have a convincing answer for that. If he has some people who are not critical thinkers, of course, in front of them he can get away with anything but let him discuss with an atheist or with a rational monotheist",
      "The Qur'an is the only explanation for us.",
      "وفي الواقع يجب أن تصمت محمد ليس لكي تحاول إشراء القرآن ولا تعجل به لسانك لا تنهض بطريقتك للإشراء ثم إن علينا قرآنا وبينة جمأ هو قرأنه",
      "Muhammad thought. Incredible! Just the opposite. The Quran says, the Quran is Mubeen, it's obvious if you use your reasoning critical thinking, use your reason but the religious people tell no no no do not reason when you're reason you mess up our religion because it's made up full of contradiction it stinks",
      "If you reason, you expose their lies. No, don't reason. You just believe it. Believe what? Why? Why should I believe you? Why don't believe another one? Well, you are born here. You have to believe the one who is close to you or believe like your ancestors. Contrary to Quran. The very book says do not follow your ancestors blindly. Question chapter 17 verse 36 for example. Use your reasoning. Follow scholars. Here, Prophet Muhammad",
      "The Quran says, You didn't know what is the book, what is Iman, what faith. What is acknowledgement of the truth? You didn'y know that. The Quran guided Muhammad. Muhammad was agnostic according to Quran in fact he was misguided. God found you dull, diverted and guided you. Therefore the Quran says",
      "the messenger who delivered the Quran alone. Again, messengers job is not to make up another decree next to God. Messengers job it's not to do religious prohibitions. No no no in fact according to Quran it is blasphemy if you do that. In Al-Hukmah illa lillah The Hukum, the degree belongs to God alone.",
      "The system belongs to God alone. Not God plus Muhammad, plus Muhammad's friend, plus this guy that guy, plus Bukhari... No no no no! It is only the Quran containing the Quran and the Quran says the Quran is mufassal, detailed, fully detailed. Nope they say nope the Quran isn't detailed. It doesn't tell us where to put our hands while praying. Very interesting.",
      "interesting it doesn't tell us where to put our hands in the prayer and as if important standing in line they tell you let's say from market you get out in front of the cashier please stand in line here you say manager or miss cashier where should i put my hands while i'm standing yes this question no",
      "No. Because it's frivolous, it's not necessary, it is not important, it isn't relevant. Stand there that's it! As long as you don't put your hand in the pocket of another customer that's all. Or don't step on their feet. That's it. Stand. You may put your hands like this if you want or like this...or like this..or maybe do like this. It's up to you who cares?",
      "God doesn't care where you put your hands. As long as you don't put in wrong places, which you know, God gave you reasoning. Don't be idiot. While praying maybe it is better not to pick your nose. Correct? Yeah, it's not good. If you are single praying alone, doesn't matter. God doesn' t care even if you put in your nose but for other people it is disgusting and it's",
      "They asked a stupid question and they made up stupid lies. 98 hadiths alone, they don't have 98 hadits about unity of God, oneness of God or about helping other people or about freedom. No no no the important things they don'y have these many hadith but they have 98 so called sahih hadith about where you put your head while you are praying.",
      "Peygamber Muhammed'in kalbine elini koydu. Anlamıyor mu? Zahir'e göre, o hadisi kocasının altına koymuş. Bazı hadislerden de göre, onun kocası altından koymuş, size göstermemi yok. Kamerayla oynatmak istemem. Bazılarında da öyle bir şey var ki, sadece elini böyle bıraktı. Çok fazla mı?",
      "with all possible combinations of where you put your hand, you defeated the purpose of that stupid question. And you end up busying people with 98 different narrations starting from Ibn-i Falan to Abu Falan. From this person to another he says stories centuries after Prophet Muhammad. You don't need that! Or how many units? We don't know. Hadith explains it.",
      "explains it. Who cares? God doesn't care if God cared in his fully explained, Mufassal mubeen buk tafsilen lukulli shay'in as the Quran says explain everything God would be able to explain two units three and this is very easy because God repeats some of things instead of repeating so many things maybe a few words God will tell you but it's not relevant it's",
      "the beginning of chapter 2, al-Baqarah, Hafer. God asked them to sacrifice a Hafer in order to save them from the cultural assimilation, cultural imperialism of Pharaoh because when they were slaves, they were also influenced by the religion of their oppressors. Like slaves came here, African slaves and",
      "They were made Christians, the religion of their oppressors. They started becoming more religious Christians than Christians themselves. Like Kenyatta said, you remember? Kenyattah! The missionaries came to Kenya, to our country. They had Bibles in their hands, we had our lands. They said let's close our eyes and pray. We closed our eyes......and prayed. And when we opened our eyes, we found out that",
      "they have our lands, we have the Bible in our hands. Same! Hafer, God said sacrifice Hafer in order mentally, psychologically entirely get over that respect towards the Hafer symbol of oppression slavery Pharaoh his religion and guess what? They missed a point",
      "the point some of the rabbis clergymen like him they say well it's not enough it is not detailed what kind of heifer is it old or young hayford very interesting to cry tells us in order not to ask for all those stupid questions it distracts from the real thing from real life",
      "And what is the color of heifer? What is in the barn or farm? There's this question. The Quran, the beginning of chapter 2, it tells us this story and then God criticized them. They were not even able to sacrifice a heifer. By asking this frivolous question. Where do I put my hand? How many units?",
      "The ablution, the verse about ablutions just one verse few words explains everything enough but they say whether I put water in my nose or not whether I do this to my ear. They ask these questions and give up with a book full of answers and contradictory of course because each makeup is sex have their own made-up rules and then your mind is kept busy with this frivolous stupid stuff",
      "bir ziyade, çok iyi bir insan değil. Birbirlerini desteklememiz gerekir. Bilgi ve bilgiyi okumamızı istemiyoruz çünkü biz din hakkında öğrenmek için kitabımız var. Sünnet! O sünneti kullanır ama Kur'an'a karşı karşıya girer. Kur'anı sevmediğini düşünmüyor. Sınnet Kur'ana göre, Allah'ın hükümetine sahip olan hükümetlerdir.",
      "If you don't know Arabic, I'm saying for those people who are impressed by this Arabic. Forgive me because there are those kind of people who were impressed or there are some people who needs reference. I provide for them so that they search the Quran and find it. And the word Sunnatullah means God's law. They turn it to Sunnah Muhammad. A god besides God in fact they take God's sunna law",
      "In fact, centuries later when they come to Sunnah Muhammad where do I find it? You end up with Bukhari who came 230 years after Muhammad or other books. In fact Bukhar even the original of Bukhaari we don't have it even 230 years of the Prophet Muhammad is much later written. We don't even have the original book but contradictory Hadiths. According to the Hadith books he's peddling in order",
      "This is his job. The most authentic hadith, the most authentic Hadith Mutabatir Hadith is this Hadith. Pay attention!",
      "These big guys hadith narrators and collectors according to them. And hadith shifters categorizing hadiths according to their truth value in 31 categories. Mahdou means fabricated hadith, top is mutawatir and it's a 31 categories of lies. They call it science of hadith.",
      "in garbage pile of stinky garbage they're finding some glucose, some sugar, some protein, some nutrients in the garbage of hadith. That's it! The science. That is the most mutawatir do not write anything from me besides the Quran wherever as written delete it and that guess what",
      "ועד כאן, תגידו לי מה? זה מטבלת רחובי חרום שמולה בקוראים דבריים. קוראות גניבות מלא לצפיות. והכן, הם עושים את זה. כי הם נמצאים אין-איף חדיש, ואומרו, אני אמרתי לכם לא לראות ממני, אז בואו יוכם לראו. אבל איזשהו פעם לא היו לראון עוד בוחארי!",
      "Why the most authentic book comes 230 years after Muhammad if Muhammad gave permission in his lifetime? Think. But they want you not to think. In fact, in the very book there is a hadith I have spent too much time on this but I have to because in the end he comes here talks about me and my book He trashes it dismisses it deceptively based on false arguments",
      "argument and he ignores all my arguments in this book. Anyway, another hadith Prophet Muhammad in his deathbed says bring me all prominent sahabas means his friends are present there Abu Bakr and Umar and others according to these hadiths again they're Sahih Hadith books six idols besides the Quran",
      "And to that Hadith, Prophet Muhammad is sick and he's deathbed. He says bring me paper and pen let me write it down something so you will not be diverted after me. Interesting. In fact as a side note shows that Muhammad knew how to write. Read and write. In Fact according to Quran he knew. Al Ummi means gentile, not people of the book but he knew how",
      "The Qur'an uses it as a contrasting with Ahl al-Kitab. But they mistranslated, distorted meaning of Ummah to someone who is illiterate. In fact, they insult their idol in one way, they praise Muhammad more than God. In effect when I say Allah, God, they don't care about Muhammad. And in many ways they make him god because here it is he says that it's above the Qur'aan. Sunnah Muhammad is behind the Qurʾān, he's governing the Qurāṭ.",
      "Quran well you made Muhammad govern God. God's word is below Muhammad Sunnah, Muhammad Sunna means whatever he does incredible and he says bring me paper and pen let me write down something again it contradicts their lie which insults Prophet Muhammad's intelligence for 23 years",
      "He dictates it to other scribes, but he cannot learn in 23 years 28 letters. He must be an idiot. Their character. In Hadith books, Muhammad is an idiot, is more merciful than God. In the story of Mi'raj, he negotiates the number of prayers a day from 50 a day, means every 28 minutes one prayer.",
      "6th heaven and he goes up and down in elevator between God and Moses supposedly he negotiates the prayers from 50 to 40, he's more merciful than God but he's not smart enough to know that it is impossible 50 prayers a day. And God is also not merciful at all. La yuqallifu Allahu nafs an illa wa sahihah God according to them is lying because here God ordered people",
      "minutes whole day 24 hours you cannot work he cannot sleep and at that time they didn't have even digital watches they hope they could even calculate every 28 minutes one time it's not units time and they made muhammad more merciful than god but in other muhammed in the story of bukhari",
      "for those who want to search for it. And then he arrests some people who are suspect of killing his shepherd, he chops their arms and legs, and then gets nails, hits them up, and with hot nails gouges their eyes, and leaves them thirsty, and even does not allow his companions to serve them water while they are dying from thirst.",
      "their prophet or prophet put a woman on two horses and split into two or sent a terrorist group nighttime called Syria to kill a woman, a poet who supposedly criticized Muhammad. Terrorist! Killer! Oppressive dictator according to them",
      "They buried Aisha while she was six years old and entered the same bed when she was nine, while he was 54 years old. These are biggest insult to Prophet Muhammad. And then basically they want us to follow. And according to that hadith, Prophet Muhammad tells people to bring... I know, I diverted from intelligence to all these things.",
      "Ve Ömer, hadis olarak onu durdurdu. Hayır, Muhammed ağrıcıdır. Kötü, ne dediğini bilmiyor. Allah'ın kitabı bize yeterli. O zamanlar bize yeterlidir dediler. Büyük bir hata. Ebu Hanif, Umeyyad ve Abbas'tan sonra yasaklandı çünkü hadise takip etmedi.",
      "كان مصنوعاً في اسمه لأنه كان عبارة عن المونوثيس لم يتبع الحديث لم يفعل حديثاً لهذا السبب كرسيته من شافعي و علامة الشافعية قد كتبت بكتابه جمال العلم",
      "He wrote that book against Hanaf, Abu Hanif the monotheist and his friends. That hadith is needed to defend hadiths he wrote that early. In fact they claimed them Zanadiq and diverted and not Muslims. They were not even praying after them. The Shafi'is said initially they were not",
      "Therefore, Bukhari does not even narrate a single hadith from Abu Hanif. Hello? Big lies! But his job is to make up lies and you cannot test these lies in laboratory it's not scientist. In this convention, in its political position, his job to peddle these lies will keep the so-called Muslim world backward, misogynist",
      "in a very bad situation and prone to become, to elect dictators and not having freedom. And it serves the interests of some imperialist groups, some big corporations. And anyway therefore even the last words in Hujjatul Wada according to them was",
      "witnessed by 100,000 Sahaba. Now 80,000 sometimes even they exaggerate the number and even the last words contradictory supposedly most people heard this well you're the most so-called authentic hadith must be this one it's not a hadith not one Sahaba heard. It is according to tens of thousands heard Prophet Muhammad's last sermon",
      "sermon comes in three different versions and guess what? The most narrated version says I left you Quran, follow the Quran. But there is another competing alternative version that says same thing. The most important crucial point. I left your Quran and Sunnati as opposed to God's sunnah. I",
      "The original one, I left you the Quran as in chapter 6 verse 19 says. As in chapter 25 verse 30 says",
      "Or in chapter 6 verse 19, This book the Quran has revealed to me in order to deliver to you and those who receive it. To warn you with and those will receive it That's it! Not Quran and Hadith In fact the word hadith throughout the Quran when it is mentioned other than the Quran It is negative like hadith and yuftara",
      "Hadith is an iftarah. Lawwal hadith, interesting but for the Quran ahsan al-hadith and the word sunnah is always for sunnatullah, for God anyway now again in their own books there are so many contradictions Bukhari came 230 years later",
      "He said he thought that 7,215 of them was authentic. Basically he trashed more than 98% of it and we see what he ended up with. He ended up all kinds of contradiction, stupid nonsense and insult to Prophet Muhammad. And the Quran says if someone makes one lie become a witness falsely",
      "false witness do not accept any anymore his testimony in chapter I think chapter 24 no more it is in case of someone falsely testify someone commit adultery and says if you prove that he's doing false testimony never",
      "anymore that's it but this is for one occasion but these guys making up lies in the name of god and muhammad that can put people's lives at risk like stoning people to death like killing the murtad the apostates or so many prohibition god's blessings or music prohibited music or chess or killing black dogs or many other things or basically",
      "Putting women in black sex burying them alive in black sacks even covering their faces According to three sects they it is mandatory to cover woman's face Contrary this the verses of the Quran for example a verse of the Qur'an says Even their beauty interests you woman's beauty interest you Muhammad. You cannot marry anymore. Aha What is the beauty of woman if they are in black sacs? You cannot even distinguish them, you know I mean I did even it could be a bearded man in black",
      "The Quran tells you to pray. It doesn't tell you how to pray, it doesn't say when to pray or how many times to pray",
      "necessary details of the prayer and prayer in fact there are two, the word Salat in the Quran has two meanings. One is connection with God and connection and support with God another connection support with society. Salat al Juma means psychological political economical financial connection support solidarity with people and with God. And I have other videos on this please",
      "watch the video on this one i because i don't want to forget this one isis uh it is rudouted um isis follows in religion please follow uh watch this one this is a very good website 19. so that our viewers have an idea of what we are and we represent pictures family pictures okay anyway",
      "anyway and this is uh okay okay um if you can see oh special british parliament i don't know i am not going to right now and 19.org i don' want to forget about this check there are manifesto for Islamic reform online and also pdf you can download also you can find the pdf of these free",
      "and I want to talk about this oh my gosh too much time passed let's see the prophet's teachings tell us how to pray when to pray the quran tells you big lie big lie those details like uh you know heifer's color what is the color of the heifer",
      "we don't need it and those details in those books, we don' t need it. In order to follow these details if you become a pedophile, you will become the killers murderers stoning people to death and worshippers of stone black stones and then oppressing women and all this sorts of bad things evil things if we need to commit in order to",
      "It's not a divine prayer, it is evil. Anyway, 38.",
      "He was from the city of Basra. He died around 161 Hijri, about 773 or 774 of the common era. He said three-fourths of the hadiths I have come across are forged. Well, Bukhari says 98% hadith. 98. More than 98 because he collected supposedly 600,000 hadith and up to 7,000 we know what kind of stupid hadith they are. Fabricated hadith, and he invited us today anyway. Three-fourth of the Hadiths that I have",
      "2 milyon Müslüman, Sünni ve Şiistanlı. İçin en çok dinci, en çok yalanlardırlar. Afganistan'a bakın, İran'a, Avrupa'ya bakın, İslam'a da bakın. En çok dinciler, en uzakta kalıyorlar. Ve bu insan bunun için ilgisi var. Bu uzak bir etkinlikte olan Müslüm dünyayı tutmak için para alıyor. Hadis diyor.",
      "This is against your mind, against your spirit, against you life, against hereafter. It's the biggest lie and insult attributed to God and Muhammad. Imagine like Catholics they make up big lies and people swallow those. Imagine worship weapon, murder weapon",
      "murder weapon and you say well this cross is our savior was tortured we love our saver and it's torture on these it's a murder weapon you see we worship this the biggest lies but people believe it like hitler's minister of propaganda says if you want people to believe it make it bigger lies",
      "more people believe in it. Exactly! Incredible, how can you imagine? A murder weapon is made worship by people who supposedly worship the sacrifice on that murder weapon. Imagine and they are given wine say well have a sip of this wine pretend",
      "is cannibalism and this cookie is his flesh. And they even discuss whether real flesh or not. You remember substantiation, consubstantiation? I even forgot that word. It's a fancy word. They even argued in the Catholic Church whether really the wine becomes really the blood of Jesus or symbolic. Whether it's symbolic pretentious",
      "There is something wrong with this. Not wrong, the word wrong is too small to describe this. The same with these religions. Sunni or Shiite, no different. They come up with the biggest most stupid lies and they accept it as a lie. Here it is. The Bukhari talks about a verse stoning to death. They made up this verse. They couldn't insert into Quran and later they came up with this lie. It is in his Hadith books.",
      "It was written on his skin. It was under Aisha's bed and then after Prophet Muhammad died a hungry goat comes and eat this skin very interesting Goat eating dry skin especially ink on it, and then he eats this verse Wow And after Muhammad well it is abrogated from the Quran because a holy hungry goat eats it What a story you say? Well, this is one of the most stupid stories not the most",
      "A sheikh who was shaykh to Izzazanaya, farjumuma albattateh.",
      "several centuries the meaning of the word change or in the dialect who is fabricating this hadith it meant that anyway if they commit adultery stone them to death and you say well thank god it has gone from the Quran correct no not so easy not so fast though it is textually eliminated abrogated mensoukh",
      "In four sects you are stoned to death. Not you, usually women are stoning to death if they are shown that they committed adultery and they do. ISIS really practiced what is in hadith books slavery in hadis, misogyny in hades pedophilia in hadees, stoning people to death chopping peoples head because of religion forcing people to pray all these in hadits book",
      "And this gentleman wants to justify that. He's well-groomed, he's a professor, he talks beautiful English, fluent Arabic, Fusha! When he talks you think he is full of knowledge but he is filled with ignorance and deception. Before or even three generations before Bukhari Muslim. Lie! So Muslims in the modern period have a question for them",
      "He's going to sort out nothing. Ask him these questions. Quran reform is this one, manifesto for Islamic reform. Call me to challenge him, invite me all you students, invite",
      "Hold on fast. You have to abandon things like the specifics of how we do wudu.",
      "you do wudu but yes trivial questions like rabbis of the past, the color of the heifer in wuddu whether should I put water in my nose or not? Whether I wash my mouth or not who cares it's not important is not relevant how I clean my hair my ear and stuff how should I say how",
      "In fact, one hadith says it should be odd number of stones. Satan, evil fabricated a Hadith associating the number of dirty stone with oneness of God. Imagine! Incredible!",
      "All, like Catholics they say. Oh! Trinity! Always everyone believed in Jesus being Son of God and stuff. Lies! They even banned the books, translations of the Bible initially that rejected the idea of trinity stuff but after they eliminated it, they claimed them to be heretic and stuff oh there was no one there everyone really believed what like Catholic believes or like Protestants believe",
      "Umar came, kicked him out from Masjid and says are you going to make up Mishnah and Gamara of this Ummah? Are you going like Jewish people made up after Torah in your own Hadiths that means the discussion about hadith since the beginning. Hadith books, the most authentic hadith book yes is written supposedly by Bukhari 230 years later",
      "It was written during the time of Muhammad. They couldn't do it after Muhammad, but somehow it is left 230 years later. And not only that, in fact they kept writing after 500 years making up hadiths to promote certain agendas of sultans or clergymen. If a guy doesn't like dogs make up hadits,",
      "or you kill black dogs. Or the person is misogynist, maybe no woman liked him and then he started making up lies against women. The person who is in town did not see buildings, tall buildings, went to town so coupled with few floors, tall building said well tall buildings are the sign of end of world evil. Made up hadiths. The guy could not sell his date, he wanted to sell his dates commercial,",
      "Bu en iyi yöntem. Ajwa, ne için korunur? Sorceri mi? Neyi? Mekan mı? Her şeyden bir tanesi de var. Açıkça her şeye karar verir. Ajva, adı. Ajway, şehirden isim. Ya da bir kral veya sultanı ödül etmek istiyorsalar, onu Mehdi'ye dönebilirler.",
      "Mahdi will come in Mecca, Medina or Basra, Damascus Yemen and somehow Mahdi appears in all of those places because when those hadiths were fabricated the Sultan was there it was fabricated by someone who is in Medina Or in Damascus he was trying to promote that Sultan or governor as a Mahdi. A Hadith is the best way to do this Why? It's propaganda",
      "propaganda for everything. Misogynists, they filled most of the hell with women or put woman in the category of dog, pig and donkey. If a woman and these pass in front of you pray your prayer is nullified. Many.",
      "music is haram. Or wanted, he's jobless, doesn't do anything except this supposedly prayer and then make up lies about well these many times if you pray you go to heaven and stuff. And a lot of also Jewish Christian stories entered tradition like circumcision from true hadiths Christians brought imported their",
      "Christians I say it was Jewish. Lie, lie, lie! Big liar you are. Lie.",
      "He's always read the Quran. Hundreds of verses he can't read.",
      "I'm not saying first. Before me it was Dr Rashad Khalifa, I worked together with him but years after him I found out there were some errors in fact in his translation. Together we work on that translation but with time we're learning because we're trying to purify ourselves from the influence of Sunni teachings and Hadith teaching. It was not just one night we couldn't, we reject the Hadith but their subconscious",
      "we didn't even question, we find that uh-oh! We didn't ever question. We need to check and therefore it took time and this is the translation and the story of these translations interesting. It was here you can stop and read in",
      "I have listed three other translations. I prove my case even if you don't know Arabic, you check. I am able over there to show how they distort the meaning of words and verses. And I want to talk a few things on these ones and I hope I will have time.",
      "We give you kawthar. What is kawtha?",
      "But then I found something which revealed that inconsistency, the inevitable inconsistence that will always trip up or reveal weakness of the Qur'an on my approach in the concept of",
      "those amongst you who do dhihār of their women. They are not their mothers. Now, this doesn't make any sense if you're just using Arabic grammar. If you go and look at all the other places in the Qur'an where this word is used it means to grant assistance to somebody. But in the beginning of Surah Al-Mujadirah",
      "about those people who do the ha'ar to their wives, they're not their mothers. And if those people will do the Ha'ar their wives take their wives back then they have to free a slave. What the heck does this mean? Imagine you've looked at all the other parts of the Quran look at this verb and it only means to grant assistance, grant assistance to people. But...and I thought maybe this translator, this Qur'an only translator would be honest and say I don't know what this means but he didn't. He said those people",
      "my mother to me these are not their mothers and if you say this and then you take your wife back you have to free a slave so how did this translator understand the meaning of the verse he looked in Arabic dictionaries and looked up Dha Hara and he said one of the meanings is to say to your wife you're like the back of my mother's hand which is a way of pre-Islamic Arabs would divorce",
      "and then basically disapproves of this act. So, this translator could say but I didn't look at hadiths, I didn'y look at the Sunnah of the Prophet, I looked at a dictionary! The problem is where do you think Arabic dictionaries came from? Arabic dictionaires today come from earlier Arabic dictionnaires, and earlier Arabic Dictionaries come from the earliest Arabic dictionarys books like Kitab al-Ayn of Al Khalil ibn Ahmad in the early 800's or",
      "the early decades, the first 150 years of Islam collecting rare words from Bedouins.",
      "He doesn't show the honesty to acknowledge those. And second, here is this supposedly the word zihar. It says you cannot understand without this one, without dictionaries. First of all, dictionaries are not like hadiths even if it is produced by the followers of hadith and sunnah and stuff.",
      "Because the language is spoken by other people too. By Christians, by agnostics, by Jewish people. There are many people who speak Arabic or study Arabic. You cannot just easily change things. Yes there are some terminology and words deliberately changed we can easily find out by studying but it's not that easy to change the meaning of a word as you make up hadiths",
      "hadiths, make up any hadith about Muhammad. People just say I heard from this as he acknowledges there were thousands of hadith made up because easy but you cannot make up thousands of meaning, you cannot makes up meanings for thousands of different words especially his dictionary because that language is already spoken by people and therefore it's not the same. He kind of confuses things. Second when",
      "dictionaries, I'm critical of the dictionaries because they can be influenced by Hadiths, by the teachings and stuff. Therefore critically evaluate look at language but I don't need even to look at the language to understand the meaning of Zahar first. Second, even if I don' t understand the mean of Zihar it doesn't make a yuta of difference. Again,",
      "It doesn't change anything. Let's say put eggs there, you don't understand. Neither your faith will be influenced, neither your practice, nothing will change. But if you believe in Hadiths, you will stone people to death. You will prohibit something who is useful like let's say sea, let's see shrimp in some sects is prohibited or prohibit music",
      "all bash women put them in black sacks if you believe in hadith he wants us again what is what is trade-off if i don't follow hadith i will not do those evil things but i will know the meaning of zahar my gain is that my loss i will become evil including pedophilia including slavery",
      "But what is my trade-off if I follow the Quran? The worst case scenario. I don't need the meaning of eggs, zikar which is an old tradition If I don' do that nothing will happen Do eggs but I will not associate partner with God I will attribute all those lies to Prophet Muhammad",
      "I will not commit like slavery or pedophilia, all these things. Or kill people because they let's say insult Muhammad. All these things! Or have thousands of rituals to follow",
      "to follow. Ablution is whole things, many many things you do or prayer oh my gosh I remember in prison when I was political prisoner someone goes in we had only one bathroom in the whole ward and he was entering and coming out and then walking walking going back into restroom he was peeing but after pee he would insert cotton",
      "The torture of grave comes from drop of urine. Therefore he was trying to avoid even a molecule of urine and he was so kind of influenced by those hadiths, he was turning to death! He turned to... Oh my gosh! I had to prohibit him because there was a line in front of one single restroom we had about 30 people there early morning and now say nope you stayed behind.",
      "He was inserting, cutting his penis and going back in and coming out multiple times. In fact they do it. In some orders they are very careful about this. And some even put their hands in their pants as they walk like that. It's crazy! Stupid! Anyway, here it is. What's my loss? Nothing. But again within the context the meaning of zihar becomes clear if you use your mind. Not like this professor",
      "this professor he's a professor but he's ignorant. He is one of the most ignorant guys like Catholic professors, like Mormon professor, like Hindu professors dogmatic fanatic do not question anything follow these traditions narration and that narration and here it is let's read the meaning of it I don't want to take so much time",
      "regarding her husband and she complains to God. God hears the argument between you, God is here, but it continues. And then in the second verse he's critical of me for translating that way",
      "Let's say I don't know X, keep it Zihar. Doesn't matter? The meaning become obvious! Here it is, let's read. Those among you who have... Instead of estranged their women, let leave it. Those those among you do X their wives. Let's see we don't it as estrangement. Zihari means back or support back or",
      "your back is like my mother's back something like that but this let's say we learned from dictionary and dictionaries assume that it is like hadith which is not. But let's assume all of these, we say we don't know estrangement those among you who acts their wives by saying to them you are as my mother they can never be as their mothers for",
      "birth to them. Indeed, they are uttering what is strange and falsehood God is pardoned again. Okay? They say X, they turn their wives to their mothers by word. They say this, they say X. We don't know the meaning of X. And they say you are like my mother. And by this way they estrange them and God says no, this is your world. By just words you cannot doom yourself",
      "and your families to estrangement. Therefore, with one word you cannot change the reality. That's it! What we learned is obvious. You don't need the meaning of X even. This is an extra. In fact, it emerges. If you are a critical thinker from the context, you can tell the meaning",
      "Here is a verse in the Quran. From here I can tell without knowing the meaning of Salla, I can know the meaning by using my mind, God-given mind.",
      "acknowledge accept the truth did not support to truth did, not except women whether when I said that I was a seller and did not sell we don't know me no Sella week and he did not do the X and then the following verse is the Anthony well a king but",
      "The opposite of sadaqa. Sadaqah means acknowledge. Kezaba means reject. Consider as a lie, reject. And then kezaba wa tawalla. Tawalla becomes the antonym of salah. Tawaala turn back, turn away. Therefore salah must be turn face, support, acknowledge, relate, connect",
      "Connect. Exactly. Within the context on the Quran, Salat means connection with God, turning your face to God, asking help from God, be solidarity with God and Salla al Jumu'ah means be solidarity people, connect with people. Simple. Context you can easily understand. I don't need even dictionaries for this word",
      "I will critically look at the dictionary because it is the language spoken by every sect and even religion and non-religious people. Within the sect you can easily change a lot of things, make up a lie just attribute to a big guy in the past that's it! That's all it takes to make up rule or create prohibition still it is made up, it's easy but changing the meaning of word is not that easy",
      "that easy. But this gentleman is a professor somewhere and here it is, let me show you something. Please check 19.org Here there's the manifesto for Islamic reform You can download it also and check also the Quran reformist translation here I want to show Do you see it here?",
      "it here okay this anonymous scholar i want to talk about this one how kill this book and first let's see reza aslan says a bold and beautiful translation that's first is a time reminder to all believers that the quran is not aesthetic scripture but they live in breathing ever evolving texts whose sacred words are",
      "14 centuries ago. Irshad Manjis, Qasim Ahmed, Gershon Kiprisi, Mark Sykes, Rifat Hassan, Aisha Musa, Jermaine Huston, Janer Taslaman, Amina Waddoud, Ghatot Adissoma and Jeff Garrison Colorado and a reader. Anyway let's see what the readers say. Thank you I am coming back because of your work",
      "because of your work, Edip. Your work has freed me from year of condemnation, cruelty and misinterpretation of Islam by my ex-husband. Your word has freed from the pain I have carried for so long and gave me back basic self esteem that was mine from God but slowly eroded by misogyny. Your Word gave me wings I had lost.\" Thank you again. There are many many this kind",
      "guy was exactly like it who is hired by those in power and who killed this the publication of this book here it is Paul Grave in 2006",
      "And there are many books here. This is their catalogue, this is the new book coming and they were ready to print. They even invited me to New York. They were very excited about this translation. Got a very good review from scholars some of them that I showed you a moment ago but at the last moment one scholar we don't know who he see CIA or a guy like this. A guy like",
      "scoundrel. Hiding his name, he said this is really distortion, this like Salman Rushdie scared them and that's it. Whoever this guy mostly from high above vetoed this one despite all the great endorsement I had. The very book is discussing",
      "is a wonderful voice, should be heard but unfortunately the fatwa of this scholar whoever this person or maybe working for CIA or for Saudi Arabia and that was Paul Gray follow they didn't give me his name. Kamal the name of the editor Kamal last name I think she was she didn't",
      "I'm still curious if anyone in Polgrave remembers this one. Please check who is this anonymous scholar, Sunni scholar, who was described by the editor of The Magmullion as a very well established professor. Very well paid. Sold his soul like this one, like Jonathan Brown. His name is Jonathan Brown and I want to make sure.",
      "Jonathan Brown works for Al-Walid bin Talal, chair of Islamic. He's paid handsomely to distort the facts, to peddle lies and he never faces people like me. He is in his ivory tower protected from people like",
      "dismisses my work by a lie and get away with it. And here it is, let me tell you a story. I want to cover my address this in fact old address. Okay here it",
      "20 years ago for a professorship in Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Texas at Austin. Upon insistence of Professor Kurzman, he was there that time, Kurzman. He knew about my work. That time I didn't have book, I didn' t even translation of the Quran but I had Turkish errors",
      "and I have some articles, published articles. And he looked at my work, he knew about my Turkish work, and then he wanted...he knew that I would be a great asset there. And I know also Arabic, Persian, Turkish languages. My father was the biggest scholar in Turkey, and I had debate with top scholars.",
      "I would be a great professor there. And they said, if there is an opening, I am the head of the committee which decides and I would like you to apply for position and you will be 100% there. He was that sure.",
      "Kursman'ı kontrol etmeliydi. Evet bu adam, Charles Kursma. İyi bir adam.",
      "I'm very sorry that we were not able to hire you for the position which I wanted you to apply. Why, I said? I knew it! He said well... he said Jewish people opposed because they saw some of your writing critical of Israel's oppression of Palestinians and therefore they objected",
      "through some Jewish foundations. I don't know, maybe from Israel and therefore but I thought that the Muslims would Muslim when they say usually Saudi and Kuwait and stuff and they would accept it and by this way the number of votes will be in your favor",
      "your criticism of Hadith and Sunnah in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and all together. And therefore he said I was alone, I couldn't make it happen. That's it! It is all political if you are licking the boots kissing the whatever I'm not going to utter those words like this gentleman",
      "Not because you are seeking the truth. Not because your honest, just because you're a good liar. Because you sell your soul. I'm challenging now to the students if you are student of Jonathan Browne, I want you in the classes raise question. You criticize him based on Zuhar,",
      "Corrections in his translation. I give you the beginning only 15 examples, but they are numerous like They translate the word Beat woman which is not there in fact four keywords in chapter 434 they mistranslate based on the usage of the Quran of those words I show that an argue by evidence That it is a mistranslation It means leave women before divorcing them",
      "before divorcing them. Separation, it is temporary separation from women and they're also a qawwamu ahli bahtihi They translate as their kind of leader of the house but in fact means they are bread earners and nishus also as an obedience to guy no no no it is not",
      "hand, thieves hands cut off, chopped off. This is another mistranslation and I showed the Quran very usage of qatayah 8 it means several things but somehow they always pick the wrong ones that contradicts with others. And this jizya has been translated as levying ex-taxation, exile taxation of non Muslims which",
      "There is no compulsion in religion. In fact, it creates financial duress. But this is mistranslation. It's war reparation. Jizya means compensation, war reparations. It has nothing to do with the religion of people. It had to do unjustified war that cost lives and property. And this is one of the worst translations. My battery is finishing anyway I will be done here.",
      "about marrying the orphans that basically pedophilia is justified through mistranslation. It is about marrying their mothers and this is one of them most mistranslated one, about description of women in fact progressive leading woman and these are responsive and leaders active in their societies and they are turned to fasting woman which has nothing to do with the mean old world or",
      "They say chop their necks, which has nothing to do with neck. means the controlling control center, means command center comes from the same word, has nothing do with, but they mistranslate or Muhammad was illiterate according to them it is another mistranslation and But I discuss",
      "Thus, I have extensive discussions prove that this is... and this one of the worst things abrogation in the Quran. They create contradictions in the Qur'an because they don't understand the Quran or distort the Quran and they say the verses abrogate each other basically they delete many verses of the Quran, they reject the meaning of many verses",
      "yet singular form always it means miracle sign has nothing to do with the verse of the Quran when it's in singular for 84 places and another mistranslation too many of them anyway my challenge is I forget my challenges for debate ask him to debate with me and invite me to your schools if you see scoundrels like",
      "what about a deep come here and expose him there, here is your chance. And this is an issue right now in the Muslim world millions of people discussing this issue and many people according to you are confused by this why not? This guy's open for discussion public debate therefore invite me if they don't invite me you question me. And uh this one is an interesting one did I show you I don't remember um this is by my professor this describes this is the",
      "the Law Review with no footnote, only a law review with no Footnote by Professor Robert Williams and Vampires Anonymous but professors."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Fake Islāmic Scholar Jonathan AC Brown Intentional_rJoIRscLiy4&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748674124.opus",
    "text": [
      "هل يعتبر الكفار في فرنسا وبريطانيا وأمريكا وغيرها من أهل الفترة مع أنهم عندهم شيء من العلم والمعرفة عن الإسلام فمثلا يعرفون أن مقركان الإسلم الشهادتين والصلاة لآخره وأن الله واحد الناس يختلفون في هذا أي",
      "في هذا فمنهم من عرف حقيقة الاسلام فلا يعدوا من اهل الفترة ومنهم مَن لم يعرف حققة الاصلام. ولم يعرف النبي صلى الله عليه وعليه وسلم. واظن الاخ الشائر يعيش بين مناشم آآ مثبتين عندهم بغاية علم عن التاريخ",
      "وإلا فيوجد في بعض البلاج الكفرية من لا يعرف عن الإسلام شيئا ولا يعرف أن النبي صلى الله عليه وعليه وسلم شيئ ما يعرفون إلا ماذا ما يعركون إلا التنثير عن الإسم",
      "لربه الكافر أو إلى غيره فلذلك هؤلاء نرجو أن يشملهم قول الله عز وجل وَمَا كُنَّا مُعَذِّبِينَ حَتَّى نَبْعَثَ رَسُولًا وقول الله عجز وجله وما كان الله ليضل قوما بعد إذ هداهم حتى يبين لهم ما يفتقون"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/FRAUD JONATHAN BROWN INSULTS PROPHET MUHAMMAD ﷺ _ _SRM-WhXjIvU&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748656952.opus",
    "text": [
      "I'm more pro-free speech than any of this. I fully support the right to people to actually insult the Prophet in the United States because I think that's the best regime for human happiness. Other questions?",
      "والأجمع العلماء قاطبة على أن مسلم تسب الدين أو تنقصه أو سب الرسول صلى الله عليه وسلم أو تناقصوه أو استهزاه به فين يكون مرتداً شافراً فإن دعوة أهل السنة، دعوت أهد الحديث، داعت الثلاثكين، داعوة اهل الأثر تقوم على التربية والتصفية"
    ]
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  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/He said WHAT__ Yaqeen Director Jonathan Brown on ___1748670139.opus",
    "text": [
      "You know, I'm more pro-free speech than any of this. I fully support the right to people to actually insult the prophet in the United States because I think that's the best regime for human happiness. Other questions?",
      "according to the Rasheel opposition, American Muslims should support the right of gay marriage under US law. Doesn't this seem very contrary to the dawah of Lut? I don't think Lut talked about gay marriage. I don' t support gay marriage, I support the RIGHT TO MARRIAGE for gay people."
    ]
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  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Is islam violent_ - Dr_ Jonathan Brown_4hGV1suCjs8&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748695217.opus",
    "text": [
      "Because there's 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and even if you take the largest number of all the Taliban, and all of Boko Haram, and ISIS, and these groups, and you add all this together and divide that by 1. 6 billion Muslims, do you know what number you get? I calculated it... 0.006% Absolutely statistically insignificant!",
      "the Koran or the Sunnah of the Prophet, if Muslims reading it just can't understand it properly and are inevitably to engage in violence? Why is that in effect no, statistically no Muslims actually engage in acts of violence in the name their religion. This is the best single argument against what you constantly come across this idea that somehow your religion something in its original foundational scriptures",
      "and community. It's just not true."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Islam and Blackness by Dr_ Jonathan A_C_ Brown - B_AVWtn1nEQ68&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW3SBwkJsAkBhyohjO8%3D_1748658129.opus",
    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum another recommended book on blackness in Islam or race in Islam a book called Islam and Blackness by Professor Jonathan A.C Brown who is a white American Muslim scholar, professor of I believe Georgetown University and yeah he wrote this books an exceptional read I was fortunate enough to read the manuscript before it was released",
      "was released and my summary is at the back of the book. Again this is a phenomenal book on race and anti-blackness in the Islamic tradition Brown builds on the long scholarly tradition of documenting the achievements of black African Muslims in history and he skillfully addresses accusations that Islam is an anti-Black religion so again this is",
      "anti-black racism in the islamic tradition where they emanate from why some prominent scholars unfortunately considered black people to be culturally, intellectually and aesthetically inferior to like Arabs and non other people. And how many of those views were influenced by ancient Greek theories as well as xenophobia which existed",
      "the notion that black people or black women in particular are undesirable or less desirable as marital, as marriage partners within the Maliki Madhab so he kind of talks about that and talks about how many of those ideas were based on their scholars personal preferences not necessarily something that is actually explicitly stated in the Quran authentic hadiths. He does address a number of the anti-black hadith unfortunately",
      "world and it still circulated in some circles when I studied Islam in Egypt. I did come across a number of these hadiths, they are not authentic but again this is really good book to read because it talks about the rise of anti-blackness in the Muslim world on why anti black sentiment still does exist unfortunately in many Muslim majority countries not only in Arab world also in South Asian cultures so again",
      "It's very easy to read, although it's quite extensive. There are over 300, almost 400 books and a lot of wonderful footnotes for further study but then definitely I'd highly recommend this book if you want to learn and understand about blackness in Islamic tradition as well as the rise of anti-blackness",
      "anti-black sentiment is unfortunately quite rampant in many Muslim communities both in the West as well as in Arabian Peninsula but again this is a highly recommended book Islam and Blackness by Professor Jonathan A.C Brown I highly recommend you check this out Asalaamu Alaikum"
    ]
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  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Islam and Blackness - Dr Jonathan Brown_ Ust_ Must_ic_r7R5w3To&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748662077.opus",
    "text": [
      "Was it at the university? So is it like this, was it... because I heard my friend lived there. There weren't that many universities. That's where I live! When did that happen? Did you talk in the convo?",
      "it was meant to be in canada but so many people signed up they did to the most that's good i do the talking about you right they didn't need to move it yeah so so yeah when i got there instead of coming to london today",
      "we will begin with recitation of Quran. InshaAllah",
      "لعلكم ترحمون يا أيها الذين آمنوا لا يسقى القوم من قوم عسى أن يكونوا خيرا منهم ولا نساء من نسائن عسي أن يكن خير منهم",
      "تنابزوا بالألقاب بثنسم الفسوق بعد الإيمان ومن لم يتب فأولئك هم الظالمون يا أيها الذين آمنوا اشتركوا كثيرا من الظن إن بعض الظني إثم ولا تجسسوا ولا يخطف بعضكم بعضا",
      "أَنْ يُحِبُّ أَحَدُكُمْ أَيَّأْكُلَ لَحْماً فِيهِ مَيتاً فَكَرِهْتُمُوهُ وَاتَّقُوا اللَّهَ إِنَّ اللَّـهَ تَوَّابٌ رَحِيمٌ",
      "Indeed the believers are but brothers, so make assessment between your brothers and fear Allah that you may receive mercy. Oh you have believed, let not a people ridicule another",
      "they may be better than them. Nor let women ridicule other women because perhaps they are even better than themselves. And do not insult one another and do not call each other by nicknames. Indeed, wretched is the name of disobedience after one's faith. And whoever does not repent, then it is those who are wrongdoers. O you who have believed! Avoid much negative assumption",
      "spy and do not backbite each other. Would one of you like to eat the flesh of his brother when he has died? You detest it, and fear Allah indeed. Allah is a tetter of repentance and merciful. O mankind! Indeed we have created you from male and female, and we made you from peoples and tribes so that you may know one another. Indeed the most noble view in sight of Allah",
      "Allah is knowing and acquainted. On behalf of the Islamic Society, I welcome all of you my dear brothers and sisters from all tribes and for all peoples to this blessed night to talk here with our esteemed guests who I hope inshallah will be living not only with knowledge this evening but with hope! And I'd like to introduce first our guest Habib Akamdey who was born in London England",
      "degree in business and film studies. After his graduation, Habib travelled to Egypt where he studied Islamic Studies. He studied Arabic, Islamic Law and Islamic History at Al-Azhar University which is a very prestigious university in Egypt and internationally for Muslims across the world. Next I welcome this team professor Jonathan A C Brown who is associate professor and chair of Islamic Civilization at Georgetown University in America.",
      "law and the author of several books including Miss Quoting Muhammad, The Challenges and Choices on Interpreting the Prophet's Dehkisi. And Rando if you're already aware that he has also published a new book Islam and Blackness which will also be on sale today outside the hall inshaAllah on the way out. Last but not least our dear Ustaz Mustafa Briggs who seems in last November loved us so much that he's come back for seconds. Alhamdulillah he is a graduate of Arabic International Relations from University of Westminster",
      "He started an MA in Foundation at SAAS with a specialisation in Arabic and Islamic texts before going on to a Lez Hub in Cairo, Egypt where he's currently doing another degree in Islamic studies and Arabic.",
      "and its role in the international Muslim world, as well as the vital role of female scholarship played in West Africa, in the West African Islamic tradition, which he presented at over 30 universities across three continents including Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale. Hamid and Yale. Mulsafah has also been featured on international media such as Al Jazeera and Islam Talent, his class games such as Islamic History and Blackness in Islam, and is also currently working on forthcoming translation of traditional West African",
      "I'll now hand over to our dear guest Habib to take over the rest of his evening. So please do sit back and enjoy, thank you very much.",
      "can give to a friend or loved one given that it's valentine's day tomorrow um but yeah no seriously very highly recommended book i've had the pleasure of reading two or three um the book at least two or free times and again i highly recommend not only for ourselves also for anyone who has any doubts about islam whether they're muslim or non-muslim or even black or nonblack is both exceptional reason again i",
      "Ond yn ôl hynny, rwy'n eisiau ceisio gwneud pethau mwy gydweithredol. Felly yn hytrach na ddaw ein dau cwmniadurion cyffredinol i gyflwyniadau ffurfiol, rydw i am ofyn ychydig o gwestiynau ers hanner munud a 45 munud ac wedyn bydd gennym Q&A. Ond os hoffai unrhyw un ofyn cwestiwn, pan wnawn ni fynd at y Q& A gallwch chi aros yn ffymdeiriedig. Yn eraill mae gennym cod QR sy'n mynd i fynd i dyfu yn brys ac yn amlwg gallwchi",
      "and then add to your, or send your questions via the Q&A. But before we get into that do you mind, I want to ask each of the authors if you can read a short excerpt from your book? And then I'll start asking some questions if that's okay. So we'll start with age before beauty so Professor Brown. Can we go with beauty before age? That might be better. Or beauty before ages. Age needs to find section.",
      "Oh, okay. Beauty I said right? I'm older than you. No problem. How old are you? Okay, bismillah. So I'll read just to give an introduction",
      "the actual book and the reason why I wrote the book, and what I speak about in the book. I'll read insha'Allah the four words after saying Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem. As-salatu wa salamu ala ash-sharifin anbiya wal mursaleen Sayyidina Muhammad wa ala aalihi atayyebeena attahireene wa ashabi ilhadine almuktadeen wa alat tabieeen wa man tabibun bi ihsanin illa yawmul deen. I first presented a short PowerPoint presentation in April 2017 called Beyond Bilal A History of Blackness in Islam",
      "University to a group of students in an institution I could only have dreamed of attending, let alone speaking at. Back then I had no idea that the 30-minute presentation would evolve into a lecture series that would travel to over 50 universities across three different continents and result in this book that you have in your hands right now. The intersection between black history, identity, Islam and the Muslim world especially in the West is something that although understudied has long been a subject",
      "like the famous or infamous Fakhru Sudan al-Albaidan, The Glory of the Black Race over the White Race by 8th century polymath Al Jahiz up until Tanwir al-Ghabash fi fadli Sudan ul Habash, The Illuminating Twilight Concerning the Virtue of Sudanese and Abyssinians of Ibn Jazi in the 11th Century and Suyuti's Rafushan al-Habshan Elevating the Prestige of Abyssianians in the 14th Century. Although the subject is often belittled overlooked or under emphasized in the Muslim community",
      "devoted themselves to producing books aimed at the most important of religious and secular sciences saw that it was just as important to write about it is a testament to the serious regard in which they held the subject, and in which we should hold it as well. Most recently due to the connection between the spread of Islam in the West and Black Liberation movements with some of the most prominent figures in Western Islam such as Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali also being key figures in both the Muslim world and the black liberation struggle",
      "of the connection between these two areas and although many people seem to view these experiences as separate they are in fact very much connected a truth that led to the events that inspired beyond billah i grew up as a young black convert to islam in inner city london actually from down the road i'm from camden and as part of the millennial generation that saw the world transform into a globalized community issues of race and identity were central to my existential search for meaning",
      "identity as a young black man of West African descent that I discovered Islam and decided to adopt the faith. Wanting to know and understand who I was and where I came from beyond the popular narrative of slavery and colonization, I was taught in school and unfortunately at home. I discovered the rich history of Islam in West Africa its fearsome empires such as Mali and Songhai and Sokoto and it's charismatic scholars and saints such as Ahmed Ubanba and Sheikh Ebrahim Niasse They both represent a thousand year legacy born",
      "and African culture, and I ended up becoming Muslim through the grandson of the latter, Imam Hassan Siza towards the end of 2007. For me uncovering this seemingly hidden legacy in history was like discovering a long lost treasure or heritage, and i did my best in the following years to learn and study and immerse myself in it absorbing as much information and history as possible. I traveled to the lands that I read about when I was able to and sat at the feet of the people who inherited this rich legacy",
      "which not only informed my place within my new faith, but my place in the wider world. Then in October 2016, The Black and Muslim in Britain YouTube project was launched in an attempt to address the lack of faith representation during Black History Month in the UK, which consisted of black Muslims relating anecdotes and voicing their opinions and experiences of being black and muslim. This was followed by other such projects which sparked a series of events and reactions with",
      "around the time that the idea for Beyond Bilal was born in 2017. This period also saw the global rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which led black Muslims to start wondering at what their face answer was to the global questions surrounding their existence and identity. Should I stop or should I continue? It's a bit long yeah? You get the idea. Professor Brown? Yeah, I feel like it's the whole getting you",
      "beginning what I'm doing. Though a contested concept, anti-blackness is most succinctly understood as racism directed against people of sub-Saharan African descent. Stereotypes about real or imagined black Africans are nearly as old as historical records. From ancient Rome to medieval China however these stereotypes rarely stood out markedly in societies that were often cosmopolitan and where skin color played a less important role than other markers",
      "the rights and standing of people racialized as black African were determined by that racialization became pervasive only in the early modern period with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade and Europe's powerful colonial states. The understanding of race and blackness that formed in the West, particularly in the United States have profoundly shaped global discourse. They have forced a dualistic template of black and white onto social terrains from Mali to Karachi which are too often dissimilar or complex for such a",
      "for such a binary. They have bound black to African-ness and slavery in an essential relationship when the link between the two has often been incidental, and they continue to insist that quote,",
      "aesthetic preference always entitled judgments of human worth. Not all descriptions of color is prescription of value.\" In the West, Islam and Muslims have been particularly singled out as anti-black an accusation emanating from a centuries old Western stereotype of Muslims as slavers as well as from contemporary American conservative cultural and political agendas. Anti blackness is rampant in much of the Muslim world from North Africa to South Asia it causes real pain that goes unrecognized but",
      "in Islam's scriptures or in its system of law and ethics. Islamic civilization inherited stereotypes about black Africans from the Greco-Roman conviction that climate shaped both body and personality, and from the Judeo-Christian lore about Africans being cursed with blackness and enslavement. Though prominent Muslim scholars opposed these ideas as antithetical to the Quran, the bulk of the Islamic tradition indulged and added to this body of material. While anti-blackness did not define",
      "intones from Morocco to India, black African came to stand in for slave and correlate with inferior social status. Sufi tradition however inverted this image using it to represent the saint's journey from earthly subjugation to liberation through union with the divine and it portrayed the black African as the pious and devout slave of God who taught and inspired his or her social betters. In Islamic law particularly norms around marriage when",
      "and undesirability was recognized, it was as a social reality that law had to manage, not as a norm for it to protect. Whether in Islamic law or in how black Africans have been perceived in other genres of Islamic scholarship, anti-blackness has been incidental, not essential. In law, Muslim jurists recognize that what blackness meant, whether it was attractive or unappealing, depended on where, when, and who was perceiving it. Negative stereotypes about black Africans",
      "were often mirrored by stereotypes about Slavs and Turks, and the association of blackness with slavery and primitiveness, including in the writings of many Black Muslims from the Sahel ultimately turned not on phenotype but on their locating blackness beyond the southern boundaries of the abode of Islam. Whether anti-blackness was incidental or accepted as social customs however, leading voices of Muslim scholarship from medieval to modern times have rejected it",
      "and advocated vigorously for the Prophet's teaching that no race or tribe has any inherent value over another. As judges, jurists, and moral guides, Muslim scholars have had to balance a realistic accommodation of custom with their duty to enjoin rights as the heirs of the Prophet. In light of the severity of the blight of anti-blackness today it is clear that their duty as moral guides must be to promote the erasure of the color line.",
      "um readings and the reason why i wanted to hear both of you interesting i wanted",
      "yn ymwneud â'r traddodiad fawr sydd gennym am sgolio gwlach a chyfranogwch Cymru hefyd, yr rôl allweddol mae gan ddullau gwlac a theimlo wedi chwarae yn y traddiad ac fe wnaethoch chi listo nifer o ffigurau sy'n eich argymell oddi wrth i'r West Africa hyd at America. Nid oedd o'r prifysgol yma, ond dros y cyfnod diweddar. Hefyd gyda broses Jonathan Brownsburg, gwybod hynny'n llawer o amrywiaeth, mawr iawn, mae'n ambell 400 page ac yn hawdd i'w darllen",
      "And I like the way you were challenging, okay we've got this perception that Islam is anti-black which some people, some critics of Islam have whether they are black orientalists or pan Africanist and also some Muslims who may have some doubts that is their religion anti-Black because of what they heard or seen from some Muslims even some respected Muslim scholars or intellectuals. So where you skillfully was addressing okay let's answer this question",
      "islamic legal tradition it's particularly looking at the maliki school and legal um some writers from sufi saints as well as some other muslim contemporary and ancient scholars who say in relation to blackness so they're both exceptional reasons for different reasons but they both deal with the topic of blackness and islam and funnily enough just before coming here someone messaged me was like why are you attending an event about blackness",
      "a non-black person speaking as if a white person shouldn't be able to speak about race and i think it's important that this is addressed. This book is phenomenal both of the books but particularly Islam in Blackness from an academic perspective, and this idea that only black people or people of African descent can speak about this I don't agree with that and even within our Islamic tradition we have great scholars such as Ibn al-Jawzi he was not black who wrote",
      "is roughly translated as illuminating the darkness regarding the virtues of black people and abyssinians like modern day people from um the whole of africa and you had a member on this youtube who also wrote a book speaking about the virtues with black people because anti-blackness has been an issue from the time of the prophet peace we've put it up until recent times so as muslims although we like to act like um anti-black or racism doesn't exist it does exist but fortunately we do have we did",
      "of address this issue not only to kind of address that islam is not anti-black religion but also to uplift and enlighten us about some great people of african descent who've contributed to an early world civilization by islamic history my question i have for both of you what are the key takeaways that you'd like people to take from reading your book go ahead go ahead",
      "the one who asked yeah i don't know that's that i hear that a lot i don' t know so just to say why i wrote this book it wasn't like i woke up one day i was like you know i want to write about blackness because this is not something i ever thought about right people ask me actually i wrote a book on Islam and slavery and people were like we should write a book about Islam and race I said I'm not crazy I'm",
      "during 2020, in the summer of 2020 there was this debate on this Research Africa academic listserv and there were professors actually like professors with academic positions making the argument that Islam is not that Muslims are racist right? That Islam at its scriptural core, the Quran and Sunnah of the Prophet is anti-black. So I wasn't on this list serve you know I was like in the summertime or doing whatever and people kept sending me emails",
      "this do you know about this hadith what about this how do you think about this quranic verse so i was like okay i'll look into it and i i finally eventually started researching this stuff and then i in order to answer one question i'd answer another question look at that and so eventually just piled up into a book but the it came out of people asking me questions about these accusations about islam as a religion so that's um why the book exists uh so i mean i think that",
      "I mean, I guess the argument I'd want someone to take away is that no, Islam's not anti-black. That's one thing, you know? Let's put that aside. I think the other thing that there are two issues I think that I would really... Well, maybe three. I'll try to be quick with them. Three issues I would like people to think about. One is that so many questions about things like... I mean think about this. Why do we call white people white?",
      "white people white? I mean, I'm not white. That paper is white. My skin's not white.\" Why do we call black people black? I've never met someone who actually has black skin. These are the kind of basic questions that we don't really think about that are really... why do people call like where do they get names for colors? This is actually really interesting because I found it to be fascinating and",
      "I really enjoyed learning about in this book when i was writing this book and you realize how much of these issues around color and race and appearance are um like we don't really question where they come from and how they're shaped that's one thing i found really interesting the second thing is that we we impose i don't even think it's",
      "imperially dominated not just the world but also the past right so everybody today whether i mean i'm not just talking about like you know what racist white people or something even people who you know let's say are like you racialized as black identify as black are angry about racism justifiably upset about this right even everybody is looking at the past through a very specific lens that's created by a very",
      "ignores the fact that all these other societies in human history have their own ways of thinking about race and color and community and all this stuff. And we just go back in time, we impose our like cookie cutter view of these issues on the past. And as I say it's sort of like imperial domination of the past and even the people who are anti-racist activists a lot of times are kind of complicit in this. I think that's something that's important to keep in mind. The third thing I want to say is that you know a lot",
      "questions about race or community and identity, discrimination are actually very hard issues to resolve. So if you think about this... Let's say there is a Pakistani Muslim family in America. And then there is black Muslim family",
      "converted like two, three generations ago or something. And let's say the kids want to get married. The Pakistani parents if they're hesitant about the marriage is it anti-black racism? Maybe and maybe that's part of it. Or is it this person is from another community they don't speak our language they're not from the same culture so one of them is invalid",
      "Right. The race racism is unacceptable in our religion concern about culture and the ability who will live together have common expectations ways of communication that that is valid, right? But how do you tell the difference so it's really hard imagine your Muslim scholar and you're trying to figure out like Someone brings you this issue You have to try and balance a cap if you can't look into people's hearts And so there's like a real challenging Islamic tradition about trying to balance the this mandate to deny",
      "deny the legitimacy of prejudice, to deny the legimacy of discrimination on one hand but also to accept like the human foibles of communities and like they need for humans to be able to relate to another. And this is it's really hard to see it's almost painful to watch Muslim scholars trying to balance these I think that we have to have you know maybe much more compassionate for some people who are involved in this",
      "about my book I have just finished reading Professor Jonathan's book and yeah, I loved it. Hamdila was a very well researched and detailed book and I feel as though the existence of this book is important in discourse around this subject because the paradigms in which we see blackness, in which race, in community and the way in which you see the world that the professor mentioned is largely the result",
      "of western academia and the way that western society has defined the world, and then applied those definitions on a global scale. And we've all been socialised to accept these western terminologies in how we define ourselves as individuals and how we find race and how do we define our function in society? And if you look at the global culture like as much as we all come from different parts of the world and we have different ways",
      "different ways of seeing things in different cultures and different languages. Essentially, we're all part of a Western global monoculture. All of us in one of our societies are products of colonization or Western education as well the way in which we've been taught to see ourselves whether we like it or not is shaped by Western academia. And so when we see issues such as racism in Islam or blackness in Islam even as Muslims but as Western educated Muslims",
      "western academia and our products are western academia that can produce works that can allow us to re-look at all of these issues the same way for example these scholars in the past were the result of the highest standard of academia available in their times and so they produced works that dealt with race and religion according to the paradigm of their time. The paradigm of our time is western academia, so to have a western academic who comes from",
      "anglo-saxon and you are essentially from the people that created all of these terms and definitions and the systems that define whiteness and blackness for you to tackle this issue in the way that you have i feel like it's very commendable and it's essential for us to be able to read it and understand it and it is a trend if you follow professor jonathan's kind of trending academia and in publishing books the first book that i had um",
      "which dealt with the accusations levied against hadith. And so you defended that issue as a Muslim, you felt it was your concern as a Western academic but also as a muslim to answer the questions and challenges of people against the hadith studies. And then when the question came to slavery you also thought it was responsibility as a Muslem to defend Islam and to defend the teachings of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam against the accusations",
      "came about Islam and anti-blackness, you felt it was your obligation as a Muslim but also as a Western academic to approach it in the way that uses your knowledge and your expertise and your privilege and your skills to defend the Prophet ﷺ and to defend The Deen. And so I do commend you for that and I thoroughly enjoyed the book and I would recommend everybody to purchase a copy because it has a lot of information. And with my book on the other hand,",
      "To compare the two books, Islam and Blackness deals with how these social phenomenons came about. And how we can address the accusations levied against Islam about the origins of these accusations. So for example, how the racialisation of black and white came about in the world at large and then in Muslim societies specifically. How anti-black racism crept into the Islamic tradition",
      "discrimination crept into the practice of Islamic law. It answers the questions about the origins of these and possibly solutions and defences for these. My book on the other hand was more about dealing with the results of these things as a lived experience, as a black Muslim somebody that has faced these discriminations or this anti-blackness etc and appealing to Muslims to relook at history in the lens of how they practice Islam today",
      "today and so i say that to say for example many of the people that i speak about in beyond bilal and this is a child this is like a criticism that i've received in the book wouldn't have been classified as being black in their societies at the time that they lived in because blackness as a term not as a physical description but as a social terminology did not exist at that time because there's black as professor mentioned in his book with a lowercase b and then there's",
      "it'll be. There's black in terms of a physical description and a phenotype, and then there's also black as a social status and as a product of specific social events that produced the class of people that were racialized as black without them having essentially been black. And so my premise of the book is that if we racialize people as black in the 21st century and we have certain stereotypes associated to",
      "which we interact with them and we have certain discriminations that we hold against them if we were to re-look at the past with the same lens that we look at the present many of the figures classified in the quran would be considered to be black many of",
      "at the way in which we interact with our own history and our own identity as Muslims if we still have inherent anti-blackness and discrimination within our practice of Islam. And so my main takeaway for the book was just basically, if you have these issues, if do discriminate against black people or as a black person, if don't feel as though you have a place within the religion that you feel discriminated against it's important to re-evaluate the tradition",
      "major figures that laid the foundations for the deen as we have it today were black and so this attitude and these kind of practices in terms of racism anti-blackness colorism etc shouldn't exist in somebody who has real love for allah real love from the prophets real love to the messengers because for many of them if they were to live in this day and age they would be racialized as the same people that are discriminated against",
      "My next question is, you've kind of both answered it in both of your previous questions. What would you say was the source or sources for anti-black racism amongst Muslims in history? I'll pass that to the professor because he explained it really well in the book. Really? Sure. I mean, I feel bad. Because half your answer, you were talking about saying how good my book was. I felt like, oh man, so guilty. I also read his book by the way which I really enjoyed.",
      "I really enjoyed and I had a copy but I gave it away so I have to get another copy. Okay, so It's interesting like the sources are There's you can think of like a couple of sources right this is good so one is Kind of general in a sense that if you're in parts of the world that are Fair, you know fairly far from the equator so you could think about let's say",
      "let's say, North Africa north is central India north. There's actually kind of a weirdly common sense link between darkness and lower status in the sense that if you have to work outside in the sun not only are you getting tanner but you're getting dirty. So the idea of blackness as darker",
      "tanned right you're burned by the sun but also black is because your hand you're covered in dirt your hands are dirty and like calloused and stuff like that the idea and then versus the lighter per lighter skin person is don't doesn't have to go outside it doesn't",
      "lighter skin tone over dark skin tone. The second is, you know I would actually say that it's really... It's sort of the unfortunately kind of a Judeo-Christian tradition and I generally don't like to throw cast blame on religious traditions but i think this is you can clearly identify this in the Old Testament the idea of the curse of Ham so this is",
      "So this is a story in the book of Genesis where Noah's son Ham, Noah gets blotto drunk and passes out naked. I'm not saying this actually happened. This is in the Old Testament, okay? And Ham, his son does not cover him up and his other sons do. So when Noah comes to he curses some of Ham's descendants with being slaves to his brothers. Notice",
      "Notice being slaves, right? Now what happens in the let's say between roughly 200 BC and around 400 AD or 500 AD is you have other versions of this story emerge in kind of Judeo-Christian lore where it's also a curse of blackness. So it's a curse",
      "Africa. So if you put this all together, you get black Africans are sort of cursed to be slaves and then if you add to this kind of Greco-Roman notions of science and where how climate affects not just how we look but how we think and our personality there's this idea that kind of African people in the it's not because they're African",
      "and really sexual, kind of hot-headed, maybe not so smart. By the way they also say people in the far north are not so smar but they're also drunk most of the time. So these are some of the ideas. But you can see if you take these together you get a pretty potent mixture. Now when in Islamic tradition really major scholars like Ibn al-Jawzi, Asayyuti, and others, Dimash Kli",
      "and sciences, they totally deny this story of the curse of Ham. They say it's inaccurate scientifically. It goes against the reliable hadiths we have on the origin of how people look. But unfortunately although there are very high statuses, they're a minority in the Islamic tradition. A lot of Muslim scholarship just kind of like it, it's taking a lot of material from the biblical tradition. One of things to take is notion of the Curse of Ham",
      "And so there's this, you get this association of blackness and slavery.",
      "with blackness and enslavement. And although prominent Muslim scholars opposed these ideas as antithetical to the Qur'an, the bulk of the Islamic tradition indulged and added to the body of that material.\"",
      "for rightly so is as much as we speak about the contribution of black people it's always black men and then oftentimes we don't hear about the contributions of black women um black muslim women in particular and i was very glad that you know mashallah you dedicated a chapter acknowledging and celebrating the contributions",
      "One of the main reasons was during the presentation that I gave about Bion Bilal. I grew up seeing representations of and I took a large portion of my Islam from female West African scholars So as much as you know, I mentioned I came into Islam through Sheikh Hassan Sisei It was his niece Aisha Sise who lives here in the UK that taught me how to read and write the Quran And I memorized the last Juz with her so like my Quranic education and Arabic education began with her",
      "with her and when i got to know her family i realized that all of her mother and all of our aunts had memorized the quran and were scholars. Her father's side same thing, her grandmother had memorized The Quran and was a scholar she studied the Arbaeen and now we have memorized them along with her brothers and she was known as somebody of knowledge and it goes back generations and generations. Her grandmother was the daughter of Sheikh Ibrahim Nias",
      "and they all became scholars in their own right, and wrote books, and started organisations, and built masajid, and were very, very active. And whenever I would go to Senegal, I would visit them, I'd spend time with them, study with them. They were accorded the exact same status and respect as the male scholars were. That was just how society functioned. The way you'd visit a son of Sheikh Ibrahim, learn from him, seek blessings for him is the same way you do so for your daughter.",
      "Salah for example women don't need Salah because of faith and all of those kind of things but other than that there wasn't really that distinction between male and female figures of authority. And so, that was something I grew up seeing but then I never really saw replicated in a lot of other religious manifestations of the Muslim community and it was something that is severely lacking in the West as well we don't really see female scholars in the same way we see male scholars they're not",
      "and teachers who are as prominent as the male figures for many different cultural reasons. As I wanted to highlight that, to show that not only was there a history of that in West Africa that wasn't being spoken about and wasn't known but also that it has deep relations to the female scholarship tradition in Islam anyway. The Qur'an as we know it came to us through a woman because after the Qur'aan was compiled by Sayyidina Abu Bakr and Sayyida Omar they entrusted",
      "the wife of the Prophet ﷺ. So when Uthman, Sayyidina Uthmann started to produce his copies of the Qur'an and send them out to the Muslim world he did so from the copy that he took from Hafsat. When we speak about hadith and sharia 25% of the sharia comes from Aisha radiallahu anha who was a female scholar. And when we look at some of our greatest scholars such as Imam Ash-Shafi'i his main teacher even though he had hundreds of teachers including Imam Malik",
      "respected the most and the teacher who sponsored his education when he was in egypt was sayden afisa who was a great granddaughter of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam and he respected her to the point that when he passed away he wrote in his will that he wanted his body to be taken to her so that she could make dua for him before he was buried and then even before all of that makkah the city that we face five times a day towards to pray",
      "that when we go there and perform hajj, we run in between Safa and Marawa. We do all of these things because of a woman. Zamzam was discovered by a woman the first inhabitant of Makkah was a woman and she was the one who established the city and made it into a city. And not only was she a woman but we know that she was an African woman and black woman so all of this kind of intersects. My reasoning and proof for the blackness of Hajar",
      "that was that if we go to the seerah of Ibn Hisham, which is one of the earliest biographies of the Prophet ﷺ. The Prophet ﷺ is very specific when he speaks to his companions and he tells them a day will come when you will enter Egypt. And he says when you enter Egypt and you see the people with dark skin and curly hair, treat them well because they are our relatives through blood and our relatives",
      "by the Greeks etc even the person who was in charge of Egypt that the Prophet gives dawah to and sends a letter to Al-Muqaukis his name actually translates as the Caucasian because he was of Greek origin and it was the Greeks and the Romans who were administering Egypt at the time that had placed him in power over Egypt but the Prophet was speaking about the original inhabitants of Egypt being dark skinned and curly hair and that his ancestor Hajar was from amongst them so when we talk",
      "communities within the Muslim world when we talk about things such as racism and discrimination they're always kind of interlinked. The subjugation of black people within Islam or the minimization of black women in Islam is also the same as the minimisation of females in Islam, so the fact that Makkah was established by a black female brings together the two struggles and so that's why I decided to write that fifth chapter. Professor Brown do you mind",
      "Do you mind sharing some thoughts on your, I think it's the final appendix, on Islam and the caste in South Asia? Because oftentimes when we think about anti-blackness is generally within sub-Saharan Africa or African American context. Whereas I'm glad that you actually spoke about the issue of anti- blackness or colorism within a South Asian context. So do you mind just talking a little bit about that appendix? Yeah. By the way, so when I was writing this book after",
      "after I finished writing it, um... I was like, I wonder if, um, because Habib actually wrote several books on this topic. He hasn't mentioned this but I uh, I was wondering if he would you know, email him and give me advice so I sent him the word document and uh, maybe you could look at it or something This book is a fairly long book right? So he's like good will hunting Akande as far as I can tell",
      "one day later, not even a day later he sent me back the whole and he annotated the whole thing Mashallah. I've never seen anybody who can read Mashallah this fast so I take lessons from you or something He gave me comments on the whole things it's very valuable. He is too modest to talk about this This is kind of pretty well studied issue and I just was drawing on existing scholarship of notion of colorism",
      "So again, I talked about this before. The idea that... First of all you have these long traditions of what lighter skin and darker skin means in societies where there's a potential for large variation in that. And you add to that colonization by European society like Britain in India",
      "of beauty being posed by the colonizer that you want to imitate and then the colonizers also favoring people that kind of look like them right so there's that dynamic added to it uh you have a strong um element of colorism in south asia although there's a lot of debate in in south Asia about whether or not this kind of color ism goes back to the pre-modern period or if it's a product of colonialism but we won't get into",
      "so that's one issue the reason i was interested in caste however it was because i was trying to think of something where because there's not a lot of in the fifth tradition you do have discussions about blackness and what that means in terms of marriage and things like that but it's not incredibly well discussed and fleshed out whereas",
      "in the question of caste and marriage amongst Muslims in India, basically from South Asia. So I was really interested in how like what looking at the way Muslim scholars talked about castes and you know it's just like the example of blackness we talked about right there are some Muslim scholars who are like look um Muslims are equal right? And caste is not this is not from the Islamic tradition okay so you know this is",
      "So it's clear that we shouldn't indulge this at all. On the other hand, Muslim scholars say probably the majority of South Asian Muslim scholars, say okay but one where part of the rules around Islamic laws of marriage is that we're supposed to respect custom right? We're supposed t o respect custom as long as it doesn't violate the Quran or the Islam of the Prophet like we can we can respect it and if part of that is you know that there are these different castes in",
      "don't want to mix a lot and if they mix it causes a lot of social problems like we kind of have to respect that so you have this like I was really interested in seeing how Muslim scholars weighed these priorities and using it as a kind of analogy to think about how we should do the same thing with race. That's why I discussed that.",
      "ask a question so maybe my questions aren't entertaining enough so shall we open up does anyone want to ask the question um",
      "is on the kind of figures and perception of darkness, and how it fits into these texts. And because I'm not trained in sort of Islamic scholarship but obviously as a Muslim, these concepts concern me. So I know Dr. Brown when you're in your book on Islam and slavery, you talk about how you saw these tropes of slavery in the Quran and then you were thinking about slavery in general, how that kind of fits into the Islamic tradition. And I guess that's something I find myself encountering when reading the Quran.",
      "the trope of darkness, this kind of figurative notion of darkness and its sort of signification. And so I was just wondering as questions for any of you, I suppose but how do you kind of think conceptualize darkness in relation to the idea of sort of phenotypical blackness or phenotypical darkness within Islamic thought? How that's negotiated? Thank you. Good question. Yeah go ahead because I liked the chapter",
      "I like the chapter in the book that dealt with that as well because we do have those. Sorry, I keep talking about this but you know what it is? I did the same thing as Habib. I started reading the book yesterday and I finished it today so it's still fresh on my mind. It's not going to be good people. Social media is going to obliteration. The only thing I would say before answering about darkness even as Muslims when we think",
      "we shouldn't just think about black people and i think that's an issue that i think a number of muslims have that's not from islam so oftentimes when i ask people when people think about slavery they might speak but then also i pose the question how come you don't think of yusuf he wasn't slaved and he was in the quran so even as muslim maybe we need to change the way we view some of these concepts whether it's slavery and even darkness being somewhat negative where they should have been um",
      "My, to relate to your question was that you were speaking about the usage of darkness and light metaphorically in biblical scripture but then we also have that accusation levied against us in the Islamic tradition because there are verses in the Quran for example when Allah speaks about the people who has received paradise in the akhirah as being people whose faces have become brightened or whitened",
      "be punished are darkened, their faces are darken and then also verses that deal with for example the Arab custom of not valuing female children or valuing male children over female children Allah describes in a particular verse the fact that when a female child is born to them their faces become dark and so many people when we see that translate into Islamic tradition",
      "sunnah per se but the scholars interpretation of the quran and the sunna you see many scholars make problematic statements or statements that would seem problematic in our time where they take these metaphorical descriptions and say that they will become physical phenotypical descriptions and so they talk about for example people's faces literally being turned black and literally being termed white and so yeah i won't give away too much the defense",
      "but I would say it's something that is present within our tradition that we need to question. And I'll hand the question over to the professor who researched it. Thank you. There are some times when you're trying to explain something and your argument is not very good. In this case, I feel very confident. If you look at... Okay, let me say it this way. In Islamic tradition there's a very clear division between metaphor",
      "metaphor and phenotype when it comes to black and white which is very interesting because that's not the case in let's say modern america you know like people want to change you know, like um uh like you know blacklist or something you they want to like take away oh, you know Like it's there's this constant melding Inability distinguish between metaphor and race in our study right? I'm not going to criticize that or say what's right or wrong. Right but the point is",
      "scholarly tradition is a very clear distinction. So even when they talk about white in faces and black in faces, they might say your face actually becomes black but like they say very explicitly that's not like black people this is another this is otherworldly this isn't like an our world right so it",
      "Or if it's actually physical, then it's something completely different from this universe. The second thing and what's very interesting is if you look at let's say black African scholars like Abdullah bin Fodio or Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse or Sheikh Adem in Senegal they come to these verses they don't go into oh my god yeah but you know they just say oh yeah it's the same thing everyone else said",
      "It's the same thing everyone else said. Black means you've been ignoble, you've denigrated lowly. White means you're proud and noble. And the reason they do this is because in early Islamic Arabic and pre-Islamic Arabic, you don't see the division of... If we're going to talk about skin color and people's appearances, you have black white binary. So in early pre-islamic arabic and early islamic",
      "This is a metaphoric binary. So if you're white of face, that means you're noble If your black of face it means you ignoble right? If you want to talk about how people look if you have a binary It's black and red so and there's a debate by the way about whether or not Arabs are in the black or the red group So black and read the other ways it is a tripartite division of black red and whites",
      "white with a black-white binary, if they go back to their own linguistic tradition and like hadith and Quran early Islamic Arabic dictionaries. Black-white is oh this is metaphorical. This is in contrast by the way and again I hate doing this but it's true. The early Christian tradition is very different there is an immediate",
      "Black as phenotype and black as metaphor. And you go back to the writings of the church fathers, John Chrysostom, Augustine, etc., etc. You'll see the idea of the devil is the black one. And there's a story in the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament about the washing of the Ethiopian. An Ethiopian guy comes to become Christian. He gets baptized.",
      "He looks different. And then when you, I mean if you look at like medieval European prints and illustrations of this he comes out looking like, you know those angel babies? Like cherubs? He looks like a little Gerber baby. You know? You know the Gerber Baby? Comes out, he looks like white guy. He looks me. So in the early Christian tradition this persists there's a very quick cross blending of metaphor",
      "metaphor and phenotype to the point that they're inextricable after that. Whereas, in Islamic tradition, they really stay apart. And sometimes they cross over a little bit but there's like a very consistent separation between the two. I wanted to add to that. I want you to just add as well with regards to the Tripartite classification of race that was used by the Arabs is interesting to see that for Arabs, the way that they use the term white in the Arabic language has been translated into",
      "into our languages as if it's the equivalent of how we use white today when that wasn't the case. So, when you look at for example the Prophet saying he was sent to the black and the red, for many people who translate, who explain this hadith they said the blacks included Africans and Arabs and then the red were Europeans because they were familiar with the Roman Empire, they were familar with people who lived in these European regions, Eastern European regions etc",
      "The Romans described the Arabs as white, while the Persians were described as light-skinned.",
      "because they're lighter than the general population, they are described white in the context of darkness. And then when we look at the descriptions of the Arabs in classical lexicons of Arabic language many scholars such as Ibn Mandur etc describe the fact that for the majority of Arabs their skin color was darker it was more to the Aswad so when we see this hadith where the Prophet saw him he sees a group",
      "and they increase in number until they are more white sheep and the black sheep are not seen anymore when he tells Sayyidina Abu Bakr this dream, Sayyida Abu Bakar interprets it as that means that the non-Arabs will enter into us and will be indistinguishable and they'll share our wealth and our lineage with us to the point that they become indistinguishable from us. And the Sahaba were like so will the non Arabs really come in and mix with us",
      "Futa Haat, like when the Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula expand into the former territories of the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia we start to see that happen. Many of the people that we classify as Arab today or Middle Eastern today are of Levantine descent or Phoenician descent or Eastern Roman descent because the capital of the eastern roman empire was Constantinople in Turkey or Damascus before that in Syria so Syria Palestine Lebanon Jordan all",
      "called Romans to the Arabs and they were described as red people to the Arab but now today, they're described as being Arab. So it's just about understanding historical context, understanding definitions. And so even when we see the word Abiyad in the Quran or white and etc., It's not the same white as what we conceptualize as white today which is linked to a very Eurocentric and Anglo-Saxon definition of white because those people were described",
      "time yeah and also just add to that i think it's also important um when we are reading the quran or hadith especially these historical books especially in relation to race we have to understand how words was used in the 7th century arabian not in our modern context and especially even when we look at race similar to what professor brown said even when",
      "in america we've got the binary black white in other parts of the world they don't look at racism that way and oftentimes we project our own prejudices and biases when reading historical texts i think you have to kind of be careful with that and um quick story when i was studying in egypt i remember when i one of my acuters he would explain he was teaching me pre-islamic poetry and he was talking about how the way the arabs used to praise women and if they used to describe the women like a buck like cow",
      "a cow and i was like that's offensive he said no that's beautiful you know she's a cow okay that's the fence back you call woman account because again from a british context to call a woman a cow it's probably going to attack you then he was explaining he said okay wait just think with me okay imagine in the desert okay your sister down there's not much going around and then use a vision",
      "slowly look at the gate of a cow that picture of voluptuous woman oh i'll go ahead you understand the context so for them in that in that case it's actually a pretty the link of a cal to a woman in that context is actually appraisal everything but if you're taking it from a modern day western european or british context we automatically assume it's a negative and so maybe next question just quick comment on the cow issue",
      "But then like Maha is a name. The guy told me soon as it means water buffalo, water buffalo's even worse than cow right? You call women a water buffalo I imagine that's like another level of bad right but then and I have a picture to prove this they do have very beautiful eyes so the idea is a water Buffalo has a very beautiful eye so that's what you're actually complimenting them on",
      "Do you think there will be a book for other populations, i.e., Vikings, Chinese, Koreans? What's SEAs? Southeast Asians. Professor Brown, do you want to answer that? So do you think",
      "Someone's asking, do you think there'll be a similar book? I doubt it. Oh, I mean, I don't think... There's not a lot of anti-white racism. Like, you know, I've never seen like a tall blonde Norwegian person getting discriminated against that much. Maybe it happens, I dunno. Yeah, but it is interesting because so I was just looking at my hands during this talk. You know what's really entertaining is just like looking at",
      "It's like my skin color is not white. I don't know what this is. My hands are currently some kind of purple or pink. So, my point about this is imagine you're like a... Who came up with the idea of calling people white? The Romans. Okay. So white in Rome, albus, means basically Mediterranean Arab-y look. When Arabs call say white they mean someone who's got a Mediterranean type look.",
      "Look and that's actually shared with with Latin When Romans talked about people who look like whose hands are like mine or look at me they say pallidus They would say palliative. It means pallid or candid us different day. That's not white I'm not wait, I'm another thing And if you're if you come across imagine you're like you're an Arab You've been hanging out in the Mediterranean with Persians and you know Coptic Christians Everyone's got a really good tan. They've got great hair etc, etc",
      "They're like, you know, and you go to Ireland. Imagine you're there, and holy moly. What are you going to call people? They call them blue. They call him red because their hair is scraggly and ugly. They really got a grotesque. So I think it's interesting to think about. There was a time when people who were whatever white, Northern European, they were kind of weird looking",
      "to other people in the world. Can you take the next question? There's going to be more questions. Yeah, yeah. Next question. This question is for you. Could you elaborate on what colour the skin of the noble Prophet ﷺ was? There are a lot of seeming contradictions in the narrations. So, the main narrations that we see if we study the Shama'il and this was a book that Alhamdulillah I just finished studying",
      "recently so it's still fresh in my mind the most popular descriptions of the prophet sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam use the word abiyat which i explained earlier was not the white that we know today but it definitely wasn't um dark which was adam or aswad there are however there is a narration from anas bin malik who was the who was",
      "unique description but most of the other descriptions describing as being Abiyad with the main one in the Shama'in being that he wasn't Abiyyat Amhaq and he wasn´t Adam so Abiyyyat Amhaka means extremely light skin or extremely pale and then Adam according to like if we look at Ibn Mandur Al-Ithsan al Arab they say anything darker than Asmar is considered Adam. So I'm considered Asmar in Egypt you studied in Egypt, I don't know if you've been called Samra before",
      "of all the different variations according to the way that he's described by his companions. So yeah, do with that what you will, inshallah. So what was your code in Egypt again? Samra. He wasn't called black like me but I used to respond at a sharp tongue. Okay. So anyway, I've got a question for both of you. Is it on the board or not? It's on the floor.",
      "Other than women and blackness, what other groups do you think need to be uplifted in the Islamic tradition?",
      "from these groups and you feel as though you need to write a book, you should write a yeah I felt like i needed to write",
      "subscribe to it. They'll say that X people are the way they are because of their race, they'll say X people have a lower IQ because of race and they'll subscribe to them. They will act like these are scientific facts that are uncomfortable truths for other people. What were your experiences with scientific racism? And how do you respond to it from the perspective of deismic tradition? Good question. Professor Brown would answer this one first? You should go first. Okay.",
      "In terms of why that is the case within the Muslim community, it relates to what I said earlier in terms of for most of us even if we are Muslim, even if come from Muslim cultures, Muslim backgrounds, Muslim heritages or Muslim majority countries. We're all products of colonization and we're all product of Western education and we all are part of this global western monoculture that is formed by western academia",
      "this pseudoscience is a part of that academia so anybody who studied in school, anybody who has taken part in this global monoculture will have remnants of this with them. In terms of my personal experience I see certain things and i hear certain things like for example sometimes I'll speak or sometimes there'll be a video of me that I'll see online circulating and somebody would say oh wow he's so eloquent! And I'm thinking in my head",
      "I know why because you don't assume that somebody that looks like me would be able to speak English as well as I do or would be a able to articulate myself as well and not speak in particular dialects or whatever. I can speak all dialects of English if you see me outside of an academic setting, I'll be speaking English in a very different way If you see at home for example I come from ethnic group called the Creole who are descended from liberated Africans",
      "to Africa after the slave trade. So we have a specific dialect of English that we speak at home called Creole, that is unintelligible to most people who speak English and it's similar to Jamaican Patois. Any song I hear in Jamaican patois I can understand 100% and by proxy speak that as well. But I say all this to say you do see the remnants of it in thought but I feel like that's all the product of Western education essentially. And then also us as non-white people trying",
      "classify ourselves in the system that has been created by white supremacy. So for many of us, instead of trying to decolonize or deconstruct these concepts we try to say okay well let me get in where I can fit in so if white is up here and black is out here but I'm not 100% black I'm part Arab or I'm this or well I'm Asian so I'm closer to this than this and then you take on those inherent inferiority complexes",
      "them on other people as well because you're trying to, you know get as close to the hierarchy as you can or get far up in the hierarchy. As you can so I feel like it's all about kind of understanding the origins of these thoughts and then deconstructing them as a solution. I think people are just afraid of um you know they're afraid of losing what they have they're, afraid of world around them they can't understand or control it and so they they like you know",
      "just think about how they're somehow gonna be always on top because other people are incapable. It just comes out of insecurity and fear, and you know, if white people say this I think they need to hang out around more white people. Because I don't really understand like white supremacy that well because when I meet white people they have a lot of problems in America. Well, I don' want to get into it but",
      "you know, a lot of work on the different social problems they have. And you could say, oh, this is because of your... I mean, it's ridiculous. Or Jahid says something really interesting in the... You know, he dies in what? 255. It's like around 850s, 860s of the Common Era. People were saying to him, you know like, the Indians we meet and the black people we meet, Africans, they're not that smart. And he's like, yeah, you",
      "That guy was like some farmer that somebody grabbed out of his farm and stuck on a boat and brought here. And some Indian guys grabbed him out of this farm, right? And brought him here as a slave. We know that the Indians have all these mathematical formulas that we've been copying. We've been using their mathematics. He'll talk about for example, the eloquence of Ethiopians. We now about all these things that we respect the Ethiopian's for but you're not thinking about that. You're just thinking about",
      "that you happen to interact with here who are, surprise, surprise not some super well educated Indian or super well-educated Ethiopian who ends up here. A lot of these assessments are based on taking people who've been victimized or have their identity obliterated or like multi generation for two centuries have every chance at having a family or any stability obliterate it education obliterates and then you're like what's wrong with you? Why aren't you smart like me?",
      "like me. I mean, so the answers to this I think are well known and it's... The fact people don't accept it I think is just because they're deep down very insecure.",
      "ac yn ystod yr adegau traddodiadol, fel Ahmer a'r Berthynas Ym Mhob Dydd. Ac gyda'r cynydd o ffyrdd Llywodraeth Cymru, felly roedden ni wedi cael... Beth sy'n dod yn glir i mi yw bod yn bach yn rhaid i'r rhain ddi-goloniau hwn, ac mae'n bach i bawb arall, sef pobl sy'nglŷn â llwybr cân gwbl ond nid o'r rhyfelwyr Croceigiaidd honno, chi'n gwybod? Rheinio'r Rhain Gwlad. Mae gennych chi'r Llawer Bawys, sy'r Eustan Ewropeaidd,",
      "If you're Arab, if you're Asian it doesn't matter. If your skin colour is white you are still black and one of the things that came up during this whole Black Lives Matter thing was we're South Asian and my children say well we're brown where do the brown people fit into this? So I find it quite interesting in a sense that you know Mashallah we're talking about black people today and I just want to say that some of the best Muslims I've met",
      "jamaican or whatever we are and you know it's taking away from the nations and tribes that alaska panda has created yet i think at the same time we have that solidarity of being dumbed down because we were invaded and not given those opportunities and that we are all in a similar sort of place and i think it's really great you've done this today i'm not sure what my question is but it was a little bit kind of muddled in my head um",
      "And I think it's interesting when we think about this binary concept of being black and white, because there's something that we don't really see develop until the modern era in terms of blackness and whiteness as we know it today.",
      "dynamic rather than actual racial classification and so instead of looking at people phenotypically and describing them as black and white it becomes people become racialized. So you see for example why Anglo-Saxon Protestants are the ones that establish America and hold all the power in America? So when, for example Irish Catholics immigrate at first they're not considered white and then when you see Jewish East Americans,",
      "when you see Italians come and immigrate, they're not considered white. But then as things change and power dynamics change, they are given an opportunity to assimilate into whiteness and not be a part of the other. And so they start to assimilate into that white power structure. It's the same with the UK if we look in the UK in the 1960s there was a term that was called political blackness in which even people of South Asian descent would describe themselves",
      "black because they felt as though they were other than the white people and then when power dynamics changed that's when we start to see different categories develop of Asian and brown and all of these things so it's something that shows how arbitrary the concept of race actually is, because it's not a reality. It doesn't exist and I say the same thing about Africa to be honest. I don't feel like Africa as a concept exists because Africans before colonization never described themselves",
      "whatever tribe or ethnicity or kingdom that they were part of but then when Africa becomes a colonial project and there's the scramble for Africa and Europeans define what the boundaries of Africa is, that's when we start to see the identification of being African as being imposed on us and then we take it upon ourselves. As a Gambian personally as well for example, the Senegambia region is somewhere",
      "kind of look the same and we are the same people essentially but because the French took Gambia and the British took Senegal, we have this distinction in our heads now after colonisation of I'm Gambian, this person is Senegalese. If I trace my family back six generations, we were Senegalise and I have cousins that live in Senegal that are Senegalsees but their mum is from Gambia. Do you know what I mean? And so even with race, I think it's a similar concept. There are people who are racialised as black",
      "who are considered black that wouldn't consider themselves black in different contexts. Like one of the people quoted in a book, I think it was Ahmed Baba. Is it Ahmed Baba? He was from a tribe called the Sanhaja Berbers so he considered himself Berber as opposed to West African populations of traditional West African ethnic groups that he considered black but when he emigrated to Marrakesh to Morocco because he was dark-skinned and he came from West Africa",
      "as opposed to Moroccans but then when Moroccains travel to Europe in the Middle Ages they're racialized as being Moors and are grouped together with black people because they're all darker skinned and they're or Muslim so it changes according to society, according to power dynamics and it's not essentially a real thing. Yeah I think it's very important that you know I also appreciate what",
      "So why is it that in the late 19th century, Italians get lynched in America? There's lynchings of Italians. They're definitely not white, right? Irish, not white. Why is it all these groups start getting acknowledged as whites when in the 1920s and 30s,",
      "South start that's called the Great Migration. They go north to cities like Boston, Chicago and New York right? Suddenly there's all these black people around and then the anglosaxons are like okay you guys are all white we're all white now right because there's the other that they're really afraid of Why did political blackness fail in the UK literally it was a movement called political blacklist why did political Blackness fail In South Africa? Why did most of the Indians the majority of Muslim community even",
      "community even side with the apartheid regime because those in power know how to divide and conquer They say oh, well yeah. Okay you guys want to have this you guys all wanna be black okay? Well hey Indians Why don't you you know we'll get your own university you can go to these places black people can't go here and Suddenly some of them were like this isn't that bad a deal if you start to fragment the solidarity This is why there's a school of thought Called afro pessimism I discusses in my book",
      "is in my book. But one of the Afro-pessimist ideas is this idea of kind of blackness, political blackness solidarity is it's basically anti-blackness. Why? Because at the end of the day all these other groups they're going to leave. They're going get accepted. They are going to get their door prized and be happy. And they're all going to be standing on top of the floor of humanity which is blackness. Like the thing that allows people",
      "people to be alive and social and real, which is there's always this other at the bottom, which are racialized black bodies. So we have to be careful because if we start talking about sort of solidarity it's a great idea and I agree with you but it's also something that has consistently been fractured and has failed when people allow themselves to be bought off basically by those in power.",
      "of investment still goes, you know the new mosques and also going to predominantly Southeast Asian communities. And it's got to a point where black Muslims feel so marginalized that they've created their own Black Muslim Congress of South Africa which they had about three conferences so far in itself but there is just a point on... A question was around how do we approach texts",
      "sort of ancient Muslims, not ancient but the older Muslim scholars like Ibn Khaldun and that way. A lot of their works are used in modern day sciences and that, but when they comment about blacks and Africans could be found in modern-day racist texts as well. So how do we approach that? Good question. Go ahead.",
      "I think, you know, as far as I know we're kind of maybe unfairly criticizing even how doing here because sometimes people will say it's like oh look this Muslim geographer or historian says that there are these black people and they're like animals and they like pagans. They're naked. They are cannibals and that seems really racist but they're not talking about black people again",
      "Again, we just assume they're talking about black Africans. Like everybody. But they're taking about non-Muslims So if there's like a Black African tribe Let's say Hausa or Fulani right? And they are Muslim They're not included in that group You'll see people like Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Majid, Damascus All these great Muslim geographers and historians",
      "and historians, and sociologists will say like these people they're like they have extreme their rulers are extremely just. They're extremely wealthy. They are very good at praying. They re extremely fastidious about their prayers and Juma prayer. They memorize they're obsessed with memorization of the Quran all this stuff and then they'll say and then to the south there are these like black people that are more like animals than human beings and they're pagans. Theyre cannibals or naked",
      "forget that we just read descriptions of all these people that are literally this maybe even the same ethnicity because they're non-Muslim Fulani and they're Muslim Fulaini there's you know these as especially as these group become Muslim they basically get brought up into the world of like human beings or described as like oh these are great societies and they have you know their good sides and their bad sides it's always the people beyond the boundaries in the outside the abode of Islam who are",
      "So we shouldn't read these as descriptions or condemnations of all black Africans. They're very specifically of pagan groups.",
      "from a place of defense. Pan-Africanism, Afro-pessimism it seems to be a reactionary movement so when we look at examples of coalitions being formed between different groups as you said they all fell the rainbow coalition in Chicago with between the black panthers gay American homosexuals and the Mexicans seem to fail and fall apart as soon as Fred Hampton was assassinated",
      "still hold the transfer transformative power that it did when allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said the message because it seems like we're working from like this brotherhood we're",
      "we don't look at their race as being a reason as to why they're so fast. So, we've got implicit racism and racism changes in form. So accepting that reality does Islam hold the same transformative power or do we as black people need to find safety in Afro-pessimism?",
      "in Afro-pessimism, in Pan-Africanism because we as black people created these fields and we find safety within them. Because black is not pejorative in these spaces. We will not be stepped on or trampled upon by anyone else because we understand and legitimize ourselves through ourselves. I'm sorry, it's a long question but just like you said Professor, I think that's really what you said as well the comment to make a comment is really problematic",
      "concept of intersectionality. At this day and age I feel like I'm black more than a Muslim because those same Black House people that you just mentioned, the only distinguishing quality I have from them is that I am Muslim. So Ibn Khaldun would say, oh Mohammed, you're Muslim mashaAllah, you saw this, you see that but my house brother over there who's non-Muslim by virtue can be in polytheism, the true concept of black now comes forth. So would Ibn Khalidun say the same thing about me if I was non-muslim?",
      "yeah just some there are two questions for me reading ibn khaldun's works were traveling um and what i noticed from a number of the scholars is one of either two approaches in terms",
      "internalizing contempt model and the other is a resistance model an internalizing content model i will kind of describe that where you kind of internalize these kind of so-called prejudices or these so- called like black people being somewhat inferior but then you say oh my shadow buddy they're still a muslim or things like someone's pretty for a dancing girl or like what most of the people saying that even though you're black you're still intelligent on martial arts you were able to write this book so that's kind of a defense that i saw from some muslim scholars and even muslim speakers today",
      "speakers today in terms of trying to defend this kind of rhetoric and then you've got some other scholars like al-Jahid who was for me very inspirational he's very unapologetic. Some people say he went over the line but he wasn't trying to seek validation approval from even his other Muslim Arabs Persians or what have you and that's kind of what inspires me and that is where I see what the brother was saying my blackness and me still being a muslim so again whatever works",
      "Ibn Khadun said, respect to scholars. May Allah have mercy upon him and elevate his rank in paradise inshallah. Anything that anyone says other than the messenger of Allah if it doesn't go in line with what the Quran and the Prophet said you can ignore it. So I don't need to seek approval from every single statement a scholar says so that's how I look at it. But I think as Muslims sometimes we look at scholars as if they're somewhat infallible but they're human beings they are products of their environment some things that they say some what scholars have said not only about black people",
      "not about black people, but women is horrific. I'm not going to try and justify or say it's this and that. No, it's wrong and I don't agree with it. I can maybe try and rationalise it and understand where the person was coming from, but i'm not waiting for this person to see my humanity. And I'll go with people and listen to people who make me feel human and acknowledge my culture, acknowledge my race and then obviously you've got the message of Allah who will transform you. So when you're saying in order to... Is Islam a transformative religion?",
      "transformative religion. If you are reading the Quran, if you're reading the seerah of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him and his early companions it will transform your life. That's my personal belief now if you are looking for guidance from those who maybe look at you as less than then you might find it quite difficult that's kind of my personal perspective on it. Yeah my perspective on is well is that when we speak about Islam We like to kind of conceptualize Islam as this institution that has always existed in the same form and the same way from the beginning",
      "from the beginning of the religion until today. And we do know that the Prophet was given the complete religion, Allah tells us that he has completed the deen for us and made it but the way that the deem manifests itself in different times and different places changes. There's an aspect of the deeam that is stable and it doesn't change then there's an aspects of the Deen that is constantly reinterpreted over time",
      "the secret in why the Prophet ﷺ was given the final religion because it's a religion that's adaptable to every time and place, not that it stays the same in every time or place. So for example when we speak about Islam in the time of the Prophet there are no books of hadith, there is not even a book of the Qur'an, there's no book you can gather together in your hands and say this is the Qur-an they only have the Prophet. And the Qur-'an came through him he was reciting words that's what they knew as Qur'aan",
      "Quran. He was speaking to people, that's what they knew as hadith. He telling people do this and don't do this, that is what they know as fiqh but when the Prophet ﷺ is no longer there it was up to the people now to say okay well how do we preserve the command of Allah to obey him and his messenger? How do we preserves the Quran and differentiate it from the speech of the Prophet? That's when you start to see scholars develop the science of Hadith, develop the",
      "Aqidah even, everybody talks about aqidat. It's so important to know that the word aqida was never mentioned by the Prophet. But when we have interaction with the Eastern Roman Empire and different philosophies in different ways of thinking and Greek philosophy people had to say well the Greeks classify being as this they classify human nature as this",
      "Muslims what is our response from the Quran and the Sunnah that's when the scholars now start to develop Ilm al Kalam, the science of speaking about these realities and then they developed Aqidah to preserve the spirit of the Quran in the Sunna. And so as every age appears every age with its own challenges and his own rhetoric and it's own phenomenon that need",
      "Sunnah. So I would say Islam does still have that transformative power if there are scholars and people who are willing to engage with the Quran and the Sunnah, and manifest it in a way that approaches the phenomenon of the time and interacts with the phenomenon at the time in the spirit of the Prophet, which is why we have a hadith where the Prophet says at the beginning of every Qan, every age Allah will send someone",
      "has changed or needs to be changed but it's that the society is changed and so it needs to have a renewed interpretation for the age, the day and age that we live in and the unique challenges that we're facing. So for example you can't go to a 14th century scholar for answers about how to interact with artificial intelligence and AI because it didn't exist they don't even have a concept of that. You can't",
      "for that you need someone that's in your time who understands the phenomenon of the time understands what's going on understands the conditions that people find themselves in and then can go to the quran go to sunnah and find answers and solutions and a manifestation of islam that doesn't stray from the religion but fits into the religion and that's why when we look at the hadith about bid'ah as well it's very interesting because there are certain groups within islam",
      "But they don't ever talk about the fact that The Quran itself in a book is a bida Praying on prayer mats Having rugs in the masjid Is a bina Using a microphone to give a khutbah is a bidah So they differentiate between different types of bidah As this is a good bidah and this is bad bidah If they realise it or if they don' t So when the Prophet SAW says Whoever innovates something into the religion People don't complete the hadith He says whoever innovates Something into the region that is not of it Will have it rejected",
      "rejected but it's up to the scholars, the people of knowledge and they exist in every age and always exist in time. And the Prophet guaranteed that there will be people of guidance in his ummah who can not to say reinterpret the religion but manifest the religion in a way that deals with the problems of their era so it is transformative if we use it in the way that it's supposed to be used",
      "I'm not really qualified to answer this question. I'm like an egghead. If they even go to protests, the second anyone blows a whistle or something, I'm going to get out of here. So I'm... Not a good authority on these things. But Islam is transformative to me. And when you said that the difference between you and your house of brothers, the only difference is you're Muslim, that's a big deal! That means a lot.",
      "It meant a lot to someone like Ibn Khaldun. So they also didn't know anything beyond the boundaries of their world, you know? So that's why they're dismissive. I mean, I think if he had more exposure to them, he wouldn't say this kind of thing. But it's just like the medieval world where they think there's sea monsters out in the ocean and just don't know what's going on there. OK, then next is anyone else. Can I just answer that?",
      "Thank you. Iman, Inner City Muslim Action Network, I think. IMAN, yeah.",
      "For those who want to learn more about blackness and Islam. We've got it right here. No, I would get... And Habib Akande's Illuminating the Blackness. These two books accomplished what I intended, but they've done it because I kind of wanted to look at what Dr Brown was asking about his Islam and anti-black religion which he comprehensively has done.",
      "some inspirational figures from our past and contemporary history in terms of kind of like inspire inspired people men and women they're like and that's what was done so that's why i definitely would recommend these two books if you want um another good recommendation dr sherman jackson's a brilliant book um islam and the problem with black suffering so for it's very academic and it's not as easy to read like dr brown's book but in terms",
      "idea that God or Allah supports black oppression. It is a very brilliant book that I can definitely recommend. Can I add to that? Yeah, yeah. So in this book the Islam and Blackness book by Professor Brown he does have an extensive list of all the other books that deal with this topic traditional books and modern books so he highlights all of the books that have been written in Arabic by",
      "more contemporary books like my book, Habib Akande's book, many of the other scholars. So you do have a very extensive list here so if you do grab this one from this one you can then branch to all the other ones and kind of create your start up back and get beyond below. The next question someone asked was are there any writings on Islam and blackness in the Ottoman context?",
      "I haven't come across any, maybe Professor? So by Ottoman do you mean like metropolitan Ottoman Istanbul Balkans area",
      "There is a book I came across a couple of weeks ago called Dispelling the Darkness. Forgive me if anyone speaks Turkish, but I'm not going to butcher this word. The Han-Birdes Treaty, A Comparative Look at Black Africa in Ottoman Letters in the Early Modern Period. And there's a couple",
      "um yeah i mean it's also if you're talking about kind of the ottoman metropolitan istanbul constantinople i think that's probably the best one but remember the ottomans empire is you know really big so there's a lot of a lot",
      "scholars in the 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, 20th century in Egypt and the Hejaz which are at that time all you know Ottoman areas.",
      "That's my... that's what people call me. Yeah, go ahead.",
      "What did you make of it? You were to address the non-Muslim white society at large. Are you comfortable or happy with the black community? Yeah, interesting question. So one of my students who graduated is supposed to come and he's white but he didn't show up. He said he wanted to make sure there was one white person here. He's not here.",
      "here um i don't have to talk to him about this but uh i i don' t know i mean like i didn't actually didn't know what to expect in the audiences here um I thought it was going to get yelled at more so I'm honestly so far pretty happy with that. Um, I don't know like I think",
      "They don't know about this stuff or they're actually racist or they feel really bad about like, they feel kind of really guilty being white and they sometimes like beat themselves up maybe too much about that. But I don't no, I think it's just so I don' t know if they are interested I'm always happy to talk to anybody about this subject but",
      "I mean, it's a slightly different question but it comes to mind as being important. Like you know, I've been treated...I have traveled throughout the Muslim world and I get treated like royalty, you know? And it really breaks my heart when I see... You know, one time I was in this scholarly event and there was this really famous scholar from Syria and he was sitting up on the front of the room",
      "young scholars and I was one of them. And this one guy who's way more knowledgeable than me, spent so long studying in Syria probably always wanted to meet the scholar who is up there on stage. They just picked me and put me up next to the scholar and then I looked at an audience. He didn't look at me...my friend didn't even look at my face in a bad way. It felt so bad. There was no...he really should have been up there. You know you feel...I feel bad that",
      "bad that um like someone could say oh well it's important because you know how to communicate to white people or something but at the same time i feel really lousy that um that people who are you know i go to muslim countries or something and i get treated better than other people who really deserve to be treated better",
      "What did I do? I mean, at the time, I was 25 years old. I was terrified and I just sat there. That's actually an interesting question, right? Because let's say I'm like, you know, you really should bring up this other guy.",
      "Then what if that's like really embarrassing for everybody to organize it or something? I don't know. Maybe that was the right thing to do. I don' t know, I'm not sure. Like I would have liked... But then I don´t know. I am not sure what happens if my friend actually you know like dropped a bag of dog poop on this guy's porch or something once and he doesn't like him. I have no idea like you know I just don't",
      "possibilities but so I don't know. But, I mean that's an interesting question. I think today I try to bring this up like I try always make sure that you know if I'm being invited somewhere that it's either because I actually am the best person to do that or not then I really encourage people to bring others who wouldn't get the same attention",
      "Okay, we've got a couple more questions and then we'll wrap up. But if you can try to keep our answers quite brief. How do we give blackness its own merit whilst also recognising its nuance? What marks out someone as black is not solely tied to skin colour? If a brief answer from me would be literally blackness",
      "the culture or the society that you're in, or you're engaging with defines it as. And so it is very nuanced because there's no strict definition of it. It's something that changes from society to society, from place to place. So you just have to look at the context in which you are in. What does it mean to be black in that society? Who is racialized as black as who isn't? Like I remember I had an interesting debate with my sister-in-law.",
      "African American and Native American. And then her mother is mixed white and Mexican, so she looks very light-skinned, she could pass as Arab, she's like racially ambiguous, and so is her sister. So I was talking to her sister one day about something, and she said to me, yeah but you know, you won't understand because you're not black. And I looked at her, I'm like what do you mean I'm not black? I'm blacker than you! She said no no no, you're African, it's different. Where I come from if",
      "you're descended from African Americans who were enslaved and even if your one drop, you're still black. He's like so I'm black, you are not black. Which flipped my whole perception of what it means to be black but in her context that's what being black meant and I wasn't a part of that whereas in my context growing up in England I am black and she is mixed or she is a laity or whatever do you know what I mean? So it's like you have to look at where...who you're engaging with",
      "with what their paradigms are and then kind of go off that. Thank you. Professor Brown, anything to add? I think you spoke about your opinion in the passage from the book. Next question. What are your opinions on monotheism being a source of unification between races? Is this notion valid? Yes, it's valid. I think it's... It should be.",
      "That's my brief answer. The next question is, this is probably for the organisers, is this session going to be recorded? Probably. Was it recorded? Yeah. Will it be made available? That's the question. Any more questions from... I'm trying. Anymore questions?",
      "What is the Islamic position on reformations, if any?",
      "So it's really bizarre, right? I know how to do reparations for Muslim slavery. Go to Egypt and Syria and Tunisia and Jordan and Turkey. Find the lightest skinned people you can and give them a bunch of money. Explain. Give them context before you get cancelled.",
      "The elites of the Ottoman Empire, some parts going back to the 1500s but definitely especially in the Mediterranean area like 1700-1800s. Their moms and mothers are Circassian concubines. Explain what's a Circassia. They're people from the Caucasus so they're all Circassians, Georgians...",
      "literally caucasian and those so is it ever wondered why like the elite people in egypt or jordan or syria they're all like they have their really light skin they have you know straight hair they don't that arab that's because their multiple generations of their mothers are uh slave concubines from europe from yeah",
      "Slavic so They would that's a good way to get people who are descendants of slaves but the reason I bring it up is it's kind of like a You know ironic right, which is that? It's a really different situation than the Americas very different situation So I think you have to like think about reparations very differently from the very beginning and it also plays into",
      "that needs to be brought to the fact that slavery in the Islamic world wasn't specifically racialized towards black people. There were a higher amount or just as much an equal amount. So, in the time of the Prophet ﷺ for example we have instances of African slaves people who were enslaved such as Bilal and his mother etc but the majority of the slaves in the Arabian Peninsula were other Arabs that were captured in war and enslaved by fellow Arabs then when we see",
      "Islamic Empire under Sayyidina Omar bin al-Khattab etc. into the Eastern Roman Empire and into the Persian Empire, many of the people that are enslaved are in fact Romans and Persians so we see for example even Imam Zain Al Abideen who's the son of Imam Hussein the grandson of the Prophet his mother was reported to have been a princess from Persia but when the Persian empire was defeated she was captured, enslaved he purchased her, he freed her",
      "her and he married her. And that was a tradition in slavery, and if we look at the Abbasid period and then the Ottoman period many of the rulers, many of elite people were people who their fathers were wealthy Arabs or wealthy people in society who had these children with enslaved European women and enslaved white women and that's why the kids ended up getting lighter and lighter because as he said it was generations of them getting a slave from Russia or a slave",
      "or that place, having children with them and then continuing. So slavery wasn't racialized in the same way that it was in the States, in the Muslim world. It was equal opportunity slavery. Final very quick question. Again, just for the benefit of anyone who's joined late, so Islam and Blackness and Beyond the Land are available outside the school? Yes, I definitely recommend each and every one of you buy two copies. Oh, and we can sign them, right? I've been signing a lot of books.",
      "I've been signing a lot of books lately. Yeah, so you can sign them at five pounds and they'll be donated. I highly recommend that each and every one of you try to purchase one or two copies. And just the last question before I bring up Bob Atman. How could we eradicate anti-blackness? Other than purchasing your book, what advice would you give? Miscegenation.",
      "Miscegenation. Yes, we need to have intermarriage. That's why that's my... Well first of all mosques need to partner so the rich Desi mosque needs a partner with America like the black mosque and they need to barbecue stuff together and hang out their kids get to know each other they get married racial problem solved.",
      "You said other than purchase the book. Other than purchasing the book, read it and purchase it for other people and just pass it on inshallah. That's my solution.",
      "And I can emphasize on buying the books from here and not from Amazon for various reasons. Amazon has ethical issues, but by buying the purchasing books from the iTrustee bookstore you benefit not only us but also the speakers so that you support them to make this a full-time profession so that they can teach us and also write books on the topic continuously So I want to talk about on topical racism",
      "A couple of days ago there were some protests organised by the far right at an asylum venue where there was violence. We foresee the rise of far-right across the world, whether it's in Europe and Latin America or in Asia, wherever you see hate and racism on the rise. I want to highlight the work that we do with the Islamic Human Rights Commission.",
      "people in the room here who are trained immigration solicitors, who specialize in supporting individuals who have a precarious immigration status to become regularized in the UK. Now imagine a world, imagine a well these three speakers, these ustaz our teachers were forced to migrate may Allah preserve them and protect them from such situation but",
      "has erupted and they had to relocate. And the new place, a new place that we've gone to, they were forced not teach, not write, not lecture at universities but to become a cleaner, not be able to produce the works they're producing now. The work that we have done at the Islamic and Human Rights Commission, we've seen how many people, countless people come to us with qualifications such as doctors and lawyers and engineers who are here in the UK",
      "of the immigration status they're not able to apply their skills to this country there's a case that I want to talk about a story that has touched me ever since I've come across his brother and I think truly if I've ever met a body of Allah this guy is a body above all and I'll tell you why this brother was introduced to us he has a large family from Indonesia struggling with finances",
      "and I was doing some research for UCL on food poverty in the UK. And I was interviewing his family, and at the time his wife had given birth, lost a child, so we got talking. And...I asked my brother, So tell me about your situation with food poverty? He goes, I am not allowed to work because of my immigration status, I don't get a job anywhere",
      "And the situation has come that when my wife was pregnant, she is so malnourished. The lack of iron in her system has meant that she miscarriages the child but also her strength in her body has so diminished that she was bedridden for months. For months because they weren't able to afford red meat or anything that's high in iron and that made me think about the time of Umar ibn al-Khattab",
      "and where people had come to Medina because there was no food. And Umar ibn Khattab said that, because of the poverty of the people who have come to my city I will stop eating meat myself. And it is reported that Umar's skin color has changed because of a lack of meat in the system. He goes on to tell me this brother that his accommodation he was staying at he was subletting illegally so that he can make some money out of it",
      "money out of it and he's able, he's got a roof over his head. And the local mosque that he goes to there was one brother who was distressed in the corner so he got talking to him and asked him, brother what's up you know how can I help you? He realized that this brother is a British citizen out of a job and for some reason or another he's going to get kicked out of his house by his family. He said brother don't worry i'll help you. So literally couple of days he went down",
      "you can find in alleyways, and he actually built, he actually had built a shed in his garden. And I sat in that shed where I was interviewing him for the research. And that shed was fully equipped with heating and electricity and it was comfortable. So he moved this brother into his house. He was giving him shelter. He gave him food. Now when I asked him what food he was eating, he said the children they were eating the food were rice and maybe some curry to go with it.",
      "did you eat? He said that anything that was left over we would eat. Sometimes we'd eat nothing, we'd skip meals. We literally would skip meals and he then he said that I always used to leave a portion for this brother who's living in the shed and this brother used to preach to him saying that brother you don't work hard enough, you should go get a job, you",
      "that he should have given to his wife so she can recover and regain her strength I can go on about this brother truly I think this guy is the Wali of Allah because of one incident he tells me about He said, one of his eldest son who studied in a madrasa in Darul Ulum up north because he couldn't afford to keep their son at home he was going to the madrasah and the university or college or madrasas were asking him for fees",
      "and he just couldn't afford it. And it got to a point where the madrasa had said, look we are gone beyond our patience so we have to reject this boy who's becoming a scholar of Islam but you can't afford to pay for him. So him and his wife said let's make dua to Allah. And literally they were both turned and making dua to allah. And then a few minutes later on top of the wardrobe they saw something glittering",
      "he realised there was some jewellery that was given to him. It was imitation jewellry, that was give by the next door neighbour and said look my wife just passed away I've got no use of these items please take it your children will play with them He thought nothing of it, put it away in a corner until this moment when he realized he'd got some imitation jewellery so he calls his brother up and says can you go to a local shop where you can get money out of it? He's too afraid to go out and about because he fears he might be caught",
      "police or authorities and be sent away. And then his wife and his children will be left destitute. So this brother goes to the shop, to the pawnshop and found out that they're actually gold. They were actual gold. He ended up getting 3,500 pounds for it. 3, 500 pounds. So he comes back and he said look, you know I was about to say his name. He said, I've just found, this is real gold",
      "He said, I just need £2,000 for the fees for this madrasa. The remaining you can take because you've been trained to raise funds so they can give dawah in certain countries. Because he was a tablighi brother. He wasn't even greedy for the money. And...",
      "to regularize the status because they don't have the funds, they don' t have the expertise and in most cases they are exploited. They will go to dodgy solicitors and exploit them. And I am not making this up. I am NOT making this UP. I've had sisters come to me and said that these solicitors were charging me extortionate fees and only way I could pay for it was by selling myself. Not making this",
      "And these sisters were going from mosque to mosque, asking for support and being turned away. Literally being turned way. Most mosques in this country don't even accommodate Muslim prayer facilities for our sisters. No matter if that was your sister or your daughter or mother or grandmother. So please, if you visit our website, you can see the work we do when it comes to racism and immigration.",
      "When I was sitting here right at the front, I saw these pillars. These pillars here. And I was doing some research for IHRC in Mexico. I was looking at the migration crisis. The person that took me to this place said there's a train that travels all the way through Mexico into America. It's called the Monster. It is a massive train that takes passengers and goods and whatnot.",
      "jump on this train so that they can get a free ride across Mexico. But there are some spots where, where they can jump off and get some food and then try to jump out or jump on the next train. Well what the authorities have done at spots where these individuals were jumping off, they had built pillars like this So that what happened is that when they're trying to jump off they get hit on the pillar",
      "end up falling onto these pillars, breaking their arm, dying, children dying sometimes children left behind on trains, father and mother separated husband and wife separated etc. This hate goes on and on and it's created a reality where we just ignore the plight of migrants and migrants from Muslim communities especially the sisters who are having to sell themselves",
      "who have worked with us, who have come across these cases. These aren't seldom cases. They are common cases that we're having to deal with. So please brothers and sisters, we take your zakat and sadaqah. I'm not asking for you to give your funds to us today but just come here to raise awareness of the work Islamic Human Rights Commission does. JazakAllah khair. As-salamu alaykum"
    ]
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    "text": [
      "Hello everyone and welcome to Blogging Theology. Today I'm delighted to talk again to Jonathan Brown, you're most welcome back sir. Hi, welcome in Salaam alaikum to everybody and it's nice to be back although it's funny because i just saw you in person in London we did now we're talking like no i don't even know if it's 20 maybe 24 hours later",
      "later now I'm in Washington DC and not I think embarrassed because we had an English sort of an English breakfast together yet vegan bacon vegan bacon these two strips of something it's not going on my list of best breakfast but you know what that's the point was it was not about the food no but I've been embarrassed you got American coming to London and what do you get he got this is why my view is disgusting vegan back",
      "But, you know, actually I went to Slough and they have a place called like Kashmiri Cafe. It's a big building, actually. It is kind of a big build with the park around it. And they had... Actually, the guy was kind of he was like, oh, you think you're going eat all this? But I ordered full English breakfast and then a Kashmri breakfast. They were both individually too big to eat on their own",
      "their own. And so I, you know, I was really struggling, but it was delicious. So I had a delicious halal English breakfast. So you don't have to worry about that. No, the food was definitely halal, although questionable integrity. Anyway, we're going to go there. It was good to see you yesterday. We had a fascinating conversation. But back to today, for those who don't know, Jonathan Brown is a professor and our lead bin Talib chair of Islamic civilization in",
      "at Georgetown University in Washington. Is it Washington, D.C., where you are now? Yep. Yep, cool. He's the author of the following books, Slavery and Islam. There we are. This is a classic work, very seminal work. And this one, misquoting Muhammad, The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy. If you've got any non-Muslim friends, I think that's a particularly good introduction to the subject. One of my favorites is his second edition",
      "in the medieval modern world because your phd is in the subject and this is your ph.d i think uh canonization of al-bukhari muslim the formation and function of the sunni hadith canon so um i recommend all those it's actually written also the uh the very short introduction to muhammad i think it's called in the oxford university very short production series which again is really great for a general reader who doesn't know anything about islam",
      "So that may not be an exhaustive list of all your books, but those are the ones I've read anyway. That's all. That is all. I've heard all your book. Now Jonathan has kindly agreed today to discuss his critically acclaimed new book. Yes there's another one titled here we go Islam and Blackness. And what a striking cover that is. I think it's a very brilliant cover book cover actually.",
      "very positive reviews indeed uh on the back cover one for example from imam zay shakir who's a professor emeritus now obviously tuna college another and other scholars as well and i just want to read uh just briefly what the dust jacket says on the inside front cover about the book i assume the publisher wrote this rather than you um oh i i wrote it oh you did okay i think they say",
      "on the inside of the dust jacket and then i write it for them they may check it and say you know this makes i mean they may it may some person might write when it's lousy and they don't use it but they've always used the ones i sent them so yeah now yeah this is uh about you though so it's in the third person um it's commonly claimed you you're right or it says that islam is anti-black even inherently bent on enslaving black africans western",
      "is in the face of very scriptural foundations and its traditions of law, spirituality and theology. But what is the basis for this accusation? Best-selling scholar Jonathan A.C. Brown examines Islamic scripture, law, Sufism and history to comprehensively interrogate",
      "origins in conservative politics, modern Afrocentrism and the old trope of Barbary enslavement. That's a particularly common one on the Internet I noticed he explains how anti black blackness arose in the Islamic world and became entangled with normative tradition from the imagery of blackened faces in the Koran to Sharia assessments or black women as undesirable",
      "Africa, this work provides an in-depth study of the controversial knot that Islam and blackness is. It identifies authoritative voices in Islam's past that are crucial for combating anti-black racism today.\" So that's the book, Islam and Blackness, the subject of our discussion. I wrote all of that except Beth Selling author Jonathan Browne. I probably just wrote,",
      "and then they just added that thank you for your honesty there yeah you didn't write that bit um so just something we need to get we need is it clear the decks on this first john if i may some people might have an issue with the fact that a white guy you uh has written a book titled islam and blackness and i know there's something that came up recently when you were in london a couple days ago at so i think",
      "of your book immediately actually what is your response I mean yeah I've heard this a lot mm-hmm I understand people I'm not angry at people for having this criticism it's just that I don't think that it has anything to do with the book like I mean the if our writing a book about you know experiences",
      "kind of getting into like the defined grains or dynamics of anti-black racism in the modern world. Like, you know maybe my being a white guy is probably not helpful or it doesn't give me some kind of perspective that I need but this book is about... It's a book of Islamic intellectual history really. I mean, it's a about how Muslim scholars over 1400 years dealt with texts and society interacted",
      "Muslim scholars dealt with their own legal and normative traditions in surrounding questions of race and color in their society. So it's really... Yeah, I mean, I just wonder if I were a Black Muslim in the US,",
      "I think that contradicts basically all the established understandings of race, which say it's not some kind of essential thing that exists throughout time and space. But rather,",
      "and space but rather it's socially constructed. So I think that the criticisms are kind of, I mean, I understand someone's criticism if they think this is a book about being black and Muslim or about how challenges of being black Muslim, but this is A book about the interaction between Islamic normative tradition. Let me just make sure my computer is not ping every couple minutes focus okay do not disturb.",
      "So, but you know that's not what the book is about. The book is it's about and we're I mean the funny thing is like We're all Foreigners to the past so none of us is from in the past Yes, if the past is foreign to all of us. Yes, I think I think it's interesting to think about like what these questions assume about the work and also I mean not to be kind of a pain about this But someone could say well your books called Islam blackness or you know where you know",
      "you know we have concerns about this okay that's fine i understand i don't expect people to read the book but you know there is the blurb that you just read which tells you what the book is about which i think that if i read this i think they would it would not um yeah probably make sense why you could have um you know uh someone who's not like a black muslim today writing it um so but i would also say that you know i mean i might as well also use this opportunity to say why i wrote the book it wasn't like i",
      "I you know, it wasn't like I woke up one day and I said hey You know, I really want to write about Islam blackness or something. I mean this was in fact when I wrote the slavery book The song and slavery book people would ask me oh, you know you should write You know you could write kind of a book on Islam and race or something and I sent away I mean I thought I'm not crazy. I'm gonna do that. Mm-hmm but what happened was in the summer of 2020 there is this debate which actually I found out later is",
      "actually a recurring debate in some circles about that where some scholars like actual professors in the US, in academia were saying that Islam had its scriptural foundations and the Quran, the Sunnah of the Prophet, right? The normative tradition of Islam is itself anti-black. Not you know Muslims are racist or something but actually the scriptural foundation's normative are anti black. Yeah. So I kept getting these",
      "these emails forwarded to me from by our questions people my friend you know colleagues asking me like hey you know there's this debate going on and someone's bringing up this hadith in this quranic verse and this thick opinion and do you have any do you Have any responses to this I'm trying to figure out how to respond And I was like oh okay interesting so I just kind of I was Like okay, I'll look at it, and I'll try and send you helpful information Hmm then I started to actually look into it. I was well This is actually really interesting and then I",
      "started to in order to answer those questions i had to look at other issues that was raised other questions issues of context and history came up and so before i knew it i had a book on my hands when that's how yeah yeah so it happened almost not accidentally but you hadn't yeah it actually was it was entirely accidental right yeah it was something where i i didn't think um yeah it",
      "I didn't intend really to do it. It kind of came up. You do write books that tend to address these popular misconceptions or misunderstanding about Islam, obviously slavery and Islam being one. And this one, I know you told me before, you didn't choose the title of this, Misquoting Muhammad. This is with reference to Bart Ehrman's Misquoten Jesus. But, you know, you do push back against misunderstandings in this book as well on Hadith. So you do have a history of really tackling some of these red button issues as they arise in our culture,",
      "arise in our culture, even though you're not looking for them. They tend to find you perhaps. I mean, I think that I think what it is is that I'm like I'm Muslim and I mean when I come across these questions as you know, I also have these questions right? So someone when I see these hadith or a fake opinion that used to be really shocking in the context of blackness. Uh I mean I also want to know what's going on so I mean i sort of I think maybe one of the reasons I do this is that II am a member of",
      "Curious readers want to know. I'm a curious reader, I wanna know the answers to these things as well. No that's fair enough. You touched on this briefly but my next question is what is the argument of your book? In fact you have a section of your books. What is the arguments of your work? So I actually have a session in all my books called The Argument of This Book",
      "so if you really don't want to read the book this section and it will tell you everything or we'll give you a summary but take everything I'd give you very very brief summary yes yeah okay so I'm gonna read it it's it's its is two pages exactly yeah what page is it again look I remember where there's age three and page page 3 to 5 but it's okay though",
      "Blackness is most distinctly understood as racism directed against people of Sub-Saharan African descent. Stereotypes about real or imagined black Africans are nearly as old as historical records from ancient Rome to medieval China, however these stereotypes rarely stood out markedly in societies that were often cosmopolitan and where skin color played a less important role than other markers of identity. The notion that the rights and standings",
      "determined by that racialization became pervasive only in the early modern period with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade and Europe's powerful colonial states. The understanding of race, sorry, the understandings of race and blackness that formed in the West, particularly the United States have profoundly shaped global discourse. They have forced a dualistic template of black and white onto social terrains from Mali to Karachi which are often too dissimilar or complex",
      "as skin tone and blackness is metaphor. Neither has aesthetic preference always entailed judgment of human worth. Not all descriptions of color is a prescription of value in the West Islam Muslims have been particularly singled out as anti-black an accusation emanating from a centuries old Western stereotype of Muslims as slavers, as well as from contemporary American conservative culture on political agendas. Anti-blackness is rampant in much of the Muslim world North Africa to South Asia",
      "Africa to South Asia. It causes real pain that goes unrecognized, but it does not originate in Islam scriptures or its system of law and ethics. Islamic civilization inherited stereotypes about black Africans from the Greco-Roman conviction that climate shaped both body and personality, and from Judeo-Christian lore about Africans being cursed with blackness and enslavement. Though prominent Muslim scholars oppose these ideas as antithetical",
      "The Sufi tradition, however, inverted this image using it to represent the saints journey from earthly subjugation to liberation through union with the divine. And it portrayed the black African as the pious and devout slave of God who taught",
      "who taught and inspired his or her social betters. In Islamic law, particularly norms around marriage when the correlation of blackness with low status and undesirability was recognized it was as a social reality that law had to manage not as a norm for it to protect. Whether in Islamic law or how Black Africans have been perceived in other genres of Islamic scholarship anti-blackness has been incidental, not essential.",
      "recognized that what blackness meant, whether it was attractive or unappealing ended on where when and who is perceiving it. Negative stereotypes about Black Africans in Muslim writings on geography and ethnology were often mirrored by stereotypes about Slavs and Turks. And the association of blackness with slavery and primitiveness including in the writings of many Black Muslims from the Sahel ultimately turned not on phenotype but on their locating blackness beyond the southern boundaries of the abode of Islam.",
      "of Islam. Whether anti-blackness was incidental or accepted as social customs, however, leading voices of Muslim scholarship from medieval to modern times have rejected it and advocated vigorously for the Prophet's teachings that no race or tribe has any inherent value over another. As judges, jurists, and moral guides, Muslim scholars have had to balance a realistic accommodation of custom with their duty to enjoin right as heirs of the Prophets. In light",
      "It is clear that their duty as moral guides must be to promote and ratio of the color line That's in that section yeah, very eloquent. I just noticed something in terms of the way you Express yourself in this is that the word black itself? Sometimes they were like black African is capitalized The capital being capital a but other times you have a small B when the word Black is what was the logic here in switching from",
      "capital to non-capital when you're using the word black? Yeah, so there's a lot of actually writing and debate around this in various academic fields in the US. Primarily in the context of Africana studies in the kind of Atlantic world. So the debate is that black can mean different things.",
      "say you know like this book cover is black like that's just a color descriptor right um if i say that uh you know um a person is black well now i mean i've never actually met anyone whose skin was actually exactly there's always struck me as this whole language of black and white but look at you",
      "So when we use it to talk about people's features, now we're getting kind of into more of a realm of figurative description and also not just that but inscription. Right? For example, in a lot of languages in Africa south the Sahara if you ask someone what color is your skin in your language they'll say black right? And that doesn't... That's such a description for them.",
      "them doesn't mean anything but when you say you know when a british person or an american person says someone's black or an arab person says one's black uh there is also other um kind of connotations about that they come through history right in addition this is also very important right if you're like herodotus you know we know the famous greek historian from um",
      "yeah uh oh my god he's not from miletus he's died for about he's from um it's today it's bodrum heliconassus yeah so he and when he talks about um ethiopians being like black he also says indians are also black so for him blackness this is actually not uncommon in the kind of greco-roman tradition but also in the pre",
      "It also includes like people who are very dark skin toned in southern India, for example. Yeah so it's it doesn't this is important right? So when we say black in modern you know kind of European linguistic traditions and we're using it as a color to describe someone's phenotype their presentation their physical appearance. We also it's not just their skin color right?",
      "feature is, features are. So there's all these kind of stereotypical phenotype ideas that come along with saying someone's black. So that's becoming suddenly a lot more complicated than just saying the color black of this book. And so the question is do we want to put a capital letter there to show that we're not... This is no longer just a neutral kind of normal",
      "about race and ethnicity and value in history and power into it. Then you take another step, which is that some people will know it's very common to find this among scholars in Africana studies that black can also mean for example if I say it's actually interesting my friend giving me a ride to the airport yesterday is British Muslim his family is from Zambia okay yeah I actually saw you walking past with him",
      "walking past with him to the car actually so he um when he went uh to visit his family members in Zambia they said you're not yeah uh you're, not black you're white. They said to him it's nothing to do with his skin color they meant like culturally you're",
      "like the word they use for white foreigners right so it was really funny because someone's telling him he's not black right but in the uk he's always being told he's black yeah so the reason why is for uh some people and this includes by the way some you know scholars and activists in let's say a black american culture or anti-race anti-racism activism",
      "Black with a capital B isn't, is really for it's not for people in Africa from Africa. It's for people who are part of this diaspora community that had the experience of enslavement of being taken away of growing up in these kind of almost like Creole communities that have different cultural and racial kind of inputs into them in the 400 years or so since the, or four even 500 years",
      "years of the atlantic slave trade and the european enslavement of africans and then exploitation of their labor in the americas and then the growth of community of these diaspora communities in the american right so in this case black would mean uh so someone would you remember when president president obama was there were these debates about whether obama is black or not what the heck is this i thought i thought he was black um but the idea is",
      "The idea is he some people would say he's not black because he doesn't share. His father was from Kenya, you know, his mother was white. His mother was what? The idea that he doesn' have shared this black experience in terms of enslavement segregation and exploitation of communities that come out of the diaspora. So there's all these debates about what black means and people will come with various ways kind of conventions for using capitalization",
      "using capitalization to indicate this. I think it's difficult because on the one hand, you want to kind of acknowledge and abide by these conventions. On the other hand, the problem is if you start to capitalize and not capitalize, it sort of becomes unmanageable because you're reading, let's say some 10th century Muslim jurist or 11th",
      "And he says someone's black and you're like, do I capitalize this or not? I mean, I don't know. What what do they mean by this? I means if I if I realize or don't count, then I might be imposing my reading of what he's trying to say on something that he might not mean. So when I say in the book is, you know, if we're going to talk about like Black British or Black American will talk about capital B, capital A right. Black Americans. Yeah, we're talking about",
      "as a modern construct that we're discussing in the context of race and everything i use uh capital b but generally i just default to lowercase because otherwise it becomes you know you sort of you you end up backing yourselves into corn yourself into a corner and forcibly interpreting for the reader something that maybe the reader should be able to kind",
      "theoretical analysis of the dilemmas of how we capitalize words. I want to go to perhaps another extreme in my experience at Speaker's Corner here in London, this occasional bear pit of a place don't necessarily recommend it. A lot of Muslims go there. A Christian missionaries go there and they're not terribly mainstream. They're quite that they're definitely anti-Muslim. They all are actually. I think it was one exception who wasn't anti, wasn't polemical and hostile",
      "hostile and uh one particular issue amongst a number that came up repeatedly um still does sometimes is what you call in your book the so-called raisin headed hadith we're going to quote it because i'm not actually sure well you say there comes a different variance anyway it's not like a single hadith some do mention the",
      "the accusations of anti-black racism in the sunnah is the point here and um now personally i don't i don' have an issue with it i mean what i think is not really the point but how what is it what is the most likely wording of this hadith and why is it problematic and how do you respond to it? I mean, is it an example of racism from the prophet himself?",
      "occurs in several variations the general uh pretty consistent part is that you should obey your commander so it's in the context of um essentially like being on a military campaign right so obey your even if he is so some versions will say like an a mutilated slave",
      "in the kind of byzantine tradition actually that sometimes slaves would be like mutilated like have their nose parts ears cut off and then some versions say you know even if he's an ethiopian slave right and then",
      "meaning of the hadith is very clear. It's not really discreet on, right? Which is that says that whoever is your commander, you obey them. It doesn't matter if they're someone you think is socially higher or socially lower than you, even if it's the lowest person in this society, this kind of mutilated slave, they're in charge, you'll obey them, right. This was then interpreted extended kind of analogically to apply to any kind of official and authority. So one of the instances in which",
      "in which the hadith is actually transmitted. And the main transmitter of the hadit, the companion Abu Dharr al-Ghaffari, he settles after the death of the Prophet at a place called Rabada, which is like kind of if you were to go on the trail from Mecca Medina to southern Iraq, it's sort of like a station way and this was also where all those Zakat camels, the camels who are collected for charitable tax work were pastured there.",
      "there so he lived there and uh one of this a like an official under the umayyad government is brought out to or the muslim government is is brought to is they're like assessing for taxation and this is the official is a an ethiopian slave whose job is to do this right",
      "like okay abu dhar has seen you know very old the companion of the prophet they say you should lead us in prayer and abu dar says no like you the uh gesturing to the ethiopian slave official he says you you should leave us because the prophet said you know obey your commander even if he's ethiopian slave right um so he uh he kind of he he he's almost interpreting this indeed",
      "general meaning of the hadith is generally it's understood to apply to any official who's an authority you obey them even if they're someone you think is lower than you okay now let's put that aside that's pretty simple the other then the issue is uh so everything about the hadit is fairly straightforward except this one clause which appears in one actually very rare narration of a hadith",
      "not in other books it's and it's actually not the most reliable narration of the hadith if you were to get all the different narrations of the hajif the part that has the clause that says his head like a uh his head is like a raisin that is actually a minority clause right so this is specifically in one version it's not themost reliably transmitted version it since i bukhari so there's no people don't really debate its authenticity but if you",
      "like look uh we have lots of different versions of this hadith which is the most reliable it would not be it would be the least reliable version okay but let's but you know no pre-modern scholar that i know of and no modern hadith scholar that I know of has ever argued that this clause is somehow false or has been added in so let's deal with it but indeed and you say to continue",
      "commentators this was not understood this particular clause or the whole hadith in any ways is pejogative in a negative way at all it was only much later um that it was understood with perhaps more racist terms the earliest uh descriptions of scholars in like the 900s and 100s they just say you know oh it just means",
      "you know their skin is like dark color like a raisin and they also say that uh the they talk about the um the texture of like tightly coiled african hair they say it looks like peppercorns so if you have um like it looks likes a bunch of peppercorn's like together they think the texture",
      "the it's the color and the texture of the raisin is like the texture. Of their hair, they just say this is what the prophet means, and then they move on. They don't have a problem with it. Incidentally, I mean, I should add right now that it's actually hard to okay. So if you look at how African Muslim scholars use his Hadith, it's",
      "say like scholars like Muhammad Bello the second ruler of the Sokoto Caliphate in what's now northern Nigeria people like his father Osman Dhanfadio died 1817, the founder of the so-called caliphate. People like Sheikh Mohammed Amin al Harari who just died a few years ago who is actually Ethiopian right? So he's not just...he's actually the exact ethnicity that's being described. None of them have any they don't ever",
      "they don't ever say anything about the Hadith that indicates that there, they consider it to be like offensive or something. They just in fact, Mohamed Bello and Abdel Mosman D'Infodio, they actually use it in instructions to their commanders, like how to act on campaign. So what does happen roughly in the sort of 1200s, 1100s, 1200s amongst Hadith scholars who are living from kind of",
      "kind of Cairo, Syria, greater Syria, kind of Iranian world is you see a shift to a much more pejorative language. Right? So what they'll say again, they don't, they're not trying to say anything pejoratively but the way they read it shows much more of a kind of social openness or contextual openness to a negative meaning.",
      "the reason why the prophet is using this example is because, you know, Ethiopian black slaves are those sort of the most disregarded sort of lowest rung of social ladder. They'll say that they're, you have to deal with like their stupidity, their lack of reason, their ugliness, right? So you get a lot of like just kind of",
      "like just kind of a lot more negativity whereas the early commentators they're just like it's color and texture and that's it and they don't really go into it anymore so uh there's definitely after the 1200s and that really continues into the you know essentially uh early modern period or maybe even to the modern period depending where you're looking that this the negativity really it becomes much more pejorative",
      "stereotypes about ugliness and stupidity um and loneliness associated because i know this is purely subjective but i i know some ethiopian uh brothers in london i would never ever think they were ugly or stupid i mean it's just i'm just wondering where this idea comes from it's not obvious that this would be something that could be said uh um and even the raisin head thing maybe i need to go look at some google images of raisins",
      "either but hey I mean so I mean here's the thing like I mean you so what's interesting is I remember I was reading this French ethnographer hmm a study on this in the 1960s on this oasis in Algeria and she talks about the describing the hair of some of the people who live there she says it looks like peppercorns which i thought was really I was",
      "the same description of peppercorns not raisin but um i would say that it's interesting right the one of the kind of pitfalls of this sort of looking into the past is that we tend especially on issues of race and blackness there's kind of been this globalization of american conceptualizations",
      "but actually kind of retroactively, imperially into the past. So it's sort of Western, you know, it's like American cultural conquest not just at the present, but of the past which is kind of a horrific way and so there's always this idea that what blackness means to Americans is somehow what it means everybody in the past or the present which is totally untrue. So one thing you find that's very interesting is... And by the way, this is same thing with Herodotus. Herodotsus talks about the Ethiopians being",
      "the 1600s 1700s 1800s early 1900s from the hejaz including foreigners who go there like snooker gronya the dutch foreigner like this one scottish traveler bruce who travels there in the 1700s trying to find the source of the nile they all know they all say the same thing and they note the same which is that people in the hejas are absolutely obsessed with ethiopian women",
      "These are considered the most beautiful women, and they're obsessed. So this one guy, Ibn Abdul-Baki's teacher, he's writing all this love poetry about Ethiopian women, how much he longs for them, and he has some concubines who are Ethiopian. And it's so bad that he also has to write a poem to his wife apologizing for his obsession with Ethiopian",
      "you could say well these people are definitely not ugly according to hijazi men from the as far as i know the 1500s pretty consistently from the 1500's to the 1900s okay on the other hand abdul baki in his the same book right i mean he has a whole section about the beauty of ethiopian women and then",
      "stupid they are lousy parents their dad I mean just so what is zange for him and the general way it's used in its kind of Arab Islamic civilization is it's people from further South on the East African coast so kind of you can imagine kind of Ethiopian Somalia and then you're going south down into you know Kenya Tanzania Malawi that area right",
      "the coasts. So these people he sees as completely different, and considers them extremely ugly. And this is very widely held in kind of Islamic civilization in the medieval to the early modern period roughly from North Africa across through the Middle East into Iran and northern India, very common opinion. But the reason I bring",
      "categorized as black uh that for someone like ibn ad-dal baqi are two totally different groups that he has absolutely dimension always assessments of in terms of their beauty yeah no that's absolutely that's very fascinating actually i think we have to uh ask the question just for the record in case anyone is unaware what did the prophet muhammad upon whom bps teach about race and what really matters to god because he did teach things so",
      "I mean, the Quranic rule is very simple, right? أَكْرَمُكُمْ عَنْدَ اللَّهِ أَتْقَاكُםْ The most noble in God's eyes is... The most nobel view according to God is the most pious. The one with the most taqwa. And of course we also have the Prophet ﷺ saying that in his famous farewell sermon, the Arab has no virtue over the non-Arab and the non Arab has",
      "and the black and the red which is interesting we can get into that if you want he's the black person has no virtue over the red and the Red has no vertue over the Black ones except in their deeds so what is red? I actually don't know, what is it in the Mughal? It's very interesting. Early Islamic Arabic and kind of pre-Islamic Arabic as far as we know if you're going to use a bipartite division for people for their appearances",
      "So two groups, you have black and red. And most scholars would say that Arabs were in the black group. So Arabs would lump themselves with Ethiopians, Southern Indians, and everyone like that. Right? So they would say we're black. The Reds would be people who are lighter skinned from maybe the North and the Mediterranean kind of Syrian Anatolian populations.",
      "they said white black and red um which is interesting by the way because when you go back and you look at like let's say ancient egyptian artwork and even some of the pre-islamic arab depictions we have some like a karyat alfau uh from roughly uh maybe 200 or 300 a.d in 300 common era place it's about kind of south east of mecca there are some",
      "there are some wall paintings and it's the same as the way egyptians are portray themselves in kind of ancient egyptian art that we all know about right uh they they draw themselves a red color almost like an ochre color so they call themselves red whereas they'll portray like a nubian or an ethiopian as literally black colored like this book color or sometimes a kind",
      "considering what we might think of as like an Arab or Middle Eastern phenotype being more red colored than, then okay. But what's also interesting is when that's not very common, right? So generally when Arabs talk about they'll either early Islamic Arabic pre-Islamic Arabic you either had the bipartite division of red and black or you have a tripartite division",
      "very dark-skinned, including dark- skinned Arabs. White would be sort of what we think of like a Mediterranean complexion which is interesting because who came up with the idea of saying white people was the Romans. The Romans used word albus to talk about a Mediterranean Complexion you and I Paul would not be white for ancient Romans or Republican",
      "early Imperial Romans, we would be what's called pallidus or candidus which means pallid. We're basically pallid colored. We are not white in the Roman kind of taxonomy of phenotype and color but that idea of a Mediterranean look is also what the Arabs meant when they said white. So the Prophet was described as white? Exactly! I was just going to ask you on that very point because it has caused some controversy",
      "It wasn't really an Arab or something. What that means is he sort of has like a, you know, medium olive tone, kind of, you're sort of a Mediterranean picture, kindof an Arab Italian or Greek Anthony Quinn. Let's go with him. I feel like that's how Anthony Quinn there, you now. Did he play Hamza in the message? The film, I mean. Yeah, yeah, he did. I mean, I don't know. He also played Aouda Abou-Tahy in Lawrence of Arabia and Zorba",
      "absorb the Greek and another guy in Guns of Navarone. But I don't know how much makeup Anthony Quinn has on him. This is true, he could have been heavily made up. You think of Anthony Quinn in all those movies, that's probably pretty good. The point is that he's a Greek and an Arab at the same time. So that's white to black-white and then red which again is sort of like a lighter skin Mediterranean person",
      "Mediterranean person a lighter skin Persian person uh Turks Byzantines Russians what's interesting is when Muslims geographers start to either travel to or hear reports about Northern Europeans people like the British Celts IRA you know Irish Irish people they're just it's like off the radar for them they don't know they're like they say they're red colored they say",
      "might be because uh the celts sometimes were portrayed with wearing blue uh makeup that might be it but i my guess is and i don't know for sure my guess isthat if you people who look really really white light skin you can kind of see their veins they're blue a lot that's my guess uh but you you the woad thing might be yeah i'm gonna go for the word thing is i prefer it because it's more exotic explanation",
      "So now what's interesting as well and very important is that I just mentioned that when early Islamic, you know, kind of Arabs at the time of the Prophet in early Islamic Arabia, pre-Islamic Arabia. If they're going to talk about people's looks, they'll say either red and black as a division or black, white and red. If They use black and whites, they don't use it for people's appearances. So black and white is metaphoric",
      "Right. It's metaphoric. It means noble and ignoble. So when this term is used in the Quran, the Sunnah and so on, people with black faces, not to understand that as a racial classification then? No, no. If you say in the Qur'an it talks about for example when people hear news of their...that they have a daughter, their face is blackened. On the Day of Judgment there will be faces that are blackened and faces that",
      "This doesn't mean they suddenly look like an African person or they suddenly looked like David Bowie or something. That's not what this means, right? And Muslim commentators are very clear about this. First of all, they debate whether or not it's just totally metaphorical and not physical at all. But in the case let's say... In this world is obviously metaphorical because it's not like your face gets darker colored when you get bad news. If anything, you might get lighter color than blood drains out of your face.",
      "But in terms of the afterlife, when the believers' faces are whitened and disbelievers' faces blackened, what they say is this is obviously the whiteness of nobility and ennoblement before God. And the blackness of perfidity and kind of debasement before God. If they even do if they say it's physical, what",
      "So it's blackness that differs from any kind of blackness in this world. It's an otherworldly color, that is not related to phenotype. Like it's not like people, everybody who you know again there's nothing to do with black and white in this word. And what's really interesting is when you go to let's say famous Arab poets were writing in the 800s like Al-Mutanabbi",
      "who, and at this time right when their commentators are writing in the 900s and 10 hundreds by this time you know anti-blackness has become common amongst Muslim scholars from Iraq to Iran. In that time it's not there they've been influenced by the same kind of anti blackness you'll see in the rest of the Mediterranean world which we can discuss later if you want but what's interesting is even those scholars",
      "culturally primed to see black people as lower and white people as higher. When someone like Al-Mutanabi uses saying, this guy is black or this guy's white, they don't interpret it in their descriptions. They'll say he means noble and ignoble. The strength of this notion that black and white as a distinction is really something that is first and foremost metaphoric,",
      "after anti-blackness has become rampant. That's interesting. When I read chapter four of your book, Islam and Blackness, when I started on the first sentence, I didn't realize it was a quote. Maybe that's deliberate, the shock value. The chapter is entitled The Western Narrative of Islam, Slavery, and Anti-Blackness. And the chapter begins... I'll just read the first couple of verses. A couple of sentences.",
      "slave trade was 200 times greater than the American slave trade. Moreover, while Westerners had fought to an end slavery globally, Muslims continued to buy and sell human beings. White guilt it would seem was uncalled for.\" And then you say so tweeted the Canadian far-right identitarian Stefan Molyneux in 2018 not long before he was banned from the platform and absolutely right",
      "right so um the question really is about the the barbary uh slave trade uh in part um and this also it has a theme that's come up at speaker's corner and certainly on social media as well i'll just read a sentence from wikipedia which i looked up earlier about this the barberry slave trade it says involves slave markets on the barbury coast of north africa which included",
      "16th and 19th centuries. European slaves were acquired by Barbary pirates in slave raids on ships, and by raids on coastal towns from Italy to the Netherlands and Ireland and South West Britain as far north as Iceland I didn't know that and into the Eastern Mediterranean so this is like a huge almost global slave trade. So in terms of Western narratives on Islam slavery",
      "uh an anti-blackness i mean this what is going on with the burberry the barbary slave trade and why are you talking about it in your book on islam and blackness yeah well it's very important when we think about the way in which this notion of islam is anti-Black how this idea comes about and how it's why it continues so strongly and what I say is that it could be traced back to",
      "uh or three or four kind of root causes i'll list the root causes and we'll count how many are listed in the end so the first one is this idea which is very present in western europe from france spain england and then also uh the american colonies of the northern united states what becomes the united states right this idea that um islam",
      "Muslims are so Islam is a slaver religion and Muslims are slavers. So this association now in this case, it's enslaving Europeans so what happens is from roughly the 1500s until Really? The early 1700s is kind of the heyday of this of the Barbary slave trade is that Pirates raiders operating out of you know attend, you know Algiers especially Morocco Tunis certain extent",
      "Tunis to an extent are capturing French, Italian, British and American ships and capturing the crews and the passengers if they're passengers. And keeping them in slavery usually for purposes of ransoming them. Right. So they want to ransom them back to their families for money. Right? So that's the Barbary Slavery. And this is like a real issue. One guy who was a famous guy who is remember",
      "crusoe in his story he talks about uh being um in fact i think maybe even the author was captured at one point we can look that up or the viewers can look this up robert lewis stevenson the author no i what the hell who the hell is the author of uh because i haven't actually read the book anyway getting who's who wrote this book uh anyway so that but it's a very early novel so as much earlier than robin yeah yeah but the",
      "John Smith, the guy who's one of the founding figures in the Jamestown colony was also captured by pirates. Now these Muslim pirates, these raiders it is a real cause of fear in the kind of public imagination. In fact this song Rule Britannia, you know, rule Britannian, rule the ways Britain never ever will be slaves. What does it talk about? This is actually talking",
      "being powerful at sea and then not being enslaved by, by being captured by the pirates. And what, but what, okay. So this is very important. And this persists in popular imagination until, I mean, until the present day, you know, you can, I have a list in my appendix, in my book of all the movies, including some movies in the 1990s and 2000s that have totally extraneous scenes of white women or white, especially white women,",
      "white women auctioned at these North African slave markets. This is today it's like a vestigial, but in some of the earliest one of the early genres of films were was the sheikh genre where white Europeans especially women get captured and sort of romance seduced by these sheikh figures right?",
      "uh so there's this very mixed up like there's a lot of you know you could put kind of british and american culture on the couch for some analysis here because of the one they're terrified of being captured on the other hand there's there's like they're terrifying to falling in love another thing by the way really is there's",
      "the Muslim captive. It's a little too, there's a lot too much focus on it in my opinion. I'm not a psychologist. I am not a psychologists. No but you know post Freudian era is impossible not to see deeper news. What happens is this... Just say it was Daniel Defoe I just looked at that. 19 so yeah much earlier than the person I mentioned here. So what happens is by that what's interesting though is by",
      "navy and of other european navies has actually turned the table so after that it's actually more europeans ship european pirates and raiders and ships who are capturing muslims in the mediterranean and there's a very you know uh brisk trade in slaves of muslim from morocco and algeria and that area being captured at sea",
      "the mid to late 1800s or the 1860s, 1870s, really kind of healthy trade of slaves being Muslims captured on sea and brought and sold as slaves usually for domestic slavery in places like Naples and Genoa. What I'm trying to say is that this becomes it transforms from a reality into this kind of phantasm that remains",
      "that remains kind of an important part of the European mind in mind, an American mind until the present day. Yeah. They're board games, they're novels, they are films. They are everything. What was interesting is not only do you have a genre of people writing really their own experiences, kind of coming back and saying my time as a bar captivity in the Barbary's end up on the Barbry coast, but it also becomes something where you make people write fake ones. So you get people writing these,",
      "these best-selling stories of how i was captured especially british or american women how i always captured by the by these moorish slavers and they're horrible like black african slaves and that they're made up there so this is like there's a hot market for this so that's one important origin for this the second is so we say what does",
      "After the abolitionist movement, which is based mainly in northern United States and Great Britain really has its big victories. In the early 1800s, in the 1830s and 1807 with the end of the British banning on the slave trade in most of the book by the way that very interesting read that yeah, 1830 s with the prohibition of slavery in Britain, and many of its colonies not all okay? Yeah. And then",
      "attention starts to turn amongst abolitionists to non-atlantic slave trade so the atlantic slave has been crippled ended or crippled significantly then they start talking about okay they say there's two kinds of slavery there's a christian slave they say it was incorrectly called the christians late trade has nothing to do with",
      "is the Mohammedan slave trade. And so for Europeans and Americans thinking about slavery globally after the 1830s, the only other show in town for them is what they call the Mohammedans slave trade.\" So this is of course completely inaccurate. It's not inaccurate to say that Muslims were engaged in the slave trade in let's say Trans-Saharan or across the Red Sea or in the Indian Ocean",
      "or in the Indian Ocean. Yes, of course Muslims were involved in this. No one's denying that, right? But the idea that it's only Muslims doing this is totally incorrect. You know that inside there's all these intra-African kind of circuits of slave trade whether it's from what's now like northern Nigeria down to the southern coast of places like Ghana",
      "in Ethiopia, in the late 1800s who's expanding his state and capturing and enslaving other Ethiopians and non-Ethiopian Africans. So this is a Christian ruler who's doing this. But the point is that from this point on, from really the mid 1800s onward you get the idea of the Arab Muslim slaver now their other target is the black African, the peaceful black African native",
      "my idea, but this is how it's portrayed. They're out dancing and doing various noble savage things, and then the evil Arab Muslims come in and enslave them. Remember... First of all, what are some of the most successful early films? Tarzan movies in the 1920s. Why, in Edward Rice Burroughs' novels and in the movies, why is Tarzan there? Why is his family there that they can be washed up on the coast and he can grow up and be raised by whatever the tiger",
      "whatever the tiger or monkey, the gorilla. His family is part of an anti... Is part of it the British effort to end the Arab slave trade. So now you have a new theme, a new story which is the white British and Americans who've come in to help save the Africans, black Africans from the evil Arabs, the evil Arab slave traders. Then you add here's",
      "Here's the third root cause. Both of these ideas are now kind of bubbling in the Western cultural imagination, the kind of vocabulary of Western European and American culture, Arab slavers, Arabs as slaving and black people. If you're a conservative who is trying to claim the kind",
      "or moral advancement, this is a great way to kind of shift the blame. So you can say, yes, we were engaged in the slave trade but we repented. We tried to end slavery. The Muslims never did. The Arab Muslims are – they never repented, they're still doing it. This is what Stephen Molyneux was doing and by the way he's just one person. If you just – Douglas Murray says the same thing on Bill Maher's show after the book was compressed.",
      "He came on the show and said this. You can find it if you just go look at kind of these more conservative or sort of West is best, West supremacist figures in public life. They will regularly bring up the idea that the Muslims slave trade was equivalent to the Atlantic slave trade. And unlike Europeans who realized it was wrong, Muslims have never realized it's wrong. So you see this over and over again. In fact, and I go into this in some detail in my book,",
      "detail in my book. It's not, it may be true, it's very hard to calculate but it may me true that from around 700 AD until 1900 AD that slightly more people were removed from Africa than by Muslims then were removed",
      "that the Western European slave trade is basically three centuries, roughly essentially 3.5 centuries. So you're talking about 3. 5 centuries worth of enslavement compared to 12 centuries, 1200 years or 1300 years. So the intensity and the violence",
      "severe than the very these various kind of muslim islamic slave trades and of course then there's all sorts of problems about calling anything like muslim slave trade islamics what does that mean i mean uh what does it mean if somebody is you know somebody one day becomes muslim and they're still a slave trader is that now the islami slave trade some of the people engaged in the slave trade are local african potentates",
      "went in and just started grabbing people. They would go and buy them from people who had already captured them or were selling their own members of their own communities. So I'm not trying to say that Muslims have no blame, or Arabs have no blaming. By the way then Arab slave raiders from the Gulf for example would go to Zanzibar in the 1800s and they would just start raiding the Zanziba Island and taking Muslims. They will start taking the local Muslims as slaves",
      "and local communities are extremely angry about, writing protest letters. These people come from what's now UAE area, kind of Persian Gulf area, come down and raid and taking people who are Arab-speaking Muslims as slaves. So it's very complicated. Anyway, the point I want to make is that you have this idea of the Arab as slaver",
      "unaccompanied, uncured slaver is very useful for conservative Western conservatives who want to push for like a West is best Western superiority to others narrative. Now, who then picks us up? The fourth very important kind of source for this not temporal source but in terms of who's driving it like who's really revving this engine and keeping it going is Israeli public diplomacy. This is I mean, someone might say",
      "Someone might say, oh, here he goes. Protocols of elders of Zionism. You call it Zionist. Yeah, you mentioned this. Israeli Zionists and others. Yeah. This is well documented. I didn't go and document this. This was well documented, right? That the role of Israeli public diplomacy either by American Zionists or by Israelis in one Islamophobia,",
      "the Islamophobia industry. Two, the narrative of Muslims as anti-black. A lot of films that have these plots are produced by Israeli producers. They're produced in Israel with Israeli actors. So why would someone... The question is why? What's the political reason? Israel was one of the earliest supporters of the South Sudanese liberation movement",
      "movement in the 1960s. It allows you to break the solidarity, the kind of first of all, Cold War, third world non-aligned movement, colonized world movement of solidarity between colonized people. So black Africans and Arabs, maybe North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, right? You break the",
      "the idea that the Arab north and Muslim north is a predatory slaving force on this, on the real Africa. Right? Quote unquote, the real African then another thing is they'll highlight anti-blackness in middle Eastern Arab society. So they'll say, and you can see, it'll come out every couple of months. You don't have to go back",
      "for discourse online. When you have someone like, I'll almost say it's Mohammed. I forget his name. Oh, I'm forgetting his name but every time there's kind of effort by some kind of black American thinkers or writers to talk about solidarity with Palestinians between Black Lives Matter and Palestinian lives though you'll see in Jerusalem Post",
      "Jerusalem Post or something will pop up an article saying, oh how do you have solidarity with Arabs when they think... They call Black people slaves and Saudi Arabia and Palestine these are all places where they treat Black people terribly. So there's a though you'll repeatedly see this idea of Arab society and Arab culture as anti-Black brought up in Israeli media,",
      "of kind of black Muslim or black Arab, or black Palestinian solidarity. It's actually to manipulate public opinion with a view to protecting the what some have called the apartheid policies of the state of Israel by as you say fracturing any- Putting in the rights watch as referred to it as this. Yeah. Divide and rule basically by bringing this.",
      "or going off subject, but where public opinion is manipulated to reach certain conclusions on events that happen in our world. So we don't live in a... We've got to be wary of fake news and how we're being manipulated. Okay, well, just draw to perhaps draw to a close, but I was struck by a sentence very early on. I was",
      "And you said, one comment on social media however stuck with me. A black Muslim asked me with the sincerity of a Muslim brother, do you know what it feels like to be considered subhuman? And you replied I do not. Once in the outskirts of Dhaka as I sat with the family that raised me there, a toddler came into the yard saw me and started bawling in fear.",
      "the one time in my life that i've ever felt singled out by my race and it was more uh entertaining than anything else you said throughout my life i have been treated like royalty at home and abroad and i thought that's very revealing and i can actually in a smaller way relate to that um when i went to california san francisco airport just a week or so ago long queue of people and",
      "I was anticipating being interrogated or asked questions. And I knew what questions they'd ask because I heard everyone else being asked them ahead of me. So, what's the length of your stay and what's purpose of your visit? And I saw people in front of me, people with different ethnicities. One woman was taken away. I don't mean screaming. She was a guy, an immigration guy who said, yeah, can you come over here please? And this person came away and took this woman away for questioning. I have no idea why.",
      "so i was all prepared for questioning and the whole interview lasted about four seconds it was like purpose of visit i'm saying seeing friends uh how long you'll be here for five days off you go and it was light whoosh straight through and i thought hang on that's it you know and what why you see because i've been told all these stories by muslim friends of mine muslim brothers who most of them are not white about the experiences they had",
      "about US immigration particularly, but same in Britain as well and elsewhere. And I didn't have that problem and I have never had that problem. Maybe I will now. But your experience of being treated like royalty, this sense of effortlessness, of just passing through things, of being accorded a welcome and it almost becomes norm, the normal behaviour. And it's not the experience of many of our brothers",
      "sometimes the same marriages and so on. And this whole notion of white privilege, whatever that may mean, but nevertheless comes home with renewed force. I thought in that comment in your book and in my recent experience in the United States, I'm not complaining by the way, I got through your country's immigration very easily, but I was aware how different it could have been for some people I know. Yeah, I mean sort of the question is if you",
      "If you were to or if I were to be wearing like a shawar kameez and have like a big beard and, you know, like a little Pakistani hat on or something. Yeah, I think we would get treated very differently. And that's not to say that there is that that's Not to kind of try to problematize the notion of white supremacy, I Think are white privilege. I think these are You know, very well established facts But I think what it means is that this idea of the racial the racial",
      "the racial Muslim, right? That being racialized as Muslim is not necessarily about your actual ethnicity or your skin color but that there are other signs you send of your Muslimness. Those will also racialize you as a Muslim in the eyes of the other and I think this is important because sometimes people will kind of be like, you know, there's no Muslim is",
      "where they're coming from because they're like, look at other races about your kind of ancestry and how you look and things like this. And Muslims look like everything and they have all sorts of ancestries. But the fact of the matter is in the eyes of the general non-Muslim public there are certain signals that mean Muslim. And if you give those signals then you'll be racialized as a Muslim and you can't get out of that right? There's nothing you can do. You can't say to",
      "to the guy at the border, I'm moderate. I have no problematic views. I'm wonderful. I love baseball. I am a Sufi Sheikh and I... They all matter right? You've become racialized as a Muslim. That's what this concept of racialization means is this notion of people reading into you something, people more powerful than you reading into something about you that they make indelible and unalterable. Anyway it was a wake up call. Perhaps we can conclude there.",
      "can conclude there and this is the book we've been talking about Islam in Blackness with its incredible cover by your good self it's quite substantial with some very positive reviews indeed from very distinguished scholars and experts in the field on the back cover I do recommend it it's not being out long and it will come out in paperback in due course I assume yeah I think so usually and I usually try to stuff some extra things into",
      "the i'll say can before you do this kind of stuff i try to stuff more stuff into notes you know so the paperback versions of my book actually have stuff that hardbacks don't have they have more stuff more um data in there yeah gosh and i'm going to plug another one of your books as one of my favorite by you is miss courting muhammad the challenging choices of interpreting the prophet's legacy in the contemporary world it's an outstanding introduction uh",
      "uh the islamic tradition today and you tackle a lot of really thorny issues about 434 we're not going to go then quran 434. uh and you know lying about the prophet and when scripture can't be true these ip ideas some people saying no to the script because they don't agree with it and hermeneutics interpretation so it's full of history and narrative as well as taking on board complex theoretical questions about how in the modern world",
      "So that's my favorite particularly for non-muslims and Muslims as well. We I certainly learned a huge amount from it so Do you have any concluding words Jonathan before we wrap up? Thanks for having me on That's all of my concluding word, and I'm happy that you sort of let me ram Ramble on and know your rambling is always Edificatory and interesting so once again thank you very much dr. Jonathan Brown for your time. I'll put a link to",
      "the two books I mentioned primary ones of misquoting Mohammed and Islam a blackness in the description below and if you haven't got them get them both they're both worth your time and share them with friends as well so Salam alaikum until next time thank you thank you"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Islam and Caste in South Asia - Jonathan Brown_Peakhn3Fe64&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748675124.opus",
    "text": [
      "Professor Brown, do you mind sharing some thoughts on your final appendix on Islam and the caste in South Asia? Because oftentimes when we think about anti-blackness it's generally within sub-Saharan Africa or African American context whereas I'm glad that he actually spoke about the issue of anti- blackness or colorism within a South Asian context. So would you mind just talking a bit about that appendix? Yeah, by the way",
      "I was like, I wonder if... Habib actually wrote several books on this topic. He hasn't mentioned this but I was wondering if he would email him and give me advice so I sent him the word document and I was thinking maybe you could look at it or something This book is a fairly long book right? So he's good will hunting Akane",
      "hunting Akande, as far as I can tell. Because one day later, not even a day later he sent me back the whole and he annotated the whole thing. Mashallah. I've never seen anybody who can read mashallah this fast so I take lessons from you or something. So he gave me comments on the whole things it's very valuable. He is too modest to talk about this. Yeah well I mean this is kind of pretty well studied issue and I just was drawing on existing scholarship",
      "scholarship of notion of colorism so again I talked about this before right the idea that's so first of all you have these kind of a long traditions of what lighter skin darker skin means in just in societies where there's like a potential for large variation and not and you add to that let's say colonization by European society like let's",
      "you're now, there's sort of a standard of beauty being imposed by the colonizer that you want to imitate. And then the colonizers also favoring people that kind of look like them, right? So there's that dynamic added to it. You have a strong element of colorism in South Asia. Although there's a lot of debate in South Asian about whether or not this kind of color is and goes back to pre-modern period or if it's a product of colonialism but we won't get into the debates",
      "get into the debates but the reason so that's one issue the reason i was interested in caste however it was because i was i was trying to think of something where because there's not a lot of in the fifth tradition you do have discussions about blackness and what that means in terms of marriage and things like that but it's it's not it's",
      "have this really discussed at length is in the question of caste and marriage amongst Muslims in India, basically, South Asia. So I was really interested in how like what looking at the way Muslim scholars talked about caste and you know it's just like the example of blackness we talked about right? There are some Muslim scholars who are like look Muslims are equal right? And caste is not from the Islamic tradition okay so",
      "not Islamic. We know what our values are, so it's clear that we shouldn't indulge this at all. On the other hand, Muslim scholars say—probably the majority of South Asian Muslim scholars—say okay but one part of the rules around Islamic laws of marriage is that we're supposed to respect custom right? We're supposed respect custom as long as it doesn't violate the Quran or some other prophet like we can we can respect it and if part of that is you know there are these different castes",
      "different castes and communities, they don't want to mix a lot. If they do it causes social problems. We have to respect that. I was interested in seeing how Muslim scholars weighed these priorities and using it as an analogy to think about how we should do the same thing with race. That's why I discussed that.",
      "People look at me like they want to ask a question. Maybe my questions aren't entertaining enough, so shall we open up?"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Islam Conference Session 3 - Jonathan Brown_HxDrFsie18U&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748695394.opus",
    "text": [
      "Okay. Let's see if this timer thing works. Starts. Hello everybody, Assalamu alaikum. Sorry. If anyone besides Grant had asked me to do this I would have said I had COVID and insisted on doing it over Zoom.",
      "I came here a few years ago. I can't remember, it was the old airport. That's all I know is the old Airport and I gave one or two or three talks and they were the best talk... They were great talks obviously but the engagement though you know Arabic like to wafuq like agree like the kind of connection between me and the students",
      "intimate and close to connections I felt here. And, uh, I don't know what that means but it was a really... It was a-a really terrific experience so when I got asked to come back I obviously said yes and I'm very happy to be here. Uh, that being said, what I've been asked to do is probably criminal in the sense that we could spend—and I don' t just mean that because everyone thinks what they study is important—but",
      "First of all, on Hadia's material. But then even more so on this material. So what I'm going to do right now is really almost criminal. I'm gonna be so short and deal with such intense stuff that I really want you to pay attention. You know? Listen to my words here. So basically... Okay anyway, I'll start going now. Don't wanna waste any time. Okay. Primary scripture, secondary scripture",
      "secondary scripture. We've just heard about the primary scripture, the Quran. And those of you who are thinking what does this mean? Primary scripture or secondary scripture? Very familiar in the Abrahamic tradition. You have the primary Scripture which is revealed by God and either immediately or very quickly put into written form right in Judaism it's the Torah in Christianity. It's the Old Testament the Septuagint",
      "the Septuagint, right? In Islam it's the Quran. And then you have a secondary scripture which is primarily oral and it explains the primary scripture. So the primary Scripture is read through and understood through the secondary scripture. The five books of Moses in Judaism are understood through an interpreted through the Oral Torah literally Torah in the mouth, which is the rabbinical tradition also believed to have been given to Moses",
      "to Moses on Sinai. In Christianity, the primary scripture, the Septuagint is read through and understood through the teachings of Jesus, the secondary scripture which are then set down in writing within a matter of let's say eight or nine decades or century-and-a-half of the life of Jesus right? So the lamb and the sacrifice of the Lamb",
      "as read through the secondary scripture. The secondary scriptures, primarily oral are written down usually when there is anxiety about the loss of their meaning or about some kind of overly contested understanding right? In the case of Islam you have the primary scripture which is the Quran. The Quran's a very small book. It is not I mean Hadi what's the usual thing is it like three fourths the size of the New Testament or something? I used to know this but I can't remember. If you remember let me know okay",
      "let me know. Okay? And in terms of law, there's only about 100 verses of the Quran which deal with issues of kind of Islamic law and ritual and things like that. So a lot of things that we you know, everyone associates with Islam five daily prayers, things like are not in the Quran. If you look in the Koran for the there's five verily you shall pray five times a day in the prayer times or ABCD it's not going to find in the",
      "secondary scripture, which is the sunnah of the prophet. Sunnah means tradition. It means the path, literally the path of the tribe, like the way of the it's the authoritative precedent of the Prophet Muhammad. It is as one Muslim scholar puts it an infallible application of the book of God. The sunnah",
      "out his teachings, the message of the Quran and therefore explaining it, affirming it and adding to it. Explaining it, affirm it and add to it right? The sunnah of the prophet you have to read the Quran through the sunnah the prophet and all Muslims have agreed on this until basically a century ago when some Muslim said no but Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims every type of Muslim",
      "They all believe you read the Qur'an through the sunnah of the Prophet. They just disagree about what the Sunnah of The Prophet is, and therefore they disagree on the meaning of the Qur-an after the Sunna of the prophet it's sort of received and interpreted and understood and lived out by his companions, the first generation Muslims than the second generation of Muslims. And then eventually just generation after generation of generations century after century after a century of Muslim scholars until the modern day right? So if you think",
      "So if you think about it as like a set of concentric circles or a very large, very divine onion. Could be the title my next book, Large and Divine Onion. The outer skin is the Muslim scholars of today who are interpreting inheriting what they learned from their teachers, who were inheriting with them from their teacher's when inheriting for loader all the way back to the first generations of Muslims who inherited their understanding of the Sunnah of the Prophet from the prophet Muhammad",
      "and lived out for them the meaning of the Quran. So I mentioned earlier, you have to read the Quran through the sunnah of the prophet. If you think that there's five daily prayers in Islam, and if you don't, you're not Muslim, then there has to be something besides the Quran, and that something is the sunna of the Prophet. The Quran tells you pray, it tells you to pray many times, right? When, how, how many times",
      "How many times? How do you actually physically do the prayer? Everyone sees the pictures of Muslims bowing and things like that. That's not mentioned in the Quran. This is described by the Prophet Muhammad in his Sunnah. And, by the way, some Muslims like to argue that we should understand Islam through the Quran alone. I'm not sure they want to do that because if they did, the Quran says the thief, male or female,",
      "cut their hand off as an exemplary punishment for what they've done. That's the court, what the Quran says but we know from the Sunnah of the Prophet that The thing has to be over above a certain value We know that the judge is supposed from the companions of the prophet and the Prophet himself that you're supposed To ask the person many times are you sure you did this? Didn't you think this was yours? Right all sorts of other issues",
      "the sharia of islamic law it's essentially unless you want to get your hand cut off you will not get your hands cut off even if you steal you know something extremely valuable um you'll get another punishment it just won't be getting your hand chopped off if you're interested in this i know it's a big issue i wrote a good article on it called stoning and hand cutting or you can find it on your clean institute website",
      "is a discrete book, right? I have one in my bag. I almost have it in my back. I'm sure lots of people have them here with them, right? There is no... If you go to the library and say okay, I really listen to the Quran but now I want to... I just saw this great talk by Jonathan Browne and I wanna learn about the Sunnah so can you give me like the Sunna? There's no book. There is not book of the Sunnah. The Sunnah is scripture in the sense of divine revelation. It's there's no contained form of the sunnah of the prophet.",
      "several forms and it's in favoring or emphasizing one of these forms over the other in different contexts that you find the reason for much of the plurality that hadia talks about in islamic law and theology so one form of the son of the prophet is communal practice why is it that in the the mosque everybody when the imam gets up to give the sermon everyone looks at the",
      "There's no textual source that says this. What about the fact that you don't pay zakat, charity tax on green vegetables? Did you know that? Probably because they go bad really quickly and it was not gonna last but one of... This is something Muslims have always done. These are just things that Muslims have all we've done. The lived practice of the Muslim community. It's also a tradition of reasoning, a tradition problem solving. We might think of it as sort like a spirit of the law.",
      "What are the values and the ways that the Muslims are supposed to think about things? They learn from the companions of the prophet, they learn from The Prophet himself that he was inspired with by God. So for example, oh this is a good example. Hadi kind of talked about it right? The Quran says or the Koran says that people of the book and usually this is understood as Christians and Jews mostly and if they're living under Muslim rule",
      "continue practicing their religion, they just pay jizya tax. The Prophet Muhammad says, oh I should have said, I'm Muslim. You know what? I should probably just change my name. This is getting too inconvenient. So the Prophet Muhammad say take the jizy from the Zoroastrians of a place called Hajar in Eastern Arabia. Right? So the prophet says he extends this ruling to Zoroasterians",
      "Then this tradition of reasoning, the early Muslims from the Companions' time onward, they treat every community that you come across as people of the book. So when Muslims meet Hindus, when they enter Sindh in the year 711 or when they meet Buddhists in northeastern Iran and Central Asia, these are not people of The Book and they're not mentioned in the Quran, they're",
      "jizya from but they think this is what the prophet would do in the situation. When Muslims meet people practicing traditional African religions in sub-Saharan Africa, they also take the jizyat from them so even though they're polytheists, at least from a Muslim perspective, they can continue practicing their religion. All right, what's happening here? Sorry okay I think I must have set some timer on this thing where it's changing automatically. Okay",
      "practice, tradition and problem solving. And wait for it, hadith. Someone's saying, wait a second, I don't know about hadith here's the hadith people. Hadith are the most textual form of the son of the prophet. If you actually want to go find a book that's going to be something like a book on the son other prophets is going to books of hadith hadith our reports about things the Prophet said things the",
      "presence and to which he did not object why is that uh important because if you eating something next to the prophet and he doesn't say you shouldn't eat that that means you're allowed to eat it right so these are the hadiths or reports about the things that prophet said prophet did things that were done in his presence into which he didn't object all right um unlike the quran hadith are not written down relatively quickly i mean the qur'an i",
      "in especially kind of pre-modern period, this is set down in permanent form very quickly. We're talking within maybe a few years of his death like two or three years and definitely within 20 years of His death. And that in pre modern times it's pretty impressive. The Hadiths are not written down like this. We have early Muslims kept their own little notes of what the things the Prophet said and did. In the early 700s",
      "early Muslim scholars kind of try to collect more material. We have some beginning of written collections, they didn't have paper right? Paper only came from China in the late 700s. Writing materials like papyrus parchment are very expensive. We had some of these surviving fragments from the mid-to-late 700's a lot from the early 800's and the major collections of Hadiths",
      "in the 800s, and then a lot in the 900s and in the 10 hundreds. But that kind of the mainstay hadith collections are done in the eight hundreds. And unlike the Quran which as I said is a very small discreet book there's no limit to the Hadiths. You say wait a second what do you mean there's not a limit? We'll discuss reliability in a second but in effect I mean if",
      "and you looked at all the books of hadith collections, I mean it would be just shelves and shelves and shelfs and shelves of hadits. Of books on, of collections of hadit. But in Sunni Islam there are six books which are seen as like kind of mainstay collections that you'd look at. They contain about 20,000 hadits and because a lot of hadis are kind of repetitions of one another they're like different versions of the same report or maybe two reports stuck together if you look at",
      "If you look at with repetitions, about 35,000. But without repetitions about 20,000 hadiths in these six books. In Shiite Islam and Imam-e-Shiism there's four collections also written kind of 800 into the early 900s. Now there's a problem right? If you're looking at the Quran, you won't find any evidence of the early civil wars",
      "You won't find any political disagreements, right? In fact, one of the reasons that Western scholars think the Quran comes from such an early period and isn't tampered with after that is because it doesn't bear any indication of these later intramuslim conflicts. So it predates them. This is not true for the Hadith corpus, OK? The Hadith Corpus, there's a huge problem of Hadith forgery.",
      "Maybe another useful parallel to kind of secondary scripture in the Christian tradition would be the problem of inauthentic gospels. So there's just sort of like proliferation of claims about the teachings of Jesus that are all, you know, here's a book that purports to be the gospel of Judas or the gospel Mary Magdalene and et cetera, et cetera. All these different claims are being made. And what are people doing? Right. As people convert to Islam in this late 600s, early 700s, 800s.",
      "800s, they are bringing in their own cultural traditions, their own political disputes. Muslims are having their own civil wars. They're having theological discussions and arguments with one another. They have legal debates with one other. And you know, one guy is saying my city's the best city in the world. Another guy is say your city's awful, my scholar's great, your city is awful or your scholars awful. All these ideas what better way to legitimate them than to say well the prophet said that your city stinks and the prophet",
      "Right, so that's literally the stuff you find in a lot of hadith collections. So Muslim scholars beginning in the second and third generations they recognize there is this huge problem with forgery. There is a huge problem of forgery but here's the problem how do you figure out what something that the Prophet really said stop it versus something that somebody is forging and attributing to the prophet?",
      "One way, right? If I said to you, I believe this is really incredible. I was digging in my backyard and I found this old text and it says, you know, this is the last will and testament of George Washington and there will come a time, my American children, that there will be a man whose hair",
      "also remarkably colored orange, right? Who will be bigly criticized and cause great... I mean, I'd be like wow look. I have proof that we shouldn't like Donald Trump but why is this something George Washington wrote or not who can tell me come on use your critic you're in students some of your critical minds Is it not? It's not something why is it not something George",
      "You guys don't like George Washington? You don't respect his opinion? Because people don't know the future. Unless you're a prophet, which means that you can know the because God can tell you the future um so here's a problem if the problem if you see of report that says there will come a time that my community will break up into 72 sex or they will come at",
      "and you shouldn't follow it. You can't use that test we would normally use because he's a prophet, God could have told him this information, right? So things like that we would generally use to try and figure out if something is forgery or not, some of those tools don't really work. Here's another problem. This is very reasonable. If the Prophet Muhammad is explaining to us the Quran in the Sunnah of the Prophet, and if the Hadiths are one of the ways",
      "then clearly a hadith can't contradict the Quran because that wouldn't make any sense. I mean, the prophet is contradicting God. So if the Quran says there's only one God and then there's a hadit that says just, you know, we've been revisioned, there's two gods, that can't be accepted. But here's the problem. How do you know the difference between contradiction and explanation? The Quran says that Karian has been prohibited for use.",
      "been prohibited for you. So if you go, I don't know, I see a lot of roadkill. I imagine you have this issue here too. In my area it's like roadkill everywhere. Sometimes I think, you know what? I should take one of these deer and eat venison but I can't because I'm not allowed to eat carrion as a Muslim. However there is a hadith that says that the companions of the Prophet were on the Red Sea coast and they found a giant beached whale and they were hungry and they started having whale burgers or whatever",
      "They told the prophet about it, and he affirmed it. Wait a second. This contradicts the Quran. Or is the prophet explaining that the Quranic command about not eating carrion applies to land animals, not to animals from the sea? Right? So that's the general... Certainly I'd say probably majority Muslim understanding. Anything that comes from the ocean you can actually eat even if it's dead. Not all Muslims think this but I'd",
      "but I'd say the majority. So you have a problem, criticize content criticism just to detect forgery is difficult. So Muslims start to especially Sunni Muslims in fact this kind of defines Sunni Islam they say let's try and take meaning out of the equation. Let's try figure out what's forgery or it's not a forgery through looking at the transmission of the Hadith. And here you have two challenges",
      "challenges and activities of Muslim scholars regarding the Sunnah of the Prophet, in particular the authenticity of hadiths. And then how you understand these hadith, how you relate them with other hadith? How you relate it with other forms of the Sunna of the prophet like communal practice, reasoning, how do you relate that with the Quran? So first of all, you have to figure out is the Hadith authentic? I will do an exercise on that one second. We'll do transmission criticism in one second",
      "mission criticism in one second. But, in general Muslims would say all Muslims would this, all Muslim scholars if a Hadith clearly contradicts the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad said there's two gods okay that can't be something he really said. If it clearly contradict reason here's a good one God the first thing God created was though the horse then the horse sweated and it created its god it created the world out of its sweat",
      "OK, somehow somebody made this up. I don't know maybe they found like a stash of hallucinogenic drugs or something and then but somebody made it up. If it contradicts reason, it can't be accepted. Like first principles of reason, like principle non-contradiction. And if it contradict the established sunnah of the prophet, it cannot be something that the Prophet said. But in general Muslim scholars are very reluctant to engage in like this content criticism",
      "this content criticism, because when you're dealing with the prophet, you don't know. Like you don' want to make your sensibilities and your reason and your understanding of the Quran the criterion for what might be prophetic speech, because he's the one who is explaining the Quran to you. It's a very difficult balance. A good example of this is a hadith that says, alleged hadith it says that a child born of fornication will not enter heaven.",
      "This Muslim scholars, first of all the chain of transmission was very unreliable but also this is just clearly contradicts a very distinct unambiguous Quranic principle which is no bearer burdens bears the burdens of another. That's. No bearer of burdens bears a burden of an other so this child didn't do anything wrong how can it be denied a chance to have salvation? So this is rejected.",
      "The bigger challenge is not, well I wouldn't say the bigger. An equal challenge besides trying to prove if the attestation is reliable. Is this something that prophet said or not? It's how to understand it. How to understand. A good example of this is a Hadith that's considered to be reliable. It says that cursing another Muslim is iniquitous and fighting another Muslim",
      "unbelief, like the opposite of being Muslim. On its face this hadith seems to say that if... So I'm Muslim, Hadi is Muslim, she was recently in a car accident it wasn't her fault and I realized this is exactly the chance I have to finally settle my score with her so I go up and kick her as hard as I can now I have according to this hadit",
      "anymore. I've fought another Muslim and that's unbelief. So technically, I'm not a Muslim anymore which is not a good thing. This is not how the Hadith is understood. Why? It has to be fit into a bigger system. What are the Quranic verses on this issue? What do other hadiths say? What does our sense perception tell us about the world right? We know from a verse in the Quran it says if two parties from amongst the believers, Muslims come to have",
      "start have a battles like fight each other with swords and stuff then you should try and uh wreck and reconcile between them therefore two groups of people who farted fighting each other sword and things were both called muslims by the quran therefore this can't literally mean that me doing this i would just be a really bad muslim or what this means is that action is sort of on",
      "but that I'm still a Muslim. And therefore, you get a general principle in Islam which is that actions don't take you out of the religion. It's only beliefs. Like if I think it's okay, if I drink alcohol, I'm just being a bad Muslim. If I think I'm allowed to drink alcohol now I'm not a Muslim anymore because it's about my belief, not my actions. Okay. But this hadith is a great example of one of the biggest challenges Muslim scholars have",
      "the sunnah of the prophet, understanding hadiths in particular. Which is the nature of prophetic speech. Prophets don't talk like lawyers because if they did no one would listen to them everyone would be like I'm out of here I'm not... They certainly wouldn't be motivated by them right? I have nothing against lawyers but lawyers who are great motivators usually don't",
      "their followers, right? The prophetic speech the speech of the Prophet Muhammad is characterized by one. One of these is characterized hyperbole or sometimes understatements but a lot of times hyperboley and this creates a real challenge which is Muslim scholars have to derive very fine rules of law and theology from speech that is often",
      "in not the kind of speech that lawyers would engage in. It's hyperbolic speech. This example of, this thing is getting away from me again, of the me attacking Hadiya, God forbid, not being Muslim anymore. This is an example of how they took the hyperbola language of the prophet and understood its legal meaning or theological meaning by comparing it like putting it into the larger system",
      "the established son of the Prophet, etc., etc. Okay, good example this is the hadith we're going to look at which is Hadith of traveling by sea. Okay so here you have a change of transmission they're called Isnaads in Arabic up at the top you have why am I looking over there? I'm gonna look here up at The top you books. There's the Sunan of Abu Dawud he He's from Sajistan Iran dies 889 of the common era So kind of written in the mid 800s Sunnah say bin Mansur it's earlier",
      "It's earlier, early 800s. Akhbar Mecca Vilfakehi also late 800s So these are the books that like if you were to go to library and want to do research on this You would go and get those books out of the library. Okay? Um You have change transmission going back to the Prophet Muhammad and you have two versions Remember when I mentioned repetitions of hadith and why the numbers of hadits in a book change depending whether it's repetition or not These are two versions of what's clearly the same statement",
      "statement but one of them has this extra part on it okay so let's start with a blue one on the left let no let no one travel by sea except uh on pilgrimage or fighting in the path of god for under the oceans is fire and under the fire is another ocean sorry okay um now we talked about sense perception this would be a good argument",
      "about there being fire under, maybe it means like magma and stuff like that in volcanoes. But then what about an ocean under that? It doesn't seem to accord with our understanding of the cosmos or the earth but anyway Now it's not really a problem because if we look at this chain of transmission, the blue chain of transmissions That first guy unknown, just the guy says a guy told me so basically what the isnad is",
      "Ismail bin Zakariya said, Mutarif bin Tarif told me that Bishr bin Abi Abdullah told me the Bashir bin Muslim told him that Abdul bin Amr told him That the Prophet said something. So it's like a sort of like a game of telephone right? And then you have other change with Haribin Tariff told me Khalid bin Abi Muslim told Him that Abdul Bin Amr Told him that the prophet said so that you can see these as like a transmission of a text either orally or written and Then kind of getting set down in this book which is which survives",
      "which survives these books at the top of the page. So Bashir bin Muslim said, a guy told me. Who's that guy? We have no idea. He could be crazy. He would be a liar. In addition, by the way, Bishop and Abi Abdullah, Bashir Bin Muslim, no one knows who they are. No one knows if they're reliable. No ones knows if transmitted material reliably, et cetera, et, cetera. They could be crazed. They can be liars. They cannot even exist.",
      "is totally unreliable. So you can forget about, this issue is off the table. We don't have to worry about oceans under fire and fires under ocean anymore. Now we just have to engage in the challenge of interpretation because let no one travel by sea except one on pilgrimage or fighting in the path of God. Sorry, Dr. Esposito. I know, well, I don't know after COVID if you're the jet setter you used to be but you should try getting an appointment with this guy before COVID. He was constantly on airplanes.",
      "constantly on airplanes. This would really put a dent in his frequent flyer status if he was not allowed to travel overseas, except well I guess teaching is fighting in the path of God so you have an excuse. You have a license. But here can anyone think and I'll be very impressed can anyone thing of a problem with this hadith? Yes? What? Living on an island yeah that's rough what if it looked like a little island yes",
      "Yeah, sometimes you have to. No, this is generally pretty correct. OK, the Koran talks about looking at the boats",
      "The Quran says in several places, one of God's signs are the ships that sail on the ocean by which you seek the bounty of God. Would that you would reflect so that you might be thankful. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? The Quran is saying one of the signs of God is traveling by sea and the ocean to seek in commerce. So this contradicts",
      "So this contradicts the Quran. So one answer would be, our friend here said, maybe it's something the prophet didn't say. But that's a jump that a lot of Muslim scholars wouldn't want to take. Generally, historically what they have said is, what this means is that the prophet's speech is hyperbolic. He's either saying that these reasons for traveling by ocean are very, are praiseworthy,",
      "Or he's emphasizing the danger of traveling by sea. So these are examples that I think I went a few minutes over, but the sunnah of the prophet is authoritative precedent through which we understand and read the Quran. One of the best and most important manifestations of the sunna is the hadiths. And when you get to hadith, you have a problem of authenticating them and then understanding them within the bigger system",
      "reason, son of the Prophet, etc. Thank you very much."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Islam_ Social Justice_ and Racism _ Dr Jonathan Br_zT0Xx1ZAeY4&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748660044.opus",
    "text": [
      "I met you and wrote on the board. So, uh, you can all hear me. Thanks for inviting me to University of Pennsylvania. I'm trying to think if I've actually ever given a talk here before. I can't remember. I actually almost came here for college. That would be many, many years ago.",
      "Would have been like 25 years ago. But I went to Georgetown instead, and one of my organizers came here instead of Georgetown so things balanced out at the end. Alright, so... Interesting picture. Anyone know what this is? I've actually been very impressed if anyone knows what this it. I'm just curious. Nobody knows what that is? Okay, that's good. That makes sense. You know what it is?",
      "Is this ancient Mesopotamian art?",
      "Arabs in the Hejaz, in the 7th century would have represented themselves in art. Also I mean granted you know if you only have...you go to one of those restaurants where they give you some crayons for your kids and they have like three crayons right? And if you had to represent yourself you'd have green yellow and red You might not have the most accurate picture but you can see that actually have a lot of colors",
      "and the shading under his lips. This is probably a noble man, he's got two ladies behind him offering him grapes. You can even see that he has kind of five o'clock shadow drawn in. Their hair is sort of wavy and big almost like Byzantine artistic style eyes. And what color would you say the skin is? Anybody have any guesses? Anyone here do art history or anything like that?",
      "joke which is this is New York we wear black until they find something darker. That was as dark as you can get, as far as I know. His facial hair. The color is it's sort of like burnt sienna or ochre? Or red? How would you make this? You'd make this out of some kind of iron oxide painting or minerals. By the way when Egyptians and Mesopotamians want to depict",
      "Want to depict people they call black what color do they use? What but yeah, this is a trick question. Thank you, but I mean like They say pitch black like you don't pitch black means What's pitch? Pitches tar Like you know the stuff he put on road surfaces tar that's top of pitch or they think ink black which is ink so When I want to make someone black day used actually",
      "They use actually black colouring, which is actually kind of weird because most people in the world... There are very few people in this world who have totally pitch-black skin like the color for a hijab. Just like there's really few people who have white skin. You'd have to be like David Bowie in the 1970s. Pretty funny I remember I've been trying to find this clip online and can't find it anywhere",
      "And this guy, he's like an American jazz artist. African-American jazz artist He was talking about how he met David Bowie for the first time and he was like This guy came in and he is white I mean white! Like actually physically white. The color of his sweatshirt. Apparently people are like that. Like the wall here Who came up with the idea of calling white people whites? These are my kids. Do you guys know the answer to this or are you just raising your hands?",
      "I have a question about the long-long, long challenge. How many times do you think that more lightening might differ from that?",
      "Where do you get the idea of calling people black? That's an interesting question. Why, I mean... It's an intersting question. If you were going to come up with words for color and you were supposed to just say what is everyone's color in this room and you're supposed to think of different things I don't think white or black would actually come to our minds if we came at it from a totally blank palette. Correct? But at some point humans",
      "And it seems to have been pretty widely agreed upon, deciding to say black and white. Which is very interesting. There's theories for this. None of them are very good, in my personal opinion. But that's interesting because you're seeing how people... Madison Hashim why do you guys have your hands up? No one knows the answer. No you don't know the answer? Nobody knows the answers. Okay. So, interesting point.",
      "This is maybe how Arabs... I guess. This is 500 years before the Prophet, but we don't have a lot of artistic evidence from Arabia period. This pretty interesting. Question. Here's another question for you. What did Arabs in the Hejaz at the time of the Prophet... Western Arabia at the prophet Muhammad in the 7th century How do they divide up people in terms of color? Kind of ethnicity, color... Yes",
      "comes to mean like Persian, not Arab but from the north? Habashis or Ethiopians. They would say black white and red So black people are like people from Africa or southern Arabia or India Red people are what? I'm red You're red",
      "You're red. Sorry to like single people out. So, we're red and if you think about it If I say something really stupid what's gonna happen to me? Let's say I turn around and there's just my pants split open or something What's going to happen to him? I'm gonna turn around even if I get a little bit hot on the door My skin is basically transparent. I don't know if you can see. It's like red. If you saw someone's skin like mine you'd be like that guy has kind of purpley-red color",
      "Red would be like people from, you know some Syrians, Turkish people From the northern Middle East and then what would they say about? Like Irish people They call them blue sometimes blonde sometimes blue Why blue is really if you think about it like people who are really light skinned. You can almost see their veins",
      "What's red and what's black? What's white? White is just like a kind of lighter skinned Arab. Kind of a typical Arab color would be the whites. Interesting, alright. Why are we talking about this topic? They asked me to talk about children justice which was terrific I want to talk issues of race because that's in the news not because I'm just talking about things that are topical but because people ask these questions",
      "I wrote a book on Islam and slavery, it's called Slavery in Islam. Not because I have any passion about this topic, but because I had questions about the relationship between slavery and Islam People had questions abut this kind of ISIS and other things like that And they kept asking me these questions, and I wanted to know the answers, and want to give people the answers So I wrote this book And then people were- Kept asking me about Islam and blackness Is Islam an anti-black religion? Etc etc Why are Muslims racist? Et cetera et cetera",
      "So I wanted to address that issue as well. That's why I wrote this new book called Islam and Blackness, And if you're talking about issues of social justice in the United States, The issues of race and issues of slavery are going to come up. These are important topics to have knowledge about, I'd say.",
      "at the beginning of this lecture, seems like a really tough opening topic. It's very upsetting topic right? Because if you talk about... that's a rhetorical question Mazmim it's not an actual question but... Bayla can you explain to him why it's a retorical questions? So the reason where I want to bring this up first is because if you are Muslim or if",
      "Islam and social justice, Muslims and social Justice. This is sort of like the elephant in the room? Is that what it is? 300 pound gorilla? It's some kind of big animal that nobody wants to talk about or mention. That's an elephant in a room right? Okay good. So because you know Muslims in America really tend to care about social justice issues, at first not all of them but a lot of young Muslims are really concerned with things",
      "And they feel that they can participate in this cause sincerely, meaningfully. They mean this deeply in their hearts. But the problem is that... Well two problems. One, unless you haven't watched the news in the last six years a lot of times slavery's associated with Islam. The second issue is that even if you don't watch the news usually there's some person, and it may come from a variety of different ideological backgrounds",
      "Also, slavery started by four countries and rich countries.",
      "Slaves are people you've captured and you decide not to kill. Like, uh... I could kill this guy but he looks like he knows how to make really good guacamole or something like that We're gonna take him back to our village we're going to put him to work for us And maybe eventually this guy actually will want to become part of your community You don't know So as far as we know at least in the Near East As far as human records go back Slavery starts with people who are captives",
      "from the other, the outside, the foreign tribes were captured. A couple of important points. We don't have a lot of time to get into details like answer questions if you have them during the Q&A. I was just... someone just sent me this tweet. Don't worry, I was not on Twitter. My wife controls my social media activity.",
      "activity. This is probably very wise. Somebody sent me this. Jordan Peterson said, without divine like basis... Without a basis in the divine it's impossible... Without divine validation of human value it's possible to say that slavery is morally wrong. Which is really interesting point. Not because you need to have a divine",
      "of divine belief in the Divine, to think slavery is morally wrong. But his assumption is that all human beings have always thought that slavery's morally wrong? Does anyone know? Let's just pick a date. Let's pick a day 1700. How many people I don't mean how many movements, I mean how may people like how many actual individuals in human history do we know of who said that slavery in and of itself is morally evil? Any guesses?",
      "Pretty much everybody would have the answer.",
      "people would say, at least this is very suspect. What's interesting about the topic is that it's an issue which in the 20th century was publicly agreed upon. But prior to... and let's just be generous. Let's say the 1700s. That's really being generous. 1800s probably more accurate. Maybe even 1900s. This was not agreed upon at all. In fact, prior to, I bet you take the 1700, Gregory of Nyssa",
      "The Empire of Nyssa, Christian bishop in Cappadocia died 394. Jean Baudin, French historian and legal scholar died 1596. Maybe Giovanni Pontano died around 1503 I think, around that time? I think he's from near Venice. And a German guy, a legal scholar from the 1200s named Ecke von Rebgau. That's it!",
      "Four people. Not Moses, not Jesus, not St Augustine, not Thomas Aquinas, not Buddha, not you name it, not Aristotle, not Plato, not any... You name it? Either they had no problem with slavery or they thought it was tolerable or defensible or even natural. Very interesting. What did Aristotle... Okay, I have a question. When did people start talking about slavery being in and of itself evil",
      "in and of itself evil, in any meaningful way. I'm kind of giving you a hint. Very late 1600s, 1690 there's a tract published by the Quaker Association here in Pennsylvania actually. Then the 1700s, really mid-1700s with Montesquieu",
      "Montesquieu and his Spirit of the Laws, discussion of it. Later with... I'll almost say Zayzib Mohammed Condorcet in late 1700's. 1800 is really- Late 1700's when you start getting like abolitionist movements in the UK and then in Britain and United States in the late 1700s. 1800 they'd really pick up steam So I have a question did people just wake up one day? I mean this interesting question did human beings wake up on day there was like",
      "Buddha, spiritually aware or not spiritually aware? Spiritually aware. Okay so it seems like... what happened? I gave you another hint. Well this is one that's highly debated but in my opinion this is how it happened. Where did I tell you the first major abolitionist declaration came from? It actually wasn't an abolitionist declaraion, just a criticism of slavery. I told you it's right here in Pennsylvania.",
      "Looms move themselves. You know what loom is? Like for sewing cloth? And so, looms move themselfs. That's an incredibly prophetic statement. What happened in the... Human beings realized they can use first water power then steam power to do what? Move things, move heavy things. Until that time, what did they use? Animals and other people. So I think this is real- but this is a real moral conundrum",
      "Because, if you ask somebody today, what's the thing that you bring out as the final hammer in an argument about moral relativism? Well, if that's the case, slavery would be okay. And then what does the person say? I mean this is kind of like Jordan Peterson trying to do in his argument. He's saying, you have to believe in God because if you don't believe in god, you actually can't say slavery is wrong and you HAVE to say slavery",
      "If there's one thing we're morally sure about, it's slavery is wrong. But if you were to look at human history through the history of our species intellectually socially this would actually not at all be the case So this is a real conundrum You can call this the Charlottesville Statue Debates American History is a great example of this I have a question",
      "This is Thomas Jefferson. The problem is, the guy that we look to as our moral and legal and kind of political guides has believed in things that put him outside of the realm of the acceptable in our society. That's a conundrum. But this is not...this is a human conundum. It's not an American conundrm, it's not a Muslim conundram, this is a",
      "This is a human conundrum. There is no religious tradition or philosophical tradition that I know of, that did not either find slavery acceptable, natural, or defensible prior to the essentially modern period. Maybe early modern period, but essentially modern. What do Muslims say about slavery? It was first of all like most other traditions it was just part of life.",
      "It was like talking about the weather or something. Or a disease. You don't want to get some horrible disease, but you don't sit around and say it sucks that this happens to somebody else. You hope it doesn't happen to you. Incidentally, when did people first start talking about abolition? The idea of getting rid of slavery as an institution. When did this start? What is the first instance that someone talked about abolition",
      "I think the Asians don't even know about it.",
      "Spartacus slaves a slave rebellion in the first century BCE, around the 60s of the 1st century BCE. Spartacuses is a slave who rebels and according to the movie he says we're going to keep fighting until we free all the slaves in Italy. That's not what Spartacuse did. Spartacouses and his other slaves they didn't want to be slaves but they weren't trying to end slavery. In fact they took their own slaves. No society that had slaves in every civilization, every human civilization that we know of had something it would be similar to...we could talk about slavery",
      "No civilization or society had slaves. Even suggested abolishing them until the early modern period Very interesting, as I said this is a conundrum. I don't want-I can't resolve it for you If you're interested in it read my book Slavery and Islam And if you're uncomfortable that's not my problem That's literally not my probelm It's uh...it's everybody's problem",
      "What does the Quran say about slavery?",
      "It depends on your labor. You can't enjoy the fruits of your labor Two, you're not a complete legal person What does that mean? Like a slave in most schools of law and Islamic law can't own property In most schools they can't be witness in court Three, you don't have full range of requirements that a free Muslim has So let's say slaves don't pay Zakat, they don't to pay charity tax Slaves don't go to Hajj, they do not have to go to the Hajj Jama'at",
      "Hajj to Mecca. They can if they want, right? So by the way this is a pretty clear listing of certainly with this idea of not being able to control your movements and enjoy the fruits of your labor, it's a very clear understanding of the problems in slavery. One of the clear principles that goes back as far as we can identify anything in the Islamic tradition",
      "It's attributed in a hadith to the Prophet. It's probably not something that the Prophet Muhammad said, it's probably something an early Muslim said and got incorrectly attributed to him but it gets picked up in Islamic legal thought very early God wants freedom You see it as a legal maxim in Islamic law The Lawgiver, God, the Lawgivers looks expectantly towards freedom. God wants Freedom",
      "in Islamic law, there's always this favoring of emancipation. So... Let's say- what's your name? Abeer. Abeer, let's say Abeer and I co-own a slave. Let's have Abeer an I co own a car And I say uh hey Abeer I just uh I don't want my half with the car. I give it away. I just gave the car away to somebody Would that be okay?",
      "Would that be okay? Okay, I have one on my half. So in every Islamic school of law if we owe Cohen a slave and I decide to set my half free That slave actually is free now Now the only question is do I have to pay you the amount Do I have pay you immediately over time or does the ex-slave now have to work to repay you that amount Or do you just have to eat take a haircut as they say in finance here with the Whartons",
      "You're here with a Wharton School of Business or whatever, having hair cut. So it's unlike other types of property if one of the partial owners said you're free, then the slave is totally free. Other things... If let's say I'm walking down this street- Oh! How about this? Let's say that I say to my slave, Okay, thanks for setting the table. Listen, you're after uh... I don't mean your- The second I say you're Free, Boom he's free, that's it. Even if I didn't intend it.",
      "Even if it's not intended. In Islamic law, in general, in contracts and declarations and marriage and all these things If you make a statement that you don't intend I think it happens to be a contract for some new telephone or something like that right? I'm not bound by the contract, it was not my intention to sign this Same thing in Islamic Law But with emancipation even if its not intended, even if it is a joke Boom! The person is free Let say you bump into somebody",
      "introduces things unknown before in, as far as I know, human history. Which is it makes not only is freeing slaves a good deed but freeing slave expiates sins This is in the Quran if you let's say somebody accidentally kills someone they commit manslaughter one of the things they have to do first they have compensate the person's family But they also have to free a believing slave Let's say you",
      "Well not if you're Hanafi, but out the other schools Let's say it's Ramadan and I sit here and I'm like giving a lecture and I go. I'm really thirsty Not accidentally I do what I just can't stand it What have I just done first off that we do this day of fasting but also I have to do I Have to free a slave or if I don't have a slave I have two feed 64 people or run around playing do that I have",
      "Fast for? What's going on with the NSA here? Imagine how much. Fast for what? Uh, times two. 60 days. That's if you intentionally do it. So don't intentionally break your fasts. If you don't like fasting because you're gonna die soon.",
      "So yeah, so makes it then the reward as stated in the Quran as stated endlessly and saying to the Prophet in the Hadith Corpus The reward you get for freeing slaves in afterlife is enormous There's kind of an irony here which is one of the reasons that Muslims That say Egypt or Baghdad or India keep buying slaves from outside Islamic world because they keep freeing Slaves",
      "slaves. It's actually kind of ironic, right? Because they need more labor so it's sort of like a vacuum machine sucking in people because they're constantly freeing them up into the free population. Another big major difference between slavery and Islamic civilization, Islamic law and let's say slavery in the United States or most places in the world Thomas Jefferson we talked about him before his children what about his children does anyone know who",
      "Yeah, I think they share... like his black and white children share ownership of his estate right now.",
      "And this goes back to the very beginning of Islam. Although ironically it's not in the Quran or specifically stated in the Hadith, but it's understood by all Muslim scholars immediately which is that if a Muslim male fathers a child with his female slave, that child is one free, two same social standing as children born of a free wife and three his mother or her mother is freed upon the ownership",
      "on the owner's death. And she can't be sold. So, most of the Abbasid caliphs all I think of the Ottoman sultans except one far as I know, except one were children of slave women not of free mothers What does that mean about let's say race?",
      "The Ottoman sultans, by the time you get to the 1800s I don't even want to think about how little of a amount of Turkish blood they had in those. They were probably genetically mostly Serbian and Greek and Italian because for generations their mothers are all Serbians, Greeks and Italians Russians, things like that",
      "What about Abbasid caliphs? Some of their mothers were Persian, some of their mother were Turkic, some other mothers were African. What does this mean about phenotype, people's appearance? If you're walking down the streets in Cairo in the year 1300 let's say and you see someone who would look like phenotypically black to us, let's just say one of their parents is Arab, one of the parents is from Africa South Sahara",
      "That person could be what? I mean, just based on their appearance. Their skin color, their phenotype They could be anything. They could the son of the or the daughter of the well if they're a daughter you probably not gonna see their face in 13th century Cairo There could be the son off the ruler. They can be member of the elite Freeborn member of The Elite Or they could be from...they could be a slave from Ethiopia. You don't know",
      "I know why that, um... The sultan's now probably like... A descendant of the sultan probably is like...",
      "This is interesting. This would be like, if you were going to make a typical paper-maché slave woman in 1300 she's probably Persian or Turkish. Okay. This is Ikhlas Khan the Grand Vizier, Slave Grand Vizer of Bijapur around 1650 in the Deccan in India.",
      "The Deccan, in India. They're both Ethiopians. Brought as slaves, become the senior administrators and basically rulers of these dynasties for many decades. So slaves actually become part of the elite.",
      "This is a picture of, from around the 1300s, painting of the Prophet Muhammad's companions visiting the king of Ethiopia to ask for permission to seek refuge there. Here's an interesting incident that's described in Ibn Abd al-Hakam's Conquest of Egypt written in the mid 1800s but drawn on earlier sources.",
      "The Muslims have just conquered Egypt. And there's a delegation that goes to the administrative leader of this Byzantine province in Egypt, Melkite Bishop. They're led by a man named Obadi bin Salman who the bishop asks, how can you accept this black man being the best among you? He should be below you in standing.",
      "And blackness, siwad, is not something disparaging amongst us. Interesting. But... Who can think of an objection to this? Nazlan I don't think you know the answer. Has anyone ever heard? But I admire your courage. What is the... no one's ever heard of the... Actually, well there's often a story that you hear that Bilal,",
      "the first Mu'addini of Ethiopian descent, a slave of Safwan bin Umayyah. Sorry, his father Umayyah. He was freed by Abu Bakr, the first successor to the Prophet and early Muslim convert. Freed, he becomes a very important early Muslim. And there's this dispute between him and another early Muslim named Abu Dharr al-Jafari.",
      "to him, you son of a black woman. Who's heard this story? This is not a reliable story. People get very mixed up. The actual thing that Abu Dharr says is I got in a fight with a man and I insulted his mother. Then some people report that was Bilal but actually the report where Abu Dhahr says",
      "Very rare hadith, and it's very unreliable. Very unreliabble from the perspective of Muslim Hadith scholars. Which is interesting. People know this story. But in effect... Well first of all now you know that story is actually highly unreliabel. But the meaning is still indicative. In a sense that when Bilal, Muslims have conquered Mecca, Bilal goes to give the adhan on top of the Kaaba in Mecca",
      "What do the Meccan elite say, who are still non-Muslim? They say... Look at this crow. They couldn't find anybody but this crow to give the adhan. What do they mean when they say crow? It's an aspergillum. Yeah I mean crows are what? They're birds and they are what color birds? Blackbirds. So you could easily if you want to insult somebody in Arabia",
      "Tell somebody in Arabia if they had African descent, you could say that you're black. So isn't that a contradiction? Between what these guys are saying and what I just told you? Isn't that contradiction? Not really. Blackness is not in fact disparaged. Other people who were black then never heard of Ahmad bin Al-Aws. A Muslim who actually oversaw the conquest of Egypt on his own initiative.",
      "This just did, Caliph I want to inform you. I've conquered Egypt. That's basically what happened except there was hell of them. Other people. Safwan bin Umayyah The son of the owner of Bilal They're described as black Their mothers were African You know who else is described as Black? Who's the second caliph of Islam? Omar ibn al-Khattab One of the most influential people in Islamic history without a doubt",
      "without a doubt, died 644 of the common era. Omar bin Khattab there's some reports that he was light skinned, some report that he dark skinned at least two of his grandmothers, two of grandparents sorry both I guess his grand mothers were African isn't that interesting? did you ever know that? Did you ever think when you hear a story about Omar Bin Al-As being insulted by someone saying your son is black woman",
      "No! Because in Arabia, at the time of the Prophet The only thing that matters is being part of a tribe And your tribal identity comes from only one person Your dad. Your mom could be whatever It doesn't matter If you're father is from that tribe Especially a noble tribe like the Quraysh",
      "like the Koresh, or Tamim, or something like that. You're set! You're like a made man in the mafia. Nobody can touch you. The worst thing is to be an outsider outside of the tribal system. What are indications of being an outsider? One of them is... well one could be that you look like you're from a different country. Like your really dark skinned, like you look from Ethiopia. But if you have dark skin but everyone knows your dad as a part of the tribe",
      "You're part of the tribe. They're not going to insult you by talking about your skin color because your skin is irrelevant But if you are a former slave like Bilal, they'll attack you for what they can see Question! Bilal had trouble getting married. Anyone ever heard that Bilal has trouble getting maried? He did. Bilal have trouble getting marry There's another Muslim who had double the trouble Bilal got getting married",
      "About trouble getting married. About which other companion? No? Who? Did you read my book? Okay, what's your name? Yeah Good thinking Salman the Persian Was Salman black? Salman was Persian Salman is a former slave",
      "Just like Bilal, he's an outsider. But he's not black. It's being an outsider that is the issue. If the way to sort of get at your outsiderness is blackness, that's what we're going to bring up. If you're not an outsider, like Omar bin al-Aas or Omar bin Al Khattab or Safwan bin Umayyah, no one's gonna talk about the way you look. Is this clear to everybody? Does everyone understand how it seems to be a contradiction is in fact not a contradiction",
      "What people, if anyone needs to have a conversation",
      "You're not allowed to speak in front of other people.",
      "a little thing on a shield. That's supposed to be Muhammad, Prophet Muhammad. It's interesting in European thought even the medieval period, the conflation of Arabia and Africa blacks, Arabs, Saracens demons it all just mixed together in one big stew of other bad non-Christian people Black as phenotype, black as metaphor very important question",
      "What is the name for like, a typical person's skin tone? Where is your family from in Mali? Yeah. Are they from like... Bamako. Okay. So if you were to go and describe a random person on the street in Bamako, how would you- In Bamboorah what language do you say their skin color is? Noir. What? Noi? That's completely French. It's noir. In Bambro you say noir? Yeah",
      "Cloud means skin, and then fiend means dark. So it's like dark skin",
      "Black sheep of the family Think about it I didn't know as many languages that I could get information on and I tried to interview people from these native speakers of language as well A lot, a lot of languages in Africa South Sahara The word for normal skin tone someone in that area is the word for black Like the same color as her hijab That language also has phrases like",
      "Black-hearted, black day, right? Does everybody understand what I'm saying? So in America we have this assumption that you have a negative metaphoric meaning for blackness is always assumed to kind of translate or be equated to or tied to black as a color descriptor. So the fact that we say, you know, blacklisted",
      "The problem with this argument is that in lots of languages, I don't want to say all, but certainly in the majority of least-languaged people in the world, light and dark?",
      "Light is a positive valence, dark is a negative valence. Not all the time, you know sometimes things like this chocolate is really dark or that can be good, or like dark beer could be good. It's not always the same but light is sort of positive, good, dark as negative Why would that be? Why would humans have... why would this be pretty consistent across human languages? I have a question. Has anyone ever told you, I'm afraid of the lights. I woke up in the middle of day, I was screaming",
      "I'm afraid of the light. There's a monster right over there. Humans are diurnal creatures. We do stuff in the day, night time we go to sleep where if darkness is something you don't know or can't see it, right? It kind of makes sense at least metaphorically speaking that this is pretty consistent with widespread human languages. As in even languages spoken by people who would describe themselves and who we in the modern global web",
      "global west would call black. Unisifically black. That is very interesting. I find that fascinating as an academic. Does anyone else find that facinating? What does this mean? This means, that we can't always assume a direct link between blackness as the color descriptor and blackness in metaphor. Very important.",
      "This is a... this... one of my friends was talking about this yesterday. People love to talk about kind of cultural colonialism or intellectual colonialism, imperialism American imperialism I'm not going to debate this stuff But you know what the irony is? Often times super woke academics are involved in essentially American imperialist of human history",
      "The world has to think about race the way Americans think about it, which I find to be imperial. Other people in the world talk about color in different ways. Not everyone in the World has the same racial issues that Americans have. I'm not saying nobody else has them but not everybody does and not everybody in history did. This is very important.",
      "and their faces will be blackened",
      "distinction, they would say black and red. And by the way most scholars think that Arabs consider themselves on the black half. When you see in Arabic black and white especially early Arabic at the time of the Prophet and early Islamic history it is almost always being used not to describe people's skin color or their features but to talk about moral evaluation. White is noble",
      "He's noble. He is white of face, he's noble Black of face It's a metaphoric language So black in faces, white in face, not day of judgment People who are felicitous, believers People who aren't felicitious, damned, unbelievers And when you look at Muslim scholars commenting on these verses This is exactly what they say",
      "They say, this is the type of blackness that has nothing to do with blackness on earth. Nothing to do...with it. This is whiteness that has nothign to do whiteness on Earth. Interesting question. When you go and look at Muslim scholars from Africa south and Sahara like let's say Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse a great Senegalese scholar died 1975 in his Tafsir of the Qur'an, his commentary on the Qurayn other scholars from Senegal how did they explain the meaning of these verses?",
      "of these verses exactly the same way. Exactly the same one whether you're Persian or Senegalese, the understanding is the same. Very important to remember that metaphor and color descriptors don't always they're not always connected at the hip. All right I talked for a long time so I'll answer any questions or hear comments you have. I'd love to hear what you have to say. Mazen do you actually have a question?",
      "Why are people, like old people going to the top of it and having all different ways? Like this guy's going in white but this one is going black.",
      "Of course. Yeah, um... Wait wait wait, not uh... Mustafa! What is it? Well we would say today probably olive skin like he was not very dark, not very light. Uh luminous white. Luminous white but something like a kind of light, a light olive, like maybe what's your name with the kind of Hawaiian shirt?",
      "That would be white colored skin. No pressure. My point is that's probably what they meant, but guess what? And this is interesting I asked one of my teachers, a Senegalese sheikh about this. It was very interesting answer. So if you're like in Malaysia, let's say you live in Java and it's the year 1700",
      "So you live in a village in Java. Okay, there's no TV, there is no internet whatever You've met other people from other villages near you in Java That's it And you have a dream and you see the Prophet Muhammad And the prophet said in a hadith Whoever sees me in their dreams, it's like they've seen me in real life The devil does not take my form What would that person see? That Javanese person, what would they see? We don't know but likely what would he see",
      "There are 1400. And you see someone who looks like Prophet Muhammad in your eyes, who looks people you know. That's the Prophet Muhammad. Interesting answer. It's all the Prophet Mohammad. Even though that's... I mean, the Prophet Mohammed had to look one way and we have descriptions of it but his spiritual manifestation is however people... Is in the eye of the beholder. Alright, other questions that are not from my own child?",
      "Why didn't SEMS outright ban slavery the way it banned alcohol?",
      "occurred, it wasn't conceptually possible. I think that's the best answer to the question. The people say, oh, some will say, same thing by the way Christians in the 1700s and 1800s said about Jesus. Why didn't Jesus... Benjamin Rush? I think he was from Philadelphia, wasn't he? Founding father, abolitionist. You could read his debates with southern",
      "It's funny, not just with southern slave owners but people who actually didn't really... they didn't like slavery but they didn' find abolitionist arguments very compelling. So it wasn't like they were supporting slavery, they just didn't buy a lot of abolitionist argument and you could read these debates And they asked Benjamin Rush why didn't Jesus ban slavery? I said well it would have been too difficult, it would've been too disruptive",
      "Because I never really thought about Jesus being a guy who wasn't afraid to make waves. Second, one of the letter writers says to Benjamin Rust is, so what you're telling me is that the Son of God on earth didn't have the courage to state something? He could just say slavery was wrong. He could've just said that. He didn't need to say, I order you to get rid of all slaves.",
      "He said that, he didn't. There was no...Rush didn't have an answer for this. Abolitionists actually didn't had answers to these questions. So, uh, that's a...who was I talking to? Oh it was you, yeah there is no answer for that except that nobody thought about that until actually it was economically possible.",
      "Somebody at ISNA. No, no I'm not just saying that. I love ISNA! I kid. No you know people have a lot of ideas. Like Neil Armstrong went to the moon heard the event. Jack Cousteau went to bottom of the ocean heard the evenem. I don't know. I've never heard this discussed.",
      "My name is Thomas. Thank you so much for speaking about the story of God and lightning. So my question is, how does a legal way to obtain Islam differ from other religions or just like free Islam?",
      "There's a couple of major changes that Islamic law, the Quran and Islamic law makes to slavery in the world in general. In the nearest particular. One I did not mention is that it restricts... So the main way into slavery if you were like in Rome in 200 AD or let's say Greece in 200 A.D. Or Damascus in 500 B.C. was debt.",
      "in general end up as slaves. You can't pay someone money, you end up their slave. It's called debt slavery. Islamic law prohibits debt slavery Another major source of slavery in human history is selling your children into slavery I know it's shocking to hear but if you're starving that might be the best way to not have your child starve at least they are going to get fed",
      "It's very common. Leaving your children out, exposing them like leaving a baby out to die because you can't support it. Someone comes and takes it. This is major sort of slavery in Europe up until the Middle Ages. Another major self-dedition giving yourself as a slave I know people think this is crazy but sometimes they think about this especially during COVID 19 or I watched this movie, this TV show Station Eleven. I watched a few episodes of it. It got too intense. They couldn't finish it. Anyone watch this?",
      "I would just be looking for anywhere like there was a community where I'd be safe. Like, there's food, there are walls and food and stuff inside. Someone said,",
      "And it's very interesting, anthropologists have talked about this especially in the 1970s and 80s. Freedom, like negative freedom is the idea that no one can control you people can't tell you what to do This is only valuable if you actually have basic security Once you have basic Security then your like I want to wear this, I want wear that, I wanna do this job, I wan to do that job, i want go over here, I wana go over there If you don't have basic",
      "then that's actually your primary concern. And negative freedom, what we think of as normalist freedom is actually pretty useless. So a lot of humans in history who became slaves gave themselves up to slaves. Another major source? Capture and war. In Islamic law the only way people can be enslaved like taken from free and made slaves is they're captured in war. Non-Muslims from outside the Muslim community",
      "the boundaries of a Muslim state, captured in war, those people can be slaves. That's the only source that is legal in Islamic law. Yes?",
      "If I understand you correctly, in fact, looking at slavery... Their first option is if you have a slave you should free your slave. Yes. So I'm curious, is that just a cultural thing or something to do with the time? Or is there something fundamental about Islam and the Quran that leads people to look at slavery not in that light as something that... I think it's something fundamental. I'll tell you why. There's a...",
      "The earliest known dictionary of Arabic is a guy named Khalil bin Ahmed in the late 700s, early 800s. He, in the definition of slave he says just to make it clear you're all slaves of God",
      "Slave of God. Abdur-Rahman, slave of the most merciful. What's one of the main words that the Quran uses to talk about human beings? Ibad Allah, the slaves of God When Muslims, and I'm sorry to say this invented human rights go look it up Tell me when someone started talking about rights that all human beings have Muslims talked about Hakuk al ibad The rights of the slaves They mean the slaves",
      "All human beings have these rights. The right to physical inviolability, the right to property, the righ to due process. Whether you're a man or woman, Muslim non-Muslim free slave. So...the main way that the Especially if we go back into like the all the way back in ancient Near East In the Old Testament and the New Testament Anytime you read the new testament like the servants of God they worded Greek is doulos",
      "The Prophet says, don't call your slave my slave. Slaves, don' t call your owner my master. They should say Master Maulaya like my kind of patron and the master should say to his slave, My boy or my girl because the prophet says you are all there's only one Lord, only one master and you're all His slaves so I think it's a conceptually part of Islamic tradition",
      "tradition, that slavery as a human institution is an uncomfortable institution. So there's this I think attempt to sort of remove as many people as possible from that category. Hang on. Yes? Go ahead. Oh, Bethar. Yeah. Sorry. I forgot to get the second question from Bethar No, no. Let's hear it.",
      "I have to worry about this. I mean, first off, I've heard a lot of these topics. It's very known topics. So thanks a lot. One thing I just wanted to ask the question because it was a really weird-ass question about how this is different than an inspiration for me or for Juan. Partly just sure that you might know about this and I know I read a book called Topics, Difference, and so on. Is there one that I'd always know?",
      "Yeah, and so I'm making this from asking the question differently with not necessarily direct inspiration. I realize maybe at the time there was some form of emotional animosity between Muslims and Europe or America. So what if they were to be fundamental economic ideas?",
      "I don't know. I mean, I don' t know the answer to that. Maybe some...I mean, i know this book. I haven't read it. I have nothing against it. Im sure its a good book but I've not read it so I don´t know any... I don''t know.",
      "We'll take one more question and then they've set up for us to play Monk Outside. No questions from any ladies? I did actually have one but I'm not sure if it was better. No, go ahead. Okay, I was going to say... Actually before I came today I had been searching your name to watch a couple of clips and I noticed some of the first results you would contract",
      "controversy, which I mean has happened to a lot of Japanese scholars and whatnot. And I was wondering how do you handle that sort of thing? When you talk about sensitive topics like today we talked about race and slavery and everything How do you kind of handle those people looking at you as a controversial figure or making a statement? Oh well, I don't know. I think it's...",
      "The job security, to answer them. If I were not a full professor, I probably would be a lot more reticent to discuss these things. But I think that if you're honest and have good intentions... You are always getting your work checked. It's very important to constantly get feedback on one's work.",
      "When I study these things, and when I'm constantly talking to other scholars and getting their... making sure that I'm not misunderstanding them. Making sure that don't have a crazy idea. You know so if you do a good job, you've done the best you can, you checked your work then if you have an answer for questions people have, I think it's responsibility of someone who is in that position to offer that to people. Is that kind of why you involve your children in this sort of thing?",
      "Yeah, they came to this talk as if it was... I mean maybe shouldn't have come to the talk. No we um in my family we kind of tiptoe around more sensitive topics when it comes to I think my brother is about your son's age and around him we like kind of covered his ears around these sorts of things Is that something you've kinda had to move past? I don't know. I just don't how well that works in the US. I mean these topics are so",
      "I don't know, probably like 20 years ago Let's just say 10 years ago. I think ten years ago as a Muslim Look you know I told this to the organizers. I hope they're not angry at me but I mean if you Ten years ago there's some this talk would have been completely unnecessary and it was probably could just cause a lot of problems, but When ISIS happened? I didn't know Muslims didn't have an interest how to address this issue",
      "They didn't have because they just swept the center of the carpet. Didn't want to talk about it or tiptoed around it. They didn t have answers And this is a major crisis for a lot of Muslims, a major crises Similarly issues of race I mean, I don't know about you but I can't go like if I if you if you google like Muslims and race or something in blackness just put that in Google Islam and race I guarantee you I guarantee one of the first things are gonna see is",
      "is Islamic slave trade, Arab slave trade Arabs are racist against black people I mean I just don't know how this is avoidable It's in almost every media and I would...I just think you have to know how to address this if your gonna deal with these things Otherwise you're going to get swarmed. You're going be a tsunami",
      "Um, yeah. Was that... Wait hang on one more question, one more questions. It's fine I apologize. No you're fine. How long until Mungerland? Uh, I think we got... Okay, one last question. Was the profits and the subvenience ever directly involved in slave trade? No not in slave trades no. Not even as companions? I don't think so. I mean like as a business?",
      "There were not really a lot of slaves. In Arabia at the time, the Prophet's slavery was very... there were slaves everywhere. I mean it was widespread but it was very minimal in the sense that there was not... It wasn't like 25% society or something where you see it's rolling. So it was... and slaves were more like...",
      "There's a big difference between societies where slaves are commercial articles and where they're just part of the economy. So what do I mean by that? If you say, okay we just raided this other tribe and captured five people from that tribe. Most of the largest group in terms of ethnic groups, slaves in Arabia were other Arabs. Number two group was Ethiopians. Number three about the same, Persians.",
      "So the largest plurality was actually other Arabs captured in raids. But they weren't engaged in slave trade, so people didn't make money off this. Now this is a big change that happens for example in England and Britain in like the 800s when the Vikings started attacking Britain. Before that there was slavery in Britain but no one thought we could grab someone from",
      "So we want to thank you Dr. Brown so much for your participation."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan A_C_ Brown Delivering Speech in One Day I_m71ybl8RNHg&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748671405.opus",
    "text": [
      "Hello everyone, this is Dr. R.T. Mullins. I'm sorry that I cannot be there with you in person, but I'm glad that I can at least present this talk in this format. This is because I think that the relationship between religion and reason is very important. Humans are rational animals. They're capable of responding to reasons and arguments. But don't you think that's kind of odd? Out of all the possible creatures that the evolutionary process could have produced, why does it produce rational animals like humans?",
      "like humans. Let me put the question in a different way. Here's the question that's been bothering me lately. Why are we living in a world like this? Out of all of the possible universes, why this universe? Osama, please cut this presentation. Why a universe with rational animals that are capable... I'm afraid we have Dr. Jonathan S. Brown who has joined us live right now and it is very late and he has requested to join. Dr. Brown, can you hear me? Yes.",
      "uh yes i come i can hear you guys sorry uh really uh for joining us i'm sure it's very late and now that you have joined us i will go straight up to you because i am sure i would like you to finish on time for you as well and please go ahead we don't need an introduction for jonathan ac brown and i would",
      "that paper, but at least it was recorded. It sounded actually pretty interesting. Yeah, I think... I don't know. You guys think I'm in California, but I'm on the East Coast. That's why I think we had to mix up with the time. Anyway, hamdallah. No big deal. Thanks for inviting me to speak to you. I wish I could come there in person,",
      "uh just wasn't possible so i'm just going to i'm going to try and give a paper this is also not my area of expertise so but it's something I've done research on but I mean I'm not you know I'm Not like a history of science scholar",
      "So it was a good chance for me to kind of review some things I've been thinking about and general, probably themes that are fairly well known to people who were familiar with this subject. And as I was doing this, you know, kind of thinking about what I was going to say and going through my notes and stuff, I kept thinking about this phrase in English, you",
      "of like uh you know something similar has happened in the past or you can you know what's going to happen you say you know we've seen this movie before kind of you know uh like some political drama or something that we've see this move where that's how i feel like a lot about these discussions about our religion and science it's really kind of people having debates about",
      "of their epistemologies you know where should they uh should there the focus of their um of their life and of their where they derive their morals and what they think is important is that should their focus be on on god and the metaphysical or should it be on kind of the material world and uh that kind of debate just happens in one of the ways it happens is through this",
      "And of course, the reason why I think it's good to put quotes around this is because people talk about, oh, is religion clashing with science or is there a contradiction between religion and science? That's like saying, is there are contradictions between one thing that's really hard to define and another thing that is really hard. The bottom line is it really depends on how you define the two things. If you define them in such a way",
      "And if you don't want to, you don' have to. I use the word clash because that's really how this is thought about now by historians of science and has been for several decades now. I mean, the whole kind of religion versus science thing is really more of a popular intellectual idea that you see in kind of amongst non scholars",
      "history and religion is as i said kind of preposterous because uh of how um uh kind of amorphous these two concepts are in world history and the notion of a clash thesis is really a product of late 19th century british and american writers and of course the influence they have in let's say places like british india right where british south asia where you have",
      "have lots of debates around evolution, around science, about the cosmology and astronomy that are in some ways like debates between Muslims and different types of missionaries or European intellectuals. That are basically kind of Muslims in South Asia interacting with this kind of British and American clash thinking in the late 19th century",
      "19th century. The two names that are the most, there's a couple of names that probably the most well-known are two American scholars, John William Draper who died in 1882 and Andrew Dixon White who died at 1918. And I think White was actually the president of Cornell University,",
      "And they both wrote books, large books about the clash between science and religion, which in a lot of ways were really kind of just anti-Catholic books. They were kind of what it really meant is that Protestant culture and rationality of Britain and America in late 19th century were in a clash with what they understood as kind of Catholic religion.",
      "So this is where this whole idea of a clash between science and religion comes from, and where it's really articulated is late 19th century, early 20th century figures. And I'll just say a couple of points which I think are worth keeping in mind. This clash thesis essentializes animosity. It essentializes an animosity between religion and science that has not only not always been the case, but at crucial times",
      "areas has been the opposite, right? So it actually has been a productive partnership. For example in the 18th century which was a crucial period in modern scientific discovery in Britain especially in Britain and France in the 19th century there was no deist so no single deist contributed to scientific advance. So if you look at like",
      "the advances in this were not done by the kind of rationalists and critics of religion of the time, namely deists. You know people who believed in you know a distant god that had no interaction with the world and just kind of the idea that God is the clockmaker who just kind creates the clock of the universe and then sets it going and has nothing to do with it anymore. So these deists who are you know these critics of",
      "ones who provided any of these scientific advancements of the 18th century. By contrast, it was extremely committed Christians who did, right? So it was only extremely committed Christian who led to these scientific advances in the 18 th century. Names known to all of us from history, from the history of early modern and modern science belong to profoundly religious people. For example, Descartes died 1650, Blaise Pascal",
      "Pascal died 1662. These are two Frenchmen. Robert Boyle died 1691, British. Michael Faraday died 1863, British Lord Kelvin died 1907 also British. So these are all extremely committed Christians. These here not just Christians who are religious in a general sense they're like more religious than the average farmer religious",
      "citizen of their countries in their era. And just to give you an idea, I mean, Pascal, we have unit of not only Blaise Pascal, not only was extremely he was such an important scientist, there's a unit of measurement named after him or Pascal, Robert Boyle, we",
      "then also a unit of measurement. So these measurements and rules are named after people who were extremely devout Christians. For some, like Blaise Pascal, the intense study of the natural world was in part encouraged because they saw the transcendental realm as beyond reason.",
      "is irrational. But what he says is that your faith and metaphysical issues aren't supposed to be rational. In fact, the fact that they're irrational gives them a bigger claim to truth. Now I don't want to get into whether that's true or not. I don' t think that's as a Muslim but we're not interested in presenting my own views here. I'm talking about these figures right? So for my point is it for Pascal one of the reasons that he could engage",
      "could engage in extremely kind of empirical rational examination of the world around him was because this world is the abode of reason. The other world, the akhira, the unseen realm, is the of irrationality for him. So in some ways you could say well the reason why these committed Christians are engaging",
      "scientific research is because the realm of the physical world has been secularized in their eyes. But that's not necessarily true for all of them at all. Religiosity and scriptural fideism or kind of faithfulness to the claims about the truth of scripture, the biblical scripture, this did not mean",
      "experimentation. So people like, there were a lot of these leading scientists who were deeply committed to religiosity in the sense of belief in the literal truth of scripture or that script, you know, the biblical scripture contained accurate reports about events that really happened. For example, Robert Boyle, the British scholar who died in 1691 I mentioned, he wrote a book called The Reconcilableness of Reason and Religion, in which he argued",
      "He argued that God can violate any of his laws if he wants. And he said the example of this is a biblical miracle. So, this is guy who in one sense is discovering literally discovering laws of nature to the point that some of them are named after him but also saying that God. Can violate these laws anytime he chooses and did so in the case of miracles all this makes me think of I think a really interesting quote by",
      "scholar Stanley Jackie, who notes that quote, whenever a scientist or philosopher worked out a scientific methodology that made it impossible to have the inference that there exists a transcendental factor, i.e., God or the creator, the results are potentially disastrous for science. So what this scholar is saying, Stanley Jacky,",
      "history extremely unproductive for scholars to be kind of atheistic or to foreclose on the possibility of the metaphysical, right? It's like the idea that there's something transcendent out there, a creator, a God, something metaphysical some metaphysical reality. That ends up almost being like a really important you know it exerts this really important gravitational pull on scientists.",
      "somehow engage in like more productive scientific research than if you have people who just say, well, there's no God. There's nothing outside the material world. The people who say the latter are not the ones who historically have made really important or landmark discoveries in science. Oh, the second point I wanted to make is literal little that we hear about today",
      "For example, I mean, I'm going to focus on biblical stories. But a lot of these things you could easily apply to Islamic tradition as well. For example the notion that nowadays people have an understanding of science and scripture so they can realize how stupid stories in the Bible are and kind of mockery of them. This goes back to the very first responses of Roman intellectuals to Christianity.",
      "For example, the second century Roman critic of Christianity, a scholar named Celsus, who as I said from the second-century of the Common Era. He mocked the biblical story of the flood and the idea that there's this ark it has you know to every animal he just made fun of this. I mean in the same way that someone like Voltaire would poke fun at it in the 1700s and that people make fun of it today. Another early critic of",
      "Porphyry was actually the senior disciple of the famous philosopher Plotinus, who died around 270 of the Common Era. Plotinas whose writings became so influential in the Islamic world with influencing scholars like Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. So Porphyri actually also writes a polemic against Christianity",
      "directly from him, which is actually preserved. His original book wasn't preserved, but we have snippets of it preserved in Christian writings like the writings of St. Augustine. So Porphyry wrote, what are we to believe concerning Jonah? Eunice, what do we to belief concerning Jonah who is said to have been three days in the whale's belly? The thing is utterly improbable and incredible that a man swallowed with his clothes on should have existed inside of fish.",
      "fish. If, however, the story is figurative, please explain the meaning of it. So he's making fun of this idea that Jonah, Eunice gets eaten, swallowed by a whale for three days. The same type of mockery you'd hear from somebody today, some kind of skeptic or scientifically inclined person. Of course, it's funny that I think in June 2021, so about two years ago, there was a lobster diver.",
      "So a guy diving for lobsters off the coast of Massachusetts here in the United States, off Provincetown. And he was swallowed by a humpback whale and he estimated he was swallowed for about a minute or so before the whales spat him out and he survived and told the story. So I mean it's funny that people make fun of these stories and they don't allow that some of these things actually might have occurred.",
      "doctor who's originally from Bergama, which is today, well Pergamum, which today Bergama in northwest Turkey. Galen the famous physician he also attacked Christians for saying that God could create a bull out of ashes I'm not sure where this came from but this notion that you could that God can take a bunch of ashes and create like an animal out of it. He made fun of this and he said you know Christians are stupid for not following the Greek idea",
      "idea that God would never attempt the impossible. So, God doesn't do things that are naturally impossible and so he kind of makes fun of Christians for thinking that that's something God could do. Similarly like you know when you tell a really new atheist proponent today about the argument from order right? So that you say how can there be no creator if",
      "If our world and our universe runs according to these exact scientific laws, then our universe is so perfectly ordered. How can you explain that? How can it be random? What are the chances of this occurring? What someone like Richard Dawkins would say is that we don't know how many universes didn't come into existence. We don't",
      "is that we happen to live in the one that succeeded. So they would just say that, yeah, it is perfectly ordered but that doesn't mean that was intended this is just a random occurrence which is funny because this is exactly the same argument that you know in the second and first century BCE was made by Epicurean philosophers and later by the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume so they say that",
      "The Epicureans and Hume, they just said that the world is a result of random occurrence. It just happens to be that it seems to be ordered in the way that we see it today. But that doesn't mean that there are actually rules. It doesn't even mean that they were – that there was some rule maker or creator. It's just means that look this is the way the world",
      "you can see it goes back 2,200 years. Finally, something that's pretty well known but I'll just mention it for the sake of comprehensiveness is this idea that we read the story of the creation of the world in seven days and like in the story Genesis in the Bible or that's alluded to as well in the Quran and this is physically impossible",
      "scholars never really took this literally, right? So religious scholars, Muslim or Christian didn't take this story. Literally going back to St. Augustine in the Western tradition and St.",
      "creation was created in seven days, because how could you have creation measured in a unit of time that didn't even exist at the time? So you don't have days until you have the sun and rotation of the sun. How can you talk about your creation in a universe that didn t even exist? He says very clearly this story is figurative it's not meant to be taken literally. The third and final point I'll make is",
      "that the consequences of an observation or a discovery, its consequences in this big debate about is this for religion or against religion? Is this an attack on religion or in support of religion? It really depends on perspective and context.",
      "a certain scientific, quote unquote, scientific fact can mean one thing in one context in one time period and then totally opposite in another time period. So nothing is in and of itself like evidence for or against the truth of a religious claim. For example, Sir Isaac Newton, the famous British scientist who died in 1727, he argued that comets were secondary causes sent by God to replenish planetary motion",
      "replenish planetary motion. So he said, he had discovered or studied the elliptical orbit of planets that kind of orbit of planet but his idea... He couldn't really explain comets because they came in seem to come in randomly and so what he said is that this is God sending in these comments to replenish the motion of these planets. Now it's funny Leibniz a German scholar who was contemporary",
      "who is a contemporary of Isaac Newton, Leibniz died in 1716. He rejected this idea. He felt that Newton was belittling God, that this argument of Newton was sort of insulting to God because why would God need to rely on secondary causation? Like why would create a system that wasn't perfect that he would then have to kind of send something into to rectify imperfections or flaws",
      "So Leibniz criticizes, you know, Newton uses comets to kind of, or he explains comets by saying this is God's involvement in creation. Leibnetz said, you're insulting God by saying God has to be involved in creation and then later, uh, or into the upkeep of creation. And then later this French a century later, this French, um, scholar and astronomer named Pierre Simon Laplace who died in 1827.",
      "he has this argument that planetary orbits are self-correcting so that they don't actually deteriorate, that if they appear to deteriorate they'll kind of fix themselves or repair themselves. He said see we don't need Newton's comets anymore my scheme doesn't require God. So one case you have a guy you know one scholar saying comets show you know our way to involve God in the maintenance of creation another scholar saying that's an insult to God and finally a third scholar",
      "We don't need a God in our creation, in our schema to begin with. So all of this is about just like what comets role is and what the role of comets is in creation. You can see that what it means to different people at different times is very different. Some people who are more fideistic or more religious than others. The last thing I'll say is the example of fossils is another one, right?",
      "study of fossils, particularly in the 1700s was used by, so the discovery of like these kind of what appeared to be bones or something of species that don't exist anymore. This was originally used by scientists who were anti-Aristotelian. So they didn't like Aristotelians science. They were kind of practitioners of new modern more modern scientific method. And",
      "Aristotle has this argument that forms were eternal, that the world is made up of matter and the matter takes the shape of these forms that are eternal. Human beings or a form or dogs or a farm or horses or a firm. But what they says is according to Aristotle, forms are eternal so you can't have a form that comes into existence or a forum that goes out of existence, it becomes extinct. They said, look our modern scientific methods",
      "Aristotelian methods that had been embraced by the Catholic Church and things like that. This then ironically becomes a big crisis for deists, for these kind of people who believe in just God who creates the universe and then has nothing and creates it like a clock that runs on its own and has no interaction with humanity. There's no revelation. There are prayers being answered or anything like that so their problem is that they didn't",
      "didn't um they couldn't explain like evolution of species. They couldn't under-explain the death of species and changes in species according to their ideas, so it ends up being something that becomes a problem, like a bump that critics of religion have to deal with until Charles Darwin says that oh well evolution is a type",
      "So evolution is sort of like God creates a system that has its own rules. And one of those rules is evolution. And so, you know, that's how evolution can actually still be part of God's function because it's just kind of a mechanism of secondary causation. Meanwhile, there's this religious cleric who's like a minister and a professor at Cambridge. His name is Alan Sedgwick, who died in 1873.",
      "And he argued that fossils were proof of a God who had continued to act in creation with things like extinction. So, for example, he says, look, fossils are actually proof that God is still involved in creation because generally at his time atheists were arguing that all creations has existed eternally.",
      "that species exists eternally in history. So what he says is that fossils show us the fact that certain things die out and come into existence or change through evolution, is actually proof that God is involved in the world. Like so it's not this god who creates things and then has nothing to do with creation. It's actually a god who's continuously involved in our world. So you can see here just the study of fossils sometimes as used as a cudgel to attack religion,",
      "bolster their claims. So sometimes it's used by some critics of religion to attack other critics of so they can have so many different meanings based on one's perspective. So I'll just summarize in the end by saying that, you know, this notion of a class between religion and science ignores the extremely important fact",
      "maybe the most important century in terms of modern scientific discoveries, the leading scholars, pioneers of science in the West were actually extremely committed and devout Christians. And second that modern criticisms of religion from a rational or scientific perspective are just repetitions",
      "been going on for 2000 years or more. And finally, that what a certain scientific fact or discovery means whether it's something that is seen as being in favor of religious claims or against religious claims this can really shift based on time and century and generation or people's perspectives and they can be... A discovery can be taken to mean different things based on the perspective",
      "Thanks very much for inviting me. And I'm going to go pass out now because I've reached the limit of my ability to concentrate. So, I hope that this talk was useful and I won't answer any questions because I probably don't know enough to answer the questions. So unfortunately you have to get someone who's a bigger expert than me although there's",
      "there's a lot of good resources out there so thanks very much khuda hafiz everybody sorry i couldn't be there in person thank you so much uh please have a round of applause for dr jonathan ac braun he especially joined us it is quite late at his at his place and we appreciate your your participation at this hour at your place and really appreciate your insightful speech although i did wanted to want to ask you a question but as",
      "but as it's really late, I'll let you go. Please. Oh no, you can ask me one question. Maybe I know the answer. We went right away towards your speech and there was a rollover question when Professor Kopersky was also giving his speech. And coincidentally, the question still remains. The question is regarding the philosophy of miracles. If I understand it correctly, you mentioned the biblical stance on basically the miracles.",
      "Is it possible to take them literally? Or should we take it in some other sense because I've not been able to understand what really exactly. Yeah, the position of Muslims on Islamic tradition and miracles... I'm trying to think if I can add a file. I can send a file to you. Is this Omar Farooq Sayyaf?",
      "yes i don't know what okay so i'm gonna email you a article i wrote about this issue and then you can uh give it to this you can just send it to your audience maybe um and it will have like it'll get into this like much more in depth but i would",
      "perspectives that Muslims, and I'm not just talking about, you know, more Tesla light or Islamic modernists. I'm talking about just regular old Sunni Muslims. You know, there's a lot of different perspectives they've had on miracles. Uh, some of them, uh, you allowing for, uh certain kinds of miracles but not ones that would be, you Know things that are kind of physically impossible or violate just kind of basic laws of reason. So there's one that's kind",
      "one that's kind of, it allows for miracles but still sees them as things that happen within the laws of nature. The second approach would be to say that... An example of that would be like you can let's say God could grant someone knowledge or something, someone knowledge that they didn't have before or God could",
      "could make water increase in volume or something, but that God could not, for example, make somebody go back in time or make a part bigger than a whole. So the miracle couldn't be something that would violate fundamental rules of",
      "of nature or logic. That's one position that you see amongst some early scholars, like even Abdelkasim al-Khoshyri, the famous Sufi who died 1072 of the Common Era. You can see this in the article I sent to you guys. They accept miracles. They just say there are certain kinds of miracles and there are limits to what God will do.",
      "will do or that a saint can do or the prophet can do. The second approach would be to say that yes, God can do miracles or prophets can do miracle or saints can do Miracles or whatever but they are not actually violations of the rules of nature. They're just examples of something happening according to those rules that we don't understand. What is a rule of nature?",
      "a rule of nature, right? And we don't... For all we know, there's not some rule of gravity that's floating out there in the cosmos, right. We just sit and observe things and we observe something happening a lot of times then we say okay well it seems like every time I drop something it falls therefore if i drop something, it falls. Therefore you know but in fact uh there could be some instances in which you draw something and it doesn't fall we just haven't observed that yet so um this is something",
      "modernists like Sir Sayyed Ahmed Khan, especially who died 1798 from the founder of Aligarh University, Muhammadan University in Aliggarh. So he argues that these things are laws of nature. They can occur but they're in fact just instances of a law of nature that we don't understand yet and the third approach is kind of the maybe more typical standard Muslim response, Sunni response",
      "response, especially is to say that God can do whatever he wants. So there are no laws in the sense that things restricts God, that there's ada or custom general rules by which things function. So you know, the idea is that if I take a, you know I drop a ball it's going to fall on the ground, that's ada and in fact, if we're gonna make plans for playing",
      "function. We follow Ada, we follow it in the natural way, you know, kind of the natural functioning of our world. We've followed it in general social functioning of out world so if I go up to somebody and say, you're a no good son of a motherless goat or something like that to his face, the person is going to get offended right? That's also Ada right? So maybe someone wouldn't be offended but the general Ada custom of things is if you go up somebody insult them like that they are going to be offended. So there's Ada in the",
      "and the social world, and that's fine. To follow these rules and take them as kind of generally binding is simply to do what God has commanded us in the Quran which is that we look at sunnah nallahi fil kaun, that we looked at God's sunna in the world, the way that the world works. But the fact that we generally follow these",
      "necessarily binding on God. And if God wants, he can do whatever he wants. If God wants to create an instance in which I drop a ball and it goes up instead of down, God can do that. Uh, God could make a sinful evil person have, uh, do a miracle right there. It can be anything, anything can happen because we have no right to constrain God's power, uh or to say what, uh that anything is possible or impossible for God. So that's the general, the kind of general Sunni rule",
      "rule. And in that case, you can obviously see that there's no problem with Quranic miracles. There's no Muslim scholar that I know of would ever say there was a problem with Qur'anic miracles because then that would be to remove themselves from the pale of the religion. Is that helpful? Absolutely helpful. Thank you so much. This was Dr. Jonathan A.C. Brown. So thank you so",
      "for joining us and uh the statement you made at the last seems very categorical in the sense how to how do we should take the miracle especially the quranic miracles maybe in the literal sense i if i'm to understand it correctly thank you so much yeah i mean yeah you could take them some of them are i mean when it says like you know jesus healed the brought the dead to life i mean you guess you could",
      "everybody hodof is i hope i get to see you all in pakistan thank you so much sir thanks so much please a round of applause for dr brown"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan A_C_ Brown_ In Conversation with Jonathan_bJYYKuONTCQ&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748678196.opus",
    "text": [
      "Sure, welcome again. Okay, Bismillah. Hi everyone, welcome once again to our session in which we started at the Ilayat on the International Speaker Series today I am very grateful that a good friend of mine and colleague and wonderful academic Professor Jonathan Brown who most of you probably already know but if you don't i'm going to go through the bio not that it's necessary but I just think that that's what we ought to do",
      "what we ought to do. So Professor Brown is the Al-Walid bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Services at Georgetown, and he did his BA in history at Georgetown University and then got a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Chicago. He's the publisher of many books and many works of which more recent some of you may know on his works on Hadith and more particularly on Rasul Sallam so Muhammad short introduction but more recently",
      "Professor Brown has indulged in works in regards to Islam and slavery, and Islam and blackness. Which I think was supposed to come out this year or has come out of this year? I'm not too sure. This year has been a very difficult one. I mean it's out! The book is physically out. I don't know when it's going to go into stores but I mean... It's like physically just now. Okay fantastic. So what we're going to do today is we're gonna cover some of these topics as a way of interacting with professor brown",
      "Brown. What we'll do is have a 40-minute session in which Professor Brown and I will have a conversation so you guys can listen attentively, and then we'll open up the last 20 minutes for a Q&A if that's okay. Once again thank you very much everyone for being here. I really appreciate it on a personal level that so many of us are willing to share and partake in the study of Ilm. It's something that's part of our tradition and culture and i hope that this continues and I'm really grateful that Professor Brown has chosen to be the first speaker of this semester",
      "of this semester in terms of this session so thank you very much professor brown and salam alaikum all right so let's let's begin so one of the interesting things that i found in terms",
      "and so forth, but you chose the route of academia. And you chose that you wanted to be an academic. What I want you to know is what was your choices very early on in your life about going down that direction? Yeah, it's actually a really interesting way to put it. So I became Muslim when I was 19. Basically, I started to learn about Islam",
      "first year of college. So I was, you know, 18 and then that summer I thought a lot about it. And when I went back to school in the fall became Muslim, you now I formally become Muslim with like October of that year. So, uh, I learned how to song through hang on is there any voice that my computer's from house computer?",
      "really well what if i should do maybe i should just reduce the volume of my computer sorry this is not very interesting but uh let me try this hello can you hear me yeah okay um yeah so uh so i became when i began i learned about Islam I really learned",
      "books of Fazlur Rahman and Muhammad Asad. We read in that class I took on Islam when I was a freshman, we read you know Fazl-ur-Rahman's book on Islam, we red Muhammad Asads translation of the Quran, and we read Muhammad Asids Road to Mecca. And so Muhammad Asid is you know um in some ways quote unquote conservative you know i think he'd probably be considered",
      "politically conservative today in the sense of being you know an islamist um but he was in terms of his like theology and his fifth he was or more even in his theology i think he was very quote-unquote liberal right so he was his law might not have been actually his fit might have been he was like sometimes sort of been described as zahiri um i'm just gonna reduce",
      "Okay, so maybe this will help. So in terms of his fit who was like more maybe not so maybe a little bit but where I think he was really kind of unorthodox for lack of better word is in his theology, his opinions on gin, his opinion on you know things",
      "a lot of these he was sort of a very almost like an extreme early muazzalite i think but my point about all this is when I learned about Islam, I learned it really from essentially Islamic modernist perspective basically right and I didn't really know about traditional Islamic scholarship. When I read about it sorry and then I read the other classes",
      "really influenced me a lot her name was Haifa Khalafallah she uh actually dedicated my most recent book to the professor who taught me the first class on Islam Mason and then also my grad student advisor Wadah Al-Khadi but that so Professor Khalafalla we she really she was doing her dissertation on Muhammad al Ghazali the scholar who died in 1996, the Egyptian scholar. And you know Muhammad al-Ghazali was also he wasn't necessarily he was a modernist but",
      "but he was really maybe kind of a manhedge, but maybe like a continuation of Mahmoud Shah Al-Tawth or maybe like Rashid Ridha a little bit. And so and Sheikh Qaradawi. So it's like he was traditional in the sense that he came from the kind of the traditional,",
      "within the tradition of fiqh and Rasool, but he was not bound to a madhab. He was more iconoclastic, willing to go between madhabs or even question positions that he felt had been wrongly taken as also Sheikh Qardawi would sometimes do. But my point is everything I knew about Islam, I knew from either Islamic modernist",
      "of reformist, slightly reformist traditional view. So I didn't actually know that like when you read books like this right? The ulema are usually it's usually like they're talked about as this bunch of idiots. They're sort of but they're either stupid or they are kind of stubborn and the need to reform. They often talk about in the past tense there's sort of like this historical either they're historically extinct",
      "extinct or they're essentially a relic of the past that needs, that is not has no real role in the present in their current state. If they want to be involved, they have to reform or something right? So that's really I didn't understand that you could actually go and learn from Muslim scholars in a way that would be productive so I was really when I was going to Egypt to study Arabic by the way i'm sorry if i'm like taking a long time to tell you this story but I think it's actually interesting",
      "I mean, I think it's great. So yeah, but I guess what I'm trying to say is I actually didn't know you could go to Syria or Egypt and Mauritania anywhere like that and study. Like Sheikh Hamza Youssef was just kind of becoming famous. You know, I just heard him give a lecture once at the time. I didn't ever, I didn' t know anything about his life. I did not know he studied in Mauritanie. I don't know if you can do this stuff. Maybe I should have just done more reading or something. But so my point is that I really",
      "I really had a very... and the attitude of Islamic modernist perspective, it wasn't just that's how I learned about Islam. It really influenced me in the sense that I considered the obligation to reform to be essential. And I looked at that traditional Muslim world quote unquote from perspective essentially I was condescending towards it right? So when I went to Egypt",
      "Egypt to study Arabic for a full year in this program called Casa, which is just like basically 24 hour Arabic for one for 12 months. In Cairo my professor, Professor Khalafallah said okay go when you go go to al-Azhar and there's a sheikh named Ali Juma and you're going to go and tell him I sent you and you've got to go, and you should attend his lessons so I did that and I started to and I was learning Arabic.",
      "I really, I couldn't speak almost no Arabic when I got there. So I was learning Arabic as I did this but I sort of get to know some of the Sheikh Ali Juma and then his senior students as well like Ahmed Zahir Salem and Sheikh Ahmad Al-Faith Rahim Allah and Sheikh Osama Sayyid Mahmoud al-Azhari and Sayed Shaltout and others.",
      "when I went, when I finished my, when iIfinished that year in Cairo. I went to apply to graduate school in the US and it didn't actually occur to me and this is, I'm sorry to give you a bad answer your question but It never actually occurred to me To go and study quote unquote traditionally because I didn't know that you could do this like I didn' t know there's something that actually I mean for me it was just obvious that I wanted to keep learning about my, I want to keep Learning about Islam. That's all I knew. I didn''t have a plan. I wasn't planning to become a professor",
      "a professor i wasn't really thinking ahead i was just knew i wanted to keep doing what i was doing and it's the only step that seemed to exist was supply to phd programs so i applied to php programs in the us went to university chicago and the first year i um uh what happened the first",
      "I said, I was like, okay, I'm going to go to Egypt and I'm just going to do this as hard rules. And I'm gonna like whatever try and benefit whatever something tell me until I went and I spent, I think that's somewhere about month and a half or two months in Cairo. And. I just went every day to these open de ruse and as her mosque with sheikh out of Juma and others. And",
      "what i realized now look i actually want to be really clear i don't agree with like sheikh al-jumah politically i don' t agree with most of his students politically i completely disagree with them but you know it would be complete lie if i said that i didn't think they were extremely knowledgeable i mean there are some of the like sheik al jumaid sayyed mahmoud i really don't argue with them politically but they're",
      "most knowledgeable people i've ever met like and i just i cannot there's nothing um maybe someone like uh sheikh dadu would be some similar but just in the amount of material they have in their minds and the amount their ability to draw on it and focus it in different kind of analytical processes as just i mean i was i felt like a worm you know i felt",
      "I was like, okay well yeah you know you in the east quote unquote you like memorize stuff but i'm from the west quote-unquote and I have an analytical reasoning right so I mean this is literally the stuff I was thinking right. I mean that's actually how I was thinkiing it's kind of embarrassing to say that now but then I would be like let me analyze this and they would just turn me into pulp they would",
      "was the one who had failed to reason properly and they do so using these like traditional like what you would call like, you know, things like they were just really completely dismantled my view of the world, you",
      "of PhD, I had a completely different view on the world. And before that, I'd always been embarrassed to be Muslim. I didn't want people to know I was Muslim. People would say snarky things about Islam and I'd be like, ha-ha! What I realized during that summer in Egypt was holy moly, being Muslim is not",
      "being muslim is a massive asset like this is like these you know i was sitting in class and people would be like reading arabic texts and you know not really understanding them and then they would not really know like the quran they wouldn't know hadiths they wouldn' t know poetry, they wouldn''t know fiqh, they woudn't know all this stuff. And yet they were...this was supposed to be like",
      "like all that stuff was just basic, it wasn't was just taken for granted amongst senior scholars in the traditional circles. Like that was just this was like child's play to them you know and even limited exposure to those traditional scholars had given me capacities and knowledge that I just felt like oh my god like this is actually...I have an advantage you know? This is something that makes",
      "it has made me a better scholar than I ever would have been before right. Can I ask you a question on this? Yeah sorry go ahead do you want to ask? What i find interesting about your life journey so far, this part of it which is interesting, is that your introduction to Islam is has been in itself it's been knowledge. I mean usually people will say I met a particular person, I met this guy at the mosque but your interaction from the inception has been something you read",
      "in Islam, and then you go to Egypt once again you're dealing with this meta institution who are the ulama who are illim based and so forth. And that seems to be how you interact with Islam which is fascinating for me because once you interact of that sort of like knowledge base you then took it upon yourself to say you know what I'm not ashamed to be Muslim in fact i'm going to now take this and I'm now going to defend it or not necessarily defend it but go back to academia and then say okay",
      "and then say, okay this is how I'm going to now do that. Yeah, I mean, I'd say it's... I understand what you mean when you say defend it but I think that like it doesn't need defending because it defends itself if it's deployed properly right? It only needs defending if the people who are talking about it have an audience that doesn't know what it is. Now of course,",
      "And this is, look if you go to Uttar and you grab the first 90 people you meet they're probably gonna be stupid. Like I mean that's true by the way of if you got American University you grabbed 90 people off the campus they're not going to be the top minds at the university right? That's just statistically likely. At a place like Uttars as you know in Pakistan or Egypt or other places",
      "is people who are really talented usually don't go into these sciences. They go into other fields, but you know, you don't judge the Islamic sciences by the average person. You judge them by their excellence, by people who were excellent examples, right? And so that's what I was very fortunate and I stumbled into it just ask backwards or whatever they say like, I mean, I just totally stumbled into, I had no idea what I doing.",
      "people who are amazing examples of this tradition and so that really uh what i realized is like that's this is not to be a being a good learning to be it good muslim scholar is not something that just is about islamic scholarship it's about that means being a great thinker it means being an excellent historian it means a great editor of manuscripts it means you're a great um critical reasoner it mean a great debater right so",
      "Muslim scholar because that was also, I mean, that was all to be a good scholar in general even in the academy. And so from that point on everything I did was really trying to meet at level of excellence that I'd seen from these scholars and to, yeah like when you write an article for Islamic law and society or something probably the premier journal on Islamic law in the West right?",
      "If you write an article, but you don't start out by saying this. And you don say, even Hajar Rahim Allah did. But almost everything else in my scholarship I don't think actually would be different if it were, if I were Muslim or not Muslim. I think a lot of these faith inflections or faith-based elements are really",
      "product of studying early Islamic history. If you study early Islamic History, then you're going to be wrapped up in a lot of presumptions. Everybody who goes into that whether they are Muslim or not Muslim or whatever is going in with a lot presumption and reading their own worldview into history that you have to be reconstructing right? We don't actually have someone sitting there during the time of the Prophet writing down like today the Prophet did this and puts it in a sealed box and we pick it up",
      "and we pick it up 1400 years later. Once you get to the, let's say time of the Muwatta or the sort of late second century Hijri, mid 700s of the common era at that point I mean, you have texts and like you can interpret text this way or you could interpret text that way but being Muslim or not Muslim is not gonna change... Someone who has faith doesn't read",
      "the uh mabstoot of a sarahsi and you know and say because i'm muslim i say you know like your obviously your perspective is going to influence you but the data itself the material you're looking at doesn't change for the muslim or non-muslim right so can i ask something on that yeah go ahead what's interesting is when we look at hadith literature itself that is usually muslims are very closely guarded in the hadith which is something which is instructive in their life",
      "And in regards to hadith literature in academia, I mean one of your earlier works is misquoting Muhammad. Clearly you were aware that there was some sort of misconception in the way that a hadith has been presented and so forth. In that sense do you feel that the way hadith is looked at by scholars who may not be Muslim or the infrastructure doesn't have the same level of interaction or decorum regarding the hadiths literature? That the outcome in itself lends to it being...",
      "to be yeah definitely right so you know when you're looking at hadith that's i consider that part of early islamic history um but there's a so i don't i've written i almost have written i've",
      "I don't really, I'm just not interested. For example my introduction to Hadith book, I spent a long time the whole chapter on Western methodology for the study of Islamic history and I take issue with certain things, I give my opinion on certain things but I'm not engaged in these debates because I find them to be this is essentially a theater for people, it's a theater of polemics right? This is where people basically go and one group of people are saying",
      "islam is not special islam, is not authentic. Islam is not intact. Islam blah blah blah whatever like the different things they want to say and they're just using pieces of they're putting like Mr potato head pieces together to make that argument and then other people are going in saying Islam is authentic Islam is intact Islam is special and they were doing their argument right but neither of these two groups is able to demonstrate to the other group",
      "other group that they are correct based on evidence that the other group would accept right so for me i'm not like i'm happy with people who want to do that god bless them you know etc etc but that's not how i i just find that to be and not super useful ways of time a super use of time again i have written about it in my very short introduction to the prophet i have read about it a little bit in my book on hadith but if you in my books let's say misquoting muhammad or slavery book or the islamic blackness book i spent almost no time",
      "no time on the issue of the authenticity question because i find it to be um look we have the quran there's no real debate about that we have basic outlines of the prophet's life alayhi salat are evident in non-muslim sources right so after that like okay once you put that aside as settled then you know okay uh if if a muslim if a non-Muslim thinks the prophet didn't say this or I think the prophet did say this",
      "that's fine but i'm not interested what i'm interested in is how muslims understand their religion so my book misquoting muhammad i mean that the title is actually just there because the publisher thought it would make money like that so they just gave me a contract they said write a book called miss quayle mohamed we don't care what's in the book this is the title right the actual title for me of the book is the subtitle which is the challenges and choices",
      "in understanding their religion over the centuries and what challenges they face, especially with modernity, et cetera. So I don't really feel that for me at least, I don t find a lot of value in engaging in wrangling over the authenticity question on Hadith. On the Quran, I think it's relatively settled. I don' t feel the need to engage in that a lot. Other people have already done the work but the Hadith stuff",
      "The Hadith stuff, it's sort of fruitless. Can I ask you a question then? In terms of your work and your career and so forth, have you seen... Because you said you wrote Misquoting Muhammad for Muslims, and I'm assuming even the other works that you're writing, even though it's within a particular Western academic framework where it's written in English, but it is aimed for a Muslim audience who can read what you're saying or even read between the lines. It's something that they can pick up and it can empower them in a particular way when you actually are speaking to them.",
      "speaking to them. Have you found in the Muslim world, in particular, in terms of their interaction with your work how things have maybe changed where Muslims in academia in particular are now writing works on hadith and it's having an impact in the muslim world whereas usually authenticity is assumed where knowledge is coming from the Muslim World? Yeah so I would say well first of all i would say a couple of things one is",
      "know when muslim scholars you know when al-ghazali or ibn rushd or um like even timea or you know but these scholars are writing i don't think they thought of themselves as like i'm writing from muslims not non-muslims but they were writing with and when they say elm they don't say like islami",
      "and collect, and parse, and reason they see as actually universal. I mean essentially universal rules right? And i think they were mostly correct about that. So what I tried to do after I wrote my first three books is when I wrote the Misplained Muhammad book, what I really wanted to do was to say I want to be like these guys. I want",
      "that yes, is about the Islamic tradition. Yes, it's going to be helpful for Muslims but what I really want to do is I want to show the world how Muslims have thought about big questions and I want people to read this who are not Muslim and say hey, I'm learning about Islam and I'm leaning about the way Muslim scholars thought and stuff like that but also I wanted them to read it and say like hey, this is actually... Hey, this an interesting way to think about free will",
      "about free will this is an interesting way to think about um the role of law in society and to what extent law is supposed to shape society versus shaped by society or to what extend you know what is truth you know is it if your kid comes and asks you a question you tell them a lie because that's the best thing to tell them at that moment is that a betrayal of truth or not like these are these are big questions that have have vexed humans throughout history",
      "of approaching those questions. What I wanted to do is say Muslims are involved in all these conversations and here's an example of their contribution. So, in some ways, I wanted try and live out or channel the confidence of a person like al-Ghazali or ibn Taymiyyah and offer that as an example",
      "Similarly with things like the slavery book, what motivated me, what drove me to write that book was a fuel for me to read that book. What I saw is incredible close-mindedness and willful ignorance that was embraced by academics. Not necessarily Muslim academics",
      "Muslim academics, period on this topic. And the public square, period, on this top. So I think that my book on slavery... It's really interesting if you want to learn about Islam and slavery but for me, the core of the book is actually the part to deal with what are the moral historical and epistemological consequences",
      "get our values and what we think about our species, and our future in our past. And that is I think this is actually just as applicable to non-Muslims as it is Muslims. So for me like that was more of a contribution to discussions around history of morality and slavery generally the Islamic part was just added on as to make what i thought was like a complete contribution",
      "contribution. Similarly, the issue of Islam and blackness like there are a lot of that book is designed to... oh sorry did I interrupt you? Yeah sorry John just these two points because i find it interesting in terms of these last two books that you worked on this notion of ethics and morality something which is coming up more and more in Islamic studies by many Muslim scholars in particular trying to raise the question of the idea of ethics",
      "the challenges we're facing just not only in regards to islam and and the lived experience but generally the sort of like fissures that exist in the world today but also trying to go back into the tradition and sort of speak about ethics and morality again are you finding that that's taking place in regards",
      "what is the role of an academic? I mean, or take what is a role of let's say like religious studies which i don't have a lot of affection for but it's a good example for this right. So one argument is that you know academics are supposed to explain understand and explain things that they kind of stand outside of what they're studying and they what they",
      "being studied is sort of lesser than death. It's something that is either part of the past, it's been superseded by the present or it's superseded a better version of thinking and spirit, you know, thinking about life, the meaning of life and all this stuff right? So... And then you kind of have to be objective about that and that our job is not to teach Islam to people but to teach people",
      "to teach people how islam as a religious tradition developed etc etc right the other argument is this sort of activist approach which is that you actually want to teach you know the job of a professor is to teach truth to people and almost like preach to them now of course if you think about western universities",
      "can't be right i can't come out and say like i am here to tell you that we almost all do jihad like like dude we can imagine that's not going to be acceptable understanding of islam right so but if i come out in say islam is just about like everybody's a good person and we need to everybody has to embrace their their own truth about like sexuality and like identity and all this stuff like if i",
      "if i come out and say that wow like this is just like really good you know this is terrific so um when i s when you when people talk about like essentially doing theology in the academy you can imagine what most of that quote unquote theology or that preaching is actually going to be angled towards in terms of its content in terms",
      "about what the role of a professor is, especially what the world professor is when we talk about religious traditions. And that I think is an area where you see this issue of ethics and what's the role that of this scholar? And I think the problem in the Western academy is there's a lot of schizophrenia about what universities are supposed to do but what professors are supposed",
      "or you know this is a bigger issue which has a bigger issues probably in our society overall. Now, in terms of like how do I think about this? I try to be very clear about when I'm doing what right so a lot of my let's say if I write a book I might write a",
      "large segments of the book just be describing historical processes and analyzing things. And these are different schools of thought that emerged, this school of thoughts at A and this school thoughts at B right? And then at the end I might say, I think X and this is why I think x now I'm going to make an argument for that but in my opinion that's very clear in the book like it's very clearly that now the author is gonna tell you what he thinks and he's gonna make his argument.",
      "leave it out or you can criticize it but it's very different from the rest of the book so that's what i try to do in my work and my writing is to be both kind of descriptive and analytical uh and able to shift perspectives for the sake of the reader and the students but then also not be afraid to give my own views um when I think it's appropriate. And this will be my final question and then we'll open up to the Q&A,",
      "than blackness. I mean, I'm sure you're aware that these subject areas were going to be controversial for an academic in this current climate but you are still willing to engage in that subject area. What was it that drove you to say, you know what? I find the subject very interesting. I know I'm gonna get some heat from this subject area but this is what I wanna put out there. This is what want to contribute to the conversation and this is generally what I think I should be permitted to do. What's the reasoning behind you winning to do that",
      "because we both know that you have taken heat from some of these subject areas people sometimes don't understand what academics are saying um and there's we have to continuously clarify ourselves even within academic settings i mean i think that you know on a slavery topic what i actually was motivated to write the book because of heat i'd taken before i wrote the book i didn't intend",
      "And it was because of what I saw in the way that academics dealt with the topic and the way the broader American society was dealing with the issue of slavery. Like, I was so stunned by what I consider to be amazing levels of cognitive dissonance",
      "I need to explain why, I need you look into this and if i'm correct. I need, to explain Why, I think this issue is such as you know it's such a thing right? So it was more like I wanted to. I was driven to do it because of what I thought were real failings in the way that scholars and general public square discussions on this issue worked in the world that you know, in the in America basically in the broader West, and even maybe globally",
      "So then the Blackness book really came out of, it was in some ways an extension of the slavery book. Like I had my own questions still lingering from that but also it was because of what I saw happening amongst scholars like they were scholars who are writing professional historians who are historians at really good universities in the West",
      "that Islam at a religion, like added scriptural basis was anti-black. And I was like what the heck is this? How can somebody say this about my religion right? But also here's the evidence they're giving and if I can't address that evidence then I just need to share it because what was happening was people weren't addressing the evidence Muslims or people who were defending Islam against us would just be like that's wrong or you know that's...and then they would tell",
      "tell like a essentially fairy tale about islamic history where no one was racist and everything was great etc etc and they weren't actually able to deal with the evidence that was given by these people who are arguing that islam is anti-black at a scriptural and kind of historical normative level and so i what i want to do is really go and and address all these issues comprehensively so that's what i did",
      "when you talk about getting crap like people the people who give who attack well at least attack me they don't actually read anything right like they know no one if someone actually reads my books and criticizes me I would be happy that's great like I'm so honored that you read my book like that's really flattered but people don't do that they just go you wrote a book and you're a jerk and you said this and you are obviously",
      "that's it like that's just the level of discussion so it's kind of stupid yeah it hurts because you'll get you know 2 000 people telling you this on twitter or something but it doesn't hurt in the sense that none of those people have actually ever read anything that i've written so I'm like I it just sort of uh you sort of doesn't really there's no substance thank you actually you know I was going to continue",
      "to continue but I know that I don't want to take up time for everyone who's here so from my perspective, I just want to say thank you very much for engaging with some of the questions that I've asked you. I can honestly slay that I wish we had more time in which we could pick your brain a bit more but the reason why I sort of appreciate this format to some degree is often when we get scholars talking on the technicalities of the work that they do but very little off...we",
      "process of what it is that they were going through while they were doing the work that we're doing. So, that was basically my intention here so thank you very much for engaging with me in that sense Jonathan I do apologize. My pleasure anytime i'm happy to come back and even in person I would love to come next time when you come down please pay us a visit and I do want to apologize as well that I may have rudely interrupted during a few occasions so I apologize for that no no it's not rude okay go ahead where are the questions let's hear questions yes",
      "So for the Q&A section, anyone who's interested in asking Professor Brown a question please do raise your hand so that we can see it and then we will pick an order. And if you want to write your question, please feel free to do that as well. The floor is open. Okay I have to do like this, or we can sleep.",
      "Okay, there's a question from Elif Yalcin. She says, As-salamu alaykum, I have a specific question. I want to hear Professor Brown's opinion about the hadith related to women being deficient in intelligence and religion. Okay, fair enough. All right, Jonathan, over to you. Okay. Why don't people ask a few questions then I can answer them? It usually takes... it's usually more efficient so that's one. What about the next one?",
      "who's next mehmet fatih arslan has his hand up that's right do you know what actually before we go to method we will probably ask a question why don't you answer this one because i think that's the last one in the written format and then we can do it like okay yeah so the hadith knock us out akrabadine is",
      "I've been doing research on this for like three years. Someone asked me this question, and I was going to write something on it, and like I'd spend three years of doing research in it. It's...I'll tell you why this is a... I find this really challenging. Okay? So one argument...so basically everybody knows the hadith right? So the Prophet comes out and tells these women he's preaching",
      "he's preaching, and he preaches. He goes and tells these women specifically given charity because you're not like you have deficient in your intellect, in your religion. And then someone says what about my how is this? And she said well don't you women not pray some of the times they're menstruating and isn't",
      "So that's in religion and isn't like the testimony of one woman worth out of you know, 2 women worth out. Of 1 man so that's intellect right? And there's also a different versions that are kind of blend in with one another, like about the prophet saying that Women are the majority of people in hell fire or that women wives",
      "lot and they're ungrateful to their husbands. Which by the way, is maybe one of the most accurate has one of them was accurate sentences ever included in history of humanity which I'm sure I'm going to get into what we're saying but he says you know, So even if the husband's like always good to his wife,",
      "one mistake then though i've said i've never seen anything good you've never done anything good for me right i i'm willing to bet that this has been heard by many people in the world um based on what i've heard i've ever heard it myself to be very clear no one's ever spoken like this to me because you know everybody might you know anyway you guys know what i'm saying so the point is that uh",
      "Okay, first of all, why is the Prophet saying that essentially menstruation is a nux? So if women didn't menstruate then humans wouldn't be born. It seems weird to say it's like a deficiency when it's clearly part",
      "like part of how God designed us and it's absolutely essential for our species. Correct? So, and there is some wording in the versions of the Hadith that I find...I haven't really analyzed this fully but strikes me as interesting because it suggests that there's more going on with what the Prophet saying than what seems to be said. But I'm not sure exactly what it is so I don't want to say anything. The second thing is that",
      "the idea of one woman's testimony being worth half a man is clearly not about their intellect because there are all sorts of other areas in which women are intellectually just treated exactly the same as men. Even you see this with Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Khaym al-Jawziyya when they talk about this, and they say like this has nothing to do with witnessing,",
      "essentially being a notary and what is considered authoritative in one society over another, in actual rational capacity men and women are... There could be a really smart woman and a really stupid man or a really dumb woman, a really small man. It doesn't break down along gender lines. Now here's the other thing. Let's say that this hadith had been misused",
      "misinterpreted or something. Or let's say this, it's not I don't think it's true but let's see that this hadith actually was unreliable we have this revelation like oh my god we looked at the isnad and it turns out this hadid is totally unreliabIble i'm not saying this as well I want to be clear i'm just saying let's stay we saw that. It still wouldn't solve our problem because if you look in the like medheb's reasonings they'll frequently cite this hadit",
      "David Gellmaner, Ph.D.: Evidence for why they come with a certain rule so even if the head let's say that it was either false or had been misunderstood it's already been built into baked into certain reasoning on med have issues now you could say that i'm okay now, for example, sheikh Mohammed side Ramadan about your him all along. David Gellerman, Ph.",
      "that this thing the prophet said was sort of like a joke which act actually is pretty convincing i think that actually makes sense to me because it's not clear again why you would say that menstruation is enough like it's sort of he's like almost like teasing the women a little bit he's talking to them like you know as often people would do you know when they're talking people like kind of teasing them and having fun with them a little",
      "them um but then that raises two questions one um the i mean if the prophet is alaysia is joking but medheb rules were built on this joke then we have an issue which is how do we explain the prophet joking when his words are the basis for rulings so shouldn't he not be",
      "the medhebs had built rules based on a joke right so um so that i think there's like so many issues around this hadith that i it's like uh you know extremely you know and i don't want to say not but there's just a lot of like ramifications for you know going back and looking at things you have to deal with like what that would mean what's the what would the consequences of that be how would you deal with those consequences",
      "it's such a fraught issue and i people ask me about the sadiq i dread it because i don't have an easy answer unfortunately i just tried to give you an insight into like some of the things i found around this city thanks for that so so may hoja did have a hand up which i missed so i apologize for that you can go first and then if i thought you could go next and then i think that would be it for a lot so um please no okay okay then uh",
      "uh is mehmet factor he's also we've lost him as well so it looks like um do you want to read it out can you feel free i know i can read it yeah sure yeah so you said being muslim is not a liability but it's a massive asset in what way ways would a similar statement of being christian or jewish differ",
      "I mean, I think obviously that being believing in the God is an asset. Like, I mean so believe in, in the creator is an assay. Um, In terms of scholarship, I'd say, you know, it's, it depends. Like I think if you were to someone like Thomas Aquinas or my monodies or something like that, you",
      "excellence and the combination of like memorization and analytical rigor that I think it Jahad has this one line. He says, So when kind of thought and memory mate wondrous things are born from this you know? But here's the thing",
      "thing like there's i just don't think that the islamic intellectual tradition has any peer it doesn't i mean and you see that you know um it's interesting muslims actually write about this even uh abu talib al-maqi in his qutb he writes about this he says that you're we're the only community that memorizes scripture word for",
      "to the founding of the religion. Like other traditions don't have an isnad back to revelation and the possessor of revelation, and he brings up, he talks about the Torah and he talks like the oral transmission of the rabbis but he says this does not go back to the... They can't trace us back to Moses in a way that we can trace our teachings back to Prophet. So I think that no tradition has the volume",
      "the kind of volume and high standards, general high standards that the Islamic one does as far as I know. At least not in the pre-modern world. Yeah but I mean that's in some ways yeah that's how I would answer it. Thank you let's see if there's any more questions? I'm not really good at navigating zoom to be honest with you. Anyone else someone can",
      "else someone can raise i don't see any hands rates who's going to raise a hand okay from ushark would you recommend academia in the u.s for example with a core path to gain knowledge about the faith no definitely not no no oh i i say this regularly don't know you don't learn about Islam if you want to learn about your religion do not go to a U.S university i don' t know in fact you'll probably end up learning the opposite you'll",
      "go find qualified scholars in teachers and where you live or online, and then this is a way to learn. Mehmet Fatih Arslan. Okay, go for it. Thank you very much for letting me at least I guess I am not interrupted the third time right?",
      "Can you hear me? Yeah, go ahead. Okay thank you I'm sorry for the pollution behind me because i was on my way just arrived at home i couldn't miss this speech so i have one comment and one question as you already stated that you said that you are not interested in someone who is trying to force or questions for authenticity of hadith and i totally agree with this i think according",
      "even doesn't have to bother about it because it's not hadith domain to substantiate that or justify the prophet was already alive and then he said this and death and then He was really Prophet of God. This is domain of ilm al-ilahi whether you're Islamic theology, whatever you name it kalam or philosophy anyways somewhere else so if someone is looking for this kind of question he has to look for somewhere else in my understanding of hadith",
      "you told that there are many academicians, especially like who are at least at a certain level of proficiency in their job and they're smearing Islam saying that well, Islam in its core anti-black or racial or I don't know. At least has a certain backbone of racial statement and Quran includes this kind of thing. My question is do you think that this is",
      "like an attempt coming from and actually, from a bad intention or coming from ignorance. Like we used to have like academicians who are non-Muslim working which we call orientalists who were really has depth of knowledge in Islamic studies someone like Shah or Godzier but in these days you can hardly find",
      "rather than they are will, they will work on Islam in America sex gender racial statements. So do you think that is this as currency on Islamic studies like down leveling it rather than focusing on really actually what is in Islamic Studies in its essence? Yeah I think it's at least on these so I think when you look at the issues, you know,",
      "Well, like anything right if there's a let's say there's A politician who says something you know he might have intentions. But you know the regular people are following them don't know they're ignorant right so They're just ignorant and they're just following somebody who says Something great but So there's yeah There's a lot of ignorance, but I think at the where these issues are generated it's definitely intentional And its sources are clear its sources Are extremely clear right? It comes from",
      "basically, what you might call like Western supremacists who want to focus on Islam and slavery and Islam as oppressive to black people because it helps Western society especially America exonerate itself from or distract other people",
      "So that's one thing. The other thing is a kind of some aspects of African-American society, especially Christians and then sharing actually sending that back. And now like in a kind dialogic relationship with Christians in places like Nigeria where there's this whole idea of vilifying Muslims as not part of Africa, as oppressive, as not indigenous to quote unquote Africa, right?",
      "And then the third is basically American conservatism, essentially like aggressive American conservative foreign policy. And this is simply demonstrably true Israeli foreign policy propaganda, essentially Hasbar right? Israeli foreign public diplomacy which sees us as a way to one split quote unquote third world solidarity",
      "to split kind of Arabs and Muslims away from Africans, and then say that the real people who are racist aren't the Israelis it's the Arabs and Palestinians they're the real race and see how much they hate black people. So this is I think I demonstrate this all very clearly in my recent book there's a whole chapter on this. Kamal Sani Bawa",
      "unmute unmute unmute kamal uh-oh kamal's having technical problems hey thank you maybe you can do it right or yeah okay talk go ahead yeah good day how are you doing",
      "I came late because of the time factor. So mine, I have a question based on what I have read from the Prophet and hadiths of the Prophet. I think that talks, the main idea of the talk is based on the hadith of the prophet Muhammad. Am I right? This talk today? No, this is more about my own life and work.",
      "and work which is seems i it seems kind of self-indulgent uh but that's what they asked me to turn around i'm just answering questions i don't know what to do yes i'm very self involved i suppose so uh kamal you may not have missed what you missed may not been as valuable as you thought so i recommend if you're interested in this you want to know what i have to say about you can read my book hadith muhammad's legacy",
      "can't get a copy in nigeria email me i'll send you a copy or my book misquoting muhammad and my book islam and slavery which are all i think good books okay maybe uh that's rough sorry go ahead see maybe i can share my email so that i can be able to have the repeat yeah yeah email you can just email uh give your email in the chat yeah so thank you very much",
      "Thank you very much. Maybe in the process now, I will be joining the process. I might have some questions later time. OK. Yeah thank you that much. Ashraf? Yeah. OK yeah so just a follow up on my question about studying in an academic situation because as you know it's very difficult to",
      "the modern world to gain knowledge in terms of you know having access to shiur or more importantly, having access a specific curriculum and going through sort of a tertib of attaining knowledge. So my question I guess was how do you see as a way forward for Muslims in terms",
      "more importantly, in terms of passing that on or practicing that. Do you think that it's sufficient? For example, like you mentioned at the beginning of your talk, you went to the Azhar and you met with people such as Sayyid Shadoud and Osama Sayyed Al-Azhari and these people who they have a very research and academic rigor to them as well",
      "and they were sort of doing it ad hoc with Sheikh Ali Juma. But how is that something that can be sort of replicable and sustainable in terms of how we function as Muslims, like I guess all over the world in terms if how we take the knowledge and how we would transmit that? Because it just seems to me from my experiences as well,",
      "just sort of it's just done so haphazardly and you have to do a private study here or you have, to just look into finding a good teacher there. There's no really like at an institutional level to sort of attain knowledge and then again pass it on to the next generation. I mean one i think that there actually are a lot of",
      "of sort resources you know if you live you know, if you're lucky and if you can live in Dallas for example there's column seminary. There's actually a lot of good institutes around the world Darula looms is a lot really good Darla looms from South Africa to Canada to the UK to United States right so I think that people you know If you want to go and get like a basic grounding in Islamic sciences it's",
      "there are institutions, you know. And if you can't get there then you can watch lectures online I mean it sounds like kind of stupid and old saying this but the internet has really made so many things available to us that you can uh watch lectures by really great scholars even whole lecture so even doing a whole shah of the Muwatta or the Shah of some Maliki",
      "you know, as if you were there. Yeah, you can't ask questions but other people are asking questions and they're getting answered and maybe your questions are gonna get answered in the process. And just that's an incredible resource. Now of course the issue there is a lot of this stuff it's based on language definitely knowing Arabic is really important for a lot or Urdu, but certainly Arabic. So, but then it's just a matter of learning language and there's a lot resources for that as well.",
      "So I think that it's not as, yeah, it's always hard to find great minds and to learn from them. But that's going to be hard no matter where you are in the world and no matter when. But we have more access to them now through the internet than we, I think ever have in the past. Folks, unfortunately, I have to go.",
      "email me again don't don't i might almost that you are going to ask for the emails i get a lot of emails i forget about things um okay jonathan thank you very much for your time and your energy effort we really do appreciate it inshallah i'll get to speak to you soon again in charlotte when you come to istanbul be great to have yoga at the department that would be fantastic i would love to thank you thank you",
      "Thank you very much everyone for being here today. We really appreciate it and this is just the beginning of the new semester so hopefully we can continue to do that, so please pray that this is successful and thank you very",
      "uh thank you very much take care and assalamu alaikum"
    ]
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    "text": [
      "يا حبيبي يا شافعي يا رسول الله بأمي وأبي فتيتك سيدي صلاة وسلام عليك يا رب"
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    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan AC Brown - The place of the Sunnah in Isl_307vm0-3tdg&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW3SBwkJsAkBhyohjO8%3D_1748692600.opus",
    "text": [
      "The Quran is a book that is bound up in the life of the Prophet. It is, in fact impossible to read without his life and his sunnah, his precedent before our eyes. And this is something that Muslim scholars understood very early on in Islam and they were often stunned by their acuity and intelligence, their wisdom",
      "When early Muslim scholars like Ayubah Sakhdiani said, The book of God needs the sunnah more than the sunna needs the book of god. Or as Yahya bin Abi Kathir and Az-Zuhri, early Muslims scholars also said that the Sunnah came to govern the Quran. The Quran didn't come to govern",
      "govern the sunnah what do they mean by that they mean that you have to understand the quran through the sunna the qur'an tells you to pray it doesn't tell you how to pray, it doesn ttell you when to pray. It doesn'ttellyou how many times to pray the prophet's teachings tell us how to",
      "are prohibited for you the quran the the sun of the prophet tells us that this doesn't apply to things that we find in the ocean but even dead whales washed up on the seashore can be eaten from like the companions or the prophet did and took an act of which he approved so these the sunnah is it explains the qur'an it adds to the qura'n it affirms the quoran",
      "as one of my teachers in Azhar said, it is تَطْبِيقٌ مَعْسُومٌ لِكِتَابِ اللَّهِ It is an infallible application of the Book of God. The Sunnah is the infallable application of book of God and Bara'a, the lawyer, and maybe some other lawyers here who can tell you this is not just something... This is a understanding that Muslims had that shared... It applies to really any time somebody gives you directions or writes a law for you",
      "It's a law for you. The law has to be explained, it has to understood when, for example, James Madison the prime writer of the Constitution he said in the Constitution of the United States said these laws they cannot be applied. They don't really come into existence until they are debated, until they're discussed, until",
      "as an idea laws as mere statements words on paper they don't mean anything until people actually try and apply them then they need guidance then they to be to have these laws explained to them that's precisely what the sunnah of the prophet does alayhissalatussalam"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan AC Brown_ What Happens When God_s Law Giv_SXgM3vvC9CY&pp=ygUOSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24%3D_1748648419.opus",
    "text": [
      "Welcome everyone to our Majlis. Most of you probably know that Jonathan, who is our guest today, is a proper scholarly star. I respect him enormously for his will and ability to reach out and leave our academic ivory towers but i didn't know anything about his achievements in that then i invited him much to his credit",
      "his credit he's with us today just due to the value of his scholarship i've never had the privilege to meet him in person yet we met online for the first time when he attended one of our matchlesses today we meet for the second time and it's a great joy to have him with us and i'm most eager to listen to what he'll say about himself his journeys",
      "Thanks very much for inviting me. It's an honor to be here, especially seeing all the other people who've participated over the last couple of sessions. It really is an impressive group of people. In case I don't get to talk a lot about the topic of the actual book, I kind of talked about it before in a talk I gave many years ago at SOAS and that's on YouTube",
      "youtube and i just put it in the chat um if if anyone wants to it feels that they didn't get kind of enough uh the discussion of the actual substance of the book then you can probably listen to this talk as well so i'd put that in a link in case so yeah i'm so what happened uh i want to talk about the book but i also wanted to i thought it would be useful to talk",
      "get written to actually the challenges of writing a book and how one, or at least how I do it. Everybody, I'm sure has different approaches. Okay. So basically this book is kind of about two things. One, it's a history of what's called mazalim or mazalam courts in Islamic civilization, which are sometimes translated as tribunals for grievances",
      "for addressing wrongs um uh mavallem short plural of mathema in arabic is you know a grievance or a wrong done and but that's the book is really about the question of what you do when the law that has derived god's law the sharia",
      "of sync with or in discord with your expectations of justice. So that's really what the book is about and, um, of course you can imagine, I mean this is a problem which has been discussed going back to Aristotle's time if not before about sometimes you have legal rulings that seem unjust or results of cases that seem",
      "crisis or problem but it does if you think that your law is derived from revelation and ultimately kind of reflects god's will in which case how do you explain how it's giving you um an unjust ruling one could take the crisis sort of to another level and say uh how do",
      "even explain why you feel that the ruling is unjust how do you explain that you have a sense of justice that is not actually totally matching with the results of the law like where where is that Justice coming from is that actually a real feeling is that like a a valid objection you have A Valid Sense Of Injustice or is that some kind of misfiring of your appetites or your desires or your biases so this is the question that that really was driving me behind this book and",
      "I guess there's three answers to that question, both theoretically and that Muslims took over time. Oh, by the way, I'm Muslim myself so I really approach this from the point of view of being Muslim. So that's why if I seem like I'm talking from that perspective, that's for those who don't know. Okay, so the first answer would be to say well, tough toenails",
      "You know, tough toenails. I don't know if this saying actually exists. My mom used to say it to me all the time, tough toe nails. John Esposito, you ever heard the phrase tough toenail before? Or am I making this too much of a Brown family idiolect? But anyway, Dr. Esposido can let me know what he thinks. So basically, you know, Tough luck. If you're if it seems like a ruling from the Sharia is unjust. Well that just means that, you",
      "What do you know? What is your sense of justice? What value does it have? This is God's law, so that's it. That's the answer. The second is to say, well, actually, God wants justice. So if the Sharia doesn't seem to be giving you justice in this situation, then you've misunderstood",
      "just follow what your sense of justice is. That's interesting, it does present some problems however which is that what do you do when you have a very clear let's say text in the Quran or agreed upon precedent of the Prophet Muhammad which gives you a ruling and then how do you misunderstand that? So if you say that... Let's take this for example like",
      "for example, like I mean the best example could be this is a really good example. The Quran says that if you are going to be witnessing a debt or a transaction or an agreement on debt that you should bring two witnesses either two men or one man and two women so in case one of the women forgets the other person",
      "And that's very clear ruling, right? I mean, it's very explicit. And there's a great example of this scholar, a Yemeni scholar in the early 20th century who says, you know, if Aisha herself, the wife of the Prophet, but if she came into my court today, I would say she needs another witness with her, right, even though Aisha actually is the source of a lot of Islamic law.",
      "So Aisha's, not just her narrations of Hadith from the Prophet, but also her legal opinions constitute a huge chunk of the rules of the Sharia. If she came into that scholar's court he would say, sorry you're basically half witness, you're not sufficient on your own. The first response I gave is his answer which was basically this is the law? This is what God says? You think it's unfair? This",
      "out of law. This is this divine secret that we don't have access to. Okay, so the second option of, you know, well, you just sort of go with what your sense of justice is and that's what God wants. Well then how do you explain the fact that sometimes this really contradicts clear rulings in the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet? It means you basically have to say, well I don't care about these things they're wrong. They're just wrong in this case. And sometimes people",
      "You don't see kind of really respected Muslim scholars say that, but it's something you'll often hear from lay Muslims in times of crisis or something or times of cultural change. I'll just say, well, I don't care what the Quran says on this. I know this is right. And probably if you're professors or community leaders, you've experienced people saying these kinds of things.",
      "possibility is to say that the Sharia has flexibility within it and that it's a kind of pluralistic tradition. It very rarely has just one answer to any kind of moral or legal question, so actually you can take advantage of that flexibility to give a just response or to give",
      "you know, you think that it's the compensation payment for killing, for accidentally killing a non-Muslim in most schools of law is less than a Muslim. It's either like a third or something of the Muslims' compensation payment if a Muslim gets killed accidentally. You could say that doesn't seem just.",
      "So you could take the Hanafi school ruling, which says that actually the compensation payment for accidentally killing a non-Muslim like a Christian or Jew who's under Muslim rule is the same as a Muslim. And you can just take that and that would seem like a just ruling. Right? So you have sort of flexibility and so you take advantage of that flexibility. Okay. And that's kind of the answer that the Madhulam court tradition gives, which is to say that",
      "If somebody comes to the Madh'alam court and says, they can come for a number of reasons throughout Islamic history. But one thing could be that they were wronged by government official like a tax collector or something. Another could be they're unhappy with existing legal ruling from the courts,",
      "say, express their discontent with the ruling. And in that case, the Madhulam court actually has much more flexibility than the normal judge's courts, which would be generally following one school of law. So the judge's court would be following the Hanifi school or Maliki school or whatever. In the Madhalim court, you can take... The judge can take from any school of",
      "more flexibility in terms of the procedure and the rulings he can draw on so he can give more easily give a just judgment now um one of the interesting questions that comes up in the course of this is important when we to understand legal procedure in his islamic tradition",
      "God's law be unjust? And it's interesting because we have to distinguish between the law as a theory, both in the sense of the Sharia like in our prayer and ethics how we treat our parents, how we treated our children. All these different aspects of the shariah that are not something that is going to come into a courtroom but also the law",
      "So what's interesting is actually the answer is yes, the law can be unjust. And we know this actually comes directly from the Prophet, peace be upon him. The law can become just because the judge can be unfair, because the judges are a constrained figure. This is very important. The judge in the Sharia tradition is a very constrained figure for example. I mean,",
      "well-known hadith of the prophet where two men come to the prophet and they having a dispute and the prophet says different depending on the different versions of the hadith but in some version he says i'm just a man i don't know the unseen on other versions he says you know i don' t know which one of you is telling the truth and it may be that one of",
      "if you win wrongly and you take your brother's property wrongly, then what you'll take is a share of hellfire. This is very important because what the Prophet is saying is I acting as a judge—and there's debate amongst Muslim scholars does the Prophet actually not know? Because there's a huge debate among Muslim scholars about whether the Prophet knows Rabe or not. But forget about that because even if he does know the unseen, he's acting like a judge to teach us how to be judges",
      "judges and he's saying I the judge don't know what's correct so actually I may rule wrongly and there are restrictions on the judge that actually prevent the judge from ruling in a just way for example in most schools of law the judge cannot rule by his own knowledge",
      "Dr. Esposito is telling the truth I know Dr. Espresso's lying I saw you know somebody comes and says Dr. S Zito came over my house he was outside he started throwing spaghetti against the windows of my house you started making a huge mess etc etc and I said okay where's your witnesses well I don't have any witnesses oh I'm sorry I have to rule that he's innocent because they're not sufficient evidence but let's say",
      "Dr. Esposito doing this? I cannot rule on that basis. I can only rule on what the witnesses bring me. So there's all sorts of restrictions on the judge. There's restrictions on what judge can do in terms of his knowledge. There are restrictions on which kind of evidence a judge can bring, and these differ especially between the schools of law. For example, the Hannafi School of Law is much more restrictive about the use of documentary evidence than the Malachi School of",
      "So if you're a Hanafi judge, you're going to have many more rules about when you can accept documents or not. So the Madhulam court judge could, for example, take the Maliki ruling on this to make it easier to take that written evidence. So there's all sorts of evidentiary and procedural restrictions on the judge that actually prevent justice from being done. And why is that? It's there because it's trying to prevent other injustices from being",
      "So let's say, I'm going to offend Dr. Esposito here, but I've decided I'm gonna pick on him because he decided to come to my talk. He couldn't just enjoy retirement, right? He has to come on my talk so basically I can say, let's, say I'm a judge and someone says, Dr. Sposito came to my house and started to throw spaghetti at the windows or things like that and make a big mess. And I say,",
      "We all know what they're like. Yeah, he's guilty. And by the way, we can easily imagine this happening based on all sorts of biases against any number of different groups. So I don't need to see the evidence. I know he's guiltier. These rules are in place to protect innocent people from being convicted without due process. Documentary evidence. Documents can be forged easily.",
      "forged easily, especially before you have printers and formal letterheads and things like that. A lot of people know how to read anyway, so it might be easier to forge or misrepresent documentary evidence. All right. It's important to remember the judge in the normal court is very constrained",
      "justice has not been done. And somebody might have reason to say, listen, I really got a bad deal here. And that's why they go to the Madhulam court. Now, why does the Madhalam court exist? Because someone could just say, you know, look, yeah, there's constraints on the judge. Yeah, sometimes you get bad results, but you know what? You're going to have some bad results",
      "So therefore, we're not going to see the need to create any other venue or forum for justice. But the ruler has a responsibility to make sure that the haqquk, the rights of God's servants are not wasted or not lost. The job of the ruler and of the justice system and of God is to, as the Prophet said,",
      "To give everybody who has a right what their right is. To get everybody what they deserve. So this is why, and we again have instances of this in the life of the Prophet. For example, when somebody is murdered and they can't figure out who killed the person. The Prophet himself pays the compensation payment to that person's family out of basically the treasury, Bayt al-Madh.",
      "So the ruler in the end is supposed to make sure that everybody gets their haq. So the madhalim court is established under the rubric of the ruler, not the qadis who are theoretically separate kind of independent from the ruler and that will be there to make",
      "And again, this is all seen as rooted in the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet. All right. So that's kind of the general theme. I should just say a general outline of the book. The book is called Justice... I don't know. I didn't even realize I hadn't mentioned this.",
      "i am finishing writing a book on this topic just doing the introduction introductions are very hard so uh the book is called justice and islamic law poland madhulam courts and legal reform and hopefully i'll submit it in finally in like maybe the early spring um february or something like that inshaallah uh and so the book okay let's explain how it came about because that might be more interesting so what happened was a couple of years ago i was on dissertation committee",
      "committee of a student who was a student at Princeton. And he was doing his PhD on legal reform and codification of law in the late Ottoman Empire. And, um, he was talking about how, uh, you know, the Ottomans had basically created courts where Christians and Jews and Muslims would all be equal before the law in terms of witnessing and things like that.",
      "the general rule in Islamic law is that you can't have a non-Muslim serving as kind of a definitive witness against a Muslim. And this is very, very widely held ruling and if there's exceptions to it they're very limited.",
      "and kind of articulating and organizing these courts, these Nizamiya courts they're called in the late Ottoman period. They pointed to a treatise written by a scholar named Jalal ad-Din Davani on Madhulam courts. Hang on I have to turn my computer to focus mode because my kids are sending me a bunch of messages. Okay that's really interesting and I was like I wonder if I could find this",
      "talked to some of my students who are from Istanbul and they said, oh yeah, we'll get you. There's no problem. It's a manuscript. We can get the PDF for you. So they got a PDF of the unpublished manuscript of this text by the scholar Jalaluddin Devani. And I started to read it and it's just a text about Madhulam courts. And so I got really interested in this topic. And then kind of more broadly got interested in these questions",
      "these questions of kind of justice and Islamic law. All right, so then I happened to be...I think the semester after that I had sabbatical after what did I have sabbatic for? Maybe it was could it have been when I got tenure? I think maybe I got tenured and I had a semester off and so I did that year I did law school at Georgetown Law School so they professors were very nice",
      "very nice and they let me sit in on all the classes. And so I took basically most of the first year law school classes, and then a couple of extra ones on property law and things like that and Roman Law. And we started to get interested in some of the theoretical questions behind this topic of justice and law because in the common law tradition you have what's called the equity courts or courts",
      "kind of emerged in the medieval period because there were certain rules of English common law which really yielding unfair results, especially on things like estates and inheritance. And so what happened is people started to go to the chancellor usually who was a member of the Church of England, and they were using Roman law principles",
      "You created this other venue for dealing with legal issues where people felt like they had been wronged in the normal courts. That really made me think more comparatively about this question. Then what I end up doing for the book is to write the first chapter, which is basically a history of madhalim courts and Islamic civilization going all the way from the beginning when they emerge in the early Abbasid period",
      "the late Ottoman Empire. And even to this day in Saudi Arabia, you have a divan al-Mu'adhalim in Saudi Arabian. Part of one of things I look at is how these functions change over time. At various points in time in Islamic history, Mu'dhallam courts function as catchalls for all sorts of things that don't really function well on the normal courts. A lot",
      "so things like murder or someone getting mugged where there's no witnesses you know someone gets murdered on a highway uh someone gets there's some kind of scheme to murder somebody and it's covered up but no one knows who did it these kind of situations would often end up in at various points in times in islamic history in the madallam court right so um i kind of go through islami civilization by different regions and different times",
      "was amalgamating material doing my own research in places where i thought there wasn't enough material and trying to come up with a comprehensive history then what i did is uh i got very interested in its three personalities at three different times and i'll explain why so um it all started with the student who i mentioned",
      "the Nizamiya courts in the Ottoman Empire, in late 19th century was a scholar named scholar slash administrator named Ahmed Jebdet Pasha who died in 1895. So Jebdeet Pasha is actually asked this question why how are you going to deal with Muslims and non-Muslims being an equal footing as witnesses in these Nizamia courts? And he says well according to Jalal ad-Din Davani in his treatise on Madhallim this is not a problem",
      "is not a problem. They can be equal.\" Of course, Devani actually does not say that explicitly in the treatise but you could argue it from what he says. Then Jebdet Pasha gives a summary and translation of important parts of Devani's treatise as part of his argument for the Islamic legitimacy of the Nizamiya court system. I had one instance of this late 19th century context of Ottoman reform",
      "Jebdat Pasha is using his own version, his own kind of redaction and translation and interpretation of Devani's text as justification for the Nizamiya court system. Devani, he died in 1502, was really the last great Sunni scholar of Iran. The last great",
      "especially his theological and his philosophical and his ethical writings were extremely important in the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal kind of Persianate curricula. Especially his ethical texts, his philosophical texts are very, very important not so much as legal writing. So what Jebdat Pasha says is here's what Jalal al-Din Devani says about madh'alam courts",
      "courts and his opponents say, well if Devani thinks that then we can't argue. So he briefly brings this huge name to just justify his reforms and then that is something that his opponents kind of just cede to. Okay so then you go back to Devani's text which was originally in Persian",
      "actually built it on Mawardi, Abul Hasan Mawradi. We all know him the famous Shafi jurist from Basra who lived in Baghdad who died in 1058 of the common era. Shafii jurists. Devani by the way is also Shafie. So what Mawaridi had written this as a chapter in his Ahkam-e Sultania, his famous ordinances of governance which is basically his book is adding onto another",
      "Another book on the same topic and with the same title by the senior Hanbali judge of Baghdad, Qadi Abu Ya'la ibn al-Farra who died in 1066 of the common era. So Qadi Abul Ya'ala writes a book on ordinance of government. Mawardi takes that book and stuffs a bunch of other material and especially lots of poetry and stories and things like that. And it sometimes gives extra legal discussions. And one chapter of that book is on madhalim courts",
      "Madhulam courts. So this is really the first and most extensive discussion of madhulim courts in Islamic history, by Mawaradi, in his context of kind of late Buyid Abbasid Iraq and Baghdad. So Devani takes this summarizes parts of it translates directly other parts of",
      "material from his experience as a judge and scholar in southern Iran, in the late 1400s. In this book I look through kind of the history of this text as it moves through these three contexts, late Buyid Abbasid Baghdad in the writing of Mawaradi, Akh Qayunlu and then lawless crisis-filled southern Iran",
      "Iran in the late 1400s, and then 19th century reform-oriented Istanbul in the writings of Cevdet Pasha. So I look at these three contexts and trace the text as it journeys and grows and shrinks and has changed in this process. And then the last two chapters of the book look at",
      "actual legal issues raised by the topic of mahalam courts. And I look at things like really, issues of procedure, legal procedure and substance for example. What about using documentary evidence? Another question that's kind of not so appealing to people but is a big deal is whether or not you can use what's called judicial torture. So",
      "So can you inflict pain on somebody who's a suspect in order to get them to confess or to give you information? And Muslim scholars fall into different positions on this. A lot of them say, absolutely not. This person is innocent. Some of them will say yes, you can. They have their justifications which we won't get into right now but one of the things that the madhalim court judge can do is actually use things like judicial torture",
      "judge would not be allowed to do this in some schools of law. Then I also look at the ability of the judge to switch between Madhabs and different schools of laws, how is that? Can the madhalim judge go outside all of the four Madhabs? Can he go into even earlier pre-Madhhab Islamic law to draw on legal rulings? And then the last chapter is looking almost at what we might consider theological and constitutional issues",
      "issues. How do we think about this idea of justice and God's justice versus the fiqh, the kind of actual substance of Islamic law? And how did Muslim scholars historically deal with instances of discord between theories of justice",
      "questions or whatever about that when we get to this, to that point. Okay. So then I, this is a, it was an interesting experience for me to write this book because I actually wrote 90% of this book years ago as starting, I would probably be 2014, 20,",
      "I was obsessed with it. I wrote 90% of this book. I got the different, I think there's four different manuscripts of Devani's text. I did a critical edition of the Persian text.",
      "jeb that pasha's uh text of it i translated that i looked at the difference between that and devani's text i did all the research i did although writing the history of madhavan court et cetera et cetera etc and um i went and uh i was you know gonna finish it and then i got kind of sidetracked on writing about and researching about issues of slavery in islam",
      "in Islam. So I wrote a book on slavery and Islamic law or slavery and islamic civilization then there were leftover questions from that on issues of race, so i wrote a Book on Islam and Blackness and that book came out and I just kind of gave up on this. I said you know what it's a pity I couldn't get back to it. I couldn t figure out how to organize the book in a way that made sense to me and I sort of despaired",
      "And then this summer, I was in Malaysia at a conference with some of my friends. I don't know if any of them are on here or if I don' have... My friends are not sufficiently good friends of mine to actually attend my talks. Apparently they're not. So one of my friend whose name is... I'll tell you his name is Osama Azmi. You guys, some of you may know him. So Osama Azzami said, can you send me the chapters of your book on Madan?",
      "Osama was actually one of our guests in a match list. Yeah, so he obviously knows about them. Arguably has this time free in his schedule depending on when but I guess this week he had something more important to do. So that's fine. So anyway, Osama said can you send me the chapters? And I was like yeah, I get depressed but okay I'll send them to you. So then I just went back and I remember where was I?",
      "I would be in the hotel room of Malaysia. And I was like, you know, starting to read. I can't just send these to Osama like this. I got to go through and make sure they make sense. So I had to read through it. And then I started to be obsessed with this topic once again. And",
      "research that had come out on Madhulam Court since I had written it and things like that. And, uh, since then I've been kind of trying to finish up the book. So, uh... Well, I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that sometimes you start projects and something comes up or you, um... Oh! I forgot another thing. And I don't know if this is too inside baseball but I'm not going to name any names so it should be fine.",
      "this book proposal to a certain press, which will not be named. And actually, not only did I submit the book proposal, I submitted you know, I had five or four complete chapters done and they sent this to three readers and two of the readers said, this is terrific.",
      "And, you know, maybe do this, change this, but this is really good. The third response was I've never seen anything. I had never seen nor have I seen anything since like this. It was a page, one solid page of text just saying this was the worst thing the person had ever seen and that the book failed",
      "the book failed in every regard to deal with any, and everything that the book tried to do it failed in ever way. I mean, it was such a comprehensive rejection that it sort of undermined itself because it would say things like this book doesn't even define madhulam courts. But I mean you might not like my definition but it definitely defines them. I don't know if they didn't read the book,",
      "some beef with me or something. And then it turned out, actually the editor said, actually this was a member of our editorial board who actually asked to write this. So apparently somebody had beef but I remember it. It was February of 2017 so Trump had just been inaugurated for the first time and people were all stressed out in the Muslim ban and all this stuff",
      "And I was really, it was really maybe one of the most professionally defeating experiences. I had really to like someone just totally and I actually wrote to the editor. I said, you know, this seems a little bit extreme. And they said that or said yeah, yeah, you Know, just when you're done with the book send it to us again and we will send it To the first two readers not the third person. I think okay, that's fine but anyway",
      "I guess my moral would be to you, although some of you are not really young and senior to me. But for those of you who are junior or curious about this, it would be two. One, sometimes you get sidetracked. That doesn't mean that you won't get back to a project in the end. Don't give up hope on a project. And two, sometimes",
      "the objections are valid and you have to accept that sometimes people can be a little bit nasty but you should take you know good take uh The Good And Leave The Bad When You Get Reviews and it's been a long time since I've written articles but I remember used to I remember this you know when you'd write an article especially like for Islamic law in society and you get these um sometimes like pretty strong criticisms for your submission",
      "And I always used to get so upset. I would be like screaming and yelling and throwing stuff and flipping out and so outraged. And then, you know, I realized, okay, give it a few days, calm down. Then you realize actually no this person's making a good point. And in the end these are actually sources for ways to make your argument better. So first you have an emotional reaction that's all right don't do it in public. You don't write anything on social media,",
      "meltdown, yell at your... Call your friend on the phone or your spouse or your dog or whatever. And then after a few days start to think more like this is actually some good advice here. So that's an important thing to keep in mind. All right. Let's see here. All Right. Some other things that I learned in this process which I think are useful",
      "useful, which is when you're doing anytime you read anything, take good notes. Anytime something interests you for me, I have I don't have any with me here, but I have these like kind of marbles like kind marble colored. They're called marble notebooks. They have kind of different color on the cover and it's sort of like a soft cover notebook, like the kind of thing you use in grade school. So I have a bunch.",
      "or even if I see it's something on TV, it's interesting or something on the internet. Or even I hear, I walk down the street, I see like a street sign. There's something interesting about a street side. I'll write down that in notebook and always make sure to know where you saw something, where are you read something page numbers, et cetera all the bibliographical information you need. And then when I start to get interested",
      "project or an idea, I'll go back through all the notebooks I've filled up, which I think now I have like 22 or 23 of these notebooks. And I'll review them and I'll say, oh, okay, here's something that might be interesting for this project, let's say on mahalam courts. So for that, I called it DAV, like for Devani. So I would write",
      "ready to kind of start going from research to writing or outlining and then writing a project you go back i go back to all my notebooks and i see ah here's i just look for that symbol for that project and i take that information which already has the all the citation information i put it in my like a big word document which just has all this information and then once i have all this material is evidence basically there's data",
      "the book, like how what are the different sections? What fits where? What is evidence for what? And then basically I'll develop the outline and then I'll just write the book or the article or whatever. The chapter into the outline already has all the bibliographical information and footnotes done. So that's, I think a very useful thing is to keep good notes because you know,",
      "I meant when I wrote this note, or I know where I got the source. Or I know which book this is.\" Guess what? In a year's time or two years' time or whenever you're not going to have any idea of what you were talking about. So always take good notes and make sure you especially bibliographical information. And I mean, especially nowadays like, you'll be on social media or on the internet and there's some tweet and you're like, oh wow, this is really good evidence for this topic. Screenshot it, learn how to cite online sources",
      "online sources you know so get the information you need for an online source and then put that and then i'll also have like a long for example for let's say the islamic blackness book there's all these debates online about islam as anti-black arab slave trade arabs are anti-blank things like that tons and tons of people talking about this online i would always screenshot this save the link um uh get the citation",
      "computer because it's obviously I can't put in books and then have, um, have put in notebooks and then a folder with all the different screenshots that I would use for that project as well. So as you know, new technologies come along, maybe there'll be like TikTok evidence in books. I'm sure we'll be citing TikTok at some point, uh, figure out how to do that. Okay. Um, yeah,",
      "One more thing. This is very, very important and I've learned this over many books and it is so important which is the best for me, the best source are my colleagues and my friends and my students. There's no amount of... I mean, I guess there is infinite amount of reading but there is no substitute for having friends scholars",
      "scholars, colleagues, scholarly colleagues, teachers, students who are experts in all such things whom you can turn to ask questions. So a lot of things that I've written about in my life, I was not really an expert in at all. And either to get specific information or to learn how to start learning about something,",
      "my peers or my juniors. And this is the most amazing resource. I talked about feeling moments of scholarly defeat where you get a bad review, or you get something rejected and you feel awful. Or someone comes and says, I read this book and this guy is not even a scholar. He's an embarrassment or whatever. This person's a joke. People can say these kinds",
      "because it hurts. One of my friends, Andrew March said this, academics, it's so painful when our work gets criticized because there's no alienation between us and the work. It's direct outcome of our minds, of who we are, of our beings almost. There's no way... It's not like I worked on a project and working at Ford Motor Company or something",
      "car and someone criticizes the car in the end. Like, you know, there's a lot of other people who are involved in a lot steps and a lot feedback and things like that. No, this is something that comes directly out of your brain as very painful when someone doesn't like it. But I came to realize that for me, the biggest let's say evidence for my value as a scholar was that they were people",
      "always eager to help me in projects. So that's very important and to really like cultivate friends, whether your teachers or your students or your peers who you learn from and who are there to help you when you need help. And then of course to be helpful to them in turn. All right, that's all I have to say. Well thank you, thank you very much indeed Jonathan. You turned upside down the structure but it worked",
      "actually you turned it back to its natural format because normally that's what we do, we give a scholarly talk and then we have a discussion at dinner. I asked our guests to do the opposite way but yeah, you returned it and it's great and i'm very grateful you gave us a lot about the topic and your openness. Thank you for it. I just wanted to ask you about",
      "out this devastating evil review. Was there anything useful in it? Did you find it useful in any way? And it's this very night, I realized something which probably is obvious for most of you that you mentioned our colleagues friends and their input. And I just realized that actually people whom we dislike can be also useful in that they",
      "say they can say things what are very useful and they can be even right doesn't it doesn't need to like a person to learn from them so I was with that review was there anything useful in it other than testing you to the limit and feeling the humiliation that other people can. So, you know what i would say about that specific review is",
      "It didn't have any like real criticism. It was almost it was so divorced from reality that it was not useful, but that was what made it I felt like some personal issue because somebody can have all sorts of very serious painful criticisms that are true. I mean, I remember one time I wrote this chapter and one of their viewers says this reads like an incomplete piece and it may be because it is incomplete.",
      "because it is incomplete. And I was like, ouch! But then I was, you know that the reason why it hurts is cause it's true. Like I remember one time when I was teaching in University of Washington Seattle, the normal professor was on leave and I taught third year Arabic. And this was probably 2008 or something. And one of the student reviews said, I've never had a teacher who cared less about a class",
      "And it hurts so much. But then I was like, you know what? They were right. They called me out. I didn't care and I didn'y try and they were right in their assessment. So sometimes stuff is painful but it's true as Alec Guinness says in Lawrence of Arabia, You tread harshly but you speak the truth. Right? You can have instances where people tread harshley but they speak the",
      "I fully agree. It really hurts when it is true, because if it's just an immensity then yeah well you know that but yeah. Jonathan would you still talk to us some minutes about how did you get to this whole research the whole field in general of your own personal intellectual history?",
      "well they don't need to be just yeah I mean it can be social whatever from your birth or from the from your distant ancestors you can you can go as deep as you want so my I mean I guess I was uh uh you know I was in college at Georgetown as an undergraduate and the best thing happened to me which is I didn't take class with John Esposito and therefore my brain was preserved",
      "It was, I'm just joking. I actually never took class with Dr. Sposito because he only taught these SF School of Foreign Service classes and I was in the College of Arts and Sciences so I never got a chance to take class with him but when I became... Randomly Georgetown has a theology requirement you have to take two theology requirements, two theology class and the second class I randomly just decided to take on Islamic thought and practice as a freshman",
      "freshman and um after that class long story short i became muslim in that summer and so then i was just so i wanted to learn everything i could about islam and anything to do with islam arabic middle east history islam in french literature and culture i took a class on islamic french literature in culture and i um so i just took and georgetown had alhamdulillah had a lot of great offerings on this topic so i took lots of guys with john voll uh with gabriel augustine who's still my colleague",
      "with Patrick Lode, who is still my colleague. And I just got so interested. And then one of my professors told me if you really want to keep doing this, you need to go learn Arabic really well. So I applied for the Center for Arabic Study Abroad CASA program in Egypt and I graduated in 2000. And that was before 9-11. So",
      "demand. I never would have gotten into Qasa, I only had not even two years of Arabic when I applied and I went and lived in Cairo from 2000 to 2001. And I studied Arabic and also started attending the lessons of the person who would become later the Mufti of Egypt Ali Juma. So I started learning about living Islamic scholarship, actual Muslim scholars who are working today and it wasn't",
      "today and it wasn't just something you read about in books. And then I really just wanted to keep learning, and I didn't even think about what I was doing. I just wanted do keep doing what I'm doing. So I applied for graduate school and ended up going to University of Chicago. My advisor was Wadah Al Qadi. I remember I drove to Chicago five days after 9-11 and started my PhD.",
      "um i mean so i was actually supposed to study islamic this is boring i don't want to talk about it's just like the kind of stuff you want to hear about okay um so then i i wanted to i was supposed to say islam philosophy and i don' know why they let me in because there's no one studying islami philosophy there but so but there were a couple students who are studying hadith with professor qadi and i was like oh this is interesting i didn't know you could actually study this",
      "study this and they're so yeah of course so i i started to um i got really interested because you know when i when i'd when i learned about islam in college i'd really learned about it through like kind of islamic modernist perspective people like fazl rahman muhammad assad and they were not really big into hadith and so i had um you'd you know you'd see or you'd hear it like muslim student association barbecue or something you'd",
      "Muslim. I was like, who's these Bukharian Muslim guys everyone's always talking about? And when I was in my first year of graduate school, I went back to Cairo to visit my friends and I found this book on the bookstore. It's one of these really cheap printings of a book. And it was a book on Hadith terminology. And",
      "2001. And he kept mentioning in the footnotes that this guy, Dara Kootenai had criticized Bukhari and Muslim books. I was like, I didn't know you could do that. You can't criticize Bukharian Muslim books? So then I was really interested in this scholar, Dora Kootanai who died in 995 of the common era from Baghdad, a huge Sunni Hadith scholar. So I started to read his books and I did my master's thesis with Zen called second year paper now it's called a master's",
      "on his criticism of Bukhari and Muslim. So then I was like, oh this is really interesting. Like how under how this fits into the canonization of Buhari and Muslims? And I was somebody must've written a book about this but no one had so then I did my dissertation on that topic. And then I graduated at a time they were handing out jobs at the door people. They were handing our jobs to the door 2006, no wait it was 2005",
      "So I applied for 10 jobs. And I stopped at 10 just because I was like, ah, that's enough. There must have been maybe 20 jobs that year in Islamic studies of different kind of religious studies, Near Eastern studies, et cetera, et I was fortunate enough to get a job at University of Washington in Seattle. And when I taught there for four years... Oh, and then I forgot to say that during my time at the University of Chicago",
      "at university chicago lo and behold who comes to town to give a speech at universal chicago but john esposito right and so you know he's not going to accept just any taxi taking him to the airport or it's like he wants to be chauffeured to the air port so he says i know you weren't you at georgetown and he told me and of course he was being very kind and mentoring",
      "Of course, it was very intimidating. But then he started to every time I would go back because my family lived in Washington DC, I'd go back to Georgetown and see my old friends and visit my old professors so I got to know Professor Esposito even though he had never been my actual professor. So then at night in 2009 a job opened up at Georgetown and I applied for it and I was very fortunate to get that job and then I came here.",
      "That's interesting, I guess. It is very interesting. I'm hesitant to ask you to go even deeper because you summarized in one sentence, I just became Muslim and I would be very curious if it doesn't just happen this way. And also, well, we haven't met before and I can honestly say",
      "honestly say i admire your courage because you are breaking through lots of limits and borders which I mentioned going out of academia and engaging with the public that's one thing but also to do this as a Muslim",
      "Muslim while being a Western scholar as well. Of course, there are many Muslims doing that but you also come from an original non-Muslim background so all these must be considerable challenges and yeah it's how if you do you want to talk about this? Yeah I mean I'm fine talking about this. So I grew up like my family was Episcopalian",
      "Christian, which is like American version of Anglican church. But my family was not very... They were not religious. We had to go to church every Sunday but that was all I remember is they had really good donuts and I loved communion wine. I was definitely going to be an alcoholic. I really liked communion wine and I was actually an acolyte up until",
      "actually help prepare the communion. But for me, that was just a way to get access to the communion wine earlier than other people in the service. So but it was weird because my family was not religious at all. But it was like some tradition you had to go to church on Sunday. There was no religion played no role in anyone's life in my family. So I think I had a lot of maybe existential anxiety which i think is pretty normal for teenagers or",
      "or people in general. But I really had, I guess like longing for truth and when I learned about Islam, I think that just for me at this, I said, this is what I was looking for and this is the answer I was look for so I decided to become Muslim. And I was at an age, I",
      "it was a very ideal choice. Like I didn't think about any consequences. I, I was unattached. I mean, I wasn't married and have any, you know, so you're sort of like this, it was very intellectual that the decision of a person who's just this sort of mind is floating free in the universe. And uh, so I think I, you maybe found there were consequences later on that I hadn't considered, but I don't ever regretted",
      "I never regretted that choice. I've never regreted it. And then, my whole life since then and as an academic has been... Oh, so I just said, I never intended to become a professor. Even when I was in my PhD program, I thought I was going to be some kind of analyst or I don't know what I was thinking but I never thought I would be a professor and it wasn't until very late maybe just when I",
      "you got to be a professor. That's what you have to do, which of course was obvious. My mom was an academic. My grandparents were professors. So it was probably pretty obvious to anybody who saw me that I was going to be professor or that I should be in academia. By the way, I couldn't do anything else. I would be totally screwed if I didn't have a job as a professor and I'm useless. There is one thing I can do well, I can clean bathrooms very",
      "really be like maybe clean rich people's bathrooms really well and they'd pay me decently i could think maybe that would be a good job but uh i don't know we didn't have any other there was nothing else i could have done i don t think and so my whole life since i you know i became muslim was really i just want to know answers to questions i want to how to understand my religion i want",
      "a Muslim, when does Islam change and when is that acceptable? And in what ways does it have to stay the same? How do changes in culture and circumstance justify changing your beliefs or your ethics? So everything I've written or every book I've read and every article I've wrote is always trying to answer my own questions as a Muslim.",
      "questions, usually other people have the same questions. At least some people and so my efforts can help them as well. So you know earlier on in my career I was much more kind of scholarly in the things that I wrote about and then as I got older I wanted to try and take out take on more general topics and also write maybe for a more general audience. I would claim or believe",
      "I believe that my work, even the most general work is of a very high academic quality. I would invite any challenge to that but I definitely stopped you know tried to write for an audience that was maybe educated New York Times reader or something or someone who's interested in these questions but I never assume that the reader has any background when I write books now.",
      "comment can you hear me yeah I can hear you I just said I point out that there is a link between Jack uh and myself and that is that the niece of Ismail al-Farouki my mentor uh I believe uh what taught Jack in exactly she was Mason Al Farooqy by the way if anyone knows her maybe somehow Farooqi is I've been trying to get in touch with her for years I think she lives in Lebanon but I have no idea",
      "love to have her contact info jack is jack is brilliant i'm really he's one of the great hires that not the best because he never cleaned my bathroom but when jack did his presentation what struck me was you had this long presentation talking about prominent figures in islamic history and he'd always know the year that they died i mean he'd",
      "refer to me and tell me when I was going to die. And he didn't do that. So, I've always held that against him. Yeah, we only pass events. But I'd say this, and this is maybe like advice. So I don't know if John, if I ever told you this, but when I did that job talk, I memorized the whole job talk. Ah.",
      "essentially memorize it word for word. Because I was so nervous, I wanted that job so badly that I remember flying in the airplane. I think we were flying international from Seattle on Alaska Air and so you would like kind of... I remember sort of when you turn in and the airlines are flying along the Potomac River twisting and turning. I remember just reciting the job talk in my head over and over again because",
      "So the reason I bring this up is if you really want to do a good job in a presentation, you can always just memorize the entire presentation. There's no limit to the amount of preparation you can do. You know, you decide at a certain point it's not worth it but you can really, really prepare very well for a presentation. Well thank you. Thank you very much indeed Jonathan. I also consider often cleaning as a viable option",
      "viable option. I don't know whether we would earn enough to maintain our families, but it's a rewarding job because well something was dirty and then it is clean. It's clearly something good. I'm truly very grateful for everything what you said and for your openness. I am actually really impressed by it though it's not unusual in a much less. So we will conclude the recording",
      "and we will start the discussion. But before, before we do that I just want to advertise our next week's Majlis which will be by Jan-Peter Hartung approaching Taliban ideology through layers of time. And it will also while discussing his Peter's book The Pashtun Borderland.",
      "Peter, do you want to say something about it now? We didn't discuss it but as you are here. No actually. I'm still in the process of memorizing my presentation. Well done. Okay so please come next week as well and then I close the recording and then we start the discussion. Yes."
    ]
  },
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    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown - Abiding Stereotypes About the Pro_jBHXVC3RefM&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748679793.opus",
    "text": [
      "Can everyone hear in the back? So-so? Is that better? Okay, I'll just lean over more. When I was asked to speak about Western approaches to the Prophet,",
      "whether to a Muslim audience or non-Muslim audience. Muslims are not, nor should they be accustomed to hearing about the Prophet in a negative way, or hearing him spoke negatively but that's exactly how to one extent or another he has always been portrayed in the West I'll do my best however to present this topic counting on you to distinguish between what I'm reporting other people having said and what I am saying myself so I just want to make it very clear",
      "people's messages. The portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad, may God's peace and blessings be upon him in the West has varied greatly in the 1400 years since the beginning of Islam. Occasionally we see extremes of ignorance and hatred. In the famous 12th century French epic, The Song of Roland or Chanson de Roland, we find that some Western Christians believe that Muslims actually worshiped",
      "The encampment of the Muslim armies arrayed against the French. The poem reads, on the highest tower they raise an image of Muhammad. Every one of the pagans prays to it and worships him. So this idea that actually Muhammad or Mahund is part of this weird trinity of God and then some other deity and then the prophet that's actually worshipped by Muslims. Of course I hope most of you know or all of you",
      "On the other hand, Europeans could be extremely well informed about the prophet's life and message. After the 1700s European scholars had access to good translations of the Syrah, The Life of the Prophet, and other historical works that explain the details of the prophet s life. Edward Gibbon an Englishman who in the 18th century wrote a history of the Roman Empire that is still very popular today, Decline and Fall of the Empire. I recommend this book it's excellent. Three volumes each one about 1000 pages.",
      "I finished one volume, working on the next one. He was better informed about the Prophet than most professors of Islamic studies today. I'll say that. He knew there was historical evidence that the Kaaba existed centuries before the beginning of Islam. He know about the doctrine of abrogation of Quranic verses. He mentioned many miracles of the Prophet such as the tree stump longing for him when",
      "So there's, when the Prophet used to give before the mosque was built in Medina, the Prophet would give his khutbahs, his Friday sermons leaning on this stump of a palm tree. And after the mosque is built people would hear the stump actually making noise and yearning for the Prophets touching it. Edward Gibbon knew about all these stories. He knew about Hadith reports about the Prophet. He know about the main authoritative Hadith collections.",
      "and unlike many media commentators today, he knew that there's a hadith that promised 72 heavenly beauties. People always say 72 virgins. 72 heavenly beauty for every Muslim not just martyrs. This is very important to get this out on the street. Every Muslim gets 72 heavenly duties you don't have to be a martyr. Very important. Not a lot of marginal benefit there. He knew that",
      "that the prophet had mentioned he had specified four perfect women, Mary, Asya, Fatima and the Prophet's own wife Khadija. In many of the varied depictions of the Prophet in the West however we see consistent negative themes that frequently appear across the centuries. They are one, that the Prophet was an imposter and opportunist. Two, that his message was stolen from other religions it was not innovative or new.",
      "knew. Three, and this is very important that he was a lecher, that he sexually deviant in some way and lustful. And four, that here's a violent fanatic. These are four images and themes that appear constantly over and over again from the 700s until today. We see all many of these things actually or actually all of them in the writings of John of Damascus. John of",
      "He was a Assyriac Christian living in Damascus. And he actually for many years of his life worked as an administrator in the Muslim caliphate, for the Umayyad Caliphs in Damascos. And later on in his life, he became a monk and retired to a monastery. He wrote many books about Christian heresies and one book called The Fount of Knowledge. In this book, he actually talks about Islam as a Christian heresy. And then he wrote another book called Disputations Between a Christian and a Syracin, between Christians and Muslims.",
      "Christian and Muslim. So he's sort of the godfather of all Christian polemics against Islam. He wrote, Muhammad, the founder of Islam is a false prophet who by chance came across the Old and New Testaments and who also pretended that he encountered an Aryan monk and thus devised his own heresy. So John was claiming that the Prophet plotted dishonestly to cobble Islam together from existing holy books, Jewish and Christian holy",
      "Jewish and Christian holy books. With John of Damascus, we also see the emergence of the idea that the prophet was a violent man, a man of the sword, and that this fact undermines the truth of his prophetic claim because John says true teachers like Jesus are men of peace and not men of war. It's important to remember that the way that most... The Christian population of the Near East was first exposed to Islam was through the Muslim conquests,",
      "Egypt, like Damascus, Iran and Iraq. Now that doesn't mean Muslims shed a great deal of blood in this area or forcibly converted people I once told...I actually still do tell students if they can find one instance of forced conversion in the first 300 years of Islam I'll give them an A in class One student actually found this once but it was not really forced because there was a governor who is a rebel who did it so I didn't count that",
      "He got added grade points for initiative. But the Christian population in the Near East were conquered, and they were then ruled by Muslim state. So this idea of Islam being a religion linked with violence and war was very clear to the Christian populations of the lands which the Muslims conquered. Stories of Muhammad's imposter and hypocrisy reach comic levels",
      "In the Chanson de Geste, which is a genre of popular tales told in medieval French from the 11th to the 13th centuries. Hildebert of Tours in the 11 century wrote a poem called Historia de Mohammed, The History of Mohammed. The most widely read medieval work on Islam, which was peppered with stories of the prophet as a drunken fool. It tells that he was buried in a temple with a coffin lid or a coffin that was magnetically suspended to fool people into believing in him.",
      "So this idea that the prophet is an imposter, that he's a charlatan. He uses various ruses to convince people of the truth of his message. The story later another sort of storyteller named Alexander Dupont wrote a book called Romain de Mohammed in 1258 which is a French poem based on a Latin original which shows the prophet as an impostor who uses a dove",
      "sitting on his shoulder to convince people that he's receiving revelations from this dove. So what he would do is, supposedly, he'd put bird feed in his ear and then this dove would come and eat food out of his ear. And people would think that this dove was, in fact, whispering messages into his ear, divine revelations. A 14th century English book of legends includes",
      "includes an even more fantastic story of imposture, that the prophet Muhammad started out as a Christian who wanted to become pope. When he realized there was no place for him in Rome, he made his way to Syria where he bewitched the Arabs into believing that he was a prophet. In the 17th century, an English scholar, Humphrey Proudhon wrote a book whose title gives you the general idea he had about the prophet, The True Nature of Imposture Fully Displayed in the Life of Muhammad.",
      "And that's Old English, so there are all sorts of weird vowels and apostrophes in places like that. It is also with John of Damascus that we see the first and one of the most primary weapons used against the Prophet by critics of Islam and used to defame his reputation. That's his marriage to Zaynab. Now this is something that actually happened, we know about it in the Quran. So the Prophet adopted",
      "adopted a young man into his household. His name was Zadim al-Harithah. Now, let's remember that in Near Eastern tradition, so this goes from Rome to Egypt to ancient Mesopotamia, when you adopt somebody they literally become your son, your child as if genetically they were your child. So when Octavian or Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus later known as Augustus Caesar,",
      "the people who had killed Julius Caesar and assassinated him, under the pretext that they had killed his father even though he was just his adopted father. People believed this. This meant it was as if he had literally... His father had been murdered. Now in Arab culture and in Jewish culture you cannot marry the wife, the widow of your father or a son cannot marry... Sorry, a father cannot marry",
      "woman who was previously married to his son. So if you look at Jewish tradition in the ancient Mediterranean, in ancient Near East, you look Arabian culture this is something that's equivalent incest. You can't... A father cannot marry someone to whom his son was previously a married woman. Now what happened was Zaid, the adopted son of the prophet, was married to a woman named Zainab and they had their marriages having problems",
      "having problems and this was particularly sensitive issue because the problem was that Zaynab was really in love with the Prophet. And the Prophet encouraged them to stay together but eventually their marriage became so tempestuous and problematic that he allowed them to be divorced, and then he married Zayna. This is very problematic. Now it was controversial during the life of the Prophet,",
      "verses to this. Zaid is one of the two people mentioned in the Quran, contemporaries of the Prophet besides the Prophet. Only two contemporaries are actually mentioned by name in the Qur'an. One of them is one his enemies Abu Lahab and the other one is Zaid. This is a very controversial issue. And what the Qur-an says is it's okay for you to do this because an adopted son is not like a real son. And this is where we get into Islam principle that adoption is never",
      "as a blood relation. You can adopt children, you can bring them into your family, you take care of them, raise them but they are never your child. They're always genetically different from you and therefore if they marry somebody and then divorce them that person is not as if your own child has married that person so this the Prophet had in fact not broken any taboo. This was very controversial. The Prophet was criticized by his enemies",
      "by his people who wanted to discredit him for this action. Now, this is then picked up as a central criticism of the Prophet by Christians and other non-Muslims writing polemics against Islam in the early Islamic period. So John makes the accusation that Muhammad had fallen in love with his adopted son Zaid's wife, Zainab, had committed adultery with her,",
      "from Zaid and to allow him to marry her. John claims that the prophet's lust was so irrepressible, that he used his false claims as a religious leader to justify them.\" So it is this idea that the Prophet is literally unable to control his passions. The story of Zaynab and the notion that the Prophets use religion to both possess women and also in this case commit adultery and incultural effect",
      "sources that it defies counting. If you look at the amount of times this story is brought up by Christian polemicists writing against Islam, whether in the Near East or Medieval Europe or early modern Europe, literally its over and over again. You could just list the authors endlessly. Just two examples here will suffice. There's a very interesting sort of mysterious 9th century Christian writing in Baghdad an Arab Christian named Abdel-Messih al-Kindi who cited",
      "who cited this as a major objection to Islam's claims of prophethood. All the way in England, in the 13th century, the historian Matthew of Paris noted that Muhammad used revelation to excuse an affair he had with his servant's wife. And so you can see this is also sort of another version of a Zaid story. It is really in the 1600s that Europeans started getting more reliable and fully colored pictures of the Prophet's life and mission. Sources like the Muslim biography",
      "and the chronicles of the Muslim historian Abu Fidda were translated into Latin and widely read by scholars. The Quran had been translated into latin in 1143 but its translation was improved on and commentary added. In 1647 it was translated into French for the first time, and in 1734 the Quran was first translated into English. But the common and abiding stereotypes about the Prophet continued",
      "the Prophet continued. Edward Gibbon, as learned as he was stated that the religion of Islam was... sorry, the religion that the Prophet preached is quote compounded of an eternal truth and a necessary fiction so the eternal truth is that there's only one God, Gibbon admits that but the necessary fiction that Muhammad had to come up with is that he was the messenger of God So this idea that even if you kind of respect Islam as a religion",
      "really a prophet because it's not about the true religion. Edward Gibbon noted that although the Prophet was monogamous for his 25 years of marriage to his first wife Khadija, he was quote inclined to jealousy and when he fell in love with his adopted son's wife Zeynep quote the amorous Prophet forgot the interest of his reputation so here we see the image of the Prophet is again uncontrollably lustful. The 19th century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt wrote",
      "quote, stole scraps from other religions to compose his own message. He says that Muhammad was successful because he was, quote, personally very fanatical. And Burkhardt then goes on to say that the victory of Islam in the Near East is a great victory of fanaticism and that the prophet had made every sin forbidden except lying because lying he reserved for himself. This idea that the",
      "We see these abiding stereotypes thriving in the West around us today. The Danish cartoon crisis of 2005-2006 was sparked, in part, by an image of the prophet with a turban packed full of bombs. In the 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie's half dream, half polemical recreation of Mahund, his prophetic characters' world in Mecca, was a den of prurience and vice. Often we find vilification of the Prophet coming from evangelical Christian leaders",
      "Pat Robertson stated on television that, quote,",
      "a demon-possessed pedophile who had 12 wives, and his last one was a nine year old girl. This last reference to a nine-year-old girl is of course referring to the Prophet's marriage to Aisha. By Aisha's own testimony, and this is found in what's considered by Sunni Muslims to be the most reliable collections of reports about the Prophet, she said that she was between 9 and 10 when the Prophet consummated his marriage with her.",
      "So he actually signed, they actually agreed on the marriage when she was six but the marriage is consummated when she's between nine and ten years old. This accusation of pedophilia has now replaced the Zainab incident as a proof of Mohammed sexual deviation. It's a crime to fit our time. Of course we have to remember that what constitutes appropriate ages for marriage or sexual intercourse are entirely conventional",
      "states and peoples, there is no universal age of consent if you look throughout history. It is thus no surprise that no critic of Islam or Muhammad brought up Aisha's age until the 20th century. So you don't see anybody talk about criticizing the Prophet for marrying Aisha and marrying a nine-year old until relatively recently. It's the Zaynab issue that is the big... If you want to look at categorized criticism of the Prophet,",
      "category, it's the Zaynab issue that dominates that category. The Aisha issue is never brought up. There's one instance, Abdul Masih al-Kindi in the 9th century in Baghdad he mentions Aisha's, the Prophet's marriage to Aisha but again the criticism of the Prophet is uncontrollably lustful because the seerah of the prophet, the traditional biography told written about him by Muslims he sees Aisha in a dream before he marries her and he sees her dressed",
      "silk brocades and stuff. And the Abdel-Masih al-Kindi says, look he's so infatuated with her that he's having these dreams about her. So the issue is that he is infatuate, the issue was not her age. The reason why we don't see this issue brought up is because marrying girls considered underage today was completely commonplace in the pre modern world. Under Roman law, the earliest permitted age for marriage was 12.",
      "By 14, a girl was considered an adult whose primary purpose was marriage. In many pre-modern law codes such as Hebrew biblical law and Salic Frankish law, marriage age was not a question at all. It was assumed that when a girl reached puberty and was able to bear children she was ready for marriage. And if you think about it this sort of makes sense. Why are we told to wait to get married or wait to have sex? Or wait to",
      "to college and you have to get a job, all these things that you're supposed to do. These people didn't have any of that to do right? If you live in the middle of the desert there's literally nothing to do I don't know if anyone has ever been into the desert it is extremely boring. Extremely boring, there isn't anything to look at okay? There's no medical school, there's no law school. The second you hit puberty and start having these urges for all the guys in the audience you know what that's like and all the girls in",
      "I mean, the second you start entering this period of your life, if you don't have anything else to do, why not do that stuff? So I think it's very important to remember that a lot of the ideas we have about appropriateness for... The idea of appropriate sexual activity or appropriate age for marriage isn't really... It's tied to our understanding of what people are supposed to do with their lives. As a result, historically, marriage ages tended to be very young in the pre-modern period.",
      "period. Data from several centuries of Imperial Roman history suggests that as many as 8% of women married at 10 or 11. In Italy in the 1300s and 1400s, the average age for women getting married was 16 to 17. Even in an 1861 census in England over 350 women married under the age of 15 in just two counties that year. I have to admit something...I am the product of your age of marriage.",
      "I was just looking through some family records. My aunt got this big batch of family records, my ancestor Captain F.M. Smith from the First Texas Legion. He was on the wrong side of the Civil War. Well, I guess we're in Virginia here so he fought it in Texas. He fought on the right side of civil war. So when he came back from the war, he saw this girl playing in the yard of his friend and she was six.",
      "hit puberty and then he got married to her. But the good news is, this is very interesting, she applied for a Civil War veteran's pension in the 1920s. One of things I saw was her pension application because her husband who was obviously a lot older than her had just died. So I've discovered all this stuff about my family. According to both Christian and Muslim teachings",
      "the Virgin Mary was not the mature maternal figure we see in movies about the Bible. She was at most in her mid-teens when she gave birth to Jesus, having only just begun menstruating and it is reported that she was as young as 10 years old. Muhammad's decision to consummate his marriage to a ten year old would have been based on the same criteria as most pre-modern societies, Aisha's sexual maturity and readiness to bear a child. Consummation of the marriage would have occurred when she had menstruated and started puberty.",
      "As the great Muslim historian Atabris reported, quote, at the time of her marriage contract Aisha was young and not capable of intercourse. Three or four years later however she was able, Aisha herself would later remark that a girl could menstruate as young as nine and thus become a woman. And there's another interesting story which I'll tell here. There's a famous Muslim jurist named Ashafi. He died in 820 of the Qaman era. One of his jobs is serving as a judge and governor in Yemen.",
      "in Sana'a. And he tells that he saw something fascinating there, he saw a 21 year old grandmother. A woman had menstruated when she was 10 and gotten married immediately got pregnant given birth to her daughter menstruate it when she is ten immediately got married how to draw had a child so this when he was in court a judge he adjudicated this issue and this one was a 21-year-old grandmother",
      "example of the full range of possibilities in human life. Beginning in the European Renaissance, however we see a new more positive theme emerging in the way that the prophet is portrayed in the West. The image of Muhammad as a brilliant state builder who used religion to forge civilization so the idea of someone who builds a civilization and uses religion as a tool to do this. Of course Western writers still assume",
      "but his accomplishments were now admired. The famous English philosopher Thomas Hobbes used the prophet as an example of a leader who used religion to empower the state, saying that he claimed to receive revelation from God in the form of a dove. Again we have this dove image. The great French historian and satirist Voltaire affirmed that the prophet was quote,",
      "that his need for love, quote, weakened neither his courage initiative nor his health. Voltaire defends polygamy as accepted in the cultures of the Near East, adding that the prophet actually restricted the practice from its excesses, i.e., men who had hundreds of wives. So if you look in the Book of Kings, you see that Solomon has some 700 wives. The prophet actually",
      "of the ancient Romans. Although Muslims did conquer the Middle East, Voltaire notes that neither the prophet nor the Muslims ever forced people to convert to Islam. In the writings of scholars like Voltair who were much more interested in criticizing corruption and the backwardness of the Catholic Church than insulting Muslims, Muhammad became an idealized alternative, a useful counter model to point out the flaws of Western institutions. It's very important to remember when you read Voltaires writing about Islam he is not really",
      "writing about Islam, he's trying to criticize the Catholic Church and especially Jews. Voltaire did not like Jews very much I don't think. And he uses the prophet as sort of an alternative and the prophet's life is an alternative to Western religious institutions. The Prophet had set out, Voltair writes,",
      "and advanced far beyond Europe in their sciences. Even amongst these partial admirers of the Prophet, however, we still find a belief that he was a liar who used religion falsely to achieve his ends. In part this is inevitable among scholars and people who do not believe in Islam. If you don't believe that Muhammad was truly sent by God then you must believe he was either insane or a liar. A fascinating alternative to this idea as of Muhammad as an imposter, however",
      "is the idea that sincere prophethood is part of human history. We find this idea in the writings of the 19th century Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle. Carlyles saw history as the work of great men who represented and brought about the great stages of human History. He picks a prophet as the person who represented the shift from the Great Man as a god, for example amongst the Greeks and Vikings to the Great man as a prophet",
      "Muhammad was a humble and frugal man, unlike the decadent Roman and Persian kings. Far from being a liar is Muhammad's very sincerity that Carlisle finds so inspiring. He feels that sincerity is essential for a great man, and Muhammad was so sincere that he was not even conscious of how sincere he was. Quote, such a man is the very heart of truth, Carlisles writes. He cannot abide falsehood. He is so committed.",
      "committed. Although Carlisle was never a Muslim, he admits that the Prophet's holy book was sincere and an expression of his greatness. Carlisles writes quote really his utterances are they not a kind of revelation? What we must call such for want some other word? Looking back on centuries of vicious attacks on the prophet in the West, Carlisled states that calling him a liar or an imposter is quote disgraceful to ourselves only",
      "Quote, the word that this man spoke has been the life guidance now of 180 millions today 1.3 billion of men these 1200 years. Carlisle continues are we supposed to suppose that it was a miserable piece of spiritual leisure domain? This which so many creatures of the almighty have lived and died by? The most interesting thing to me about the western depictions",
      "of the Prophet is how little they have changed in 1,400 years. Certainly we do not find the absurdly ignorant idea that Muslims actually worshiped the prophet as a god but if you search the internet today for non-Muslim impressions of the prophet, the themes of deception, lechery, extremism and violence are still predominant. The good news is that the approach taken by Carlisle namely to take the prophets seriously on his own terms is becoming more popular. This is perhaps due",
      "decreased role of Christianity in academic discussions. When one is less committed to the exclusive truth of one religion, it is easier to admit that an influential religious leader could have been sincere in his own religion.\" I hope that from this point on we will stop holding the Prophet accountable to norms that although they seem sound and permanent to us today, have not been so in the past and are not so for others today. Thank you."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown and Shadee talk about Muslim Jerks__1748687725.opus",
    "text": [
      "If someone's like a slanderous bloated jerk. Yeah, these cockroaches that's they're sort of cockroaches and rats and hyenas really hyenas I accept criticism when it's done by complete A-holes okay? This is what i see i don't know if you tell me It's been taken over by this like Kharijite attitudes Of if you have one mistake One thing we're gonna meme you to death We're going to attack"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown Claims Shaykh al Albani and Shaykh _r0lvIdpPtP8&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748692288.opus",
    "text": [
      "It's very important to remember that al-Albani considered democracy to be haram. He considered participation in democratic government to be Haram. I mean, they were literally their minds were in the Middle Ages. I don't mean that as a sort of pejorative critique of somebody just being backwards. They're thinking in terms of a tradition that was developed and elaborated in the middle ages.",
      "developed and elaborated in the Middle Ages. It's very important to remember that al-Albani considered democracy to be haram, he considered participation in democratic government to be",
      "Now, I have a question for you.",
      "Again, I want to be very clear that I'm not trying to argue that Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani and Muqbi bin Hadi al-Wad'i represent some misunderstood kinder gentler face of Islam. They were... I don't think their problem was... I dont think it's their methodology that is extreme. It's their outlook. I mean they were literally... Their minds were in the Middle Ages. And I don tmean that as a sort of pejorative critique of somebody just being backwards. I mea,y they're thinking in terms of",
      "a tradition that was developed and elaborated in the middle ages so then the shaykh he mentions so how can the excellence of knowledge and the ulama be hidden? How can it be hidden from the Muslim whilst he recites the statement of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala where Allah jalla wa ala has stated in the Quran قُلْ هَلْ يَسْتَوِي الَّذِينَ يَعْلَمُونَ وَالَّذِّينَ لَا يَحْلُمُوا إِنَّمَا یَتَذَكَّرُ أُولُو الْأَلبَابِ Allah subhana wa taala mentions in this ayah say to them O Muhammad are those who know",
      "those who know equal to those who do not know it is only men of understanding who will recall or who will remember so here allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is clearly standing the messenger of allah inform the believers inform mankind that the one who has knowledge and the one",
      "this when you put your vote in elections that the one who possesses ilm is like the one does not possess ilm so the knowledge or the voting even though voting in Islam is something that is not correct rather in Islam what is correct is that the ones who have knowledge and the ones with ilm and the one's who have khibra they are the ones to make decisions but as for these western lands the most ajhalunnas",
      "and the most sinful of people, and the akfarunnas, and he most disbelieving of the people that his voice is like the voice of the one who is the most righteous and the pious and the just and the one keeps away from kufr and shirk and disobedience to Allah. Their voices are considered to be the same. And they say his vote is one and his vote as if their athwaad and their voices are at the same level in the sight of Allah. Whereas in Islam those who have ilm",
      "gives them a darajah, gives him levels above the rest of the people. So knowledge is a virtue so this is why Allah mentions that those who have knowledge are they the same or are they equal? Those who know and those who do not know and it is only the men of understanding who will remember. So then the Shaykh he mentions so how can the excellence of knowledge"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown doesn_t know Arabic__TmREkytPl7k&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748692521.opus",
    "text": [
      "هذه الأمراض والآلام لا بد أن تستأثر باهتمامنا نعم نعم معالج ومعالج المعالاج باسم المفهوم",
      "الشيخ أولاً يبدأ بالتعليم والتنزيل التعويل والتعاليم تنزيع الأحكام تحقيق المنافس",
      "الشيخ يريد التحدث عن اثنين من الموضوعات",
      "trying to, oh okay sorry. Here we go. So basically the when you look at this issue of Tanzia what's our wheel within telling what and zeal we have to use these tools to basically reconsider"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown_ Evidentiary Maxims in Hadith Criti_UGHeO5ZS6UQ&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748661319.opus",
    "text": [
      "Salam alaikum everyone. Today we have the well-known scholar in Islamic studies and Hadith studies, Professor Dr Jonathan Browne. And today he will speak about the topic Evidentiary Maxims in Hadith, Quixotism, Interpretation and more.",
      "to welcome you in Tübingen personally. And now, you can begin. Okay. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Rahim. Thank you for inviting me. I'm very honored to be included among the list of scholars who are presenting in your seminar. It's a very impressive group. So it's very flattering for me. So originally, I was supposed to present about current issues and Hadith studies or something but that was only because",
      "because I did not reply to the email asking me what my title was, because I was too disorganized. So I figured the organizers just added that title in because they had no idea what else to do. And I could have talked about something like this, but I think it would not be that interesting or it would be kind of maybe too interesting who knows, but i figured i'm gonna... This is my chance to... I was like you know there's actually a project I was working on for a long time and",
      "audience will appreciate it. So this is something that I was looking at, maybe I'm working on since I was in grad school which was a long time ago now and it's about a maxim qaeda you could say qaeda usuliyya or yeah probably qaeda like an interpretive or evidentiary maxim which is",
      "al-nafi, al-muthbit muqaddam al-anafi. The person or the party that is affirming something supersedes or is presumed to supersede the one denying it. So the superseder... Sorry, the affirmation supersedes denial, basically, if we could think about that. Al-muhbib muqaddam al-annafi. I'm just going to use the Arabic because it's easier than English, I think. Alhambra al-nafi.",
      "on a naffy. This is something I noticed when I was doing my dissertation or when I went to grad school, and I just kind of kept track of this anytime I came across it. And I could probably do one of those shameless searches for this and find a lot more material, but this just represents what I've come across on my own, which I think is also interesting because it's not just the instances in which you have that exact wording used, but also in which",
      "of that wording, or also just the concept itself instead of necessarily any literal deployment of that maxim. So anyway, I thought this would be an interesting thing to go over and see how it's used. This maxim actually appears very early on in Islamic intellectual history. We have evidence of it very early",
      "In his Kitab al-Tamiz, a small book part of which has survived on his discussion of the methodology of Hadith criticism. He says that",
      "But he says, essentially is that a narration or someone making a claim about material that other narrations or other transmitters don't have is like a witness who has recalled something or remember somebody that other witnesses have forgotten. So it's interesting in this case you have this idea that somebody affirming something or adding it is like someone bearing testimony and remembers something that somebody else",
      "or sorry, has forgotten, or I did not remember. Imam al-Tahawi, the famous Hanifi Hadith scholar who died 321 about 932 of the common era, he uses it in his Sharh Mushkil Al-Athar, a massive text dealing with interpretation of hadith and reconciliation of different hadith evidence. He used it to argue that one narration of a hadith with an additional clause in it should be taken over another,",
      "narration that lacks that clause and he says the thing that is adding is better than a thing that",
      "Abu Sulaiman Hamd al-Khattabi, who died in 998 of the common year. He was from Bost today. That's I think Lashkar Gah in Afghanistan. It's a fascinating scholar. I think he's one of the... Maybe someone has already studied this but his works are one of places you see maybe the most common or frequent deployment of Al-Qua'id and Fiqhiya wa al-Usuliyyah in Islamic history as far as I know. His books are just full of these.",
      "also a theologian known for not liking kalam. He wrote a big multi-volume book condemning kalam and also the earliest hadith commentary we have, for example, on Sunan Abu Dawud and Sahih Bukhari are by al-Khattabi. And he says on the issue of raising your hands in prayer so when you do your prayers Allahu Akbar or something like that and then when you go to bow Allahu Akbar you come up with your hands like this if you're a Hanafi you don't do that or Maliki you go down this and you come",
      "this and you come up without raising your hands but if you're a shafi or a humbly we go like this um so there's lots of hadiths that say both right they're both thoughts that can be marshaled for both positions um says is alif bat awlamin so the hadits that affirm that the prophet raised his hands in prayer are supersede trump those that deny that he or say that he didn't do that",
      "didn't do that. This maxim, especially as it comes... I think it'd be interesting to see where it comes out of because unless... I could be wrong about this but it seems to me that it originates amongst hadith scholars or in the early Ahlus Sunnah wa Jama'ah circles and then of course spreads much more widely",
      "which means the addition made by the trustworthy party, a trustworthy transmitter. And this is the idea that if you have let's say 10 narrations of a Hadith and one of them says, nine of them say X and one on them says X plus Y, if the narration that says X Plus Y is narrated by reliable transmitter, you should take that edition even though actually it's the minority position.",
      "This is maybe not the position of early Muslim hadith scholars, but it becomes accepted as a general or mainstream position by the time you get to the ten hundreds of the common era. Or for example, it's not just about like the text of a hadith, it could also be the normative force of the hadith. So if you have let's say 10 narrations of a report and nine of them attributed to Umar bin al-Khattab so",
      "attributes it to the Prophet Muhammad, according to the principle of ziyadu thika. You would take the version that's attributed to the prophet Muhammad if it's transmitted by a reliable transmitter even if it is only one out of ten narrations. Especially in the early period and amongst hadith scholars you'll see this notion of al-muthbid muqaddama ala nāfi a lot of times invoked along with or in association with this idea of",
      "this idea of ziyadat al-thiqa, the acceptability of the trustworthy transmitter. Anybody have any questions so far? I mean, if anyone has any questions, they can raise their hand or if I haven't been clear about something, please let me know. Okay. By the way, this can be very consequential. This ziyada thiqaa issue is not just an academic eggheady thing that",
      "famous hadith of Umm Warqa, the hadith in which the Prophet tells the companion a woman named Umm Warqu to lead her household in prayer. Almost all every single narration of this hadith except one says that the Prophet says lead your household in pray. Darha in prayer like darha or household and",
      "And scholars across the board who say da'at includes men and women. Only one narration, which appears rather late in the Sunan of a Daara Qutni, famous Shafi Hadith scholar from Baghdad who died 385-995 of the Common Era. In the Sunn of a Dara Qotni has a diversion says lead the women of her household in prayer. So it's general I mean, it's not agreed upon in all the meditatives but it's",
      "controversial that a woman would lead other women in prayer. It is more controversial that",
      "By the way, this is why in the Hanbali school, for example, women can lead men in prayer and things like tarawih prayer and that because they actually take the predominant evidence on this issue from the hadiths. So anyway, that's a point where you see this impact of legal ruling. Okay, so I'll give you some examples",
      "is used in law, especially debates around hadith and law. This might be kind of boring but this is a German university so we're serious about these things. Not that it's boring but that this is the place to get into the weeds. For example, the great Mufassir and Maliki scholar Al-Qurtubi died at 1273",
      "of the Common Era, he says that he uses this principle to argue that the reports of the Prophet ﷺ wiping over his leather socks which are in any case more numerous than those denying it or that it's abrogated supersede those that he didn't. So the reports that the Prophet did wipe over his",
      "based on this principle. The famous Hanbali scholar of Damascus, Ibn Qadama, who died in 620-1223 of the Common Era, he cites this maxim or he refers to it, alludes to it as a piece of evidence that the hadiths going against the Hanbalid ruling on qasamah are not definitive or should not carry the day. So qasama is the issue when you have someone",
      "died and you have been similarly seems to be murdered. And you don't know either, you don t have enough evidence to prove someone guilty. You don't have the required, you do not have evidence that meets the evidentiary standard or you do nt have any idea who did it in this case there is a debate about, you know, the people, are the people in the neighborhood where area where he was found? The person dead person founded they swear an oath that they didn't do it? Or does the person's family come and swear an",
      "do it? Or when they swear the oath, are they then... Do they then have to pay the dia, blood money for the person, compensation payment or does that the judge or the government pay the Dia? If I'm not mistaken maybe somebody can look this up while I'm talking and tell me if I'm wrong because I don't want to be wrong and mislead you. But as far as I know the Hanbali position is that the people who were accused take some number of them like 40",
      "them, like 40 of them take the oath that they did not do it. And then the government pays the dia I think to the person's family. Maybe somebody can look that up and tell me if I'm wrong and correct me if i'm incorrect and give me the right answer.\" So what he says is all the evidence going against the Hanbali position should not be taken because of the principle that al-muthbit muqaddim ala nafi",
      "A person who uses this maxim a lot, is al-Hafidh ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, the great Hadith scholar of Cairo. Although originally his family was from Gaza. He died in 852, 1449. I have an ongoing strong friendship across time with al-Haftab ibn Hijr al-Askalani because I'm translating Sahih Bukhari. Somebody asked me how that's going. It's going well.",
      "It's going well. That's all I can say. It's doing well, but I've read now maybe like half of Fath al-Bari and he uses this, mashallah, he uses Maxim a great deal. So for example the hadith that the Prophet did not raise his hands in prayer supersedes those",
      "in prayer because al-muthbit mukaddim ala annafi. Narrations affirm that the Prophet recited parts of the Quran during the noon and afternoon prayer, so in the Asr and Dhuhr prayer you say silently you recite stories of the Qur'an or parts of it. We all know that right? But there's narrations from Ibn Abbas radiAllahu ta'ala anhuma that he did not know if the Prophet did this or even that he thinks the Prophet",
      "from the Quran in these Doha and Asr prayers. But narrations affirming that the Prophet recited parts of the Quran during the afternoon afternoon prayer supersede those that he didn't because al-Muthbit mukaddim ala nafi reports that the prophet did pray two rak'ah after the afternoon prayer it's a hadith inside Bukhari supersede Muawiyah's report that he did not pray two raka'ahs after the evening prayer due to the principle of al-Musbit mukadım ala nafi now somebody might say",
      "I remember after when I first became Muslim, I just thought you prayed two rakahs after everything. So I remember I was praying two rakas after Asr prayer and my friend Muhammad Noor, Rahimahu Allah, great guy came up to me and said what are you doing brother? You are not supposed to pray this. Very nice guy. But then the Prophet did pray two rakat after the afternoon prayer but he did it in his house not in the mosque. Correct me if I'm wrong. Okay. There's another",
      "uh there's another example but it's so really in you know involved and I don't want to explain that so these are just several of many examples in which ibn Hajar al-hafidh invokes the principle of in his discussion anybody find out anything about the kasama handily position on kasama we got 56 people in the audience come on somebody out there has a computer and they can Google",
      "i um sheikh muhammad i think he would be a good person to do this assuming and i know he has internet access because he's on this call okay i'm just saying anyway if uh famous moroccan hadith scholar resident in cairo died in 1960. famous brought the oldest of the humari brothers",
      "uses this argument for the permissibility of combining prayers so you can combine the prayer without any danger or without travel. So, you're not traveling there's no rain you're in danger you can still combine them as long as you don't make it a habit he says why what's his evidence for this because",
      "at tiramidi which says the prophet combined his prayers when without matar or khatar no rain no danger uh has in fact been acted on he says uh eternity says nobody's acted on this hadith you know it's narrated but nobody ever acted on it so it's not really taken as evidence uh says no no some people did act on it namely uh some maliki scholars okay uh is this is nabil has wow",
      "to somebody. How am I supposed to read this while I'm giving a presentation, people? You're supposed to speak out, you know, just say the answer. But were you right or are you wrong? I'm just going to wait for someone to speak. Otherwise, I'm going to keep going. Okay. So he says that the fact that some people have acted on this hadith in the Maliki school",
      "school means that it can be, it is evidence right? It's a position that can be taken because the if-bat, the affirmation of the people acting on it supersedes Imam al-Tirmidhi's denial that people had acted on it. Okay now it's interesting right this hadith it doesn't just appear in sorry this principle isn't just used in the context of hadith and law but also in discussions of usul",
      "and even in the application of law in courts. For example, Abu Ishaq al-Sharazi, Sheikh Abu Isahaq al Sharazi, the great Shafi jurist and legal theorist of Baghdad, he died 476, 1083. He invokes this maxim on matters of evidence, on matters epistemology and evidence in Usul. I think that's... I can't remember which book that's in of his or maybe his Luma, I'm not sure.",
      "And there's also the famous legal anthropologist, Lawrence Rosen in his book, Anthropology of Law. He talks about in his two decades of observing court activity in the court in Qadi Court in the rural area of Safrou in Morocco. He says that this he gives evidence or he gives a report of a judge invoking this maxim in a property dispute",
      "dispute, where it shows that this principle, that al-muthbit muqaddim al-nafi, shows that all things being equal, a claim of harm supersedes a denial of harm. So if someone makes a claim that they're being harmed and the party denies that they are being harmed, the claim supersedes. That's very interesting by the way. I wonder if anyone can think of a problem with this? Anyone think of an objection to this?",
      "do they have like a cricket sound effect sure I just need if you can just repeat the last time yeah so in the property dispute it is in a court in sephirou and Morocco in the probably 1970s the the uh a woman says that she her property had been harmed and the other party denies it and then he says that in uh we take the principle of that the affirmation supersedes the denial",
      "Okay, I'll tell you. This occurred to me right now which is that the person making the claim is required to provide direct evidence. The person against whom the claim",
      "we don't know enough, we have to go look more into the details of the case to see but off the top my head I can't recall what they are. Sorry. Is this in regard to the itself because maybe that reason is the other maybe there was another Qaeda I'm not sure",
      "So when it comes to... It's similar, yeah. It's familiar, right? Man hafidha hujjatun ala man lam yahzad is even more famous. So it's similar. I think they're linked conceptually. It about ilm, but here it's something else more. Maybe it's like huqqu or something. I'm not sure. The claim being made. Okay then there are a number of examples from theology, theological disputes. Imam Inouyeh,",
      "1277 of the common era he uses this evidence to show that the debate over whether the prophet when he went on the israel did he actually see god with his eyes or not and there's a number of reports and companion opinions like most famously uh the opinion of ibn abbas that uh he did see the prophet and then of course there was an",
      "isn't not speaking truly, not speaking accurately. And what he says, and now he says is that the mutbid muqaddim al-anafi on this issue, right? So you have contrasting evidence then one, the affirmation of seeing God supersedes the denial that you did not see God. And again, this is invoked as well by Imam al-Bayjuri, Burhan ad-Din al-Bayjuri the famous Shaykh al-Azhar who died in 1860 of the common era also on the issue of the Prophet seeing God",
      "on the miraculous journey to the heavens. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani again invokes it on the issue of whether the Prophet saw the jinn, whether the Prophets saw the Jinn or not. So there's a famous debate you have Hadith ibn Mas'ud Abd al-Ibn Masaud in Sahih Muslim that the Prophet met the Jijn so one night he actually",
      "encounters jinn and he recites quran to them some quran for them um and that then ibn mas'ud and the other companions who are with the prophet they actually the next day the prophet shows them the traces of the author the traces or the jinns and says don't use bones to wipe yourself if you go to the bathroom like pieces of bone because the jinn eat them so you don't want to ruin the jhin food basically",
      "Now there's another narration of the report from Ibn Mas'ud which is in Musnad of Ahmed bin Hanbal, which is not considered reliable generally. In which the companions themselves also see the jinn and they say that they look like men from Zut. Men who are like Indians or type of Indian people from India.",
      "The reliable report of Ibn Mas'ud is that the Prophet saw the jinn. But then, Ibn Abbas's report in Sahih Muslim, Ibran al-Abbas gives his story of what happened. He says the Prophet did not see the jins and he did not recite any Qur'an to them. So what Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani says is that in this case again",
      "that affirm the Prophet saw the jinn are Trump, those reports say he did not see the jann. You also have examples of it being used in actual discussions of hadith critical methodology, the actual methodology of hadit criticism and narration criticism. The famous, well, he's not so famous. He's pretty famous. Hadith scholar Medjideen ibn al-Athir who died 606 1210. He is the brother of the historian Ibn Al-Ahthir",
      "of al-Kamil fi tarikh is his brother. He wrote a book, Al-Jami' al-Asul Fi Hadith al-Rasul I think is the book he wrote. In a short section on Jarh al-Ta'deel, on criticism of transmitters that he addended to this book, he discusses and says that if you have a competing Jarh and Ta'deels, so one kind of criticism of a narrator and one defense of that narrator, the Jarh, the criticism supersedes the defense sorry",
      "Sorry. Because it is, quote, awareness of additional description. Ittila' ala ziyadat wasf. Awareness of additional distribution. IE, in other words, information that the critic of the person has that the defender does not have. This is interesting because it's linked to the principle in Jahu Ta'dil that Al-Jarh Muqaddama ala Ta'diel Idha kan Al-jarh Thabit Mufassir as-sabbah",
      "a suburb but here it doesn't say he doesn't bring this up. He just says that the criticism supersedes the defense because it implies or seems to rely on awareness of additional information that the defender did not have. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani in his discussion of whether the successor Mujahid, Mujahed bin Jabir died 105 Hijri if I'm not mistaken. Did he hear from Aisha directly?",
      "Aisha directly? Did he hear and study and learn from Aisha or not? Abu Hatim al-Razi, who died in 270 Hijri says that he did not. But Ali ibn Al-Madini, who had died in 234 Hijri, said Mujahid heard from Aishah because",
      "ibn Hajar al-Haytami, not the Ibn Hajr al-Isqalani. Ibn Hadj Al-Haythami, the famous Shafi jurist originally from Egypt settled in Mecca died 975 1565, I think 974 or 1565 around that time he died one year earlier than Sulaiman the Magnificent, I remember that so he says on the issue of did Al Hasan Al Basri, did he hear",
      "Did he hear hadiths and learn from Ali ibn Abi Talib? This is a hotly debated topic with lots of people bringing evidence on both sides. Ibn Hajar says, Al-Hassan did hear from Ali in part because al-Muthbit Muqaddim ala al-Nafi says this in his Fatawa al-Hadithiyya. Okay, now the problem with maxims or qawwa'id",
      "they only give you an incomplete picture, right? So somebody could say, the ends justify the means. But then there's another principle which is the ends don't justify the mean. So which one do you take, right or sometimes these maxims if you just took them and didn't take any other evidence, you would end up with a kind of ridiculous conclusion. And of course Muslim scholars are aware of this so it's important to remember that in every instance",
      "In every instance that I, every example that I gave here so far in the talk. This Maxim was invoked as one argument, one evident piece of evidence among many pieces of evidence. So debates about which hadith narrations are more reliable, about which opinions are more liable, about majority opinion, minority opinion, et cetera, et Cetera. So there's lots of evidence being invoked. This maxim is being invoke only as part of a larger arguments and",
      "And sometimes Muslim scholars give us clear evidence that they're aware of its limitations. So, for example, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani says a scholar who loved this principle if anybody loves the principle of مُقَدَّم على النَّافِي it's Ibn Hijr al-Askalani. If Donald Trump were speaking he said nobody likes this principle more than Ibn Haji al-Askilani if I were Donald Trump giving this presentation. He says on the debate about when the first revelation occurred when did the Prophet or Laysa Sallam first receive revelation and in what circumstances?",
      "He says, So the affirmation supersedes the negation. Unless the negating party, they have their evidence. If they bring evidence to the table, we're presuming that this is evidence that all thinking is being equal.",
      "thinking is being equal, the superseder is going to trump the denier. But if the deniers has evidence and the affirmer doesn't, then the deniers wins. So this isn't a maxim that's invoked totally denuded of any other consideration of evidence. If the deniar has superior evidence than the affirming, then",
      "Similarly, Majdeen ibn al-Thiyar in his deployment of that maxim in the example I gave above, he adds this important addition. He says, except if the affirmation can be manifestly disproven. So for example, if someone says so and so killed a person, and then you see that person alive and well.",
      "And Zayd said, Muhammad didn't kill this person. Except then you see Muhammad walking around, you know Muhammad's not dead. So unless there is a miracle, but miraculous violations of the normal course of nature aren't admissible as evidence in legal discussions.",
      "denying that he was killed wins in this case. Okay, thank you very much. If you guys have any questions or you want to discuss this I'm happy to. Let me see what you guys wrote about the... It was 50 people Professor Brown not 40 in Khanbali school for Khusama.",
      "but no one just what's the ruling on the the humbly ruling on kasama is it that the the judge pays or who pays to look this up now thank you professor Jonathan brown for this interesting presentation and uh um maxims of",
      "in hadith criticism and this interpretation now um we will come to the questions if we have any questions in the room or online um we can begin now okay so i can start",
      "Thank you very much and sorry for coming late. So if I understood everything well, I have two questions. The first one, I missed the beginning but is this maxim... What would be the origin of this maxim? Is it thick? It seems, you know, the Kawa'ite normally... I don't have a lot knowledge about this Kawa',",
      "white topic but uh to my lord knowledge this is especially a topic in trick i mean there's an instrument in the finding of norms so what is he the origin or headed in origin in in the science of hadith and then as you explained it was applied in various domains",
      "I mean, you showed also in the domain of questions of and et cetera. But it seems to me to be a principle of normative criticism or normative interpretation about all this. That's right? That was my first question. And then the second question which I found interesting is that what does this say about the Muslim or Sunni conception",
      "of transmission and tradition in the sense that um take for example this concept of ziyadat as-sikra and as you explained that it became accepted at the time you know there was a sort of consensual use of this acceptance and doesn't this say that we have a conception of tradition",
      "as something which is growing you know traditional and something which which uh it's not the you know the um transmission of a fixed corpus but of something which",
      "not in the sense that um the is bad does it have something to do with the fact that and the islamic epistemology i mean certitudes if the foundation of knowledge you know if you contrast this as you know with modern conceptions the catholic right you know doubt of the foundation",
      "different form so this um thought that came up while listening to you thank you very much yeah i think um i mean it's hard to know uh based on what i've seen and i could be totally wrong about this but uh based upon what i have seen it seems to originate in hadith scholarship like kind of literally about additional either additions to chains of transmission addition to the text of hadith additions to the normative level of the hadith or",
      "or information about a transmitter. And then it seems to become, uh, to kind of proliferate from Hadith scholarship into other domains. That's my impression. I could be wrong. So I'm not, if someone else finds that to the contrary, I'm happy to admit there, to admit that. You know, I think the interesting thing about this certainly in the context of Hadith",
      "is it actually kind of goes against the general methodology of certainly early Hadith scholars, maybe the first 300 years where they really were their main means of measurements measuring or ascertaining reliability was about Ishtihar like something being widely transmitted versus something being narrowly with only limited transmission.",
      "transmission. So, and this is by the way you know it's not my opinion uh this was brought up by many hadith scholars already people like al-Khatib al-Baghdadi and others discussed this and then other figures in the Mamluk period as well discussed this I actually wrote an article about this topic which probably no one ever read called critical rigor and juridical utility i think it's in Islamic law and society so they pointed out like this is",
      "it out. This Ziyadah-Fiqla principle kind of goes against what early Hadith scholars thought, which is that if you have 10 reports saying X and only one report saying X plus Y, why would you take the X plusY report? That goes against how we think about evidence. On the other hand, this material was supposed to be used. So I think",
      "and what it suggests about, what it kind of elucidates about Islamic history or intellectual history is that it's a tradition that is there to provide things for people. It's not something that exists in a vacuum. It supposed to give people answers and it's supposed to get people answers for any possible question they have. And it's suppose to give you answers that are useful, right? So if you have a Hadith that gives you another an additional piece of information, that's tempting to take. If you have hadith that provides an explanation when others",
      "or a little bit maybe ambiguous, you're going to be very attracted to taking that additional information. And in fact, al-Bukhari does this in his sahihah actually is one of the instances in the sahih where Bukhara himself gives his kind of opinion on how hadiths are criticized or more than criticize how they're used. He says aziyad maqboola",
      "Zakat, it's chapter on Zakat. And because if you have one version narration of Hadith that gives additional information to the other, then you're going to take that and it's going to provide explanation for the other. Now we have to remember, of course, in the case of Bukhari Sahih, it is sort of not the best laboratory for this because everything for him is reliable. But the question would be if you had a very reliable Hadith and another version that is not so reliable that has additional information do you take that?",
      "take that because you run the risk of allowing not so reliable information to alter your understanding of reliable information but um so we don't know what bukhari would say about that situation but i think the the primary uh maybe factor that is goes behind why this principle is so widely used are and why such use is so common is that muslim scholars had to give people answers",
      "or productive material, so to speak. Okay, Siraj, you have a question? Yes, thank you very much, Professor Brown. My question, I think you touched on some aspects of it when you compared the utility of the qaida in hadith versus in legal issues and also in theology.",
      "And so my question is pertaining to that. To what extent does the qaeda have the same level of applicability in theological matters as it does in perhaps legal or legal matters that are in the hadith, for example? Because each... It's not so dissimilar I think, speaking as a lawyer now, it's not dissimiler from the idea of the burden of proof that is used in courts. The fact that",
      "the person that's making an accusation or the prosecution would have to prove something beyond all reasonable doubt. Whereas, the accused person can stay silent and doesn't have to disprove anything really until the evidence of the person accusing them is considered to be sound or at least a persuasive strength. And so when we talk about al-Muthbit does that mean something",
      "Does that mean something which is just a strong claim or is it something which has proven already? So I think this gets... I was just looking. Unfortunately, the index of my edition is not alphabetical but if you would actually find this maxim in other books,",
      "I don't recall it really being something you find in books of Qawai'id, like what's Ashba and Nadair books. It's almost below the radar. It is sort too... I don t want to say too mundane. It s almost too practical, something that they invoke without... It is assumed. Yeah, there's too basic a level of acceptance to make it into these higher levels but I mean, I don",
      "likes to search shamila things what can do this while we're talking they can see if it comes up in like a spell when the light of a city but i think your question is really good because if i'm not mistaken it does it does actually create a problem for example the general principle and islamic claims about you know uh obligation or liability or anything responsibility is that the person making a claim about the change",
      "change to the status quo does not have to provide evidence, absent the other party providing evidence. Whereas this maxim says exactly the opposite. The person who supersedes all things being equal. It's a really good question. I don't know the answer. It is actually maybe another angle that could be taken on this topic of trying",
      "scholars see these things as in opposition or counterweight to one another, how they dealt with that. In terms of where it's used, I mean, it seems to be used in theological debates as in law, as commonly as in legal debates. Thank you. Do we have any other questions?",
      "shocked no one has questions the idea because you raised your hand at the beginning yes i just responded to that question from dr jolathan for this uh last presentation about",
      "the additions of fiqhāt in general by muḥaddithīn and what was later, the mainstream of the usūliyīn an-fuqaha because Wat al-Bukhārī and Al-Bazzar and many others they say it will be accepted if he is Ḥafidh. إِنَ كَانَتْ زِيادة الثِّقَى محفوظةً So the condition is if it's sound or not. وَاللَّهُ أَعْدَمُ So they would not accept it if it is عَمَّ يُجْما و حَبِثُ like Muslim said in his Muqaddimah or if they see it from the source of Waham or Mukharifah as you said",
      "x plus y or something it's not necessarily even to accept it in general to make it absolute accepted but later after special khatib ghadad in kithaya he mostly took the opinions of usuri and then it was spread more widely still there will be some hufadh like ibrahim others from the late scholars even if they have that they will not accept every ziyadah of fiqh they will see about the stage the level the time if it's from whose yujbah haditha",
      "فهم يقبلون عادة زيادة ثقة مطلقة من التابع",
      "I don't know. I'm not sure if that's, uh, I would have to look into that. And then someone said, um, asked Maxon how it'd be perceived in relationship to sorry, it's Raj. The Raj is when the words of a narrator get infused with the prophets words. Well, that's interesting. Um, for even Hajar, he would say that, uh I know this cause he says it all the time that you can't make a claim about a garage unless",
      "So you can't say that the prophet, this is actually not the words of the prophet. This is the words to someone else unless that requires evidence. That actually kind of goes against like again we would be against this principle right so in theory if you had a deep it said X plus Y that would be and then another Hadith says X well must be more cut about naffy so X plus y would win but then",
      "the narrator's speech, and this is a draj. In which case Ibn Hajar would say, well, I don't know actually maybe it would actually fit together because for him they would have the same result because he would say if you're going to make that claim you have to provide evidence. The default assumption is that the text of the hadith is the words of the prophet unless you can provide evidence otherwise. Someone else held their hand up I think.",
      "okay remember uh we have two questions online from um naeem hassan and then from muhammad safi um just to elaborate on the brother mohamed point i think imam i know we frequently use it this principle in his shahs muslim i think quite a few of the scholars",
      "scholars later on, the hadith genre they have said that this is not a mutlaqan principle so you know you just can't accept just because somebody's bringing additional information whether it's a mataran or isnadan. My question is mainly relating to the ifbat versus nafi and is it something... Can we find anything related to the tafsir of the Qur'an earlier generation? Because some",
      "especially the Iraqi genre, when they are bringing up some unprecedented interpretation of the Quran. How were the scholar dealing with this interpretation considering for it is bad versus nafi principle? Yeah I don't know anything about that. That's a good question. I mean we could go and look in maybe like Mahmoud Maturidi's Tafsir of the Qur'an and see if there's stuff in there or",
      "I'm not sure that would be an interesting thing to look at.",
      "debates, at least in like the Arabophone literature about Qara'in versus Qala'id. And I think Dr. Snowbird's article even was translated into English recently and one of the new companions or something like that. And so you've got this kind of one side of the debate that wants to say something like actually the earlier period, the Mutakaddim didn't really have Qala'd it's all Qala'. And it's only these like Mutaakhirin that are trying to superimpose the Qala', on them",
      "qawa'id on them. And then I think there are others, I personally see myself in this camp that sees it no, they're all qawa'd but it's just subtle and it's nuanced so we kind of have to talk about it based upon some of the stuff you had written, I would've thought maybe you would've leaned a little bit too that there really aren't qawa'. But it seems to me from this presentation that your description of the early period is that there are qawa', it's jut a little more nuance than that. Well, I mean, there's definitely qawa''d from the early",
      "in hadiths like al-muda'i, al-yamin al-mudai. So these are maxims that are actually hadith but again they're not... you always have circumstances matter so al-bayina al- muda'i does not wa yamina alman ankar if the person who is the defendant also brings bayinah then they win right? But",
      "But if the person making a claim, the plaintiff has bayena and the defendant swears an oath. The person wins, the Plaintiff wins right? So bayena beats an oath so it's not like it doesn't just it's Not just like oh you know um the defendant always wins or something It's not You have to look at that actual weight of evidence in these",
      "It's just that there's always going to be a, the defendant is always going enjoy. The burden of proof is always gonna be on the person making the claim no matter what and all things being equal if things are equal, the person, making the claims will lose it things being Equal but like you could have you know it could go up like many levels so you always look at the circumstances same thing with the evidence we some of the cases we discussed I would say that",
      "There's always maxims, but there's also always evidence. It's always taken into consideration. And I think maybe what happens in some instances is that a person trying to make an argument will use a maxim rhetorically or strategically to win their argument and then we don't see the respondent because we know we don t see the person responding to their book necessarily unless we happen to have a response. But the person",
      "It doesn't work in this case because of these circumstances. So I think like, by the way, it's normal that you're not going to find a lot of maxims in the first 200 years or even let's say first 150 years of Islamic history because technical terms, legal maxims, things like their maxims are always going to come",
      "always going to come in later periods of development. They're not the things that people come up with when they first start kind of practicing a science or practicing some kind of activity, they come in a later on a period of formalization and that's not uh that's",
      "the later formulations? Sorry, if you don't mind just a follow-up, just to clarify. So I think I intended more the qawa'id for like naqad itself. So whether it's ziyadat al-thiqa or its wasl and irsal or any of the ones that you mentioned within the talk which we mentioned quite a few they're all connected. So one thing is to say that the qawwa'ids are... It seems to me that some contemporary hadith scholars want to say something like",
      "there really aren't quwa'id. It's qara'in and then it seems that um there are another group that want to say there are quwa'd, um and so I just was wondering kind of what you're... There are always they're definitely because people cite them even scholars like you know Imam Muslim or someone who's definitely one of the early scholars would invoke these if not in so many words certainly conceptually invoke them",
      "to perceptually invoke them, but they're always going to be subject to adjustment by circumstances. So they're not always good. They're never gonna be categorical. There are always gonna be things that work until they don't work. Exactly. We have another two questions in the chat. The first question is about",
      "um there is any relation between this yeah it does i mean i gave example of how it's invoked by majdine discusses it and then you know generally this idea that uh josh mcadam criticism would supersede or trump um you know",
      "approval of somebody or defense of somebody's character. So yeah, definitely it has a manifestation in the science of transmitter criticism. Can I just ask something because I have the same question? Because I had always in mind you know, excuse me and you know the notion of",
      "you know that uh i mean there are many conditions for josh as far as i know i mean you know so i was a little bit surprised to hear that this maxim is applied to jock in the sense i mean but i mean because as far",
      "quite careful with uh except maybe some yeah but yeah they were but they are also you know remember that i mean the hustle the deep the presumption for human beings is the fizzle you know except if you're in the hanafi school i think it's like the first couple of generations or assumed to be acceptable but i mean a general presumption is that people are not good people you know that so that's why and that's",
      "makes a chain of transmission unreliable because if they were unknown and anonymous, you could assume... For example, if it's an unknown narrator and you want to know if they're free or a slave, the presumption is they're three. Because that's the default presumption for human beings. But the default assumption for character is fiscal, is that you're like a dirtbag or something. You're not good person. This is a good approach generally for people trying to sell you things in my opinion as well.",
      "As far as I know, it's quite common to say, you can see there are details here. Which is that criticism supersedes or trumps positive evaluation provided the criticism is reliable like you actually some you can trace",
      "person who says it. It's not just some random person on the street saying it. And then also, what's the reason for this criticism? But if you have that, then that's going to beat an approval. That's quite common. The notion of Thabit is quite strong. I mean, Thabits... No, but it's not here. Thabitt isn't like it's true about the person. If I say Taser is a dirtbag, no offense, Taser, right? The question of",
      "be bad here isn't is tayser actually a dirt bag the question is did jonathan brown actually say that tysere's a dirtbag if you have if you had my book transmitted from me by you know transmitters and it's been you know properly studied by the person as they look i johnathan brown's book here i've been snagged to the author of the book and he said taysir's a dirty bag boss that's and i say he's a",
      "my cheese all the time without my permission. This is not true, by the way. Tessier's a very kind and clean person. But if now you have Thabit back to me, and I gave you my reasons, I explained exactly what the problem is, why I'm criticizing him, what the nature of his problem is. That's Thabits Mufassir As-Sabah. Not necessarily... I could be wrong.",
      "but that's the issue is if you have somebody else saying no taysir is a wonderful guy my criticism is going to uh beat his other person's other person approval okay we uh we haven't answered question from um yeah assalamu alaikum um okay so thank you doctor for all of this",
      "explanation and I think maybe we have to go back to the reason behind this maximum because it's because of the ziyadat al-ilm so there is ziyada fil ilm. The original case is, there is negative negatives like bara asliya or nafi so it's the original case but when there is something",
      "um what we call it that there is a jab or there is something there is an act for example or if there is yet time in another way so this this is why there is uh there is it proceed then but of course it's a claim of ziava inc a claim",
      "additional knowledge and that's why uh it's uh um it's not clear that it should I mean it's a if we knew this information were correct there probably wouldn't be a debate but because the debate often is whether or not you accept this information and then the answer except additional information you accept affirmation over denial uh then that's that's actually to respond to the question of whether this knowledge is in fact",
      "Exactly. And yes, sorry. So the word, what does it mean? Right. We don't we don't talk about any information. We are talking about something mostly it is right. Right. Because it's so I think they are accurate in their explanation for this Qaeda, for this maxim. It's Ziyadatul Ilmin.",
      "They didn't say another thing. They said, and it is a specific word, right? I'm not sure. I'd have to think about it more to be able to answer your question specifically. It's hard for me to answer definitively in this kind of like giving Q&A in a talk. It' very complicated for me.",
      "And yeah, I think this is you have a situation in which people are making claims about knowledge or facts and then saying that the claim itself makes the claim acceptable. But the point is that we don't know if the claim is feasible. So it sort of strikes me as being an element of circular reasoning here, which I think is not my discovery. I think Muslim scholars in the past would happily acknowledge that this was a problem. Yeah, thank you.",
      "thank you thank you um we have another question from moise muhammad can you please unmute yourself okay oh sorry did any of the early uh mortezila scholars discuss this maxim i haven't seen anybody but again i i you know i should go and if i got my act together fast enough i would have gone and done some kind of a sham with a search of this",
      "this maxim more broadly. But as I said, this is really only what I came across in my own reading over the past 23... No, no, it can't be 23 years. 15 years. Let's say 15 years So I don't know. It would be interesting to see if they use this in their books. That would be an interesting question. Okay, we have another question from Naeem Hassan.",
      "Assalamu alaikum, Dr. Brown. I'm trying to understand where does this principle fit in the contemporary historical critical methodology? Because I'm just trying to think it compared with the biblical studies. As you know, there's synoptic gospels when they compare with the gospel of John. When the gospel is bringing some new information in light of historical critical method, they don't accept it. So where does the contemporary scholarship, Western scholarship would view that kind of principle?",
      "Yeah, I mean it's interesting. Of course you know Western scholars are not they're not like computer programs right? I mean they also are influenced by their own biases right so i think that the general as far as i know the general kind of methodology methodological starting point would be that if you have",
      "if you have let's say different manuscripts the manuscript with additional material is probably suspicious right because people the idea is someone would add in additional material to explain something whereas they wouldn't take out additional material right so yes if you",
      "just A is the correct original version, someone else added in B. This is the example of their principle of I think lexico-difficulior, right? The more difficult reading. So the thing that makes the least sense is probably the original version because why would you change something into something that doesn't make sense? You would change it into something",
      "of or against the muqaddim al-nafi but also you know people are uh you can see this often with western scholars in their study of early islamic history which is they also want answers so if they find a source that you know is um maybe not not promoting like a sunni orthodoxy",
      "it's acceptable because uh you know sunnis are the only people who are like the the you know i don't know whatever religious oppressive and religious i don' t know what we would be called but uh like um so if they find something that is uh you now giving some information that goes against this sort of sunni orthodoxy version of history even if that provides much more information than other sources they'd probably be inclined to take it",
      "on the so in this case they would take additional material uh even though it's um you know it's they would but that's uh you know i think that you really have to look at these how they be how scholars acted in specific situations i think because scholars are not again",
      "their own cultures and biases, so they tend to act differently. And maybe not be totally consistent all the time in how they apply their methodologies. Okay I have a question. It's according to the question of Diyadat al-Sikha in Hadith Criticism. The question is how can we deal nowadays with this Diyada al-sikha and the different hadith variants if",
      "we discussed this problem from two points of view. The first point of view is hadith authenticity, if this addition of fiqh can be ascribed to the Prophet or not and then another aspect is how can we deal with this addition in hadith exegesis or interpretation because there's a big debate between hadith scholars about acceptance of their",
      "yeah well i mean i'm not qualified to say which camp is correct so as you said there's a disagreement about like maybe sort of menhage mutaqadimeen or menhajil on this question and that's about maybe the thibout",
      "of a certain, let's say version of Hadith over another the kind of reliability of it. But the second part of your question I think is actually much more... I don't know what you mean. Well, I think it's more interesting. It's I think all maybe influential and more subtle which is that you will regularly see scholars",
      "they're early scholars, later scholars, very critical, very lax, which is they'll regularly take narrations that have additional information in their interpretation of the Hadith. Which as you point... I mean, we've discussed it's somewhat problematic if you have a version of Hadith that is not very reliable and provides explanatory material but that explanation itself might",
      "If you rely on that explanation, you take into account, you will be going down the wrong path. It'd be no different than you taking a Hadith that was not reliable, right? Which is a question for which I have no answer. I don't have an answer for that.",
      "your understanding of one hadith to be influenced by a hadith of equally strong reliability, right? But that's often not the case. And yeah, I don't have an answer for that. So a student asked me about this once as well and I said, I'm going to give you an answer because I can't give anything useful.",
      "give anything useful. There is a comment from Ziyad, you can explain what you wrote in Arabic here for others. Yeah, what I'm going to say could be more accurate if we differentiate between the Nukkad al-Hadeeth scholars not about",
      "in early periods like al-Tirmidhi, Ibn Jalil they were a bit... They have some ease and they are called to be mutasahir. But you can find some later Muhallithi like Dara Khutni and later ibn Rajab, al-Dhahabi, ibn Abdul Hadi, Shams Muhammad Abdul Hadi and others. They were more going with the old and looking more about the Ilha Al Hadith and this what it was mentioned by many Huffadh that it was rare between the Huffad by themselves.",
      "to differentiate between or who was more affected with the and the who will not go seek directly in the and to see the deep because what's real is and this is not for everyone because what you say this is it's easy to people to know about history with not that wide knowledge but to know the differences between this is accepted even",
      "كانت الأمر ليس مناسبة، هذا علم دائماً أفضل ودقيق. لذا يمكن أن تكون المعارك بينهم كثيراً أكثر من نهجاً لأن في الثانيين الأحياء سوف يصبحون بالأكبر حالياً. زيادة ثقة مقبولة المثبت بقدر مع النهر في الجنرال. لا يمكننا القول أنهم في قواعدهم خطئة لأنهم أيضاً يتبعون القواعد الأولى ولكن عن التطبيق العاملي",
      "من يعرف هذه المشكلة عن شذوذ عل القادحة؟ فقط الأحداثيين البرئيسيون الذين يتبعون النقد الأولى",
      "their uh decisions do we have any very lucid thank you okay if we don't have any questions um we would like to thank you once more professor brown for this interesting topic and the answering of the questions",
      "questions and we wish to have you soon in tubing again in person inshallah um i would love that thank you very much you guys for inviting me and everybody for coming in three questions before we close",
      "I just want to appreciate your effort, you guys. This is Rashid Abogani from Nigeria, from Gombe State University. I received your invitation and I decided to join the session. I found it very interesting. Keep it up. Thank you very much. Thank You. Bye everybody. Salam. Yes thank you again Dr. Jonathan Browne. It was a pleasure.",
      "um where is he i can't see him again ah yeah okay okay anyway so and thank you for uh everybody attending so next week there won't be a session because we will be in london at the bryce conference but um the week afterwards we will begin our series thank you very much for attending and have a nice evening"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown From Yaqeen Institute On Gay Marria__1748660510.opus",
    "text": [
      "Let me read something that you've written. You said, according to the Rashi opposition, American Muslims should support the right of gay marriage under US law. Doesn't this seem very contrary to the dawah of Lut? I don't think Lut talked about gay marriage. I don' t support gay marriage, I support the rights to marriage for gay people."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown From Yaqeen Institute Spreading Kuf_crMRYnS6TD0&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748681646.opus",
    "text": [
      "I'm more pro-free speech than any of this. I fully support the right to people to actually insult the Prophet in the United States because I think that's the best regime for human happiness. Other questions?"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown is live__YGFrf8F8h64&pp=ygUOSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24%3D_1748646818.opus",
    "text": [
      "28th place is Andre Wester. 15th place, Ryan Guy. 14th place Wayne Hoffman. I'll be here in 8 coming up front to pick up your money. 5th place Jackie Dooley 4th place Garrison 3rd place is Diane",
      "I'm going to let the camera go.",
      "Uh, Senator O'Bolter, uh, leave your dog and don't go anywhere. Today's payout.",
      "I took the card, bro. Yeah, it is.",
      "You got a fork? I got a fucking bag, don't worry.",
      "That's alright, that's your spot.",
      "I think they're trying to do this.",
      "I'm trying to get you. What do I do?",
      "You know my next friend loves pizza.",
      "You almost said shitbox. 8 grand.",
      "Hey, I hit my mark this time! Something wrong with me?",
      "I'm really like, I would carry a lot of my life on me.",
      "Kind of like yesterday all of a sudden. Same thing happened.",
      "I don't know about being healthy.",
      "I think my voice is going to drive me.",
      "I almost went with the whole program.",
      "Stay right there, Jonathan. Stay right here. You take it over. No, stay right there. We've got to convince him. Has there ever been a Brooklyn 300? I don't know.",
      "I would sit there and watch that.",
      "Yesterday is gone, today is a new day.",
      "Sampai jumpa di video selanjutnya.",
      "Sampai jumpa di video selanjutnya.",
      "I'm looking at myself and like, this did not happen at all yesterday. At all. Damn it Brian! Brian. I said damn it Brian. Oh come on dude my guy.",
      "And then I had to go into work tomorrow for style.",
      "I'm not saying that you're going to stop and come back. I'm just saying what's going to happen. I am not here for a true incident, okay? Then when I go to work tomorrow, don't look at me like, oh hey, how do you ever stop?",
      "Thank you Lord, I've got another 10 minutes.",
      "Good luck as you are watching. This is the place that I was telling you to call the guy because he's waiting for you to come.",
      "I know we can go all day next day.",
      "John, then you better pick it up.",
      "I said, that's why when I struck out. I said it doesn't matter I'm getting killed. And then he got us down. I gotta get gold, I gotta break. Nice game.",
      "That's how you pick up a 710, like that.",
      "I just put myself in a deep trap.",
      "What was that, Cale? That'll teach you. Don't do that again.",
      "I should go home, I don't know if i can do that again. I should get home while I look good.",
      "Sampai jumpa di video selanjutnya.",
      "That's the only thing that can ever get me mad and going.",
      "Now I know why people hold my phone.",
      "It's going fine. Anybody in the chair?",
      "I think you're in the key right there.",
      "Welcome to Green Ancestors, Harold.",
      "I don't know. Don't tell nobody!",
      "Sorry, told you I was gonna hit it loud.",
      "Holy shit! Yeah, but look at what I had to do to get there.",
      "I tried. Yeah, it distracts me.",
      "Yeah, see those three? Those two. Seven to nine and another nine. One down. And uh... Ow! Still two in the net.",
      "You're in two weeks, right? They said yes before but just make sure.",
      "I don't smoke beer but I don take no shit from you.",
      "You know what I wanted. You know, I saw it.",
      "Hey Phillip, if you're watching and want a $30-$40 gift card from Buffy. I got one Sunday.",
      "This is my track, and why it doesn't follow the YouTube.",
      "This is a tie-tracking birthday. Tie for you and me in both.",
      "Are we there, ladies and gentlemen?",
      "They have their goals yesterday.",
      "You know, it's growing up great.",
      "I have to go through the third.",
      "I told you I was going to do it.",
      "Come on, throw a couple more pins at it.",
      "There you go! Hold it, hold it with your hands. I'm gonna call that cold as well. Magic!",
      "I wonder what they're doing with the chicken.",
      "I got this all right. You got it in the newspaper. In the newspaper! That's how old you are, you don't even have newspapers anymore!",
      "Have a good one, man. I'll see you next time.",
      "Hey, get it again kid! I don't think the pins like me at all.",
      "If I have like I bought a bowling alley",
      "Still waiting on an 8-pounder. I called in and I was going to send it. You sent it, I saw you sent it.",
      "That was a good ball. That was A TOO long I got mad!",
      "That ball when I released that last ball, I'm like great ball.",
      "I would have came back here obviously",
      "I'm just happy by how much home trip gets me.",
      "And the funny thing was, is I just like said, what in the end?",
      "It is like you would be with our 835 if it was in a higher spot. It's a good place. It could have run all the wings he wanted.",
      "They're the dealer in last place.",
      "I don't know if you can see, but all three of us are going to go together."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown labelled _selfish_ by Moloney ___1748648862.opus",
    "text": [
      "What will I fell legend Jonathan Brown be walking you out? Mate, he's not making the trip to Tokyo. Unfortunately, he got a Selfishly he's got his Fox footy stuff to look after but he is gonna be there the week after in Perth To watch watch my twin brother and probably carry the flag out in Perse Just a small crew just a small group of Aussies going over for this one, but that's alright",
      "We'll go over there, small little army. We'll get the job done and we'll come back and I'll obviously fly straight to Perth and watch my brother and then we can have the big team joint celebration."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown lies about Muslims__d69AS86uSlY&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748655990.opus",
    "text": [
      "And so oftentimes when you look at someone like Osama bin Laden, for example or a lot of the Muslim terrorist organizations today are related ideologically to Salafism. They sort of come out of that same school thought but it's not because they're Salafis is because they've stepped into a worldview which is very black and white and once you start seeing the world in black-and-white if you decide that your white any other person's black and your enemies then",
      "then it sets the stage for real potential for violence. Indian scholar, Mohammed Nasser al-Din al-Albani who although born in Albania lived most of his life in Syria and then inside Arabia and Jordan he died in 1999 and the second one is Mukwil bin Hazi Al Wada'i who's a Yemeni and who was also in fact a student of al-albani",
      "نار اللهم عليك بروشانة. ايناعا وعليك ايضا بهذه حمزة",
      "وَبِقُلْنَا رَاجًا هِيجًا فِي بِلادٍ المُسْلمينِ اللهم اكسم ظاهرة"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown_ Mualaf Amerika yang Jadi Profesor _q0vobVNXhK8&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748657767.opus",
    "text": [
      "Menarik, kadang-kadang orang berpikir bahwa Al-Quran sangat luas karena itu dalam Bahasa Arab. Tapi sebenarnya ini buku yang sangat terkaitkan.",
      "Pria kelahiran 9 Agustus 1977 itu merupakan mualaf asal Amerika Serikat yang kini menjadi profesor ahli hadits. Profesor Jonathan A.C. Brown merupakkan sarjana muslim yang sangat populer dengan penelitian-penelitían di bidang hadits dan sejarah Islam.",
      "Islam dan Peradaban di berbagai forum. Brown merupakan penulis buku miskoting Muhammad, The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy, Hadith, Muhammad as Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, Muhammad, A Very Short Introduction, dan The Canonization of Al-Bukhari and Muslim. Ia lahir di tengah keluarga yang tak terlalu religius.",
      "Dibesarkan di Anglikan, gereja Inggris di Amerika. Dia tumbuh bukan sebagai orang yang patuh dan taat sebagai seorang Kristen. Meski begitu, Brown termasuk salah satu anak-anak Amerika yang percaya akan adanya Tuhan. Satu tahun pertama George Towne, dia mengambil kelas yang mengajarkan tentang Islam, diajar oleh seorang Muslimah. Dalam kelas tersebut, Brown belajar banyak hal tentang konsep Tuhan",
      "konsep Tuhan. Dia juga menemukan bahwa akal dan agama seharusnya selaras. Agama hadir untuk meningkatkan kualitas hidup manusia, bukan malah mempersulit dan membawa penderitaan. Hingga akhir semester, pada musim panas 1997, ketertarikan Brown pada Islam semakin kuat.",
      "seluruh Eropa dan Maroko, ketika saya kembali ke sekolah pada awal tahun kedua kuliah saya. Saya menjadi Muslim, kata Brown, dikutip Laman Last Prophet. Keputusan Brown masuk Islam cukup unik. Ia tak pernah berinteraksi dengan seorang Muslim. Ianya mempelajari agama Islam dari buku. Salah satu buku yang menarik perhatian Brown adalah sebuah buku tentang biografi singkat Nabi Muhammad",
      "Nabi Muhammad yang merupakan seri buku dari Oxford University Press, bahkan Brown menulis satu buku tentang Nabi Muhamad. Buku tersebut bercerita tentang beberapa sejarawan barat yang menulisi tentang Nabimuhammad. Ia ingin berdiskusi dengan siapa saja melalui buku itu. Di sisi lain dia mendekankan semua hal tentang kehidupan nabi berasal dari hadits hanya",
      "bisa terbit dengan mudah. Penerbit di Amerika beralasan harus mengirim buku tersebut ke kantor penerbit mereka di Pakistan terlebih dahulu, untuk diteliti agar tidak ada narasi yang menyinggung umat Islam. Namun Brown merasa aneh dengan hal itu. Sebab, buku berikutnya adalah sebuah buku yang terdapat di Indonesia. Buku terse but ditulis seorang muslim dan tentu tidak akan menyingggung ummat Islam karena buku-buku yang dianggap menghina nabi biasanya menimbulkan masalah.",
      "tetapi bagi penerbit, masalah seperti ini berarti orang membeli buku lebih banyak. Saya tidak tahu apa yang mereka khawatirkan,\" kata Brown. Masuk Islam karena Kagum kepada Nabi Muhammad? Brown mengaku tertarik masuk islam karena kagum terhadap kehidupan Baginda Nabi muhammad. Dia menyebut rasulullah sebagai manusia terbaik di muka bumi dalam hal apapun.",
      "Dia menggambarkan Nabi Muhammad sebagai sosok yang pandai membaca situasi dan bertindak dengan cara terbaik. Ia manusia pemaaf, lembut, dan kadang tegas, sabar dan di lain waktu bertindakan cepat. Rasulullah memiliki karakter terbaic-terbaic sebagai teladan umat manusia di muka bumi.",
      "2009, Brown menyebut salah satu orientalis paling tajam menyuarakan keraguan otentisitas Hadits adalah William Muir. W1095, bagi Muir, Hadits bukan perkataan atau rekaman perbuatan Nabi Muhammad, tapi hanya cerminan ambisi dari generasi-generasi Muslim tertentu sesudah Nabi wafat. Muir mengajak para orientalis Eropa menolak sedikitnya setengah dari isi Syahi Buhari.",
      "Muir juga mengklaim studi hadits yang dimulai dari generasi Tabiin tidak berguna sama sekali, karena hanya berfokus pada sanat, alih-alih kandungan teks hadits itu sendiri. Kalangan orientalis bahkan menuduh Abu Hurairah hanya membuat buat teks sehingga dinamakan hadits. Bagaimanapun, Brown menilai kritis skeptisme para orientalis abad ke-20 itu.",
      "terhadap klaim-klaimnya sendiri. Maka itu, mudah bagi para orientalis demikian untuk salah mengartikan bukti-bukti historis penting mengenai sejarah penghimpunan hadith. Pandangan skeptis buta orientalis akan-akan menuduh ahli hadith cenderung berani berbohong atas nama Nabi Muhammad demi kepentingan patron politik mereka. Hal yang luput dari kajian para orientalist adalah pemilahan",
      "yang kompeten daripada yang nirkompeten, bahkan sekadar tukang cerita. Para pembelajar hadits yang amat tekun, khususnya penulis Syahi Haing, yakni Imam Buhari dan Imam Muslim, tentu saja tidak pernah menerima perawi nirkompeten atau tukungan. Poin perbedaannya pada kepercayaan terus.",
      "sebagai sosok yang pantang berdusta. Sementara, kaum orientalis leluasa menuduh mereka rela menukar informasi dari Rasulullah hanya demi kepentingan politik. Semestinya ilmuwan barat itu mempelajari studi hadith secara jujur dan terbuka, alih-alih tendensius. Seseorang bertanya pada Brown, apakah Muslim hari ini bisa menerapkan ajaran-ajaran Nabi di kehidupan sehari-hari? Tentu saja.",
      "Saya kira Muslim hari ini mesti berpikir bahwa Nabi Muhammad SAW adalah sosok yang idealis dan efektif di waktu yang sama. Beliau memiliki sejumlah prinsip yang dia pegang, namun beliau juga mengetahui bagaimana menawarkan ajarannya serta cara berdialog dengan orang-orang tertentu untuk meyakinkan mereka, dia juga tahu bagaimanaber dialog dengan seseorang untuk menjadikannya sebagai kawan.",
      "Beliau tidak selalu hanya bersikap tegas dan ketat. Beliau tahu bagaimana menyesuaikan pesan-pesannya ke orang-orang yang berbeda, bukan untuk merubah pesannya, tapi mengemasnya agar diterima orang tertentu. Itu bukan merubahi isi, hanya cara menyampaikannya saja. Ini sangat berguna. Saya kira saat ini ketika orang-orang Islam merasa mereka sangat religius,",
      "cenderung membuat banyak pernyataan tentang apa yang haram. Untuk benar-benar mengikuti apa yang dicontohkan oleh Nabi Muhammad, sebenarnya adalah berpikir untuk menyatakan apa yang sesungguhnya benar dan baik dilakukan. Itu yang saya kira sangat bermanfaat hari ini."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown of Yaqeen institute claims Qadianis_mOThJd8cv3o&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748688119.opus",
    "text": [
      "Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, who is a Muslim scholar in British Occupied India said in the Punjab right says that he is the return of Jesus. In the Islamic tradition most of all to believe Jesus is going to come back at the end of time. He's the returned person of Jesus and that of course caused a lot of controversy.",
      "think that there are many differences between Ahmadiyya, let's say Islam and regular Sunni Islam. Except they don't believe in any violent jihad and their authority structure is much more focused around the successors of Mirza Muhammad so they don' have a problem with decentralized authority like other Sunni schools have but this is the real central issue is this claim about Mirza Mahmoud being",
      "Muslim scholars rejected that and saw it as very dangerous because they saw it breaking with that fundamental position that the Prophet Muhammad is the last prophet. Now what do Ahmadiyya Muslims say in defense of this? They say we don't believe that Mirza Ghulam Ahmed is a prophet, in the sense that you're saying he is. He's a non-law bringing prophet so yes he's sort of a prophet but not like Muhammad was. So this dispute causes a lot of rancor",
      "branker and uh in the government of pakistan let's say the government is saudi arabia i don't consider ahmadi to be amadia to be actual muslims ahmadis themselves consider themselves a muslim i think that the qadiani school is more has a stronger claim about mirza wahman's prophecy than the bahor school if i'm not mistaken okay um what's my position toward that yeah like personally",
      "Well, I mean, I don't really know how to distinguish my position as a scholar from my position personally. So I'll just say what my position is based on what I know or what I think of it. I mean I don' t agree with the claim that Mirza Muhammad was the eternal Jesus. I don''t really know a lot about it but until I was given pretty good evidence I wouldn't believe it. But I consider Ahmadi Muslims to be Muslims like other Muslims.",
      "What? Yeah, I mean that's my own personal position. There are too many problems in the world to say you know kick people out of slumfords and I mean I know that might be controversial but I've not seen anything come from the Lamini community that is not very excellent morally and very useful and good."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown of Yaqeen Institute VS Salafi Schol__1748680445.opus",
    "text": [
      "I'm more pro-free speech than any of this. I fully support the right to people to actually insult a prophet in the United States because I think that's the best regime for human happiness. Other questions?",
      "ويستهزأ به حين يكون مرتدًا كافرًا"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown On Communicating Islam To Americans_d-DwTmfXwaA&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748657004.opus",
    "text": [
      "Jonathan Brown converted to Islam almost 20 years ago. He spent much of his adult life studying the history, evolution and scholarship of the religion that claims more than a billion adherents around the world. On Tuesday, October 27th, Brown, a Georgetown University professor, delivered the University of Tennessee College of Religious Studies annual Siddiqui lecture in Islamic studies.",
      "topics in Islamic history. The most recent, misquoting Muhammad, was released in 2014. Muslims are not a group of people you can examine from the outside,\" Brown told WUOT All Things considered host Brandon Hollingsworth. Americans, I think generally, are pretty dismissive about Islam. That's not possible for me.\" That desire to learn more",
      "tougher questions about Islam. Especially in the United States. The big question for me is what does the religion of Islam ask of me where does religion end and culture begin what does it mean to be a Muslim in America Brown said. In this extended conversation, Brown talks to Hollingsworth about how economic change in the Muslim world could spur greater freedoms for women. How Muslims and non-Muslims can benefit from studying the religion and more."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown on contemporary arguments against H__1748653002.opus",
    "text": [
      "One of the things you see in Islamic modernists or progressive Muslims is, let's just say a significantly reduced level of humility. A certainty about their moral or scientific view of the world and not being willing to say like, maybe God and the prophet know better than us on something. That's I think what's really an issue.",
      "So in some ways, these debates, although they might be about Abu Hurayrah or about whether we believe Hadiths or not, that's not really what the debate is. The debate is how willing are we to subordinate what people around us are saying are the certainties, the moral certainties? The political certainties whatever scientific certainties of our world. How willing are We saying these are more powerful than the message of God and his prophet? That's what we're saying. That's through the debate right?"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown on Insulting Muhamamd_swYFaCdKuH4&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748695090.opus",
    "text": [
      "Pro-free speech in any of this. I fully support the right to people To actually insult the prophet in the United States because i think that's the best regime for human happiness other questions If you believe and you can see this oddly enough In Muslim countries, countries like Indonesia, countries Like Egypt where they have this thing now where you can't call someone who is not a Muslim a kafir",
      "because it caused like imagine how are Muslims supposed to talk about their religion or teach their children their religion if basic things in the Quran like criticisms of another religious tradition criticism and other religious beliefs telling someone who's not Muslim a kafir if you can't do that art the Quran itself becomes an article"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown on PROBLEMATIC Hadiths_ySvK0BKAISo&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748679756.opus",
    "text": [
      "And by the way, Muslim scholars for many, many centuries after Imam Bukhari's life identified hadiths in his book. You know, in terms of problems that don't affect anything about whether the hadith is true or not. These are like tiny little problems. There are about 200 or so hadith that people have identified with small issues here and there. Sometimes there's more than one chain of transmission, more than",
      "Oftentimes with Bukhari's book there is more than one isnad. So if one isnada has some kind of problem, there are other isnads that don't. And there are about three hadiths in the book that I know of, three or four hadith, that people had problems... Muslim scholars said the content of this hadith I believe is wrong. Now it's hard to tell exactly but there are around 5,000-6,000 hadith in Bukharis books",
      "So if you're talking three or four hadiths, there's a very small percentage that people might have problems with. Even if you were to say there are 20 hadith, even if you said there are 30 hadith this is an insignificant, statistically insignificant number in terms of the value of the book as a whole."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown vs _MohammedHijab on Prophet Lut an__1748686167.opus",
    "text": [
      "Let me read something that you've written. You said, according to the Rasho opposition American Muslims should support the right of gay marriage under US law. Doesn't this seem very contrary to the dawah of Lut? I don't think Lut talked about gay marriage."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Jonathan Brown vs Shaykh Bin Baz on Blasphemy__1748678602.opus",
    "text": [
      "I'm more pro-free speech than any of this. I fully support the right to people to actually insult the Prophet in the United States because I think that's the best regime for human happiness."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/La façon surprenante dont Jonathan Brown a découve_bL-QRkKRSMs&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748660542.opus",
    "text": [
      "Imaginez un homme qui grandit dans une famille chrétienne, sans jamais connaître un musulman de sa vie. Et pourtant, ce même homme devient l'un des experts mondiaux les plus respectés sur les hadiths du prophète Mohammed. Paix et bénédiction sur lui. Cela peut paraître étonnant, mais c'est l'histoire vraie de Jonathan A. Brown, un homme who made the decision to convert himself into Islam after simply studying sacred texts and the history of our prophet. Who would have thought that such a journey could lead to an entirely dedicated life",
      "de l'islam au point de devenir un universitaire reconnu dans le domaine des hadiths. Jonathan Brown, né aux États-Unis en 1977, a grandi dans une famille anglicane où la religion n'était pas un pilier central de la vie quotidienne. Comme beaucoup, il croyait en Dieu mais ne se sentait pas profondément connecté à la pratique chrétienne. Ce qui le différenciait, c'est qu'il était un chercheur, un penseur, en quête de vérités. Tout a changé lorsqu'il a pris un cours sur l'Islam à l'université de Georgetown, donné par",
      "classe, il a été frappé par la vision profonde de l'islam. Il a compris que la religion ne devrait pas être une cause de souffrance et de division mais au contraire un moyen d'améliorer la qualité de la vie humaine. C'est ce principe de l harmonie entre raison et religion qui l'a attirée. Peu après ce cours, il s'est plongé dans les livres islamiques, à voyager en Europe et au Maroc et en 1997, il prit la décision audacieuse de se convertir à l'Islam. Mais ce qui est encore plus frappant c'est",
      "complet et équilibré. Jonathan Brown, dans une interview, a expliqué que le prophète était l'exemple parfait de la flexibilité et de l'adaptabilité. Selon lui, le prophète savait quand être ferme, quand être doux, quand pardonner et quand être patient. Le prophète ne s'est jamais laissé enfermer dans une seule approche. Il a su lire les situations et agir en fonction des besoins du moment. Et c'est cela qui a inspiré Jonathan Brown à devenir un érudit du hadith.",
      "Jonathan Brown ne s'est pas contenté d'étudier l'islam dans les livres. Il a également étudié la critique occidentale des hadiths, en particulier les accusations portées contre l'authenticité des narrations. Un des plus célèbres critiques occidentaux, William Muir, avait rejeté une grande partie des hadits comme étant des inventions politiques.",
      "Mais Jonathan Brown, dans ses écrits, a démontré que ces accusations étaient non seulement infondées mais qu'elles étaient basées sur des malentendus et des biais culturels.",
      "En ce sens, il a défendu l'intégrité des hadiths et a remis en question la manière dont l'Occident les a souvent interprétés. Ce qui rend l'histoire de Jonathan Brown encore plus fascinante, c'est qu'il a écrit un livre, « Misquoting Muhammad », dans lequel il aborde les défis et les choix liés à l'interprétation de l'héritage du prophète. Dans ce livre, il ne se contente pas de répéter ce qu' Il a appris mais il interroge les discours sur",
      "L'éditeur américain, avant de le publier, a exigé qu'il soit d'abord examiné au Pakistan pour vérifier qu'ils ne contenaient rien d'offensant pour les musulmans. Mais Jonathan a souligné qu il était lui-même musulman et que tout dans son livre était tiré de sources islamiques authentique.",
      "plutôt que sur ce qui nous unit. Jonathan Brown a vu l'unité de la vérité dans l'islam, au-delà des frontières culturelles, des préjugés et des malentendus. Il a compris que les enseignements du prophète Muhammad, paix et bénédiction sur lui, ne sont pas seulement des paroles anciennes, mais des principes intemporels qui peuvent transformer nos vies aujourd'hui. Nous musulmans devons prendre exemple sur cette capacité à voir au-délà des différences",
      "à ce que nous faisons de notre propre foi. Le véritable changement commence par l'acceptation de la vérité et l'engagement à la propager, tout comme il l'a fait. N'oubliez pas de vous abonner à notre chaîne pour plus de vidéos sur des sujets spirituels et scientifiques liés à l'islam ainsi que de partager cette vidéo pour répandre la véritée et les connaissances que nous avons découvertes grâce à cette recherche incroyable."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Let_s Talk Isnad with Dr Jonathan A_C_ Brown_aSW4ukQFHqc&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748695469.opus",
    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.",
      "Really happy that you joined me on this podcast. And of course, let us not delay and bring on our guest of honor this evening inshallah none other than Dr Jonathan A C Brown Asalaamu Alaikum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh How are you doing? So lovely to have you and thank you so much for agreeing to join us in the podcast My pleasure Nice compliment to be",
      "be a bit so i'm going to do it oh no no i think the honors hours really um i've known you for a couple of years now alhamdulillah i'm happy to call you teacher uh i remember the first time walking into a into a lecture hall this small little lecture room and we were gonna learn this course on hadith with this book hadith muhammad's legacy in the medieval and modern world and i'm reading the book i'm thinking okay it's written by jonathan brown like",
      "Like, where do you get a Jonathan Brown who writes a book on hadith? Muhammad's legacy in the medieval and modern world. And I was just expecting to get this whole Ignis Goldsyear, Joseph Schacht type of thing. And then as I read the book, I was like, oh, this is interesting. And when I met Dr. Brown Alhamdulillah, and also have a sanad that goes through Hadathana, Sheikh Jonathan Brown Qala Hadathna",
      "we had so many requests for you to narrate that Hadith, Al-Musalsa Bil Awaliya. There are many of our colleagues and teachers there who didn't have that opportunity the last time and they said, You know what? You have to ask him to tell us about his Isnar and his Mashayikh and his studies in the traditional world. So over to you Dr. Ibrahim, what do you have to say about that?",
      "silly. I mean, it's not a silly request. It's silly for people like you. You all have done so much more study than me that I don't know why you would... No, it is true! It's not like a matter of interpretation. It is factual. I wouldn't even pretend to have gone through the kind of studies you've gone through too. I just have a different perspective and that may be like I ask different questions",
      "questions I try to explain in a different way and so it can be useful but you know, I don't think that anything in that book is something that is an insight that you're not going to find in the Islamic tradition. It's just sort of organized differently although except for the lines. Presented really well for Western audience as well like really taking doing a good job of presenting the tradition",
      "and telling the story of hadith really as opposed to you know normally what we tend to do when trying to present hadith is we or at least I did in the past basically just try and convey mustalah al-hadith which is like a whole lot of terminology and when people start hearing all those terminologies then they just get completely turned away from hadith because it's like no this thing is just too complicated and you know it's not for me",
      "which is what really got me into your articles and your books and so on. It was somewhat different, right Dr Yusuf? Yeah definitely! And let me state here Dr Brown, Moulana Irshad was my teacher at the madrasa when I came in to third year and so you taught us hadith and I remember obviously studying mustalah and various other of the sciences within hadith but every lecture we got an article from your respected self,",
      "mean definitely you'll benefit by reading the classical texts like nukhba and so forth but personally for me and i'm sure for the other students in the class and in the madrasa was that your works augmented what we studied and I think that's important especially from an academic perspective being able to articulate certain points because usually students at you know madrassas they tend to remain within a cocoon and within a sort of a traditional shell and they're not really aware of the studies",
      "So who's your inspiration? I mean, this was surely like uncharted territory for you. Where did you draw from in terms of presenting the traditional sciences in this format? What was your guru in this field? Well, by the way it was funny because I think that class that I taught that year at South Africa, I walked in and they were recording",
      "sitting on a pile of my books and leaning on a pIle of my book,s and then looking at me it was just sort of this incredibly narcissistic image of just like lecturing on something and being recorded on a PIle of My Own Books which is funny. I think I still have a picture of that but yeah I mean I think for me it",
      "strains. One would be reading the books of Muhammad Abu Zahra, Sheikh Muhammad Abu-Zahra, I think he died in 1974, Egyptian Azhari scholar who wrote a volume on each of the four Imams. He wrote one on Jafar As-Sadiq, he wrote one about Ibn Hazm, he worked on Ibn Taymiyyah and then but he really looked at",
      "Malik or Abu Hanifa was trying to, they were all trying to accomplish the same task right. So he would kind of look at their perspective and it wasn't judging them or you know engaging in polemics. It was really trying to understand like what was this person trying to do? And why did that lead them to make this choice and that choice? Then I realized that he was drawing a lot on Shah Wali Allah,",
      "died 1762 miladi and so when i read his books especially his um his uh al-insaf he has bab al-ikhtilaf yeah is uh hujat allah and i saw kind of the same approach where he's he's really trying he's looking at all these madhavs or all these schools of thought as kind of perspectives on one",
      "They have different priorities. They have the same anxieties, but different ways of addressing those anxieties. By anxiety here I don't mean like some kind of teenage thing where you walk and just worry you don't have your pants on or something. I mean they're worried about misrepresenting the Prophet's words alayhi salam. They're worried abut misunderstanding their religion. They are worried about corrupting it. They also worried that people won't understand it.",
      "like they have these anxieties, you know whether it's like the Mu'tazila or Ahmed ibn Hanbal rahimahummaAllah They all have the same concern right? They want to understand their religion correctly. They don't want to corrupt it. They Don't want him to represent it. Um, they want to Understand what aspects of it are kind of eternal and unchanging what aspects out there are change with with circumstance and You know Although they might sometimes oppose each other bitterly on some particular",
      "on some particular issues, they're all motivated by the same approach. And I think that seeing that like and when you look at history like that an Islamic thought like that it stops being this as you said sort of like a dry and almost academic examination and really you go back and live like you put yourself in the shoes of those early community that early community and then as the generations move on you can like almost kind of live",
      "kind of live relive that experience of like trying to address these challenges and as time goes on, as you move geographically and temporarily away from Arabia. And so that was really like to try and go back and see show how the Hadith tradition emerged not is some kind of kind of dry academic or obscure science but actually has a very common sense way of trying",
      "to sort through claims people are making and how do you know which ones are correct, which ones aren't. And then so that was one way. And the other way was through what, you know, people who study hadith today would talk about is like, you I got this from some of my teachers in Cairo and especially they turned me on to the books of Sheikh Hamza Mellibari in the UAE and he's an Indian scholar. And I read his books",
      "read his books and i eventually actually met him it was really nice to meet him in person but uh you know where that approach also kind of goes back and says let's like these mustalha they don't really work very well i mean which is true that i mean this is in some ways i you know it's a most how does a useful way of learning about things but you it's not really",
      "card means this and then you go and read a book that guy doesn't mean that by monk very little practical application to understanding the story of hadith in that sense yeah so you don't know you always have to know what a certain person means by our term because they don't follow these books that are going to come off that they didn't know were going to become centuries after they died and so I think that approach really also it's very common sense",
      "So those two, I think there's two perspectives really. It's quite interesting that I think and this is maybe why I was so taken by your work especially when I read misquoting Muhammad and your fascination with Shaul Aliullah and our own teacher the late Malataha Rahimahullah who we sadly lost malagrant in Jannah he was also very fond of the works of Shaul Aliyullah and we read many of his works",
      "Iqtul Jee'd, Hujjatullah al-Balighah was actually one of the works in the final year. It was studied in the Final Year once upon a time and Al-Insaf as well but it is more of the accomplishments in the revival of Hadith and his approach that really stood out and its quite evident in your works as well and Subhanallah for us it's like we have a rock star in the field of academia",
      "academia who's representing the tradition I think that's how many of us felt. I mean, of course, I can't speak for everyone and that's at least how I felt and Alhamdulillah and you know when I met you it was like wow not only is he a rock star in terms of his writing he looks like one too. Yeah yeah. Subhanallah I know you've been talking about that. Yeah I mean I think...",
      "I was really, I met him, I think in Cape town and. I thought he was a really interesting person. He was very open-minded. He's very conservative but also very open minded which I thought was an impressive disposition to have.",
      "Yeah, I don't. I mean, I think like I've tried. I think maybe if I've attributed anything to sort of just show that you can be a Muslim who's really proud of their tradition and be an academic in the West. I'm not sure that's a big accomplishment, but I mean I don' t see those things as intention. I see the Islamic tradition as a tradition of academic excellence",
      "with the same thing in theory that I'm supposed to be pursuing as a professor or as a writer, researcher. And I don't see these things as in any way in conflict at all. So I think trying to reveal the idea that these are supposed to",
      "there's disagreements or incompatibilities. Those are not inherent in those two kind of traditions, right? So if you say, well, you know, you have to be secular to be an academic. I don't know who said that. I mean, why is that the case? That is a perception. Yeah, that's definitely a perception, I think also in the past, you",
      "so, I suppose in the madrasa systems if we want to be honest about it. It does play out there because this is historical baggage not to blame the students or to blame structures but I think that something needs to be looked at and ameliorated. And again, I think these type of works, these types of engagements finding common ground between scholars like yourself, scholars within traditional settings sharing platforms speaking engaging working on shared projects those",
      "those type of engagements definitely help and i think it breaks that perception um absolutely but how do you do it uh dr brown like seriously we were just discussing this before we started and we said you know what this man mashallah is producing like really amazing works and yet you know you're active in facebook whenever we hear from you you always commenting about some movie or something of the sort",
      "works that you produce like where do you find the time to accomplish what you're doing this is no ordinary feat this is your latest uh your largest or rather your latest large publication slavery and Islam i haven't read the entire book yet but you know mashallah the way you tackle this topic it was a brave step even for me this was interesting because I remember at the madrasa when I think it was the fifth year",
      "and so forth. And so slavery and Islam came up, and it was something that a lot of the students were I wouldn't say battling with, but they were trying to understand in a bit more detail. And then a week later, you know, I just saw a message coming out that you'll be pursuing a book on the subject. So yeah, it's really interesting how these things sort of spur. How do you do that though? I think that well one way I was able to produce a lot",
      "a lot of material was that i didn't get married till i was 32. uh i mean i didn t i mean like you know hermetic existence you know for a long time it would sort of just i would travel a lot to do research to meet people but i would um you know i just sort of read and read and red and read",
      "stuff for a long time, maybe when other people would be busy with other things. And I was just obsessed and I didn't...I just did nothing but read and read and study and listen and listen for years and years and so on. So when I started to write stuff, I had a lot of research to draw on. Then the second thing was",
      "you know to to know muslim scholars who i could ask for help on things who were you know able to direct me to sources that i wouldn't know about or i wouldn' have thought of consulting um people like you you know people and people like u guys so uh you know i that that was a big thing i mean a lot of what I've done is really just",
      "of translate it not literally translate it but kind of translate conceptually or shift its presentation to you know a kind of English language uh kind of secular facing medium um so those are two ways uh and I again I think this is you know you people have a negative some people have kind of negative view",
      "a very unfortunate view. And I think that people who have that view, maybe they haven't really met enough impressive Muslim scholars. And when you meet some and then you read books of others, you're just kind of blown away. To this day, I don't think there's a day that goes by where I can't believe what these people do.",
      "sort of you know i i have internet and word processing and search engines and all the indices we have and and just like keeping up with let's say the books that that had be a sighting or even hudger site i mean you know you're you're your you you you have all these tools and you're just using them to kind of keep up with what this other guy was doing yeah yeah we didn't have any of these tools you know",
      "of the massive multi-volume books that he wrote, let alone you could... So I think that's my point is that there are people. I don't think there are necessarily people like Ibn Hajar today. There are very rarely other people like that. Someone like Qawthari was or the Ghomari brothers were like that but there are a lot of people like them today. I mean, there are certainly one or two",
      "And if you can meet those people and learn from them, and then, you know, meet their students and learn From their students, and have those people there to help you when you have a question, Then you're going to be, you're gonna have an amazing guide through the things you want to study. And for me it's always, There are always questions I want to answer. And they're not just sort of, I'm not trying to act like my questions are somehow important but",
      "The questions I have, I've found over the years are usually questions other people have, you know, that they're useful. So, you",
      "How do you get, is there a way to sort of get over the problem of subjectivity with metta and criticism? I mean, I don't think there is. But I also don't that's necessarily a problem. That's not an impediment. It's just something to keep in mind. Another question I had was Muslims have been all this time authenticating material but they also or at least some Muslims use material that they know is not authentic",
      "not authentic so why is that like you know so those are the questions i have um uh you know questions about miracles like uh you no muslims are supposed to believe in miracles of saints what does that mean does that means have muslim always agreed on that i mean i'm not even talking about bringing some kind of insane left field progressive rat you know view or something i'm saying like just within",
      "that when Muslim scholars, like you know, when they differ on these topics their disagreements are really not only are they kind of very sensibly grounded disagreements but they're the same disagreements that people would bring up today right? So if you believe in miracles of saints and if miracles of",
      "or, you know, people will end up kind of harming their relationships. They'll say like, well, I'm going to this miracle happen and so I'm gonna leave my wife and go off in a wander around the wilderness or something. And some scholars are like hey, there's just like a social cost to these things. So I mean, I think that when you explore these things, do realize that we tend to look back at these Muslim scholars quote unquote",
      "quote unquote, and say these guys are sort of they don't really have what it takes. And they never had what it take to address modern problems like they're always kind of lacking that capacity. What I find over and over again is quite the opposite. Because a lot of these problems are perennial problems. We think that there are new problems but they're perennial",
      "And when they disagree with each other, those are the same disagreements we have today. Right? So you find that there's not really an objection you can bring up today or some kind of concern you can get today that some Muslim scholar in the past, some prominent Muslim scholar hasn't already looked at and probably has the same point you have, you know, and was making that 1,200 years ago or something.",
      "And then, you know, just in terms of other things like literally the questions that I have, like something about slavery or maybe. Yeah, those are, you now these tend to be questions that a lot of Muslims have and that's really like the misquoting Muhammad book came out of that sort of going giving lectures and talks at mosques and Islamic centers.",
      "needs to and then of course the writing i do for yakin institute you know a lot of that those articles and essays are all on this precisely these topics um apostasy um you know the quran and sunnah addressing men and women um and so uh that that's really like um you",
      "but also accessible answers to these questions. MashaAllah, job well done. Right, Doc? Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. Dr. Brown, what I wanted to ask, obviously many Muslim students, academics know that your PhD was on the canonization of Bukhari and Muslim, but what was your initial study years in terms of your BA? Did you explore languages or did you immediately go into Islamic studies",
      "to Islamic studies? What was your foundational years like when I was undergraduate, I you know, I was originally I think at a Russian major before I was Muslim and then when I became Muslim. I just got interested in everything. I wanted to take any class that's done anything to do with Islam or some world or Arabic so I started to do that and a lot of the classes were history literature things like that",
      "But I took anything I could and I just really got it. Again, I was trying to answer questions that I had. How do I understand? How am I supposed to live as a Muslim in the United States? What does it mean to be Muslim in a place that's so different from where Muslims began? And in a lot of ways, that's the big question that everybody has.",
      "many people kind of miss as well like being muslim in the united states is not like being Muslim in a predominantly Muslim country it's quite different, the dynamic is different. Yeah I mean in some ways i think you're really lucky in place like South Africa because you have both very strong Muslim community but also",
      "So I think that's a really good combination. In the U.S., most of the community is obviously a lot younger and less established, and has spent the last 20 years as the object of immense scrutiny from the government and constant attack from conservative groups,",
      "That's taken a big toll on Muslims in this country, unfortunately. But yeah, so I think I studied that a lot with history and but that really was kind of intellectual history which is really sort of studying Islamic thought. And then I went to Cairo for a year and I studied Arabic and I did some sitting in on like traditional study circles",
      "circles but i was i mean i didn't know arabic well enough at the beginning to do that but i met a lot of people where later on i would go and study with them but then uh i went to grad school and it's funny i think if i could go back i would have spent a lot more time studying in you know like a muslim country",
      "never like a systematic study. So more informal? Well, yeah, I was... I mean, I would say informal is a... I don't think you mean that in an insulting way but I think like informal if you're doing one-on-one studies with somebody that's informal but it's also hell of a lot more effective than sitting in class with like 30 other people who are passing notes to each other and throwing paper or something like that so I mean I think",
      "it wasn't systematic in the sense that i didn't get you know this just kind of uh a to z study course of studies like all these different subjects so i mean today like people ask me like how do i do this you know and i'll be like i don't know like i i don' t even know everything how do I lead the funeral prayer? Like, I don't knoW. I mean, I never learned about my religion like Islamic studies Islamic sciences is",
      "actually live my life it was more like these intellectual topics right interesting so uh in terms of your traditional studies doc is asking about academic studies but in terms",
      "Was there anything that stands out? Yeah. I mean, it's kind of unfortunate because the people that I really benefited from, I disagree with them significantly on some political issues but I still really respect them as scholars. One of them",
      "One of them is Sheikh Ali Juma, the Egyptian scholar. I got to know him when he was still relatively not famous in the early 2000s and I got a chance to study with him and read one full book with him which was Fiqh al-Lughah by Al-Asnawi",
      "you know, to hear some hadith books that he did commentary on. And yeah, I mean it wasn't... Just like kind of being exposed to his way of thinking was really... It had a big impact on me. You know? It just showed me how what it was like to be around a Muslim scholar who is really, you know... Had the gigahertz mental capacity that somebody who's from",
      "I don't want to say this is like an elitist way, but what I mean is that he could have been anything in Egypt. He could have a neurosurgeon or whatever and he decided to become an alim. And then to have somebody who brought together hifdh and thaka'a and ihatha', and to see that was just really inspiring",
      "inspiring and to, you realize like how in some ways how impoverished one is if one just reads books because the books are not to be... They're not kind of guides. They're living guides or they're sort of resources and you can speak their tools when you see someone using the tools then you're like oh that's like otherwise you'd be like",
      "This part of the book says X and this part of books has not acts And that's a contradiction and look Muslims contradict themselves and look at our heritage all messed up is over I mean you realize like that's not that's Not the case these people were not idiots. They didn't um just kind of they weren't so stupid that they didn't They wrote things and they understood that sometimes this thing was the tool use and knows that thing was a true use and that's what it was fine completely fine for them",
      "And to see that and to really be humbled over and over again by somebody, you know, when you ask a question, you think you've got somebody. And then they just sort of wipe the floor with you. And you're like, oh wow. It's really humbling for me. It was really humbing. Then some of his students especially... There are a number of his student I studied with that I really benefited from but the one I think that I ended up studying most with personally",
      "had a big influence on me was uh scholar named osama uh mahmoud i'm sorry uh sama said mahmood al-azhari i don't know why i forgot that but uh he's he was only about a year older than me or seven years too older than him but he was really uh i mean this guy was incredible i mean no that's when you",
      "is memorize like whole books and books and just, and then just that's just like the data bank they're drawing on. And then they're also, you know, cognitively really capable and, and, you to sit and read with them and to hear them reply to questions and it's a, it's just kind of awe inspiring for me. Uh, and I think it would be for anybody. Like,",
      "I'm insightful, either insightful or kind of have low standards. I was, I think anybody intelligent or not would be impressed with these, with this, with experience. So yeah, we read, I read a lot of books with him, but he would mostly sort of assign me books to read and then I would come back and talk to him about it and ask questions. So one thing I think that was like, I mean,",
      "really being kind of learning a lot from his reading the whole Meezan al-A'tidal of Al Dahabi with him. The whole thing? Yeah, and then you know, and reading like the Muqaddimah of Sayyidina Muslam, reading Ilil As-Saghir of At-Tirmidhi, reading... I did that with you. Oh really? Yeah I hope it was probably made some music. It's very good.",
      "and also reading like the first quarter of uh the sunan of a dadami which is if anyone hasn't read that i mean you're interested i mean it's really fascinating yeah you know what is it abu abdul rahman abdullah bin muhammad i think died 55 injury about eight",
      "78 or something, 860. I can't remember, 868? He's from near Samarkand and he was kind of a scholar in the Shafi not yet Shafii Medha but Shafie tradition and his Sunan, I think it's about quarter of the book is sort of like an usool of the Ahl al-Hadith It's sort of an usooal approach to interpretation and epistemology",
      "told through and constructed out of a thought of the companion, you know, the prophet, it says on the companions, the successors that sort of the first two or three generations. And it's really amazing. And sort of to read that with him was I mean, so I think that these kind of those experiences were formative for me. Yeah, I think those are interesting",
      "no i think those are interesting points uh something definitely i think many of us experience as well with someone like mononataha i remember i mean i came from the medical field i studied medicine first and so when i was in med school you know you sort of had this grand picture of a professor when they present you know on the ward rounds and that's something that you aspire to and you're really impressed with the with the breadth of knowledge in terms of how they apply clinical medicine and studies and theory and so forth but then you know when you meet people as you mentioned",
      "as you mentioned, like Sheikh Ali Juma and so forth. You really get affected in influence in terms of how scholars of the past and as you mention as well, scholars today actually still hold that legacy up. I remember when I met Moulana Taha for the first time, I was just blown away in terms his breath. Like you really appreciate this concept of when they say someone's an ocean of knowledge, like he is a bahar.",
      "really appreciated that you know within the islamic studies uh domain when i met someone like monotaha and i think it gives confidence to muslims you know just to to know that there is a tradition a lot of people speak about reformation and i",
      "you need to know the boundaries, you need what can be achieved within a tradition and the tools and instruments. So I found that really influencing on me personally. Absolutely. Hang on guys, I gotta run grab my power cord because my computer's gonna die. I'll be back in one second. So so i actually have a secret right? We started the Isnad Academy podcast and this channel basically",
      "channel basically and I did not delve into what an isnad is or speak about it because I was kind of saving that for the day that we got Dr. Jonathan Brown on so that he could explain it because i felt that you know it's such a central concept in our tradition like from the tabi'ain al-isnadu min ad deen right? And it's so central that every single science",
      "Hadith, Tafseer, Qira'ah You name it Every science in the traditional world you don't just pick up the book and read it. You get the Isnad And that's essentially what connects you to this legacy And you can see the impact that it has I mean People say oh Dr Brown This American scholar But he is connected to scholars who essentially He even attaches himself too as part of this tradition",
      "is this is traditional Islam and for me, this is kind of just like what sets it apart. So now that he's back we can stop speaking about him. Dr Virat I was just saying that we started this channel right? We said we were not going to actually delve into the concept of Isnad and I know many people were thinking Isnad Academy like what's this about but I was telling Dr Patalia",
      "traditional Islam and its study, that every science comes through this isnad. And I remember when I read it from your book on hadith, I just felt that it was so beautifully explained that it's not just this chain of verification, a chain that you can verify authenticity with, but it has so much more than that. Would you care to share your thoughts on isnad? Let's talk isnad",
      "with dr johnston down bismillah i mean i guess you know i think well in one one from one perspective it's just it's very very obvious and i think that we i think bob ourselves of a lot of benefit by not seeing uh so you know when he talks about um knowledge right i mean you either",
      "And this is kind of a, again, this is not some profound insight he came up with. He's just going to give you a summary of how Muslims talk about, not just how Muslims but how like Aristotle or St. Augustine would talk about the acquisition of knowledge. But here I mean knowledge like literally just perception and idrakh of the world around you, right? So either you get things through perception",
      "Sense perception obviously is a lot. But anything you haven't experienced, you get through it's not like whether it's someone telling you something or it's something you read or it say video you watch right so everything getting by some kind of transmission that do anything you have an experience as comes by transmission. So in one sense, like you to think about that and to think",
      "don't think about that critically or when i you know when i uh you know what i um you know hear that like my son's soccer practice is going to get moved to some other time like i don't sort of be like who's telling me this and we so much of our lives we just you know we kind of trust things because we are used to them or it's not that important if we're being misled",
      "But that when things are important, we do make a lot of effort to verify. So that's one sense like thinking about isn't out as like what we learn or the way that we perceive the world around us is I think very important because that's how Muslim scholars thought about it. Right. They thought about anything you don't anything that you can't experience yourself or grasp principles of reason.",
      "you're going to have to get through some kind of chain and then you should be aware of what that chain is um and what its potential risks are the second thing is uh you know that our traditions of knowledge to this day are still isnad based even in the west right so i mean there's a when you go to like you know you could buy my book on hadith",
      "book on hadith and just read my book on Hadith. And that's like pretty much anything I'm going to, I mean, my classes, like I might give examples that are not in the book, but like, you know, everything I'm gonna tell you is pretty much in them. Hmm. That same thing with mine. I've written so many books now people could just read My books or, you Know, But why do you go to class? To be with a teacher because you interact with them, they correct",
      "to specify right you learn to think critically like they're teaching you how to think critical. Like one of my students asked me yesterday from one of classes, what am I supposed to learn in this class? And I said actually for this class I don't really care if you'd learn anything because this class is not really about you learning material it's about you, learning how to Think critically read critically speak articulately and so that's what you get from being around people who are more knowledgeable than",
      "more experienced than you so the same uh tradition in our uh in in any kind of place of education any kind traditional education or practice whether if they're like medicine i mean how do you learn how to like cut a liver or transfer a liver i mean you could read books on it but you gotta basically someone who's done that a lot",
      "finally the last thing is just uh you know the idea of connection to the past the idea a lot reliance on the past, the idea being both an inheritor and a kind of junior inheritor of something that's bigger than you and greater than you from people",
      "having to rise to the occasion of that, right? So you are now the face. You are now at the latest edge of this, the leading edge of it, of this tradition as it moves into the present and future. And then you have to fill those shoes even though you might not be as capable as you'd like to be. You have to feel the issues. That's a big responsibility.",
      "that you know that's like really important and i think that you I yeah, I think that's very important. Awesome! You know where this is leading today? Yeah. We're gonna culminate into getting that isn't it from Dr. Rahim Nischal. You know what I found interesting really in these recent times of COVID-19 is the application of hadith principles. And we actually got a comment just a moment ago. In fact, we should actually look at the comments. I think it's exactly what you were about to say. Just reading there",
      "reading there um yeah so basically that as uh isaac says even during the whole experience of covert 19 it's not has been essentially has been essential but so easily discarded and that's really just what i wanted to say as well in terms of the practical utility of hadith principles and the value of isnad with all this mass information",
      "are more confused than ever in terms of the authenticity and the value of what they're reading. And especially when it comes to, you know, something so serious as COVID-19 with so many people have passed away, so many become sick, have been impaired. It's important that we at least able to draw on our tradition. Yes I mean it's not hadith proper in a sense of, you now practicing the principles but it's something that we could translate into our general daily activities and our daily lives. I don't know what your thoughts on that doctor",
      "your thoughts on that, Dr. Brown with regards to the situation in the US? But yeah, that's what we've been experiencing here in South Africa. A lot of criticism on misinformation and fake news. Yeah, I mean definitely. First of all, the idea that you verify information, you verify it by getting corroboration, you",
      "the reliability of a source by their history of providing information, right? So it doesn't matter if I think Maulana Irshad is a nice guy or not. That just doesn't matters. What matters is have I consistently gotten reliable information from Maulna Irshada, right. Or does it matter that Maulnana Irshaad is Hanefi or Shafi or Shiite or Sunni, right, you know, like that's the issue is his performance.",
      "somebody you know that you don't like trusting people's claims is just never a good idea in the sense that so you know milan or shag come and say like oh you know i heard from this guy who i really trust this thing and that guy's full of it like you know it doesn't you don' t like you don''t the world isn't we don't get information just because somebody told me something and you know yeah he says the guy's reliable like which guy who is this person you",
      "did that person really say this? Because Mirshad misunderstood the person, right? So go and check. I mean, I always remember this example in... Allahumma salli wa sallim Muhammad. I think it's in... No, I think",
      "in the kind of time of Shafi, Imam al-Shafi. He wants to rebut Imam al Shafii's some of his opinions but he doesn't just do that. He goes and he sends two like his reliable secretaries to go and attend I think Al Muzini's class and he says did Shafia actually say this? And they listened to the whole book and then they checked did he say this thing? Yes, he said this.",
      "Then he gets the report back and then he rebuts the opinions. He doesn't just say like, I heard Shafi says this. And oh my God, I am typing about because maybe that's not what Shafie said. Maybe he never said that. Maybe somebody misunderstood him. So how much of our reaction to each other or reaction to information or reaction",
      "like and it's they did that because they knew that the way that errors come into reasoning and to chains of transmission And this is not just I mean we're talking about hadith But this is like in any that what I just gave you as example from law, whether its law or theology or anything This methodology of the Asnad permeates all Islamic sciences Except right. It doesn't remember",
      "there's this qaeda you know the that like you know what is it right so whatever is its proof is inside it it doesn't you don't need to know like if someone says two plus two is four you don' t be like who said that yeah like that person reliable like where did you get that information",
      "So if someone says, you know, like we're kind of critical point. Right. So if somebody says like I'm trying to think is something from my COVID-19 or something like, you",
      "it's more dangerous to get this disease. That's a basic, almost rational principle. If you lack the resistance of a regular person to X then you are going to be more vulnerable to X than a regular. So that kind of thing is... But then you also have to be very careful about where that division between makul and mankul is because if someone says like",
      "someone says like, oh I am really nervous about COVID-19 so I'm gonna wipe my groceries with the Blythol wipes or something and then because you're thinking about kind of this like you're getting a cold or some other but then you don't you're you're taking this is reasonable. And maybe it's a good precaution when you don' have access to information yet but then",
      "through air, right? So it's not like something you get like a cold where you're going to touch something and then put, touch your eye or something like that. Right. Like, so it's, I, you know, sometimes we think that some, that our conclusion we come to is reasonable. Whereas in fact, we don't understand that it's actually not accessible to like first principles of reason that it",
      "again but this would be like um that uh you know improving health care reduces for to uh um reduces population growth they're like wait a second what do you mean if you have bad hat healthcare more people die that means there's less people okay but if you look just sort of over time how is this how the how this actually functions in society if you increase health care people have less babies",
      "people have observed who study that one area and so you know a lot of times we get mixed up between um you know man cool what's like not cool in the sense of uh or uh like first principles of reason yeah versus what's actually um",
      "So you have to have investigation and then empirical study before you can say that you can like rationally grasp certain things. So I think our failure to kind of appreciate these categories, and of course then it doesn't matter who says certain things, like somebody will go are you gonna listen to that point? That guy's a bad person or that guy is a Republican or Democrat,",
      "and when you don't listen to people because you don t agree with other things they say then that's, you know, fundamentally misunderstanding how knowledge and truth work. We could do an entire podcast just on that last point. It s such a huge thing these days I mean with cancel culture, you now sort of flowing over into the traditional circles all of a sudden like there is this scholar he said one thing somewhere you re willing to write off every single thing he has ever written",
      "said look i've got it i've one question from um kari malna salim gaby he's one of the top scholars of qira in south africa and he said uh i need to ask this question so in honor of one of my teachers one of our teachers actually i'm listening gabby wants to know what's your advice uh to a student who you know wants to further their studies either they're just beginning as a student of dean",
      "you know, go further? Do you advise them to enter into academic studies in formal universities and how should they approach that if you do? Well I think it depends one where you are. It depends what you want to do with it. I think like in a place let's say you're in South Africa I think...I'm not sure who teaches in universities there but I mean it kind of",
      "kind of depends right so if you in general i would say be very careful of academia because um you know i might not see any clash between you know being a muslim in the islamic tradition and being an academic but most people most people do and those people are not fans of the muslim part of that right so in a lot of ways uh and by the way like people like farid assaq this is why i think they",
      "I think they, I mean, I don't want to speak for him but I imagine he would agree with me. You know, I think one of the reasons they kind of got turned off by aspects of academia in the West is that they saw that a lot of Islamic studies or discussions about Islam and the academy are essentially political projects",
      "sort of just suck in Muslims and just crush them spiritually, and then also kind of neuter them politically in a lot of ways. So I think that this... Sorry, I think",
      "And it's just, there's not like there's some conspiracy. There's not some committee of people who are like, I'm not saying that. It's just the way that academia works. So in the United States, let's say, I don't know how things are in South Africa, but in the U.S., you have... Okay, Muslims are a problem because this is how they're seen by the mainstream. They're a problem",
      "because they're conservative and they don't have right views about gender. They don't conform to our culture, right? So the organs of that society, the infrastructure of that is going to work to break those things down, right. So if you like, you're gonna act full people who are generally progressive liberal on feasts, right, and they are going to perpetuate",
      "perpetuate those views and to push those on their students like that's just the way it is. And who's going to get the job? Like, who's gonna get the Job as an academic, like the guy who writes a book on how you know Islam says that actually homosexuality is great or the guy Who said writes a books as long as his homosexuality prohibited who's Gonna Get The Job who's Going To Get That Fellowship who's, Gonna Get Like Our Societies are built to produce and to encourage",
      "uh results that the power elite in those societies wants right and so they want liberal progressive depoliticized unsure understandings of religion that's what they want right um and so that's",
      "this is i mean uh basically says we should go and promote like liberal progressive muslims and sufis and uh you know gulenists and stuff like that that's what it literally says this stuff you know and so it's not some kind of conspiracy how it's how a society's functioned so i think that uni universities are organs in that system and that doesn't i i love universities i've never left university i i this is not a criticism this is just the sense of like",
      "Like you need to know what, if you want to go to university, go to. Really going to benefit things that you're going to be kind of put into a meat grinder over now. It depends like if you, I, if yo ugo to, uh, If you can, if y oucan study with people who are not lik e that right? So if someone ca say, Oh, I wanna study wit Jonathan Browne, well, I'm not gonna b like that. You kno, I'm",
      "classes, you're not going to be subjected to that kind of treatment. And it doesn't mean that I'm not going try my best to make you a good scholar. I am but it just means that the environment is very different and so I think that it depends who you have the opportunity to study with. And I would say that whatever you do, do not go... Do not study Islam or anything about religion or philosophy",
      "anything about kind of morality or knowledge without this very strong traditional grounding. You really have to know your stuff, or you're going to get chewed up. And I've seen this happen more times than I can count. And now, I mean, I look at the kind of Muslims that I went into grad school in the same cohort, not just at my university but across the board and then",
      "And then ones went in 10, 20 over the past 20 years. And I mean it's been like you can see a few programs where you have professors who have more kind of integrity as Muslims. They're producing I think really good Muslim scholars and good scholars period but a lot of the programs are just producing essentially not just people who have completely lost themselves to doubt and skepticism",
      "and skepticism but that are then committed to propagating that and sucking other people into that as well. That's very disturbing and sad. It's sad we're not like that. Absolutely, I think it is a beautiful perspective and many of our viewers who inform me that they are waiting eagerly for this podcast will appreciate that advice. Also many students currently",
      "currently and people who intend on you know pursuing the study of islam it's a big question because i mean these real benefits to taking your studies further at university for whatever reason but you know these are the concerns that they have uh dr brown as we proceed to the end um i know we've had you on here for about an hour now how do you feel about that request",
      "read in a snad, I guess. But I don't think you give it over podcasts. I know people have written books on or written stuff on this. If I were... My friend Garrett would probably know the answer to this. I mean, I'm sure that people have done fatwas on this topic. Yeah. It's been so long since I... Yeah, I mean",
      "I should actually collect my snads. It's not going to be like an award-winning book or anything, but it would be... And I have friends that have shorter snads than I do. But I try my best. So I understand. What do you want? You just want me to read in a snad for you? Is that the...? Yeah, I think the one in particular we were speaking about was the Hadith al-Musalsal bil Awaliya. If possible.",
      "possible you know we don't really put you on the spot and pressure you into that i mean i uh you know i haven't i'm not gonna read it to you because i'm going to memory because i haven t i'm confident that i wouldn't make a mistake and there's no reason to make stupid mistakes yeah but uh",
      "let me think i can find some other ones maybe once again um yeah um oops yeah this is from uh",
      "of uh bukhari to snag to the bahara which is a pretty short uh shortest nod um okay um i'll do two and then you can uh i can uh I can just do two, and then",
      "It's sort of cheap to read, but otherwise it's not going to be accurate. I don't feel comfortable.",
      "The famous Hadith scholar of the Hijaz, but originally from Sindh.",
      "Now we've gone to the Hadilah in Zabid, Yemen.",
      "وهو الحديث سمعته من؟ قال حدثنا محمد عبدالعزيز بفتح الميمة المنوفية في مصر وهو حديث السماعة من؟",
      "شهير بن حجر العسقلاني الكناني المصري هو أول حديث سمعت من قال حدثنا الإمام عبد الرحيم ابن الحسين العراقي الحافظ وهو أول",
      "وهو أول حديث سمعته من قال أخبرنا الإمام أبو الفرج عبد الرحمن بن العليين الشهير بابن الجوزي الحنبلي البغدادي وهو الحديث السماعته من قال اخبرني أحمد ابن عبد الملك النيسة بوري وهو الأول حتيث سماعه من قل أخبارنا والدي عبدالملك ابن اسماعيل المؤذن",
      "قال أخبرنا الإمام أبو الطاهر محمد بن محمش الزيادة وعود الحديث سمعت من؟",
      "بشر بن الحكم العبدي وهو الحديث سمعته من قال حدثنا أمير المؤمنين في الحدي ثفيان بن عيينة وهو هو الحدي تسمعته من وإلى الثفيان تنتهي الأولية على هذا الملوال قال حتثنا عمر بن دينار عن أبي قابوس مولى سيدنا عبد الله بن عمر ابن الغاص رضي الله تعالى عنهما عن سيدن عبد",
      "And then the second hadith is, first hadith from Sahih Bukhari.",
      "but who remembered hearing Sayyid Bukhari when he was a child in Damascus and then going out afterwards and playing in the canal with his friends, who is later found to be the last surviving person from those Hadith sessions. Ahmed bin Abi Talib Al-Hajjar",
      "عبد الله بن الزبير قال حدثنا سفيان قال حديثنا يحيى ابن السعيد الانصاري قال اخبرني محمد ابن ابراهيم التيمي انه قال سمعت القمة بن وقاس يقول سمعة عمر بن الخطاب على المنبر قد قال سماعت رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم يقول إنما العمال بالنيات وإنما لكل إمرأة ما نوى",
      "Dr. Ibrahim, thank you so much for your time. All of us and we look forward to",
      "and we look forward to having you in South Africa again really soon. I know you love South Africa, and I know the people of South Africa so we really need to get to you please. Yeah, I really want to come. Whenever you or whoever can manage to finagle an invitation for me this time I want to try and bring my family along. Bring my kids over. Shall we all get that sorted? No, definitely not. I'm not asking anyone to pay for them but",
      "whatever whatever however much they can you guys can chip away at the cost i'd appreciate it um just uh sideline question your favorite espionage movies no the reason why i asked this is that i had a debate today with a couple of friends after juma regarding",
      "bond movie that's also coming out now so we're just discussing you know what would probably uh take the the top few places like this or a movie or the best like no not just in terms of just in times of these espionage spy movies like what could you write uh like as your personal preference obviously uh do you enjoy it yeah actually i i the born movies you know the one i really liked was the the bourne legacy the one that doesn't have matt damon and it's not not that i have anything",
      "I just really liked the Bourne Legacy with Jeremy Renner. I thought that was really good. It's funny because it was a bizarre circumstance, but I ended up talking to the director of some of the other Bourne movies. This is very bizarre. And I said, you know, I like this other one the most. And he said, well, that's the one I like the least. I was like, okay, well. Anyway.",
      "Anyway, then I really liked Spy Game with Brad Pitt and Robert Redford. That was very good. It came out not long after 9-11 so it's an interesting kind of document of almost pre-9-11 film on espionage. I liked the Spy Game. I mean, I like all the James Bond movies obviously",
      "obviously. I liked my favorite James Bond is either Timothy Dalton or George Lazenby. I did not expect Timothy Dalson. Yeah, so much passion you know he's got a really good day. I like that I think the Living Daylights is my favorite one. Okay interesting yeah. Although GoldenEye is my close second. I would have gone for Pierce Brosnan.",
      "yeah i enjoyed watching roger moore i enjoyed and oh good this is not to knock any other one but i just think simony dalton brought a level of passion to the role that i hadn't seen uh and then you know which movie he used",
      "I like them. Well, I liked the mission, but I mean the last one or two didn't blow me away. But I think they...I liked uh one. I liked Philip Seymour Hoffman. I like yeah, I mean yeah of course Mission Impossible is great. Yeah and I think that's",
      "it's a good summary i don't i mean yeah i don' know how many did they make that i think books like you do when i start watching movies like you one of the ways i don''t watch i almost never watch movies on television because especially before covid 19 i travel a lot so i would watch movies",
      "and just catch up on everything yeah so i mean i don't know what else you can do ever since i had uh kids and maybe even since i got married i my wife was trying to call me actually right now i'm probably have to go in a second because oh yeah no i mean we've kicked you but thanks for that i think uh we really really are looking forward to having you in south africa like",
      "wife because she can also give talks on lots of absolutely yeah and uh we would love to come as a family well yeah i will set something up i'll speak to one of my good family friends professor yassin muhammad i think he's with yakine as well um yeah and a few of our local our local academic centers the library academy we'll work on something as soon as covert allows inshallah",
      "is allowed now sort of like it's kind of the it's sort of a hard situation because you're like i yeah first we go to germany in a month or two and i'm like should i just go to german actually i it's funny i went to turkey in the summer and it was a lot less stressful than but it was also kind of before that delta stuff happened so right today am i supposed to should i do this or not i don't know i don",
      "covered uh dr brown because you know doctor is actually a medical doctor we'll sort you out inshallah yeah but i think it's it's always the same just to see how things go over the next couple of months see how thing span out that's i mean it's a novel virus we don't know how the vaccines obviously in a sense with regards to long-term immunity so i think",
      "person as well inshallah i'm sure you'll appreciate the holiday in cape town eh just to oh yeah it's a beautiful place and the food the food bunny chow all that stuff that's it all that no we know that's enjoyable i think that wasn't joe big yeah",
      "We also, there was a place. There was this place in Alto in Johannesburg but I remember this coffee shop called Motherland Coffee and it had a drink called The Dictator. Make the day obey you. If any of you go to that coffee shop take a picture of that drink like on the menu. I somehow stupidly didn't take a",
      "Thank you. Salam to your family and we hope to have you on soon again. Thank you so much for your time. Stay safe. Shukran everyone for joining us, it's quite late. We all have other things to do tomorrow inshallah but thank you so muc h and shukran to Dr Yusuf Patel for joining me as a co-host on this podcast. Ahlan wa sahlan, you're welcome anytime inshaAllah. Until next time, salam alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuhu."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/L_évolution de la Science du hadith _DR_ Jonathan _vkAUHtinmHM&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748695253.opus",
    "text": [
      "My name is Jonathan Brown. I'm a professor at Georgetown University in the School of Foreign Service, and I am an intellectual historian. And I have written a number of books on Hadith interpretation in Islamic law, scripture and authority, and most recently a book on slavery in Islam.",
      "So when Muslims, from the beginning of their religious tradition they learned their religion through the revelation that came from God at the Qur'an and then from the Prophet Muhammad's explanation of that revelation and added teachings. The Qur'aan is the first foundational source of their religion but then the precedent to the Prophet or the teaching",
      "teachings of the Prophet which is called the Sunnah of the prophet. The Sunnah the prophet is like the second source, which explains and adds to the Quranic revelation. And of course during the time of the Prophets Muslims could just ask him questions about something they didn't understand but after his death in 632 then they're left with kind of on their own devices to try and look to these original sources",
      "believe what they can do, or they can't do. And that's kind of the position that Muslims remain in today, which is they look back at their tradition and try to seek guidance in it. Now, the way that the Koran was written down and officially promulgated within 20 years of the Prophet's death—and there's not really a lot of debate about historical authenticity even amongst Western scholars like there's no hadith. The Koran comes from",
      "comes from the mid-7th century, it's from the time of the Prophet. And people debate its meaning but they don't really debate the text itself, the existence of the text, itself. The thing about the Sunnah of the prophet, the precedent of the Prophets is that it doesn't get written down in any authoritative form. In fact, he doesn't really get written done or any form at all for around 70 or 80 years after",
      "written down when it is, is through what's called hadith. Hadith are reports about things the Prophet said, things the prophet did, things that were done around him. So a famous hadith would be something like all deeds are determined by their intentions or the Prophet prohibited Muslims from buying and selling things that don't exist yet. So these are rulings or guidance that he gives in addition to the Qur'an",
      "or affirming the meaning of the Qur'an. Now, the problem is that unlike the Qur-an these aren't written down in any kind of very contained way and so you have a lot of forgery. So remember that in the first century of Islamic history Muslims expand from the Arabian Peninsula to North Africa",
      "Suddenly you have all these Christians, Jews and Buddhists and Zoroastrians and Persians and Africans and Byzantine people. Everybody's becoming Muslim and give civil wars amongst the Muslims in theological debates, amongst legal debate. So anybody in any one of these disputes is just saying that the best way to kind of advance their cause is say oh well the Prophet said I'm right and you're wrong. So Muslim scholars had to try and figure out how do you sort these forged Hadiths from reliable ones?",
      "There's different opinions amongst Muslim scholars on how you should do this. One school of thought says that you should look more at the content of the Hadith, does it agree with the Quran? Does it agree reason and does it go with a kind of established precedent of Muhammad? And then if it does, then you accept it. If you don't, then reject it. Another school of thoughts said they were uncomfortable with that because it gives human reason and our interpretation of things too much power and we really should be accepting maybe",
      "could tell us things that alter our understanding of reason or alter our understand of the Qur'an. And so they focused more on looking at the transmission of these hadiths and is it transmitted reliably, was it widely transmitted, was corroborated? Or was it only narrated by a few people or people who were unreliable? It's more like a transmission-based focus. Now the hadith tradition ends up being extremely important for Muslims because most",
      "Islamic law and theology don't come from the Qur'an, they come from Sunnah of the Prophet. And one of the main ways we know the Sunnah the Prophet is through these hadiths."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Liberal bakri Jonathan Brown supports blasphemy of_3J7iYiUleYw&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW3SBwkJsAkBhyohjO8%3D_1748687702.opus",
    "text": [
      "I'm more pro-free speech than any of this. I fully support the right to people to actually insult the profit in the United States because I think that's the best regime for human happiness. Other questions?"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Message to Jonathan Brown___ _islam _allah _quran __1748679128.opus",
    "text": [
      "I don't support gay marriage. I support the right to marriage for gay people. Doesn't this seem very contrary to the da'wah of Lut, alayhi salam, for example who very much was opposed to these kinds of practices let alone facilitated it? On what Islamic... I don t think Lut talked about gay marriage",
      "من العالمين إنكم لتأتون الرجال شهوة من دون النساء بل أنتم قوم مسرفون"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Muslim Academic Jonathan Brown can_t SPEAK ARABIC_42Y_lwp-l04&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748679289.opus",
    "text": [
      "أولاً يبدأ بالتعليم والتنزيل التعليل والتعلم تحقيق المنابع",
      "الشيخ يريد أن يتحدث عن اثنين من المواصلات",
      "so basically the when you look at this issue of Tanzania what top what how we"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Muslim Identity_Case Studies _ Dr_ Jonathan A_C_ B_QLn2DqAuBSs&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748683174.opus",
    "text": [
      "How's everybody doing? Assalamu alaikum. Oh, you have a ping pong table. Does that thing work? Yes it does. We've got some players here in Monsanto. Look. How good are the best ping-pong players? Hamza, Hamza...",
      "You guys all have like similar hairstyles. No, I just know it's like it's sort of short on the sides and then long on the top. Is that the style now?",
      "Is that the style now? I'm just curious. I'm not trying to make fun of you, I'm curious. Yeah. Do any of you have mullets? No? You guys have video games here. Those things work?",
      "OK. I'm going to think about how to talk to you all. OK, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Rahim. So everyone here and everybody, you guys are all in the same group of people? Right? This is like one cohort? Something like that.",
      "Is that you who answered? I didn't answer. Who answered? Okay, good for you. At least you answered. I'm concerned about students who don't actually interact or answer questions. It happens a lot. All right. So coming over here, I was thinking, I wonder what these students are going to be like. I wonder how I should talk. Is that Sabri? Assalamu alaikum. How's it going? You've been to Tunisia lately?",
      "Tunisia lately? No way, how is it? Is it nice? Chaotic. Like how chaotic? Are people fighting in the streets chaotic or just... Oh sounds like lots of places okay um you guys staying",
      "You guys staying hydrated? It's important to stay hydrated. You don't want to, like what if you're in this basement and you just run out of hydration? So we like pass out. Yeah so as I said Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. So I was coming over here I was thinking about something my other students he's staying",
      "I was talking to a group of students yesterday and they were non-Muslim students. They asked me about inheritance in Islam, Muslim families. How does inheritance work? And I said well... In Islamic law these laws are in the Quran actually. Well some of them are in there Quran. So for example the Prophet tells us that you can do with up",
      "and you can do with up to one third of your estate, like everything you own. You can give it to anybody you want except those people who already are gonna inherit from you unless all the people agree but otherwise for example let's say I wanna give a third of my estate to Darl Hedra. I can do that. No one can stop me. None of my kids or wife or parents or brothers or sisters can stop right?",
      "Otherwise, the rest of my wealth is going to get divided up according to the shares that are stated in the Quran and in the Sunnah of the Prophet. So my wife is gonna get I think a fourth of my... A fourth or an eighth? An eighth. My wife's gonna get an eighth of my estate. And then the rest is gonna be divided between my two sons.",
      "It doesn't matter, let's say one of them is a jerk and he... I don't like his life choices. He has bad haircuts all the time for example. And I just don't approve of his lifestyle. There's nothing I can do right? This guy, he's gonna inherit half... So I was thinking to myself this is a real blessing because a lot of times especially when",
      "Especially when, I see this a lot with my relatives, my non-Muslim relatives. People are always trying to be nice to their relatives that they think they're gonna inherit something from because they want that person to put them in their will but if you're an Islam it doesn't matter. If you know if you know somebody you're nice someone because you wanna be nice of them because there's no, it's not going to do any benefit right? To be nice your uncle or not right? Now,",
      "La wasi'at al-warath illa insha'al waratha",
      "But I can't give any to, let's say, I talked about my wife and two sons. Unless my wife or my two sons all agree that okay, let us give one more to this son because he needs more help or he has a business he wants to start or something like that. So anyway, I was telling my students about this. They were... You know, so in the Quran it says that the daughter gets half the share of his son. And of course the students are like why is that?",
      "that it's not fair and i said well you know the quran doesn't say why but scholars have usually assumed that it is because men have more responsibilities a muslim man has to pay mahar when he gets married and then a muslin man is responsible for his female relatives so I'm responsible for my sisters, I'm responsibble for my mom right?",
      "who are related to me if they aren't able to care for themselves or if they don't have someone to care them. But, you know in any case I thought it's interesting because these students were thinking was this is an example of Islam means that Islam doesn't really think of women as having the same value as men",
      "And so I thought about that and said, well I don't think that's true because for example in the same verses of the Quran who knows how much if I have parents my parents are dead but let's say I had parents. How much would each of them inherit from me if I died? Anybody know? Come on guys use your phones or something useful.",
      "An eighth. Who said that? You? Well, actually, that's wrong but it's not a bad guess. But you know what, look, look. Mashallah this guy's brain is working. There's like nerves or electrical impulses are being sent along synapses. Activity is happening. One fifth.",
      "fifth? Are you guys just guessing? You guys are hysterical. I'm thinking about my kids being your age and I'm like, I'm full of dread but also I'm optimistic because I'm going to abuse them mercilessly.",
      "I'm gonna let them have it whenever they make bad hairstyle choices. So my point is, how much is it? You said a fifth, you said a fourth? Sub-reef! What? Yeah, well it depends on who else is alive but one sixth each.",
      "If my father and mother both get one sixth, what does that mean about how does the Quran think about the value of men and women? In this case it's the same. Then I thought about this Hadith in Sunan al-Nisa'i and Sunan at-Tirmidhi where a man comes to the Prophet and asks him he wants to give gifts to his children",
      "phone play guy? Adam. So, Adam and then what's your name? Ahmed. Ahmed, what's you're name? Tasneem. Tasneeem? Yes. Oh that's a nice name. Okay, and? Maryam. Maryam, so let's say I have four, I have a pie how am I going to be just in dividing this pie between these people? One quarter each. So like it seems like the default is one quarter each right?",
      "Okay, but now let's imagine that you know it's been a long weekend. You guys have been doing Darl Hijra stuff activities and Adam and Tasneem they were working the whole time. They were making the coffee. They are making the tea. They organized everything and what was your name again? Ahmed and Miriam they're basically sitting around playing on their phones for two days",
      "So now let's say, who... Now I have this pie. How do I divide it justly? They've been working hard. You guys are all four of you hungry but Adam and Tasneem they've been really working hard for common good. Ahmed and Miriam they were basically sitting around. What is the just way to divide my pie? One half.",
      "You still think equally? I mean, maybe you're right. Maybe that's correct. But probably you could also maybe make an argument that like, you know, Adam and Tasneem should get more. They spent more calories didn't they? Correct? So does everyone know the difference between...",
      "like woke social media or something like that, between equality and equity? Who knows the difference between this? You guys why don't you stop talking to each other and listen to me answer my questions. Demonstrate your intelligence not your ability to whisper probably unimportant things to your friends. What's the difference in equality and Equity? Yes what's your name? Yusuf",
      "I'm blown away people. Yousef, you've restored my hope in the youth of today. I was gonna go home, I was going to start crying,",
      "But now Yusuf has restored my faith. So equality is when things are divided equally. Equity is when you, as the prophet says, لِكُلِّ ذِي حَقٍّ حَكَّهُ Everybody who has a haq gets their haq. Everybody who",
      "I'm not the guy, who's this? Abdullah. You've never heard, he got your just desserts. You're something like that, yeah. You heard this? Thank you, Abdullah. My faith is also bolstered. Sabri, you've heard it? Just desserts. He got his just desserts? Sabri you've been in Tunisia too long man. Go on the streets of the US and listen to what people are saying. So that just desserts,",
      "That actually has nothing to do with desserts. What does dessert mean? This is a question now you didn't think you were going to lose. What is it, what does dessert means? Yes. What's your name? Fahmy. Fahmi, Mashallah. Fahn my desert is the stuff you get at the end of the meal which you really want. It's from a French word to deserve. The idea is like oh you've earned this here's your desserts right",
      "deserts right so dessert comes actually when you say just as it means what you deserve when you see how he got is just desserts saying it doesn't mean he got like a pie or something your cake it means he got what he got was coming to him good job that me",
      "One example is to think about one way of being just, is to divide things equally. One way is to be divide things equitably. Is one better than the other? Is one more just than the another? I don't know. I mean it kind of depends right? It sort of... It kinda depends on the context. Yes?",
      "Like, if it comes to the law, everyone. But when it comes how hard someone works, that should be accurate. OK, yeah. So I have a question. Now let's say that there's two teenagers.",
      "this person is gonna be a professional football player. This guy, I'm just gonna use guys because I don't know about girls sports and I guess they won't get paid that much so it's not going to help my example but let's... One guy, this guy's gonna be professional football players another guy is gonna do professional thumb twiddler. This dude, this guys he's not gonna make any money. He's got no future in professional sports",
      "of sports, maybe he's got no future in anything. Not very impressive. Now let's say that some guy is a jerk and he goes around attacking Muslim people and he hits one guy on the arm with a baseball bat and the other guy on an arm with the baseball bat. How much should they get paid? Like how much did they get as their damages from the court",
      "And this guy is having, hmm? Or from insurance. Yes, put it that way. Do you think they should get equal amount? So the guy who's going to make millions and millions of dollars using his passing arm should get the same amount of money as a guy who wasn't really gonna make any money. Interesting. That's not what the American law says. Although interestingly... Okay.",
      "I'm surprised that was your answer. Does everyone agree with that? I'm curious. I'm not angry or anything, I'm just curious. She said there should be equal amount. What's your name? Hatham. So what do you think? Yeah, in fact they lost more, right? Their arm was more valuable basically their arm was",
      "arm is not like my arm. Now it doesn't mean that my arm is worthless, but it just means that Tom Brady's arm is worth a lot more. So you know it's interesting, I thought this example would be clear but Maryam disagrees with me so it's not clear. Yeah",
      "They didn't do enough in their life to deserve it. That's interesting. No, that's an interesting question. So let's say... Let's think of another example. Equity versus equality. It's like a raffle, right?",
      "everybody should get one raffle ticket, right? So everybody gets like the same number of raffle tickets. Everybody has the same chance to win. Here it seems like equality is a good thing what's just but when we think about let's say a company and there's a couple people who are in a company, and they one person is doing all the work or let's 90% of the work one the other people all doing 10% of",
      "depends on what? That 90%, like the other 10% they put a lot of money. You mean so they do other things? Yeah, what if they put like for example in business- All other things are equal, all other things",
      "So maybe more things at play, right? Maybe one person's doing 90% of the work but the other person is doing 10% of their work. But they're bringing 90% percent of the assets. They provide the computers and the chairs in that building everything good point. But let's say all things being equal. Maybe the person who's doing it, let's just he's bringing 90 percent of everything. He should get more like more of the earnings",
      "the company or if it becomes successful, he'll get more of the earning over there. Of the value. Okay so it's interesting that in a case of... There is another Hadith this one is narrated by Ibn Abbas where Ibn Abbass remembers the Prophet saying not be just between the children",
      "between them. That's interesting. So what he remembers is the Prophet said be equal between them so it seems like if you have one hadith that says be just between them and there could be different ways of being just, you don't know which one to take and you've another companion remembering the hadith and its give equally between them What do you think you should do with these two pieces of evidence?",
      "Let's say I tell you, guys go get me a beverage. And then someone else says no he said go get my hot beverage. What should you do with these two pieces of information?",
      "like modify the other one. You're like, oh this one's unclear, this one is clear so we are going to take a clearer piece of evidence and it's gonna like modify, modify the another one. It's gonna specify it right? So it's interesting in this case it seems that what the prophet Alayhi Salam was saying is actually if you have children and your giving them gifts you should give equally between them. What does that say about the valuing",
      "of valuing of boys and girls, or males and females in the prophet's view? Yeah they're equal. Right? And then it's an interesting case because Muslim scholars historically had no problem so let's say that I have two sons and a daughter",
      "make sure the daughter gets, maybe she wants to do a business or something. Or she wants go live separately in another country or something so I want to make sure she gets enough money for my inheritance and I go from my estate. I go and ask my sons, I say okay listen guys, do you agree that I'm gonna give some of this 1 3rd to your sister? And then she's going to get the same as you? They said yes. Muslim scholars had no problem writing",
      "writing the documents for this and helping families work to stuff out. So, the bottom line is they didn't have any problem like there was no indication that Muslim scholars ever thought that these Quranic verses meant that boys were somehow more valuable than girls. And we know from this Hadith I told you about the prophet answering the question about giving gifts to a person, you know, with person giving gifts their children when they're alive.",
      "that the prophet thought that boys should get more than girls. In fact, it seems like he's saying give equally to your children. So you have a system that as a default or presumption gives more to your son and to your daughter because his son is probably gonna have more responsibilities but if you don't wanna do that, or if the son is gonna have less responsibility maybe the son's kind of an idiot,",
      "And there's no problem with giving more to the daughter. Okay, so I thought that was an interesting answer to the student's question because their assumption about what the Quran meant, I don't think is accurate. It's not accurate when you look at that Quranic verse in the context of the teachings of the Prophet, and the context",
      "the students were asking me about marriage. In three of the four Sunni schools of law, and the main opinion of the Hanafi school of law. So almost all Muslim scholars. If a daughter wants to get married, does she need the permission of her let's say male guardian like her father or if her father is dead",
      "like her uncle or brother or someone. Does she need that? Yeah, okay. That person's called the wali, the guardian. This of course did not make these students happy. They said this is not fair. I was thinking about this and I'll be honest. You know when you're... I'm not an imam so I don't get a lot",
      "complaints, but I do get some. Imams they get lots of people coming to them with marriage problems. I get some people coming in with marriage problem. Alhamdulillah it's gotten less over the last couple years. Is it time to stop? Okay. But I keep seeing these instances where a Muslim woman gets married to a guy who everybody",
      "who everybody knew was bad news. Actually, a woman I know very well when choosing to get married to this guy, I met this guy and I said, this guy is terrible. There's no way she should get married with this guy. Sure enough the guy was terrible now they're getting divorced. Total misery. People, when you're in love",
      "you're not thinking about practical things. You need someone who's gonna be there to say, you know what? I think this is right or it was good for you or this is bad for you. But my student... I made this case to my students but they said, Professor Brown, you now what? That's not how this is going to happen. What's going to happened is, what if the dad is like oppressive? He wants to control his daughter and he doesn't let her marry some wonderful guy who everybody thinks is amazing as a great Muslim and so talented",
      "There's another way, you can go to another one.",
      "the judge will just say, this guy your dad is being unreasonable and I'm gonna supersede him as the welly. What's your name again? Yeah were you like sneezing or something are you okay? Okay if you have allergies do you need an EpiPen or something? Okay good I just want to make sure that you're all right.",
      "Herbalite nutrition. Herbalife nutrition, yeah. Yeah it's written on your shirt. I'm just wondering maybe you're like, you got swag from them or something? OK. They say that they get free stuff.",
      "And some of the time. Okay, so what was I talking about? Marriage, exactly. So anyway, I said to my students like this is not... The things that you're thinking",
      "the things that you're thinking this means are not entailed by what the Quran and the Prophet Sunnah, and the Muslim tradition actually teaches. So all these things they thought when they heard about these rules, these Quranic verses I don't think were actually entailed",
      "and not give you a chance to ask questions. Do any of you have any questions about these specific issues, like inheritance and marriage laws and things like that? And issues with equality and bias? Yeah, what's your... Maryam.",
      "When you're older, are you young?",
      "You have to be good to your parents. Even if your parents ask you, like they want you to worship another god or they want to stop you but they want something wrong, you still have to do something for them. This is very important and we know from the son of the prophet that it's a duty especially to be kind to one's mother. And I know that a lot of times, especially with women, obviously sometimes people",
      "Sometimes people have great relationships, but sometimes there can be a lot of tension between mothers and daughters as people get older. And it's really important that you are always good to your parents. Now that doesn't mean you have to listen to what they say, especially if what they want you to do is wrong. But my advice, I think this is based very well in the Quran",
      "like Quran and Sunnah of the Prophet, is it's very important to be good. When your parents... I'm not just saying even you but when one's parents die, you never can go back and fix these things. And you'll regret. You'll regret the bad feelings and the fights and they'll seem silly. So it depends. Sometimes",
      "You know, if people are really being like harmful and nasty and mean, you might have to be like distant, you know, have some distance from them. But it's always really important to be respectful, even if the person spits it back in your face, even",
      "but like you always have to be respectful and always have be kind. And if you let yourself get angry at them in the way you think they deserve, and sort of treat them in a way that you think that they've earned being treated, you'll regret this. And when they're gone, you won't have a chance to fix it.",
      "I don't understand how things can be so funny. Like, I mean, I remember being your age but life wasn't that funny. Okay, so the... I think that... Okay, I think I answered it. Yeah go ahead. Also on the thing like marriage this is something I didn't realize when I was younger and I learned as you get older. I wish someone had given me this advice which is",
      "It's really important that your spouse gets along with your family. It's a really important thing, and I didn't ever really think about it. I got lucky, alhamdulillah. My in-laws are very nice. But being married is tough. It is hard enough to be married.",
      "like don't like you, it can be really make life really, really unpleasant. So a lot of these rules that I used to think when I was younger, I thought about them as kind of like old fashioned or limiting. I realized later on, these were just really good advice, really good advise. And there's no... Especially when you're young and you're meeting people, like you always think this is the only person for me",
      "If I don't get married to them, I'm never going to meet anybody. I'll be miserable my whole life. Things like that. But that's not true. There's lots of people in the world and you'll meet someone else that are probably just as good if not better. And so... You know, I think that's something that it's hard for young people to hear but it's useful and it's true. Other questions?",
      "What's your name? Hashem. You've been very well behaved. Do you have any questions? What about you, Yusuf? Oh, you who restored my faith in the young? Yes. In your past life like in a previous life",
      "like in a previous life, like reincarnation or- In the past. Yeah. I say it's always good to forgive people really and because you don't wanna... Anger at people is like a weight. You carry around it starts eat at you and burden you. And especially as you get older there's just not",
      "it's hard to, it becomes a real burden. And if you don't get in the habit of forgiving people, there's a hadith of the prophet, man la yarham la yurham. The person who doesn't have mercy, they're not gonna be, people aren't gonna deal with them mercifully. Or as the prophet said, be merciful in this world",
      "world and the God in heaven will be merciful with you. So, you know, like, you have to get in the habit of being able to forgive people. It's hard when you're angry but especially as time goes by it'll be easier to forgive them. Maybe when something happened recently it's hard to forgive. As time goes",
      "to forgive the person. Now that doesn't mean you're stupid, right? So if someone is, you know, if someone took your car and trashed it and you're angry at them, and then they took your other car and they trashed, and you are angry with them, right, and they, you lend them what kids have that they care about, what is that thing? Is that some kind of video game that's like a fidget spinner? It's a fidgit?",
      "How does it work? Oh, one of those little things that pops. Yeah, so let's say you like these and then you keep lending them to your friend and he keeps losing them right? Like don't lend him your car next time, don't loan them your fidget spinner right? So it doesn't mean that you don't recognize that people can have bad habits, that people could be trouble, maybe you don' want them around. There are some people and they're just",
      "they just, they like attract bad stuff. They're just always causing drama. They are always having problems and after a while if you have a choice, you might not wanna be always with this person. You don't want to have some distance so forgiving someone doesn't mean you have to give them another chance to hurt you but it just means you forgive them for that thing and you don't carry that anger around",
      "Very important. And I've learned the value of adab, you learn that at the value adab especially when people are disagreeing a lot. It's very important to have good adab. A lot of the problems of like politics in our country today is really it's just about bad manners. Like people can't be polite to each other they can't respectful. You don't have to be... You can really disagree with someone you can really think they're wrong",
      "but you always just have to be respectful to them. This is a very important habit to be in, right? And that's why like a lot of the rules we learn as Muslims, for example if you have a guest, you'll always honor your guests. You always offer them food, you always offer drinks, right, you're always respectful. Doesn't matter they could be a jerk, it can be someone you hate,",
      "But it doesn't matter, you always honor your guests. That's just a rule you follow. It's not about whether you like the person, it's not whether they're about you... If we all went around treating each other according to how we really felt about one another or according whether we liked their political views or not our society would just fray. We wouldn't be able to deal with one another. So forgiveness, good manners are important habits to develop. These are habits you developed. They're not things that just are automatically part of your personality",
      "And when you're young, it's a good time to start these habits. How is it going? He's just... No, he's fine.",
      "Other questions? Come on, guys. Ladies? Just name nothing? Yes, what's your name? Selma. I was wondering, what do you think is the biggest reason why people talk to me about this?",
      "Like non-Muslim people? Yeah, like what's... Have your students ever asked you about ceramic or public art? What's kind of the biggest misconception that they face? Misconception. I mean, I think probably it depends how intelligent they are.",
      "So let's take someone who is not just kind of bigoted and doesn't like stuff because they're not used to it or something. I think it's, it's not necessarily something about the prophet that he says Islam, it more that there are certain things that they're very sure of and if someone doesn't affirm those things, they don't really find them to be appealing.",
      "certain things about, I don't wanna say too much but like certain things are all gender or sexuality and things like that. Like some people today they just will not believe that anybody who doesn't think these things can be morally in the right at all let alone be worthy of following. Huh? Polygamy I think is not so much a big deal anymore. You know when I was younger, when I when I",
      "at school, this was a big deal. Polygamy was always being debated. I haven't talked about polygamy for like seven years. Okay. You know, I haven' t talked about this for years. It's just once you let's put it this way. Once you've at least notionally as a society decided that other kind of relationships are okay and it's all about consenting adults and stuff who is going to object? So that's almost",
      "That's almost like, now it's about other things. Like LGBT stuff. I think that's actually one of the biggest issues. Guys, ladies, it's been a pleasure. Guys? Yusuf? The other guys who did well? I'm impressed. How old are you guys?",
      "How old are you guys? Teenagers."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/Paul Williams_ Jonathan Brown talking about here a_rtE97Gdi_5E&pp=ygUUSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24gaXNsYW0%3D_1748665288.opus",
    "text": [
      "In the name of Allah, the most gracious, most merciful. O Allah save us from Shaitan Christians, Shaitaan Jewish, Shaiitan Hindu. Save us from evil. Three religions they don't understand Islam and they giving hard time worldwide but they don' t understand Christianity only in Europe",
      "understand Hinduism only in Asia and they don't understand these you know stupid guys Jewish only in Israel. And Islam spreading so fast everywhere in the world and today this is my dream come true like yesterday I saw one video, one brother Paul Williams he become Muslim I don't",
      "He is an American guy. And Paul Williams is a Britisher and he's a professor I think, brown young man, young boy and the Paul Williams like my age I am 66, I don't know Paul Williams' age 60 maybe or 50 I donno but that guy is from UK",
      "England London and part, you know I used to I saw him in Speak speak Kurt Conner in one hidden park in London so Sometimes he talking and he wants me find out a lot of you know what is Islam? And he's talking with Christians and he talking with the Jewish and some other regions also. I think because I'm not watching every video here",
      "American Christians often line label they hate Muslims and they spread rumors Muslims is a terrorist like So the brown brother he living in America, and he has lot of knowledge And both came you know zoom chit chat like The communication I saw in the video and brother Paul Williams",
      "He introduced him, Brown and he said Assalamu Alaikum brother Brown. So Paul Williams says Waalaikumsalam Oh my God! Unbelievable happiness came in my heart I say oh my god we conquer America and British no doubt is that",
      "These two white guys, they forgot you know their background is a Jewish or Christianity. They forgot that. Why did they forget? Because today technology proved that Islam only in this earth growing so fast. Islam only challenge for Jew and Christians. They going to hell. Islam they show only God sent prophets link.",
      "So, congratulations my Paul William brother. You become Muslim, Allah give it to you in heaven and you keep straight path till your last breath. Why I am saying this? One Canadian guy he practiced 14 years 16 years after that his mind evil mind he decide his own decision",
      "He practiced 16 years and he got knowledge, Arabic knowledge with you know I think translation also. And Quran he studied and he give to message also dawah like but after 14 years he said no no something going wrong in Islam and immediately he went back Christianity.",
      "I don't want to be seen like this because Allah doesn't like if you have doubt. So Paul William, I give it to you advice. Why am giving advice? To understand this. There is no doubt in the Quran. Allah challenge first. You have to check this in the Holy Quran Surah Al-Baqarah. There's no doubt. If you believe Allah He keeps you straight path.",
      "If you have doubt, this is the evil religion start. Christianity, Jewishism, Hinduism like who they left Islam 14 years practice after that. So there is no doubt in the Quran. This is the challenge Almighty God Allah and one more Jesus Allah created with water and his value is nothing so you don't need to find out he died",
      "I saw that video, that's why I am saying. He died for our sin, this bullshit going on in Christianity circle. So this is nothing. Why nothing? Think about it. Jesus was in the baby, mother-baby. Private part is that. Nine months his mother pregnant and nine months she not came",
      "She not came front of human, you know even in Israel place Children from Israel they know only after she give to the birth and she hide her many months That's why the Jewish They says to her. She is a bitch This world since 2000 years think about",
      "Yes, think about why Jesus is not clear if he's a God. Why He is not cleared this world if He is a Son? This all bullshit going on only in Europe. So main point, He was in the baggie that time you can't see any miracle. He didn't show any miracle and she eating food. Think about why she eating because",
      "Because her baby needs milk. That's why she eats food and God gives to her without seeds and fruits. Witness, Prophet Zachariah. This is the witness. But Christians they have so many doubts in the Bible. Some of them say Jehovah, some of them says Jesus is a saint",
      "Jesus is the son of God. Some of them say Holy Spirit, Father and Son. Some say incarnation God. So this doubt Bible you no need to be checked now. Sorry to say. You no need that. Close that! A challenge for Christianity. Close it! Because you can't find original Bible.",
      "Think about who created this world like. And Jewish not accept him as a god-like or son-like. Think about present only Jewish in front of Jesus and that time Hinduism in Asia, this message not convey Jesus is a son or God-like in India. That's why they are idol worshippers, pagans. So water every man believe",
      "Man is a God like Hindu. Man is the god like Buddhist, they believe. Man as a god like Sikhism, they belief Guru Nanak. Man Is a god Like Christians believe. So this all man,man,man. Allah says I create whom with what? So check this Islam you can't find one single mistake in the Quran",
      "mistake in the Quran. One single mistake, one single doubt also. There is no doubt but Christians they want to be you know defense Bible, they want different Christianity, they say Jesus is a real God like that's why they want show Islam we have any doubts like this. Because we are swithimans, evil ones. Allah clear sign give it",
      "ہمیں دے سکتا ہے کہ اگر آپ صحیح طریقہ ہیں تو اللہ آپ کو یاد کرداری کیا ہے۔"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "jonathan_brown/PRACTICE REPORT_ Jonathan Brown Talks Revamped O-L_NkXb4d3bq_k&pp=ygUOSm9uYXRoYW4gQnJvd24%3D_1748648182.opus",
    "text": [
      "Last year was really the off season and even last season I began to gain more strength, more athletic ability just to come out this offseason produce on the field and get where I am now. John from a year ago to John today is a totally different player for us and I think what it really boils down to is he got really hungry, he put that to work, he puts a ton of effort into the off-season in spring ball and summer ball then fall camp",
      "fall camp and is paying dividends for it now. I think we did good, we had one pre-snap penalty which was you know just is what it is working on that this week and just got to get better every week. Saw a good clean execution for the most part. I saw guys that were excited to play, guys that wanted to win. It was great to see us go out there work together and achieve something together. Probably my biggest thing",
      "mistakes, eliminate them. We had a few penalties, eliminate those and if we can do that we'll get better each practice. I've lived with Avery for a long time probably the last two years so me and him are real good and Travis has been here since I've been here, he's been a real mentor especially me getting to do my first start. Yeah so Travis Glover is here and he's",
      "You know, the thing I would say about that is we grow each day. So those guys are fun to coach because they want to get better each day and you know the chemistry that they build is just...you know those guys don't wanna let each other down and they want it better every day so it's easy be a teammate with somebody who's like-minded and I think that's where we're at and we'll get better every step."
    ]
  }
]