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    "file": "anjum/_19_ Dr_Ovamir Anjum _ Politics_ Law_ and Communit_YpHPBr8d4zg&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750598410.opus",
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      "Welcome, respected listeners, respected brothers and sisters. You're joining us once again here",
      "once again here at the Islamic Literary Society. Alhamdulillah, we've managed to come together again as we do every month and bring you an exciting interview with an exciting author and a very exciting text. And the materials of today we're going to be looking at is gonna be really interesting about particular scholar in history with great ideas. Ideas that some people have understood, some people who have misunderstood. InshaAllah will get to the bottom of that. Now respect to listeners",
      "is a site that was founded in 2019 with the aim of promoting, fostering and developing a heightened appreciation of authors and literary works of classical and contemporary scholarship. And this is achieved by a number of different ways through reading book launches talks and the best of ways, the easiest of ways like we do today as we get to speak to the author directly with a set of questions and we get into their minds",
      "them to get to where they are today, to see what inspired them to write the particular books that they have brought forward. So inshallah ta'ala let us begin by introducing our guest inshAllah today and then we can go into our questions so let's open that up okay so I'd like to begin uh by introducing with us Dr Uweme Anjum",
      "So with us today we just give an introduction to our Shaykh. The doctor is the Imam Khatib of a number of places Islamic in you're the chair of what's the name of the department? It's Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies at the University of Toledo, Ohio",
      "Toledo, Ohio. The department is the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. Mashallah. Okay, good, good. I didn't have that cleared in front of me. So furthermore, the doctor has obtained a PhD in Islamic intellectual history in the Department Of History. Likewise he has a master's in social sciences from the University of Chicago. He has a Master's in computer science and a bachelor's in nuclear engineering and physics also mashallah subh'alaq Allah that's a range of different topics his Islamic training began at home while growing",
      "at home while growing up in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States where he is now with a broad range of scholars including remarkably your grandmother and continue as you studied fiqh with South Asian Hanafi and Ahl al-Jiz scholars and Asul al Fiqh and Qiraat of the Quran with scholars from Egypt and other and Syria. And he's the author of which is the book we'll be talking about today is Politics Law",
      "the Taimiyyan moment. InshaAllah we'll be having a look at that so Shaykh, that's a rich CV Mashallah that's that's alot on your plate. Well done. Shaykh let us begin then with me now if I can trace back your roots and trace back how you've managed to get to where you are. Can you give us a bit of background into your education, your journey? And what made you take this route because apparently you've gone from like nuclear engineering",
      "Can you give us a bit of background into your studies, please? I was born in Pakistan and in a religious family alhamdulillah. And so I had access to religious texts writings in Urdu primarily at first and then in English and Arabic when while I was quite young well I lived between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia Jeddah where my father worked",
      "really my formation and I was very interested in Islamic history, Islamic sciences but I didn't think of it as a something that would do for a living to do Islamic studies. In part because of the way religious studies and Islamic studies is pursued in the societies of which we are always apart, I was",
      "my family and my surrounding, one of the great blessings was that I imbibed a deep commitment to faith as well as to Muslims. And religious work did not seem like something that could be conducive to helping the Ummah raising the Muslims both ethically, religiously right? As well in terms",
      "their condition in the world. So seeing the suffering of Muslims as well as struggle of many Muslims on, uh, on the ground if you will, especially poor Muslims which is very encouraging and most people try to put down what Muslims are like but if you look at... You know I did not look at it from ivory tower. I grew up, if you",
      "and the power of faith, and the beauty of it despite all of that in the middle of all of this. So I think that was really my first motivation but I wanted to be a physicist. That was my first love. I was very impressed by the stories of Abdus Salam and Abdul Qadir Khan and so on. But at the same time as deeply interested",
      "the united states as i did to pursue nuclear physics and engineering i discovered a whole new world where almost you know in the united States you realize that this is where not a lot of knowledge that runs the Muslim world is produced and people sort of look up to this in the Muslim",
      "different plane of existence you cannot analyze and understand it there are no cracks in it everything that happens in the world is a kind of a well-planned conspiracy by great powers that you know when you begin to see the societies and you realize how human and weak and almost in need of Islam and truth just as much as anybody else they are and so you begin both sort of develop sympathy for it but also",
      "the world in the place that it is why is it that you know some people have so much most have so few so little and how uh Islamic tradition Islamic truth that Allah sent how it can play a role in bringing humanity back to truth and I like to say the way i perceive my quest for knowledge is this truth and one of the names of allah",
      "And that's how I see that seeking knowledge, seeking truth whether it is through the history or truth of our... of the knowledge that Allah has revealed. It is the best way to serve Allah. So ultimately that became my path. Yeah and so you have a nice bridge between traditional knowledge as you made mention of studying with Azhari scholars and Ahlul Hadith scholars and Hanafi scholars including your grandmother as well",
      "and then you also have obtained a PhD in Western University. So my question would be that now you're working as an Imam, what was your incentive in wanting to go get a doctorate? Become qualified with a PhD? How does that add value and what made you take that route as well? So let me first make that correction I do not work as an imam.",
      "and the chair is named Imam Khattab Chair. Okay. So I do, I'm involved in my local masjids and give papas and help what I can but that's not my official role. How I became interested was as I pursued my undergraduate in physics and nuclear engineering and political science at the University of Madison Wisconsin, I was just really fascinated by all this knowledge",
      "knowledge you know it's one of the things that allah instilled in me is love for love for knowing a lust of knowing as it's you know called in english literature there is uh so knowing through getting to know political science or sociology and all of that stuff i began to see things i realized in it you know i was both fascinated by it but also deeply dissatisfied with what",
      "but also really just about human beings, I thought was deeply flawed knowledge, but also deeply intriguing knowledge. Far more sophisticated, far more engaged with the world than anything that one... That I had encountered in Muslim literature. So I switched to my gears if you will and went to pursue social sciences masters in social sciences at the University of Chicago",
      "And then after doing that, I also did a master's in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison which was a top program and database programming at the time. And this was the time that if you went to a good program, you could easily walk into a job. So I worked as software engineer for a couple years and then but always as a way",
      "way to come back and finish my search, and my work in Islamic studies, Islamic history. So I had made up my mind while doing my undergraduate that I needed to do serious studies in Islamic Studies but I couldn't get there without first few steps so... And I often tell my students",
      "If you're thinking of an educational career, intellectual career in Islam, you have to take the long view. This is a lifelong commitment. Don't think of it as merely a job and a career. As yourself, as you were telling me that mashallah you spent some eight-some years at Al-Azhar University. And this is the kind of commitment that it takes.",
      "into it at the time I needed to do a couple masters and take care of my financial situation, and then come back to it. Anyway so that's eventually what happened especially after 9-11 it became very difficult for me as i witnessed it while I was in fact at work. I realized that I could not do anything but go back to my studies finish them and get more. So at this point career was not on my radar",
      "as an important consideration. Yeah, so Shaykh I can ask a direct question then. So do you think in terms of your understanding of Islam, your ability to learn Islam that your PhD has helped you in gaining that? Has it helped you giving dawah and so on and so forth? Was it was it a good decision? I think alhamdulillah in my case it was Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la I always believe, I always say and feel that Allah took me by the hand",
      "and Allah does for each one of us. And may Allah, those who commit to Allah with some sincerity, Allah complete the sincerity. We all have problems even in our intention but Allah covers that up. And I feel that this is not to say that every PhD and every career move necessarily leads to an improvement. There are people who go to Western academia and lose their path, lose their faith.",
      "However, in my case both my instructors that were available to me and the community engagement and Allah's guidance that all of this in fact worked to complete the path that I had sort of charted out for myself. And I think one thing that helped tremendously was that I did not go to a PhD program",
      "to know what real Islam is. If you are going to a PhD program, then you're absolutely in the wrong place. You need to have your grounding and bearing with the Qur'an and the Sunnah in the tradition. And then you need to go to a Phd program in order to develop and polish your tools",
      "and perhaps polish your questions as well, right? But not to find yourself. Not to find your faith. Not understand what Islam is because that is not what this is for. Right, right. And Sheikh you mentioned earlier on at the start of the interview one of the things that motivated you was looking at the affairs in the states with Muslims and when the situation... We're going to get into this a bit more detail when we get into your book but how important would you say at this stage it is",
      "our situations the where Muslims are today that we really engage in education and learning informal studies or informal studies how important is it that we get serious with our studies absolutely I think this is a priority this is as many ulama have said this is the jihad of our time that um with a little knowledge you can pursue you can accomplish a lot in today's world",
      "mastery of knowledge, a whole of different kinds. Even a lot of effort sometimes turns into counterproductive work so I think that the other important part of today's world is that you have to combine both Islamic traditional knowledge,",
      "the tradition that we have with deep and sympathetic reverence as well as critique. But you have to then learn human knowledge that's available, and I don't like to call it Western knowledge because it's no longer Western. We have this separate method from truth just the fact that when you look at much scientific knowledge whether it's physics or biology and whatnot there are some theories and there are certain facts",
      "similarly anthropology or sociology of political science and human political behavior, and so on and so forth. The way systems work that is knowledge that um knowledge of history most of all how we got where we are how uh you know many other people have what kind of complex paths they've had this empowers us right? And this is part of the truth that Allah has required of us to know so that we could then",
      "then implement the mission that Allah has given us. You have to know the world, right? And I think that whether you start first with traditional knowledge and go over and learn more about the world or the other way around, either way we need people who are bringing this knowledge together critically",
      "also learn to critique. Right, okay, okay great. What I would like to do now inshallah if i can show our respected audience your book right so there's a book on the screen so it's Politics Law and Community in Islamic Thought Determined Moment. There's the book inshAllah this is in the next segment of our discussion we're going to have a look at",
      "behind this book as well. So if I can kindly ask you, Sheikh, to just give us a kind of summary on the content of this book. So I know you've done this... You can go back to actually showing the French cover and yes, I'm happy to talk about it. And I'll begin by talking about the cover of the book which is a picture taken by",
      "Professor Yahya Michaud, who is of Belgian origin, who converted to Islam after studying Islam. And that's a real beautiful path very different from mine but people have found Islam you know Westerners and Easterners by studying Islam and come to it and learn the languages that are necessary so uh professor Yahya Mishaud is world renowned one of the best scholars of",
      "Ibn Taymiyyah, Shaykh al-Islam ibn Taymyyah as well as Ibn Sina. And he took this picture of Tala'at D'mashq the fortress or the citadel of Damascus where Shaykh Al-Islaam ibn Temiyya was imprisoned and where he died. Right right okay. And so that's the uh that's",
      "ideas for the cover of my book. Right, okay that's an amazing introduction to the book and the picture right let's open the front cover then and we'll get you to give us a just a quick summary of what is the book about them so of course we can see the name Ibn Taymiyyah there but in a summary uh what were you talking about here? So you could look at",
      "book the title of the book law politics law and community these three things politics siyasa law um and then community in islamic thought it is a history of these three thing if you will these three concepts over the course of the first seven centuries of islam until uh",
      "then recovers, if you will and brings them together synthesizes them in his own way. So the focus is on looking at Islamic history first seven centuries through the lens of a Thamean scholarship. And the phrase Thameian moment is something that I get from European intellectual history there's a great book by Joan Pocock called The Machiavellian Moment",
      "I explained that in the book, but a number of people have asked me about it. The Machiavellian moment is about how early modernity begins with Machiavelli and what I wanted to say is that in a sense Ibn Taymiyyah with his just absolutely grand expanse of knowledge both breadth and depth is able to provide a synthesis of Islam in a similar way that Hujjat al-Islam",
      "Imam Ghazali, Rahimahullah had done a couple centuries earlier. And Imam Al-Shafi'i, Rahmahullah radiAllahu anhu, had done essentially a couple of centuries before him. Ibn Taymiyyah's synthesis and if you will revisioning the narrative of Islam provides a moment through which we can understand some crucial aspects of Islamic history.",
      "moment, a political moment. So I guess I should say something about the first, the main arc of the book and then why I call this political. The main arc is well you could think of it this way, Bernard Lewis famously wrote this book right? Bernard Lewis is this old Zionist British colonial officer who wrote about Muslim history",
      "Muslim history and his, his history of Islam has been very popular. In fact, it's been translated into Islamic languages and most people don't know any other version of Islamic history but he isn't here this famous book that came after 9-11 called What Went Wrong? So the way to learn Islamic history was what went wrong right? And what he thought went wrong was that Muslims were good and great once but then modernity came and defeated them and they're angry about that defeat",
      "defeat and that's effectively what is happening. That it is this anger that is producing terrorism, rage resistance to secularization, resistance to sort of moving on to the next phase. And I wanted to provide an account of what really happened in Islamic history once you look at closely at the sources how deep, how rich, how interesting uh this story",
      "story is and in fact a story that is so interesting and deep, that you have for the future of Muslims much to learn from that history rather than rejecting it as something that's gone wrong. And that one needs to modernize and secularize the story. In fact once you look closely at it you realize that the political debates, the discussions,",
      "Islam among scholars is so rich that you can learn about your contemporary situation, about the nature of political life, the nature sort of timeless political questions by looking at our history. So that's sort of the big picture view. Yeah, Sheikh, just like a question that comes to mind is that you named the book Politics Law and Community. So we've got Sharia with we've",
      "which is politics. But what came to mind immediately, if we actually look back in our texts and books, we have very little work when it comes to al-shari'ah, siyasa sharia'. So how do you reconcile? How did you come up with such a rich book when there are very little sources? Ah! That's a very interesting question, perhaps more interesting than you realized asking because",
      "I could write another book answering that question, which is the following. Okay.",
      "And this is the first time that title of Fiasa Ash-Shar'iya is written. Before that you do not have this title ever before, right? What you do have is a very different set of titles they're not called as Fiasas Shariya what it's called Al Hakkab As Sultaniyya Right? You have Tawaneen al Wizarah. You have Ghiyat al Ghiyati Ghiyath al Umm Fil Fiath al Bulam by Imam al Juhaini The first two titles are by Imam mawardi",
      "And then you have books like Siyasat-Nama of Nizam al-Mulk, the great vizier, the Seljuk vizir at the time of Al-Juwayni and then Ghazali who was really the patron of both Al-Ghazali and then Al-Dawini or rather doing an Al-ghajali.",
      "sent the precursor to a siyasa ash-shari'iyah in some ways. So why is it that you do not have a siyasah as shari'iya, any book like a siyaasah as sharia before Ibn Taymiyyah and then after Ibn Tamiyyah you have a number of works that take that title or some versions of that title? Siyasa as sharaiyyah becomes a popular thing afterwards. And I think that has to do with the Mongol destruction of the caliphate.",
      "So this may be something that's conceptually somewhat difficult for people to understand. But let me say it because you have asked a really good question. Go for it. First seven centuries, Muslims did not talk about the Sharia as the center of what Islam has brought in this world. What I mean to say is that if... You know before, the Prophet and the Quran and the Sunnah and Hadith everybody knows and the Risalah of this is what Islam is.",
      "question for this world what would you name islam's system would you call it politics law would you",
      "if you will, gravity center of gravity in Islam. It is the Khilafah that constitutes a continuity to the Prophet and when who have the Khalifa in Baghdad who legitimately claims to be continuous with the Prophet through this appointment as well as lineage to the prophet's tribe. And then this Khalifah also symbolically",
      "symbolically unites all Muslims, whether they are under his actual power or not. The actual rulers all over the Muslim world write letters and request letters of investiture and their rule under his name. So there the Khalifa provides a living point of continuity to the Prophet and to the Ummah. Right?",
      "pointed to the khilafah and you pointed to so this was a living reality when the mongols destroyed that in 656 or 1258 that came to an end right and then it was re-established after three years in cairo but something new happened if you will in the muslim collective mind which was",
      "You need to think about Islam in a way that Khilafah is dependent on that, rather than hanging everything on the institution of the Khilafa as the center. So if you read Al-Mawardi, Al-Ghazali, Al Zawaini, Rahimahumullah, for them the Khilafa is the point of beginning. If you will they hang everything on that. They don't try to theorize how to justify Khilapa itself",
      "rather to them you take that for granted, you know, you give justifications for it but morally formal justification for why we have Sunni Khalifa and why legitimate so on. But they don't have to justify if you will theorize politics from ground up as a Muslim I need to have this. For the first time it is Ibn Taymiyyah who has the independent and it's in mind of Mutlaq which",
      "which I believe he was. He faces a situation that none of these great ulama had faced before, and which is that now that you have a khalifa but the khalifah is very clear, you know, he's effectively under house arrest in the time of ibn Taymiyyah doesn't have any power so now you have to think about what is the essence",
      "needs to produce the rest of the system in which the rest is dependent. And Khalifa comes out of that system, but you have to justify the basics. One way to talk about it is that rather than a descending view of politics, which is the political order given from back in history, from the Khilafah and down to communities, now you need an ascending",
      "you need an ascending view of politics how from a muslim community all these muslim communities that they have that we have how can they ascend if you will how can like justify the authority that rules them yeah and she's just to sort of interject but at the same time i think like you made mention in ascending approach but i think now with good time and different versions of islam now now we've gone even further back now",
      "ascending approach in the first place? In fact, that some people may even deny the very essence of siyasa shar'iyya. There's no need for it. Well, so I think that what siyassa shar'iya of the work that Abidineya provided but also which is built its parts are not new. It's only the arrangement that's new, the meaning that's",
      "trying to make and it's uh it's something that I don't want people you know after this talk to say well you know even then he had invented a siyasa Sharia there was no such thing before then Islam was secular before that and not I'm actually saying the opposite of that what I'm saying is that because people took khilafah for granted as a point of continuity to the past and the entire ummah is connected to it in at least in theory people didn't try to theorize",
      "to theorize and explain and justify the political order it sort of came with islam and if it's important because he realized when that order broke down that now we need to justify that and that's why as siyasa sharia and his other works are so important and and that is sort of what my book in a sense is about to provide an account",
      "of that for today as well. And basically to your question, I would say even Tania, as well as other scholars really give us a consensus on the necessity of political existence of Islam. Right? That is something you find in almost every part of Islam, if you open a book or shaka'a on marriage and you say, Well, what do you do with a girl whose father dies?",
      "Hanafis and Malikis would say the Sultan decides, right? Or the qadi decides who is appointed by the Sultan. So in our fiqh unlike Christians or unlike other religions, in our law, our law of fiq is not private law. Fiqh is a law that starts if you will with ibadat and with purification but it necessarily requires",
      "and protecting the law of Allah SWT. Right, so Sheikh Dadd because of time we've got to jump and I want to jump in history and look at the modern world today right? So this is the big question so let's say we've read the book we understand this period prior to Shaykh Hussein bin Samir and post-Shaykh Hussein bin Samira but now we're living in the nation states we live in a different world altogether so is there any applicability",
      "living today can we apply the same books in our lives today in the modern nation-state world yeah so you know this is more my recent work where um i'm i haven't pub i published some of it and intend to do more and other scholars including professor wild hallock's book the impossible state which i have commented earlier in my article who wants the caliphate",
      "which is also available online, in which I argue that the nation state is fundamentally incompatible with Islam. But also I argue, that the Nation State is not an irreversible kind of given it's a historical development that really doesn't come into existence until 70 years ago after the Second World War and it has already starting in the 90s begun to transform fundamentalist",
      "form fundamentally in such a way that you can now talk about European Union, for instance, which has already taken some of the powers of the nation state. And so think of the world we should not Muslims should not think of global change as something that other people are doing and we are simply receiving. We are simply passive recipients of history,",
      "in which Muslims now, one fourth of the humanity we and we have Al-Haqf in our hands. And we see the world really going to the dogs. It is the world that whether it's climate change or economic inequality or injustice and most of all loss of meaning and purpose in life people are looking to us for guidance. We cannot sit back and say that oh let the Kuffar",
      "uh Trump's and Elon Musk, then the people who are lowest of the low in their ethics decide to face the fate of the world right. The direction of the World and we as the ulama of Islam and the students of Islam, and followers of Muhammad our job is only to listen what they say is the reality and for us to simply respond and say",
      "is irreversible that is what we are saying when we say the secularism is reversible that is where the world is screaming and asking for an alternative and we have the truth from allah so we should rather understand this world and with compassion and sympathy and wisdom provide the alternative that's uh that is really enlightening to him i'm really happy to hear that and you said you've got a book on that as well who wants it what was it",
      "the name of the book i have an article online it's called who wants the caliphate it's available at yakin institute website but also um for those who are interested i have a new initiative called umatix colloquium dot org where i have some uh i and a number of scholars from around the world are beginning to write about this of how to if you will think about",
      "as you know, as an agent that can, you know that needs to start thinking about it. It's very interesting because Sheikh at most if we have honest frank discussion at most, if we talk to our scholars or learned people and we talk about change or talk about Islam so the most we'll get is the scholars will encourage us to just partake in the existing system and hopefully wishful thinking that some kind of Islamic change is going to come",
      "change is going to come. Not that I disagree with that, but I think it's a bit naive to try and sell that to the people. Yeah. Yeah, I think that our ulama are of course they're of different kinds. Some ulama have given their lives to pass Islam on to us. And sometimes we forget that these are the ulama who are the real ulama and the real heirs of the Prophet and the Sahaba. But then there are ulama would say take care of while you're doing",
      "while you're doing the rest of that stuff, also take care of your family and your community because that is what ultimately is going to protect your Iman in Islam. That is where you're going to get the foot soldiers and Abu Bakr and Umar and Ali and Uthman, Abu Ubaidah ibn al-Darrah from those families, from those mothers and fathers who carry this fire in their hearts. We need those ulama in our mosques",
      "in our mosques, in madrasas to carry that. But what we are missing is the ulama who will complete the picture by thinking about the big problems of the ummah and unfortunately today we live in a world where the creative power of human beings is much greater than it ever was before. Human power to engineer ourselves right?",
      "now people are even changing the way we think right they are augmenting reality you're thinking about alternative realities meta and so on so forth this is allah has given us if he will a rope that is long enough to hang ourselves human beings have been given the power to destroy ourselves in the way that",
      "well, really do not engage with that. Then it's only for the people of Kufr and Jahad who really control the world and the future of the world. And what's gonna happen in 20 years where there is alternative reality and where none of men people will impact change the basic human body",
      "And, you know, the ulama will, the Ulama of this kind who don't want to engage right well they will simply have to respond by saying yes it's halal. You can do some of this, some of that but the real world is running away. But of course there are Ulama al-Haqq, there are ulama who have wisdom and who were seeing this and we need to empower them. We need to become their students. We meet to become the best of us will become those ulama and that's what's necessary",
      "necessary. MashaAllah, I'm really enjoying this conversation Subhanallah it's a fresh breath of air where normally you get to hear similar answers being said in different modes but here Mashallah you're getting us to think and you're inspiring as well youngsters to think outside the box that we don't necessarily always have to take what's put on the plate sometimes we can put something on the play as well. Mashallah it is really impressive. Sheikh we've taken a lot",
      "Didn't go too detailed in the book, but alhamdulillah I think we get kind of a rough understanding of what the book's about. I wanted to now move on just a little bit and get you to really talk about literature and writing. Mashieh, you mentioned that you've got an article inshaAllah we'll be looking at reading that hopefully. How important is it that we also, the Muslim world engages in writing articles, writing books and so on and so forth to express our viewpoints? What role does that play?",
      "Yes, excellent question and excellent emphasis. Writing is really important. Muslims often tend to choose careers that are of practical value for their families or themselves whether in sciences or technical areas medicine and engineering and so on and often we neglect",
      "the power of well-crafted written word. First of all, for good thinking you can't really do it without writing. Writing itself improves your thinking because you begin to argue with yourself. The second thing is that once you learn the art of writing well,",
      "not able to you know we could tell them the truth of islam in words that are not well chosen right words that don't resonate with them and they might feel that what you have to say isn't really that important because you don't know the words to engage so the art of writing is is really crucial in getting the message out um in uh in sort of",
      "allowing us as an ummah to begin to think and argue better. Because when you argue in person, a lot of people whether it's Facebook or Twitter, when you have short-form arguments, when effectively yelling at each other often you just create bad blood. Allowing yourself to write in its longer form and write carefully is I",
      "is I think really important to move the discourse to a better level. So, I couldn't agree more with your emphasis on that. Yeah and so just kind of practical answer here that hopefully inshallah people watching this are going to be inspired into picking up the pen and wanting to write but they're nervous a bit hesitant I don't know how to write my English is not very good I don' t know how do it what kind of initial advice would you give so they can start flying?",
      "Well, I think the best way to start writing is just read. Read good fun stuff. So reading widely is the secret to good writing. And you read at the... Alhamdulillah we are increasingly beginning to produce good Islamic stuff, good Islamic material that is original and at home in English. It's not merely translated",
      "I'm not sure if that's clearly translated, although translations are important. But what is produced and people are thinking in English and writing with beautiful idioms, that is coming out so we need to sort of learn who the good writers are.",
      "introducing Islam in a way with literary flair. And so I invite you to look at that and many other scholars are beginning to do that. Okay, okay. MashaAllah. Shaykh Azraal, one or two more questions inshaAllah. As you see us here the Islamic Literary Society we are trying to take the initiative and try to shed light on people like yourself and others who are writing",
      "work and we feel that are not appreciated enough. Could you give the audience some words of wisdom on the importance of such a project, of supporting our scholars, our academics or intellectuals? Yes JazakAllah Khairan I was very pleased to see your interview with earlier scholars who were also inspiring",
      "inspired by examples, which is why Allah in the Quran gave us even the Prophet was taught by giving examples of the prophets who came before. And similarly we need to believe that Islam is happening right now it's not only in the past so we need see examples of ulama at work So when somebody comes and tells you there are no ulama or good ulama and nobody doing the work",
      "doing the work you know that that's not the case. You feel the hope and strength to go and follow their role models, and so I believe that what you're doing here is part of the mission of Rasulullah ﷺ to carry on the good work and showcase what is good insha'Allah and what is light in order to overcome the darkness.",
      "And Sheikh, are we expecting any more publications from yourself? Any more books, any more articles? What's next for me? So recently last year my book or my translation of Imam Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawzi is a book Madarid al-Salekeen. It is a total four volume translation first two volumes",
      "First two volumes, each about a thousand pages is published. Alhamdulillah last year and now just this week in fact the paperback version of that translation which is much more affordable is being printed if you are interested so it's called Ranks of Divine Seekers The Translation of Madari Dostarikin",
      "my recent work and you will see that some work that I'm doing at Yaqeen Institute, which is more accessible to general audience inshaAllah. And then I have some scholarly work in the works as well. MashaAllah so you're covering the politics and you also looking after our hearts at the same time. My own heart and hoping that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, you know, that we could remove some of the rust that we have. Alhamdulillah. Shaykh in that case",
      "in that case and hamdulillah you're giving us a lot of your time we do appreciate that we really do and i would say so myself have conducted many interviews and this is one that i really enjoyed and really got me thinking um i'm very much interested in looking at your other works very much interesting reading articles and uh sheikh is a figure that's one of so many people have written on and it's amazing that a man can inspire so many",
      "the man so subhanallah um do you have any closing remarks or statements uh to our audience or to myself well sheikh was just one of the infinite rays that came out of muhammad and so when you know he became a receptacle of those rays and this is something",
      "for the truth and love of Messenger of Allah can become that source of light for so many others. So think of when you're doing your work, especially if you are in scholarly work, that your work should be something that people will be reading and benefiting from even if they don't know your name but they will know and benefit from it 200 years after you die 300 years 400 years",
      "If this is the scale that you have in mind, inshallah it will be easy to overcome some of the limitations and some of temptations of immediate fame and focusing on what this world tends you to. And focus on producing true knowledge and knowledge that would benefit people in the long run even if they don't see it as popular today.",
      "So, Sheikh do stay with us don't go anywhere.",
      "on various different subjects. And we also have the videos in which you can watch all of these things and newsletters. We've got a reading club, so we meet up regularly and discussions take place. We have a monthly discussion. And the book we're reading at the moment is I Refuse to Condemn. So have a look at that as well. There's a section here which is for membership. So please do join us.",
      "join us um and become members you get special privileges there so do join us inshallah uh inshAllah so that's uh so that about it from us so i'd like to thank all the viewers for tuning in and Shaykh will also like to give you a warm thank you as well reward you for your time and for answering all of these difficult questions and I'd like",
      "and likewise listeners as well we'll see you all shortly inshallah next month"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Dr_ Ovamir Anjum - Citizenship _ Minorities in Con_R5i6SoTRJcM&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750592003.opus",
    "text": [
      "I was asked to talk about the notion of citizenship in early Islam and pre-modern period, so I'll begin with some general remarks and not really go much beyond that. Let me begin, in fact, with the Marrakesh Declaration",
      "that Dr. Sinanowitsch just mentioned, and he said there was nothing new in content but that the signatory are traditional scholars, and that was new that they're buying into what seems to have been a reformist agenda for some time",
      "equal membership of non-Muslims should be upheld and that they are somehow abandoning that. I would argue that in fact there is nothing new, not even in that element. In fact the traditional folks who wear the traditional cloak have been accepting",
      "by the strongmen in the Middle East, particularly the Arab states since the beginning of these states in mid 20th century. And if you look at the scholars who claim that tradition mostly pro-establishment scholars who have agreed that yes we are willing to",
      "accord equal citizenship and so on but none of that in fact offers a actual interesting argument engaged with their tradition. So I would say that it is what has been happening in the 20th century in the Muslim states,",
      "based on intellectual, political and global trends. In other words Muslim elite, Muslims strong men autocrates, autocrats dictators have adjusted to their mechanisms if you will of staying in power to different circumstances in which a certain contingent of scholars have always served as yes-men",
      "incredibly new. Because when we talk about the Moroccan Declaration, it talks about citizenship of non-Muslims but we don't really hear much about citizenship per se. We don't hear about citizenship for Muslims or non-muslims. We do not have any rights that belong to people who live there. There is no strong pushback against the current status quo",
      "So it seems to me to be a document that compiled in order to serve agendas other than advancing serious traditional discourse. Let me then move back and look at the challenge of what is citizenship, how to map this new concept",
      "17th and 18th century Europe. In the absolute state of its major, or one famous theorist is Thomas Hobbes who argues in wake of a civil English Civil War and receiving church that individuals should give up some of their liberty in order to",
      "give the certain authorities to the Leviathan, the state. And from that argument emerges a discourse on the rights of citizens especially that become stronger in John Locke who writes later in 17th century and 18th century. In the 19th century when we see the birth of the nation-state these rights",
      "become more front and center. So that's the story of citizenship as we see it in the West. We often don't question where this citizenship comes from, why talk about citizenship in terms",
      "of citizenship as we imagine it today. In other words, one interesting critique for example of this notion of citizenship has been that citizenship is a set of rights given to those who belong in a certain place and it's based on the notions exclusions and inclusion. Certain rights are given to people who belong and others don't have right they",
      "is the question of investment in a society and acts of citizenship. Professor, I'm gonna butcher his name because I don't quite know, Engin Isen who has written this amazing book on questioning this story called Acts of Citizenship where he emphasizes that citizenship",
      "citizenship should be invested in, we should reconceptualize citizenship as something that is, that hinges more on the investment that individuals make in a community and that sort of reciprocity. And if you imagine citizenship not",
      "but in a broader sense, he argues that one can begin to see much more possibility of thinking of citizenship in pre-modern Islamic systems. And he points out one important institution, the institution of waqf which both Muslims and non-Muslims could invest in and waqfs or endowments",
      "allow members of these communities to have long-term relationship and investment in the communities to which they belong. And, in that sense, the sense of belonging that Christians had to a city of for example Damascus or Cairo was no less than",
      "and legally protected mechanisms by which these citizens or citizens quote-unquote could feel that they are just as invested in things going right rather than thinking of it in terms of certain legal possessions that they have, that is rights. Scholars point out for example",
      "for example that a Christian's rights in Islamic jurisprudence once looks through these manuals they don't talk but they don'y have a chapter of citizenship, they have a chap on what. But the rights of Christians and Christian endowments are protected just as much as Muslim endowment and in that sense there is no difference. There is a legal order",
      "whether if a Christian leaves his state to a mosque, would that be acceptable or not? And the concern there is that a Christian should naturally not leave his state for a mosque but to a Christian cause. If a Christian may be doing so it's likelihood that there was some coercion or something involved and there is greater need for oversight meaning",
      "do things that Christians normally do and that right should be protected by Islamic law, Muslim parties and jurists. So that sort of citizenship understood in slightly a different way than we normally think of as rights the kind of citizenship that is bequeathed to us by tradition of Hobbes to Locke",
      "take a different tack on the kind of problem that citizenship in Islam presents. Now, the traditional story is that Muslims are emerged in Arabia as a super tribe",
      "of guidance. The Quran establishes the mission of this community and that mission is that you are the best of communities raised for mankind, brought forth for mankind meaning your missionary community it would make sense if any law that comes out of that commandment privileges those who believe in",
      "take part of that mission and those who reject it are treated differently. Once Islamic legal order gets established one finds something very interesting which is the Quranic, what we may call Quranic realism, which is that on the one hand a Quran claims to absolute truth",
      "Quran says something very strange and very odd that seems almost out of character for a claim, for the text in scripture that is so absolutely self-assured which is that there is no coercion in religion. That is if the Quran knows and is so adamant",
      "must believe that Heaven and hell their eternal success depends on believing in this message Then why give any quarter to those who don't believe? yet you find in the legal order of Islam a Different ethos than what you want. You would find if you will in the theological ethos, the theology is there's one accident truth and People believe when people don't really I mean you can talk about realistic Theologies but that",
      "But that's on the whole, that's a relatively recent development. Supercessionism seems to be the dominant ethos in the Quran but the legal order seems to give quarter, seems to say well it is kind of like an example would be you have sort of imagine a kindergarten where in a building",
      "children hey there's a building is on fire and everybody and the children don't pay attention what is your ethical responsibility then if you proceed just from the theological imperative you must force them to convert otherwise going to hell but the legal order the legal or legal command starting with the commandments of the Quran and many others is that",
      "a point i want to make that i think that a distinction that we often don't make between the quranic theological order and the legal order and that the legal border proceeds in a slightly different direction in tension if you will or logical tension with the qurani theological order now if you go uh with this the the theological narrative which i think is certainly remains",
      "overshadows and guides the theological order, which is that this community",
      "and it has its laws, what role do others have in it? You find that the laws of dhimma or protection of non-Muslim peoples we shouldn't call them minorities by the way. Dhimmis were not minority for a very long time but rather non-muslim people under Muslim rule and they were given certain rights",
      "is of course in a sense because they don't belong to the theological mission should they have legal rights or not. And, because my time is running out I'll simply end with this general direction which is that even though that theological order remains, I think, in effect but Islamic legal order allows starting with very Quranic foundations and",
      "historical contingencies one finds that there are there's Quranic imperatives to make exceptions to what would seem to be a theological imperative thank you very much"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Dr_ Ovamir Anjum - Community Talk _4_27_24__hUpmClIWoGE&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750606769.opus",
    "text": [
      "So yesterday I mentioned the unique and transformative place that the Muslim community today in America is. We have been maligned, we have been attacked but at the same time we are in an exceptionally historic place",
      "place. We are a small community and we're not, compared to some of the more established communities, we're now the most resourceful compared say to the Jews for instance, the Jewish community or the more-established white community but because our deen",
      "fact that we have community and family values, that the rest of the country and the rest",
      "also have them. Some of the people who come from, say Latin America have some of them but what makes Muslim communities especially powerful when this strong community comes together with these strong values and the deen of Islam, the universal part of the",
      "Let me remind ourselves of something that I often think the Muslims forget. And then we'll open up to Q&A, inshallah. We live... This is 2024. If you go back 100 years, 1900s, and look at the population of the world, 1910 specifically,",
      "time before the First World War. This was a time in which Muslims were all colonized, nearly all colonize. The people who are not colonized I'm talking 19 what? 1010. Ottomans those",
      "Those who were not colonized, were either a small portion in Turkey. Right? What is present-day Turkey. At that time there was no such thing as Turkey Anatolia. They were mentally dying to become like the West, like the elites in Istanbul and they were many people resisting no doubt but Muslims",
      "and vulnerable position, and not only that they did not have the basic skills for the modern world. They did not the basic skill for the world. In South Asia Muslims were struggling and in South Asian Muslim population was more than twice the population of all of the Arabs and Ottomans put together so then",
      "In terms of number, Muslims in South Asia are much bigger. But they had been colonized for longer because the British East India Company got there in 1757. That's when they made their first move and then 1857 they formally colonized India. Until then, India had been ruled by Muslims for 700 years.",
      "So it was a major shock for Muslims. So that's one major population of Muslims. The other major population was in the Ottoman Empire and the Ottoman empire had been reduced to something like 10% of its original size, and if you look at the total global population at this time before the first world war,",
      "the Islamists controlled what percentage of Muslim population? Any guesses? 10 to 15 percent. Which means that majority of Muslims were living as colonized by the British, British in South East Asia, which is Indonesia right, Malaysia, that region they were colonized",
      "and then you had the Middle East that was now colonized by Egypt or the French. Algeria was soon to be colonized, and Libya was soon colonized. Morocco was not formally colonized but effectively it was under the power of the French",
      "and other European powers. So, Muslims were extremely weak compared to today. Muslims were so much so that in South India, sorry, in India, South Asia they were looking for somebody a lawyer or somebody who could talk English",
      "English, like the British people to become their leader. That's why they imported somebody by the name of Muhammad Ali Jinnah from Britain who was a student there. This gives you a sense that Muslims lived in a world that for a thousand years they believed this was the most powerful world. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala had blessed them. They had all the power and so they never thought",
      "people's languages, other people's civilization and now they found themselves in the 1800s and early 1900s when they had all the disadvantages in the world. They did not have sciences. Those sciences were going on elsewhere. Their own books! Islamic civilization had produced more books than any other civilization before by ten times",
      "All of those books or the vast majority of those had been taken to Europe and were being put in museums, or they were being circulated among elites, lords, dukes as prizes. So this was the situation 100 years ago. Now, the number of people, number of Muslims in the world",
      "What is the number today? Let's start with the easy question. Was that... So what's the total number of Muslims in the world today? Close to, people say 2 billion, 1.8 to 2 billion. 1.7 billion. It's probably a more accurate number at this point but it's growing. So imagine about 2 billion people right?",
      "right? This is a big rounding up, let's round that up. Out of 8 billion people in the world. At that time there was a census done in 1910. Guess how many Muslims did you have? The total population of the world was 2 billion at that time and the number of Muslims was... Was that 750 what?",
      "750 what? 750 million. 200 million, who said that? Yes it was 200 million. Two hundred million out of two billion, what is that percentage? Ten percent right? What's the percentage today? So it's about 25% and",
      "and it's going up, and it is projected to be 30%. It's going from 1 tenth. It was 10% It's gone already from 10% to 25%.",
      "The absolute number has gone from 200 million to almost 2 billion, so 10 times. And now look at the resources Muslims have. Muslims know all the European languages, right? All Western languages, Eastern languages and any other languages, computer science languages, engineering language,",
      "Have you not seen Artugral? Okay, you gotta wait for your turn. Okay. Let other people talk too. So is there any field that you can say this is the field in which there are no Muslims? There isn't a field today.",
      "a specialized field, there isn't a body of knowledge that Muslims do not have comfortable access to. When it comes to money resources at that time Muslims did not have capital and the resources the Muslims had access to were you know physically Muslims",
      "few people could be found outside, right? That's not the case anymore. So the world situation has changed dramatically for Muslims despite the fact that there are all kinds of aggressive agendas against Islam, right but it's nothing compared to",
      "150 years ago, 100 years ago. And even 70, 80 years ago Even 50 years ago But that has been changing One of the major changes that has happened is of course the demographic success Muslims have increased in number both in absolute and relative terms right",
      "Well, a hundred years ago, a lot of people were talking about poverty and usually in poverty people tend to grieve for having their children.",
      "that they do not have resources, they tend to reproduce more. However historically wealth and population are correlated so for example the majority of people you had in the world were in India and China why because those were the richest lands because they could produce agricultural products",
      "in the pre-modern world, but it became true after modern medicine became available and the number of people began to increase. So it's kind of a complicated relationship. But Muslims were able to reproduce, have large families, and continue to have families. Whereas wherever",
      "as whatever modernity went and people became modernized, and lost their family values the fertility went down. Today you do not have replacement rate in most modern societies. In fact, in all modern societies you are below replacement rate which means that if things continue this way then economy is likely to",
      "to suffer because you will not have labor and they are importing people from other places. Yes, sir? That is true. So that is one of the biggest challenges, biggest threats what they call browning of America.",
      "Yes, yes sister. Absolutely. So you put if you will more concisely what I'm trying to get at which is that in our deen family is important. Zina is haram and the Prophet says that he loves",
      "He loves for you to have children. He loves children and Allah Ta'ala teaches us in the Quran honoring of parents which is a very central value because if you don't do that then people lose motivation to have",
      "honor my parents, my children are not going to honor and respect me. And it's not worth it for me to have children. So if you want to see whether family is strong, the strongest indicator of that is respect for parents. China is an example of a society where you had very strong respect for",
      "self-destructed their tradition through communism, through a modern ideology. And India you have a similar situation where there is great respect for ancestors, respect for parents but that's and so India actually remains one of the reasons why India remains",
      "India remains a strong, despite its poverty and all of the problems one of the reasons why it remains a force Indian Americans remain a strong force but Hindus included. And India is becoming a strong economic power because despite their problems are many they're very unequal society",
      "one of the most if you will merciless society and most unequal society in the world despite that they're able to economically punch above their weight so all this to say that in islam in islām you have a an enormous gift for us",
      "times what we were in absolute numbers and you've gone by 15% from 10 to 25 percent of the world population now often people talk to me about revival of Islam in history and whether we are doing well or not and often people feel that there is nothing but bad news",
      "the first rapid expansion was right after the Prophet and then in the Abbasid period, and then after the Mongol period. Those are like the two or three waves of expansion of Islam. And then the strongest wave expansion",
      "after the first one because first one you're going from zero to uh you know whatever number you have so that's a very uh that's so if you set that one aside this is the greatest way of expansion of Islam in history that we are living today and in terms of resources and wealth and skills of Muslims we have never had this much diversity and wealth",
      "The only thing that comes close to that is the height of the Abbasid period when Muslims were among the richest people in the world, but that's wealth and relative so we're not comparing to that. That was one of the richest points in human history as well per capita wealth But in terms of our access to different parts of the world and different languages and access to",
      "resourceful as today. And when and how does this happen? There are a number of factors at play, I gave you the most important factor. The most important is family values and deen because family values alone cannot be protected it's the deen that matters sometimes the two contradict and dee has to win but it is so important in Islam",
      "Wa abudullaha wa la tushrikubihi shay'in, wa bilwalidaini ihsana",
      "which is very interesting and counterintuitive. Instead of saying that forget about these pagan parents who are teaching you polytheism, Allah says, وَبِالْوَالِدَيْنِ احْسَانًا And Allah says if they ask you to worship anyone but Allah then do not follow them. But you still have to be good to them in this dunya. It's counterintuitive. If it was not from Allah SWT",
      "Allah, anybody who's designing a movement would have said forget about the old generation. This generation gap that we are seeing today in America and elsewhere, this would've been just as bad or worse in Mecca. Now think about Medina, same thing. Medina Muslims come and Prophet does brothers and sisters, brothers right between the Muhajirin and the Ansar become brothers",
      "And then Allah says in Surah Al-Ahzab, وَأُولُو الْأَرْحَامِ بَعْدُهُمْ أَوْلَىٰ بِبَعضٍ فِي كِتَابِ اللَّهِ That brotherhood system that the Prophet ﷺ created, it is limited in the Qur'an. That they are not going to inherit from each other.",
      "to keep them, even though this was a brotherhood of faith. Muslims could have become a brother hood, as a band of warriors that are connected by nothing but faith, nothing but Iman. Allah SWT cancels that system. You have to worry about your parents, your cousins, your clan to which you belong. Even though they're going to put negative pressure on you sometimes.",
      "فهذا من خلال التصميم الذي أعطى الله سبحانه وتعالى لنا دين شريعة مفيدة في كل مرات وفي كل مكان ولم يكن تسوية إذا كنت عامل الإسلام ستنظر إلى هذا كمركب لأنه لو كانوا قد أعضوا على إنساناً، فقد تصممون المجتمع للأحياء الأولى ولكن الله سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَى تصنيع المجسم لكل مرة وكل مكان",
      "And in that, respect for parents, love for parents and cousins is so important which is why our family system remains strong. And that's why I am really worried about our young generation in America as we are being assimilated. Young men and women do not want to get married. There is an epidemic that young men and",
      "They do not want to get married. They are straying from the Sunnah of 1400 years that has kept us strong When our rulers lost wars, militaries, right? We lost in technology, we lost in everything There's one thing that kept us going through the centuries of colonialism That was the strength of her families In fact if I could go one step further and say I grew up in Saudi Arabia One of the reasons why the Saudis proved so weak",
      "in front of Americanization is because their family system was destroyed by their Filipino and non-Muslim nannies that were being brought from outside, and their family systems are weak. And their generational gap is very strong. Whereas if you look at Muslims who lived under the British and French, so for example Muslims in Egypt or India they had much stronger",
      "stronger family ties, they developed immunity against westernization. And that allowed them to live and persist under conditions that were much worse. Saudis are doing it to themselves whereas in South Asia and Egypt and many of these countries where all of them are colonized, they could not do that to us because they could penetrate through our strongest defense system.",
      "The same thing applies to Palestinians and Israelis. The Palestinians and the Israelis hate that. They absolutely despise, they call them vermin, that these people reproduce and so on but this is because these are human beings who can sacrifice for others. What does family require? Sacrifice. What",
      "requires saying that instead of enjoying my own time and my own body for 30 more years, I'm going to stop that. And now I'm gonna share my time in my body with the next generation. That is sacrifice. We don't think of it in terms of that because alhamdulillah we have better terms to think of but if you turn in biological terms, that's what it is. It is a sacrifice that at 20,",
      "that I can have, all the wealth that I could enjoy and I'm going to have these little critters that are going to take away all of that time. And time and money from me right? For the rest of my life. That sacrifice now people are saying including among Muslims because we're becoming ideologically westernized We want to enjoy the same things",
      "But that would be the end of our race if everybody went that route. So, that's why is the second commandment after already in Mecca and then it's repeated in Medina. So that's the beauty of our deen and our sharia",
      "And so with that, inshallah, set up, I wanted to give more depth to what I said. That we as Muslims have to share to humanity and to the West what nobody else has. And we are punching much above our weight despite being the targets. So that's what I wanted",
      "say inshallah open with and then I'll open for any Q&A inshAllah that you have from what I said yesterday or today yes brother",
      "So the question is, beyond the romantic idea of the Khilafah and generalizations, are there serious studies of how it would look like? It's a very good question. That's what we're working on at omatics.org so you have, Alhamdulillah, asked just the right question.",
      "So I would say we don't have a lot of literature published on this yet. It's in the works, not to my satisfaction yet. However yes there is a lot more thinking that's going on now it's happening everywhere they're major Muslim centered populations particularly saying if you go to Istanbul and elsewhere you have a number of centers of research Arabic",
      "But particularly every Muslim majority or Muslim minority in the West, wherever there is freedom, you find that there are new centers popping up. So Omatics is one. You have at least four that I know of, four or five in Istanbul. And then you have some elsewhere as well in the UK and elsewhere. So the question of how any kind of unification would look like",
      "There are multiple theories and multiple pathways that are being explored. One, what I consider to be a definitive prerequisite, and that's economic integration. So whatever political integration is... Now I'm talking a little bit of theory and I don't want to... I'll make it short inshallah and we can take later if there are more questions about it. Political integration means that people actually come together in their administration",
      "they are administration and governance. And that is ultimately necessary because based on the studies that we have done, federations are not very stable. Total state mergers are much more stable. Like European Union is not as stable as United States of America for instance. So that seems to be true across the board.",
      "of United Arab Republic, Egypt, Syria and briefly Iraq. But this is not true elsewhere as well so that's why there's a strong case to be made that you need a merger but actually some people are studying mergers within... Some people are interested in looking at these multinational mergers",
      "complex systems to merge. And the other path that I just mentioned is economic regional integration. Currently, and I may have said this earlier, what percentage of trade of Muslim countries there are 50 plus Muslim countries, Muslim majority countries, what percent of their trade is with each other? I know I said it to some people earlier so",
      "earlier so. 3% of their trade is with each other, 97 percent of their tree is usually with colonizing or they're former colonizers or with great powers in the world in which they are in deficit because they are exporting raw materials as well as you know",
      "and they are buying products. And sometimes it's even worse, as in the case of Egypt your weed comes from outside. The breadbasket of the world that historically produced and fed all the people around is now dependent for its wheat on outsiders. You could not think of a worse nightmare for any kind of regional independence.",
      "that's the first step and not everything can be changed because obviously governments have investments in this but there is what we are studying for instance uh is how what's the",
      "the wealth today is based in the West which means Western Muslim communities have enormous power. How can we change that? So these kinds of things are being studied.",
      "And even that vision has been lost over time in the last century. So one of the things I really recommend people to do, to invest more in reading history is because things are not the same even though they look like they're always the same, they're not the",
      "same, we are where we were. That's not true that's what I tried to show right? So what is changing and how do you read these big changes and then systematically apply pressure and apply redirection where it's needed? That's what you talk about as I completely that's why we need",
      "of a large number of global community, large number people you realize the different opportunities and different dynamics which I can only very briefly talk about right now. The Jews were persecuted in Europe in the West for nearly 2,000 years as modernity arrived",
      "arrived in Europe a little earlier and that empowered Europeans to colonize the rest of the world, Jews who have been a persecuted minority living within Europe began to think that we can use first of all we want to become modernized and when they realized after Jews became modernized that they are still hated. In fact they're hated now in new ways",
      "And as they are realizing this in the 19th century, 18th century and 19th centuries. They are also absorbing the colonial mindset themselves. So what they begin to think is that we cannot live in Europe. We have to plan to colonize one of these other regions and Palestine because it's in their books",
      "on it, but they had other options as well. Well-known Rwanda, elsewhere they could have gone. These were secular atheist Jews, but the begin to plan. They have a vision. Not all of them planned. If you look at their plans none of it worked out, but there was a vision and that vision they kept at and in itself that vision would not have succeeded if not for the First World War and the Second World War",
      "the plan didn't work out, their vision worked out. Now I'm not saying that they are our role models because in many ways they were a colonial... They embraced British and French colonial mindset. They thought of Palestinians and other people as subhuman, that they could just be eliminated just the same way Europe is eliminating us.",
      "But there is something there to learn. Now if you learn more carefully the history, you will realize of course there are similarities and differences. Our...and like in anything, if you're planning a company or planning a business, if your planning construction, you look at similarities and difference as opportunities and threats. We have some opportunities available that are unprecedented which are",
      "We need to have Islam in our lives, not just private but also in our actual lives.",
      "to them about talking to her about her life in Egypt. She said she got married in the 40s and she was showing her wedding pictures to me in the forties, and her husband who had died at that time Allah has mercy on him, was a Sheikh of Qusool al-Sharia in Al Azhar, but she was not wearing hijab in her wedding picture so I asked",
      "and there is a belly dancer with almost no clothes on. I said, this is the 40s Egypt how is that possible? And this is The Wedding of Shaykh al-Azhar. And see she told me, that is what we did if you wanted to be respected.",
      "hurt him, it killed him to have a photographer take my picture. But he had to do it. So he told the photographer when you're taking the picture of my bride without hijab, do not look at her just take a picture and look somewhere else. These were the contradictions of the world that had just come out of colonialism.",
      "That is where Sahwa changed. When you go to Egypt in the 80s and especially then in the 90s, almost every Muslim woman is wearing hijab. And this is happening across the world at a different pace everywhere. It's happening in the rest of the Arab world, of course. The Gulf was much more conservative and now it's becoming westernized. In South Asia, to give you an example, India and Pakistan",
      "Again, another example. Just do you understand what's happening in the Muslim world? And how effort matters. How sahwa and revival matters. In Bangladesh, or Bengal at the time, which is one of the greatest populations of Muslims in India, there is in the 18th century and then 19th century a farazi movement. Anybody guess",
      "And the people who prayed five times a day were mullahs. So, this was the Muslim world. Today, this is very, very different. And I can go on and on. If you say what's happening with the Sahaba or Ihyaa or Tahreek Islami or they call it Tahreek Islamic, Harakat Islamia in Arabic but it's happening everywhere",
      "it's happening everywhere, that's what's happening. So alhamdulillah, what people do the effort people make is changing the world. Yes sister?",
      "Yeah, so both very good points. No no no, what I'm trying to give you is that these are waves and these are trends. And it is true that in Arab countries for example",
      "you are having some of the similar problems with replacement rate or that's not the case in some other places. But, and divorce rate is higher, that is true. Divorce rate goes up whenever there is increase in women education, women health and women resources. So these are larger phenomenon we have studied for example",
      "medieval Damascus, the studies that we have show that there were moments where divorce rate was very high. All I'm saying is that this is not if you're seeing a dip it doesn't mean it's the end of the world. We have seen many dips before and second try not to focus your attention",
      "For example, if you're looking at Egypt I can understand it's depressing. But Turkey is different Pakistan is different Malaysia is different Indonesia is different Western Muslim communities are Different places are going through different movements So for example we were really depressed at a point that in the United States Muslim community was vast majority were pro LGBT just 10 years ago",
      "Most people were saying we have no problem with LGBT. Whereas at the same time, when you surveyed UK Muslims, 95% of UK Muslims were against that and what now happened is that the wave turned even in the United States and the United State Muslim community, the rate is actually very different now. So this is not to say that the Arab Spring was not a heartbreak",
      "There was not a heartbreak, but simply to say that these are not necessarily permanent trends. There are different locales that have their own dynamics in general with the rise of education and modernity you're going to see increased turbulence in families. This was true actually in this Medina Rasulullah because there were wars",
      "wars and migrations, you had very high divorce rate. But when things became settled in the century after for Muslims, that changed. So whenever there is migration, there is war, and there are major social changes, divorce rates tend to go up. Yes, sister? Go ahead.",
      "separation of the wealth classes, even amongst most of the countries. Where it may be very difficult in some situations to actually get married and have families because people can't afford it because the cost of living has gone up without actually having an increase in wealth for the middle class. The rich are getting richer and more in their interest to stay rich and not share that wealth. So coming back to the theme",
      "because women are being more proactive about their rights as Muslim women who are married and when they're not getting what they need, they're speaking up and they're getting divorced. They're not staying in conflict situations. So how do we as a community other than you know I think there needs to be a bigger action when it comes to the implication of not having means",
      "it's actually causing a lot of suffering throughout, not just our families but in our worldwide community. Absolutely. So everything that you said I agree with. It's deen but Rasulullah says I'm going to end with this because I realize our time is up isn't it? How much time do we have? Ten more minutes? Okay. Let me just respond to her and then I'll come back to you.",
      "come back to you. Rasulullah says that Iman is seventy some branches. The highest branch of Iman",
      "Something as simple as simply cleaning the way for people to walk on or parking your car correctly so that it's not inconvenient for people. That's part of deen, that's part Iman. So our task is always to know which part of Deen is missing and it helps to know ourselves, to know the community, to talk to various parts of the community",
      "I can't talk about all of the world's problems. I do believe that let's not overemphasize deen or lack of deen, but rather focus on which part of deem is weak because you're right if women are feeling that they have opportunities outside the Muslim community and within the Muslim Community they are necessarily restricted and then sometimes unnecessarily restricted",
      "necessarily restricted and unnecessarily. Necessarily meaning by the requirement of deen and community, we are restricted. And if you do not want restrictions on your lifestyle, the Muslim community in the way of Islam is going to look to you restricted at first. And that's a big attraction out there. In the academy, my field, many young women for instance who come into the academy find",
      "Why do they love them? You can get jobs easy. Why? Because these old white men see that this is the way to get to the Muslim community. These women are not going to get leadership or important positions, or even decent spaces in their mosques but when they go and embrace feminism and abortion and LGBT on campuses",
      "And if I'm a woman, I'm going to say, look, I am going to look for another path. Right? So that's the problem. It is a problem in too many masjids. But if I am goign to go through the route of pleasing those white men, the rest of my life is going to be pleasing those White Men. I am just going to become a feminist just to please those White men. That's the route and then I am invited to masjid, I will be invited to important places, I may die alone",
      "alone. But that's the long term. In other words, fixing our communities, fixing of families is difficult at first and for women who are qualified and who have love for Islam, love for deen, Muslim communities are turning them off and that is a big loss for us. So those are structural problems we need to address.",
      "But at the same time, we're talking about Muslim communities, Muslim countries. The problem is political. Our as minorities, we do not have the power to decide. We live by the conditions created by it. So for example here you are here because of Intel. You were created by socioeconomic.",
      "This community is created by socio-economic conditions. We cannot control them. But the Muslim, you know nearly 2 billion Muslims are living in circumstances where these horrible conditions where they cannot live right? They cannot get married until as sister said absolutely if you're not getting married until late because you do not have housing, you do",
      "and children and everything. But those are political problems. Here we have certain opportunities, but these are always going to be limited. It's like you're living in Mecca, right? And the Rasulullah ﷺ didn't just say that I'm going to when I mean be living in Makkah as in the Prophet's Meccan period. The Prophet ﷺ is looking for sovereignty. He's looking to go out of there so he can create a community and live by the Sharia.",
      "And so we have to sort of keep those two things in mind. You have to make da'wah here, you have to do your best here but understand that you cannot apply full sharia without having some political sovereignty. Yes brother?",
      "Okay, so I completely agree that you have to worry about your children. But allow me to respect",
      "Allow me to respectfully disagree about the zero-sum scenario you created. The zero sum is, you can only win one or the other. As if Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and he's making da'wah. That's what I'm trying to create the picture is that Rasulallah Sallallaahu Alaihim is making daahwa in Makkah Is he saying let me not worry about where I might protect the community? He's doing both! And that's the way of Islam",
      "It's not everybody's job, but if you are only worried about small steps, baby steps, you are good and healthy if you have good leadership. But if that same leadership is going to exploit you, if you do not have the big picture, you",
      "to be exploited because all you're worried about is teaching my children the Quran, right? Which is great. Necessary. But these same children could be serving the military generals shooting at innocent people while telling them that yeah, the Quran Allah tells you to do it. Why? Because they have the Quran but they don't have the picture of the Ummah. So you cannot... Basically it's not a zero-sum game. You have",
      "The same thing today, for example, what we're seeing on campuses. If these young men and women said let me do my engineering, let me be a really good engineer even if that means that I'm participating in a genocide. No! These people said you know what? I have to worry about my job and my grades and whatnot but when my country is committing genocide",
      "is getting out of doing both. And as human beings, we are not sheep. We're not mice. We are not rabbits. We have the ability to envision in a way that other animals don't. When human beings find themselves in a situation where they cannot dream",
      "If you try to live without dreams, you will live in a nightmare forever. Because somebody else will come and use you and exploit you. So you have to have your own dreams. So that's all I'll say there inshallah. And this young man is very eager so I have to take his one last question.",
      "That's a very good question and can I just answer that question because I think it is really brilliant question. And you're absolutely correct, that 1.8 billion Muslims are not going to follow any single vision nor is the case they all going to pray and fast. They're always going to be bad apples right? But the good thing if you look at history or you look",
      "you do not have to have 100% perfect individuals for there to be a good community or a good polity, a good society. Right? So usually if you are in a situation where you do",
      "So for example, in the time of the Sahaba. Just to give you an example. Something to think with. How many of the sahaba of the Prophet ﷺ? Actually how many sahaba were there? Who can tell me? Was that? Okay very good question. So in the 10 years of Medina or Mecca. How may sahaba are there in Mecca? So yeah okay so these numbers are different.",
      "ومع ذلك يوجد سبعة منهم تتبع المنافق والسبعة تستمر مع النبي عليه السلام",
      "the conquest came and the number exploded. How many Sahaba did you have? 1,400. Hudaybiyah, 1,000. Followed the Prophet ﷺ. Some people say 1,500 but 1,100 that's the number that the ulama considered to be the golden number of the Sahaba because Allah says about them in the Quran in Surat Al-Fath, عَلِمُ اللَّهُ مَا فِي قُلُوبِهِمْ Allah knew what is in their hearts and Allah was pleased with what was in their",
      "in their hearts. Anyway, long story short of these how many people memorized the Quran? How many Sahaba had memorized the Qur'an in the lifetime of Prophet? Not later but in the life time of Prophet in Medina? 25 The vanguard of people who have",
      "and that's all there was at this time. Quran was the vision, Quran was knowledge, it was nothing else. It is 25. So you do not need... The Prophet didn't say that every one of the 1400 have to memorize the Quran before I do anything. We have to understand how these dynamics work. We tend to fall into this fallacies what I call the sequentialist fallacy",
      "things in which everybody first must become perfect and then I can think about a good community, and then i can think of a good polity and a good society and good ummah. That's not how it works. There will never be a point where there are no family problems. There is never a point when husband and wife are not going to fight or people in the community are not",
      "With that, I know there are lots of really good questions. And I'm learning tremendously from you all but I have to inshallah wrap it up as well so we ask Allah SWT to benefit us from what He has taught us and teach us which is a benefit to us We ask Allah to enlighten our hearts and minds",
      "in the ummah of His beloved Muhammad and the guidance of his beloved Prophet to our hearts. And may Allah give love and harmony in our communities, in our families. We will never be perfect but Allah forgives and overlooks. He is",
      "الأرض ويوم العرض عليك اللهم أنسر الإسلام والمسلمين يا رب العالمين وآخر دعوانا أن الحمد لله ربنا"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Dr_ Ovamir Anjum_s message to Al-Madinah CC Toledo_c2CqQGftDjc&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750591319.opus",
    "text": [
      "Okay, Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullah. I am very excited to be part of the Medina community. I think this is a major contribution to the community. Many families that I know in the community including myself we feel there is a lot more valuable and high quality activities for all members of the family that this community center is providing",
      "I know myself and all of my family members highly value it. May Allah bless and grow this activity. Thank you."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Ep_ 55 - Friday Night Live with Dr_ Ovamir Anjum __mRDRIe2UMP4&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750599225.opus",
    "text": [
      "As-salāmu ʿalaykum wa-rahmatullahi wa-barakātuh. Ahlan wa sahlan bikum. Welcome everyone to another session of our Friday Night Live program. Like always, it is an honor to be with you all on Friday night and making this program what it is. And continuing it is through your support, your du'as,",
      "regardless if it's live or later on may Allah make these programs a means of our increasing our knowledge, increasing our Iman increasing our brotherhood and sisterhood and also bringing us closer towards Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala every week the goal is to somehow rejuvenate our Imaan inspire us again through having different discussions hearing different lectures rather than just hearing a lecture",
      "The goal is that inshaAllah, that information can lead to some transformation to some extent. And we come back on every Friday and you all join us. May Allah reward you all. And hopefully this can continue happening. As you're joining, please say Assalamualaikum. And let us know that, you know, you can hear us and see us and all is good and all Is clear. Alhamdulillah. Once again, I think I'll be alone today. Not alone, of course, you",
      "with me so you won't just have me the entire time. I won't bore you all but Shaykh Abdullah will not be joining as a host, he's still traveling inshaAllah he'll be back very soon but we have a beautiful program planned today one of the topics that a lot of us listen to talk about want to learn more about during the month of Muharram and during the specific days",
      "In the situation that took place with Hussain and his blessed family The family of the Prophet ﷺ So we've spoken about Muharram as a month We've spoken Ashura as a day of fasting But we haven't gotten the chance to dive into the historical aspect Of the incident of Karbala in all these surrounding elements Obviously one session will not do what it deserves",
      "that, but it will at least touch upon the main topics that a lot of us wish to learn about, hear about and hopefully it can give us more perspective on why this took place how it took place. Of course, a lot times with these discussions we leave with more questions than answers so hopefully we'll leave with some more answers. We have an expert with us today Dr Anjung from Toledo Ohio not too far from us in Michigan before that I would like to bring on one of my dear friends who I have",
      "I've been meeting virtually the last two years. I've grown fond of him, his work, his voice, his character, his personality and inshaAllah we'll continue to bring him on. And I'm referring to none other than my friend brother Akhil Fareed. Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh. Waalaikumsalam warahmatoollahi wbarakatuh. How are you? Alhamdulillah I'm fine. How about you? 6am in the morning? 6.30 am now? Yes, 6.40.",
      "Alhamdulillah. May Allah reward you for staying up after Fajr. It's a Saturday, right? Not Friday. Yep, it's Saturday here. So do you have... Every time you come join and people enjoy it, I enjoy it. I know my mother enjoys it. Alhamdullilah. That's good. How is the Delta variant COVID anything happening in Pakistan or are things relaxed? The waves are coming and going.",
      "coming and going but overall it's fine. It's relaxed. Alhamdulillah. Everybody is getting vaccinated as well. I think like millions of people have got vaccinated already. So, inshallah. This vaccine is accessible to everyone pretty much now. Yup. Everyone for free here by the government. Okay that's great. Alhumdulillah protect you all and you are in where Islamabad Lahore? Where? Yep. Islamabad. The capital capital city. Yes. Protect you all InshaAllah.",
      "What do you what do you have in store for us today? What are you gonna start with? Okay, I'm going to start this uh with it's a of uh Dr. So it's basically the person is telling God that wherever I see I see you so it's about our love to our creator. You could say.",
      "Jaha dekhun tujhe dekh un, main chah hun bas tujh e cha hun.",
      "tu na ho toh mai mar jaun jaha dekhoon tuje dekhoon mai chahoon bas tujhe chaahoon",
      "I don't say it. Now, in me, I don' t live anymore. You have descended into my soul. You are the one who has come down from the dead.",
      "SubhanAllah. Takbir, Allahu Akbar. What a beautiful kalam. What an amazing poem by Alhamdulillah and sung so beautifully by you Aqibai. Honestly this is my first time hearing it from you. I don't think you've... Have you read this before as well? No. I'm planning to. InshaAllah. Please do.",
      "Please do. Again, for the audience, alhamdulillah everyone knows that every Friday we try to bring different artists on, different languages. Today we have Urdu but I'm pretty sure even people who didn't understand it still enjoyed it because of your tone and rhythm. And a lot of times sometimes you don't need to understand what's being said. We can just put ourselves in lock ourselves in and hopefully just benefit from the rhythm, the tone and I'll try to summarize it where",
      "the poet is talking about wherever I look, Ya Allah, I see you. You are... It's not talking about the physical sense. We know that لا تدرك الأبصار ويدرك الابصار That no one can... No eyesight in this world can encapsulate Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala and hence one of the biggest and most enjoyable luxuries of the Akhirah right? In Jannah is to finally see Allah Subchanahu Wa ta'ala هَذَا الجزاءُ الإحسانِ إلاَّ الإحْسَانِ لِلَّذِينَ أَحْثَنُوا الْحُسْنَةُ",
      "الْحُسْنَةِ وَزِيَادَةٍ People will actually be able to see Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Allah will say to the people of Jannah, after entering into Jannah do you have any other desire need or want? Like this is after getting into Janna. Imagine like we got our fruits, you got your families, you have your siblings and everyone's together and Allah says do you want anything else? So the response would be Ya Rabb, نجوتنا من النار ودخلتنا الجنة You've freed us from Jahannam and you've given us entrance into Jannah",
      "to Jannah, you've reunited us with our loved ones and family members I don't think there's anything else You can give us the curtains will be lifted and it'll be removed and at that moment the people of Jannah will be able to witness the beauty of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala and at this moment we will say Allah there is nothing else that We want in Jannah more than Your view there is nothng else as enjoyable anymore so in this world we can but inshaAllah",
      "we can't but inshaAllah in the akhirah we will. But the idea is that I find you Ya Allah, in everything. I find You in the hymning of the birds, I find Your in the sounds of the waves, I found You in beauty of the moon, I finds You in everything around me.\" And the poet says, وَفِي كُلِّ شَيْءٍ لَّهُ آيَةً تَدْلُو عَلَىٰ أَنَّهْ وَاحِدٌ Then everything in this world and every creation there's a sign that denotes that Allah is there, Allah is present. Obviously every line has its own summary",
      "has its own summary, but this is just a crux of what's being said. Akhirat, please add if there's anything else that you want to add for the audience to know what this poem is saying. Yeah, I think you've added enough. So the main concept is that wherever I see that maybe you could say that I see your signs. We can translate I see you into this. The mountains, the sky, everything is so beautiful. So how beautiful would be the creator of all these things?",
      "in store for us anything else they're gonna pull out of your pocket mashallah beautiful poems yep i can okay so it's uh",
      "of who is loving us Allah is loving Us a reminder that what truly matters is what Allah thinks of us before anything else was created Allah was there and after everything will be destroyed",
      "of Allah. And one day that Divine Presence will become a pure reality for us believers where Allah says, إِنَّ الْمُتَّقِينَ فِي جَنَّاتٍ وَنَهَرٍ The Believers the people of Taqwa will be in these gardens and they'll be enjoying next to these rivers. في مَقَعَةٍ صدقٍ عِندَ مَلِكٍ مُخْتَذِرٍ In the presence of the greatest King of the world and we'll be sitting with Him",
      "with him. The poem reminds me of the reality that we will also leave and only one that remains is Allah before there were stars, and the moon, and mountains in the creation that we're so in awe of it was only one Allah and everything comes back to Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala and wala ya'udhu hu hafidhuhumma the entire creation of this world depends upon Allah and this is the definition of Allahu Samad Allah is samad and we are all dependent but I keep reminding us",
      "May Allah reward you for reminding us of these feelings. One is to remind us of information, one is to reminds us of feelings and also these feelings are important.",
      "more for us today. which we have it's a.",
      "منور کر دیا جس نے فضا وہ رہنما دیکھوں تمنائے دل رسول اللہ تمنیے در حبیب اللہ بلندی کا نظارہ گمبد خزرا کی بستی میں",
      "دل حبیب اللہ قدم باہر مدینے سے تصور میں مدينہ ہے الہی یا الہ ہی عظمتوں کی انتہا دیکھو وہ شان خلق دو عالم درو دن پر سلام ان پر میرے مولا یہ موقع دے",
      "امبیاء دیکھوں تمنا اے دل رسول اللہ تمنا",
      "Very heavy words for people that understood",
      "Hopefully you enjoyed it. For those that didn't, I've been hoping and wishing for oh so long that I can finally come and visit you Ya Rasulullah. Just want to come visit you in your resting place and be in the presence of where you are laid to rest. For oh so",
      "We actually want to finally see you and embrace you. And enjoy your beauty. A beauty such as no eye has ever seen. Poet says, Oh Muhammad ﷺ, But no eye can ever see the beauty similar",
      "similar to the beauty of the Prophet ﷺ. No mother can ever give birth to such a beautiful child. خُلِقْتَ مُبَرَّأً مِّن كُلِّ عَيْمٍ Created free from all defects. كَأَنَّكِ قَدْ خُलِق்تَكَ مَا تَشَاءُ As if you were made the way you desire to be. لَوْ لَمْ تَكُنْ لَّهُ آيَةٌ مُّبَيِّنَةٍ لَكάνَ مانظوره يَأْتِيكَ بِالْخَضَرِ عبد الله بن رواحى says, رضي الله عنه لَا وَلَم تَکُن لَهُ اٰيَتٌ مَبَیِّنةٌ صلى الله عليه وسلم",
      "O Prophet of Allah, if you had no miracles to show us No Qur'an to read to us No words of Hadith To recite upon us Rather you sat in one place your entire life لَكَانَ مَنْظُرُهُ يَأْتِيكَ بِالْخَبْرِ Your sight would be enough for us to believe in Allah That's all we need So inshallah We're able to go back to Madina Munawwara One of our dear friends is there I think it's opened up For certain countries",
      "countries and they're sending us pictures and videos, never have I been envious in a good way of anyone similar to this manner. I wish we were able to go inshaAllah Allah accepts us it's in the hands of Allah to accept us to come to the blessed lands of Makkah tul Mukarramah Madinatul Munawwarah for those that have not gone and don't feel like they have that urge or that desire we should build it save up for it InshaAllah go visit the land of our Habib",
      "The beauty of the Prophet is entire lessons. It's what we call a shama'il. We can speak about it for a long time, but I think we'll suffice with that and inshaAllah hopefully through our sessions in the future we can speak more about it. It is one of my favorite subjects. Bulaqib do you have any other short ones or should we call it a night? It's up to you. I can do a short one if you... Okay, go on. InshaAllah we can do an short one Dr Anjum if you're on insha Allah if you are on then we will bring you on right after because perfect",
      "I think that's perfect. so a short one will be good and so the guest doesn't have to wait any longer.",
      "You had two about the greatness of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and our love for him. Then you had two poems about our love or our Habib shallallahu alayhi wasalam. May Allah allow us to continue benefiting from your work inshaAllah, and please continue joining us whenever you have time inshaAlllah. InshaAllah inshaAllaah. Everyone please say salam to Mulaaqib inshaALLAH. JazakAllah khair Mulaakib. Get some rest inshallah. Thank you. Thankyou so much.",
      "May Dr. Anjum wait for quite a bit and bring him on board. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh, Dr.",
      "Did I get it right? Awayn al-Anjum. Dr. Awaym al-ANJUM is joining us from Toledo, Ohio where he is a professor at the university. He received his PhD in Madison, Wisconsin. He's also an editor-in-chief for Yaqeen Institute and Imam in Toledo and has been serving the Muslim Ummah at various levels for many years and Alhamdulillah have been able to benefit from him at the Miftah platform even on a personal level",
      "and inshaAllah I hope to continue doing so. And Dr. Anjum from his many fields of expertise, one of his specific fields of expertize is history and he focuses on Islamic history and also general history. So InshaAllah today we're able to hopefully pick his brain on the specific incident that took place in Karbala and take some benefit and also hopefully some lessons from it as well. Dr.Anjum, I hope I didn't butcher your bio.",
      "Oh, you're good. Thank you very much. Alhamdulillah. How's the family? How's everyone? Very good, alhamdulillahi. Are you joining us from Toledo or are you traveling or are your home? I'm in Toledo. So Dr. Anjum we'll just jump right into it. I know you've been waiting and I think audience has also been waiting. We ended off the poems speaking about the Prophet ﷺ and now we're diving",
      "time of the year comes, I think people are always looking for some answers. And I know last year we were able to host a class with you. You can find it online on the portal as well where you gave a quick recap to some extent of the battle, the whole tragedy of Karbala. It was called Strength Through Trials as well. And today we're here again, pretty much one year later in a different setting to speak about this discussion again, this topic again",
      "Okay, JazakAllah khairan Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem Alhamdulillah wa salatu wasalam ala Rasulullah It's an honor to be here To be speaking to you all",
      "to you all and uh to be talking about a topic um which is dear to my heart that of the story of early Islam and the story ahlulbayt, the family of the Prophet ﷺ and the",
      "month of Muharram and it is the 11th of Muharrem depending on when you how you started your month. And we want to talk about Ashura which literally in Arabic means the 10th day of Muharam. When Rasulullah ﷺ moved Medina he found that the people of Medina, Ahl al-Kitab,",
      "that the Jews would fast on this day Ashura and the Prophet when he inquired, he learned that this was because Allah gave victory to the people of Musa This is one narration, one explanation of how fasting in fact began early on. And then these, the fast of Ashura at first was an obligation for Muslims",
      "only for a very short period of time until the verses came down for Ramadan and then Ramadan became a Fadiba but the days of Ashura remain highly rewarded and the Prophet ﷺ would fast on the day of Ashurua. And in order to distinguish Muslims from other people of the book,",
      "of religions he instructed us to add a day before or after the Day of Ashura. So an important lesson that we learn here is that on one hand, we follow the Sunnah of earlier prophets and Musa is our prophet. We are Ahakub bi-Musa, we have more right",
      "because we are on Tawheed and on the message that Musa alayhi salam brought. And the Qur'an, our book that Allah has honored this Ummah with mentions Musa aleyhis salaam 136 times. He is the most frequently mentioned prophet in the Qur-an. So the story of Ashura",
      "was a celebration of the victory that Allah gave to Musa against their own and against the people of their own. That story really features centrally in the Quran, it's very very important stories you could say a backbone of the Quranic narrative so a very good big chunk of the",
      "The story of Musa is the most frequently told story in the Qur'an. Why? Because it is such a complete story and it resembles the seerah of the Prophet ﷺ So Allah ﷻ used that story to instruct the Muslims, to instruct Muhammad ﷺ and his ummah until the end of times",
      "when he suffers before he is given prophethood and then when he is giving prophethood, he struggles against and challenges the great oppressor, the great tyrant. And then his story continues in a new phase when his struggle is one in which he becomes the leader. He becomes the judge and the leader and commander of his people",
      "people and then the struggle comes from the Muslims of their time, the believers of their times themselves. And that way Allah completes the guidance shows the lessons to be learned when Muslims are weak and lessons to learn when Muslims",
      "we celebrate and we fast on the day of Ashura. Some 60 years, 61 years after the hijrah of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, the grandson of the prophet ﷺ, al-Hussein was martyred by the Iraqi governor of the Umayyad dynasty whose ruler at the time was Yazid in the year 61. On this day 10th of Muharram",
      "Muharram, our beloved Imam Al-Hussain ibn Ali radiallahu anhu who was known al-hassan and hussein were known as sons of the prophet sallallaho alaihi wa sallam. And he was martyred by an unfortunate person who acted in the interest of his own short term political self assertion",
      "Al-Fatharshan, Ubaidullah ibn Ziyad. And since then Muslims have reflected on these events and that is what I want to talk about briefly because I suspect that most of you know the story and I've heard it many times I will only point out certain themes",
      "First, the story of al-Husayn is seen as a tragedy. But I disagree with this characterization. The word tragedy comes from Greek tradition of a story that is sad and one that is characterized with grief. It's a story of Greek theater. There would be stories or performances that would make people laugh. There will be comedies. And then there will be tragedies where",
      "tragedies where the end would be unsatisfying and people would cry, and your main character would die. But a crucial aspect of what makes a tragedy in Greek understanding and ever since in English understanding is that it is an unresolved grief. It is a loss",
      "that leaves the hero and those who are watching the drama or listening to the story without any resolution, in pain. It's not just death. It is rather death of someone that finds no resolution. So for instance, to give you an example, let's say your father lived a full life",
      "At the end of his full days, he died with his sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters in such a way that they brought him honor and respect. And if he dies, there is no tragedy in that. Tragedy is that if, let's say by mistake or in anger or in rage you killed your father",
      "you were wrong in doing so that's a tragedy tragedy is when there is no resolution it's not just any grief and that's why we use the word tragedy we misunderstand we misunderstand it and for ahlul sunnah wal jama'ah for the people of quran and the sunnah and people who follow the sahaba",
      "celebrates or mourns people's births and deaths, and certainly does not build its narrative, its story of salvation, its history. It is a story of truth around tragedies. Why? Because this Islamic story is not a story tragedy. You see if you look at the Christian story it's a tragic story. If you understand it from Christian perspective God sent his son and that son was crucified",
      "There could be no more unsatisfying, irresolvable, unrequited story than that. God's son came and died. But for Muslims in Islam Allah is very clear that Allah gives victory to his",
      "to his messengers. His prophets, anbiya may die but ghusl are always victorious. Allah says that this is a rule of Allah that Allah and His messengers are always victorius. Now the reason that story is that theological teaching is very important is that we understand",
      "life such that the result of our efforts, the efforts of the pious people who stand for Allah and fight for Allah, and suffer for Allah, it doesn't end in tragedy in this life. Like the story which is for Islam, the paradigmatic story, the story of Islam, which is the seerah of the Prophet. What happens in the seera?",
      "So Islam's story is the story of Nassrullah, the victory of Allah and people entering into deen of Allah. So that if you think about it, the ultimate truth and the affairs of this world they come together. It is the Prophet that is victorious. It",
      "We worship Allah by celebrating the great acts of the messengers of Allah, the great and pious worshippers and slaves of Allah and servants of Allah. Such as if you look at all the celebrations in Islam, the two Eids they are celebrations not of somebody's birth or somebody's death or mourning or some tragedy",
      "celebration of actions pious actions actions when human beings choose Allah so when Ibrahim chose Allah, when Hajar chose Allah and Ismail chose Allah that it became a celebration of the greatest Eid for us. That became our Hajj and Eid Al-Adha Similarly when we worship Allah for a whole month",
      "whole month then comes at the end celebrating the actions of all the righteous people since the time the prophet so we celebrate actions of uh of service to allah actions of devotion to allahu obedience and that is also the greatest and",
      "poems recited about the Messenger of Allah. May my father and mother be sacrificed for him and myself. Allah says to us that, إِن كُنتُمْ تُحَبُّونَ اللَّهُ Say O Prophet to them if you love Allah فاتَّبِعوني يُحْبِثْكُمُ الله Then follow me Allah will love you back. In other words Prophet is saying",
      "It is very good, it is important to sing about me, to talk about me To think about coming and visiting my grave But if you don't do any of that And you follow me You are mine If you do all of that and you don' t follow me Then you're not mine This is the rule Allah has given and Rasulullah This is why Ashura and martyrdom of Al-Husayn",
      "is not a mourning for us Islam has no mourning its nature in the nature of the Quran and the Sunnah and the story of Islam are contradictory to that understanding in which mourning and tragedy are the center a passion about loss and tragedy, that is not the spirit of Islam now",
      "Now, all that said, why is Ashura and the story of Al-Hussein ibn Ali still I believe very important for Muslims? And one of the important events of course out of many many others there were many people who were martyred.",
      "lived for Allah and died for what they believed to be true. And for enacting the message of Rasulullah ﷺ. That is not a tragedy, right? That is the greatest honor. We know that shuhada are alive with Allah ﷻ and those who are coward, they are truly dead. So we have no reason",
      "tragedy or more. So now I want to change tacks a little bit and think about a couple of particular incidents, the particular disputes that are often raised and I will give you my sense of why a few things should be brought up and especially I understand most of my audience today are from Ahlus Sunnah",
      "caution uh the sunni uh some of these students who are learning their being about a couple things because you'll find this this come up over and over first uh this notion that sunnah and shia have always been in conflict this is some kind of a you know eternal conflict and things could never be better and they could never",
      "and it's theologically false that in fact you've had cases when there is conflict, and yet also cases when There is collaboration and cooperation. And a better time for all these those when Muslims were able to set aside their Their differences and focus on what is more important so Sahaba of course the honor of the sahabah is extremely important",
      "of the Prophet ﷺ and belief in Allah and Qur'an, his message are more important. So in that sense, the wise thing to do for this Ummah going forward as it was in the past was to unify on things we agree on and try to mitigate the misunderstandings and the ignorance",
      "create hatred that is not warranted, that is based on lies. I'll give you a quick example in the time of the Mongols, of course, the Shia Rizir cooperated with the Mongol and that is often cited as an example of how the Shias always, they're always treacherous. And that is a historical incident and it is true but it doesn't create a general principle",
      "general principle because just before that for centuries in fact the Twelver Shia had been on the forefront of jihad against the Byzantines for the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate. Let me say that again, the area which is today northern Syria it was ruled by a Twelvershiya dynasty Hamdanites who fought",
      "against the Byzantines, which was the single greatest threat to Islam, to the Abbasid Empire. Defending so they were the province that faced the Byzantine and they were more the most warlike province that in fact defended the Abasids Sunni Caliphate against the byzantines. And when the Buyid who are also Shia took over",
      "They were less invested in this defense and then the crusaders came. But even during the Crusades, there are very interesting stories where in one case for example a few years after Jerusalem was taken, the world of Islam was split between the seven Shi'a, the Fatimids in Egypt",
      "Iraq and Iran and elsewhere. And the Fatimids did play a role in inviting and making it easy for the crusaders to come, but when the jihad against the crusader started some of the Shia ulema were in fact at the forefront encouraging soldiers of Turks, Sunnis, to fight and not run away from fighting",
      "Ibn Shabdad was the name of an alim, a 12-year shia'i alim who in fact was involved in this resistance that began the movement. And of course there were many, many ulama afterward and then Sunni ulama who led this jihad, this jihadi ilm.",
      "the knowledge, change the conversation of Muslims so that they will be they would believe in their ability to unify and make jihad before Salah ad-Din al-Ayubi and Nur ad-din Zanfi came. They are the ones these ulama prepared this ground So my point is simply to diffuse this narrative that a clash or hatred between Sunnis and Shia because we disagree about this issue",
      "This clash is necessary. That is not the case that you can we can disagree about this issue yet also agree to disagree and Also, of course insults that are Directed at The Sahaba and the wives of the Prophet Sallallahu alaihi wasallam are truly Offensive to not only",
      "to not only Sunnis because they are Sunnis and because they have some dogma. Anyone who reads the Qur'an knows that Allah in the Qur-an praises the Sahaba in a way that is completely clear, unadulterated, not at all confusing about Allah praising the Sahabah who are later accused. And so it is an offensive thing",
      "offensive thing for us. Nevertheless, this is the trick that we have to bring people to the truth through knowledge by mastering the knowledge rather than sort of taking refuge in fictions that are pleasing",
      "out the people who praise Yazid for instance are and denigrate or take away from the honor and struggle of Al-Hussein ibn Ali they call themselves Sunnis but they're not doing either Islam or truth any favor. The greatest of ulama",
      "cursed Yazid or stayed silent about cursing Yazid only because they did not want cursing to become their habit and religion, not because Yazid doesn't deserve it. And this is a saying of Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal in one of his sayings that he legitimates cursing another one. He simply says I don't curse them because I don' t curse anyone else.",
      "opinion of again Imam Shaykh al-Islam ibn Taymiyyah who is considered very harsh against those who attack the Sahaba. Nevertheless on this issue he says the ulama have two legitimate opinions, the greatest ulama of opinions whether you can curse Yazid or not. No one says that Yazid is a hero or he was a pious and righteous man whom we should follow and what he did at Karbala",
      "took place in medina a horrible instance incident which is also unleashed against the people of medina his army of muslim uh ibn hajjaj in order to bring them um bring them through submission both of these incidents are absolutely horrible and they should not be justified because the danger of justifying such actions is that we tolerate such oppression and tyranny",
      "in our rulers and that is not Islam. That is not the Islam of Musa. That is no Islam of Muhammad. So let us not kid ourselves, and let us give a pass to tyrants in the name of some kind of dogma, and we should stand for justice. So these are some reflections I have on this day of Isra because of Allah's will.",
      "running us through all those historical points and giving us those details I think I would just continue from there, and just throw a few questions out. Before I ask my questions, I feel like to give some backdrop to the audience that this month of Muharram one of the key characteristics of it is Adil Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala makes that clear in",
      "That no one should oppress one another at any level, not macro, neither micro. And... Another ayah... This month truly teaches us to be just even if it's against ourselves or our own families.",
      "Tanjum, you explained the entire background of why Muharram is important in a few words and then you dove into a topic that I think very few people feel comfortable speaking about to be honest. It's not everyone's comfort zone where they can speak about these to some extent sensitive topics and making clear statements about how we should or shouldn't react to certain individuals. How you spoke about Yazid and other things",
      "made something clear for the audience and myself that is the conflict is not, the conflict does not necessary. It was there sometimes, sometimes it wasn't there. And then the second backdrop for all of us is to truly understand the level in the reverence that our Ummah has for Hassan Hussain as Ahlul Sunnah wal Jama'a. Sometimes people think that perhaps we don't have that type of love and reverence",
      "A lot of times this happens where people champion certain individuals and it seems as if they're the only ones that love that person. That's not true. So regardless of how the Shi'is or the other people react to Hassan Hussain, that doesn't mean that we should not react in a way that we feel comfortable with, with expressing our love and so on and so forth. The Prophet ﷺ would say, هُمَا رَيْحَانَتَايَ فِي جَنَّةٍ And the Prophet ﷺ will say, مَن أَحَبَّهُمًا فإني أحبّهُ Whoever loves them, I also love them.",
      "the various narrations that speak about Hassan and Hussain playing on the back of the Prophet ﷺ. One day Abu Bakr ad-Dilaw enters into the home of the prophet, and Hassan & Hussin are riding the Prophet, and he enters the room and he says, نعم المركب What a beautiful ride! Like if you have nephews and nieces and children we know what that means. And the Prophet looks up in his mouth and says,",
      "One is Hassan, one is Hussain. Beautiful youngsters, the Sayyidah, Shababi, Ahlul Jannah, the leaders of Jannah. One is poisoned and one is murdered in cold blood. I know Dr. Nirmik you explained it very well that we should never call this a tragedy but the heart aches in these situations but of course there's something bigger that is happening in the Qadr of Allah. The Prophet at times would be giving khutbah and they would climb on the back of the Prophet",
      "Ibn Amr narrates that the children, these two kids were playing tag with a Prophet in the city of Medina. So there's such a love and attachment. And Dr. Anjum they're only seven six years old when the Prophet left this world but that attachment was built so early on. And so this is what we're referring to in Hussain right? And then fast forward so many years and 61 years after hijrah Dr.",
      "takes place. But Anjum, just to give us some type of... We don't have 15-20 minutes left perhaps but just to go back and forth on anything specific that is left. To give us a quick bird's eye view of the geopolitical affairs at that time. Why was Hussain going to Kufa? Why was he being called? Of course many people have probably heard this story but there is reason why he left Makkat al Mukarramah",
      "Makkatul Mukarrama, after sending his cousin Muslim Al-Aqeel. So perhaps in a few minutes we can speak about this if you feel comfortable, if you think it's beneficial and then we'll just go from there. If anyone has any questions please feel free to type them on the side inshaAllah if we have enough time we'll get to them Okay so there is no way to do justice to those events and the sources in this short time I want to only in fact take this time to warn people",
      "people that our deen is the deen of truth not feelings you may feel that you want to attribute something to the prophet because it sounds good you can attribute it to the Prophet right? The Prophet must have said that is one of the greatest things as you know whoever lies about me the Prophet says",
      "He should make his place in fire. Because the truth about the Prophet and truth about what happened, this is really crucial part of our Deen. This is not how many other religions and people think about their religion. They make up stories. In our deen we have to know what happened. What the Prophet said whether it's a matter of law or virtue or something else.",
      "This is how we preserve our Qur'an. It is preserved through the truthfulness of the community's verbal oral transmission. We trust our Salaf, our predecessors and ancestors because they were truthful people and they believed in this truth. Now a lot of lying became very common in the time of fitna, in times when people disagreed.",
      "massive fabrications were circulated both about the virtues of ali and ahlulbayt and the virtues uh and that sometimes the line got so bad that this it got out of hand so there are really we have volumes and volumes of fabricated about virtues",
      "virtues that the ulama later spent their lives and generations to figure out that these were lies how to separate right from wrong. The reason I'm talking about this is well known, everyone knows all ulama know that this was a big fitna of lying and therefore religion had to be saved just as it had to",
      "than others in Medina and then the other enemy. It had to be saved from the hands of the kadaaboon, those people. I mean if I could show up isn't this one of the reasons perhaps for the audience know that even the concept of sanad became dominant you know. Where Abdullah ibn al-Baghdadi would actually say this that prior",
      "it came from and who said it because everyone was telling the truth. And no one would lie about the Prophet ﷺ but only after these differences rose and these made up narrations came to light that we kind of clenched down on it, that okay now we have to figure out where everything is coming from. Exactly. So why I mentioned this problem is because many of the stories that you'll hear about Karbala they are written over a hundred, 150 years after the events",
      "the events and often they have no isn't especially the details have noticed that uh they are told by people whose credibility is questionable um in particular most of these stories come from really one or two narrators um abu meknaf yahya bin lukman is one of the main narrators",
      "So a lot of emotional stories that you hear about what happened, they're all made up. And then there are exaggerated centuries after century so that what was attributed to Abu Mikhnah in the second century is much more manageable. To give you an example, we have a small book about Maqt al-Husayn, The Death of Al Hussein,",
      "in the second century of Rakhnaf. But then you have seven centuries later, seven centuries Later, you have a much bigger book about much greater details of what was happening and exaggeration is crazy. So in one case for example Al Hussein or some brother has killed five men and later it was 500 men that he's single-handedly killing and facing.",
      "people think that you can exaggerate in order to increase emotional effect. So what often happens is that when we're talking to Sunni or Shia, even Shia scholars by the way of Hadith critics they recognize this is all later. This isn't just the Sunnis. Anyone who's a historian or a Hadith critic recognizes all this stuff is coming later and I'm mentioning this is that whether you are reading about",
      "about the some of the great virtues of muawiyah or of uh of other of ahlulbayt you should know that in general this is the saying of ibn al-qayyim that most of the hadith that are about and virtues of mawya are fabricated he's a sahabi no doubt about that but most of",
      "people who are on the side of mawya many of the hadith about the virtues of ali and hassan hussein are fabricated but after you remove all the fabricated ahadith on both sides still there are many authentic ahadi in virtues of aliyah that we of course in these circulate and we must know them um and uh but that exaggeration can",
      "can destroy our sense of balance, can destroy the deen and this kind of exaggeration takes over so much so that the actual message of the Qur'an and Sunnah is lost. So this I think is perhaps a more important reminder than history lesson which may be too short of time to go over right now.",
      "Am I echoing? No, you're fine. There's some static but it's not bad. Okay. So in regards to understanding that where of course there are authentic narrations about their virtue like Um A'awi radiyaAllahu anhu even the Prophet ﷺ when he saw him even as a youngster and he mentioned that this will be the kisra of the Arabs in the sense that he will be a great leader",
      "all the narrations of Hassan and Hussain that we mentioned, there's many more. But Dr Anjum for just for the sake of the discussion, Hussien when he gets through and travels certain people mention to him not to go like Ibn Abbas and other companions that the people of Iraq are not people that can be trusted in this matter. The famous story about",
      "During Hajj And they said to him What is the penalty of killing a mosquito? So what penalty do we have to pay? What diya Do we have? And he said to them Where are you from? And they say, we're from Iraq And he says, you guys are asking about The diya Of killing a mosquitoes And you were the ones that slaughtered the children of the Prophet Or the grandson of the prophet ﷺ",
      "There were certain rumblings around, right? That perhaps they will not host you correctly. And for the audience, people at this time, Yazid becomes khalifa after Muawiyah. And that is also disputed and why he became khalifah because the truth was which Hasan made with Muawiya that after you leave this world, khilafah will come back to the general public and it'll be chosen through the shura but it came to Yazid",
      "it was said that the people of Kufa wanted to do bay'ah to Hussain and so on and so forth. And he sends his cousin, Muslim ibn Aqeel, and he goes there and he says, People are here, they would like you to come, so on. But then why were certain people telling him not to go? If you can just perhaps give us some detail on that. And the fact that he still went was to stand for justice. There were people being oppressed, and",
      "Even reach Kufa in land, Karbala not too far from Kufah. He was made Shaheed Yeah so When the news of the passing of Muawiyah arrives in Medina The governor calls the elders if you will the community and both Al-Husayn and Abdullah ibn al Zubair",
      "60s of this time. Abdullah ibn Zubayr was a little older and they would, they immediately realized what was going to happen there is as I report in Al-Bukhari which suggests that in his lifetime Muawiyah had come to Medina and given it taken a pre-Bay'a so which was an odd thing but he",
      "a fitna that might come if Muslims are left without a ruler. This is in Bukhari, in which Abdullah ibn Abbas sorry, Abdullah ibb Omar radiallahu anhu in fact reports this story. So there was some understanding that Muawiyah radiallahi anhu is going to pass this on to Yazid and the reason for that we can't go into right now I have a book on this coming soon inshaAllah",
      "inshallah um so one of the things then uh if that this basically both al-hussein and abdullah these are the elders of the community the only people person who is elder than them older than them is more senior he's like but he is in his 70s and he's an old man who doesn't want to fight",
      "costs among Muslims. He saw the first fitna that took place 30 years earlier, 20 years and he did not want anything like that. However Al-Hussein and Abdullah ibn Zubayr said that accepting Yazid would be wrong, that we can launch a successful rebellion against him and they both go to Mecca. Abdullah ibb Zubai's main support is in Mecca whereas",
      "is allegedly in Kufa, in Iraq way far by the month where his father was he used to be at one point however people who witnessed what had happened in the time when Ali Rav Yalan was killed and then Al-Hassan his older brother was made Khalifa and then he was attacked and then",
      "That is what everybody remembered and they said these are not people that you should rely on. However, in terms of reports that we have from this era it is true that Abdullah ibn Abbas encouraged him not to go There are reports that everybody came to him and told him not To go Those are more questionable reports So again I'm speaking from the perspective of historical authenticity",
      "means of how many people told him not to go um so it's not sure it is possible that everybody told you not to know but we cannot be sure and hussein's reasoning in other words was not completely uh out of the in other ways he wasn't um uh you know irrational to go it seems that his support his supporters would have been in iraq",
      "the Ummah, if you will against Mu'mayyads in Syria, Yazid's army in Syria. Nevertheless he seriously underestimated the nature of politics in Iraq and how these same people who had invited him in fact joined the army against him. And these were the people who started this whole idea of mourning and there is a movement",
      "of Tawwabun. They call themselves Tawbubun, those are penitents which was a this was of course not a Shia movement in the sense you think it has no different theology. These are Muslims but they were on the party of Al-Hussein politically and then when they saw his martyrdom and they themselves were part of the army in which this martyrdom took place",
      "when you begin to see this tragedy narrative emerging. Now, this was a small group of people led by Suleiman ibn Surab who was a Sahabi who had been part of this. So he swore that we are going to avenge the death of al-Husayn or die trying and they died trying quickly but this was the first movement. Again, it's very important",
      "It's very important. They did not reject Umar and Abu Bakr, they did not condemn Umm al-Mu'mineen Aisha radiAllahu anha. All of this stuff was unknown among the general population at this time especially people in Medina. And one final thing I think we should always remember is that Ahlulbayt, people of the family of Prophet Muhammad, families of Al Hasan and Hussein and Muhammad ibn al-Hafia their younger brother,",
      "They all lived in Medina alongside the Umayyads and the Zubairids, and the family of Omar and the Abu Bakr. And they all intermarried. What's more, they all named their children after Abu Bakar and Omar and Uthman. Right? And they married among the Umays. Not sometimes happily, you know, but Al-Hassan was softer about this and Al- Hussain was more angry. He did not want to marry with the Umaiyads.",
      "But they did. It was a family business, right? It's very different They did not think of each other as enemies and of course Ali had the son Abu Bakr and Omar Then Al-Hassan and Hussein similarly had these so they thought all of these people as part of their families So we should",
      "This is the most concrete evidence. Historically, the evidence about people's names is the more concrete evidence because you can't cook this up. This is a solid evidence that the Sahaba and Ahlul Bayt were family and friends. They may have some disagreements in the same way we had disagreements with our brothers and cousins. Right? And sometimes what people have done is take a small disagreement",
      "disagreement that may appear in some report and exaggerate turned into a colossal metaphysical animosity if i say you know my brother is really lazy and you say you",
      "my son. That is the kind of exaggeration that has taken place unfortunately and this has happened fortunately through fabrication on both sides may Allah protect us from that",
      "somewhere between 70 to 120 casualties and the people that became shaheed amongst children of the family of the Prophet ﷺ. As you made very clear, the concept of saying things about sahabas and so on and so forth was not found in the first century or the first hundred years. These are things that came later on. And in no way do we need to shy away our love for the family",
      "that we tear down anyone else's virtue. Where Imam Shafi' Rahimahullah used to speak highly of the family of Prophet ﷺ and he would say if this means that I am a person that is not part of Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaa then so be it because speaking about their love is perfectly fine as long as we keep it within the balance and that's the hope for Ahlus sunnah wal jamaa that wa qeem al-wazna bilqishti wa la tukhsirul mizan that we keep everything at a specific balance Allah reward you Dr. Anjum for joining us",
      "leave, you have to tell us inshaAllah if you don't mind a few books that people are asking if they could read in any language English Arabic or Urdu that they can benefit. I heard you mention that you are also coming out with some type of book in regards to this insha Allah that will definitely be something that should be on everyone's bookshelves but as of now anything that they could",
      "historical narrations as you know and I know that there's very difficult when it comes to historical narrators to find a perfect perspective because everyone narrates things based on their own bias but whatever book that you can comment on perhaps people can look forward to reading inshaAllah so, on the narrative of what happened especially on the story of Karbala",
      "There is, of course, a tremendous amount that has been written. And it's really specialist writing. It's difficult to find stuff that is a good narrative that does justice to the issue at hand for Muslims. Often Western authors in fact especially specialists not generalists",
      "not the generalist sometimes you know some one person writes this history of entire islam and they probably don't know much in the recent century um so honestly i start writing a book precisely because there's no not much out there there isn't much one thing out there that i could say this is a good place even to store uh usually",
      "book the Prophet and the age of the caliphates for this period it's a it talks about in my area of Maya history and the Abbasid history starts an early period but what it says about the sea off course you could mostly black that by",
      "not historically critical account, but a fairly good account of what the most reliable sources say. It doesn't discuss religious aspects, it doesn't religious hadith, it does not really discuss the weakness of the sources, but it gives a good overall first narrative. Once you have that then you can start digging into it. I would just add to that for anyone that's wondering",
      "that's one I'm wondering where to read. I think the first place to start is reading seerah. I see a lot of people, they get really excited right after Anjum and they want to read Baq Hussain and Al-Dilu'anu and Karbala and understandably so but we don't have necessarily a foundation to be able to digest some of the information that is coming from these discussions, right? Some of it may be hard to digest. So I always say to read these stories we need to take a pill of iman like you need to really rejuvenate yourself",
      "You know be ready for it. So we start from seerah and there's many books on seerat that you can read I think there's Many books out there in majority of them are a benefit There is Seeratul Mustafa in English, which is Written by Maulana Idris Kandali rahimallah Which has been translated into English as three volumes. I would say it's my favorite book is that People can read on the seerot and get a good understanding and perspective Of course, there's other books as well that you",
      "And then you have the lives of the four Khulafa that we need to read about before we get here. And books like Tariq al-Khulafa by Suyuti and others as well can be opened in red, they're translated into English if I remember correctly. Let me actually plug in for that as well. Suyoti's TariQ al- Kholafa has been translated in an abridged form. Okay good. So look for that. That is really a good place",
      "who have the stomach for some historical writing and some hadiths and report. So it's not one good, nice narrative but it's a very good place to start. Now there is an actual book that has been translated by an Orientalist author which is a 600 page book, very small print. You don't want that. It's been translated",
      "And it's much more readable and though for scholarly purposes smaller And a bridge and that may be a good place to start For this. What is that called? A Suyuti book translated and abridged in simpler English Actual original has also been translated",
      "but that's a bigger book of I think six to eight hundred pages in small print so that's for people who have the capacity for dealing with that kind of text, but the abridged translation I think it's easy to find and it's available online PDF as well, it would be a good place to start.",
      "And hopefully we're able to bring you back on and continue these discussions, and also other historical discussions that I personally think the entire Muslim audience can benefit from. You know, I think Western history can be a little dry and boring but Islamic history has… it's like a roller coaster. There is a lot to take from and there's a lot of benefit from and so much to learn. So hopefully we can give it more time, more space in our mind for it and hopefully more",
      "benefit from those stories. JazakAllah khidr Dr Anjum, may Allah bless you your family your children how many children do you have? You know me as Dr Anjam I have five You have five masha'Allah mashaAllah what is what is your how old is your eldest my older two are in college oh masha Allah and I met one of your sons he's your he's what uh 21 um this",
      "my daughter well my son is turning 21 and my daughter is 17. and then the three three are younger um 12 9 and 6. masha'allah protect them you always visit in michigan we're not that far from you uh sometimes it makes me feel like we're like you know in texas because you don't come visit us but when you invite you probably as well please inshallah we'll come visit dr andrew insha allah and i will bring you here uh mel rewards you and your family"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Friday_ January 12_ 2024 Khateeb_ Dr_ Ovamir Anjum_nTj4-7fnHM4&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750583261.opus",
    "text": [
      "السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته",
      "لا إله إلا الله أشهد أن محمد رسول الله",
      "إن الحمد لله نحمده ونستعينه وناستغفره ونتوب إليه و نشهد أن لا إله إلا الله ونشهدي أن محمداً عبده ورسوله",
      "وزد وبارك على نبينا محمد وعلى آله وسحبه أجمعين ومن تبعه بإحسان إلى يوم الدين ونعوذ بالله من شرور أنفسنا ومن سيئات أعمالنا من يهده الله فلا مضل له ومن يضلل فلا هادي له",
      "My brothers and sisters in Islam, I begin by praising Allah bearing witness that there is none worthy of worship but Allah and that Muhammad is his servant and messenger. May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him. Whomsoever Allah guides cannot be misled and whosoever Allah allows to go astray cannot",
      "May Allah make us among those who are guided. My brothers and sisters in Islam, our hearts are broken. Many of us spend hours thinking worrying and crying making dua complaining Our hearts are Broken and they should be broken",
      "يجب أن تكون محطمة. هذا هو أثناء الإنسانية ولكنه أثناً من الإيمان لأن الله سبحانه وتعالى خلق لنا واحدة أمة",
      "Rasulullah ﷺ said that the example of this ummah is like one body in its mutual love, in its feeling and mercy. When one part of it hurts, the entire body responds with wakeful nights and fever. And my brothers and sisters a part of our body",
      "the heart of our body. The land of the prophets, the land where Allah took His prophet on his night journey. And the blessed people of that land are being massacred and they're being massaced openly",
      "with complete impunity. So our hearts should hurt and this is a sign of Iman. And this is the sign that we belong to the Ummah of Muhammad, the same Prophet, the same man who on the Day of Judgment when everyone including Prophets will say,",
      "that man, alayhi salatu was-salam, alaihi afdalu salat wa atammu taslim will be saying, Ummati, Ummatiy. If you want to belong to that Ummah, if you wantto belong tothatman, ifyou want to drink from his hand on the Hawth of Kawthar, on the dayof judgment after which there is no thirst then you make that pain your pain",
      "your pain and you have to say Ummati, Ummati. And it's a blessed pain because kuntum khaira ummatin You are the best of nations, the best people and the Prophet said The most tested people in Allahs creation",
      "are prophets. And then those who are most like prophets and then those that are most alike them. So being tested is a sign that Allah has made you like prophets, and our people in Gaza, our brothers and sisters in Gaza. Our people are most of us. Of us, most like Prophets.",
      "We know that, don't we? They spent decades and billions of dollars in propaganda against us. Making sure that ordinary people, men and women, their young, their youth look at one of us with a kufi, with a beard and think that this is a terrible person.",
      "our sisters, our blessed sisters in hijab and they say this person, this one is oppressed and unhappy. They spent billions of dollars. They built policy around it. And we see people in Gaza who are being bombed and killed",
      "them holding on to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. You see them having mercy, not just for humans but for animals. You seem thanking Allah subhana wa ta-ala when they are in an open air prison whereas the people of this world who enjoy all the blessings more than humans ever have in history, consume more than",
      "the luxuries and they cannot bear this life. They take their own lives because they have lost what Allah sent, they have loss what Muhammad brought. They cannot bear these life whereas people in Gaza, they just look at their faces",
      "It is a genocide. The worst genocide that we have seen because genocides used to be hidden. They used to his secret, you couldn't talk about it. Now they're announcing it, they are planning it, and rubbing it in the face of this Ummah and of the world.",
      "that have woken up, that are looking at these clips, these videos, these sounds and they're saying what do they have? I want it! What is it that gives them this power? What is that gives then this hope? What it is that give them this attitude toward life? And my brothers and sisters in Islam",
      "رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم قال المؤمن مرآة أخيه",
      "You look at what other believers have, you see the virtue in them and you know that you can do what they are doing. You see any flaws in them? And you know you should correct those flaws inside of you. And so... What they have, YOU HAVE! What THEY have, WE ALL HAVE! We can work those miracles!",
      "And the world, you know tens of thousands of people are coming to Islam. Even in the West despite all the propaganda and this is happening across the world. This is the best community.",
      "When we say that something is the best, like the best car, the best house, the garden, the country, the vacation spot. When Allah says it's the best! It has a different meaning. It means it is closest to the Prophets who are beloved to Allah and they will be tested and made examples for humanity, for people. Ummatan wasatan litakoonu shuhadan",
      "يُوشك أن تتداعى عليكم الأمم كما انتداعة الأكلة إلى قصعتها",
      "instead of saying, my Allah, my Rabb, you say nafsi, nafshi then you become like them. Then your punishment is harder than the rest. That's the deal with those people that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala raises with a gift when they turn away from it they are not like the rest They're reminded and this ummah is being reminded",
      "حب الدنيا و كراهية الموت عندما تحب هذه الحياة أكثر من أنت تحبي الله و عندما تعجبين موت أكبر من أنكم تعجون قدرة الله ثم سوف يكون لديك عذر في هذه الحيات والعياذ بالله ربنا لا نجعلنا من بين هؤلاء الذين فقدوا على رأي الأسئلة وقاموا بالوقف",
      "وقال الله تعالى سوف يجعلهم يشعرون بمعذرة قصيرة أكثر منها. لذا في نفس المنطقة، لمن توقفنا هذا هو عبادة. أي مخلوحة هي عبارة.",
      "give hope, give up hope in Allah this is a punishment. You belong to a Mubarak Ummah, a blessed Ummah and you must display it my brothers and sisters, you must show it! You must exude the same kind of hope in allah that our people without water",
      "بدون طبق وعادة بدون عمليات تظهر. ويجب أن ينزل قلبك أيضاً في الوقت نفسه. يجب ان تكون محفوظاً وخائفاً بأن هذا يحدث. ويمكنك ايضا ان تعرف ما هو الذي سوف تفعله.",
      "الدعاء الذي يبدأ في قلوبنا ، دعاءً هو دعائك الذي تطلبه للله سبحانه وتعالى ومصر أبتدأ من الله سبحنه وتعلق على الله سُبْحَانهُ وَ تعالى او الله دعني أكون مسبقاً للمستقبل والإسلام والفضولة لهذه الأمة وللناس الذين يشعرون بها ما يمكنني فعله",
      "My brothers and sisters in Islam,",
      "Every blessing comes with a test and our test is that in this dunya, the world gathers against us even though it needs most what we have.",
      "What we have is a burden. In this ummah, we have to make a choice whether to belong to it and to take that strength that exists in iman and let that be the light that guides us or",
      "By the world, we will always be seen as those people. The world will not forgive and forget. They always make us the target no matter how much we give up our deen. It is sometimes those people, the enemies of truth that make us realize who we really are.",
      "إذاً دعونا نعود إلى الدين ونحصل على من هم نحن",
      "who did some good. The people of the left hand, whose bad deeds, whose failures overwhelmed them. And then there are السابقون السابعون The ones that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala describes first with the greatest praise and happiness because Allah these are the people it's not enough for them to be good",
      "يريدون أن تكونوا الأفضل قبل الله سبحانه وتعالى",
      "when we change our ways. Each one of us has a reformation, an islah that we must do within ourselves and go to the next level no matter what level you are at. That is our call. If you have seen everything about Gaza and you have see the analysis and you've seen the injustices",
      "And you have even tweeted about it or posted about it, or talked about it. Which is your duty? Which is my duty to do everything you can if you have donated about it? Which if we can be must But you have not done your duty until you have turned within yourself and asked",
      "just of the powers in the world or the United Nations, or our governments even. But ask yourself how can I contribute? How can I become that change? People of Gaza you know when little kids are being pulled out of rubble, you know what they say? They say",
      "They are not fighting for the peace of land. They're fighting for, they're struggling for, and they are being bombed and dismembered from the Deen of Allah because they say Al-Qudsulana we will not give up the first Ka'bah, the first Qibla. We will not gave up the masjid of Rasool Allah.",
      "Is it that we fight for? We who have all of our limbs and our wealth is secure, and our homes are secure, And our future generations are secure. And we as American Muslims in particular Western Muslims and American Muslims the most resourceful The most wealthy and knowledge in terms of technical knowledge",
      "of Muslims in the world, what are we doing? We ask Allah to make us those who see the blessings receive the blessings and do shukr. Who are grateful and who return to our Lord our best services. Who",
      "and wealth in what Allah has given us to share what we have by making da'wah, to protect and reach out to those of us our people in Palestine or elsewhere who are in need. My brothers and sisters this is an ummah that is ummah mubarakah it is a blessed ummah and this is why",
      "We cannot close our eyes and simply enjoy this apparent short life that Allah has given us. Trying to be normal, trying to be like the rest. Teach your children you're not normal. Trying",
      "that brings us down because we compare ourselves to others when Allah has made us the chosen ummah. Let us take up that challenge.",
      "وبين معاصيك ومن طاعتك ما تبلغنا به جنتك ومنا اليقين ما تهون به علينا مصائب الدنيا اللهم لا تسلط علينا بذنوبنا من لا يخافك فينا ولا يرحمنا اللهم لاتجعل الدنيa اكبر همنا ولا مبلغ علمنا",
      "وقلت لهم أخذوا دعوانا أن الحمد لله رب العالمين وأقيم الصلاة",
      "Please stand foot to foot and shoulder to shoulder and pray attentively as if this is your last prayer for it might well be. Allahu Akbar!",
      "الحمد لله رب العالمين الرحمن الرحيم مالك يوم الدين إياك نعبد وإياك",
      "وتعز من تشاء وتذل من تساء بيدك الخير إنك على كل شيء قدير",
      "تخرج الميت من الحي وترزق من تشاء بغير حساب",
      "مالك يوم الدين إياك نعبد وإياك تستعين اهدنا الشراط المستقيم شراط الذين أنعمت عليهم غير المغضوب عليهم ولا الضالين",
      "ألم تر كيف فعل ربك بأصحاب الفيل ألم يجعل كيدهم في تضليل وأرسل عليهم طيراً أبابيل",
      "بحجارة من سجيل فاجعلهم كعصف مأكول الله أكبر",
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah.",
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah.",
      "to many other organizations. Jazakumullah khairan, brother. There's a family night tonight we have Imam Hassan leading the Kahoot play for our youth. Most important announcement that I want to make actually also is the acquisition of the land. Some of you guys have heard that we've made a deal with the neighbors next door which was the former hay so we're looking for large donations inshallah from each and every one",
      "guys if you can't afford it please reach out to your family friends. If you're not part of the masjid originally in the 80s or more recently in the 2000s building this beautiful masjids now here's an opportunity for you we need to raise about four hundred thousand dollars as a deposit for them soon as possible within the month or so, so please reach",
      "weekend school have open enrollment so please register your kids for next year's school year as well say it Arif Hussain passed away on Sunday brother Faizan is here you can pass all its your condolences to him please make the office much better and also I remember our brothers sisters in Gaza and everywhere else was suffering going on"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Friday Khutbah - By Dr_ Ovamir Anjum _4_26_2024__U_kdXJ5hvhA&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750595511.opus",
    "text": [
      "الحمد لله رب العالمين نحمدُه ونستعينُه، ونسْتاؤفِرُه وأنا أشهَد أن لا إله إلا الله، وأن محمداً عبدُه والرسولُك اللهم صلِّ وسلِّم وزيد وبارِك على نبينا وحبيبنا وقدوتنا محمدٍ وعلى آله وسحبه يجمعين",
      "يا أيها الذين آمنوا اتقوا الله حق تُقاته ولا تموتن إلا وأنتم مسلمون ويقول أيضا ألم تر كيف ضرب الله مثلاً كلمة طيبة كشجرة طيبت أصلها ثابت وفروحوها في السماء تؤتي أوكلها كل حين بإذن ربي",
      "My brothers and sisters, I begin by praising Allah bearing witness that there is none worthy of worship but Allah and Muhammad is his servant and messenger. May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him. It is my first time to be in Oregon, the beautiful city of Portland",
      "anywhere in the world, when I step into the masjid and step into Muslim community, I feel home. This is a blessing that only Muslims know. This a blessing of kalima tayyiba And today my khutbah is about Tayyibah, the word Tayyip.",
      "We are carriers of embodiments of tayyib. And Allah SWT has called His kalima, kalima la ilaha illallah Muhammadur Rasulullah that is non-worthy of worship but Allah and that Muhammad is his messenger. This kalima this word",
      "is the essence of for why Allah has created this universe. Why Allah swt created life it is kalima that is tayyiba similarly the sharia, the law, the way of life, the deen that Allah swta has sent with Muhammad sallallaahu alaihi wasalam",
      "And wherever it goes, it is like a seed. A good seed that once it finds opportunity to grow, it gives out a tree. أَلَمْ تَرَ كَيْفَ ضَرَّبُ اللَّهُ مَثَلًا كَلِمَةً طَيِّبَةٍ كَشَّجَارَةٌ طَیِّبًا Have you not seen how Allah SWT strikes an example? Allah gives an example analogy",
      "of how La ilaha illallah Muhammadur Rasulullah and the deen that comes out of it is like a beautiful tree. It is a tree whose roots are deep into the earth, and its branches are into the sky.",
      "And I'm going to give you translations of both these words, inshallah. The opposite of tayyib is khabith and Allah says something that I want every one of us especially our young people to remember there's one thing that you take from the khutbah today and that is this Khabith can never be equal to tayyid no matter how much of khabiz you have You can have a billion khabif things",
      "things, they will not equal one tayyib thing. Even though it is tempting to think that this is a billionaire, this is millionaire and no matter how they got there, they are strong, they're powerful, they were the ones who decide what happens in the world so let us try to be like them. The Quran says a billion khabith things cannot equal one Tayyib",
      "So what is طيّب? You will see that typically طيِّب is translated as good. It's good in the deepest truest sense of the word. Good not only in the sense, you know let's say you're eating something and you're eat ice cream it's good! Why it's because it tastes good on your palate but if you eat too much of it what happens",
      "It's got sugar, may give you stomach problems. It may be harmful for you. It's good for a little bit but it's not طيب in the fullest sense. طيّب is that which is good in the deepest sense. It is good and fitting suitable for wherever it is. So Islam is good",
      "good. Islam is good in the sense that it is the truth from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Islam Is good in a sense that when you apply it in your personal life, you prosper, you are pleased. It fills a hole in your heart that nothing else can fill. There's a God shaped hole in",
      "And it is good in your family. If Islam is taken out of your family, you will have problems. Which doesn't mean that if you are Muslim everything will be perfect but you will solve problems in a way that is good and will help you grow. If you have the norms of Islam, the laws of Islam the Sunan of Rasulullah ﷺ, that's Tayyib!",
      "In your communities, in your societies, in you polities there is a God-shaped hole. When you put the law of Allah SWT, the Sharia of Allah they prosper! When you take that out to the extent that you take it out they become khabith and it may take a little while but they are khabif So good is what is good in all senses It is nourishing",
      "It is good for the short term and for the long term. It's good in this dunya So when you practice the deen of Allah SWT, it is good in his dunya. لَنُحْيِيَنَّهُ حَيَاةً طَيِّبًا Allah SWt says that for those who follow our guidance Allah will Give them a life That is طَیِّب That is fulfilling That is sweet",
      "When your worship of Allah is good, when you do things in the right way, the kind of happiness that you feel, that you experience, you cannot experience anywhere else.",
      "Whatever they find good. In the old times it used to be gold and silver, now it's oil. Whatever it is, if they knew what is in our hearts, in the heart of the simplest Muslim believer, simplest Muslim child, if они знали удовольствие и счастье в worshipе الله سبحانه وتعالى alone, They would not go after oil. They would go after that. But the nature",
      "But the nature of this dunya, the deception, the deceit of khabith is that it presents itself as tayyib until its too late. So thats why the principle Allah gives in the Quran that you can have a billion khabits and it will not equal one tayyip.",
      "to make and it's only two I want to make today. Khabith is very attractive, and so the people who have tayyib, people who are of Allah SWT are often tempted to imitate the khabith. That's the test of this dunya. The test is to try to be normal",
      "What is normal? Rasulullah ﷺ says in a beautiful hadith, لا تكونوا كالإمّاع Do not be like إمّع The word إمَّع in Arabic is a beautiful word. It's a compound. It means أنا معه I'm with him. Meaning, I want to follow the trend. I want",
      "girls, the coolest men, the man with money. Those are my role models that everybody is following. I'm with them. The Prophet said do not be like that. Do not try to be normal in that sense. Try to be good in the way that Lord has commanded you",
      "Today, as Allah SWT says in the Quran, in Surah Al-Ma'idah, one of the final surahs to be revealed during the final hajj of the Prophet SAW. Today I have perfected your deen and Allah is addressing humanity from the beginning of time Adam AS until the end of time. Allah is saying, today I have",
      "مع محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم ، الدين هو نائم و أتممت عليكم نعمتي وأنا قد تحققت من عبادتي علىكم ورضيت لكم الإسلام ديناً و أنا سبحانه وتعالى يقول أنني متأكد بإسلام كدينك الإسلام طيب الإسلايم الكلمة الإسليمة هي كلمة طيبة لا إله إلا الله محمدا رسول الله لا تحاول أن تكون مثلهم",
      "who have kalima khabeethah as the foundation of their life. And they are looking, they're hungry, they thirsty, they lost! They're looking to us for guidance and subhanallah every now and then we feel their thirst and today is one of those times people in tens of thousands are turning to Islam today if you look at the history of Islam",
      "in America last 30, 40, 50 years. There hasn't been a time like this and it starts with October 7th in Gaza It has started when the people who have suffered for 75 years and their determination even though that Khabith of this world have come together The Tayyib is fighting back",
      "And we are seeing as the people around the world Are witnessing The strength of the ordinary Muslim People of Gaza And wallahi al-azim What people in Gaza have We all have They have kalima tayyiba It is just What is their power, what is their strength That they can be bombed They can be broken to pieces",
      "one by one die, their homes and entire savings in their entire life collapse in front of their eyes. And they say Alhamdulillah. And the turn to Allah SWT and not away from Allah SWt This is a miracle! A modern day miracle because people today they suffer a job loss They have a broken relationship",
      "The economy is down because they're based in kalima khabitha. They break down. They blame Allah, they lose their religion, they loose their family. وَالْعِيَادُ بِاللَّهِ They commit suicide or they harm others. This is the people around the world.",
      "And when they are seeing the people of Gaza, the Muslims for the first time in recent memory, Muslims have been made out to be the bad guys. This is what they have spent billions and trillions of Khabif dollars. Trillions of Khabif dollars are spent against us, against Kalima Tayyiba. Does it help? No. Because Kalima",
      "earth and branches are into the sky. So what is happening today? I teach at a university in Ohio. Children, young people, young men and women who are studying the world, who are the future of this country, what are they doing? They are recognizing kalima qayyiba. They are recognising their strength and beauty and justice. Despite what they are being taught, despite",
      "their journalism, their media. Everyone is turning against them and yet they are seeing Kalima Tayyiba So live Kalima tayyiba with that strength and with that confidence like what we are seeing in people of Gaza What people of gaza have you have Let that not be",
      "أقول قولي هذا واستغفر الله لي ولكم فاستغرفوه إنه الغفور الرحيم",
      "What are some of the manifestations of this Kalima Qayyiba? Start with small things. People in Gaza started with",
      "Quran. The people in Gaza are not flawless angels. The People in Palestine tried everything they tried nationalism, they tried Palestinian nationalism, They tried leftist ideologies. They learned that their strength comes from Allah just like we are learning. In the last 20 years there has been a",
      "There has been a proliferation, an increase of Quran schools in Gaza. Quran schools that have changed the way that people thought about their suffering. They became like the people if you remember the story of Musa alayhi salam once he saved the Muslims of that time, the Israelites. He saved them, Allah SWT saved them right?",
      "They saw the biggest miracles. And when it was time for them to stand up and do what Allah SWT said, they said, اذهب أنت وربك فقاتل We will not make jihad with you, O Musa. We don't have the strength. We won't have this strength.",
      "were not corrupted by slavery. We are seeing today what people in Gaza, what happened to them as the Quran came amongst them and various other ideologies receded you see their strength. The same is happening throughout the world among Muslims and it can happen",
      "Turn to the Quran, turn to Salah. Turn to doing your salawat in time. Turn making your masajid the dearest places to you. Masajids Allah says are the dearest places to Allah on this earth and every masjid is a house of Allah. Make these masajids the coolness of your eyes.",
      "spend for them, invest in them make your children love them that's the first step second stand for this Ummah teach your children about this Ummat about their suffering the difficulties the challenges and the triumphs and the victories the heroes of this Ummar",
      "Do not give up your love for kalima tayyiba. Do not try to be normal like other people. Accept, embrace not being normal. Embrace being people of principle, people of truth, people al-hakka when everybody else is following the trends. This is true of young people, young men and young women. Old man and old woman all of us have our own",
      "اللهم ارحمنا برحمتك يا أحمر رحمين",
      "ممتَّعنا اللهم بإسماعِنا وأبصارِنا وجميع قواتِنا أبدًا ما أبقَيتَنا اللّهُم جعلْه الوارثَ منا وانصُرنا على من عادانا اللهم انصُّر الإسلام والمسلمين يا رب العالمين اللهم امَّاه منصُور المستدعفين في كلِّ مكان الله منصور المجاهدين فيكلِّ مكان يا ربي العالمین",
      "O Allah, do not make this dunya our biggest concern. O Allah do not let us live kalima tayyiba",
      "O Allah, allow us to love each other for the sake of Kalima Tayyiba. O Allah give us harmony and understanding and mutual love in our communities and families. O Allaah raise us on the day of judgment under the shade of Rasulullah.",
      "from his hand in Hawd Kauthar, after which there will be no thirst. O Allah, give us the highest rank in Jannah and our children and children's children. O, Allah seed Islam in this land so that in the next generations Islam is stronger and healthier and it grows and it becomes a solution to the problems of this dunya.",
      "Please stand foot to foot and shoulder to shoulder and pray attentively as if this is your last prayer for it might very well be.",
      "الله أكبر الحمد لله رب العالمين الرحمن الرحيم",
      "مالك يوم الدين إياك نعبد وإياك تستعين اهدنا الصراط المستقيم صراط الذين أنعمت عليهم غير المغضوب عليهم ولا الضالين",
      "قل اللهم مالك الملك تؤتي الملك من تشاء وتنزع الملك ممن تشأ",
      "بيدك الخير إنك على كل شيء قدير تولج الليل في النهار وتولج النهر في الليل وتخرج الحي من الميت وتخر جلميت من الحي",
      "ويذكرون في خلق السماوات والأرض واختلاف الليل والنار لآيات لأولي الألباب الذين يذكرن الله قياماً وقعوداً على جنوبهم ويتفكرون",
      "ربنا إنك من تدخل النار فقد أخزيته وما للظالمين من أنصار",
      "ربنا وآتنا ما وعدتنا على رسلك ولا تخزنا يوم القيامة إنك لا تخلف الميعاد",
      "Insha'Allah, we'll pray Maghrib together insha'allah tonight. And then our guest Dr. Omer Anjum insha Allah is going to be our guest speaker for tonight for the Friday night talk. InshaAllah a night full of goodness and good inshaAllah. So please be with us and bring your families and friends inshaAllah. Also there is a program tomorrow so tomorrow we're gonna have breakfast together inshAllah at 9 30 followed by a talk for adults",
      "afternoon inshallah there will be a talk specifically for youth so please come join us inshAllah very exciting program for the weekend in trouble just like"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Friday Sermon with Ovamir Anjum January 27th _ Raj_852H2AbI3sU&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbdIHCQm-CQGHKiGM7w%3D%3D_1750582312.opus",
    "text": [
      "Allah is the greatest, Allah is",
      "I bear witness that there is no god but Allah. I bear testimony that Muhammad is His servant and Messenger. O Allah, bless and grant peace and blessing upon our Prophet Muhammad and all his family and companions and those who follow him in good conduct until the Day of Judgment.",
      "Islam, I begin by praising Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la bearing witness that there is none worthy of worship. There is noneworthy of devotion in your life. There's none worthy no center of life that is worthy to live for and die for but the Creator, The Master, the most merciful, the Most Gracious,",
      "and who will collect us at the end of our time. So we seek his guidance as we must for our travails, our difficulties, our challenges in this life. As each one of us has a soul that has been given to us that is eternal,",
      "that will go either to him or will be rejected. And it is that soul, it is the spirit that is real you that you must care for and cultivate and enrich and protect not your bodies",
      "And just as this body seeks comfort and it has certain conditions in which it thrives, in which is healthy. Just as this Body likes certain things, it has",
      "the Ru'h that Allah has given us also yearns for certain things. It becomes stronger, it draws closer to Allah in certain conditions and it is distant from Allah. It is rejected by Allah in other conditions",
      "And I want to talk about the most important of those conditions that are emphasized, that is emphasized in the Qur'an and in the Sunnah of Rasulullah ﷺ. And that is al-akhuwah fil Islam, siblinghood in Islam, being brothers and sisters in Islam and for the sake of Allah ﷻ.",
      "Allah says, إِنَّمَا الْمُؤْمِنُونَ إِخْوَةً The believers are brothers and sisters, are siblings. And إنما is a particle that adds the meaning of exclusivity in Arabic which means, إَنَّ مَا لْمَؤْبِنونَ اِخ்وَى Muslims are only brothers. Meaning, if they're not brothers,",
      "If you don't feel that siblinghood, that only brothers are truly believers. That is when you feel brotherhood and sisterhood with everyone who says la ilaha illallah Muhammadur Rasulullah, that is when",
      "you will feel the sweetness of faith. And my brothers and sisters, faith, Iman has sweetness. And it's hard for you to go on because the Iman is a challenge if you don't have the sweetness that's driving you to get up for Fajr, to sacrifice, to hold your tongue, to act in a certain way when nobody is watching,",
      "or surrounded by haram, if you do not have that sweetness it's going to be hard to hold on to it. You're not gonna grow in Iman if you don't have sweetness. So what are the three things that make Iman sweet? The first thing is to love Allah and His Messenger more than anything else.",
      "And the second condition that the Prophet ﷺ gave is what I want to talk about today, which is that you love someone for no other reason but Allah. Not because they can tell you jokes that are funny, not because you grew up together, not just because you're good at basketball. All of those things are okay!",
      "But you hang out with them, you care about them, and you take care of them only because they have Iman. All other things are good but this will give you sweetness of faith. This will make other things easy. I often teach there is no shortcut to Jannah. You got to do all the things Rasulullah taught us",
      "You got to be good to people. You got a good, be good your family. You gotta uphold this commandment and that commandment. But one there is one shortcut or as close as you can get the shortcut in Islam. And that is when the people that you hang out with people that like people that are friends with when they call you to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la,",
      "hang out together and they will hang out in the masjid, do qiyam al-layl after their basketball then qiyama lay is as much fun as basketball or going out for ice cream or watching a movie together. Imagine that! That is magical that happens because of the company that you choose. I know youth in our community, I come from Toledo Ohio it's hard to get them",
      "to get them out of the masjid. They don't come for Salatul Jama'ah, it's hard for them even to be on time for Juma'. But they're excited about Qiyam al-Layl when other youth are doing it. So the point is that's a nature that Allah put sweetness when you are together with",
      "So when you're wrestling with your own Iman or you're wresting with other problems in life, seek out good company. Value good company more than you value rich. You know richness often sometimes the masajid we care about donors because they are rich and if they are using their money for the good may Allah bless them but they",
      "important for a masjid than people who have iman, who will welcome other people that they don't know, who smile to people they don' t know because that person says la ilaha illallah muhammadur rasulullah. Those are the minarets on which masajids are built, community is built, ummah is built. Believers are brothers innama al-mu'minuna ikhwah. So be brothers and sisters",
      "for Allah and investigate your relationships, your social circles. Is there anybody who comes to your house for any other reason but because of your friends and relatives? Is there anyone who is invited to your home for Eid, Ramadan or gatherings because that person has Iman? Because you love the way they raise their children?",
      "because they are poor and there is nobody inviting them on the day of Eid. Perhaps, they're converts and they have nobody and you are watching out for them. If your house doesn't have that, if the only guests in your house and only people in your circle are those that you work with, you have a problem. You try to do it alone even if you try to come to the masajid",
      "by one thread but when you do it together that's the blessing. That's why Allah this is a sunnah of Allah to do it and the Ummah of Islam, anyone anywhere in the world who says la ilaha illallah Muhammadur Rasulullah has a demand on our love",
      "Demand on our heart has a place in our heart. And you know what that does? Imagine if 1.6 billion people have a place, in your heart, that heart has to be awfully big. That life is rich! There are people who live lives they're unable to love one person but as a believer, if you're doing it right,",
      "and I'm increasing, Alhamdulillah. That's the blessing of iman. That is the blessing that you can go to anywhere in the world. Go to the masjid, meet people in jum'ah and you will find people with whom you feel like you've known them all your lives.",
      "the beauty of belonging. You have to cultivate it in the masajid that you are in, you have to cultivated in your homes and your circles but it makes it worth living. There's some research recently I believe the name there is a journalist I think Jonathan Hari is his name who did research on depression which",
      "which is an epidemic in the West and in America. And of course we know that there is a whole cottage industry of therapists, people who are trying to say they will save you from depression. And what he found it's a lot of research that shows this, that the best way to lift people out of depression was their connectedness to other people. So the people who",
      "almost always those who are unable to connect for whatever reason. It's not their fault, always! Sometimes they could do something about it but other times nobody else reached out and solved their problem. That is the magic of community. And a lot of people... A lot of",
      "do not have Iman, so many people are looking for answers if they only knew the kind of beauty and Iman that Iman can provide. And if Muslims only opened up to their own faith there is a treasure that's available to each one of us. Innamal mu'minuna ikhwah. The believers are brothers and sisters",
      "and sisters. Let us ensure that we are investing in this brotherhood and in this sisterhood.",
      "As for the rest, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ summarizes these teachings so beautifully when he says",
      "حديث كما تخصص في البخاري وفي المكان الآخر حديد من الإسلام أن النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم قال إن المؤمنين في محبةهم والترحمة لبعضهم",
      "Rahmah means reaching out to those who are weak and forgiving those who have wronged you. Those two things go together in rahmah. Wa ta'atufihim Ta'ataf means to have emotions, shared emotions that you are happy about the same thing and you're sad about the",
      "all of the conspiracies that I'm sure each one of you can lecture me about. When Morocco won, the entire Muslim world, people who don't know anything about soccer, including myself, it made my day, it make my week, that Morocco or another Muslim country is doing well in soccer. That connection",
      "That connection is incredible. And you know what? Nobody plans it. This is Iman. And despite the fact that we are falling off sometimes, we're not ideal Muslims. But that is that connection that so beautifully captures what Rasulullah said. This Ta'atufihim. This Is ta'ahtuif that we have shared emotions. Wa tawadihim and their mutual love for each other",
      "for each other like they're like one body when one part of it hurts so the prophet especially mentions a heart because hurting that's when you really know your brotherhood and your sisterhood then the whole body reacts and the prophet uses the example of a body",
      "an immune reaction. There is response when the hand hurts, the whole body prepares to take care of it. That's that's the nature and we look at what Rasulullah ﷺ is saying in the ayah that I recited from Surat Al-Hujurat, إِنَّمَا الْمُؤْمِنُونَ They're actually talking about context in which there is conflict or pain",
      "So the ayah in Surat Al-Hujurat came in the context when some Muslims, the Sahaba disagreed with each other and almost were beginning to fight. There was a brawl so the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam emphasized Brothers and sisters if you have children or if you had brothers and sisters you know one thing they're not always at peace",
      "at peace, they fight. They are in conflict. They test each other's limits. They're rivals. So this metaphor that Allah has used is very beautiful and powerful and instructive because it says for you to be brothers and sisters in a community elsewhere in the world, we're going to have conflicts that you have to do Islah so brotherhood comes with Islam",
      "making peace constantly. Because when you work with other people, your patience is going to be tested. A lot of people, especially the younger generation I find they will have all kinds of conflict at work that they tolerate because they make money but when there's a conflict with the masjid they have no patience for it. But that's not how brotherhood works. You know if you have children, if you're brothers and sisters",
      "you know as brothers and sisters, biological brothers and sister that you know you have the same parents at the end after you fight. You come back together right? But you have to constantly make Islah so the same way as having the same parent leads to you making Islah constantly Iman should be what you look at your Iman is the reason",
      "is the reason why you keep going back to each other and going to the masjid and making masajid in beautiful places even when there is conflict. That is Iman. That's the way to success, that is a way to beautiful communities, that it's the ways to lift lonely people out of depression, to bring people who are lost into the masajids when people will come and convert to Islam embrace Islam because they see that beauty in the masaja",
      "Sajid. And Alhamdulillah, despite all of her challenges, that is one thing that's still happening. That's one thing in which Islam is still winning. That even when we sometimes abandon many of the teachings of Islam, the beauty of Islam of Allah, when some people practice it, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala through their barakah brings the rest of us. So rejoice!",
      "and do your part. And don't think that caring about the ummah and a billion people is hard, it's a blessing. It makes your life rich and big. We ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to bring our ummah comfort and peace and justice and success and strength in this dunya. Our people whether they are",
      "Rohingya or the Uighur, or the Palestinians, or Kashmiris, or Pakistanis, Egyptians, Americans, white Americans, black Americans, Latino Americans. They're all our people! That's the beauty of Islam we ask Allah. O Allah, solve their problems. Lift them out of misery and poverty. O Allah allow us to love each other for Your sake.",
      "shade on the day of judgment because we loved each other for your sake. O Allah, draw us closer to you through our service to each other. My brothers and sisters,",
      "Community is your strongest rope to Iman. But we have to realize also that with this strength and the beauty comes responsibility, and that responsibility that we have for entire Ummah requires investment.",
      "That investment that you have to know your brother or your sister from a different country who speaks a different language. You have to invest and share in the communication, you have",
      "then you will find this news just annoying. People suffering, always fighting what's happening? I don't know. I don' care about it. That's these Kashmiris why are they? What's wrong with them? For a very long period of time Muslims in the last century were so divided that and have been so divided for reasons we won't go into whether",
      "it's politics, their commitment to this dunya that we abandoned each other. And when we abandon each other, each one of us suffers. To give you an example, our brothers and sisters in Kashmir. It is extremely hard today",
      "to be part of an oppressive, narrow-minded nation state which demonizes Islam and to struggle but not have anyone to care about. Anyone that cares about you.",
      "Many Kashmiris come to me and say, look we talk about Palestine all the time but nobody knows about us. And the effect of that is that there is an epidemic of drugs and suicide and just general depression in Kashmir among people, among youth because they feel abandoned.",
      "it when we started to do something and many other people are doing it I'm simply reporting on their behalf just for them to know that other Muslims around the world care about them or are talking about them that actually is what they want more than money and alhamdulillah now this cooperation",
      "so that they are now protesting when something happens in Palestine. And that increases, you know, these people who are suffering but they're suffering for the same reason because they say la ilaha illallah Muhammadur Rasulullah. But that is enough that now they're seeking strength in each other even when a lot of other Muslims are ignoring them. But",
      "to them as part of an institute that I have initiated with many other people alhamdulillah the ummatix Institute to bring the ummah together through knowledge, through this connection so that we know who we are and so we can think together about revival restoration just in its",
      "It's transformative for them just to think that there are Muslims in America, and America is the center of global power. What we can do here is just enormous. That starts a whole new movement there of hope.",
      "That is real, real love when your concerns are greater than yourself. Often as I teach at a university people who care most about what's happening in these poor countries it often and it breaks my heart to see",
      "are students, white students who are studying. They learn something about the region and they hear and they learn about absolutely terrifying situation and they become champions whereas Muslim kids are only concerned about making money being doctors and engineers nothing wrong with that but you don't care",
      "care about other Muslims, other people in the world when you're sitting at the center of power where most decisions are made. That is something that will be asked for my brothers and sisters. So educate yourself about issues of the Ummah.",
      "وحب العمل الذي يقربنا إلى حبك يا رب العالمين وأثر دعوانا أن الحمد لله رب عالمين أقيم الصلاة",
      "Allah is the Greatest, the Most Gracious. I bear witness that there is none worthy of worship except Allah. I bears witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.",
      "Please stand foot to foot and shoulder to shoulder and pray attentively as if this is the last prayer, it might very well be.",
      "الحمد لله رب العالمين الرحمن الرحيم مالك يوم الدين إياك نعبد وإياك لاستعين اهدنا الصراط المستقيم",
      "ونعمت عليهم غير المغضوب عليهم ولا الضالين",
      "وتنزع الهلك ممن تشاء وتعز من تشاه وتذل من تساوى بيدك الخير إنك على ذل شيء قدير تولج الليل في النهار وتولج المنار في الليل",
      "وتخرج الحي من الميت وتخر جو الميت من الحين وترزق من تشاء بغير حساب الله أكبر",
      "الحمد لله رب العالمين الرحمن الرحيم مالك يوم الدين إياك نعبد وإياك تستعين اهدنا الصراط المستقيم صراط الذين نعمت عليهم غير المغطوب عليهم ولا الضال",
      "ويتفكرون في خلق السماوات والأرض ربنا ما خلقت هذا باطلا سبحانك فقنا عذاب النار ربna إنك من تدخل النارة فقد أخزيته وما للظالمين من أنصار",
      "So, we're just going to go through our announcements very quickly.",
      "So join us after Isha tonight for our family night. We're going to be discussing the signs of the Day of Judgment, so this is gonna be tonight after Isya. Please don't forget. To all the young 7-16 year old boys and girls we are bringing you a soccer camp. This was supposed to happen last week but it got rescheduled to this weekend inshallah. This is gonna tomorrow from 10am to 12pm. So 10am-12pm please sign up through the link on WhatsApp group",
      "It was supposed to happen last weekend but it got rescheduled for this weekend inshallah. Tomorrow 10am-12pm Tuesday, January 31st at 7.30 am we are going to have a shuttle that is departing from Maryam Masjid and many other massages they're all gonna have the same as well that's heading to the Capitol building in Austin for the Texas Muslim Capital Day This is organized by CARE and a lot of other partners InshaAllah this is going to be",
      "730 a.m.. So please make sure you sign up for that as well We are blessed to have two Islamic conferences You know they're gonna be happening we have the Al-Maghrib Institute's Ilmfest This is going to be held this Saturday InshaAllah on the 28th also Rasala Foundation's conference on culture, creed and community will be held on Saturday February 4th so both these conferences have a beautiful lineup of scholars Please make sure your build this opportunity",
      "this opportunity again our maghrib institute's film fest is this weekend or this saturday and then uh foundation's culture creed community conference is going to be saturday next weekend we are running short of non-perishable items there's a car outside you can you know donate to the van please make dua shifa for muhammad please make duality and for all of the members of the community one last announcement inshaallah",
      "There is a request to write emails to the Fort Bend ISD superintendent and board of trustees before February 5th. This is to request aid as a school holiday. Let them know that they can get this information from the email addresses. You know, there's more information on the MariaMessage WhatsApp groups but again, the deadline is for February 5. So if you could all as community members",
      "the fortman ids isd superintendent and the board of trustees uh before the fifth to again inform them about eid and request that he'd be made a school holiday inshallah i guess the more number of people we have uh the more emails they get and the more encouragement they get to do this inshalla"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/How Dr_ Ovamir Became Ummatic _ Ovamir Anjum__1750605867.opus",
    "text": [
      "Muslims were worthless. The Muslim life was worthless. That had a deep impact on me, that how could it be that the Ummah of Muhammad, the people who have the guidance, people who are supposed to have this honor and care for each other, that we have invited an army that has killed half a million? And that was just what they admitted. What's happening on the ground was far worse. And so we had abandoned Arapis, the Ummuh, right? But that was",
      "and then the Afghan, and then Gaza. So you could say that was a formative moment for me, very personal. Kashmir was another cause I grew up with, and I remember as a high school student thinking about it and really crying in anger like helplessness that we can't do anything"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Ovamir Anjum _ Kitaab Pod with Arhum Ali _ Episode_ER9nVSI_6IM&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750606620.opus",
    "text": [
      "So bismillah, alhamdulilah you're in California. We are very honored to have you here, very happy to have You Alhamdulillah, honored to be here Alhamdullilah and we were looking at like the things that you've been working on mashallah You've become an expert in many fields And I think one of the things really stands out about you is that you got a background in your Islamic studies then you also are really interested in tasawwuf You're also interested in the idea of Islamic politics",
      "politics. So I want to hear like where did you even start if you just take us back to your childhood, your upbringing and what brought you here all the way? Okay so Bismillah Alhamdulilah I was born in Pakistan in Karachi and I moved to Saudi Arabia when I was about 12 but my father",
      "most of our time there that was outside of school and then we moved there. So my schooling, high school you could say middle and high school was in Saudi Arabia and then I came to the United States in 1994. And rather end of night beginning of 1995. And I think that my family,",
      "Saudi Arabia, just seeing both the suffering and the potential and thinking about what was happening. I think one formative moment for me was well if we go really way back it's in the 80s the ethnic conflicts in Pakistan",
      "power and its abuse, use and abuse. So I had a close sense of what was going on in Pakistan even though I was a child. And as I moved to Saudi Arabia you know different circumstances but I was because of my family background religious and really concerned about the Ummah. As you know in the 1980s a lot of things are happening there is Afghan jihad",
      "Iraq War going on and in the 1990-1991, the first Gulf war happens which is I think a turning point for me. I remember having this nightmare in my apartment building in Jeddah that the Americans have attacked us even though the idea was, the narrative was that the American troops were",
      "had at the core that we as an Ummah are no longer protected because we have a non-Muslim army in the Holy Land. And a lot of Muslims felt that way, but for me it was very personal. It was a recurring nightmare that American planes have come and bombed our apartment building. So there was this sense that the Ummah is on one hand there's signs of hope",
      "there was the Sahwa, reawakening of the Ummah. That's when the masses of the ummah became religious. Obviously in 1979 Iranian revolution all of that played into that but then in 1990-1991 there was this divorce if you will between Muslim governments and Muslim societies",
      "to invite the Americans, the Muslim societies became split. The governments were also split most decided to go with Saudi Arabia but only because of both carrot and stick in reality the societies and the and the Muslim Societies felt that there was a betrayal and then what happened in Iraq in the decade of 1990",
      "mass murder of Iraqis by the Americans through this inhumane sanctions. And as you know, a famous interview clip that circulated 1998, Madeleine Albright was asked do you think the murder of half a million children, Muslim children, right? Our people and that's how I felt about it",
      "That's how I felt about it, though people can choose to otherize because they were Iraqis. When she was asked if this is worth it, she said yes, it was worth it. There was no identifiable policy objective for war in Iraq. Really there was none. There wasn't a threat to the United States but despite that, the life of half a million Muslim children was worth",
      "that Westerners say as part of an argument, you know, as a gotcha argument. You know Democrats against Republicans or the other way around but Muslims were worthless. The Muslim life was worthless and that had a deep impact on me. That how could it be that Ummah of Muhammad, the people who have",
      "that we have invited an army that has killed a half a million. And that was just what they admitted, but what's happening on the ground was far worse. And so we had abandoned Iraqis, the Ummah, right? But that was jut the beginning because then we were going to abandon the Afghan and then Gaza. So you could say that that was a formative moment for me, very personal. Kashmir was another cause I grew up with",
      "that I grew up with and I remember as a high school student thinking about it, really crying in anger like helplessness. That we can't do anything. Were all of these different issues... did you hear about it from your parents a lot or was it something that came from your own heart? Good question. I think there was a lot. Alhamdulillah I grew",
      "in many other ways. There were people that were trying to do children's programs, including folks from Jamaat-e-Islami and from Tablighi Jama'at and others. So I had a lot of interaction with my cousins and uncles, and my own parents are religious. My mother, I think also...my mother and grandmother played very important roles.",
      "and a very, very smart individual who had this very strong sense of religion. My mother had a very strong sent of sense of umatic love. So I know that those things hadn't had an effect on me but it wasn't just those things. I think that I was fortunate to both see suffering but also kind of like what people are seeing in Gaza today that they see suffering, of course nothing like that but they're also with standing with each other",
      "with each other. And I saw, in other words, I love Muslims. These are my people. Yeah. And it's not like other people are not my people but this is my family. Right. And moving around Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and then the United States. The United States and Madison Wisconsin where I went to school and the masjid was you know a lot of students from all over the world",
      "And I felt that this was amazing. This is like, you know, had friends graduate students at the university from all over the world who were mature enough that they knew what was happening in their countries many of them were runaways because they were hunted down by their governments for praying in the mosque or something like that. Nineties were very oppressive increasingly so",
      "That was my real education in the Islamic Center in Madison, Wisconsin. That's where sort of this culminated because I felt that this is...I found my identity there ironically in the middle of this small Midwestern town. But in terms of having access to Arabic language and Quran and history those things were part",
      "I never thought that I'd be doing Islamic studies. I came to the West not because I thought, I'll find Islam here. I cam because I wanted to be a nuclear physicist. I wanted unify the forces and something like Nobel Prize worthy because that was my passion. Well, was that connected to the ommatic vision that you developed up to that point? I think so. Yeah there was this sense I was proud of what Abdus Salam,",
      "physicist had done and Abdul Qadir Khan who had built up this Pakistan's nuclear program but the sense that science was what you needed to fix the Muslim world and our problems. And of course when I came here, and I thought about it, and studied history and political science, I took courses and talked to people, I realized... It wasn't a very private realization",
      "that it's not science. It's not a science, that's the problem because if science has... Science needs a society, it needs demand, it means certain kind of independence and thinking, it need some kind of support and stability, curiosity those are all things that come from somewhere else they're pre-scientific commitments there they come from the heart. A society commits to it,",
      "to those things and I thought we were missing those, that we needed those first. So even though I still love science but I felt that those are the things that I need to think about so I went and studied after it did I finished my bachelor's in nuclear physics and engineering but i went on to do a master's in social sciences at the University of Chicago. And that was another world, a whole world of western social sciences which",
      "crisis and fragmentation, and there is a problem of Orientalism how Islam has been studied by the Westerners and how that has become part of Muslims own self-understanding. So for me it was a very strong realization which is what I wrote about an article that became ironically quite famous one of my most well read articles was when I",
      "in my master's at that time. What is that one called? It's called Talal Asad and Islam Is a Discursive Tradition, Talal Al-Assad and His Interlocutors. And it was really a way to challenge the way Islam was being studied in the West. And so my graduate degree came out of that because I wanted to study Islam classically",
      "So that's where I began to do Islamic intellectual history and just read early sources, looking at this question. Put simply my question was what went wrong? Like Bernard Lewis.",
      "world and the answer his answer was you guys are just angry at us because we won, you lost. Right? It's almost kind of a childish answer but the thing is that it has such purchase in the Muslim world because he was historian and he did hit on something really important which people Muslims were asking that question so for me the",
      "what went wrong, where and more importantly were Muslims able to understand what went so I wanted to understand how Muslims understood what went rather than through a lens of modernity. So that's where I discovered Islamic political thought on Islamic theology in Kalam and its relationship to questions that are fundamentally political",
      "Bi-political is a very important part, I think in my own discoveries that when you think about politics usually people think of something dirty. It's horse trading, it's maximizing your personal interest or the interests of your group and whatnot but the word political as it was initially conceived by Plato and Aristotle and so on, it was a noble word for...that was trying to solve the problem of collective action",
      "that political, you know... How can it be that a lot of people from different families and tribes live together? And they have something that they share. The city, the polis. And what they do is good for them and for polis at the same time. What are those actions that they can do",
      "political meant to Plato. That zero-sum game means my gain has to mean your loss. If I win, my neighbor has to lose, my other tribe has to loose maybe even my cousin has to loose but this idea of political philosophy was what was good for everyone and their fundamental premise was that or this was a western political philosophy",
      "you cannot be a good human being outside of a good community. So there is no such thing as successful or flourishing as a human being without being part of a community that also flourishes. So this way of thinking was what political meant, the best of political philosophy. And so the question for me going into Islamic sciences",
      "would be Islamic political philosophy. Now typically if you look at what Westerners were calling Islamic political philosophies was basically a translation of Aristotle and Plato into the Arabic language that happened starting in the third century of Hijrah, and it becomes a dominant tradition. But there was very little Islam in there. If you read Al-Farabi, it's brilliant, it is interesting but its commentary on Aristotle. Where",
      "Where is the Prophet? Where are the struggles of Islam? Where is this companion's vision of Khilaf al-Rashidah? Where's the Quran in there? Where was Abu Hanifa's struggle and his vision of where is that fiqh, where is Al Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyyah. These were the people who formed a core Islamic religious tradition",
      "that was grounded in the Qur'an and Sunnah. But, that's not what you find in a typical treatment of Islamic political philosophy or Islamic politics. Typically these are considered jurists that didn't do politics. They were just involved with the... like not with the government related stuff but everything that is other than government? Or put differently they were concerned only with law. So even when they were",
      "with politics, they were concerned just with what the Sharia law said. Whereas this idea of a political vision of what is good for everyone that was done by Greeks and those who inherited Greek philosophy, the Neo-Platonic philosophers, the Hellenistic philosophy in the Muslim world. So as I encountered this problem my attempt was to say well I want to recover or",
      "uncover this entire, if you will the Islamic political philosophy which means I have to go to books that don't say political or siyasa maybe in the title but you have to look at theology. You have to looks at jurisprudence. You've got to look",
      "about what happened in the first fitna between the companions of Prophet ﷺ, how people understand that this is where they're thinking about what is good for everyone and what the vision of Islam is with a vision of ummah. And from that my book on Islamic political thought came from that discovery of what went wrong but to do so from within",
      "really to look for what went wrong but rather, what were the sources of strength in our civilization by which we can self-critique. Because I think that...I was and I still am somewhat different from a lot of my colleagues, Muslim colleagues in the West today who are largely interested in defending Islam",
      "I was not interested in that. I almost felt that orientalists are just not worthy of even refuting because we had something bigger and better to do. We have to think about how to recover our strengths, and Western propaganda, Western attack, misunderstandings, and sometimes brilliant insights and discoveries",
      "but they are not our real... In other words, our real narrative when we're doing scholarships should not be, oh, you guys got this wrong about Islam and Islam is good. Right, like apologetics. Apologetics, right? So for me the question was, you're guests, great, thank you for pointing out these books. You stole a lot of her books, preserved some, commented on some, but your job is done.",
      "I'm much more interested in what's real. And what's really is this is God's message and this is the Ummah of Prophet. And we have to think about what has been our internal dynamics, where did be...what we got right and what we got wrong as an Ummah? So internal critique. Now all that is background to where Ummatics came from.",
      "Ummatics literally you could say it rhymes with politics, right? And that's sort of what it means as well. Politics was the science of what is good for the city, the polis. So ummatics is a science of What is good For the Ummah Not the individuals only but the Ummas as a whole How do you solve the collective action problem",
      "collective action problem. You familiar with this collective action problems? In political science, right the issue is that if in a public park let's say which everybody uses but who takes care of it? Who pays for it? I have my children, I take care of them, right? I maybe my backyard, I",
      "That's a collective action problem. Another way of looking at this problem is, if you heard of that story, it became very famous in sociology and in the West, a woman is raped in the middle of a busy public square and nobody calls the police, nobody does anything. Why? Well, that's a",
      "That's happening in Gaza. Right. But that was happening in Kashmir, that happened in Iraq, that happen in Afghanistan. So it's not new. It's been around for a long time. It has been happening over and over and when would you say that started or when would we say it started going on the decline where we have that collective action problem? I think with the dissolution of the abolition of the caliphate 1924 is when it becomes a formal problem.",
      "Before that you could say that maybe the Khilafah was in decline for a century before that, but there was hope and there was at least a center you could blame. There was a place to go to which was historically connected all the way to the Prophet. That's what Khilafa means. Literally Khilfa is successorship or deputieship to the prophet. So the ruler has...",
      "of the ruler, the foundation of the authority of the Ruler comes from their attempt to and their claim to follow the Prophet. Their claim to care for the Ummah of the Prophet. That's their basis of their legitimacy but once that's gone what's the source of legitimacy of these various stateless that were created by the British and the French?",
      "what is the source of their authority. So that's where we see that Muslim political situation spirals down, that rulers are... they find their source of legitimacy in secular nation-state ideals that they're importing from the West but they have no purchase within their own populations that go against some of the fundamental teachings of the Quran most of all Islamic Brotherhood. The sense of the Ummah which is at first very strong",
      "strong, but it's dissolving because the nation state demands loyalty to an imagined nation that has been created and the Ummah stands in the way. The Ummah is not my problem. So if you're Egyptian, Sudan is not your problem. Palestine is not a problem. If you are Pakistani, Afghanistan is not",
      "Unless it becomes a national problem or national cause. But theoretically, the nation state stands in direct opposition to the idea of the ummah. So that's what is happening since 1924. The symbol that could have been saved and re-infused with significance was lost",
      "was lost. And history matters, right? The idea of the fact that this thing had gone on for hundreds of years, 1300 some years and the fact unanimously Muslim scholars, Orthodox Muslims scholars had believed in the obligation of the Khilafah. So much so that in our books of jurisprudence",
      "jurisprudence, so many problems are simply dependent explicitly on oh you know if your wali dies then who takes care of these children? Wali al-Amr. If the father is no longer there mother is not there nobody take care of them jurisprudent says khila khalifa for the Hanafis even the Juma'ah Salatul Jumaa right the most important feature",
      "of our religious life, right? A fixture. A fundamental thing that you know if you're not religiously is one thing that You got to do go to Juma'ah That's not valid except by the permission of a khalifa and so my point is that our jurisprudence is empty without... Right it's heavily dependent upon the idea of a leader of a Khalifa So when you take that",
      "take that out, that system out then you're left with a lot of rules that are difficult to apply. That are difficult apply, that do not close meaning that you have endless fights then because there is nobody to make that final decision which is part of the law or the legal system. That could be our whether we gonna decide Eid this way or that way or whether we're going to know the time for Fajr is going to be 18 degrees or 15 degrees",
      "there's jurisprudence problems, but sometimes the final decision has to be made by a khalifa. So it's there in the jurisprudence, but it's also there in Aqidah. It's found in early centuries. This is found in books of Aqida. And so that's the theoretical if you will background of where ummatiks came from",
      "came from and more practically Arab Spring 2011, 9-11 happens and Muslims basically become targets of this global war on terror. And this global War on Terror which becomes a license to persecute your Muslim problem, to solve the Muslim problem in any way you like it's a license given",
      "tyrants all around the world by the United States China India Myanmar UAE Saudi Arabia Egypt anybody who has a Muslim problem call them terrorists and do whatever you want it's it's a you know free get out of jail card and so Muslims are oppressed you know and Muslims have been in in the last few decades but now Muslims",
      "for say, you know two decades after that. And then 2011 Arab Spring happens which is also very personal to me I was there in the Haridah Square in Egypt in 2011 talking to people about what their vision was and it disappointed me that there was not an Islamic awareness The discourse was kind of empty You felt that... It's still nationalistic?",
      "It was actually very interesting. It was nationalistic and secular to some degree, but it was naive and all over the place. Very easy to manipulate. And I felt that Muslims aren't ready. If you talk to people, even the more mature politicians, they would say our problem was Hosni Mubarak.",
      "one bad guy. We had a bad egg.\" And this was so naive because this was happening to every country in the global south, the crony capitalism, the unequal system of capital accumulation in the center of the world, the western countries and exploitation",
      "but there was this lack of awareness, it was a lack of preparation I felt. And then what happened after that the massacres and counter-revolution made me think we needed an alternative vision for the Ummah where what I had thought about in my seminars and books",
      "because it was, I no longer you know when you go to grad school you think that you have all the time in the world to think. I realized that I didn't know, I did not longer had 50 more years to improve my thinking and write more books but in the meanwhile I was doing other things as you also said whether I was translating with Aridjus Salikian and I was working on contemporary movements as well",
      "But it was, these were the key moments that led me to write the article Who Wants the Caliphate? We sort of launched the Oumatics Institute eventually. Very nice, very nice. It's a very interesting background and if we go back to like the 70s and 80s when these thoughts are forming what were your impressions at that time like when the Afghan Jihad is happening",
      "had this happening and then you have the situation happening in Iraq. Are you like Muslims at that time, especially in the regions that you were in? Where are they gravitating towards? Is there because at least at that times there was more external expressions of Islam and people who were looking at Afghanistan as an example of them going against an occupying power. So what was that like? And where you disappointed with what happened after or was it just a natural progression from there?",
      "from there? Disappointed in... In basically the following years after the Soviets were out then what happens in Afghanistan. There's decades of problems. Yeah, no that was I mean I came to if you will I grew up in the 80s. I was born late 70s so in the eighties toward the end when you know you basically on one hand saw this heroic victory and",
      "and then also saw why military prowess and military resistance doesn't take you all the way. That you needed something else, you needed discourse of unification, of integration",
      "reasons or maybe Islamic reasons, but they were sectarian, divided along sectarian and ethnic lines. And if Islam is not a strong enough force to unite people then our victories all disappear.",
      "there was this the hope that this is temporary, that we'll figure this out right? But after 1990 1991 first Gulf War There is this enormous sense. I think the Muslim world felt Which we sort of became used to but there was a sense of great insult Like there was time when Muslims felt some level of self-respect, which is gone after",
      "after Saudi Arabia invites the American army in the Holy Land, which they used to say that non-Muslims are not even allowed in these holy lands. Now you have an army and that army is there to protect against another Muslim army. So it's there. And it turns out later, to add insult to injury, that those pictures that were shown of Iraqi accumulation on Saudi border",
      "King Fahd was persuaded were doctored. So you are so helpless and... I feel like you've been fooled at that point. You have been fooled, and then you basically subjected the entire Muslim world and Muslim population to so much misery on the basis of American designs and whims. Would you say that was a turning point for how Muslims felt about America",
      "Yeah, I think that is true. So the third world country, Global South even you know since going back to the beginning of the 20th century if you remember Roosevelt's",
      "14 points in which a lot of hope was invested and people thought that America was different. It was not like the British and the French were imperialist, Americans are different. Now reality was very different. America had its colonial project in Philippines which didn't work out and America sort of didn't need it but there was this idea that the Americans are",
      "so on after the Second World War then Americans move in and replace the British and French. And that is I think when Americans begin to fundamentally transform, basically take on British policies but in the Cold War still you know second basically 50s",
      "they use the Muslim world as a chessboard, right? So topple this guy, kill that guy. But in the naive way in which population thinks, our general impressions are never very sophisticated. Like we have a sense of these guys are good and those guys are bad. The sense generally was the Americans are whatever else they may be, they're better than the British.",
      "and also they were using Islam to fight against the Soviets, leftist forces in the Muslim world and elsewhere. So that is why Americans supported Islamic movements or felt that Islamic movements could be used. Now of course instrumentalization never works as you think.",
      "you think. You may be doing it for one reason or somebody else is benefiting or thinking of a different reason. So Islamic movements are very much indigenous and they have their own logic, but in the 70s and 80s, Islamic movements have the left which is atheistic",
      "interests come together and that's why there is a generally positive view of Americans, which kind of changes in 79 what happens with Iran. With Iran or Shia and maybe Sunnis are able to set that aside,",
      "First, America tries to topple democratically elected government in 1954. And after that there was other problems with the United States but on the whole America is better than Soviet, the Soviets. But 1990-91 is when that begins to change. Got it and when 1979 that's when the Iranian Revolution happened so is that a moment where a lot of Sunni Muslims were happy? That at least even if they're Shia",
      "at the end of the day they're replacing a government that was much more secularized. Yeah, so it's very interesting in the middle of the 20th century there is a lot more relationship between Shia and Sunni. They are reading each other's literature Sayyid Qutb is read, Mawdudi is read in Iran",
      "and other Shia authors are read in the Sunni world. And there is a sense of camaraderie against the colonizers, and against secular forces. But when the Saudis become big players on the scene, and after 1979, after Iranian Revolution, and then there was some internal revolution or rebellion attempt within Saudi Arabia",
      "Saudi Arabia, basically. And also Faisal is assassinated King Faisa Rahimahullah who was the last good king, Saudi king when I think of it and after that basically Americans have the Saudis not as much as they do now but they are able to control the Saudi royal family much more",
      "They're obviously the Wahhabi background with a very strong anti-Shia sentiment, which wasn't very prominent before when Iran was not a Shia power. But as soon as Iran becomes Shia Power Khomeini also has very strong rhetoric that is very antagonistic so it puts Sunnis on edge, it puts Saudis on edge",
      "America, Iraq, Saddam's Iraq attacks Iran in the middle of all this as soon as the new Islamic revolution is completed and that sort of changes the game. Now why that war happened there's a lot there but basically research that I've seen shows",
      "Iran, a million people are killed on one side and almost three quarters of a million on Iraq's side. So a devastating war which Saudis and Americans are backing Iraq in helping destroy Iran. And this also basically pushes Iran to an extreme because Iran has to choose between complete annihilation or coming together against the Sunni evil.",
      "becomes more radicalized and the Sunni powers become more... basically, the United States is playing this Cold War game in which Sunnis and Shias are being divided. And within the societies there is a war between the left and Islamists that Americans are supporting Islamists in.",
      "are, you know, they're objecting to American designs in the region after 91. They become the enemy as well. So there is this is the progression in which Americans, American policy as it unfolds in the Muslim world and Middle East, it becomes more and more draconian. Right.",
      "Right. Very interesting. And so during that time, it seems like you'd realized this idea of the American empire, which a lot of people are realizing right now within the past two years with the situation flaring up and becoming much more popularized. So at that time what made you decide that you want to come to America to study? Because people would think that okay if you're living in that side of the world",
      "the empire that's destroying the lives of a lot of Muslims, then why should I go live there? Why should I pay taxes? Well, that's an interesting question. Remember, I'm a kid and I come right about the time when these views are changing. Right. In the 90s, we don't know what was happening in Iraq. This is all retrospect now it's easy to say. There is a sense of fear that you have",
      "that there is something wrong with American army in the Holy Land, in Saudi Arabia and the Hijaz, in the land of Prophet. But on the whole it wasn't as nearly as antagonistic as it became after 9-11 2001. And hands down I think most people don't realize and American Muslims don't realise science",
      "Science and knowledge, universities in the United States which are being dismantled now is really one of the most exceptional things that any civilization has produced ever. The amount of knowledge and advanced knowledge that is available and that is being disseminated. I mean that's how China got strong, that's India got strong to come to the American university which now Americans have turned against but it really was an exceptional institution",
      "And it still is. I'm speaking of it in the past because I think it's a sharp decline. So that's why people came. That's why best people all over the world came, because if you wanted to know science no matter who you were... There was a moment after the 60s when other people could come and American University really opened up",
      "it from minds all over the world, it was a very exciting place. You could do best science there, you can do best social sciences there, and you could do debate. It was open, it's free, and merit was rewarded. So I think that it is a tragedy what's happening today. It's a tragedy for humanity because that institution I think is dying and I hope Muslims",
      "learn from it and recover our own traditions of free inquiry. Building off that, one thing I want to talk about is the concept of Dar al-Islam and Dar al Harb Are we in Dar al harb living in America? Is that bifurcation maybe not the right way to think about it now since modernity has changed a lot of the factors? Let's first think about where does this distinction between Dar al Islam and Dar Al Harb come from",
      "It comes from the fact that Muslims live by a law, Sharia. Law requires power and authority in application. Now if you go to any court anywhere, if you need to go to parking ticket, the first thing they will ask you is does this court have jurisdiction over you? If a police officer gave you a ticket at a time when",
      "road over, that ticket is invalid because they're not in the jurisdiction. Jurisdiction is a central problem in law. Dar al-Islam is an answer to the question of where do the Islamic laws whether there's penal code and other norms, where does it apply? And Dar al Islam is where they apply. So if you are outside of that then Muslim Imam and Muslim Qadis",
      "Muslim Qadis, the judges and political authorities cannot guarantee your rights. That's what it means that you are in Dar al-Kufr or Dar al Haram. You're no longer within the realm of Dar al Islam and therefore those rights do not apply. So if you erase this distinction one of two things have to happen. One, you say the entire world has to be treated like Dar al Islm which means we should be going",
      "Because it's an obligation to do what God says, and God says this is the punishment if somebody steals. But we don't do that. Why do we not do that? That's because of the distinction between Dar al-Islam and Dar al Haram or Dar al Kufr or Dar ad Dawah. There are different names for it. But that distinction I think is very important. The other thing you could do is to say that Islamic law was never meant to be applied.",
      "It is merely a book of ethics and you can leave anything that is inconvenient or interpret everything that you can't apply as a metaphor. Now Muslim jurisprudence, Muslim tradition never accepted that position. That would be considered really denying the Book of Allah.",
      "between Dar al-Islam and other abodes, other jurisdictions is necessary. If a non-Muslim understands what these things are they would demand that you understand us as not Dar al Islam. So the problem is in the apologetic it sounded so bad that this is the abode of war or the",
      "Therefore it was somehow seen by Muslim apologists as an ancient distinction that no longer applies. But again, as I said when you deny that you're making one of those statements Islamic law is never supposed to be applied It's just a book of ethics, it's just the book of Confucius wisdom or you are really trying to apply Islamic law everywhere and the borders don't matter",
      "classical jurisprudence, particularly for the Hanafis those borders mattered. And for other schools the borders mattered a little bit less but they still mattered. Got it. So then now that we're living like I've seen some opinions in the past that said that you're not supposed to live in Dar al-Harb, you're",
      "So that's a very good question. Briefly, number one Muslims are supposed to live in Dar al-Islam, that is true but it's also the case that if they can practice their religion elsewhere classical jurists said that they can live and there is some disagreement between Malikis, Hanafis, Shaifaris and Hanbali on that I don't want to go into the details so basically there were jurists",
      "somewhere else and make dawah there, then you're allowed to. And some even said you are obligated to live there to make da'wah to people outside. So people went as far as saying that so long as your practice...you're able to practice your religion. So all of that jurisprudence is dependent on what you can do and your circumstances. And this is even assuming that there is Darul Islam waiting for",
      "back and you'll be okay, you'll have a job. But that's not the case for very large number of people. 30% of Muslims live as minorities in India, Russia, China. The West is a minority in fact. In these minorities, West is small minority. What are 200 million Muslims going to do? Where they're gonna go? How about Russia was it 30 million?",
      "So, I don't think that Muslims who are living in Dar al-Harb or Dar al Da'wa, that's a new designation that some of the scholars have spoken about and I like it. That this is a place where you invite people to Islam. And if you're able to practice your religion then you're permitted to live there",
      "able to help Islam by preaching Islam, by helping Muslims back home even. In many ways the powers that Muslims have, the power of citizenship, passports, the fact you can move around the world. The majority of Muslim countries can't move around in the world because we have wealth and skills in the West that you don't have around the",
      "should do what we can. This is a collective thing, right? But as an individual you may feel that your children are threatened their Iman is threatened and in that case it becomes your obligation to move or do whatever you can to save their religion but if you are in the field of dawah and if you're in a strong community",
      "and your children see that, and become part of it. And you're not worried about them losing their Iman then there is no reason for you to move. Now in reality, I will give you that many Muslims rightly feel that they are threatened here and they can use some of the wealth that they have in the West to bargain for a safe space somewhere in the Muslim world",
      "in Turkey, Malaysia, elsewhere. And if they can do that I think that's a decision they have to make on the basis of weighing pros and cons. But a blanket statement is hard to make precisely as you said even if you want to move back most people cannot there is no back for most people to move where Muslims in India been there 700 years where are they going to move?",
      "India was ruled by Muslims and now we're... So, we cannot solve this problem by this moving back or the mentality. We have to think about Muslims having the power to negotiate for the rights of Muslim minorities. And that cannot happen unless we unite, unless we come together, unless",
      "mentioning about moving back if i think for myself i was born here i was raised here i speak english much better than i speak urdu and even though i've been to pakistan many times and i can speak or do and get around there i feel like i would be very ineffective there because i don't have that understanding of the culture as i do over here so that may be also another reason why even if we're thinking from an omatic perspective",
      "it might be better for people to find their best positions where they can be the most effective. You know, there was a time when Muslims thought about this that we are here, we're not going anywhere, we have to become good citizens but we thought about it from a place of weakness and defeat which is that we were giving up on the Muslim Ummah We belong to America, we want to assimilate",
      "mirage, that was a deceit. It was... America is a very divided place and it has many crimes that it's committing now, it has committed in the past but at the same time America is where there is a fighting chance, there is civil rights movement, there",
      "There's history of xenophobia, but there is also a history of these great universities that I was just talking about. So there is a fighting chance. What happened after 9-11 is that the American establishment lied to Muslims, Muslims who were generally new and unsophisticated about America. And they told these guys that we are a united front if you either are with us or are the enemy. You have to become like us.",
      "And poor Muslim uncles bought into that vision. So when they said we are becoming America, Americans, they thought that they have to become like this vision, this idea. American dream. American Dream. And it's somehow necessary for them. They even went so far as to say this was our religious... I mean, they got some people to sign fatwas that is our religious duty. Some even would say that it's a religious duty to fight in American armies those all wars",
      "But really it was a sickness because apart from all the violation of everything Islamic, the duty to other Muslims and the duty not to fight in unjust wars and not to kill other people let alone other Muslims. All of that aside this was a false vision of what America is. America's at war with itself there are sides",
      "How do you use that to help the situation, to do the right thing? But understand what the sides are. There is 1% against the 99%. Majority of Americans are oppressed people. We don't have to see them, majority of Americans as the enemy. Their enemies on the whole are the same as the enemies of Islam.",
      "wage these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in Palestine are also the ones now more explicitly waging war against their own people. The poor, the middle class, the blacks. So we because we're able to see things much close as a community grown",
      "battles and we can choose much better battles than the ones that post 9-11 leadership was trying to fight, which was against their own identity and looking, trying to follow this mirage. So when I answer you the question, when I answered the question the way that I did, there's no back home. My reason is the exact opposite of what they were saying.",
      "work on that home. We have to use the advantages that we have here, to ensure that Ummah is empowered and protected because in many ways, many of us who came from back home, even if you're a convert your loyalties should belong to the Ummah and not to your own particular trajectory. You should think about empowering the Ummat",
      "the ummah. You should think about transferring the knowledge and the skills and wealth to the hundreds of millions of poor starving people that are the target of American bombs, and American policies, American coups, and America conspiracies, and generally colonial history of last couple centuries. We should think of ourselves as champions",
      "ethical thing to do whether you are Muslim or not. So I think that's the vision I'm advocating, but that's what being an Ummatic person today means, an American Muslim or Western Muslim is that we think of the ummah as a project our future without being out of place in America",
      "And that, in fact, aligns well because by standing up for the weak and the poor and the oppressed you would be doing a favor to the United States as well. Because the American policy of exploitation is very much",
      "exploitation of the other people, other countries comes back home. The same companies that are killing people outside they come back and turn against their own people. So we're at this moment where this has become clearer than ever before. It's great that you have your organization working on this because one thing I've noticed being in the Muslim community is there isn't much discussion about these topics",
      "In fact, if we look at how Islam is taught in the West a lot of times it's depoliticized and we don't really focus on those issues even in fiqh. When someone's studying the abwab of fiqhh they'll go through all of the ibadat but when it goes through the political issues, the governance issues then you just speed through it and get through it so in that sense what would you say is the correct way of going about this? There are two approaches that I'm seeing from the Muslim community",
      "People want to focus on their spirituality. And then they're saying that an outcome of purifying yourself is going to be that it's going to fix our situation, we're going to get better leaders, we are going to a better system that is in line with Islam. That's the more spiritual approach. The other approach that we're seeing and correct me if I'm wrong but I feel you are also proponent of is that if we have Islamic system, it's not at odds with spirituality. You could have spirituality as well",
      "as well, but when you have an Islamic system then that's going to facilitate a better society that is free from the corruption and the fahsha that exist. And then that is going to flow down into spirituality as well. So how do we understand that division between politics and spirituality? If I need to say that because in this Ramadan I've been doing this series Rheumatics on exactly this question what I call worship and world making. That's our series called four lectures on that.",
      "that the fourth one is coming out inshallah which is precisely to deconstruct this dichotomy this false dichotony between worship and world making in our deen in Islam worship is not meditation on nothing it's not Buddhist meditation or nothing it is not running away from the world it is an attempt to bring the world to Islam that part of our worship",
      "world to Islam, to win this world over for Allah. So yes our relationship to Allah SWT through Salah and Atikaf and through Dhikr of Allah those are all things that are central in our worship but all of our pillars of worship require engagement with the community directly or they require both directly",
      "run away from the world in Islam. And you cannot say that this dichotomy between, oh I'm going to be socially conservative, I'm gonna pray in my mosque and then I'm gunna join this capitalist corporation that's maybe exploiting poor people or making weapons for somebody and so on.",
      "No, you cannot make that distinction. That you have to join the work of Allah SWT and do your best. In that you will suffer, in that you learn, in it you will recognize your own limitations as you are making da'wahs trying to convince people, being corrected by people all of that is what Islam is. If you look at so much of the Quran",
      "That's where the worship is. That's what Taqwa of Allah is that you're trying to make Dawa, trying to change the world for Allah So I agree with the second of the options. I don't think there is any running away from the world in Islam and that our worship is integrated",
      "We learn our lessons when we are trying to... Good character, right? That itself is an engaged form of worship. But if that is because you're trying to bring people to Allah, you're saving them from Allah's wrath, then that's the noblest thing you can do. That's part of our worship.",
      "Sometimes we need to focus on our one-to-one relationship with Allah SWT. And this is the month for that, even though there are so many collective aspects of this month. But in our tahajjud, in our qiyam al-layl, in atikaf, there is a strong individual part, even",
      "We don't run away from society, we don't ran away from Muslims. So yeah a world making is an important part of Islamic worship and one Sufi saint once put it that Muhammad when he met... God sent his message, God sent His light to him",
      "And he came down from that mountain to the world. If God had sent me that guidance, I would never have come down because that's what I'm looking for. That's all I want. I want the pain and the confusion of the world to go away and I want to be one with God. Whereas our deen is well, that is where your mission starts. Once you have received that message from God now you go and change the world so the Prophet never went back",
      "to the Jabal al-Nur, right? And that's a symbol of what Islamic worship is really about. It's with the people in your struggle and the highest form of worship is for the people or it is that of the people who are engaged in that struggle. That's a very beautiful statement and beautiful way to summarize the balance that exists between the way we engage with the material world",
      "When you look around in this country, Muslim communities, masajid institutions. Do you feel that there is a lack of discussion on the political and world-making side? I think that there's a lack because we're still recovering from 20 years of post 9-11 propaganda but also it's not really over",
      "really over and our Imams are often terrified. And so I think that is true but with the important caveat, that I think reading of Qur'an and Fiqh and classical books even the Arabic language or other languages of Islam",
      "learning those skills, those are all part of what it means to become a robust Ummah. So you can't be Ummatic without Qur'anic teachers teaching Tajweed and memorizing the Qur'an and helping people, teaching them Sunnah. That's the foundation? That's that need will never go away",
      "away and our ulama sort of retreat into that because no matter how the situation is bad, that's one thing they can do. It's like a safer zone? It's safer and it's the foundation. That's one from which then the next generation can take on right there is a hadith of the Prophet who says that my example of my ummah is like rain and some people are like barren land and the rain just actually makes it even worse because that fertile soil is washed away",
      "is washed away and some people are like the reservoirs they will hold the water for other people to come take. And some people, are like fertile land which takes the water, mix it with soil in the sun and brings out vegetation. If you cannot be that vegetation then at least be a pond. Many ulama go into that mode.",
      "So I don't blame them for it, but that's sometimes all we can do. Right? I think this is not one of those times. Although people in India, for example, may feel that way today. People are really facing a genocidal kind of situation with 200 million Muslims and preserving the Deen is all they can do and we as Muslim Ummah have responsibility to them",
      "to them. So that's why I see it in a much more complicated light, I don't want to blame people especially the ulama and imams given what they are wrestling with their day-to-day problems but i think that more young people who need to...young imams included and young students who are now in the seminaries",
      "because I do see a crisis, I do se e problem. I do seem any problems but you know to point to one which is the protests that are taking place for Gaza. The religious Muslim youth especially religious Muslim males were in conspicuous absence in those protests. Why our boys not joining? They're not why are we not they're not leading",
      "Well, they would argue that there's a lot of un-Islamic things happening or like the leaders of those protests are often from the left side who are also doing protests for LGBTQ and other related issues. Do you think that's to be considered at all? Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't know if we want to get to another discussion but I would say that those are not... Those are objections by people",
      "who are weak and insecure, and I don't mean to criticize them. They may be immigrants or they may be somehow in other ways disempowered but when you protest, you take charge and I think that if you look at many of the stories",
      "showed strength, they dictated the terms and other people accepted their leadership. But when they didn't, other people took charge. And sometimes you need to for one higher purpose collaborate with other people. We have a number of articles",
      "I have one on this, Imam Tom Bikini has some on this that we addressed this issue. But I think this is more than anything else a symptom of the lack of our political education that we need to learn to fight and I think what Palestinians have shown us",
      "pro-Palestinian activists have shown us is that you can change that narrative, a narrative as deeply embedded in America as pro Zionist narrative. You can change THAT if you stand up and I think the fact that many Muslims were afraid to speak about this, many mosques remained silent about it. Not mine, alhamdulillah I come from a community where we prayed Qunut for",
      "for 15 months and every salah for Gaza, and we're very active. But there were many, many mosques that could not bring themselves to talk about this. So that is a symptom of that problem. And I think that that is what work we need to do. We need to learn to talk",
      "If the protest is on their terms, it seems that we are giving up something important, an important principle by joining in. That's why we need to develop a nomadic narrative for why if we're fighting for Quds, we are the rights of Muslims what can be more a nomatic cause than that? Right. The next thing I want to ask you about is Tasawwuf",
      "Tasawwuf and Jihad together because if you look in our history some of the heroes that we think about such as Salahuddin Ayyubi he was known to be part of Qadiriyya Tariqa. And someone else such as Umar Mukhtar, you have also Imam Shamil Uthman Danfodio. Imam Shamal in fact his soldiers were called the Mureeds so there's always existed like this relationship between",
      "and the mujahid in one person. Now, in many ways like Sufism has been seen as something that's pacifistic it's been seen people that work with governments and so how do we understand that component? Has there been a change in terms of how tasawwuf is understood? So tasawwwuf is extremely diverse and if they have been all kinds of movements historically but those",
      "pointed out are absolutely correct. But that's also true of other forms of Islam, no matter what group you see. There is no group that is secure against co-optation whether Sufi or Salafi or Ash'ari or what have you. There's no group like that. So anybody who thinks that",
      "that by joining this one group I somehow do not have the responsibility to be self-critical and to worry about cooptation, they are fooling themselves. And so yeah, I'll leave it at that. I think that the issue of cooption is one that has to do with...",
      "mistaken understanding of this kind of sectarian identity where we believe that belonging to this one group is sufficient for me. I belong to the right group and then my group is a right group, whereas I believe that we need to have a dynamic understanding",
      "each other, correcting each other. Even if they are wrong in some parts of Aqeedah, they may be the ones that are correcting somebody else, the mainstream or the dominant views and therefore the protection of this Ummah is in commanding right forbidding wrong by the standards of what Allah has told us in the Quran",
      "and our reason. So I believe that this sectarian narrative of belonging to the saved sect is very problematic, and that hadith that is often cited for this, that my Ummah will be divided into 73 sects and then all are in hellfire except one, it's a weak hadith although some people do with Tashih",
      "But I believe that the correct opinion is this is a weak hadith. And particularly, the part that says all parts are in hellfire except one is the weakest part. There's no good snat for it. And before sending all Muslims to hell we should at least demand one sahih chain. Right? I think that's not asking a lot. So I think",
      "And we should try to avoid that and we should be humble when others correct us. Right, the last thing I want to turn to is towards history, Islamic history and what the importance of Islamic history is in fostering an omatic vision because the more you have a shared memory, a shared culture, a share language then there's going to be more cohesiveness as well so what would you say is the importance learning our history?",
      "you put it is somewhat halcyonic, I mean somewhat more positive than a lot of people take it because there's a lot conflict in history. And history is kind of like news. People report it only when there's something going wrong so you have to be careful because you could look at history and you can learn only about the parts where we would be selective and say all the things that your opponents did wrong because that's what you were interested",
      "So history is one thing and good professional academic history that is fair, methodologically sound and it's learned in respectful debate is another thing. And I think we need the latter. So doing history but then is one things doing good history where you are... History doesn't really teach you lessons",
      "tweet at somebody. But I think that is, that kind of history does harm. So but when we look at history carefully and professionally with integrity as believers ought to because we are, we worship Allah SWT one of the names of Allah SWt that I love and I'm going to end with this is the Sufis love this name of Allah",
      "Al Haq, the truth, the real. And I find as a student of history and of Islam, Islamic theology, I find that name of Allah SWT is most powerful and one that we through our scholarship worship Allah through that name. Allah is the Truth so don't try to cheat because when you look for al haq you will find al ha q",
      "take method and data and scholarship seriously, and try to be fair. And the best way to do that is you know, try to root out your own biases and engage in debate and discussion scholarly discussions in a fair way",
      "So you give others the same kind of benefit that you would demand for yourself. If you say, for example, things like Sunnis have always done this and Shia have always been doing this, well actually look at that data. I think both sides these days are witnessing social media wars",
      "and both sides are extremely unjust to each other. And not just both sides, but all sides, not just the Sunni and Shia, but any division. Different lines are drawn between people, and that's a matter of fashion. So five years from now it may be something else that people are fighting about. But whatever lines that we draw, people tend to be unfair.",
      "sometimes are more likely to be unfair if religion is a matter of identity for them. Religion has to be a matter truth and commitment to Allah. But religious people often tend to fall into sectarianism, and we should avoid it because that's an enemy of scholarship, enemy of self-knowledge as well,",
      "isn't one source. I would say on our website, Onomatics we have a number of sources and we are putting out curricula where people can actually go at whatever level they're at and start to educate themselves history politics Aqeedah and other things",
      "provide a large amount of resources from different traditions. But when it comes to professional historical or available historical accounts, I'd say Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi's book Saviors of Islamic Spirit is a good start. It's written in good spirit",
      "If you're trying to do theology, Sherman Jackson's book on Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering is a good introduction to various theological schools. If you try to do Seerah then I think there are number of good ones have become available recently but I'd say Seerat is always a place to start we should invest in learning Seerath",
      "I don't even know. It's just so, it becomes so prevalent that everyone is like mentioning this. I think Sami Hamdi... I think it's an idea whose time has come. Yeah. So it was a need. Like we wanted to talk about ourselves. We didn't have the vocabulary. We did not have the vocabularies. Right and I think Sammy Hamdi was using it quite frequently and since he was on bigger podcasts a lot of people started using it after that. But Alhamdulillah inshaAllah we are praying that your work is blessed and brings a lot good for the Ummah inshallah. Jazakallahu khair."
    ]
  },
  {
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    "text": [
      "ساری کراچی میں ہوئی اس کے بعد آپ نے آگے کی تعلیم سعودی عرب میں حاصل کی اور ہائر ایڈوکیشن کے لیے آپ امریکہ تشریف لے گئے اور وہاں سے اپنی تعلق مکمل کرنے کے بعد اب گزشتہ بارہ سال سے آپ وہا یونیورسٹی آف ٹولیڑو میں کوہائیوں سے واپستہ ہیں آپ کا جو بنیادی کام ہے وہ الہیات اور اسلامی",
      "تصوف اور مستیسن کے حوالے سے بھی آپ نے کام کیا. آپ کی کچھ کتابیں بھی شائع ہو چکی ہیں جیسے جی اسے بات ہم کریں گے آپ کے تعریف میں آگے بڑھیں گئے تو ساری چیزیں ہم آپ کے سامنے لے کر آئیں گی. میں welcome کرتا ہوں جی ڈرکٹ صاحب آپ کو welcome to the show. بہت شکریہ آپ کا. بے شکر ہے.",
      "پوری دنیا میں خاص طور پر جدید دنیاء میں اور امریکہ اور یورپ میں اسلام کے حوالے سے اسلامی فقریات کے حوالے سے جو کام ہو رہا ہے جدھید انداز میں اور جو مباعث چل رہے ہیں وہاں پہ ان مباحث سے اس کام سے اس فکر سے ہمارے پاکستان میں مقیم طلبہ کو عام افراد کو دانشوروں کو انٹیلیجنشیا کو متعارف کروائے گئے تو ہمیں بہت سوشی ہوتی ہے خاص",
      "کے ہیں اور کلتو میں گفتگو کرتے ہیں وہ اگر ان سے ہمیں مقالمہ کا موقع ملے تو میں آپ پھر آپ کو شکریہ ادا کرتا ہوں میں نے آپ کی تعرف کی زمن میں کچھ بنیادی چیزیں تو بیان کر دی ہے لیکن میں چاہوں گا کہ آپ اس کو تھوڑا سا مفسر انداز میں اپنا یہ پورا جو فکری سفر ہے وہ اذا بیار کر دیا تو ہمارے سننے والوں کے لئے بہت بہٹا رہنا",
      "بات ہو رہی ہے پاکستانی سامین سے میرا نام اوئیمر انجم ہے اور میں کراچی میں پیدا ہوا اس کے بعد ہماری تعلیم جو تھی وہ کراٹشی سے رہیں اسلامی حمدللہ آنکھرانہ تھا تو بہت ساری جو تعالیم وغیرہ تھی",
      "والد سعودیہ میں جدہ میں ہوا کرتے تھے تو پھر اس کے بعد وہاں پر منتقل ہوئے تعلیم وہا سے کمل ہوئی پھن امریکہ جو ہے وہ کا سفر ہوا اور سمجھ لیں پچھلے تقریباً پچیس سال سے آہ امرکہ میں آہ قیام ہیں میرا پہلا جو",
      "مجھے انترسٹ آم وہ میرا سائنس میں تھا فیزیکس سے بہت جو تھی اور میرے ہیرو جو تھے وہ پاکستانی آہ سائینٹسٹ ابدالسلام اور عبدالقدیر خان ہوا کرتے تھے اور سوچتے",
      "تو اس طرح جو ہے میرا دلچسپی شروع میں سائنس میں بھی تھی اور دین میں بھئی تھی اس لحاظ سے. ماشاءاللہ. جب امریکہ میں جا کے پڑھائے شروعت ہوئی تو مجھے یہ سمجھ آئی کہ ایک طرز سے یہ ریالائز کیا کہ اصل مسئلہ جو",
      "پاکستانی اور اسلام مسلمان وہ ہماری شناخت کا ہے وہ ہماری سوچ کا ہے تو اس وجہ سے پھر تھوڑے یہ مور لیا اسلامی تاریخ اور فلوسفی اور سیوری کی طرف بہت بہات ازابطہ صاحب میں چاہوں گا کہ آپ نے اب تک جنجن موضوعات پر کام کیا ہے آپ کے کچھ کتابیں بھی آئیں ہیں آپ کے ریسرچ پیپرز آتے رہے ہیں آپ کی ٹاکس موجود ہیں",
      "مختلف انٹیلیکشنز کے ساتھ سے انٹریکشند اور انٹریوز موجود ہیں تو ہم اس میں سے ایک ایک کرکے جو آپ کی اہم جو جو موضوعات ہے ان پہ بات کرنا چاہیں گے مثلاً سب سے پہلے اگر میں آپ سے بات کنا چاؤں آپ کی کتاب آئی غالباً اسلام کی سیاسی فقر کی تاریخ پہ میں چاوں گا کہ ہمارے قدوم والوں کے لیے اس کتام کا تھوڑا سا تاؤس کرواتے ہیں اس میں جو",
      "جیہاں تو جو ہماری پہلی کتاب جو دوہزار بارہ میں شائع ہوئی کیمرج یونیورسٹی پریس سے اس کا نام ہے پولٹکس لانڈ کمینٹ فاؤنٹ دے تیمیا مومنٹ آم اور اس کا سمجھ لیجئے ترجمہ اس طرح ہوں گا کہ سیاست اور امت جہا وہ اسلام میں کس طرحت رہی کیا تعلق رہا اور خاص طور پر وہ لمحہ ہمарی تاریخ میں جو شیخ الاسلام ابنتی میہ کی",
      "کی سوچ کے آہ سوٹ سے اثر ہوا اس کے بعد آہ کس طرح انہوں نے آہ اسلام کی تاریخ کو آہ",
      "کی تو اصل میں اس کی وجہ ایک طرح سے بہت گہری ہے سمجھنا چاہیے کہ اسلام جو ہے وہ ایک",
      "اس کتاب میں بھی علام اقوال کرتے ہیں ان کو آہ اور وہ جو ابن تیمیا کی آہ فگر سے ان کو وہ اثرانداز ہوئے اور ابن خلدون اور ابنتیمیہ دونوں ایسے تھے جس کو آپ امپیریسز کہا سکتے",
      "اسلام کی سیاسی تاریخ کے بارے میں کہ اسلام",
      "ممالک تھے کچھ شہنشاہ اور سلاطین ایسے رہے ہیں کہ جن میں خلافتِ راشدہ کی جو روح تھی وہ بلکل ختم ہو گئی ہے اور بہت سارے اچھے بھی رہیں تو بہرحال اور علماء کا اس میں کیا تعلق تھا اب دیکھیں یہ سب سے جو بنیادی ایک طرح سے مشکل ہے کتاب میں یعنی کہ پرابلم جو ہے وہ پراؤڈلم سٹیٹمنٹ",
      "تو ایک طرح سے سیاسی طور پر بہت alive ہے سیاست اور دین میں کوئی فرق نہیں ہے لیکن ان کا جو دین ہے وہ زندہ دین ہیں وہ دنیا کی خدمت کرنے والا دین ہوں لیکم دنیاء کو اسلام کے لیے ترپ لانے والے ہیں",
      "کے بجائے پروفیسرز تھے جو کہ زیادہ تا ان کی سیلریز ہوتی ہیں وہ اس کے بارے میں آم یونیو اسلام جو ہے ایک طرح سے کتابوں کا دین بن گیا ٹھیک ہے وہ شروع ہوا ایسے کہ وہ دنیا کو تلوار سے ازاد کریں گے لیکن پھر پلاسکل پیریڈ میں آ کتبیں بیٹھ کے لکھیں گे اور پڑھیں",
      "ہوئی ہے اس کے بارے میں یہ کتاب ہے",
      "کو آپ نے دیکھا اس کو آگے بڑھایا اس پہ آپ نے بہت کام کیا تو مختصراً اگر وہ سفر اور اس حوالے سے جو بھی آپ کے تجربات ہیں وہ کچھ ان کا تعرف کروائی ہے ہم سے.",
      "رہے تلال اسی صاحب پھر ان کو اکسفورڈ چلے گئے جب اک سوٹ گئی تو وہاں ان کو عقلیت آہ ریشنالیٹی سے بہت زیادہ امپریس تھے لیکن وہ خود اپنی آہ آہ زندگی کے بارے میں بتاتے ہیں اپني آپ بیٹھی کے بائے میں کہ کس طرح جو ہے وہ ایک طرحت سے بڑی مایوسی ہو ان کو دیکھیں کہ کچھ طرحد لوگ ہیں کسطرح پر کیا سکولرز ہیں کہ ریاشنالٹی اور",
      "ہے اس عصبیت وغیرہ اور احساس برتری اسی سے ڈرائف ہوتا ہے ان کا اصل مسئلہ جو ہے وہ پڑھنے کا دوسروں کے یعنی دنیا کو پڈھ رہے ہیں لیکن عصابیت سے جو",
      "سب سے بڑے ناموں میں شمار ہوتا ہے میں نے جو ہیں ان کو سمجھ دیجئے میں یونیورسٹی آف شیکاغو میں جب ماسترز کر رہا تھا تو اس وقت میرا ان سے تعرف ہوا پھر اس کے بعد آہ میں نے کتابیں پڑھی اور ان کی کتاپ اصل میں کافی مشکل ہوتی ہیں لوگوں کے لیے سماجنا کنسپچولی تو اس کے بارے میں نے ایک آہ آرٹیکل لکھا جو آر ٹیکل کافي مشہور ہو گیا تو میرا نام ان سے جو ہے واقعی طریقہ اس طرح ہوا لیکن وہ تو آہ ان کا کام انٹروپالوجی",
      "اسلامی سٹالیز میں لیکن ہمارا تعلق رہا ہے اور ان کے ساتھ میرا ایک کافی لمبا انٹریو بھی شائع ہوا ہے کچھ سال پہلے اور وہ اور ان کی شاگردوں سے میرا تعلقت رہائے ان کا بنیادی جو ہے وہ چیلنج یہ ہے کہ یہ جو بات ہوتی ہے سیکلرزم کی خاص طور پر سیکلا رزم کے اس میں جو",
      "مزہبی تاثر ختم ہو جائے اور یہ سب وائلنس جو آتی ہے مذہب کی طرف سے اگر آپ مذھب نکال دیں گے پبلک سفئر سے تو وائلم ختم",
      "اور پوری ایک فیلڈ ایک طرح سے پیدا ہوئی یہاں پر امریکہ میں اور یورپ میں کہ لوگوں نے پھر یہ کہنا شروع کیا کہ بھائی یہ تو بالکل صحیح بات ہے کہ جو ساری بڑی جنگیں ہوئیں ہیں اور بہت سارے ملکوں میں دنیا کے جو آپریشن ہو رہی ہے ظلم ہے اور استبداد ہے یہ سب سیکلر آئیڈیالوجز کے نام سے ہے",
      "آہ مذہب کو نکال دیں تو جنگ ختم ہو جائے گی تو اس وجہ سے جو ہے وہ ان ہونے ایک طرح سے ایک فیلڈ جو ہیں اس کو پیدا کی زور دیا اور بھی دوسری لوگ تھے جو یہ بات کہہ رہے ہیں بہت بہوت عرصے سے تو اس لئے ہمارا تعلق ان سے یہ رہا کہ اسلام کو پڑھنے کے لیے جب یہ اورینٹلس اور مستشرفین",
      "مفسر گفتگو کریں گے ڈاکٹس صاحب سے ڑاکس صحاب جیسا کہ ابھی آپ نے ذکر کیا طلال حصد کا اور خاص طور پہ سیکریزم کے حوالے سے ان کی اپروچ و ان کے مقدمات کا یہ یقین بہت اہم موضوع ہے وہ خاص",
      "کے لیے اگر آگے بڑھیں تو حالی میں حال ہی میں تو نہیں کچھ عرصہ پہلے وائن لو لاکھ صاحب کی کتاب آئی ہے دین پاسیبل سٹیٹ اور ریسنٹلی پاکستان میں ہمارے دوست صابر صاحبر نے اس کا اردو میں ترجمہ بھی کیا تو ہمائے فقری حلقوں میں اس پہ بہت بات ہو رہی ہے تو کیا آپ چاہیں گے کہ اس پے اس پر آپ کا ان کے ساتھ کیونکہ بڡا مقالمہ رہا آپ کی بڈی ڈبیٹس رہیں ہیں آپ نے آپ کے سامنے کے ساب انگیج رہے ہیں تو تھوڑا سا آپ بتائیں",
      "ہے اور دوسرا آپ کی اس پہ اگر کوئی کرٹیک ہے یا آپ کے ساتھ agreement میں ہے یعنی آپ کی کیا رائے ہیں تو جس پہ بات کیجئے آہ جی ہمارے حلاف صاحب کی کتاب the impossible state یہ ناممکن ریاست آہ اس کا بنیادی آہ thesis یہ ہے کہ شریعت اسلامیہ جو ہے پہلے دباع سمجھنا چاہیے کہ واحل حلاق ایک",
      "جیسے طلال حصد صاحب ینگ ایج میں برطانیہ چل گئی وائل ہلاک صاحاب جو ہے وہ امریکہ گئے اور وہاں تعلیم حاصل کی وہ مسلمان نہیں ہیں لیکن وہ یہ کہتے ہیں کہ شریعت جو مغربی مادرنٹی ہے یہ مغربي حالی جو سبلائزیشن ہے اس سے بہت زیادہ بہतر ہے",
      "بنیادی وجہ یہ ہے کہ شریعت کی بنیار ایک اخلاقی فکر میں تھی وہ یہ ہے",
      "جبکہ مغرب کا بنیادی question جو ہے وہ یہ ہے کہ میں اس دنیا کو استعمال کیسے کر سکتا ہوں اپنے لئے بنیدی سوال جو زندگی کا آپ سمجھ لیجئے fundamental question entire philosophy and civilization if you take that",
      "ایل حلاق صاحب کی یہ کہنا ہے اسلام کا بنیادی question وہ ہے اخلاقی now بہت سارے ایسی civilization ہیں جن کا questions اس طرح بنیدی روئیاں یہ ہی رہا ہے لیکن وہ یہ کہتے ہیں کہ اسلام کے برابر کوئی ایشی civilization نہیں رہی ہے جس نے بہن ساری دوسری لوگوں کو پرداشت بھی کیا",
      "اور یہ ہے کہ آپ نے دنیا کو ختم کیا اخلاق کو خدم کیا دنیاء کو بلکہ تب سے بڑی بات یہ ہے جو پورا environment ہے اسی کو آپ نے ختم کردیا تو اس لئے اسلام تو بہتر ہے ہمارا ان سے جو تعلق رہا ہے بہوت عرصے سے اور مقالمہ جو آپ جیسے آپ نے کہا حوار اور مکالمہ ان سے رہائے بنیادی طور پر میرا ان سے بالکل اتفاق ہے اس بنیالی کلام",
      "اس کا تعرف کروائی ہے وہ کہ کس مہینے کی چیز ہے اور وہ کیا کام ہے آہ جی ہاں تو ہمارا جیسے آہ اسلامی سیاسی آہ فکر سے بنیادی طور پر تعلق رہا ہے میری آہ میرے کام کا شروع سے تو پچھلے کچھ سالوں سے میں نے آہ مسلمی دنیا کے حالات",
      "عرب ملک میں جو ایراب سپرنگ شروع ہوا تھا دوہزار گیارہ میں تو اس کے بعد سے میں وہاں پر اس کے ساتھ چاہے میں نے اس کو سٹری بھی کیا دونہزائر گیانہ میں مصر میں تھا میں تو پھر اس",
      "لیبرل حضرات ہیں جو اسلام کے بارے میں بات کرتے ہیں اس میں کیا کمی ہے اس میں",
      "حالانکہ اس کا مقصد شروع سے یہ نہیں تھا لیکن اس کو ساری دنیا کے ملکوں نے سارے دنیاء کے قوتوں نے اپنے لئے ایک ہتھیار بنا لیا ہے اسلام کے خلاف دوسری چیز میں نے یہ نوٹس کی کیونکہ یہ میں اسلام گلوبل سٹیڈیز وغیرہ میں یہ پڑھتا ہوں گلوبلائزیشن جی گلولائزيشن کے بارے میں میرا تھوڑا کام ہے کہ سارी دن یا جہاں وہ اپني سیولائیزیچن کی طرف جا رہی ہے پیچھے",
      "پیچھے یعنی globalization سے وہ deglobalization ہو رہی ہے چائنا جو ہے اپنی ایک civilization بنا رہا ہے اور رشیا اپني بنارہا ہوں انڈیا اس کی بات کر رہے ہیں یورپ جو اب ایک white گوروں کی جو civilization ہے اس کی طرف واپس جا رہہا",
      "اہم حصہ ہمارے لیے سب سے اہام حصات مسلمان دنیا وہ بالکل یتیم رہ گیا ہے اور اس کو جو ہے وہ خلافت عثمانیہ کے زوال کے بعد سے اس کے اندر جو",
      "کی کریں سب مغرب کی طرف جائیں اور ان سب میں ناکام ہو رہے ہیں ایک کے بعد ایک کچھ تھا وہ بالکل آہ سٹیٹ ہی ختم ہوئی ہے اس سے سیریا ہے یمن ہے لیویہ ہے اور کچh جہاں وہ آہ فیلئر کے قریب بالکن ایسے فیال سٹیک ابھی تک نہیں ہے لیکن اس کے قریب قریبرہتے ہیں اور اس کی وجہ سے دہشتگردی بڑھ رہی ہے تو اس کی",
      "مسلمانوں کے طور پہ آہ الگ الگ پاکستانیوں کے",
      "مسلمان کے طور پر حل کر سکتے ہیں تو دنیا نی طور میں جو علامہ اقبال صاحب کا وزن تھا بہت سارے ہمارے سب سے بڑے آہ جو قریم تھے دنیاء میں مسلمائوں کی رہے ہیں آہ ان کا جو وزنا تھا وہ تھا کہ کس طرح واپس جایا جائے اس آہ اتحاد کی طرف اسلامی اتھات کی طرب جو کہ آہ آپ کو آئی سی بھی فائین ہوئی اور بہن ساری آہ تعدام لیے گئے پہلے اور جب سب اب",
      "دنیا کی جو ایک طرح جو یہ جہتی ہے وہ بالکل ختم ہو گئی ہے وار اور انٹریور کی وجہ سے تو میرا یہ تجزیہ تھا کہ اس کو اگر واپس نہیں لایا گیا تو مسلمان دنیاء جو ہے وہ زبال کی طرف ہی جاتے رہیں گے تو یہ ایک",
      "پانچویں اور چھٹی سدھی حجری میں رہے ہیں پانشویں صدی حجری میں آ ان کا نام تھا اب اسمائل الانسار الحروی کیونکہ وہ ہرات سے تھے افغانستان میں تو ان کی کتاب کی یہ شرح ہے. اچھا اس کا مدارس کی سب سے بڑی خاصیت یہ ہے کہ یہ تصوف کو قرآن اور سنت کی طرف لے جاتی تصویف کو کنڈیم نہیں کرتے یعنی کہتی کہ یہ جو ہے وہ سب بدتے ہیں",
      "کہتے ہیں بلکہ تصوف کا جو بنیادی امپلس تھا بنیدی جو اس کی کورٹھی وہ قرآن اور سنت کی طرف لائی جا سکتی ہے بل کے قران و سنت سے شروع ہوتی ہے لیکن چیزیں تصفح میں ایسی ہیں جو کہ باہر سے آئی ہیں اور بہت ساری ایشی چی زیں جو پرامستند کے خلاف ہیں تو کس طرح ان میں فرق کیا جائے تو یہ کتاب اس کا مقصد یہ تھا کہ تصویف کو",
      "اور یہ پوری کتاب جو ہے وہ ایک طرح سے تفسیر کے طور پہ لکھی گئی ہے تفسير سورة الفاتحہ کی خاص طور فی سورت الفاتحت میں جو بنیادی اور بیچ کی آیت ہے کہ اس کی جو ہاں یہ ایک تفسری ہے پورے کتب ہزاروں صفحات پر تو آہ اس کا پورا نام مدارج السالقین",
      "اس آیت کے بیچ کے اندر یا کہنا بدو اللہ صرف تری عباد کرسین یا کنستانین اللہ سفر ہی سے مدد مانگتے ہیں اچھا اس کا تعلق سریعت سے یہ رہا ہے کی تصوف میں جس کو سوفزم کہا جاتا ہے انگریزی میں تصوق میں سریعط جسکو میسٹیسزم",
      "اور ظاہر ہے یہ بڑی لمبی تفصیل ہے کہ اس کا فرق کیا ہے انشاءاللہ بات ہوگی لیکن مدارج کو سمجھ دیجئے مداد جو صالحین قرآن کی ایک قرانی تصوف کو بیان کرتا ہے نا اس کا اثر جو ہے وہ بری صغیر میں بھی اور مسلمانوں میں پاکستان کے اور ہند کے بہت رہا ہیں",
      "جماعتیں شامل تھیں اس کا پہلا خدم جو ہے وہ سمجھ دیجئے ابن اقیم اور ابن تینیا سے شروع کرنا",
      "کیا آپ کے نظر ہوگی یا آپ کا مطالعہ ہوگا جہاں پوری امت مسلمان کی سیاسی فکر تاریخ اور حال تک آپ نے دیکھا ہے تو آپ سے اگر ہم یہ سوال کریں کہ پاکستان میں موجود اسلامی تحریک ہے یا اسلام آیای تاریک ہے جنہیں ہم کہتے ہیں آپ نے چونکہ خلافت کی بھی بات کی مسلم کلٹر پر تھاؤڈ کی بی بات",
      "آپ کس طرح سے دیکھتے ہیں؟ اگر ویری بریفلی تھوڑا سا اس پہ بھی ہمیں بتا دیں یہ پاکستان کی آہ پاكستان دنیا اسلام میں بہت اہمیت رکھتا ہے آہ یہ میں صرف پاقستانی کی طور پہ نہیں کہہ رہا بلکہ ساری دنیاء کے لوگ جو ہیں وہ آہ سائر مسلمان ایک طرحت سے پاچستان",
      "ہوا صحیح علام اقبال کو ساری دنیا کے لوگ جانتے ہیں عربی میں ترجمہ ہو چکا ہے مولانا مدودی صاحب کو سعری دنیاء کے لو گ جاناتے ہیں ان کا ترجما ہو چیکا ہے اور ان کی خاص طور پر جو فکر ہے وہ بہت آہ سمجھی جاتی ہے مانی جاتي ہے آہ اور پھر جہاں آہ پاکستان کی پاكستان تو ایک طرح سماجھ جاتا ہے کہ خاصطور پہ سعودیہ دوسری ملک جو ہے",
      "یہ ہے کہ ایک طرح سے آہ کمی ہے اور وہ کم ہوتی ہے کہ وہاں آہ ایک دینی حضرات دین علماء میں اور جو انٹیلیکچولز ہیں جو کے آہ کر رہے ہیں آہ",
      "گفتگو نہیں ہے تو اس وجہ سے جو انٹیلیکچول کیا کہتے ہیں ایک حرارت ہے پاکستان میں وہ نہیں پائی جاتی سب جہاں وہ اپنی صرف کیا",
      "سے جو ہے وہ میرا خیال ہے ایک پاکستان میں ایک خلا ہے جس کو پورا کرنا چاہیے.",
      "ہے تو ہم سننے والوں کو بتائیں گے کہ بہت جلد اس سیسرے میں ہم ڈاکٹر صاحب کے ساتھ پوری دشستوں کا ایک سلسلہ شروع کر رہے ہیں جس میں ان کی تمام جو بھی ان کا کام ہے اس پہ متین طور پر سوالات کر کے اور ہر موضوع کو ایک پریان کے اندر cover کرنے کی کوشش کریں گا۔ ڑاکر صحابہ بہو شکریہ آپ کی قیمتی وقت کا انشاء اللہ آپ سے آئندہ بھی گفتگو کرتے رہیں۔"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Rebellion in Islam with Professor Ovamir Anjum_d9M7MVf6UfI&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750607154.opus",
    "text": [
      "Hello everyone and welcome to Blogging Theology. Today I am delighted to talk again to Professor Ovemeir Anjem, you are most welcome sir. Thank you very much for having me. Oveemeir, for those who don't know is Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies at the University of Toledo in the United States and he obtained his PhD in Islamic History and he's the author of this book",
      "This book entitled Politics, Law and Community in Islamic Thought. The Tumayyan Moment, and it's published by Cambridge University Press. And I do highly recommend this book today over me has kindly agreed to discuss the contentious issue of rebellion in Islam does is does the Islamic tradition require Muslims",
      "rulers or is armed rebellion permissible against a tyrant what does Islam actually teach so would you like to introduce us to this subject sir sure my pleasure thank you very much Paul again for having me and the and uh for your interest in this topic which",
      "authoritarian states take over throughout the world, particularly the Muslim world and use religious clerics and religious traditions to serve their narrow interests. And in that effort unfortunately Islam is being conscripted which is ironic and tragic because",
      "history ban a religion of justice so let me start with this anecdote you know when I was an undergraduate oh God and embarrassing me long time ago um uh I had a professor at University of Wisconsin Madison who would teach world religions right the way he taught",
      "read deeply into its sources and come out with one thing that he thought the religion was about. So, I remember when he would talk about Judaism it was community. The central value of Judaism was community When he would talked about Christianity it was charity And when it was Islam",
      "Islam, he would say this religion is all about justice. And it's not very hard to see why he would come to that conclusion. You read the Quran, you read the saying of Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him, you look at his own career, his own conduct, you",
      "crucial idea that pops up again and again in every field. And the very idea of law, right? It's so central to Islam, and law is about ultimately, you know, it's about justice that God cares about not that you pray ritually to him which is of course very important but that God care that you are just to his creatures. So, it ironic therefore that over the course of the 20th century in particular",
      "some of the theological moves that have taken place in the wake of, of course colonialism and then after colonialism. The nominally free nation states which are in some ways even more deeply colonized than the colonial Muslim world of the 19th century",
      "a theology of domination, a theology that might is right kind of theology has emerged. At the center of that theology is the idea that I want to talk about today which is that no matter how unjust and how tyrannical the ruler Muslims by their creed",
      "their creed, by their aqidah not merely as a matter of one possible opinion or prudence but credally bound never to rebel and always to obey. And in fact, not even protest peacefully right? So this theology has gone to the point that it says that even peaceful public protest is against",
      "against islam and that's what i want to talk about today excellent taking you through all the sources uh are recalled good just so we just what we need to go through so thank you for this okay wonderful so let me",
      "of the complex materials that i can now just talk about yeah um islamic views and rebellion against unjust muslim rulers so each of these uh adjectives is important this is we're talking about ad unjust muslin rulers or not non-muslim rulers and not just muslim",
      "briefly i'm going to go over contemporary claims about rebellion being always prohibited as a matter of sunni creed in particular summary response to those claims and then i will examine the hadith evidence uh the reason we'll look at the quran evidence but we'll talk really about why there isn't any direct evidence for or against it in the qur'an",
      "views and the early Imams of the first two centuries. When I use the word Imams, of course Shia used the word imam in a more particular sense than the Sunnis do. And I will be talking primarily about the Sunni perspective and from Sunni perspectives that Imams are the scholars who are followed. They're not infallible but they are",
      "followed by the vast majority of Muslims and, of course, the four schools of Islamic… of Sunni Islam come to mind – the four school of jurisprudence. But I'm using the word more broadly as the leaders including those four but also ones that they follow it as well and once that are generally referred to when we're talking about jurisprudential discussions. And then I will look at some",
      "look at some major figures such as Imam al-Juwaini and Ibn Taymiyyah, Al-Mawardi in order to look at how this doctrine develops later in history. So first let's start with contemporary claims about rebellion.",
      "First, that any rebellion of subjects, you know, of course in the modern world would be citizens. But given how the modern particularly Arab world works there is really no effective citizenship. So all or any rebellion on subjects or citizens against rulers is prohibited in Sunni Islam. This prohibition includes unjust tyrannical Muslim rulers",
      "This prohibition is part of the Aqidah or the agreed upon creed of Ahl al-Sunnah. This is a statement recently made by the American preacher Hamza Yousaf. Number four, the prohibition extends to unarmed protesters. For instance in contemporary Egypt not too long ago unarmed protestors who are called dogs of hell which is",
      "a term of course as it sounds, a condemnation but also is particular reference to a very deeply feared and hated sect in early Islam called the Kharijites. And fatwas were given to shoot to kill them in hundreds and thousands if necessary over 1000 people",
      "uh with the blessing of some of these clerics ali jamaa being the most prominent one in uae and wahhabi saudi establishment that is these gulf states it has been a long-standing orthodoxy if you will of the 20th century that advice to rulers can only be given in private otherwise it causes dissension so",
      "um so do not publicly protest injustice and and do not talk to rulers in a way that might put them off uh might displease them rulers must always be pleased even when you're disagreeing with them so do so in private and very politely also one thing",
      "public way to defend UAE's normalization with Israel and whatnot by Sheikh bin Bayah, who is a Mauritanian cleric working for and within United Arab Emirates these days. And finally the sixth point I want to make is that over the... it was the Saudi Wahhabi establishment",
      "rebel never questioned views as being the only acceptable orthodoxy um but even there is a shift even in that uh over the course of the 20th century because pre-1990s this idea never rebelled was based on a religious mission the religious wahhabi mission to to protect monotheism so",
      "you are accepting the rulers for who they are, even if they're imperfect because they're protecting religion. But in the recent incarnation of this with Binbaya and company, in fact, you are protecting a secular state. You're protecting just the ruler and his family regardless of their religious credentials",
      "religious credentials which you don't question and which are not brought forth at all. So, in other words this doctrine has become secularized in the late 20th and early 21st century. So these are the claims that I will be talking about today. My summary rebuttal of these extreme statist claims – I'm calling them status claims",
      "uh you know people by well-meaning students of islamic history as quietest claims but in fact there's nothing quietist about them they're very politically activist they are in fact supporting political action on the part of the state in order to suppress raging and suppress dissidents and in fact start wars all over the world and support wars so they are very politically activists",
      "the state is ultimately, it's entirely unquestioned authority. It says it is the authority of Islam and because there are many states effectively what you have is all of these states that are claiming the authority",
      "matter of religious creed. Now, I will claim that there is no precedence in Islam for this extremist statism or even its more moderate versions. There is a disagreement so you could never say that it's just part of the Aqidah, part of Muslim creed but when it comes to this extreme status and there is",
      "goes against everything that we know from the Quran and the Sunnah, and from the Islamic tradition. In the tradition, we will show that the prohibition against rebellion is not general but limited in the very hadith reports that are cited which we'll discuss below. It's limited to Muslim rulers who establishes prayers and all pillars of religion and does not commit clear unbelief.",
      "But also, there is some ambiguity there of whether what does it mean to establish all religious pillars of religion? And you know, does this mean establishing the Book of Allah which includes justice and so on. So there has been a very deep and healthy discussion and disagreement in among Muslim jurists throughout on this question",
      "which we'll talk about briefly. If the ruler is deemed to be just and upholds Islam, rebellion is prohibited by consensus, which of course those who are rebelling may think that this is unjust but it should be... And therefore that's how they justify their rebellion and there are in fact very strict laws for that of how people like that could be dealt with",
      "confronting rebels who are mistaken, in fact still has a lot of responsibilities toward them that you will find in books of Islamic jurisprudence under chapters of Ahkam al-Bughat or How to Deal with Rebels. So, in other words the idea that even if you're a just ruler and the rebels are entirely unjustified, you do not open fire at them and don't shoot to kill right?",
      "Finally, in Islamic tradition if the ruler is tyrannical there are three opinions on rebellion against such a tyrannic ruler. One it is permissible and some would say even an obligation this is an opinion that can be derived from the actions of many of the companions but also some of the classical scholars will talk about",
      "we'll talk about Imam al-Jawaini in this regard. Number two, it is permissible if ruler can be unseated without more bloodshed than what the ruler is causing. So in other words there is a weighing of benefit and harm and feasibility as well as benefit and if you will Muslim jurists taking their cue from the Quran and the Sunnah always want to minimize",
      "minimize bloodshed. If that means tolerating a moderately bad ruler, for instance, so long as they're doing largely good, do so. So, that's the spirit of the school. Now this is Abu Hanifa's school. What I will argue is that Imam Abu Hanifah's own opinion, Rahimahullah, is closer to the first one but we'll also talk about those details later. Finally, the third opinion",
      "opinion is that it is impermissible and that's the opinion that we have, that we know today as the only possible opinion but in fact it is a relatively late opinion. And even those great Imams who have defended this opinion like Ibn Taymiyyah they clearly explicitly state",
      "Salaf and the Sahaba had other opinions. So on the Quran, as I said there is no direct evidence in the Quran but generally a proactive attitude towards the use of force for justice. The Quran is talking in a society where there is not established central authority. The Prophet is the one establishing that authority. But nevertheless",
      "Nevertheless, when issues like great injustice are mentioned, when one group unjustly attacks the other, here is the Quranic guidance in Surah Al-Hujurat. And if two factions among the believers should fight, then make peace between them. The word iqtatalu is not just necessarily hand to hand combat.",
      "or rather this isn't necessarily just a fight, but one that involves arms and killing. But if one of them oppresses the other then fight against the one that oppresses until it returns to the ordinance of Allah.\" So the word oppression here which is a translation of the word baghat, baghi rebellion. Here the Quran is saying that you should not",
      "you should assess which of the groups of Muslims that are fighting is just. So, the key word is justice and oppression. When you go against justice, you become an oppressor. And the Quran doesn't say, well, sit and wait. The Quran doesn' t say be quiet. The Qur'an doesn't",
      "that is just against the one that is uh rebelling and transgressing but of course start by first trying to make peace between them so peace is always a priority but of",
      "returns then make peace between them in justice and act justly two words for justice adil and pistol uh and allah loves those who act just so this is uh there are some other verses in the quran but effectively this is the um the ethos of the qura justice is very important",
      "the hadith reports which are much more numerous and much more complex on this question so what i have done here is i have listed all the major authentic reports there are many inauthentic reports on these questions um precisely because they were politically",
      "please the ruler or the leader on their side tended to fabricate reports. That's why it's very important that each of these reports, that we don't employ those reports that sort of derail our discussions because they enter into other later politically charged rulings.",
      "These are all traditions that Sunni scholars accept. They're found in main Sunni traditional corpus and mostly in Bukhari and Muslim and some in the Musnad of Ahmed, but I will not go into those details. What I have given here is given a little bit of Arabic which in Arabic is called Taraf, a part of the hadith which you can use to search and find the original.",
      "or the original. So, here are the hadiths. In Islamic hadith science, as I'm sure you know, a hadith is typically known by the sahabi, or the companion who narrated the hadits. So I have given on the left, the companion, who narrates the hadit there may be other down the chain many other narrators from that sahabiy but that's how the hadis is recognized in the",
      "uh in the left um list you will find the hadith that are against rebellion or that appear to be against rebellion and the gist of those hadith is do not rebel if the ruler continues to establish prayers in another narration do not rebelle until you see uh in",
      "And another narration, do not ever be pleased with an oppressive ruler. Do not support them but do not take up arms against them if they pray and fast. So here the prayer fasting is included meaning that this isn't it's not just about the prayer but rather what is being referred to as something else meaning that they are establishing prayer and fasting. They're establishing the religion of Allah",
      "And then in the second line, the hadith of Abadat ibn al-Samit radiAllahu anhu you'll find that a relatively high this is the highest bar that's given which is that until they commit clear unbelief. So you could say that establishing prayer is one bar and clear belief is another bar and we can talk about that.",
      "Next hadith, Anas ibn Malik's hadith which is both in Bukhari and Muslim. Obey your Imam even an Abyssinian slave which was seen this was seen Abyssian slaves were seen as slaves they were brought into Mecca as outsiders and the Meccans would consider outsiders as the least likely to become or Meccan and Medinians would see outsiders as a least likely candidate for leadership",
      "leadership the prophet is saying even such a person an outsider comes so long as they're ruling by the book of allah accept them um ibn abbas uh his narration says whoever if you hate something from your commander be patient and the reason commander is important is because sometimes",
      "matching for particular tasks and he calls one of them their commander um and he says look if your Commander who is going out to do some recon work or something if he does something that you don't like don't start fighting with each other so it's a very sort of practical pragmatic command",
      "And then there's a sixth one, the hadith of Hudhayfah ibn Yaman radiAllahu anhu which is sort of a curveball as I will say because it says something very strong which is that obey your ruler even if he beats your back and takes your wealth. So all of a sudden as you will see especially when we look at the hadit on",
      "hadith seems to be a kind of obsequious uh submission that is completely off the rest of the traditions and against seemingly against it but we'll talk about that later now look at the hadith on the right hand side all of the hadis are in authentic compilations that",
      "um seem to suggest a positive attitude toward rebellion or at least the use of force in correcting what has gone wrong so ibn masroud abdullah bin massarud's narration no obedience to anyone who disobeys allah uh",
      "no listening and no obedience is a phrase that is used not merely as in you know uh i am your servant but i will you know respectfully disagree with this particular command but rather when you say means i have no you have no authority over me right um now this",
      "often this is how the Arabs use the word, which means that if the ruler is disobeying God then their political authority can be challenged. At least this is one interpretation of these hadiths. Similarly, the Hadith of Zaid al-Khudri whoever sees an evil change it by force or by tongue or by heart and doing just by heart is the least of faith you can have beyond this there is no faith. The Hadith",
      "ibn abdullah and baliqa bin shihab and many other narrations this is a very important hadith that the greatest jihad or martyrdom uh is that you command and forbid an oppressive ruler in front of him publicly and are killed as a result there are many narrations of this hadith from different narrations different companions which means the prophet would repeat this",
      "so the highest form of jihad highest form martyrdom is to speak truth to power do so publicly uh about it in the summit hadith that says similarly the theme that has gone above and then the very important hadith which is that when people see an oppressor",
      "then God will punish them all with the oppression. The Hadith of Ibn Mas'ud, when you see an oppressive authority, oppressive ruler and you do not take force fight against them or rather the wording goes this way that whoever does something with their hands meaning fights them",
      "fights them is a believer, whoever speaks out against them as a believer. Whoever feels repulsion in their heart because they're not able to do anything else is a Believer but beyond that there is no faith. And finally another hadith of Abdullah ibn Amr, whoever dies fighting to protect their wealth or their property is a martyr. So the very commonsensical thing",
      "sensical thing that you have to protect what you have, as opposed to of course the hadith that seems like your ruler can beat you and take your wealth and you're not supposed to react. So this is the big picture of the hadi's traditions here I summarized them. The pro-rebellion sorry, pro quietism hadith on the left that suggest",
      "just if the rulers are tyrannical never be pleased with them nor follow them right so never join them but do not take up arms against them so long as and this so long is it becomes tricky because some hadiths say so long they're just praying which means the bar couldn't be very high or praying and fasting and doing all the religious things uh",
      "bar is a little high do not exhibit clear unbelief this is perhaps the lowest bar which is that so long as they're not um you know actively committing unbelief and then there is another version of narration which require which places the bar high which is obey even an outside ruler so long",
      "right this is that not just that they're not unbelievers but that they are in fact establishing the book of allah now all of these these these different type of hadith what they do is because it is the scholars who have to judge which of these is really meant and when is the prophet alaihi salatu wasalam simply using a simple language to explain to people what is meant so does establishing prayer meaning establishing the",
      "perhaps all it means is not being clearly a non-Muslim. So, all of these are up for discussion which is why and this is not uncommon in Hadith tradition anybody who does fitna or does jurisprudence knows that scholars then have the burden to reconcile what seems like differing opinions on the right hand side as I said you seem",
      "hadith which require removing of evil and fighting injustice actively okay now on in this list here on the left hand side what i'm calling a curveball which is an american phrase for something that you don't expect which is obey the ruler even if he beats you back your back",
      "done a little bit of research on that hadith there are three main narrations of the hadith and when you look at the context of the hadeeth um in fact it becomes clear that the prophet sallallaahu is talking about um you know he's talking about an extreme kind of emergency situation so where uh",
      "in future the end times the worst times that are going to happen so the prophet said this will happen then what joseph says what should i do or this happens then what should I do and then when uh exhausting having exhausted all other options that you couldn't fight such a bad ruler things have gone really bad it's nearly n times then you find one ruler who may not be the kindest and most",
      "the most fair, but who is upholding God's rule, God's norms. Then the prophet said join such a ruler even if he beats your back and takes your wealth. So it was in that kind of emergency situation those kinds of exceptional circumstances that almost end times apocalyptic tradition in which the next step after that is the Antichrist appears.",
      "so that's why i don't think that this hadith is uh should be uh i don t question the authenticity of the hadith because i've studied it and you know that again this will be an entirely different lecture just on that hadith and its various narrations but um this hadif is about emergency situations when",
      "when you find that end times are near. Now, let's look at which is what all jurisprudential schools do in one way or another, when they find that there is a complex set of commands by the Prophet, you look at the conduct of the companions, how they understood those commands. Well here's what we find",
      "Here's what we find for Abu Bakr first sermon. He says, radiAllahu anhu obey me if I obey God not otherwise. So if he is disobeying God, he leaves quite a wide leeway in what people could do. In the case of Umar there are anecdotes such as where Umar would say, What would I do if I went astray? Not that I left Islam but I went",
      "no longer fair toward you and uh in one case the response is we will take up arms and straighten you up and omar praises god for giving him followers muslims who will correct him if he went astray uh ruth man radhiallahu anhu who is surrounded for weeks by rebels never uses these traditions to say that",
      "thing. Rather, Uthman spent a long time explaining where his policies were either misunderstood or what he would correct. All of this stuff is found in hadith literature and in tarikh literature. Tariq is history so in historical literature and hadiths literature all of this is well established. Ali ibn Abi Talib radiAllahu anhu the fourth caliph",
      "and relevant figure in this case because it is in his time that most rebellions took place he never cites any of these traditions against any of the rebels um let's look at the first civil war when ali is uh fighting so can i just clarify it so i just jump in there",
      "the rebels that the question naturally arises why didn't he cite these if these traditions are authentic traditions of the prophet and they are clearly pertinent well it might well be pertinent what why apparently did he not cite them i don't understand yes um but if you could hold that question until the end because there is going to be we're gonna have to frankly address that question head on and think about that okay right because it's not just ali's conduct",
      "When you look at this Ma'rikat al-Siffin, or rather Jamal, the first one and Talha Zubayr Aisha, these are all old friends and relatives who end up fighting. In this case, most companions side with Ali, many side with Talha, Zubair and Aisha. And once they're defeated then the Siffin comes when much bigger combat against Muawiyah",
      "mawia a minority sides with mawiya majority sides but ali and a third uh in another an important small minority um stays neutral i shouldn't say how small there is some studies recently that shows that the majority of the sahaba sided with ali but how small is the minority that straight neutral i haven't seen a good study nevertheless",
      "These people, the Sahaba such as Sa'd ibn Abi Waqas and Ibn Umar and a number of important companions stayed neutral. Right? And it is their opinion that staying neutral that becomes, of course for later Sunnis this becomes the probative opinion, the only opinion but early Sunnis understood that this was just one of those various options. But here's the great",
      "the great surprise to the extent that we have an idea of what these people were saying to each other and how they were arguing with each other no one reports citing any prohibition by the prophet says that look you know the prophet said once you have an imam do not rebel yeah right similarly in the next case um two three decades later we have",
      "war of al-hussein the second civil war rather of al hussein uh rebelling against yazeed in the 60s and um yeah in the sixties of hijra um and then abdullah ibn zubayr rebelled against jazeeb many companions that were alive at this time um",
      "ibn al-Hanafiya, a Taba'i Nuri companion. But nevertheless, now number of these people are trying to dissuade Al Hussein from leaving Mecca to go to Kufa right? Against a sitting Imam against a sitting leader Yazid none of them cites these hadiths. None of them says look your grandfather O Husain radiAllahu anhu your grandfather said never rebel",
      "of them says that all of them use prudential reasons that these people in kufa are not reliable don't go to them they will betray you i mean would al-hussein have dismissed his grandfather's clear agreed upon well-known command um now later and younger companions begin to cite reports on both sides after the second civil war so",
      "So, as shown in this, if you look at the people who are citing Auf ibn Malik, Obad al-Nusamit ibn Salama, Anas ibn Maalik, Ibn Abbas. These are all... In fact not even Ibn A'bass but all of these are relatively companions who lived long and were relatively less important compared to the first generation",
      "the first generation, the senior companions. So this is what if you will adds to the wonder why are they not citing the hadith of the Prophet ﷺ in key moments? And now this is not something that we can necessarily resolve but I think",
      "and I think that my understanding as a historian who works in first century is, as well. That is, I look at later periods as well but I recently completed a book on the first century which hasn't been published yet. My understanding is that none of them understood the prohibition of the Prophet to apply",
      "to a blanket prohibition of rebellion against the ruler they understood the prophet's command to be about first of all the khawarij the rebels who began fighting muslims and killing muslim innocent muslim and also they understood those to be applicable in part to",
      "if a ruler becomes a clear enemy of islam if they uh if they abandon the sunnah of the prophet such that islam is being disfigured then those prohibitions did not apply so those provisions applied to things like the ruler begins to drink alcohol because this was a very common disease among among rulers at the time",
      "and starts to enjoy personal luxuries which go far beyond what islamic law prohibits but you have uh the ruler at the same time is applying islamiq law in all parts of you know upholding living by islam protecting the borders of islam now taking up arms against them just for personal",
      "deficiencies might lead to more bloodshed. Whereas when the ruler begins to work against the interest of Islam, against the Book of Allah in such a way that people move away from religion which was al-Hussein's analysis right? Al-Hussain would think that what Yazid is doing even though Yazid",
      "he was a Muslim, but a Muslim whose interests were systematically going against the true understanding of Islam that al-Husayn and the people in Medina generally had. So when they thought... so what the Prophet was talking about was don't take these personal",
      "personal sins as an excuse just to rebel against because now the prophet is talking to a people who are not used to central government they're not used in government at all there are people who take pride in they write poetry about their freedom about the anarchy and the prophet uh knew that many of these people are going to rebel this is exactly what happened the time for bubacca right half of arabia rebelled against central authority",
      "central authority not in any kind of principled reason but because they didn't want taxation or they didn' t want the primacy of medina over them so anyway this is my interpretation but we can move on back to our topic of how did the great muslim imams whom all sunnis see as their authority",
      "rebellion in the first century, I guess I should say something about late first century. There are three main centers of Islamic scholarship of the great leaders where companions as well as their main students and leaders are situated there is Iraq, there's Medina, and there's Syria. Iraq, the center of Iraq, Kufa",
      "is one of the most important and the largest cities in in the Islamic world. And then you have Medina, which is of course important because of the legacy of the Prophet, the family of the prophet and of the main companions. And and then Syria, which",
      "And many of Medina, including leaders of Sunnis that today we cite as evidence when taking this or that jurisprudential opinion. They supported the rebellion of people like Ibn al-Ash'ath against Al-Hajjaj. Al- Hajjaj is no doubt established a governor of Abdul Malik ibn Marwan, the Marwanid Umayyad leader and Abdur Rahman bin Ash'as rebels against him",
      "scholars of kufa uh join that rebellion in some reports it is said somewhat exaggeration that none of the scholars remain behind none of them remained behind now of course you know this is this was perhaps political propaganda but then nevertheless we know many important uh scholars rebelled um no hajad had not committed he was",
      "many of the imams of ahlulbayt of course rebelled um but abdullah son of omar ibn abdul aziz the great caliph joined some of those rebellions none of these people thought that the prophet had a blanket prohibition against rebellion now these rulers that they're rebelling against are in fact much more legitimate in many ways they are much more islamic",
      "upholding the Sharia. Not only that, people like the Marwanids are in fact Islamicizing the bureaucracy so they are far more Islamic than any rulers today certainly and even throughout history arguably. So my point is that this – in the second century when Islamic tradition sort of comes together and the great Imams – this is when the great",
      "most people seem to be okay with rebellion. Imam ibn Hazm, a fifth century prodigy, one of the greatest independent scholars says,",
      "Um, uh, Imam Ibn Hajar al-Astalani. And for those of you who are familiar with Islamic tradition, I've been Hajar is a very important reference here because you cannot accuse him of being too early or being influenced by just early stuff. He's in fact the cornerstone of late Sunni Orthodoxy. He is the great commentator on the Bukhari Asahi of Al-Bukhara Fathulbari he says some rebels have",
      "Some rebelled in their zeal for the religion due to the tyranny of the rulers, not their unbelief but the tyrannies of the ruler and their abandoning of the prophetic sunnah. Not unbelief once again. And they were on the right. Included among these is Al Hussein and the Medinans, the people of Medina on the occasion of al-Hara who rebelling against Yazid. The Quran reciters of Kufa who rebelled against al-hajjaj",
      "82 rebellion of the rahman ibn ashraf others rebelled for power and such are proper properly called rebels and elsewhere he notes that rebellion against tyrants was the opinion of the earliest predecessors that is legitimacy of rebellion right uh and these are the arabic quotes that i have for what i have just cited abu hanifa",
      "supported so he is born around 80 82 and dies in the year 150. He sees these great transformation transformations in his lifetime. He supported rebellion both against the Umayyads, that is the Great Rebellion of Zaid ibn Ali against Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik in the Year 122. And against Abbasids,",
      "Nafs al-Zakiya and his brother, Naf s al-zakiya being in the Hijaz and his brothers Ibrahim being in Iraq. They both simultaneously rebelled and Abu Hanifa supported both of them. Now what's interesting is that rebellion for him was not only permissible and he did not call any of them kafir. None of them were unbelievers and none of them stopped praying. Hisham in fact is known personally to be a pious caliph",
      "And now later Hanafis add the condition that, you know, Abu Hanifa is really supporting rebellion if they are feasible. Right? But of course this is breeding into what might happen in future whether the rebellion is going to succeed or not. But none of the two rebellions that Abu Hanifah supported, they succeeded. Both of them seemed unfeasible. In fact",
      "feasible in fact there are some reports that suggest that he knew they're unfeasible but he supported them financially and didn't personally join he was an old man at the time but he would support his some of his disciples to go and join and he would financially support them uh Malik uh again um nobody needs to second-guess malik's authority",
      "in the knowledge of tradition, his opinion was again, the original quote by Al-Qadi ibn al-Arabi who is quoting the opinion, the Maliki opinion, is that one must support the just leader be he the sitting ruler or the one revolting against an oppressor. So what matters is justice and not whether you have the power.",
      "And he also went one step ahead and said any pledge of allegiance for the ruler that is based on fear and coercion is not valid. Now, of course, these days we don't it's not fashionable in later Islam to even believe in any kind of pledge or allegiance or election. God forbid, that's democracy. But in reality, for early Muslims,",
      "uh seen as necessary and if the consent was uh was forced meaning it wasn't true consent then any such pledge is not um not valid and malik in fact was physically beaten for giving this fatwa by the abbasids but he did not renege from it wow",
      "Shafi'i, in his earlier Iraqi school, endorsed the Iraqi pro-rebellion opinion. And some reports have him join a rebellion against Harun al-Rashid in 180s in Yemen. That is year 180 of Hijrah and after. But these reports, in other words, Shafai then would be the only imam of the four who actually joined their rebellion.",
      "are too obscure and contradictory to make a solid case. What we do know is that in his earlier actual jurisprudential opinion in Iraq, he took a pro-rebellion position. Even Ahmed ibn Hanbal – and this would be shocking for most people who see Ahmad ibn Handal as the most anti-rebelian person but in fact there",
      "whether ibn Hanbal tolerated rebellion and he in one report seems to suggest that it was justified not against an unbelieving ruler but against the sitting of basids al-ma'mun uh and his predecessors who are all believing Muslims all prayed and Islam was established in their time so um just I guess really quickly go over how the opinion evolves",
      "evolves. Al-Mawardi, now we are moving back two centuries later in early 5th century of Hijrah. I'm sorry, I'm using Hijri centuries. So instead of thinking about a common era, think about time since the Hijra of the Prophet ﷺ, right? So an early 5st century scholar,",
      "also the judge of judges, Qabi al-Qudat in Baghdad. In his famous book Al-Ahkam as Sultaniya and elsewhere there is a chapter on Ahkam al-Baghd in which a number of conditions are given to declare any opponent of the ruler as a rebel that is legitimate to fight for the ruler so here these",
      "the ruler can go and fight, and how can the ruler fight? And those conditions include that those rebels are armed. So unarmed protesters just do not count as rebels at all. That not only are they armed because people are generally armed at the time, they have chosen – they have gathered in one place and they have chose a leader to lead their rebellion. And on top of that, they",
      "reason but that they're giving to challenge the ruler because if they don't have this and they are simply killing people then they're bandits but if they have a reason by which they're saying that the ruler is unjust um uh and so on then only can the ruler go and fight them and treat them as what so it's not free for all for the ruler that anybody who criticizes me anybody who you know has",
      "has, you know, maybe they have gathered and maybe they haven't taken up arms. They then then they do not count as rebels. Al-Juwaini who comes a century or sorry, a generation after al-Mawaridhi was still fifth century of Hijra. Al Jwaini says in his book Al Ghyathi",
      "one of the most important and detailed books written on the subject. Al-Juwaini, of course is a very important authority, the leading Ash'ari, the student, the teacher of Imam al Ghazali whose opinion on this is the most developed opinion because in his book he imagines the possibility of rulers,",
      "and what will happen later, and so on and so forth. Al-Jawaini's opinion is that if a ruler becomes unjust, a Muslim ruler, a sitting Muslim ruler not only unjust and begins to… So he's very clear that personal wickedness or personal sins of the ruler do not disqualify him but let's say this is not personal",
      "justice is impossible to uphold that people find that um the interest uh that the ruler's interests and the ruling class's interests are systematically against the the people of course I'm translating in modern language then he says not only should you rebel but you should not hesitate from rebelling in fear of bloodshed because the bloodshad the ruler is causing and the harm may be much greater so",
      "al-Juwaini is pro rebellion in very you know these are very qualified much more developed conditions than we find in earlier literature. In other words politically it's much more mature and finally Ibn Taymiyyah the scholars that i study and admire very much he is very clearly against rebellion but when he gives his anti-rebellion position",
      "position, he's very clear that the early Salaf and many of the leaders, many of them imams, the Sahaba in fact held a pro-rebellion opinion. So what is Ibn Taymiyyah reason for being anti rebellion? Well it's really just his political analysis that it never works. Now is he right on this as historian I disagree we live in a country, I live in",
      "against the British. And it is in many ways, the most prosperous country in human history. So I don't necessarily take his historical analysis to be infallible but he is very clear that you know, the position that he's adopting is a position that can be disagreed with and it's a position based on prudence",
      "of circumstance that he had analyzed. Anyway, so this is all I have on the rebellion. There is a lot that could be said about how the jurisprudential opinion evolves but I will not go into that. Happy to take any questions and thoughts. Well thank you very much for an extraordinary survey of the historical data,",
      "the founders of the schools and right up to Ibn Taymiyyah, absolutely fascinating. I still find myself a little bit confused however that their companions themselves it would seem had different opinions if i've understood you correctly there wasn't uniformity of view and that's quite disconcerting emotionally I suppose one might say because one would wish for uniformity or opinion or uniformity",
      "about their views why do they just seemingly have these divergent views which mean that we're still perhaps today not absolutely certain which is the correct view for us all yeah so i think that in general uh the companions agreed on a number of crucial issues but did not this it did not agree",
      "scholars and the ummah as a mercy because if companions all agreed on one thing then we would not have a choice but to say this one thing this must be the true and single and only opinion um but when companions disagreed perhaps this was to some degree an evidence of the fact that well you know they disagreed at the time in the prophet sallallaahu alaihi",
      "crucial issues in which the Prophet would correct them. Whether, for example, the famous story where the Prophet says don't pray, or don't prayer until you get to settlement of Abu al-Quraida and some companions prayed because it got late and they thought he was just trying to make them hurry and others thought no, he actually literally meant don't",
      "between general command of praying on time and a specific command, not praying until you get there. And this conflict is resolved by the companions in different ways. And the prophet has most remarkable thing. The prophet does not comment. He doesn't say who was right sometimes leaving people, leaving the Muslims to use their own moral judgment and intellectual understanding of the tradition that",
      "that is in some ways the most important lesson of the prophet, right? This is why our tradition of jurisprudence became such a rich and such an important tradition. It wasn't simply citing the things that were… it's not a recipe, in other words, right, its guidelines often and their general sometimes the general goals are given but you have to figure out the way to get there",
      "get there. So on this question, when the companions disagreed, of course, there's a question of why the first civil war happened, which is not our topic today. I'm happy to talk about it at a different time. But the point is that civil war in which the companions at the end of the day dealt with the civil war without excommunicating each other.",
      "And the center of that lesson is Ali ibn Abi Talib, right? The hero, if you will, at the moment is the fourth caliph, Ali izn Abi Talik, who is in the worldly politics. He loses the political battle. He wins militarily, but there is no peace in his time and so on and so forth. But when it came to the moral superiority",
      "Islam became, and I'm talking about Sunni Islam. It is his analysis and his conduct during these rebellions and during these turbulent times that became the center of Islamic jurisprudence to give you an example how you deal with the rebels and the different kinds of rebels people only look at his conduct because we don't have anything direct from the Prophet or the first three caliphs right? Only indirect evidence so Ali",
      "So Ali, radiallahu anhu, was the one who, for instance, when he was dealing with the Kharijites, rebels who are left and right killing other Muslims. He dealt with them differently than when he dealt with Talha and Zubayr and Aisha, radiAllahu anhum, that he hated fighting them. And when he subdued them, he respectfully sent Aisha back to Medina and he made up with the rest. Again, this is a conduct of what do you do",
      "fighting other Muslims who are, whose intention might be good and disagree with them. How do you deal with that? Similarly on the occasion of the battle he had with Muawiyah at Safin, he accepted to make peace in arbitration whereas some extremists in his group refused to do so and that's when Kharijites are born. The conduct of Ali",
      "arguing with the extremists. I mean, in some ways it's really very important part of Islamic jurisprudence. All that I do in my work as somebody who does political jurisprudent, political if you will, it would be almost non-existent if it were not for the fact that first civil war happened and Ali was there to represent the Islamic opinion. And then the whole idea of there being disagreement",
      "disagreement among Muslims in which they do not simply excommunicate the others, as happened with the Christians and another place. In fact you might argue with the Jews between the two north and south kingdoms. In Islam this didn't happen. In islam uh the first fitnaw ended with unity not with complete dispersion of religion",
      "in some ways the best times materially and in terms of unity and civilization start when um hassan uh radiallahu anhu the elder son of ali hands power to mawia in order to make peace well you know some people see that as a great tragedy i see that",
      "the possibility of coming together through a sacrifice by grandson and prophet sallallaahu alaihi wasallam but a role model for how muslims can behave in these circumstances without ending the religious community right without uh complete division and sectarianism in which religion itself is lost that doesn't happen no i mean thank you for that but it strikes me i mean what one could say",
      "I mean, the states that exist in the Middle East and elsewhere have developed a new power based on technology, on armory, on weapons, on the power of the state. It's surveillance of citizens. It is intrusion into the private realm which I think is unprecedented in history. The ability to do that and to control and survey populations through technology. And I mentioned the weaponry as well.",
      "Doesn't it render this whole question of rebellion in Islam a moot point? In other words, is kind of almost redundant because the state has such overwhelming power now to impose its will. And we saw this in the out-uprise uprisings which were ruthlessly suppressed by force of arms. Are we not in a different era now where these questions no longer but they have an entirely different kind of paradigm to work with? I mean... So I would say both yes and no",
      "I agree with you in so far as, of course, the modern world, the political powers of surveillance and of large scale organization have become unprecedented. This by the way Muslim scholars have recognized for over a century and done wonderful work overtime to analysis. Sometimes when I'm talking to younger Muslims or people who are involved",
      "people who are involved in Western discourses, they seem to be like, you know, refer only to Western literature as if this is a new recognition. But in fact, we find this all the way to the end of the 19th century. People like Rashidullah are talking about the power of large corporations and how that changes things. And you find this recognition among Muslims who have therefore been wrestling with this issue. And I think it's really important that we include the great scholarship of Muslim world",
      "century, in order to discuss these things. And what people say is that yes the new state is enormously powerful but in some ways the early Islamic model of Medina is much more relevant today than it was ever before in medieval period. In many ways the ability for people to be much more informed, for the majority of people",
      "general social discussion of what should happen is possible today in a way that it never was. And this is actually much more like the Medina of the Prophet, sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam, just at a much larger scale than the medieval period in which because of size people simply had to depend on the metropolis, the caliphate center",
      "converse people's opinions on a number of issues and people were just not literate um so uh in a sense many things have become possible today that are in fact in harmony with earlier the spirit of early islam uh on the other hand you so so you're right that look uh rebelling against all the powers of the state are um you know it it's difficult but",
      "difficult but raging change and political change in the modern world is an extremely common occurrence right it's not rare at all in fact in some ways it is much more common and you know perhaps Western democracies are much more stable but the rest of the world is not um and when I say they're stable they're Stable for 50 years right this is not like 500 years that we're talking about yeah so uh",
      "i would say that power change still happens and the reason it happens as a political scientist study something that i studied uh as well um that rebellions usually take place when there is an split among the elite where the elites join the people some part of the elite joins the people and that still happens so i wouldn't say that this is all un you know this is we live in a different world where where older world has no wisdom for us",
      "A third thing is that the possibility of rebellion, it indicates a profound sense of responsibility and understanding of where political power comes from. So it's not the actual act of rebellion but the idea that people have in some cases their right to rebel",
      "rebel that should change the way that the state rules or the power elite conceive of their rule, right? In the case when you can never rebel as the case with the Wahhabi State and it's increasingly with the wahabi Saudi state being now becoming the norm for the rest of the Muslim world. The Arab world in particular not actually by the way for non-Arab countries but for the Arab countries",
      "Arab countries, this idea that you cannot even protest peacefully which is a monstrosity. I mean moral monstrocity to say that you can not peacefully protest. This gives the ruler the idea that he is God nearly then when it comes to political decision making he has now what happens is that people in the Gulf like these rulers and adults they only have",
      "what washington is going to think right because they they think that the clerics in their system are going to control the people and they're going to tell them that look if you rebel against the ruler you're gonna burn hellfire forever you don't want that do you so therefore uh no matter what the ruler does you effectively worship the state",
      "and Syria, and elsewhere the kind of attitude that is demanded of people. It's impossible for there to be a good government, an accountable government, a government that cares for the people or religion or morality. You simply cannot have a government has any sense of responsibility to the people if you think that your power is unquestionable in theory",
      "and your clerical establishment, Islam is a very strong power in Muslim societies despite all the losses of Islamic institutions. Islam as an emotional fact is lived and felt in Muslim society perhaps more than it was in fact in the mid-20th century. And if that Islam is saying that",
      "that you cannot protest, then this is a formula for this kind of almost voluntary totalitarianism. And this is the best way that foreign powers can use these rulers as puppets. It's very convenient obviously for Western foreign policy to have regimes or governments which are compliant in that way it makes",
      "were much more easier to manage, it seems for the Western dominance of the geopolitical situation is obviously very significant. I think we might draw it to a conclusion there. Thank you very much indeed for this. There's so many other questions one could raise and I fear that will go on forever but I think myself, certainly to ponder on much of this evidence, Aba Hanifa and Shafi'i Maliki his views are very,",
      "his views very, very interesting and often not at least in my experience presented very publicly as a, as factors to consider in this conversation about rebellion in Islam. So I'm immensely grateful to you sir for your time and your expertise and your, your knowledge. And I'm very much looking forward also to see people talking about what you've said and discussing it and looking at the evidence and continuing the conversation because it's such an important subject for all of us in the world today. So thank you very much indeed.",
      "you very much indeed for your time thank you very"
    ]
  },
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    "file": "anjum/Sunday Lecture _02-26-23_ w_Dr_ Ovamir Anjum_b1pG7w3V_VY&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750592693.opus",
    "text": [
      "We'll add to stream. Assalamu alaikum and welcome. We just begin with the recitation of Surah Al-Fatihah.",
      "As-salamu alaykum and welcome, and thank you for being here. My name is Mahjabeen Islam. I'm vice president of the Islamic Center Council. Dr. Saleh Jabareen was unable to be here, and Dr. Amjad Hussain is traveling, so I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Anjum.",
      "I want to first express gratitude and tribute to Drs. Amjad Hussain and Saleh Jabarin for perpetuating a wonderful lecture series that has a wide range of subjects from law, medicine up to religion. The three most important entities in Islam are Allah, Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him, and the Quran. There's a very tender verse in Surah Baqarah, verse 186 which says",
      "In which Allah is saying to Prophet Muhammad that they will ask you where I am and tell them that I am near. Fortunate are people who feel the presence of Allah, the fact is that Allah though is not physically visible for us.",
      "He is not among us. But the Quran, in all its originality, is with us. We need to create a relationship with the Quran. Read it for even 15 minutes every day and read a translation or commentary, not just the original text. Though there's a lot of barakah in the original texts, of course. And you will notice that it will address your issues. It's really remarkable how it does.",
      "and it will address your issues in real time, and it would be a life-changing experience. It is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Omer Anjum, Professor of Philosophy and Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies at the University of Toledo. He has been a frequent contributor in our lecture series, and today we will be discussing preservation of the Quran. Welcome, Dr. Anjom.",
      "Thank you very much. Beautiful words, I could not agree more. The Qur'an and the connection with the Qur'aan is the greatest spiritual treasure that you will find. Today I want to talk about how the Qur-an has been preserved.",
      "informal conversational um and if you have any specific technical questions i'm happy to get to that so let me start by asking you raise your hand and answer the question feel free to how has the quran been preserved what answer comes to your mind",
      "mind yes please okay so people have been memorizing okay very good yes okay so a very interesting word the word means um when you hear something or when you see something or you encounter something over and over and",
      "and when you have many people tell you like if if you if you're running out or you know here at the masjid somebody comes and tells you there is a fire outside dr islam told you there's a fire and you know if you are me that's enough for you to believe that there is the fire but that's not enough dr jim andre or tim andrey comes and says hey there is",
      "After that, the rest of you, people you know, people who don't know, all people that are trustworthy come and tell you one after another. So many that you can't even count that there is a fire outside. We're sure there's a fire on site, right? These people have no reason to lie but there is an additional factor if it's a possibility that for some reason these people just want to get you out of the mess gym and they have all conspired together",
      "You have a reason to doubt that they have met together They all know each other and they are conspired To get you out of the mustard because you just wouldn't get out. And so they're just saying they're making this up If that's the case, then this is not tawakkur So tawakkul is a word that means recurrent reports that confirm each other there is no possibility of conspiracy",
      "and they could have come together to make up this report so what dr. Abdul Wahab said is that there is tawatur is the means by which we know the Quran has been preserved I'm going to explain how that works so both answers happen right on one is hufadh",
      "transmission through memory, right? It's oral and aural transmissions. There are two words, oral which is when you say something and aurel is when hear it. A-W, so A-U-R-A-L So the Quran has been preserved through aural recitation and aura transmission. Aura transmission takes place when let's say I am the memorizer of the Quran You come and recite to me and I say yes, you got it. That's aural transmission",
      "So the Quran has been preserved through oral. That is, I recited to you and then you recited back to me. That's oral and aural translation. So that's absolutely correct. What else? Does anything else come to mind? Yes sir. Khalifa Uthman. Ah okay. Right to the jugular. Nobody's wasting time anymore. Which is that Uthmann, the third caliph,",
      "or rather not preserved. He did something that gave his name to this process of transmission. What he did, does anybody want to venture what he did? What was the work of Uthman, the third caliph, Uthmann ibn Affan in the presentation on the Quran?",
      "Got it printed. Well, you're close but there was no printing press at the time. They wrote it but they had already written it. In fact, the Quran was written at the times of Prophet Muhammad himself so that's not what he did. He compiled it. Oh, so warm because",
      "Because the Quran was compiled in times of Abu Bakr already. So what did Uthman do? Yes sir, back there. He compounded one narration. Ah, very good. He standardized it. So in other words, they were people writing their private copies of various parts of the Quran. You've got Surah Yaseen written,",
      "written you've got so that Baha written you're a poor man so you got only Alif Las written and it matters because there's no paper where is paper invented by Egyptians right nobody is there but sorry you missed out a little bit",
      "paper is invented in China. But when the Chinese used paper, they use it only for diplomatic state business. It's not public property. It expensive and there is no great need to disseminate anything so it's really written as to do formal official communication. When Muslims",
      "in a war, in a battle. They defeat some Chinese warlord and they come into possession of paper in that raid. And they find something really interesting which is something lighter than what they were used to writing on. So they got Chinese involved",
      "the abbasid period in uh the ninth century second century late second century of islam which is the ninth centur y of common era and an explosion happens at this time an explosion of paper making in baghdad in the city of baghdat for the first",
      "of the Quran or some prayers right and that actually is one of the main sources of documentary early Islamic history because you don't have a lot of written stuff from that period but these stones are really handy but it takes a long time to write the car on stone right and it's hard to carry them so what else very good animal skin untanned goat",
      "They would write on that or, and this is creative, on camel's shoulder blade which is really wide you dry that bone and you write on it. So yes sir back there? Tree bark Yes except that there is not a lot of trees in Arabia so what you actually do is because if you are rich you would import paper or leaf dried leaf",
      "leaf from Egypt but these people aren't rich so you do have that but it's not very widespread and that's where what by the word by the way the word Bible comes from the name for the leaf of that tree that Egyptians used to dry and write on a virus",
      "in other words writing is expensive and rare it's hard so what is happening as the quran is being revealed you have plenty of sources that show that the prophet himself wrote uh and instructed the writing of the qur'an even though himself he was not a scribe did not know how to write or read um how do we know that how do",
      "and writing was involved in the time of the Prophet, what was the first verse or first set of verses to be revealed? Iqra' To recite. But reciting could be just from memory. Right? But then In that verse it says",
      "So in the very first five verses, you will notice that these five verses are just addressing this 40-year-old man who is a pious merchant of Mecca. Who had no expectation that he is going to receive God's message, right? What he's told is recite in the name of your Lord and He is not a reader.",
      "There were people who used to recite and read in Mecca, but he wasn't one of them. So he is surprised by that. And then that very first set of verses say, Recite in the name of your Lord, the One Who created you from blood clot, and The One Who taught men, Who taught man by the pen.",
      "not just about reciting from memory, that the pen was referred to right from the beginning. Right from the begining and then there is another surah in the Quran which some scholars say is probably a second surah to be revealed after this first one. And some say it came a little later but among the very earliest ones is called Surat Nun.",
      "noon and the pen and i follow swears by the pen with which they're writing which means their writing right so the idea of writing is there in the quran from the very beginning in fact some scholars say the writing isn't introduced before allah is introduced i mean you could say the name allah because it does not mention what it does",
      "the name of Allah. It says, The Lord who created it. Right? But it mentions the pen. Allah is introduced first when in Surah Al-Fatiha. That's when. Now of course Muhammad peace be upon him was aware of Allah as the deity. All Arabs knew Allah as",
      "the deity in fact for thousands of years before islam the near eastern people called the creator deity the one who created the heaven they call that deity allah even when they were polytheists they recognized that as allah and the christians and the jews also who spoke semitic languages used the word allah jesus who spoke aramaic would have called",
      "called God Allah or the Arabic version of it which is very similar, very close. Moses and Abraham would have called God a lot so the Quran begins by mentioning writing",
      "that the Prophet had scribes who would write down the Quran as soon as it comes to him. He recites it, it is written down and then we know from the story like the famous story of the conversion of Umar ibn Taffaf where he goes and overhears his sister being taught the Quran right? And he is angry he is the enemy of Islam at the time, the man and he goes inside and she hides away",
      "pages of the Quran. So we know that this was happening from very early on. However, first of all, the Quran is coming down. It's being recited. Majority of people do not know how to read and write. According to reports in Quraysh, in the city of Mecca which was the most important city in Arabia. It was the holy city. It wasn't a center of trade precisely because it was a sanctuary and people could be safe there. They were only",
      "there were only 17 individuals who could read and write. And so a few people, it was elite knowledge that the population of Mecca probably was over 5,000 at the time. So there is writing down taking place but writing down is taking place only for the benefit of a small number of people",
      "But people are mostly memorizing the Quran. The Arabs were amazing at memorizing and in fact it is a witness phenomenon even today you go to deserts of Mauritania, you have people that I have met personally, you recite something to them once and they will repeat it right back to you.",
      "One such scholar has memorized not only the Quran, but all books of hadith. The six books of Hadith. And you know what that is? There are literally thousands, like tens of thousands of hadif in these volumes put together. But they appear in different versions and different chains of narration. So when you say somebody has memorized a book of hadit, that means they have memorized the chains along with the text.",
      "with the text and the variations of the texts these people are able to memorize with amazing precision not everybody so this is a gift like some people have more than others but it is not uncommon for the human mind to you don't have the distractions your mind is not involved in abstract calculations your mind",
      "You're out in the desert, you have a great sense of various spaces and paths. And you actually memorize by attaching words to those spaces. And so these people have amazing memories. This is how preservation on the Qur'an takes place. What is it that Uthman do that is different? Well,",
      "Quran is a live text. It's coming down and people are reciting it, and then people begin to recite it at night. So that's another thing that we know from internal evidence in the Quran. One of the earliest surahs to be revealed is Surat Al-Muzzammil. How does it start? Somebody remind me.",
      "Wake up, stay up at night and recite the Quran. وَرَتِّلِ الْقُرْآنَ تَبْتِيلًا So you have a few verses revealed or a few surahs revealed that are increasing every day but Muslims are being told to do what? To stay up all night and recite those verses in the Quran right?",
      "the Quran at night. It is an art, it is something that Muslims are really proud of and as soon as somebody becomes a Muslim we have some evidence that they're assigned a mentor who will teach them the Quran. In Medina by the way majority of the Quran is revealed in Mecca. Slight majority of it. When you go to Medina",
      "The Prophet is clearly concerned with the process of preservation. So a famous incident takes place in the Battle of Bethlehem, the first battle against the Meccans. A number of Meccan elite are captured as prisoners of war and one of the things the Prophet asks them that could be used as ransom is what?",
      "Teach 10 of our kids to read and write. And you can go home. This is how important reading and writing is to the Prophet, peace be upon him. So at this time in fact the Prophet is also encountering Jews who have a much more developed culture of writing than anything the Matkans had. So basically there is a lot more literature",
      "lot more literature, a lot more writing involved in the deen. But the Quran is not put together as one book because there is no concept of book and also imagine making a book out of camel shoulder blades. It doesn't work. So what you have is people, different people have different pieces of writing they're memorizing it but how do we know that the Quran exists?",
      "How do we know? The Quran exists because it's recited in the five daily prayers. And especially during Ramadan, the whole Quran would be recited. In order. So for there to be a book you have to have order. Right?",
      "time the prophet as he as the quran is coming down and he recites it in a certain order and the last year that he died according to tradition he recited three times a disease beginning to end so that's how we know the qur'an exists in the minds of people in memory they know what comes first what comes next but it is not a book in one single place after the death of the prophet muhammad there is",
      "a battle um rebellion in arabia anti-state rebellion by both against islam and some cases just against the state political power of islam called the riddha wars or apostasy wars where a lot of companions of the prophet who had memorized the quran are killed which is what prompts omar ibn khattab to begin",
      "people who memorize the quran are dying and what if the young the future generation was the kind of man worried about the future there are many instances of that so anyway he goes to abu bakr and says compile the qura'an and what he meant by that is bring all the pieces of the qur'an in order and put them together in one place didn't mean book or printing because that didn't exist",
      "And Abu Bakr said, the Prophet didn't do that. I don't feel comfortable doing that. It's an innovation. And Abu Baker in particular was a man who saw himself as an extension of the Prophet. If the Prophet did not do it, I'm not going to do it. But Ammar keeps coming back to him and makes arguments that look, times are different. People are dying. Revelation has stopped. The Prophet is gone.",
      "gone, alayhi salam. We have to do something until Abu Bakr feels that you know what? You got a point. Let us do that. So then he makes a committee of people who were some are young and they were with the Prophet. They were known for their best memory. And some were older who were with The Prophet all the way from the beginning in Mecca. People like Abdullah ibn Masrud who were early Meccan companions who was master of the Quran",
      "of the quran and zaid ibn thabit who is a young man amazing memory uh and he was with the prophet all the time as the prophet recited the qur'an and then a couple others abdullah bin obayy and a couple other people are put together and they say you know basically write down every verse in the qura but for every verse that you write make sure that",
      "doesn't play tricks on you make sure that there are two other people outside of you who witness that this is the verse and this is decoder now there is some dispute among Muslims about whether the order ordering up the Quran was for the word that's used as though Tifi meaning that it is divinely commanded or is it that these surahs could be changed",
      "fee that is it was given from the beginning and others who say that wasn't um at least based in recent research that i have seen it seems that the order was known now whether it was stable or not that's still i think uh i don't have an opinion on but there was an order but whether you could you know some people could disagree about that there is some evidence that not everybody knew",
      "the exact quarter. Anyway, that aside all the verses are put together and they fill a small room. This is not a book. These are all things that are piled together. That's what happened in the time of Abu Bakr. Now at this time Islam expands soon after. At this point Medina is the center",
      "All the important people lived there. But soon afterward, within 30 years of the passing of the Prophet Muhammad alayhi salam, Muslims have conquered all of the Persian Empire and two-thirds, 75% of... Sorry. Anybody who does math just should have noticed that this was an error. 66% of the Roman Empire was conquered.",
      "was conquered so what is present-day turkey anatolia is the historical name of the place and it's only i was not conquered because of the mountains the arabs couldn't take the camels across from that but um the syria in egypt with greater syria the entire lebanon and egypt were uh conquered",
      "land and the companions of the prophet Muhammad are spreading to different cities. The major cities at this time are, I'm going to test you on this five Mecca Medina Baghdad in Cairo no thank you neither of them exist at this",
      "Khufa and Basra. Khufah and Basar. In Egypt, it's called Bustat at the time. Bustan is where Cairo was later established centuries later. So tell me now the names again. Khutbah, Basrah, and both are in Iraq? Bustad in Egypt. How did you forget that? And what else?",
      "What else? Damascus, Mecca, Medina. So Mecca and Medina together are called Hijaz. And then Cuspat in Egypt which almost serves as like an attachment to Damascus. And the you have centers like Kufa and Basra so those are the main places where Muslims have spread. Those are the mean centers. Those also both be military centers or detainment centers they're call Amsar by the way",
      "by the way. Each of these is called Misr. Misr just means a military camp or garrison as in old language. Garrison town. So each of these are garrisons towns and in each of this Amsar you have various companions who go and spread and settle there and they begin to teach Quran to the people that are coming to them. Their people are converting to Islam particularly from Arabia",
      "and they are moving to one of these cities, and they're learning the Quran. Now a problem emerges which is that you have these companions who are separated from each other in different Ansar who are reciting the Quran, and if there is a disagreement among them well that disagreement becomes stabilized rather than being corrected",
      "Arabic language, like any other language before the modern period is not a standard one single standard. You see, one of the things that we don't often appreciate is that human language is constantly changing, constantly evolving. According to scholars of linguistic geography every 12 miles language changes. There's different dialect and new words",
      "what a typical human being in the past would this is how far they would go um and beyond that right you're there's a different village that you almost never visit in your life right so basically different words emerge and then it gets slightly different usages that's happening everywhere in fact if you try to read english right from 300 years ago you will find difficulty 500 years",
      "modern language in the modern world english becomes standardized is because government becomes big people begin to move you have steamboat you have the ability to travel long distances and this allows language to become standardized and then modern academies are born modern dictionaries lexicons were born a couple hundred years ago and today the internet right that standardizes the english language so we shouldn't take for granted that everybody spoke the same arabic",
      "right in the arabian peninsula they have same families of words but everybody speaks a slightly different language so when the prophet is speaking if he spoke only the quranic only dialect his own personal dialect what happens is that if he did that well arabs are extremely jealous all people all tribal people particularly are um and",
      "And the more limited you are in your movement, the more jealous you are. So Arabs would feel if the Prophet only spoke Quraysh dialect they would feel every time they heard a word that was Qurayshi's word but not us in Yemen who were superior to those Qurayish what do they know? Every time the Prophet is talking about cotton he is using the word we have got something better",
      "have got something better our word is open so what you're going to do you feel something for it so what happened is that when the prophet recited the quran he asked jibri according to the tradition to bring down the qur'an in the language of people that he's residing too so words change so for example you hear the word um in uh in a presentation about",
      "of Al-Fatiha, Malik Yaumiti. Another recitation is Maliki Yaumitin because God knows what but because some people did not have the word malik and for them malik was a foreign or foreign word we say malik so Maliki yaumiti Maliki Yawmiti similarly",
      "is a word that the arabs used uh sorry qurashis used but other people use the word and so the prophet asked jibril according to tradition to recite to him so that he could recite to people in that dialect",
      "received the Qur'an in seven ahruf. Literally, it means seven words or seven letters. And scholars still dispute how exactly to interpret this idea of seven letters because it just means the Qurʾān has been revealed in multiple forms without changing the meaning. Therefore, if you hear a slightly different recitation do not fight.",
      "do not disagree is there were cases when one companion would hear somebody else recite slightly differently and would start fighting he said no you don't know how to recite it and they would go to the prophet like uh and then the prophet would say both of those both of them are correct so um now after this process",
      "of people now in the world are not majority of Muslims now certainly majority of people that was the drool over or non-non Arabs but many people who are converting to Islam they don't care what original dialect you have just tell us the right thing right it's kind of like if you've started to if you never tried to learn Arabic one thing that you realize is that there is no such thing as one Arabic everybody can talk everybody isn't different dialect and so",
      "what happens is that if you're a student and you want to learn Arabic, you want the learn one standard dialect. And thanks to Arab scholars many of whom actually were 19th century Christian Arabs who helped standardized help standardized one Arabic dialect one standard Arabic which could be used in like news broadcasts",
      "In any of these different places, Morocco, I don't understand Moroccan accent. I can understand almost all others because it's so different. Most people who are, say, Moroccan, if they talk to somebody from the Gulf, they wouldn't be able to understand the Moroccan accents. Everybody will understand the Gulf accent. So it's different. Well, how do you deal with this problem at this time which is really in terms of technology",
      "really fundamental, really primitive. So the Prophet created a tolerance for different words but now because non-Arabic speaking people are converting and they're learning Arabic they don't care about those differences they just want one Arabic so increasingly there is a pressure to standardize the Quran and those dialectical",
      "So that is where Uthman comes in. Uthuman says, we're going to write, take Abu Bakr's compilation. Now also because you are richer, you have better technology available. You can use just light skin and bring it all together and write it in one script. In one script,",
      "the different dialects are accommodated now sometimes the differences most of the differences by the way within the quranic recitations can be accommodated in writing if you look at how malik is written how maliki's written the difference is only the vowels that you add not the basic structure what is called skeleton the skeleton is the same all that's different is",
      "right so the with monic codex a copy of a manuscript is called a codex the what monic kodak's incorporates writing just this skeleton and allows different people to recite those skeletons differently some of those differences are at required skeleton difference",
      "difference okay now we're getting technical like if you go from the words are different the skeleton is different so how is that accommodating according to scholars now we don't have othmanic codex available to us it doesn't survive so how do we know what was done um it's a better it's matter of scholarly reconstruction but according to the best reconstruction we have",
      "we have, some scholars say that different Usman created a number of quodasis. Five up to five and those differences could be accommodated there so one place would have one and the other place would had the other skeleton Now comes the question of ira'at The actual recitations that people have preserved until today If you go to a scholar",
      "scholar of the quran somebody who memorizes that we're at in an expert way not like you know you memorize one recitation a to z that's a great beginning but that's just the beginning because normally what you do is you have to memorize all the 10 recitations so a typical reciter from al-azhar university or medina or damascus they when",
      "all the ten main verse or there and there are more that are considered shahada or unusual so you actually memorize all of them all of the 10 recitations along with the chains of where this recitation how it was preserved so now people say look the Quran is completely",
      "a harakal it's not a dot that you could uh that has been changed right what do you think of that have dots been changed or added and later yeah could people change or take away dots they couldn't tell me more",
      "yeah exactly so the harakat were actually added later because harakat like right or for persians and south asians it's those are added later to help uh",
      "who's it's not their language so they wouldn't know how to read. So what is preserved as a sound recite the actual writing right? The actual writing is if you will, the human...it's a mnemonic device. It's a device to memorize, to remember. It' s a mneumonic device and the more people need that today for example",
      "to the different ways in which you're going to recite, to say a letter. That is the same kind of thing that they were doing back then as non-Arabs are converting, non-arabs are reciting, they need to know how to recite this so we'll add haraket. Similarly dots often writing was very laborious enterprise and dots would have been very difficult",
      "have a stable than a ticked annotation so basically these things are added but the standard was always oral and our own transmission that's why writing even though it's happening from the beginning but writing is just a way to aid overall transmission of the book how can it be said",
      "Continues because it's happening constantly right people are memorizing and people are reciting already from the early Meccan period so anyway, that's the role of the Uthmanic codex or what's called Mus'haf Uthmein The Codex of Uthmen Alright, so that's all I have to say questions additions yes",
      "Yeah, that's a wonderful question. At the Ohio State University Professor Ahmed Jalad is an expert on that question",
      "My daughter who goes there is taking a course with him and excited about it. The Arabic language existed, Arabic poetry existed so it's not that the language did not exist but it was fairly well developed language But there are these variations And how the Qur'an dealt with those variations is part of what the scholars say is a miracle of the Qur-an",
      "variations in such a way that one part of the Quran clarifies other parts of the Qur'an. There is almost no word in the Quran that is used only once in what context so that by Quran using its words in different places, the Quran explains what it means by certain words. The only words that are strange, that are new and",
      "and not repeated are those that are describing like natural phenomena if you don't understand the reference like what it means you're okay um there is a story of omar who was one of the readers and writers of one of them when he heard the word uh in surah right he said what is that i've never heard that word but",
      "It's he said it doesn't actually hurt me at all. It's just say it's just talking about when The snow falls precipitation, but its ice how it hits the ground You never seen it and We know it we can understand the phenomenon much better But in her understanding of the plan so there words like that but any word that is",
      "that is crucial to the meaning of the Quran, it's always repeated. And that's why those scholars point out some people who don't know enough Arabic and don't have context they might say the Quran repeats itself a lot but actually the Quran almost never repeats itself in the same context every time sometimes even the same verse would be repeated but its meaning",
      "the first verse and so it almost becomes a uh almost become a new meaning a new appreciation but also it is a hermeneutic device because it allows the first first to be explained without reference to an external lexicon because the lexical doesn't exist so you could say that the quran creates its own lexican similarly in grammar of course there's",
      "course grammar exists now the rules of right language and wrong language they do exist they are actually a little more stable than vocabulary um but the quran uses vocabulary in such a way sorry grammatical concept in such",
      "explain what they are because that will only benefit those who know but the Quran constantly shifts between past tense and present tense when describing God. Because the concept that the Quran is capturing is that God is about time, God is not limited by time. Sometimes the Day of Judgment is described as already having happened",
      "And sometimes past is described in the present tense. So, grammar, grammatical rules also settle in this way. Sometimes, and that's another very, very important feature of the Quran, final thing I will say. The only way to understand, to finally settle and tie down these meanings",
      "if the Quran is talking about something that everybody sees. So then you would know, aha! This is what it's talking about, right? So that's why the Quran can only be understood properly in the context of what is happening to the Prophet. So the Quran",
      "the Quran will come and start explaining like you know God has heard the complaint of the woman who is arguing with you about her husband. The Quran doesn't say what the argument was, the Quran comes right in the middle and says everybody saw this woman come to the Prophet and complain and the Quran starts right there. Now everybody will understand from this",
      "mean to say that a woman what is the samia uh what is right that she's arguing they know what these words mean now because they saw the phenomenon and they heard them or heard the quran comment on that and then the qur'an resolves this problem so this way if you don't know",
      "which the quran came right if you don't know this seerah you can actually radically misunderstand the qur'an and that's why it's really important uh and this happened right from the beginning early scholars of islam they preserved two things to make quran accessible otherwise the qura'n will not be accessible to you two things one pre-islamic poetry",
      "not be able to triangulate and understand how the word language is used because remember there are no lexicons, there are dictionaries that are printed by Oxford. So the only way you can know how words are used is by because people have memorized Arabic poetry before and so they know this is how these words are second way in which the Quran ties down its meaning is by referring to concrete events",
      "We have two questions from online. First, one person wants to know if you could talk about the non-Arabic words in the Quran and then the second question first he sends his salaams and he wants to",
      "I don't know. I'll be in London, actually Oxford and Cambridge next week or first week of March And the event at Oxford, I believe will be live but it's always the organizers who decide those things Now non-Arabic words in the Quran",
      "non-Arabic words in the Quran. Because the Quran often insists, frequently that it is an Arabic text and the reason this insisting became important was because the Arab, Quraysh his opponents would often say that he is learning these stories, myths of what happened to Adam and Moses and Jesus. He's learning this mythology from",
      "great storytellers of persia and there were storytellings all persia who are well known uh and then these great myths um but great wrestlers and great emperors so on an arabian press pilot and so the quran is clear and emphasizes that no they're talking about you know a different mythology a non-arabic language",
      "language whereas this is an Arabic Quran how could it be just recited, how could we just copy from it but also the Quran emphasizes this is a Arabic text. Masha'if in fact had a very clear position that all words of the Quran are Arabic but the problem is how do you define what is Arabic remember language is always fluid language is",
      "so you do have words in the Quran such as pinwan and sinwan which the Arabs didn't know we seem to have come from elsewhere um and so it's in my view of the resolution of that debate is that there",
      "that has not been arabicized and its meaning has not become settled among parents because sometimes you use words that people don't know it's just a different look you know in english you could use the meaning of a word right or you could",
      "And the meaning of liberalism could be protecting private property or it could mean sexual liberty. Different people will use it differently. And who controls the word? Well, it's not an Arabic word and Arabs don't control the word. But if a word that has become part of the Arabic language and the Arabs now have a meaning regardless of what the original language does with them",
      "does with that word the meaning has become our own of meaning now we're not gonna so if the meaning changes in that language the Arabic is not going to be affected that's what it means to say the word has to become arabized in order to use Quran and that is the case you don't have any work in the Quran that the Arabs of some dialect do not recognize as their",
      "own has a stable thank you very much"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Sunday Lecture _10-30-22_ w_Dr_ Ovamir Anjum_4A3kTcY1Lx8&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750599982.opus",
    "text": [
      "So today is the second of the lectures in the series of history of Islam",
      "Our speaker did a fantastic job on his first lecture about a month ago. Just those of you who are not familiar with this series, it would be the last Sunday of every month and you will get, both of you on the mailing list, you will",
      "Usually they say that our speaker does not need any introduction and this speaker clearly does not use an introduction. And I'm not going to spend half an hour to introduce him anyway, because usually people end up doing that. Very briefly Dr. Awameen Anjum is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toledo and holds the chair of Imam Tattal Chair in Islamic Studies",
      "Islamic studies at the university and been a professor now for few years. And last week, week and half ago we had a very nice program around his latest scholarly work in which he translated an old Arabic text, Madaraj al-Taliki",
      "discussion on that this is a monumental work that he has done but I am grateful to him personally that he had committed to give this video the place thank you very much all right there trying to make it",
      "Maybe something on my end? Okay, good. Okay.",
      "Today my topic is Islamic history, why and what? What counts as Islamic history and why ought we to learn Islamic history. Some justification some philosophical reflections on history and what might call theory of Islamic history What does history mean? If you don't mind I'll make it a little interactive so",
      "yeah it's his story his story okay that's the series of facts linked by your story okay one um as somebody said uh one damn fact after another what else it's an attitude of the flesh",
      "talking about facts and we have narrative there is a little tension between fact and narrative the thing is that we don't ever have all the facts about the past and not only do we not have all of the facts, we have in fact a very narrow version or selection of facts that somebody has collected",
      "History can be done better or worse, but it's never merely a matter of one damn fact after another because nobody would want to learn it. For instance, how many people know how many blades of grass are there outside in the parking lot? It's a fact, but I doubt anybody ever even thought about knowing. So we don't wanna know facts. We wanna know the facts that fit into some narrative",
      "of what is important in life, right? So the ancient way of doing it, pre-modern way if history was called tarikh for the Arabs. And from tarikh, it went from Arabic,",
      "Turkish and Urdu, and all of these different Islamic languages. And I use the word Islamiquet right? That's a little trick there. When you say something is Islamic that means it somehow geologically has to do with belief in God and the Prophet Muhammad. When I say something in Islamic kit, that's the way people use the work Italic kit meaning related to the civilization but not"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/An Intimate Conversation with Dr_ Ovamir Anjum_ixjgeiEthwI&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750679586.opus",
    "text": [
      "So this is an interview conducted by Sean Charon with Dr. Aubamey Anzum.",
      "of intellect, reason in various domains of Islamic thought ranging from politics, law, theology, philosophy and spirituality. He brings his historical studies to bear on issues in contemporary Islamic thought and movements and is currently researching developments in Islamic political",
      "His work is essentially interdisciplinary, drawing on the fields of classical Islamic studies, political philosophy and cultural anthropology. He obtained his Ph.D. in Islamic Intellectual History in the Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Masters in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and Masters in Computer Science from the Universities of Wisconsin Madison. He's the author of Politics, Law and Community in Islamic Thought.",
      "His current projects include one forthcoming edited volume on Islam after the 2011 Arab Risings and a monograph on the foundations of modern Islamic political thought. He is also near completion of a decade-long project to translate a popular Islamic spiritual and theological classic, Madarij as Salikin, Ranks of Divine Seekers by Ibn al Qayyim which on completion would be the largest single author English translation of a classical Islamic text. Welcome Dr. Vermiljum.",
      "construct an Islamic political thought, more specifically a critique of Islamic political tradition from within Islamic history, from within the Islamic tradition. So my hope at the methodological level was to try to extricate myself from the argument about Orientalism and anti-Orientalism modernity and postmodernity",
      "modernity and see if Islamic tradition how it's it could stand on its own. And in my view for a tradition to stand on his own, it needs to be able to self critique. So I chose the moment of the Taimiyan Moment. It is that moment of",
      "important moment when because of the Mongol attacks and the annexation, the Mongol annexation of a large part of the Muslim world, eastern half. There was at least among some thinkers a motivation an opening to reconsider",
      "closed and settled for the last three or four centuries. And do you want me to stop and wait? Okay, so Ibn Taymiyyah is a central figure in that self-critique of Islamic tradition because on the one hand he is right at",
      "He starts with a profound critique of foreign intrusions in Islam. Yet at the same time, he is profoundly aware of the Falsafah tradition, Kalam tradition as well as a number of other esoteric Neoplatonic traditions that had influenced religious trends such as the Bhakti Sevan or Shia",
      "the twelver shay'i thought, as well as the Sufis philosophized Sufism of Ibn Arabi and others. So Ibn Timiyyah is an extremely well-read traditionalist. And this is quite remarkable because traditionalists typically did not engage in dialogue with or theorization of their positions apart from repeating the positions of their predecessors",
      "their predecessors. So Ibn Taymiyyah brought together sort of you know kalam, falafel traditions and in essence his project was to take the early scholarship of Islam the first two or three centuries",
      "I think that allowed a great sort of opening, a new kind of resettlement with greater hindsight and greater sophistication. So a new settlement of reason and revelation. That's one theoretical aspect of my work. The result in politics was that Ibn Taymiyyah tried to rehabilitate",
      "the community-centered focus of early Islamic thought at a time when community had become incredibly divided in various sects and mathab communities. And so that is why I call it a political thought, political moment because politics in the essence is about collectivity. It's about thinking of the whole instead",
      "the interests of particular parts of the whole. And medieval Islamic thought had become quite used to thinking as a madhhab establishment or you know, a particular class or status group. The ulama often thought of themselves as belonging to a particular madhhb, a particularly class and so even when they",
      "the lens through which many people of course we can't generalize but most people thought, most scholars was through the lens of their particular sect and class. So Ibn Taymiyyah is remarkable in bringing back the idea of ummah as an agent, the ummah has as a entity with agency which is why i call his vision community-centered vision of Islam",
      "So the way you are framing and from your book I understand that you see Betaymi as a kind of anti-establishment during his age. And also, you frame the Gazalian vision of politics",
      "as a kind of elitist politics, isn't it? Well yes but I should qualify that. When Imam Ghazali is writing he's writing before the Mongol period and yes his vision is elitists but also he is trying to preserve the Abbasid caliphate",
      "Sunni Islam and Ghazali as well as all of the rest of the thinkers, Ibn Taymiyyah and others thought of the caliphate as a central obligation for all Muslims but for Ghazaly that obligation had almost an urgency. And that urgency was that the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt which is the esoteric Shi'i movement they were actively",
      "were actively undermining the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad and elsewhere. So Ghazali was, one could go as far as saying that Ghazaly was obsessed with trying to save Sunni Islam through the Abbasids caliphate. This is not to say that the Abassid Caliphate or the Caliphates itself is merely instrumental these people seriously believed this is Ijmaa",
      "This is ijma' of scholars that the caliphate is an obligation. The great treatise written by Imam al-Juwaini, the teacher of Al Ghazali. But for Al Ghzali it had a special urgency and so Ghazal didn't really imagine politics bottom up. He didn't think about how do Muslims come together in a community on the basis",
      "and basic sort of usul ul fiqh, and basic sources how they become obliged to create local political authority. And where does political authority come from? His discussion was pre-Mongol and top down, how do you save the caliphate? After the Mongols when the Caliph was killed in Baghdad in 1258,",
      "The caliphate that was re-established in Cairo had none of the prestige, even the symbolic prestige of the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad. And it... That caliph played no role in the actual politics of Muslims. The Sunni Islam was now limited to these two centers Egypt and Syria",
      "Syria. On the one hand it was sandwiched by two inveterate enemies, the crusaders from the West and the Mongols from the East North so Ibn Taymiyyah is writing at a time when there is a need to rethink where does legitimate political authority come from? And so for Ibn",
      "meaning his return to the Qur'an and secondarily hadith and sunnah. And often people misunderstand that, people think he is primarily Ahl al-Hadith. I believe that Qur'aan is much more central to his thinking and Sunnah is very important but for him unlike some other Ahl Al-Hadeeth, the Qurraan is what sets the vision and image if you will of the general picture.",
      "Just to clarify, so you're saying that if we compare with the Ahl al-Hadith movement Ibn Taymiyyah was much more Qur'an oriented? Yes exactly. Because Ahl Al Hadith would sometimes and this included Hanbalis would be much more invested in particular hadith analysis whereas Ibn Tamiyyah was a master of hadith",
      "But for him, his hadith analysis would be guided by a deep reading of the Qur'an. And often careful readers of Ibn Taymiyyah would notice...",
      "I have heard in your lecture that you're saying even a modernist scholar like Fuzrahman was greatly influenced by Ibn Taymiyyah. How do you see this intersection of Ibn Temiyyah and Fuzrahmn?",
      "So, Ibn Taymiyyah was not only influenced it seems like increasingly influenced and deeply touched by Ibn Tamiyyah but there is a big difference between the two in the sense that Fadlur Rahman did not know the Sunnah first hand. For him he knew the Sunna through primarily shakhd and sort of half cooked early orientalism",
      "of tradition in the West. In Germany, for example, Harald Motzke who starts basically from a Shachtian perspective and then has come to completely overturn Shacht and comes to a position that is very close to traditional but also in the west in the United States many scholars of Hadith have come to conclude that the older critiques whether it's Goldier or Shacht were",
      "Not that they were entirely wrong, but believing in them was just as much a matter of faith as not believing. Meaning you have to be able to believe that all these Muslims would lie and agree on lying in different parts of the world. And they would agree on this methodology.",
      "that even mutawatir hadith, multiply reported hadith such as whoever lies about me the Prophet said in a mutawatr hadith whoever lies should make his bone in fire. So Fathur Rahman says about this hadith it was also fabricated meaning you almost have to have an amazing supernatural ability to have faith like faith in Santa Claus",
      "that all of these people in this civilization who are, in fact very different often in disagreement with each other widespread and they would come to agreement on lying about these things. And so that's why I argue that it requires immense amount of faith on the part of the orientalists to believe in their thesis",
      "Whereas, if you use Occam's razor the simplest explanation for why there is so much uniformity despite the fact of course there's a lot of fabrication. That's the whole reason for Hadith sciences that they was fabrication but the thing is that the question is whether the project of critical analysis of Hadith critical evaluation was it successful and",
      "So, the difference between Ibn Taymiyyah and Fuz-ur-Rahman is that Fuz ur-Rahma was not able to take Sunnah seriously.",
      "The Qur'an is the only language that can be understood in the Quran.",
      "In fact, it can only make proper sense in its context. And you have to... and the Qur'an preserves that context. Now of course, that said there is something powerful about Fazlur Rahman because he takes the Quran seriously despite these serious limitations",
      "expositor of Islamic thought because Ibn Taymiyyah similarly starts with the Qur'an while taking Sunnah as well. But you'll often find that Ibn Temiyyah would take a Quranic theme and, because his knowledge of the Sunnah is so vast that even if one or two hadiths seem to contradict the Qur-an, because he's able to put them in a larger context of many, many traditions,",
      "once you're able to contextualize the Sunnah in this context of the Quran. So I think that's why Fadhr Rahman finds ibn Taymiyyah so persuasive.",
      "I mean, established Islamic thought which existed in the pre-modern period before Ibn Taymiyyah. So is there kind of like just an instrumentalist use of Ibn Temiyyah? Or do you see it as a kind of serious scholarship? Well, I think that it's difficult to say. There are, of course, scholars who instrumentalize names of whether Ibn Tamia or Ghazali.",
      "to talk about these scholars and who are not themselves any kind, do not have the kind of deep commitment. But Fazlur Rahman was not like that I mean regardless of this segment one would have he is a very seriously grounded and clearly passionate scholar and of course there may be other scholars who do instrumentalize but I think that part of the reason for Ibn Taymiyyah's",
      "Mostly because he goes back to the basics while also remaining within sort of a core of the tradition, scripture. So it's a scriptural critique of medieval formations but also the impetus or focus or impulse of Ibn Taymiyyah is to recover action and community activism",
      "and which is something that Muslims, as challenged by an overwhelming Western colonialism and then post-colonial imperialism, Muslims find the medieval articulations of Islam that emphasize pacifism submission to authority and submission to whoever's in power. Theologies of domination. Ibn Taymiyyah rejected and challenged",
      "So you are quite often saying this term scripturalism. Do you think that going back to the text kind of disregards what we had as a kind of intellectual production in the pre-modern period?",
      "this kind of methodology disregards the contextual reality. Is there any chance of it, in this kind or methodology?",
      "It is a reaction to some things, but it is also the way in you know some sort of focus on hadith for example works out for some people that hadith Is used not only by simply non scholars But sometimes even scholars in certain traditions to trump both the Quran And the larger context of the Sunnah and hadith and that is a serious problem",
      "is to go back to the Qur'an and Sunnah in a holistic sense. And I do not reject the tradition, not at all. So I'm not a Quranist. In fact, I believe that rejecting this Sunnah leaves you without the Qur-an if you have any understanding of the historical preservation of these texts or the preservation of the meanings of these text. The community is a central part of the Qurr-an and the Qurn itself requires the Sunnah and the",
      "understanding that is preserved through various texts and passed on. So one can't simply look at the Quran without also looking at the Sunnah and other tradition. However, my only point when I say scripturalism which is something that I'm very adamant on that Muslims must go back to scripture My point of scriptural ism",
      "evaluating medieval tradition and its enormous variety, enormous internal diversity. And often at least sometimes ethical compromises in that tradition and a dazzling array of conflicts in that",
      "Right, through which you judge the tradition and not the other way around. In other words, you don't look at your particular tradition and say everything in scripture that goes against it is meaningless or abrogated or no longer relevant. What's important is my particular tradition. No, in fact God spoke transcendentally, timelessly, timeless truth to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ",
      "and that is why we go to those principles in there, and the vision of life that is within the Qur'an. And I emphasize sometimes there are certain particular teachings of the Qur-an that are for that time and for the particular circumstances that arose but what I argue emphatically is that there is a vision of normative life not a blueprint of social order",
      "of social order, but a vision of normative life in the Qur'an that has to be the backdrop against which you understand the evolution of the tradition. And whenever that vision of life, which has to of course be proved and substantiated by using both scripture and reason, when tradition seems to go against that then it is our responsibility as",
      "as scholars and intellectuals, of course not as people who are outside of traditional scholarship and simply instrumentally rejecting and so on. You have to feel fully committed to both scripture and tradition in order to do this but as scholars it is our responsibility to evaluate the various conflicts within the tradition through that scriptural vision which is rational in my view",
      "and which is also scriptural in the sense that you do not impose it on the tradition, you find evidence for it, hermeneutic evidence for its in the scripture. So basically I reject both simplistic hadith-based studies but also I reject blind taqlid type of understanding.",
      "on the basis of the scripture itself?",
      "So we, in the same sense, Muslims are Ahlul Quran. We are Ahli al-Kitab and our Kitab is the Quran. And this is very important to be thinking about what we are about. We're people who are distinct, distinguished because we have been given the final message. The relationship between Ibn Taymiyyah and the Greek tradition, we all know it was very contentious.",
      "But scholars like Said Hussein Nasser and many others would say that the contemporary challenges of Muslims is mainly philosophical. What we face from the West is mainly philosophically, so in that context how an Islamic intellectual trend inspired by Ibn Taymiyyah can challenge the philosophical",
      "discussion from this kind of trend? Well I believe that if one means by the philosophical challenge iman in kufr then yes but if one mean by a philosophical challenge rehabilitating tired washed up neoplatonism, then no. And unfortunately for some Muslims influenced by late European romanticism anti-modernity as Sayyid Hussain Nasir Wa is",
      "that traditionalist with capital T and a perennialist. Unfortunately, brilliant as his reading of Western history and philosophy or science is for them the real struggle in life and the world is between modernity and anti-modernity. Modernity is the great evil and everything pre-modern was great except",
      "that led to the rise of modernity. In other words, the real problem is not turning away from God and belief in Abrahamic God who reached out to humanity and spoke to prophets and who is absolutely infinite and absolutely perfect and whom we know through his scripture. Rather than that for some people it is some kind",
      "kind of Greek paganism and Hindu paganism that presented somehow the reality, which invalidates the entire project off the Qur'an. The Qur'aan comes to people who are polytheists. They're worshipping nature. They love nature. What's the point of Prophet Muhammad, who came",
      "And Tawheed meant not only that there is one God, that it's something they're readily granted. The Qur'an is very clear and emphatic about it but that one must worship one god, one must actively submit to one god. One must obey in one's life that one god so the prophetic message, the prophetic mission of Muhammad,",
      "it has always been and not some kind of philosophical. The Prophet was not a philosopher, the Prophet was a da'i, a caller to God and he is talking to people whose fitrah, who's nature is screaming to be in tune with God so when he talks, he calls to them",
      "their desire, their confusion and they're willing to see... They are able to see the proof of God in their own nature. And they don't need to be given taught Aristotle or Plato. They don't have to be taught doctrines of philosophers or pagan philosophers. The Prophet does none of that. And same remains true today I believe that most people who become Muslim",
      "in a myriad of ways, the veil of falsehood is taken away from them. They see their own nature, they see the obviousness of the truth of God and then the challenge is how do you organize such a community?",
      "a sophisticated philosophical discussion. But apart from that, when we talk about West as kind of knowledge production, these various disciplines like anthropology, psychology, science and many other disciplines they have in the backdrop a very sophisticated philosophical discussions. So if Muslims, contemporary Muslims follow this path the way Ibn Taymiyya articulated will it not make Muslims lagging behind",
      "in this discipline's life, in giving new dimension or new paradigm to the knowledge production system of the West? I'm not sure why you would say that. So what some traditionalists would argue is that let's go back to Aristotle and fundamental modern empirical, modern science for example is a rejection of Aristotle",
      "Aristotle. So why would you go up to a washed-up philosophy that has really no foundation left in the modern empirical world and struggle with it when, in itself is falsehood according to your own faith and basic commitment and reason? Why would you do that? Why wouldn't you engage with the empirical realities of the Qur'an and the Sunnah and, of course, the great tradition of scholarship that did precisely",
      "But I don't see why bringing in pagan philosophy wouldn't strengthen you. Now of course, if you were talking about Western knowledge production, I think that a class of Muslim scholars are certainly to engage in deconstructing that. That's important.",
      "That is the question. And if the ground on which you stand is a floating island, like for postmodernists, you end up with nothing but an onion of critiques or if that ground on what you stand in some kind of Aristotelian imminent understanding of nature then you're essentially speaking",
      "speaking in my view from a pagan position. What makes Islamic philosophy Islamic or ought to make it Islamic is the commitment to Abrahamic God, the absolute infinite incomprehensible inscrutable God who reached out to us through scripture and prophets whereas for Aristotelians God is merely an explanation for an imminent universe",
      "in the West, a scientific establishment is an ideological establishment. But even there good scientists can tell the difference between empirical science and its ideological constructions which is to me the power of modern empirical science. As far as projects like anthropology and sociology many of these are of course colonial projects but I don't understand why one needs",
      "to go either through Aristotelian philosophy or why can one not engage with these through Qur'anic philosophy? In fact, I don't see another way of liberation than a properly scripturally grounded philosophy.",
      "I mean, we have a tendency that especially it's not about Ibn Taymiyyah. It's about how as you are an historian when it comes to Islamic intellectual history especially so how orthodoxy is formed in the context of Islamic history because we see now in certain trends in history and in the current trend that Ibn Taimiyyah is out of the picture of orthodox",
      "We only hear this like Ash'ari and Madhuri are the only orthodox Sunni Muslim. So can you just elaborate more on the historical factors defining this orthodoxy, and how history shapes it? Well so obviously in recent world...in the recent years after 9-11 and the connection that is CIA",
      "established between the Wahhabism and terrorism, which is not an untrue connection but it's overly simplified. It's because of that that the Wahabi type, Wahabi branch of Salafism that had been quite powerful in the middle of the 20th century as a result of petrodollars, this latter part of the",
      "Therefore, there is a desire even among the autocratic governments in the Middle East to distance themselves from Wahhabism and so on. And Ash'arism and Maturidism are simply thrown around as part of this neo-traditionalist project",
      "to recover a romantic view of tradition. In reality, anybody who knows this stuff knows that there is the Ash'aris and Maturidis tremendously disagreed on important fundamental questions in many ways. There are four schools of theology that continue, the Mu'tazila, the Ashaara, the Maturidis, and the traditionalists, the Atharīs. And if you look at... seriously sit down",
      "which they agreed, and the one in which they disagreed you'll find that they're pretty much all overlap. And they all disagree significantly. Now Ma'taridis tend to be a little closer to Ash'aris than Mu'tazila. In fact traditionalists tend to closer to Ma'ta'dis than Ash'ari's but they also overlap with Mu'tazzila. These are four schools that have been going on and various groups among them can use their power political circumstances",
      "circumstances to be then labeled in the media and in popular speech as orthodox. As far as I'm concerned, orthodoxy comes in Islam from one's commitment to one's ability to show that one is grounded in scripture. Everything else that comes after",
      "provisional. So there was a time when Wahhabism was strong, now it's not I don't think that all this in reality means is who gets to speak louder but anyone who does the actual history and actual analysis of these doctrines knows that they overlap profoundly and they disagree",
      "Ash'ari, Sunni. You know Sunni Islam as a matter of absolutely indisputable history was anti-Kalam like this is when Sunni islam is born in response to the rejection of Kalam that's the earliest doc earliest sources are completely clear on that in fourth century as both Sunni and Ash'ar founders or eponyms are born",
      "and there, if you will, kalam becomes sort of incorporated by Sunnis. So after that for a number of reasons part of which is political in the east it is the Nizam al-Mulk's support of Asharism and in the west it is Ibn Tumart's conquest of the Maghrib that leads to the establishment widespread establishment of Ashrarism. These are of course there's politics involved here but",
      "Now, for later us looking back at history how does one look at these what is orthodoxy? Well, one has to make up one's mind based on what one thinks and how one resolves the central contradictions or central issues hermeneutical issues. How will one see God's attributes right",
      "So just for layman, what does actually define Sunni Islam? What are the minimum requirements?",
      "who were agreeing on the Sunnah of, and by that meant Sunnah all of the Sahaba as opposed to one group. Not just the pro-Ali and pro-Ma'awiyah or pro-Uthman or the neutral ones. Ahl al-Sunnah was a word that we are going to receive the prophetic teachings from all of companions that were teaching in different centers in Iraq and Medina and Damascus and so on.",
      "who are often converts and urbanized Arabs, it is in those groups that are usually the students or the students of companions. These are the groups that begin to speak of themselves as Ahl al-Sunnah, that is those people who are neither Shia nor Khawarij, nor say one of the other extreme Uthmanis but rather they're an umbrella group.",
      "excommunicating other Muslims can come in. And then the term Al-Jama'ah is added, Ahl al-Sunnah wal Jamaa to emphasize the point that it's the mainstream united Muslim community, the umbrella Islam. So Ahl as Sunna terminology, Ahls sunnah wal jama'at had nothing do with particular theology, it had to do with accepting all of the Sahaba and the traditions of the Prophet coming through all of",
      "in his book, What is Islam? He's giving a different picture of what was the dominant Islamic trend in the Islamic civilization. As a historian, how do you see it? I think that What is Islm is... It has... It's a seriously deficient and wrong-headed book.",
      "that it doesn't do what it claims to do and that the claim that it wants to make are seriously, theoretically incoherent. And I don't think he does history of Ahl as-Sunnah wal Jama'ah or...I don't thing that is possible for a scholar writing as an outsider who is in fact an outsider very clear about not writing as a Muslim",
      "I don't think that for Muslims, that kind of scholarship has any normative authority apart from the kind of engagement a Muslim scholar can have with Shah the Gold's ear. Meaning that it is a mistake for people to try to... You see only when you fail to understand",
      "to understand the project of religious studies and anthropology that these are outside fields. They're not interested in the kinds of questions that you as a Muslim are asking about what the truth is. These are fundamentally incompatible questions. One is asking, look there is no such thing as truth. God has got nothing to do with this let us look at this",
      "as a human project and figure out what are these different people saying. And when you're in this cacophony of voices about what is Islam, that is what Shahab Ahmad is trying to portray. You can evaluate his project as this fundamentally secular project whether it was right or persuasive or not. I think it's not very persuasive but one must never do",
      "to say that a scholar like Shahab Ahmad is trying to speak about what Islam is to a believer. He is talking about what islam is to non-believer, that is somebody who has decided that truth and God have nothing to do with this project if they are involved that's not",
      "You may say, well I want to know from the objective outsider's perspective. And this could be true when you're looking at neutral perhaps historical facts but it isn't true because the fundamental contention about which strand has right to claim is Islam.",
      "So, for example, between the people who built a mosque, Masjid Dirar in Medina and the Prophet from this perspective there is no difference. These are simply two competing voices. The hypocrites of Medina AND the followers of the Prophet Muhammad himself are equal claimants of Islam. Of course, for a Muslim believer that is not the case. Unless you understand that I suggest",
      "Western scholarship to understand Islam.",
      "potential contribution in the modern world and do you see this kind of like gazillion vision of politics or his epistemic standpoint is a root block to the political emancipation and also the intellectual emancipations in the world for the Muslims?",
      "many other things, I think about many of the things. That was a book that in which my project was to see what critique Ibn Taymiyyah was making off this project, of classical formation and as far as that book, which again was published six years ago, as far is that book is concerned, the argument there was",
      "that Ibn Taymiyyah is a moment for me. He's not the central figure, but a moment and most people don't understand the appreciation of that language. What I meant by that is he captured a moment of self-critique in Islamic long Islamic history. But I also write in the same book very clearly that Ibin Taymiyya would not be possible if you did not have Razi and Ghazali.",
      "that then inspires him to his project. And you can't understand Ibn Taymiyyah, at least his intellectual project fully until you understand the dialogue that's going on since earlier on not only early thinkers and the Salaf but also Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali and especially Razi.",
      "but also his project begins with where Razi seems to have reached a dead end. At least that's how Ibn Taymiyyah sees his project, that Razi, a brilliant mind brings out certain aporia, certain difficulties of kalam where then Ibn Tamiyyah begins. But my interest is primarily in showing that certain if you will the",
      "The ethical volunteerism and subjectivism of Ash'arism had a negative impact on Islamic political imagination. And the particular reconciliation of reason and revelation in Ash'rism had an negative impact aspects of Islamic political imaginations. But, of course, Ash'irism is much bigger than these",
      "these commitments. In other words, most Ash'ari scholars don't really repeat or base their doctrines or teachings or life or religion on these things. They happen to be things that a few great minds concern themselves with but once they become widespread",
      "They have a complex interaction with social reality. So I think that Ibn Taymiyyah sees the Mongol period and, if you will, the divisions before the Mongol Period and the Crusades as a result of certain intellectual forces",
      "intellectual formations, let's say. The excessive taqlid for example leads Muslim scholars to be concerned more with their particular communal, particular parochial benefit or interest than the interest of the ummah right? So Ibn Taymiyyah is interested in seeing that and reopening that now of course in reality what happens is that Ibn Tamiyyah followers make turn him into another madhhab",
      "Ibn Taymiyyah is often described as the father figure of Salafism. How do you see this relationship between Ibn Taimiyyah and Salafis? What is the actual nature of it?",
      "is in part a reaction to the colonial onslaught and decline, and the desire to reform traditions so that we can respond to colonial challenge. And particularly the intellectual challenge of modernity. And Ibn Taymiyyah's particular recovery of early tradition",
      "and political energy of the early Islam, but also his rejection of excessive amount of imminent spiritualism that becomes superstition. He rejected those things and those things for early Salafi reformers were very attractive. They didn't know or read or fully comprehend Ibn Taymiyyah's entire project",
      "and used Ibn Taymiyyah, talking about Muhammad Abdul Rashid Ridha. And many others before them actually who are more conservative scholars in Syria and India and Yemen elsewhere. And before them even whenever there is a if you will sense of sort of intellectual decline",
      "of Ibn Arabi kind in the Ottoman Empire, you find Ibn Taymiyyah emerging. Qadi Zadili movement for example inspired either by Ibn Temiyyah but looks very much like a Salafi movement and so I see if you begin...if you look at Salafism not as a particular movement in the 20th century but as an impulse within Islam that reacts to excessive construction",
      "construction of clerical authority that becomes self-referential. Salafi Islam then is an instance of a reformist impulse, scripturalist impulse in Islam and that scripturalists impulse I find to be inherent to Islam distinctive to Islam it's not something that you can compare to Protestant Christianity because Protestantism",
      "Whereas in Islam, Islam begins with critique of old scriptures by rejecting the clerical authority criticizing the political authority of Jews and Christians. And then emphasizing that here go back to God's words right so in other words the Quranic message begins with a critique of inherited ancestral",
      "by calling to go to scripture. So there is nothing like that in either Judaism or Christianity. Go ahead. Just a question, I mean some people compare the first Christian because are not that strongly anti-modern, so like the when it comes to economics and science and other things. How do you respond? Yes, so I think that's an interesting point you make but I don't think",
      "So I don't think that, you know, so early quote-unquote Salafis like Muhammad Abdul Rashid Rida are much more open to modernity. Whereas later Salafi's late 20th century Salafies influenced by Wahhabism are extremely anti-modernity. I don t think that pro or anti-Modernity is an inherent element of Salafism in fact so and that s true of Asharism or any other Shi'ism",
      "Shiism or Sunnism, I don't think that you can essentialize them according to their response to modernity. Right? I think that's a mistake. But what I think is sort of an internal dynamic in Salafism is there are two kinds of ways in which tradition can be received. Just to simplify a very complex picture.",
      "I call, you could have a solid line tradition, traditionalism which sees that every preceding generation receives tradition completely and totally and perfectly. And therefore, every generation must receive its inheritance with total fidelity. And it has no right to or capacity of going back to any other standard point",
      "That is, if you will, what I call accretist traditionalism. Traditionism that is based on accretion of authority and body of knowledge from generation to generation. Whereas what I called originalist traditionalists is one which gives itself the authority, has this optimistic move where it says yes we're going to receive tradition but",
      "which we can access on our own. Now, of course there is this optimistic move here that it is possible for us to access scripture and judge a created tradition, the tradition that has been received. Salafis don't reject that tradition. Salahis in fact are the traditionalists",
      "and the continuity of that tradition in hadith. What they reject is only certain aspects of tradition, later accretions, kalam, even aspects of other tasawwuf and so on. But that's, of course, a radical simplification. But what's remarkable here is that once you give yourself the optimistic ability to judge the tradition that has been received,",
      "received, then you can either go and say well I see some problems in the inherited tradition. I'm going to go back to the original Salaf so that would be an ultra conservative move or you could say well i see some problem in the accreted tradition. i'm going use a scripture to sort of destabilize its authority and replace some of that with adaptations according",
      "modern, my contemporary needs. So that would go well with the reformist model or even modernist model and both of them are Salafi in what's in one sense that they are able to originalists in a sense that They are able see past the accreted tradition The accumulated tradition but whether they go back in the past",
      "the past or they move to contemporary adaptationism, that leads to two different kinds of movements. Now I argue that apart from these simplistic oppositions all Muslims are Salafi in a sense today. In reality no serious scholars today take any one accreted local madhab tradition with",
      "without giving themselves this optimistic right to critique and evaluate. We do not have the strict maintenance of who the mujtahid or muqallad is between, in Hanafi Madhab or Maliki Madhab. We rather speak of authorities from different eras according to their arguments",
      "their arguments rather than according to how they were ranked in the past. So strictly speaking, most scholars today have accepted basic premises of Salafism.",
      "I'm not sure what they have done that would qualify as brilliant.",
      "is brilliant, but I think that they are learned scholars. And I think... They're in fact very different. This is just a laundry list because they would probably disagree on many things. But I think",
      "methodology, none of them are greatly coherent but rather motivated by particular circumstances which is why you can't say well I'm using the methodology of Sheikh Bulti. They didn't produce such methodology what Sheikh Bin Bayya is doing is explicable more",
      "than by any kind of methodological commitment to anything. So for example, he has rejected the Ijma on the caliphate which again would... when progressives do the same thing these people are up in arms but when they need for their political needs to reject the IJMA they're happy to do that",
      "that. So, that doesn't to me count as credible scholarship you find people like that in the last century by the dozen I mean pretty much all scholars that are serving this or that state have done precisely that. I think the great scholars are those who maintain a consistent methodology but also show",
      "And you mentioned some of the names.",
      "when I say he's much the head yet, he's somebody who is willing to look at that tradition and say well that tradition fell short in this or that element respect so to me that kind of scholar is really... And a scholar like that can't easily box them because they are doing their thinking that is really grounded in scripture",
      "How do you see the legacy of Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi in this?",
      "a remarkably learned scholar in our time, but in terms of his depth of consistent scholarship with nitty-gritty of scholarship I don't think that he has produced enough for other scholars. He's produced a lot for the activist class.",
      "And just something related to it, not even in the Western academic area but also among Muslims.",
      "historical sense that I mean there has been a decline of Islam certain period of time and certainly like scholars of Jamal bin al-Ghani, Abdul and Zuhidul Rida they came up and Islamic revivalism happened recently I came across with the works of Khaled Al Ruwayhib from Harvard yeah so he's debunking this kind",
      "doesn't respond to, or doesn't even engage with the Muslim scholarship on the subject. So I don't think that what he's saying is that the scholarship on scholasticism which is this infinite categorization of kalam debates and casuistic kalam based in the debate",
      "debates of the medieval period which themselves were based on reconciling an Aristotelian notion of nature and Abrahamic notion of Nature those debates continue with rigor even in during the 17th and 18th century and therefore there was no decline, which I think is a non sequitur. When Muslims say that",
      "So what is the defining factor in that case? Of revival and symptoms of decline.",
      "to tawheed in a very lived sense, from activism. People have turned away from... I mean if you look at medieval life and you find that this life is filled with a kind of miracle-mongering saints it's a very sort of the kind of spirituality there",
      "is very close to what the Prophet ﷺ came to repudiate in Mecca. And so when Muslims are, that's one, another is Muslims are divided and Muslims are dividing and fighting each other and in fact doing terrible things to each other. And not only that but there isn't a strong enough critique or here an ethical Islamic critique that we should do otherwise. When that is happening you realize",
      "that there is a decline. When Muslims are butchering each other in the name of questionable local, parochial tribal ethnic identities you say there's a decline, there's problem That's how Muslims talk What's the problem with this anti-Orientalist Orientalist debate is",
      "It sees itself, it wants to insert itself in a debate that it doesn't understand. Muslims are not concerned. When Muslims say there is a decline they're not copying orientalist thesis. It's a new sort of trend that has begun in the anti-orientalist scholarship. There are when Muslims are divided into this nation state various nation states and before",
      "States and before that when Muslims are incapable of I mean if you just look realistically at in the 19th century 18th century what books are available to most local scholars in different parts of the Muslim world you realize that they're terribly undereducated. That is what decline means, that they don't know what other Muslims wrote throughout history,",
      "there are networks of revivalists, right? And you have to look at their discourse and their argument with their larger societies to figure out what their objection is. Of course one has to be clear that there are a number of revivalist reformist trends among Sufis as well as non-Sufis in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries",
      "something is wrong. Now as a historian you might say, well it's always going on isn't it? Everybody, you know, something is always wrong so we shouldn't be talking about decline but they missed the point that this is how Muslims talk based on hadith. Muslims believe that distance from the Prophet ﷺ right leads to this increasing decline in end times",
      "This is not an Orientalist conspiracy. These are a hadith, this is Quran and what kind of subjectivity it produces that's what interesting to Muslims that makes us more and more aware of and anxious about our loss and so we respond to that sense that oh these are end times because look at the spread of bloodshed right? And secular outside",
      "outside historians who don't understand Islam, do not understand Islamic scripture, do no t understand the logic of internal discourse. They talk about whether there was a decline or not declined using factors and parameters that are irrelevant to us. Your article also indicates that you still believe that there is not enough work regarding the Islamic intellectual tradition. You wrote this article, Do Islamists have Intellectual Deficit?",
      "at the Brookings Institution. The way I have read it, your argument is that the reformist Islamic tradition is still not a dense or discursive tradition like other traditionalists or many of the pre-modern Islamic intellectual traditions. But don't you think that having a dense and discursively tradition takes 100 to 200 years?",
      "So, reformist Islamic tradition is on the way to that kind of becoming a discursive tradition. Is it the right time to conclude that there's a deficit?",
      "and in writing critically. I think however that reformist tradition has other problems, not merely its infancy. It's not infant, it has had more over a hundred years but at least certain Islamic trends",
      "the Islamic movement model which certainly many advantages and its response to a certain reality, rise of certain middle class. And I understand that but there is also certain anti-intellectualism so in other words there is no investment in serious thinking of and use of the existing traditions.",
      "or is only infant, but because of the way it has become anti-intellectual, it has became infantile. So I think that throughout Islamic history, Islamic history has never been stagnant. The tradition has never without its folks in the margins who are challenging it, who are questioning it, reviving it. Ghazali, who now stands for Islamic tradition and",
      "and accretion. In fact, he was a major critic of the existing status quo. And this has always been happening. So I argue that this reformist tradition has deprived itself of this extremely rich tradition by leaving scholarship in the hands",
      "in the hands of sort of establishment institutional scholars and failing to even when reformists establish institutions their scholarship is very result oriented not interested in knowledge as an exciting and interesting thing but rather too quickly jumping",
      "So it tends to turn off serious scholars. And I think that dilemma has yet to be resolved.",
      "that the leftist discourse is much more powerful and also like when some of the Muslim scholars they're using their methodologies and they have been successfully able to critique national strength and other stuff. But why is that? Why are the ulama not able to go outside of the boundary of the nation state,",
      "I mean, I think that understanding modernity and secularism are extremely important.",
      "extremely important projects, but that requires a long exposure to modernity. And I don't think leftist critique is sort of external to modernities. It's part of modernity so it's sort of self-critique of modernities and secularism. Whenever you're trying to understand a phenomenon",
      "and that is why I think you read...I don't think that leftist critique of modernity has to be given this unique position as somehow the distinguished ally of Islam. I think that you have to try to understand capitalism, anti-capitalism, socialism, anti socialisms these critiques as they're evolving but unless you develop a deep scriptural sense",
      "of the scriptural vision of life, which is what I argue for. You will always simply be a dry leaf in the air between this and that tradition because leftist tradition itself can be deeply problematic. And so I think that yes one we need to exploit",
      "understand tradition better when we study internal conflicts between any traditions and within any tradition. Yet at the same time there is a need to engage with these traditions from the perspective of Islamic vision, and in that process you will make allies and you will enlighten critiques of modernity but also aspects",
      "but also aspects of modernity. I don't think that, I mean, modernity is not a singular thing it is a set of material and also intellectual social conditions that are constantly in flux so one should not become obsessed with being modern but one should now have become obsessed to be anti-modern one should I think if you're Muslim you should stick to that",
      "So is there a kind of lackings of methodological sophistication among the Muslim scholars that they are going back again and again to other traditions?",
      "impoverished poverty, right? Impoverished state of the Muslim states, Muslim countries, Muslim institutions. Look, intellectual production is a luxury. People who have filled stomachs and secure lives and whose jobs can be secured engage in serious long-term inquiries.",
      "And the vast majority of Muslim countries simply do not provide that. They don't provide you basics, so only Muslims who travel to the West often have that kind of luxury. Of course there are traditional institutions which I think would naturally engage with aspects of modernity if their tyrannical governments would not shoot them down",
      "down the minute they spoke something that was relevant and challenging so therefore they have to remain within their limits for very clear existential political limits",
      "the other side is that Mawlana Maududi had all this authority on Islamic law and other stuff. What is your historical reading on it regarding Mawluna Mauduidi, and how do you see his legacy now?",
      "were not doing what he would like them to do, which is to be engaged in political communal Islamic project. Now... He was well trained enough that he wrote a you know, wrote tafsir and opinions but he never claimed to be an alim partly maybe for political reasons, partly because he did not see himself as primarily a jurist so I don't think the lack of knowledge",
      "I mean most people who call themselves ulama today are you know these are like 25 year old people who have like a seven-year degree from one of these institutions. I mean, these are kids they don't have knowledge equivalent to a good undergraduate institution right but they're happy to call themselves alims but Maududi after his decades of learning and writing",
      "and teaching, he was not an alim. So obviously this is just internal polemics. Of course their challenges with Mawdudi were partly because he was a lonely genius in the following sense. Good scholarship is produced, sophisticated scholarship is introduced in the context of community of scholars who will review critique your scholarship. And in the way that he constructs his challenges, that's not there.",
      "not there. So he becomes too decisive, if you will, to finalistic on issues that are open. He's trained as a Hanafi jurist, not as a top jurist but he is good enough by the standards of modern jurists.",
      "in his readings of the Qur'an. Even there he has a very sort of active agenda, but nonetheless it is a very insightful reading of the Quran. There are sometimes some issues when I'm reading...I read like 20 different tafsir books. I come to Madhudi and there is an issue that would make you know where he would have an insightful point so to me these kind of parochial internal fights among scholars or this sect they're not interesting",
      "But I think he did have a limitation, which is that he tends to be too simplistic and monolithic. Partly because he's not being challenged or maybe he is being challenged but he's acknowledging the challenges by other scholars, which I think was a flaw.",
      "And we don't see any scholars coming after him.",
      "And again, I'm no expert on Pakistan. This is my feeling. Talking to Pakistani scholars or the few that I know, they would say we have nobody to talk to here in Karachi in such a large city where you would expect there is a lively intellectual culture. There isn't. So it may be – it's not true. I'm simply reporting what I've heard of people from there.",
      "there aren't serious scholars or there isn't a concentration of scholars in Pakistan who are interested in asking tough questions. There are, by the way, lots of ideologues in Pakistan, who think that they have figured everything out and in a sense that may be something that Mawdudi, but his sort of attitude had perhaps",
      "But there were scholars like Amin Ahsan Islahi, Awal Hassan Nadvi, Hamad Zain Farahi. But it didn't go well with Mawdudi.",
      "these scholars, it's just that they didn't produce many heirs. Farahi is an original scholar of the Qur'an and had we had institutional and cultural capacity there should have been a school of Qur'anic tafsir",
      "Just a couple of questions before we wrap up. We want to hear something about your personal experience in the Western academia when it comes to Islamic studies and what is the current state of affairs, and what's the future?",
      "I think that over the last 30 to 40 years, Western scholarship, literally dozens and dozens of major Western institutions have produced hundreds of scholars that have produced",
      "And I think that's a rare moment in history when we have so much knowledge available. Anti-Orientalist scholarship has had some effect, in the sense that many of these studies are able to go past simplistic Orientalism and say very insightful things even though they're often coming from maybe theoretical",
      "maybe theoretically, even if they have a theoretically questionable premise, they provide you enough data and in their arguments there are grounded enough that these thousands and thousands of studies have changed the field",
      "will either use them or they will go to waste. It'll be a terrible waste. I think that there is a need for Muslims, Muslims to get past this excessive Orientalism and anti-Orientalism thing, be grounded in Scripture and take these studies and benefit from them, from their theoretical rigor,",
      "that. I think this is not, we shouldn't call it Western Islam or Western scholarship. This is scholarship and that's why I think we should use these old dichotomies of East and West when it comes to good scholarship they are meaningless. I",
      "and they are missing out, even though they themselves often draw on this scholarship. So I think that... However, what's crucial is that one has to be scripturally grounded. As opposed to Islamic studies in the West, when we look in the Muslim world, we see that religious authorities actually here, like the great shayyukhs or the faqih. So what role scholars of Islamic studies",
      "or in the Muslim world. And that context, I mean, in what sense is the Muslim World lagging behind when it comes to some studies?",
      "There are great scholars coming out of the Western Islamic Studies program like Fuz Rahman, Khaled Abul-Fadl, Sayyid As-Sannaf, Tariq Ramadan and many others. What is their legacy now? Will there be new scholars coming in this discipline?",
      "these great scholars of Islam, right? All these were sort of they belong in particular Western traditions. None of them in my view come even close to somebody like Tahir ibn Ashur and I think that you have to understand something about Western scholarship which is that the Western scholarship is a corporate enterprise it shines not because it produces greater great scholars individuals",
      "It happens but it's rare. It shines because it works in a way that number of scholarships are brought together by experts working in narrow fields and which means that scholars who were working in those fields, one may be an atheist or maybe non-Muslim, nonbeliever who works on one particular issue which is I don't know in the 1390s what were these",
      "were this Sufi group doing in eastern Damascus. That's what I am expert on, I don't know anything about Salah, I dont' know anything giving a sermon, I do not know how to help a confused person, I didn't know about anything about the Seerah or the Quran, I know one thing and if you are very good at that methodologically educated enough",
      "and you'll get tenure. And then, you will be looked upon by Muslims locally but also internationally as an authority on Islam when in fact you're an authority of the left ear of the Qadi in Damascus in 2001. That's all you know. You have to understand this is how Western scholarship works. Just because somebody is a scholar of Islamic studies or so on in the West doesn't mean that they are...",
      "So I promise, I will finish. Just last two simple questions.",
      "The first one is about what are some of the future projects you're working on now? I remember last year, you talked to me about the survey of Islamic history and a book on Khawarij. Can you just tell in brief?",
      "and ISIS where, and I argue that such movements are in fact ever present there. They're omnipresent in Islamic history and they play an important role but Muslims have not, Muslim scholars haven't theorized enough, haven't paid you know of course exceptions where this happens even Khaldun is an important one",
      "and violence, politics are important in creating the spaces in which Islamic law is practiced and Islamic life is lived. And so we have to take that seriously and theorize it, how to ethically morally Islamically respond to cases like that. That's one project, both historical and theoretical projects you could say sort of history and philosophy together.",
      "The survey of Islamic history is a, in fact, it's a, In terms of its concerns, It's an overlapping project but it's more sort of a survey that hopes to... Excuse me. So my hope is that I'll write a survey",
      "a survey that will hopefully for Muslims, for thinking critical Muslims replace works like Ira Lapidus or Marshall Hodson or Bernard Lewis even though they're very different in their approaches which is that you know I'm interested in sort of historical rigor but at the same time",
      "what are the Islamic forces that are at play in various sort of almost competing, competing forces, competing trends in Islam. And so I'm interested in history of Islamic action. In other words it's a history of... It's a survey of Islamic history but not a story of kings or conquests those things are there",
      "I want to bring not only scholars, which is often done but also women and generals and administrators and viziers like Nizam al-Mulk who played such an important role. Basically folks who formed a plate formative influence in Islam in shaping Islam and how one could look at",
      "The different, the variety of ways in which they were inspired by Islam. I mean I have a couple other books in the back burner but these are the main projects. Of course Madarij, the translation of Madaraj is also ongoing.",
      "going to like western studies what are the i mean main suggestions you want to give to that to the young students or who wants to become a scholar a proper muslim scholar well i think at this point there is no one single perfect solution so you have to engage in this your scholarship has to reflect the attempt to engage",
      "and dialectic between the Western corporate scholarship, which is good at research, and rigor in asking questions. And Islamic scholarship, Which prepares you to embody and feel and sense and think Islamically with the Quranic Islamic vision.",
      "that you may start in one and go to the other, and there is no one perfect way of doing it. But I think if you are Muslim, you should master that scriptural scholarship, scriptural vision which does not mean that you memorize everything but",
      "that you should have direct connection with both scripture and the local Muslim communities of which you are a part. And, you should be able to understand, speak to, listen to those poor Muslims who come pray Fajr at the masjid or the women that you talk to if you're a woman. The other thing is I think",
      "Women scholars are direly needed. Women Muslim scholars in Islamic scriptural, especially in scriptural Islam, centrally Islamic fields I think there is a great dire need for that. There's an important scholar Dr Akram Nedvi who was writing about women scholars and Islam hadithat and one of the things he says that I find quite touching",
      "important enough that their biographies are contained, or written down in the Tabakat literature. Every century of Islam until about the 10th century and then there is a serious decline that the Tabakat literature, mention of women scholars goes from about 100 every century to a few and then completely disappears. And I think that decline of women's scholarship represents to me as the state of Muslim scholarship.",
      "Thank you Dr. Anzum for your precious time. You are welcome."
    ]
  },
  {
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    "text": [
      "Is traditionalism necessarily fatalist, historically speaking? And I will show that that's not the case and I'll explain why. But I think the question is very important as something to keep in mind and that's something that because if you don't... If you keep it in the back of your mind, you accept it and then you accept its consequences that, in my view go against",
      "against almost certain imperative that we have. But I do want to say there is a difference between... when they say there's perfection, and they say divine contact with humanity and a certain kind of perfection the question is what kind of",
      "How do you separate that from... Now, Ira Lapidus is a downright secular historian who is almost fated to say that Islam did nothing new. It's just like if you're a social historian and then you're either an Orientalist who is motivated by sort of a traditional Christian Orientalists perspective that Islam was evil or you're motivated",
      "like Edward Said perspective, which is that Islam and the West are one in the same thing. Islam is really nothing. So don't blame it because it doesn't really exist. It's just like people are people. So that's the second perspective where Islam equals nothing. It doesn't exist as a socio-political structure. It does not do anything new. So when I make this statement, I am making this statement about a different realm.",
      "I'm making this statement about perfection in what Muslims seek, which is perfection of our inner connection to God. And the two domains are not disconnected for Muslims, meaning our socio-political success, longevity, stability, prosperity",
      "our spiritual success, right? Allah says in the Quran for example to the people of Nuh. Nuh says to people that famous ayah, everybody know? Why do you not turn to Allah? وَقَدْ خَلَقَّكُمْ أَطْوَارًا That Allah has created you and then He says if you do so what happens?",
      "is raining and the earth will grow in other words worldly prosperity if you ask for forgiveness so there is in the past there is a stronger connection in these verses between spiritual or religious commitment to God and worldly prosperity but this is not a social causation because Allah has also",
      "threads that we must put together, right? Because causality means one thing always leads to another. So you would say if you're pious, you'll always be successful whereas Allah says in the Quran that whenever believers believe when they say they are done what happens to them? They are tested. Tested with difficulty.",
      "وَنَقْسٍ مِّنَ الْأَمْوَالِ وَالْأُنفُسِ وَّالثَّمَرَاتِ وُشِّرِ الصَّابِدِينَ It is a different causality here. So spiritual causality is different from what we may call civilizational causality or sociopolitical causality. They're connected, but they're connected in ways that are not one directly related to the other. So in the religious sense is when we say that can never be like the Prophet ﷺ.",
      "Prophet, was it the most prosperous society in the world? No. Was there zero crime? No, was there never any divorce? No So in what indicator would you say according to what social indicator would You say that the prophet's society was perfect In a different matrix So going then to",
      "The question of does traditionalism require us to be fatalist? No, but it requires us to humble in this domain. That's all. Meaning that when you see poverty, when you suffering, you don't say I know dude you're really poor but the prophet's time was perfect,",
      "suffering is pretty common and God deal with it, right? So we don't argue like that. The same is true—we can't argue if you take that argument there is no reason why we should not reflect on how to... We cannot eliminate poverty as a metaphysical sense. You can't be a Marxist and say",
      "of this idea that there was perfection because what that idea requires is that human beings, regardless of its atheism, what it says is that the human motivation will fundamentally change if we have a better relationship with our production and everybody will be happy hunky-dory. Everybody will just love to make",
      "need for government, no need for poverty. Elimination of poverty is different from sadaqah, justice. Allah has created us differently that's not going to end. That kind of society is called utopian society. Utopia is not what we are talking about. Now often when people accuse political Islam",
      "being utopian. These people, in my view, are just sectarian polemicists because political Islam with the exception of a few Khawarij type people who abandon society majority of reformists have never said that they are very clear about what they want they want to work within the parameters of the modern inventions, modern society in order to improve. They may be wrong but what they're not is just simplification",
      "is just simplistic utilitarians. So I am very much against any group trashing others among Muslims because there is good and there is argument that's really everywhere you find an element of the Sunnah, an element off the Quranic message that different people are holding on to. So my point is that it's that utopianism however that often more secular Muslims are likely to fall into",
      "to fall into, which is that it's possible to eliminate poverty by coming up with a brilliant system. Which is different from saying we have a tyrant and we have to find ways to better hold ourselves accountable. And the fatalist argument that look we have Bashar and Bashar anybody you know this guy",
      "you know what, he belongs to this tiny minority that the worst security state in the world and there is nothing we can do about it because God has put us in this situation. Well, you could argue that same about Salah like, you know, it's pretty hard God has",
      "Why should I, you know. So this kind of argument does not hold up. In other words fatalism is in Fatalism goes against the fundamentals of Islamic law which says You do, you undertake action in order to pray, in order be just, in ordo do al-amr bil ma'ruf wa naiyarul munkar requires initiative even more so the general commandment to do good",
      "to do good, which is Allah says, إِنَّ اللَّهَ يَأْمُرُ بِالْعَدْلِ وَالإِحْسَانِ. عَلْعْدَلٍ إِحسَاً. Allah commands you to do justice and to do favor, to act beautifully. This is not connected to any particular commandment, which means it's your job to find where justice",
      "If racism is unjust, then removing it is justice. And that is part of this verse. Whereas you may have an ayah that's talking about making tayammum in certain situations and giving you a certain legal conveniences. Now there is this element of... There are two kinds of ahkam, two kinds",
      "Particular rulings and general rulings. Particular ruling, khas is the foundation if you will, the structure, stable structure of Islamic life, Islamic law but then there are general commandments and if you reduce Islam to the literal following of just those commandments what you don't...",
      "you have to turn away from the general commandments which says establish justice and do good. And when are we going to do that if all justice is already in following the particular commandment? So this notion that we are simply supposed",
      "whatever we can and not try to change our situation because that goes against tawakkul, that goes again trust in God. That fatalism, in my view is never justified. Yeah?",
      "activism how common has that been among Muslims themselves throughout history because you know you find in history",
      "little to nothing about it, it seems. It seems. And that's what we're going to see why that's not the case but that's a very good question. It's one of the themes that I think is gonna come up again and again. That Islamic history... So you take any region and you look at",
      "North Africa, for example. Sort of a little bit far away from the center. History of North Africa. Very traditional Maliki-Ash'ari region is punctuated by what? There are al-Muravids, al- Murabitun an activist militant conquest movement. Al-Mubahidun, al Mohads after that who are practically the same as the Wahabis. Their doctrine their practice",
      "is exactly the same as the Muhammadans, except that they are Ash'ari or super-Ash'ari rather than super Ahl al-Hadith. But other than that they're the same and look at recent history, the Sunni order, the Sufi orders, the Usman Danfodio order Islamic history is punctuated by every century by these major activist movements that say enough is enough. The",
      "in the ninety years of Umayyad period. So, the idea of quietism is invented only relatively late and we'll talk about why it becomes an attractive ideal."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Book Signing _ Launch w_Dr_ Ovamir Anjum _10-22-22_YEWkFblwGNY&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750672358.opus",
    "text": [
      "Bismillah, Alhamdulillah, Wasallatu wasalamu ala Rasulullah wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa min wa alam We begin as always with the name of Allah Most Merciful, Most Kind. We ask Him to send His peace and blessings upon our noble Master and Messenger Muhammad sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam And upon his honorable family and blessed companions may God be pleased with all of them we are having tonight tonight's very special beautiful event",
      "We have the internationally acclaimed scholar who lives amongst us, Dr. Omer Enjam. May Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala protect and preserve him. And he recently wrote or translated one of the most famous books in the science of Tal Salwuf or Sufism.",
      "you can see it for those who are online, you could see it on the table and masha'Allah I mean I read through a lot of it. The translation very very fine details it's not a surprise that it won an international translation award masha Allah so we're not just honored by the content that we're going to be discussing today which is of prime importance but",
      "Dr. Obramir Edjum and inshallah we'll be doing today's talk",
      "need any introduction and then somebody goes ahead and spends half an hour introducing this video but our guest upon it does need, he does not need recognition he already has but I think a brief introduction will be in order. As all of you know Dr. Omir Anjam holds the Imam Khattab",
      "Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Toledo. Just bear with me for a moment to see how this chair of Islamic studies came into about. About 15, no more than 20 years ago 25 years ago one Muslim and two Christian professors",
      "professors at the University thought that there should be a chair of Islamic studies. They had already been a Chair of Catholic Studies at the university and Dr. Sameer Abu-Absi and Dr Najam and Dr Sajid Ibrahim they spearheaded the effort",
      "effort and as they say the cliche is the rest is history that this community raised funds to sponsor that chairman that chair at the university so dr anjum it's probably the third among about cheer am i right",
      "I think it's the second, but that might be wrong. There was an interim. Yeah there was an interm in between the first and when you came. He over the past decade has proven himself as Dr Imam Deeb said so eloquently",
      "has made a name and position among the religious academics in this country and abroad. And again, I would echo what Imam Deeb said that it's fortunate for us of the community of Toledo, Islamic community of",
      "of Toledo in particular because this was the community which spearheaded effort to create this gym. His activities have been varied and broad. He, his work focuses on nexus of theology ethics politics and law and Islam with comparative interest in Western thought.",
      "His work is essentially interdisciplinary, drawing in the fields of classical Islamic studies, political philosophy and cultural anthropology. He obtained his doctorate in Islamic intellectual history at the Department of History University of Wisconsin at Madison.",
      "masters in computer science and bachelors in nuclear engineering and physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, most people. The man is a computer biz he's an engineer and some other communities somebody would say that this is absolutely",
      "absolutely unbelievable but i'd like to go back to the first five six seven hundred years of islamic history the word which was used for the scholars was hakim it's a very expensive that e x p e n e xp am",
      "means the one who has the knowledge. Unfortunately we have made that word reduce to somebody who looks or feels the person and gives prescription, Hakeem but Hakee in the real sense is a person who has knowledge and keeping the background of Dr Anjam",
      "in the true tradition of Islamic culture and history. There is an interesting caveat in his Bible, and that is that before higher education, his Islamic training began at home while growing up in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia,",
      "We do not, in this current atmosphere and climate we do not think that the women have too much of a role in being scholars but Dr. Anjum had shared this with me previously and that is that the greatest impact on him when he was growing up",
      "his grandmother your father's mother daddy yeah that she was a scholar in her own right and she influenced a woman influenced him to go where he children on the path he stole with his mother remarkable uh woman and indeed she was then if i recall",
      "I recall Dr. Anjumshi is the one who gave you your first name? That is correct. Right? Yes sir, yes. And he continued his studies in Shek with South Asian Hanafi and Ahl al-Hadith scholars and Asulal Sheik and Qur'an of the Quran with scholars from Egypt Al-Azhar and Syria",
      "He is the author of Park and community in Islamic Park. This was published by Cambridge University in 2012. His current projects include a survey of Islamic history and a monograph on Islamic. As Imamuddin mentioned,",
      "is the author more recently of Adana Jal al-Kin, Ranks of Divine Seekers which was published in April 2020 two years ago by Emna Kiyam one of the greatest Islamic spiritual classics which is the largest single author English compilation of an Arabic text. You can see the voluminous work that Dr. Iyengar has put",
      "I want to congratulate him for this fantastic treat that he has accomplished and I will turn it over to Imam B.",
      "Once again, we're here to discuss one of the most beautiful works in Islamic tradition called Madad-e-Jusayriqin which is a work of spirituality, Islamic spirituality. And we're discussing it with Dr. Omar Anjum inshaAllah We are going to very quickly some housekeeping.",
      "and then we'll open the floor for any questions that you may have. We might do that even sooner, if you have burning questions, inshallah. I want this to be an organic session. With that, inshaAllah, we'll get right into it. Dr. Anjum, once again, thank you so much for joining us. Very honored to have you here. Our first question is about your story with this book. Why this book in particular? This is a huge project. A lot of people,",
      "There's only two volumes. It's not done, right? There are still two more volumes if I'm not mistaken So this is probably arguably going to be your biggest you know Potentially your biggest academic project why was it so important to you and what is the story with this book? Thank you very much first of all for a very generous introduction by both of you very kind",
      "yourself than about me and when somebody's introducing me in the glorious terms that you all did i'm thinking of what imam ahmed who was persecuted for his faith uh and one of it was the greatest scholar of hadith known in but that third century uh third hijri century ninth century",
      "Islamic common hero. And when he underwent this mihna, this inquisition and came out of it victorious the caliph himself converted to his position after quartering him for 20 years. And people from all over the empire would come to Baghdad Christians and Jews would come look at him and they would say that you remind us of Musa or Isa. And",
      "praise him he would say you cannot fool a man who knows his worth and so that's what i have to say not because there is any comparison between me and him but it's one sentiment that I share with them the story of this book um is that",
      "software designer for a while in the silicon valley but i had started my islamic studies earlier advanced studies at the university of chicago and was doing my masters there and",
      "together and wanted to study Islamic classics, and they wanted to pick something that brought together Tazkiyah which is purification sciences. And a broad swathe of Islamic sciences from all different schools was also available in English because half of them spoke Arabic,",
      "We couldn't come to an agreement on any one book that was worthy of all of this. So we started reading from Ibn al-Qayyim or Ibn Al-Qa'im al-Dawziya, his book Madadir Salikin which I'll talk about a little bit and this book I began to translate for those who didn't know Arabic",
      "Arabic from week to week and that's how it started 20 years ago or 22 years ago. And so after a while when I continued with my graduate studies, there was one thing that I did for myself once I started translating the book. I realized that this was such a great gem. It is one of the most well published books. I don't know if people actually read it but it's extremely",
      "in the Arab literary market today. In every country, Beirut, Egypt, Serbia you find dozens of editions of the book but when I talk to my Arab friends about the book they say that it's a very difficult book for them to understand and often many of them actually are using this translation to understand",
      "that it uses vocabulary from at least three different fields. In advanced vocabulary, for example, of course the book is primarily concerned with the discipline of the sawwulf and peskiyah which we'll talk about but also concerned with fiqh, jurisprudence on practical matters and aqidah or usl al-din or qalam so three different sciences are intertwined in",
      "in addition to Tafsir, which is exegesis of the Quran and then Nakhleed al-Hadeen as well. So you could say five different disciplines are intertwined and it is difficult for people to bring those together. Now the basic project of the book I will say this and then I will let him lead the discussion The basic project",
      "in the Quran especially in Surah Al-Fatiha and especially in the one verse And the thesis of the book is that the signs of the sawwuf or at least the heart of the signs is not foreign to Islam it is there in not only in the Qur'an, but also in the surat",
      "which is the middle ayah of surat al-Fatiha, the third ayah, which says, O Allah, You alone we worship. So worship or ibadah is one of the central themes and you alone be seen for help, which is isti'ana. And ibadh and isti'stiana",
      "the same coin which is the relationship between the human being and the lord almighty so ibadah is what a servant when you look at it from the side of the human beings you are giving your ibadat to allah and allah in return provides his help in everything that we do including course in the very thing the fact that we exist and breathe",
      "and that we have faith, so on. So Ibadah Isti'ana in other words this is a book about relationship or Taalluk ma Allah azawajal, the relationship with Allah SWT",
      "The book is in fact a commentary on an earlier book.",
      "original book is written by a great Sufi from Afghanistan, from Herat who was an older contemporary of Imam al-Ghazali and he had written a small book called which literally means stations of those",
      "of the travelers stations of travelers effectively say or travel or journey was a metaphor that the ulama of suluq ulama used to describe the journey to allah so basically this was an invention you could say of the soul of the science of tasawwuf that they took",
      "into a curriculum so that you start like in kindergarten, first second third grade and get your PhD. Basically it became a pedagogical method right? And so you could say this was an innovation right conceptual innovation and that innovation was something with some great ulama of Islam sometimes they resisted and critiqued they didn't know what to do with it and others adopted it cautiously over time",
      "time and the greatest textbook if you will of that curriculum was written by Abus Ma'id al-Harawiyya al-Aqsa which was divided into 100 stations. You can think of that as 100 classes. Each station was a perspective or an angle on man-God relationship, relationship between the human being and Allah SWT. Starting with Al-Yaqadah",
      "al-yaqadah, or awakening when the human being realizes that they have a life of purpose beyond eating and drinking and persisting in this life, surviving. Discovering that they",
      "three levels each. So initiate the first level and then once you have some time with it, you go to the second level and third level. And to name some of these stations that you will find, the station of dhikr, remembering Allah. When an ordinary Muslim, when you remember Allah, it's a station that comes or it's",
      "there may be times where months go by when you don't really remember Allah intentionally. But sometimes it happens to you, perhaps in Ramadan, perhaps when you pray, perhaps that's when you're sick. This is called hal. Now we getting into technical Sufi categories. Hal is when a station such as remembrance of Allah or patience",
      "gratitude or the state of love it comes to you and then it goes away quickly and you don't know how to pursue it but it sometimes just happens to you. And then when you become a if you will, you enroll in this school of this journey to Allah and you begin to train yourself, train your soul and your body",
      "you begin to acquire the next station or next level which is called maqam. Maqam is when hal becomes slightly more permanent. When you remember Allah but you remember in a way that is more permanent where you understand how to remember Allah and carry on that remembrance for a while. No maqab is permanent, but the higher you walk in this path",
      "then these states become similarly patients right patient something that all of us have to encounter we have to be patient to pursue anything in life sometimes it's not a choice you lose something and you have to do you have go on with your life but what does it mean for this patience to become the aha so",
      "you know, whenever a calamity comes, whenever it difficultly comes, whatever difficult mission you have to undertake. You start from not from zero but from a station where you already have endurance and patience and courage So basically this is what the discussion is about and then it proceeds like that.",
      "takes us back to the field that this text is situated in. I want to kind of like address the elephant in the room, you know, ibn Khayyim and it's part of a larger spiritual intellectual tradition right? The science of tasawwuf in particular Sufism, Islamic spirituality however way one may want to translate that",
      "quite early on. The term was used by Ibn Khayyim, it was used in the Tamiyah favorably himself but one of the things that you find in our community is that there's like a knee-jerk reaction to this term people think that they hear Sufism and they immediately associate it with reprehensible innovations associated",
      "even though that, even though every science within Islam had proponents that went into excess and had you know in the science of Al-Qaeda You had all of these sciences had proponent from within them that at times You know were heterodox. And so I'd love your perspective on why do you feel this",
      "still to this science when even its critiques and we'll get to like Imam Qayyim has very respectful disagreements within the field why is that something that still exists? And how do you feel we should deal with that as a community? Yeah excellent question but also it's a complex question",
      "and patience to learn the answer because there isn't a simple one. Also, I wanted to welcome Dr. Samir Abu-Absi you were just mentioned and you're most welcome here thank you very much So the word means it comes from the Arabic word Suf and Suf means wool",
      "wool, woolen clothes. And in early Islam we're talking second century when Islam spread to countries like Egypt and Iraq there were Christian saints there who or monastery dwellers of monasteries in Egypt and elsewhere",
      "as an expression of poverty. Now when you say, of course the modern word poverty just means being poor but in Christianity, in forms of Christianity this was particularly in Egypt and this was a doctrine, this was something people would say part of being Christian, part of the way of being",
      "was celibacy you did not marry but he also abandoned so aggressive life and you actually have that condition continue in Greece today for example I was just recently reading an article of Greek monasteries where people have lived Christian monastery people have live all their lives and one thing they do for example they don't",
      "years without ever laying eyes on a woman and so when muslims encountered this this was adopted by some muslim as a way of critique against the more luxurious lifestyle of now rich muslim that's how it starts it doesn't have any doctrine or content other than just being",
      "to be pious but along with that also came many christian doctrines this is second century third century you could say a number of muslim scholars in baghdad began to basically produce an islamic discourse of spirituality",
      "That became known as tasawwuf. But they rejected the idea that you had to wear wool only because the idea of wearing wool was in fact criticized by other Muslims, other great Muslim saints and ascetics or people who renounced the world but they said that you Sufis by wearing wool you're advertising your piety. So all of these things were actually discussed and debated in early Islam.",
      "in early Islam. When I use the word, I use people of rather than the reason being and it's what people don't appreciate is the historical thing that was the spiritual movement about that not all the rest of Islamic world so for example in eastern Iran or Afghanistan Sufis were seen as bad",
      "the Malamatiyya movement, people who do malama or malamati in Urdu they blame themselves and they saw Sufis as praising themselves showing off if you will. Similarly you had ascetics or suhad who did not come up with a doctrine of tasawwuf but rather they would abandon this world and have adopted spirituality then there were the movement of bukkaun",
      "who of people who wept a lot fearing allah fearing standing before allah so these are all movements groups of people men and women women played an important role uh the famous uh aesthetic above that rabia for example was known as a sufi but she like lived",
      "wrote about abandoning everything but allah and a lot of poetry of love to god is attributed to her we do know historically that there were many women who are involved in these ascetic movements whether sufi or malamati or subhan and so on now over time centuries later uh sufism because bardad was now the center of the world",
      "but that brand of spirituality gave its name to everything especially when western scholars got involved and they started documenting history they called everything sufism uh but what you find in madari is a much more historically accurate account where there are sufis there are people of sulu their malamities all of those people belong in different traditions",
      "without all being called Sufis. In other words, Sufism is like pampers. You know what I'm talking about? You don't call it diaper, it's pampas or Kleenex. It's not tissue, it KleeneX no matter what brand it is. So that's sort of what happened with the Suf especially starting in the 13th century of communism",
      "of common era that is the seventh century of Islamic now um now is the soul good or bad that's uh that's the question now if you went 200 years earlier 500 years ago most Muslims everywhere",
      "There were Sufis who rejected Sharia, who railed against law. And there are Sufies today in America I'm sure many of you are aware, who are not Muslim. In fact in Toledo they have a group that is not Muslim But since at least Al-Harawi the scholar that we mentioned The author of the original book and then Ghazali Abu Hamid al-Ghazali",
      "and ever since there have been attempts to bring Sufism within the realm of mainstream Islam. And so you could say that historically, Sufism has been one of the most diverse movements in Islam more so than for example jurisprudence. In jurisprudent if you are not following scripture, you don't have a prayer but Sufisme has something special about it which is",
      "wants to use a universal language and as such you can find that universal language outside of the quran in the holy man of central asia or the animist scholar of africa who conjures spirits uh or you could use the language of the yogi the jogis of india right",
      "was open to universalism and that universalism both served it and harmed it. It served it because it provided a bridge to other people who cannot become Arabs and learn Arabic, read the Quran, read Hadith especially at a time when nobody read Iraq you know almost nobody",
      "nobody 98 of human beings in any literate civilized society 98 people did not read or write you would actually get most illiterate people in the world before western civilization in islamic civilization in the urban centers of islam but even there the rate is not more than five percent which means",
      "especially if you are far from the urban centers where there is a concentration of scholars and madrassas, you would live your Islam through very simple belonging to a community. And Sufism was one of the means in which it was provided. Now, in the modern world, Sufis came under attack from two sides. One, pre-modern Wahhabi movement from Saudi Arabia",
      "that was initiated by Sheikh Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahab in the middle of Arabia, close to present-day Riyadh where he was among the first major reformers who came out of completely traditional circumstances. He hadn't met any Western colonial occupation",
      "It's very much internal mechanisms of Islamic societies. There were a number of people doing that, by the way. A number of them were critiquing Asawu from within. Most of them are Sufis themselves whether it was Mahdi Antonio or Sanusi in North Africa or Shah Waliullah or Sir Handi in India but Abdul Wahab, Ibn Abdul Wahhab was the first one who rejected Sufism completely as something",
      "that just can't be fixed. And the reason perhaps was a situation that he encountered and perhaps it was his own lack of sophistication. There is a lot of debate among scholars about which it was. The second source was colonialism and Western modernity itself, and Western",
      "militarily. Now when you lose militarily, we don't have to lose culturally and intellectually but Muslims also found that the internal crises led them to be attracted to aspects of maturity. And this again has a complicated story because as Malik bin Nabi, great North African scholar and intellectual said",
      "colonizable before they were colonized and one of the ways in which they became colonizable was that wisdom societies you know 200 years ago 300 years ago were full of superstition and superstition was so bad then you know bad if we don't like superstition of course it's not superstition",
      "you have stories of Sufis flying saints. It wasn't even the idea of saint was beyond Sufism, right? It was basically a local folklorist kind of religiosity. So basically you can have the greatest scholar who has written the greatest books and knows every hadith and Quran and Tafsir talk to people and then you have somebody who says I just flew from my home here",
      "home here and of course there were no airplanes at the time which one are people more likely to listen to the guy who flew or walked in water and all he needed was two or three other people say yes of course i saw this this what do you love is speed do this stuff and this was becoming such a problem in late medieval islamic societies that the jurists were wondering if",
      "Who could overcome and by a physical laws physical norm so easily? For example if somebody could buy locate the time does you know anybody know what bio Kate means? By no cake is a miracle where you could be in two places at the same time So a man for example sees his shade Doing something wrong something wrong Right. I want name what that was their children",
      "there's children here and then uh also his disciples tell him that he was teaching at the mosque so the sheikh just says i was bible king and because he is such a shaykh you didn't know where which part of his presence could be held accountable by law right so muslim jurists in fact",
      "were trying to push against it, but this was a massive phenomenon. It wasn't something that limited to one place and this led to a lot of pushback against the Sahel from within. But when Western notion of science and Western notion on colonialism and the idea that all of these saints could not defeat white man's guns well maybe there is something going wrong right? We need science rather than",
      "rather than more peace with more miracles. And that actually became a discourse that was quite strong in the 19th century, early 20th century that led to an inner reaction against it. And of course like most civilizations that are on the losing end they can't always balance and differentiate between baby and the bathwater right? So that's why there was this very strong reaction",
      "the saw of that I think we are at a point where perhaps in fact tables have turned now and many Muslims are finding that they must go back to something other than pure rationality whether it's good or bad that's a more complicated judgment but as a historian I find that",
      "have finding a balance has always been the best uh best way to live right so you could unders we need to know that god intervenes in real life we need To know that God answers our prayers otherwise you can't be Muslim if you don't believe that Gabriel came from seventh heaven to Muhammad and spoke to him you can t be Muslim",
      "Moses you know Miracles were given to moses and jesus and muhammad which are very clear in the quran we can't be muslim yet at the same time if all you see is miracles and miracles and miracle Well, when do you live your normal life? Why do struggle rather than just pray why did the prophet muhammad himself struggle and suffer rather than this? Wiping out all these enemies with a prayer so that's",
      "That's a balance that the difficulty that Muslims are not the only ones in fact we had similar debate about Christians and Jews as well Where does our responsibility begin? So I think that Sufism is part of that discourse I'm glad to ask There's so many follow-up questions that I have. I think before we continue Is there anyone in the audience that I would like to participate any questions",
      "I just have one question. Where do you put the revivalist movements in Islam, starting with Abdul-Bahab in Saudi Arabia and bringing forth after the great mutiny in India when the Muslims got together",
      "Why is it that we are at the losing end of what's happening in the world? Is it because God is angry with us and that was the birth of the North Indian city which gave the name to this movement.",
      "North India and then they started an education system which was purely Devan that was totally religious and Sir Sita Dhamma Khan who was a reformer he started his science-based education",
      "My question is that did the revivalist movements like that, and there were others in India and perhaps elsewhere in the Muslim world. Where does the Sufism locate itself in these moments?",
      "I already went off a little bit to the detriment of our topic perhaps. But, the Ubandis embraced As-Sabuf but a much more disciplined and Sharia centered As-Sabuf group. So Sayyid or Sir I guess he was called in British then, Sayyed Ahmad Khan",
      "rejected not only the soul but also miracles which is why he came under fire from more traditional circles and he was also for example influenced by Hinduism for example so he was against sacrificing animals like vegetarianism so there were different things that different performers at",
      "So I would say that the saw wolf in India was experiencing similar dynamics that I've described. In fact, in some ways, India was ahead of other places because it was more thoroughly and it was colonized before Middle East, right? Syria remained under Ottoman control until very late.",
      "Egypt was colonized only in 1882, whereas India had the pleasure of being colonized certainly in 1757 is when it started by 1837. India was completely colonized and mutiny that occurred in 1857 was lost. And this also meant that Indian Muslims were ahead of the challenge of responding to modernity",
      "And that's why this relationship between Muslims globally, in fact, played an important role where Indian Muslims are often the first ones. Any school that you have, whether good or bad, often arises first in South Asia and only later in the Arab world. And of course, the other people who were – I don't want to take all the credit of all the South Asian myself – were Turks themselves.",
      "turks turkish muslims of course were had diplomatic relations with europe they understood what was happening the problem or the great tragedy that happened with turkey and the turkic scholarship was that mustafa kamal ended that wisdom right so all of turkis scholarship came to an end as turkey gave up on their islamic heritage",
      "decades and they're trying to uncover the roots of many of these ideas that we think they started either in India or Egypt, they actually go back to Istanbul. So that's modern scholarship. And that's really fascinating work being done. What is also interesting is that many of those ideas are simultaneously emerging in different places.",
      "I am in both volume one and two talks about is the concept of experience. And I have just a, masha'Allah, one of the things that I love about your translation is that there's two ways to translate things. There's one way which is how do I capture the linguistic accuracy of the text? And the other way is how to actually capture the meaning? Dr. Anjum miraculously does both somehow, mashallah.",
      "And Ibn Khayyam's discussion on music, interestingly, which he has an extensive discussion on as you know Dr. Anjum He talks about how one's engagement in practices of tasawwuf such as reading Quran and piety practices of piety that they become so in love and reach states of ecstasy such that...",
      "for something above which I saw not. When we met and I saw her splendor, I realized it had only been child's play.\" So in other words he uses this kind of metaphor of you know, I'm overtaken by desire but then when I actually experienced the desire spiritual experience I realized everything before was nothing but child's way. I wanted to talk about this because at times in the community we don't...we feel that religious",
      "may not be as emphasized when you find it in Ibn Khayyam's discussion. He says, in fact, we want to talk about an alternative to music, right? You won't even have the desire for listening to music when you have that experience quenched by spiritual wicked and pietistic experiences. So I would love for you to kind of speak",
      "grounded religious experience and any comments as to you know how we can uh integrate that in our communities excellent question i want to comment on your first comment i think that again you're very generous the problem of translation when you're doing translation there is no such thing as exact translation what you're",
      "somewhere. And the reason I was able to do it in English, and I think doing it over the last 20 years has made me realize that English is capable of being translated into because of Christianity. Because there are older Christian references to many of these experiences that actually meet up with Islamic practices",
      "practices so current English of course is very secular but pre-modern English which of course draws on the modern Latin and French in German and these languages have wrestled with questions",
      "And that's why, for example, the word ascetic, which is a translation of zahid. The word ascetric comes from original Greek. But it was transformed by Christians and medieval Christians into what they called ascetics of Christ. And literally, ascetics, the world ascetics means athletes. Athletes, which used to compete in Greek competitions, they were called ascets.",
      "religion you know christianize the language they became ascetics of christ those who competed for christ meaning competed in controlling their body for christ they wouldn't eat and drink for a long time right so that's the term that can capture uh the idea of fatah and zulu in arabic and that's how it's often translated some people don't like",
      "connotation but my point is when you're doing this translation you have to learn history of words in two different worlds right in Arabic and in the Western languages not just English but the ancestors of English and there you realize common struggles of these traditions only question",
      "Of course, deen of Allah SWT, religion of God is something that you cannot capture in words. You can only point to places but you have to experience it. And what happens in experience is something the word that is used in literature is ineffable",
      "meaning you cannot put it into words. And I guess the irony of Sufi literature is that they say it's inaffable, but then they talk incessantly about it. Partly because if something is inaffiable, you can't stop talking about it, you're always trying to point to it from different angles. So this book is very much a book",
      "book well I guess I'll tell you my own experience with the boat in order to understand what it means this book puts me to shame meaning that I have a troubled relationship with the translation because it holds a mirror to where you are more than any other you know if you were to write an academic book on history or theory or even theology is easy it was B people see",
      "but this book is saying where do you stand this book the question this has is where are you in your journey to god and so in that sense it is a difficult relationship it's like you read it and you feel um",
      "doesn't match your words and that I think captures the challenge and the struggle of the path of Tazkiyah in Suluq and the Sawwuf. The people who tend to be more famous and most successful, in my experience are those don't ask those questions they're good at talking",
      "And that's why very early on one of the great Sufis of 4th century or 3rd century I believe, Abu Shanji was his name. He coined this phrase that in the time of Muhammad ﷺ there was Tasawwuf without a name and now there is the name without the Tasawwwuf. So now everybody is a Sufi and they are famous Sufies, they are rich Sufie but you don't find anyone.",
      "And that's why in my view I never use the word Sufi to describe myself, knowing who I like when anybody says they are a Sufi. Because to me you have to show me the goods. Later Tasawwuf became a badge of honor especially and it was a badge belonging to Duroq, to orders. These Duroques sometimes fought themselves, competed among themselves, the sheikhs, the peers",
      "got rich if you are from pakistan today you will know that all the rich uh lands of pakistan the river indus for example the five rivers are owned by these great thieves one of their son is in the parliament the other sun",
      "mechanisms of power and these people have hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands at least of serfs, people on their lands whom they will not let become literate. That's what the Salafist means to a lot of people in Pakistan today. The Feeb, if you look in his eyes wrong he could finish your family. Not through a prayer by the way. And so that's what",
      "the soul means to a lot of people today and that's what contributes to behavior of the soul the same is true in many places in egypt uh and elsewhere so the soul became a great business and it's difficult just to prove it that you have this station with god",
      "define themselves through their service to humanity and conceal their inner relationship to God. And often it's the other way that's done, and that gives band name to sciences of civil. I think that's a very valuable critique",
      "critique yeah inshallah a question about where does stand on visiting the graves going to the graves and making",
      "So the question is what is Ibn al-Bayyim and Ibn Thaniyya's stance on the practice of visiting the graves? And in particular there are two practices",
      "two practices called the tawassul which is asking to be connected to God through the blessing from certain Shaykh and then istighatha which is a practice of seeking help praying to the saint. And so these are extremely, they're hotly debated",
      "throughout Islamic history. Praying to a saint is considered wrong in Islam, there's no debate about that. The debate has been whether what happens if you pray through the righteousness say for example of a prophet? You say I'm praying by the honor of the Prophet",
      "by the honor of the prophet and the question scholars have asked is what this does this mean you're praying to god or are you praying to the prophet in this case if you say by jackie w for example the debate is do you should you understand that by me by my love of the",
      "you are asking by something you were doing right and that is considered permissible if we say that that is consider permissible by the claim in the Josiah and all of yours if you say that the Jahi Nabi means I'm praying to the Prophet then it is considered impermissible",
      "if it's impermissible by the prophet, then of course by any other saint even more so. So this has been a major point of disagreement amongst scholars in fact well before the Companion of Meditania. This is a practice which sort of expands in the medieval period.",
      "for example, those of you who are interested, Joseph Mary, M-E-R-I is the name of the scholar who documents what people were actually doing. And Jews and Christians and Muslims would visit the same graves and make the same prayers. And many scholars would say that what these Muslims are doing is impermissible. Another debate on this question is whether these people should be considered",
      "unbelievers or merely doing wrong right and muhammad claim the main intervention that he made with it they're not really wrong they are in fact unbelievers",
      "was something that the Wahabi, especially after Muhammad was engaged in and that was considered to be one of their greatest points where they were criticized, censured, and called the Karajites an extremist by other Muslims. At the same time, the Wahhabi movement",
      "perhaps single-handedly responsible for eliminating this practice which other scholars considered to be wrong but not wrong enough to fight against so it's wrong but should you take up arms and fight against it so you end this practice um",
      "becomes the practice of worshiping to the graves comes under fire from all different angles, from modernists to reformists. People are saying well this is just irrational and others who say that this is un-Islamic. The debate nevertheless remains people who do tajheer or excommunication on this basis. And that position has declined",
      "declined meaning that most scholars would say that is not the correct position nevertheless this remains a hotly debated issue any other questions from the audience",
      "I guess I don't understand why somebody becomes labeled a Sufism versus somebody who's just sincerely seeking to focus their law on the link and trying to fall into place. I don' know, I'm confused. Yeah, that was a great question. As I said, perhaps not clearly enough, Sufisim was one particular historical movement that emerged in the third century about that. And there are all kinds of other ways",
      "in which people sought tazkiyah and the words that are used in the Quran for this and the Sunnah or it is yeah right in fact as yeah which means literally purification is a key word in the quran that appears again and again whatever the Prophet Muhammad s mission is described four times",
      "who came to teach you the book. يَتْبُعَ عَلِيكُمْ أَيَاتِنَا وَيُعْلِّمُكُ مُّ الْقِتَابُ وَالْحِكْمَةِ وَیُزَكِّيكوا And sometimes يُزكيكم comes before يُعلمكم القِتاب والحِکمة So there are four things that the Prophet is supposed to do and one of them is to purify.",
      "god's uh god's oneness take the knowledge of the book the commands the promises the warnings and to internalize them right so it's one thing to say there is one god that's another thing to",
      "that is the quest of the science of this year whether you call it the saw or we call it as here or some people call it signs of sand which comes from the honey the tree that's really a matter of of the tradition in the place and that you belong to what",
      "path is much, much, MUCH easier if you are in good company. If you have other Muslims who are striving in the same path it's much easier than if you're doing it alone when you are your only judge and your nafs can play games with you so that you think you are the most pious person. It is also beneficial",
      "Right? Like in any science, like in any practice, any craft should learn from those who have a higher status than you. That's where the idea of a Shaykh appear be literally Persian means a father for an old person Shaykh comes from but there were even in this tradition",
      "some Sufis began to say that you have to be before your Shaykh like a dead body before the washer, meaning you're dead and the Shaykh can do whatever. The assumption there is the Shayakh has some kind of guarantee from God which again is not found in Orthodox teachings so you have",
      "Find people who are more advanced, right? Shaykhs or shaykhas. But don't be like a dead body before them. Ask them, hold them accountable, right, without losing what is called adab or etiquette, without knowing that people who have greater experience of life have more to teach us.",
      "scholars after him they have um entered this world of innovations buddha and they fear that buddhah these buddhas are becoming or piling up like a snowball where you know it's getting out of control uh so is that a true statement where the best that like abu will have",
      "We needed the Sophie because they had a different element or dimension of purification. We needed that movement at times, but again my question is Is that the true stance where a lot of Senate saw it? They feared that if they give too much Too much How can I say...they leave the Sulfis That pile is going to be more productive innovations and not leave us straight from the Zuma before then",
      "prophet insisted that you should not invent a worship this is a very crucial and uh crucial teaching one that there is no dispute that you",
      "that is already established and so for example which was started by who the practice of tarawih now did not start it he did not have the authority to start in new worship but",
      "he stopped for the fear that it might become an obligation now that we do not have a prophet so we can in fact continue to practice that the prophet would have liked people used to pray individually in the mosque he brought them together under one reader this was if you die but the scholars with some scholars would say this was not a bid'ah at all people who say",
      "Well, it's linguistically bid'ah but it's bid'a hasana a good kind of innovation and therefore there could be a good Kind of innovation similarly subha the practice of you know using a rosary which actually came from Christians To say your tasbih Subhanallah wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh Is it a bad thing?",
      "and most scholars said no it is merely an aid to a worship that you already are doing others would say no that even some companions did not like this practice and then people scholars go back and forth that scholars did not write this practice only as a credential measure meaning that it was better not to do it because it could lead to bidhan so among scholars",
      "There is no question that bid'ah is bad, but they differ on what counts as bad bid'at that you should avoid versus what counts simply amplifying a command or an act of worship that already exists. And that continues. Ibn Duniya and Ibn al-Qayyim took the more strident position",
      "that these bila, including Sufi singing for example, samaa should be avoided. It is haram. Before them there were three positions among the ulama that it is permissible spiritual singing not ordinary singing but singing God and prophets some people would say it was impermissible some people said well we're not sure",
      "it is permissible. And they took a position among those three positions, right? They said no, it's not permissible so in that sense they weren't doing anything that was unusual. Every scholar had sort of had a position on this majority the impact prohibited it for the fear of bid'ah. Now one last comment that did Ibn al-Tayyib ibn Niyam or Ibn Al-Qayyim ever",
      "ever condemned the Sābhūf? And the answer is no. Not only did they not condemn the Sábhūt, but as you find in Ibn al-Qayyim this book is a book on the Sábbhūts But it is a critical commentary of the Sâbbhuf So some of the claims of the sābbhûts are challenged. But again other great Sufi scholars were doing precisely that",
      "Ghazali, for example, or Muhammad al-Ghazali who came two centuries before the De'a, who is known as a great Sufi. In fact in his time he was more of an Orthodox mainstream scholar who brought Musawwuf into Orthodoxy. He wasn't mainly a Sufi He gave a fatwa... just to give you an example so that the expectations that we typically have about these figures are I think we should be more careful",
      "more careful his fatwa even though he's a defender of the soul his fatwas that these Sufi dervishes are people who are running around and saying they're God when they're talking to God or that they are changing you know praise be to me because I am God he said they should be punished with capital punishment this is",
      "has taken this was one of the zari's position even fainia's position on this was no because these people who are in these this state of haad and this is also a position they have lost their mind they're not losing your mind and saying crazy things like i am god",
      "a potential there's a potential hand that you can get into and you no longer have control and at that time what you say you are like a madman what you think will not count so they actually take a more lenient position because and it is also known in the vietnamese story that he actually experienced towards himself",
      "were the same but he would say that people who say those things are those who are weak intellectually or psychologically and they should be excused for them but if it becomes a business as in you say these things right and you have like a meaning that actually this is true i am somehow special then the legal punishment will apply on such person",
      "So we're going to pray. I'll start at 530. Just in terms of concluding remarks, Dr. Arjun, I guess the last question that maybe you can conclude with is that what does Ibn Khayyam... I think you touched about his disagreements and what it tells us about the Islamic intellectual tradition and how their etiquette in disagreeing with one another. But can you maybe conclude by telling us how you feel this book and inshallah this translation",
      "translation can unify the Muslim community with regards to the science of tasawwuf or tazkiyah.",
      "disagree with someone, while at the same time not merely respecting them but revering them. So if the item says about the original scholar Abu Ismail al-Harawi al-Amsari he used to call him Shaykhul Islam. Shaykh Al-Islam is usually applied in India but this term was also applied to the greatest scholars of their time and it was applied to al-Harawi al Ansari as well so he would say",
      "he would say, that we are criticizing this. He would say even though the author Al-Harawi is dear to us but the truth is to us nearer. However, he would and then he goes on to say my position in this vis a vis the great status of Al-Harawi is like the hoodhood who came with a message",
      "with a message to Suleiman. He's saying, I'm nothing. I'm like a bird who is simply repeating few things from scripture whereas you are like Suleimani. So it's like you have the great knowledge, you have great wisdom but you've got these things wrong and I say this only because... And his critiques were not gentle by the way.",
      "sense in their content uh and how do we consistently deny causality whereas opposed causality and he says of course fire burns so we should say fireworks um and causality is okay nevertheless you would say similarly goodies don't necessarily lead to something you know paradise",
      "has promised certain things and God holds his promises, and his promises are true. Nevertheless when he disagreed with him Al-Harawi in fact sometimes would go as far as to say that the very knowledge that you have of God and of Sharia'ah, of right and wrong is an impediment in the path to God meaning you should completely lose your mind in order to worship God this is called",
      "of witness. Ibn al-Qayyim disagreed with this, but he disagreed in this register where he would say that we know you have great status, that we have to learn from you, nevertheless, we must speak the truth. And I think that this is a great lesson in how Muslims can disagree with each other while",
      "uh while respecting and we were interviewing each other and appreciating their efforts um",
      "may be able to stay for just a few minutes after I'll start. Not too long, he has a family so please don't keep him too much longer after the prayer but if you do have your books and you want them signed inshallah, I'm sure Dr. Anjum would not mind. He definitely lives a lot of the principles in the book so please make da'at for him and make da'dah for his family. He took out close to two hours of his time for this and he's been doing this repeatedly despite",
      "He's been doing this repeatedly for his local community. Not a lot of people do that, so inshallah we want to recognize and honor that. BarakAllahu fiqhum, thank you again for attending, and we'll break for Asr now. And then there's a reception downstairs. Oh right exactly yeah, thankyou for reminding me Dr. Amjad. So inshaAllah after Asr if you want your book signed, also there is a reception down stairs in the social hall. You can help yourself there and enjoy yourself there inshAllah."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Community of Service and Dissent - Ovamir Anjum_m7dZn05kUWQ&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750787152.opus",
    "text": [
      "So what should be our vision as leaders? In three words, I summarize that as communities of service and dissent. And this is all each of these three words I want to emphasize. I've thought quite a bit about it and in fact the message of much of what we heard today in the talks before me",
      "The first layer of community that we are people who seek our value and our action through community. That our virtue comes in a community, that we learn to be virtuous, we learn successful, we learned to be prosperous within a community. And despite the fact that our modern culture or social media, our habits of consumption,",
      "tell us to be islands that are just concerned with hoarding, that our deen tells us to break those idols and to seek our happiness in helping other people in being part of the community. But we're also a community of dissent. That is, we are dealing with such great injustices at every different level",
      "every different levels at every different level in within the united states but across the world and we are a global umma let us not forget that we are global um we are",
      "that gives us plenitude of life, that gives fullness of life. So when you worry about Palestinians, people of Al-Quds, people from this blessed place that Allah has praised and given to us the Muslim Ummah as a sign of the special mission of the Ummah to humankind.",
      "worry and when they are thrown out of their homes, when they're victims of this cultural genocide. People all around the Ummah come together for them and define themselves through them.",
      "people in Kashmir. I'm from Pakistan and I know that people of Kashmir, when we think about it, when they struggle with their own persecution, half a century long persecution at the hands of Indian army that has become extreme now,",
      "They take strength through the struggle of Palestinians and vice versa. So now that the number of Muslims that are suffering around the world, the communities that are sufferng around the World as they're multiplying we should see that as a networking of communities around the word so that Muslims are becoming aware of each other and Muslims are being tested and we are being aware of",
      "but it's a blessing we have. So, we are a community, but they're also a community of blessing wherever we are, a community service wherever we go, but there is also the community to go back, the community of dissent that we must also be a community that is not afraid to challenge structures of power, of injustice or kufr and structures that perpetrate",
      "and desire, and lust, and promiscuity as a way to maximize profits. As a way divide people and destroy communities so that they could build their own false gods on that. We are a community of dissent and we do not have a ready friend if you will either in the left or right this or that.",
      "stand for principle and I want to end with these five metaphors of what it means to be a community of service and dissent. We are a community that of the arc, we're a community",
      "dream we are a community of win-win and we're a community not giving rats ear five things i'm gonna say them again. We are a Community of the Arc, of the Spark, of The Dream, of Win-Win and of Not Giving Rats Ear those are five things that to me define the community of dissent",
      "leadership. First, the ark and by that I mean Noah's Ark when Noah was building his ark nobody believed him he looked like a madman who is planning for a flood that will never come and he was spending his life doing things that others don't see so no the ark stands in our deen",
      "the adyan of all the Abrahamic prophets for planning, but thinking long term. We have to think as the Imam said at the beginning of this program that we have to 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now and invest make a long-term investment. Planning is not something that only investment firms do. Planning",
      "corporations seeking profits do or at least they ought not to be the only ones that are doing the planning. Planning is a sunnah of prophets, planning is a Sunnah of the second father Abu al-anbiya and Abu al bashar Nuh Alayhi Salaam the second Father of all human beings And this was the planning This was the lesson that Allah Ta'ala taught us through Nuh That you have faith and You plan",
      "and you plan to pass on your faith, and you planned knowing that the promise of Allah is true when others don't believe. The second we're a community of spark and what I mean by that is that anecdote that moment in life of our Prophet Muhammad when they are digging",
      "and surrounded medina in the fifth year of hijrah and there is a rock that nobody can break and they go to the prophet sallallaahu alaihi wasalam and the prophet comes and he strikes at this rock three times and each time a spark comes out and when that spark comes",
      "which is on the Syrian border. And these three sparks came out and Rasulullah saw three palaces, and what that meant was that he saw that Muslims are going to possess and overcome these great powers. And the hypocrites, people who did not share that vision and did not",
      "they said one of us is finds it hard to go to the bathroom right now and look at him he is dreaming about uh palaces of the persians and the romans but that was you see there that spark",
      "which was planning and effort, and great struggle. A time when truly people were afraid to go to the bathroom that they had nothing to eat sometimes other than leaves. Yet at that time he had a vision but this vision was not... He wasn't sleeping when he envisioned. This dream was a dream of a man who was striking and breaking rocks",
      "and we are a community of that spark, the community of passion and vision and struggle. We're a community dream good dreams. The Prophet is known to have loved good almonds, good signs and good dreams in fact he would encourage his companions to say their dreams after fajr because",
      "Because good dreams, Allah gives them good signs that Allah gives all around us. But we are bogged down by negativity of all the things that the Arabs used to do in the past before Islam. Rasulullah prohibited them you know, the kind of fa'al they used to have whether to travel or not to travel various kinds of astrology The only thing the Prophet continued",
      "to do and he loved to do was tafa'ul or feeling optimistic, being hopeful. This was a sign and character of the Prophet ﷺ because Allah ﷻ as a matter of fact shows us signs in everything all the time. Everything is an ayah from Allah ﷻ. And a believer is never wrong whenever he or she feels hopeful based on a sign from Allah ﷺ and good faith in Allah ﷻ",
      "in Allah SWT. Whether you see a sign, a dream or something else around the world some interpretation of yours but it makes you gives you hope that is tafa'ul that is a good dream and that is from Allah SWt. And we are a community of positive action even when we see that yes there is an environmental apocalypse",
      "Capitalism has conquered the world. We know that the worst of the people The worst of people Conquered if you will have conquered the World they seem to be calling shots But we are a people of hope and we know that Allah SWT will give victory",
      "that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, that the victory is for us. Finally we are a community... The fourth one, we're a community of win-win meaning that we do not think that by supporting one cause of our brothers and sisters in Palestine, we are going to damage the people in Kashmir or that by upholding the rights of people in",
      "harm our brothers and sisters in inner cities in America. And finally, we are people who don't give rats here. Allah Almighty defines the Sahaba as la yakhafuna loma tala'im people who are not afraid of the criticism of those who criticize. People attack you.",
      "There is Islamophobia, there is bias in the media. But we are a people who have a different judge and having that kind of grit is part of the necessary part of our leadership. So with that I end my message of community of service and of dissent"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Dedicated to the Truth_ with Dr_ Ovamir Anjum _ Ep_emn9tgLENTA&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750672895.opus",
    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum, I'm Imam Tom and welcome to Dogma Disrupted a podcast that looks at the most pressing issues and ideologies that face us as Muslims today. For our first episode we have very special guest the editor in chief of Yaqeen Institute Dr. Uwemer Anjam. Welcome!",
      "wanted to bring you in to talk about ethics. That's been the subject of a lot of the academic output that you've partaken into, and I think it's really significant to Yaqeen Institute's mission. So we're going to get into all of that inshallah, but first I wanted to kind of lay the groundwork by having you explain to people what is ethics, and maybe more importantly, what's the place that ethics occupies in the modern world that we live in today? Okay,",
      "Okay. Yeah, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. Alhamdulillah wa salatu wasalam ala rasulullah. The word ethics or morality that are used interchangeably mean this idea of actions being right or wrong, good or bad and we can talk about practical ethics, we can",
      "we look at the actual evaluation of whether something is right or wrong. Now, if you look at Islam first and foremost, the idea of right and wrong is absolutely everywhere. So if you looked through the Quran and all of Islam, the ideas that certain things are good and other things are bad, that's absolutely essential. You could say",
      "say all of Islam is ethics. All of Islam, this moral question of what is the right thing to do and in all respects so therefore in a strict sense you can't really separate that this is Islamic ethics it's almost like saying this is Islamic Islam because all of islam is about uh the right",
      "life itself. And the right way to respond to life is to recognize the one Creator who is, who is the bestower of life and form. And as such there is this ethical impulse, a fundamental axiomatic idea that we must be thankful to the One Who has given us everything.",
      "the benefactor, shukra al-mun'aam as Muslim theologians have called it or as the Quran calls us, hal jazaul ihsan illa lihsan is there anything more appropriate than responding to good with good to express gratitude to the gifts that God has given us but when we look specifically at the idea of ethics in Islam",
      "ethics in Islam you don't find any translation, any particular word. The word that comes closest to it is the word khuluq or akhlaaq but if you look at the tafsir of that word in the Quran when for example in Surah Nun one of the very early suras to be revealed to Rasulullah",
      "Allah says to the Prophet, you are upon a great khuluq, a magnificent khuluqi, a",
      "as he is going about making his da'wah. So Islam itself is ethics, Islam is the khuluq, the right way of being. However, as things proceeded in Islam there are more specialized meanings that emerge we have when it comes to questions of obligations that are given by Allah SWT they take",
      "jurisprudence as it's called. When the Quran says to pray or to fast, or to give charity all of those things are part of what God is saying is good and necessary in fact not just good but it is an obligation upon you. And then that obligation that God gives us",
      "attached to both this worldly happiness but more importantly, to its reflection in the eternal real true life. In the salvific afterlife so that's if you will the domain of fiqh know what is right uh what is an obligation",
      "but rather a much more worked out categorization of every action, whether it's in these famous five categories. Whether something is an obligation or merely recommended or neutral or disliked or prohibited. And early on Muslim jurists came up with the agreement really that every human action",
      "human action to which we can say this ought to be done, this should be done or not be done has a divine answer. It has a Divine command attached to it and is covered in other words as part of the Sharia but then the question is what is the role of Khuluq? Is there something else that's remaining outside of it? And there I think there is another question that Fiqh",
      "Fik or the question, the discipline of Fik doesn't directly address which is you're supposed to tell the truth. You're supposed be kind to others. You are supposed to love to pray to God or rather let me take that back. You suppose to pray too God but how do I make those things? Truthfulness, prayerfulness, devotion beloved to me. How can I",
      "and make those things my habit so that I naturally do so, so that i enjoy doing so. So that I love doing something right? So how I you know my emotions also are in line with what God demands. So it is that domain of",
      "ethical formation of the human being that is taken up in the discipline of akhlaq or adab, or you have this genre alongside effect. Or in fact, in the disciplines of tazkiyah and tasawwuf where the idea is not to discover what is right and wrong because that's been given by God",
      "through ijtihad in interaction with divine texts, and interaction with rational understanding of the world. But rather once I know that how do I form myself in response to it so that I actually love to tell the truth? So that I can actually tell the Truth when it's hard to tell The Truth right because easy is easy say to tell",
      "instance to focus in your prayers uh you can be you can do your prayers correctly in every way uh in terms of your external behavior you may will do you're facing the qibla uh you have the right time you know how many cycles you're supposed to offer so on but your heart isn't there you don't feel the presence of god you don' t feel the love for the prophet muhammad who gave us his guidance um you feel you don''t feel",
      "you don't feel the khushu'ah, the sense of humility or the presence of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. How do you cultivate that? So the disciplines of akhlaaq and tazkiyah become involved in the creation of those selves through proper reminders and proper sacrifices and practices and so on. Okay, that's extremely significant",
      "to unpack there i think i'll just like touch on a couple things first of all i want to restate basically this the scheme that you just laid out so it's a difference between on one hand we have discovering what's ethically right and what's wrong okay and that's something that is much more closed off to human sort of um interpretation or human tampering or human sort input let's say but i want",
      "and relative or relatively relative, and then things that are absolutely fixed. So I do want to get back to that. But there is this other aspect which is maybe we could say the production or the inculcation of a person that's going to spontaneously produce those virtues when they're called upon in an ethical moment. Who's gonna refuse the bribe? Who's going",
      "flirting with them who's going to be able to do the right thing when no one is looking right so this second thing that you're talking about that has sort of like um we can say it's more open to practices that achieve results let's just say which is kind of the opening because a lot of people are confused by tasawwuf and they're confused by the idea of well i thought",
      "Sunnah, we have the understanding of the companions and the Salaf. There's as is commonly said there's no goodness outside of what they brought. So then if you're going to say that five centuries later there's Sheikh Fulan and I'lan who developed this sort of weird for example of either statements or particular sort of actions or whatever that this is something that's not what they",
      "in this scheme is that we're talking about two different types of ethical concerns. We have discovering ethics on the one hand, okay? It's like what is right and what is wrong. And then we have the inculcation or the cultivation of the person who's going to act ethically, that's going act according to the discovery of those ethics in the first category. And that first one is far more limited when it comes to human input et cetera than the second one.",
      "So would you agree with that, my sort of rendering of that first of all before I bring it back to the first thing? I would tweak it a little bit. So the question is whether one... It's not whether one is far more limited than the other because Allah and His Messenger have in fact taught us not only what is right and wrong but also how to respond to them.",
      "So I wouldn't say one is more limited than the other because even when it comes to our response to scripture, the intellectual response to a scripture, The immediate response to obey or do not obey and if you obey then how to implement that obedience. That requires constant intellectual effort Even creativity In resolving problems that Allah says well go make da'wah But it was up to you to figure out",
      "how to approach other people in the right and proper way. You know, Allah says you have to be good, the best of you, the Prophet said the best are those who are best to their family, particularly their wives or spouses. But what precisely is it that your spouse loves that you do? Let's say about your wife. Does she like flowers? Does she likes surprises? Does he like that you take her out?",
      "her out does she have languages right yeah i want to get back to that because let's so let's sit there since we got there so if we come to that first one the discovery of what is ethical okay so um a lot of people unfortunately they have a crude conception of sort of that aspect of ethics so we're saying that it's not that it completely limited and shut off um there are things",
      "we delineate or help people understand which of those things are not negotiable and which are negotiable such as the ones you're getting at something that is Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala commands us but leaves unspecified how we are to fulfill that obligation then this is something that's known as, you know, the sort of burden of proof shifts",
      "as long as it's not explicitly sort of prohibited. So what are all the areas that are negotiable? You mentioned culture, right? What are all of the areas which are negotiables and what are things non-negotiable when it comes to the discovery of what is and isn't ethical? Right so I think when you look at Islam in the Qur'an you find that in almost every area of life",
      "rather i would say in everything that you do as a human being and and and as you encounter a normative question of whether you should do this or not whether it's the right thing or wrong you have divine guidance in some form sometimes in summary forms when it you know whether it is your relationship to your family or the question of eating or drinking or addressing what you wear or your sartorial choices",
      "You know, you could say even something that would be as modern as driving. Right? But should you follow the speed limit for instance? Does the Sharia have anything to say about you violating speed limits such that you're going 65 in a 25 zone? Are you doing something wrong? And if you especially if you know the harm that you could cause by killing children for instance instead of playing around",
      "laying around. Do you have a sharia responsibility? And any faqih will tell you that yes, of course and it's not merely maslaha mursalah here, it's something much bigger because avoiding harm and avoiding situations that lead to harm can be much more immediate, much more urgent than that. It's actually something specifically mentioned in the Quran so it's fulfilling",
      "Sharia principle or a sharia goal. Right, and if you in fact—if it is a rule or a hukum of the hakim that is a legitimate Muslim ruler then even if its rationale doesn't necessarily come as clearly as the example I gave following that rule is like following Allah and His Messenger because obedience to a legitimate ruler can become part",
      "of our responsibility. In fact, it is part of Islamic Sharia as Islam does require that we order our lives in a particular way as a community and not just as individuals. So what I'm saying is that you find known commandments and prohibitions in every field. And then outside of that, you have masalah mursala or unspecified goods that we are supposed to pursue",
      "pursue. But I want to say that, you know if you look at the Qur'an there are 200 mentions of just a general commandment to do good rather than saying do x y and z so of course there are particular laws in the Qur-an commandments in the Quran right both in ibadah worship and say commerce and relationships",
      "says, do good deeds. It is as if there's so much emphasis on you figuring out what is good and doing it. And this is constant in the Quran. As part of the definition of the faithful of the believer is and the righteous deed is not specified to be specifically just the commandments but general.",
      "Allah commands justice and to act charitably in general. This is a general commandment,",
      "And then do more. Ihsan is more than justice, right? To act charitably, to act in a way that is generally benevolent toward the world and all creation around us. So what I want to say in response to your excellent question is that in every domain there are known parameters if you will as if...and I like to use the example of like a skeleton",
      "has given us and then we are supposed to put flesh on it uh ourselves in every field excellent no that's that's very that's a useful way to think about it um so i think the second thing that i would like to get back to by the way i think an interesting addition is also the language that allah uses right",
      "actually there's something else being communicated there. It is known good, right? So that degree of human sort of ascertaining what is the good in the first place and then in Surah Al-A'raf when it's sort of a little bit more further in that direction he actually says to command with what is sort of customary so it kind of is an indication that there is this you know between two extremes as usual, right",
      "relative and that everything is open season and negotiable, obviously that would be nonsensical. But it's also not the crude caricature that some people want to portray that everything",
      "are inflected maybe we could say right in fact um if you allow me uh of course which is a meccan surah and which declares something really important almost the most concise statement about the law that has been revealed to prophet muhammad the final prophet when in fact addressing people",
      "Allah says, which is Allah says that the people who have been given Injeel and Torah will find it in their own books about this imperative to obey",
      "this messenger and prophet who is an ummi a gentile a non-jew who then what is his mission what does he do exactly as you said he commands them to what they know to be good by their fitra by their nature and prohibits them things that are strange to their nature lifts takes away any burden from them",
      "you know, or it's actually as well as part of the verse that I didn't say. That he makes licit for them all the things that are good and illicit all the thing that are in their nature and takes any burdens away from them. And what this means is that",
      "the divine law that has been given through the prophet is not arbitrary right as you exactly suggested that it's known to be good known to bad and this precise question, this precise feature a central feature of Islamic law",
      "Islamic law and ethics are ultimately inseparable, except almost for analytical purposes we can separate them. But really they are the same thing because Allah says all the things that the Prophet ﷺ commands are good. And there is no extra burden that's been given that's there just for testing. In other words, Allah has the full right to command us",
      "things that allah has in fact commanded us are those that are good for us and can be known to be good and the ulama of course when you get a little bit theology i'm going to say that's gonna open up between the uh yeah right so but even if you even before we get into the iftila or this disagreement about",
      "certain actions that are ta'abudi yes uh and certain actions on outside of those ibadat all actions in when we deal with human beings we deal each other deal with society politics culture so on there the norms are uh all rational yeah then when you get to",
      "we cannot reason with everything. So you do have cases where it may just be a test. So the ulama would say there are these three different kinds of ahkam that are given, one is just an exception, you'll find maybe one or two such things and then ta'budi where you can find the reason for it but its form is fixed and then the rest of the sharia, the vast majority of our life is things where its reason",
      "and its legislation are intimately intertwined with each other so that when a jurist is looking at whether something is haram or mubah or something, they actually are looking at maqasid as well. What is the purpose that pertains to the human good? Yes. And for the listeners who are looking for the Arabic term, that's mu'allala, something that has a ta'leel behind it.",
      "ta'leel behind it, something that has a rationale. And it's sort of a separate epistemic question as to how accurately can we discern the rationale and then once identified to be able to apply it. But that's a really, really key point that you mentioned because I'll always remember actually, you know, because maqasid sharia has gotten now sort of, it's become a dirty word or it's gotten a bad reputation because some people have instrumentalized",
      "the Sharia and obliterate it in a frank sense. So we have to be careful not to swing to the other extreme, and make it seem like this is all just set in stone in a way that Allah did not intend. If you look into the first four Khulafat, you see the things they changed from one Khalifa to the next.",
      "things that even were rulings at the time of the Prophet ﷺ. One of the famous examples is Earthman, right? At the time the Prophet alayhi salatu wasalam lost camels you know he was asked about lost camel alayhis salatu wa sallam and the prophet said well leave them go because either the wolf's gonna get them or their owner's going to find it but then the situation had changed to the point in Earthman's reign where he changed that entirely and he said no we're going to gather the lost camles",
      "serve the public interest in that sort of way. And nobody came and accused Uthman of going against the guidance of the Prophet ﷺ or changing the sharia, or doing something like this because the companions and the salaf understood that these sorts of rules and guidelines were muallala they were tied to a rationale that gave that open space that if the circumstance changed so that rule no longer served",
      "then the rule therefore couldn't change as well. And there's very strict rules as to the process and how to ascertain that, and to apply that, it's not open season but you know we live in a time of polarization and we live at a time where you've got people who want to lean too far on one extreme and want to make everything about Maqasid say well Islam is about justice and bring a modern definition of what justice is that completely flouts the Sharia",
      "now back project that onto Islam and do away with everything that Allah gave us, that contradicts our modern sense of justice. Well, that's very wrong. We also can't get drawn into the opposite extreme which is saying that absolutely everything has to be you know it's completely closed, it's a completely closed system that there's no there's absolutely no sort of intellectual work or rational work to be done when it comes to the application",
      "or these sorts of things. So that's extremely important, and I'm glad that you brought that up. If you don't have any further comments on that, I did want to get back to the idea of sufism and tasawwuf because we talked about sort of... We have the discovery of what is ethical on one hand, and that's sort of its own project, and you did a great job of showing how it's probably not as fixed as some people might imagine it. There are there's definitely",
      "play when it comes to maslaha or when it becomes to interpretation, or when is comes to figuring out does it serve the rationale that Allah intended for it. And then there's the second concern which is the sort of cultivation of a self or the production of a human individual that is going to be able to spontaneously and hopefully with some regularity act in an ethical way.",
      "area in which Sufism moves, right? And just like Makkah said, you know, Sufis gets a bad rap because of the sort of extreme streams or variations of it. But maybe you could talk a little bit about what is that acceptable area of the Sharia when it comes to developing the ethical self and harnessing that ability to spontaneously produce ethical action that renders at least the idea of Sufim as something that's legitimate.",
      "That's legitimate. Right, so let me first make a small comment about the maqasid. As you correctly pointed out it has been unmoored from principles and usur al-fiqh unfortunately whereas in classical fiqh it was merely a tool to guide usur ul-fi'k where there you could not reach...where it was not determinative enough. In other words if",
      "out there were more than one answers and there was clearly one that led to improvement of islamic principle or islami goals um and others weren't but textually you can arrive at any of those solutions then the solution that led",
      "who in my view was just as much of a giant as any medieval giant, even though he died in 1930 only. And they were talking about a very principled enterprise that is attached to usool al-faqh and the Qur'an and the Sunnah, and that recognizes that human beings can... there's no open season, as you say.",
      "But if you look at the maqasid itself, what's the first maqsid? The first purpose of the Sharia is hafizud deen. And what you find often is that that discourse itself, if taken seriously and rigorously rather than used as an excuse to get out of stuff, it says the first priority is the protection of deen over life.",
      "And so that's why sometimes you sacrifice yourself to protect the deen. That's a most meritorious act in Islam, in fact in any religion that takes itself seriously. We look at patriots for example we consider them the highest form of citizenship because they are giving their life for an ideal that is moral and ethical.",
      "often when i talk to you know people who are doing maqasid in the way that you're recommending or you are critiquing um that most fundamental uh consideration is lost right so becomes life liberty and pursuit of happiness almost whereas if they simply paid attention",
      "truth in which there is the maslaha of everything and for everyone because god knows best then you wouldn't have this problem so it's in my view uh much of the problem is the application of the maqfasid discourse under circumstances where um the institutions as well as epistemological conditions such as the knowledge of usul al-faqih and so on",
      "as you said there is the question fit is about primarily about discovery of right and wrong um and then there is a question of embodiment or inculcation and i have identified akhlap as belonging to that category of embodiments how to in fact make it a habit to do good things now i would say ahlap are complementary uh now even when i use the word",
      "word the saw wolf i am simply i should say that i'm simply using a common understanding not an academically or historically rigorous understanding because the soul as a discourse as a name and the movement emerged in the third century of hijra our ninth century um and it emerged as one of many tazkiya movements in islam there were other movements say for example in khorasan",
      "example, in Khorasan, the Malamatiya movement. In Baghdad you had the Sufis and elsewhere and before even the Sufi's you had al-Bakka'un and other traditions. These were all names for particular traditions that were local to various places that we're trying to do what we are calling this general embodiment or let me call it tazkiyah as a more general word because that is a Qur'anic word",
      "purification, right? But Sufism because it was in Baghdad and Baghdad was the center of the world at that time. It gave its name to the entire phenomenon of tazkiyah in Islam. So in other words, it's kind of like Kleenex when you say bring me Kleenexes so it's a particular brand but you know what I mean. So let me talk about tazkiyah in general",
      "are complementary both are about embodiment but akhlaq pertains in the way it has just evolved uh in islamic history ahlak is about a relationship between human beings and between human being and god's creation whereas tazkia is applied to the relationship between the self and allah the creator of the self",
      "But even this boundary is not maintained. So, for example, some of the more famous definitions of tasawwuf you'll find that these scholars will say tasawwwuf is nothing but akhlaq and the more you have akhlawq the better you are in terms of taskiyah so that many ulama considered or practitioners",
      "of tasawwuf considered tasawwwuf to be concerned primarily with akhlaq, both with respect to God's creation and God. So this is something about terminology so that we get the terminology straight when I use the word tasawwo and tazkiyah sometimes interchangeably i'm kind of doing what people do with Kleenex even though...and",
      "that are referred to in the discourse of Tasawwuf never used the word Tasawwwuf or they used it almost negatively. But, they became incorporated as great masters of Tasauwuf. For example Abu Talib al-Makki and his Qut al-Qulub which is a model for Ahya ul Madin of Imam Al Ghazali. Imam Al Ghasali effectively was inspired",
      "because of this wonderful, insightful book, Bukhut al-Kulub, Nourishment of the Hearts by Abu Talib bin Makki who does not refer to Tasawwuf except a couple times and both times as people who are making arbitrary claims. But later he becomes known as you know, the great Sufi. So my point is that we should keep this in mind historically that Tasawwwuf is a particular tazkia movement of Baghdadi brand",
      "that emerges in the third century and then it has its critics. And those critics are sometimes the best of its authorities. So much so, some of the great Sufis famously said that the subwoof is now a name without a reality. In the time of Rasulullah, it was a reality without a name.",
      "with a particular evaluation of the Sawwuf, unless we specify which specific branch of the sawwuf we are talking about and so on. Of course there are certain things historically that became very popular when established in the domain of the sowhuf. Much of that was actually quite later late medieval developments. Early sawwus was very different early to sawwulf in the third fourth fifth centuries it was much more intellectual one might even say elitist",
      "even say elitist uh not tariqas and um the emphasis on particularly the emphasis of the shrines for example which in later tasawwuf becomes quite significant is not there in early tasawwwuf so early tasaweef is much more about this one might say in modern terms the psychology of the relationship with allah swt and with the creation of allah",
      "Now in that process, the tawwuf or practitioners of this tazkiyah some of which get called the tawswuf later discover insights about what we do when we are talking about Allah and when we're relating to other human beings. Al-Muhasibi for example a contemporary author of Muhammad ibn Hanbal was known",
      "for this kind of insight, self-evaluation and self critique. And muhasabah as it's called. So much so that his name came to be al-Muhasibi. But sometimes those insights were useful and good and they really reflected some of the shortcuts people were taking.",
      "overdone. To give you one example, just so that we understand that even within the area of tasawwuf, sharia is still the master, right? It's God's command. Al-Muhasibi rahimahullah for example wrote a book ri'ayat or consideration of one's inner states when praying and",
      "strict and was so insightful but perhaps overly critical that the ulama say that the masjid of Baghdad became empty when people read that book because people lost hope in their ability to actually worship Allah. They thought they were just worshipping themselves, you know, they are distracted, their prayers are not worth it, people lost",
      "you know there is a proper way of doing it and that one should understand the nafs human nafs with its imperfections and so on so forth my point is simply to say that just because something is in domain of tazkiyah or tasawwuf doesn't mean that it is above critique by the considerations of the sharia yes now that's a really essential point and just to i think just shine that light on",
      "light on the area that legitimate tasawwuf or tazkiyah occupies within the sharia is kind of getting to things that we mentioned earlier about yes like observing insights that adhere to the shariah and then basically trying to collect those insights and maybe benefit others by them like that in an that in and of itself right because",
      "itself before you deal with the iterations, right? If somebody wants to talk about Sufism or Tussauds, you don't immediately go to the most extreme shrine-worshipping sort of example. You have to deal with idea of it and the idea of I think to elucidate through the audience that's the idea",
      "human beings tend to show off. And what can we do to stop ourselves from showing off? Like when I'm giving charity, even these days, we have lots of things on social media, people militating against being too spectacle oriented when it comes to giving and charity. You shouldn't be recording yourself or going live necessarily. This sort of showmanship that can get into it. We do this work already.",
      "work already where we're noticing things about our internal states that are from the Sharia and we're holding ourselves accountable to them, and we are sharing them with others so that we can sort of benefit from the collective observance and wisdom of other people. So I think just to elucidate to the audience, that's the legitimate grounds upon which it stands. Absolutely. And if I may just elaborate on what you said because I think it is a question",
      "If Tasawwuf did not emerge, something else would have. It would have been called something different. Why? Because the imperative to love Allah, to worship Allah and to worship as if you see Him right? Just take that commandment that's so central in Hadith Jibreel To worship Allah as if You see him Well should Muslims not sit together and talk about what does it mean",
      "You know, I feel as if I worship Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, as if i see him. I feel that presence under certain circumstances but not other circumstances like when I'm over full with food, I don't feel that way it's harder or for instance, I feeI like when i'm in front of other people, I dont feel that Way etc etc etc right? These are insights that are just you know inevitably Muslims as they're going to practice Islam",
      "deal with those insights, the better their practice is going to be. I should also say that not all of those traditions that looked into these questions again are known as tasawwuf. Before tasawwwuf, the ulama were discussing those things. There's a discipline of zuhid for example. They were books written under the name of zuhd which suggested",
      "suggest and inculcate in human beings, prepare a certain attitude toward the world. Similarly you had other traditions like Malamatiya that I mentioned and the Hikmah tradition so on. So all of these traditions are various disciplines that if so long as they're trying to do this tazkiyah that is shara'i, the ulama generally embraced it. And when they overstep their boundaries",
      "overstepped their boundaries the ulama provide provided critiques for it yes that's excellent yeah even with at the level of insight right because somebody could say well i feel like i'm closer to a lost when i'm doing x prohibited action and that's where we have the sharia to be the guard rails basically of those sorts of insights um excellent i'd like to go back to something that we said earlier and use it as a launch pad",
      "we talked about, you know, you eloquently stated about how Islam is ethics. There really is no sort of separation. Now that is somewhat counterintuitive to the modern disposition especially in the English language because of historical shifts that have happened so let's talk about what do ethics for most people represent today? What is the place of ethics in modern society and",
      "if we can even talk about it in that language when it comes to Islam? Yeah, so it's a great question. Really wonderful and I'll answer it into two veins. First what has happened right in the modern period and then secondly whether we should use this discourse on ethics in an Islamic context. So first",
      "with the rise of secularism, the question of good and evil have become purely rational since the Enlightenment and the Kantian ethics. And ever since people think that reason is sufficient to determine what is right and what is wrong, not only what is",
      "right and wrong so for example there are various theories of how we should look at this idea of right and wron.g For example, for Kant we must look at those things as duty something that we must not enjoy in fact the more we enjoy good the more questionable it becomes because enjoyment and habitus and our habit and inclination have nothing at all to do with this universal imperative whereas when you look at Greek ethics Aristotle",
      "and so on, the idea there was to inculcate habits so that we love, we like to do certain things that are good and enjoyable. So you have very different notions of ethics all outside of Islam but we can look at them as Muslims and engage with those questions without feeling that we're doing something wrong or extra Islamic so long as we understand Sharia. And in this vein I have",
      "vein i have you know in the articles that are published uh at yakin the last two articles i have tried to say that islam looks at these various traditions and has an alternative the islamic way of looking at ethics is looking through the model of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasalam",
      "not merely the idea of some universal truths with which your person is not involved, as Kant would say. Or some habits and character formation or virtue ethics, as it's called. But it's something different, a third category in which prophets, not just Muhammad, but all prophets are the role models. And why are they the role model? Because they embody the first commandment of life,",
      "existence la ilaha illallah and Muhammad Rasulullah the first second part historically you know of course uh as ours but any messenger believing that Messenger submitting to that Messenger that becomes the first and foremost imperative if you asked if you sat down with Ibrahim alaihissalam or Musa alaihi salam or Isa alaihis-salam and ask them you know this is your religion this is Your Ethics they would simply not know what you're talking about it would be impossible because God",
      "God is telling them what is good, right? And in that sense the separation of religion from ethics is quintessentially secular. What I mean to say is that that's what secularism is. It's not one of the things that secularism proposes but rather secularism",
      "to interject there, it makes possible the question that is on so many people's minds. What about so-and-so? They were a good person but they didn't have religion or they rejected God or etc., etc. And what you're saying implies that that question only becomes possible to even ask after secularism has done its work. That question is literally nonsensical. It's a contradiction in terms if we go before secularism",
      "a truly Islamic frame. Absolutely. One thing that I should say is that this does not mean that people who are not exposed to Islam, they're not good. They cannot be good. Not at all. In fact, the Prophet ﷺ would recognize people's good traits among non-Muslims as well. In",
      "In other words, Islam is a normative frame that builds on the character that exists. And so this is not to say that good cannot exist outside but rather all the good that exists even outside of Islam right people who don't know about Islam they must wrestle with the question of life of where life came from and maybe their answer was flawed",
      "answer was flawed but they were sincere vis-a-vis that answer and if that were the case or at least if they were sincerely asking that question right they should be as soon as they hear that there is a prophet there is one god that's something so you know in their fitra in their nature it must resonate and they must they have this then this duty to respond to something that you know now i have to look into them the message the final message that god has sent me",
      "has sent me and if they're not doing so then it's possible that they were never sincere in asking that question uh that they weren't truly ethical that their ethics may simply be utilitarian or self-serving or maybe socially oriented and so on um so in that sense the idea is not that you know you cannot be good outside of Islam but rather we believe",
      "coming to Islam. People recognize Islam even though they don't grow up as Muslims and in fact I believe, you know, I know that people have very deep and sometimes very fundamental critiques of Western society. I take a more what I might call moderate position because I believe that since so far as people are experiencing life",
      "forth. Their nature and their desire for God is bursting forth even in these interactions, so they are looking for what is good, and therefore, and sometimes you find articulations of that, you know, you read fiction, you find people are looking For truth, what is Good right? And they find Islam sometimes by looking at the way somebody's praying, it's really somebody's wearing hijab or the way Somebody's treating their parents, You know, and some sometimes a simplicity",
      "the simplicity and beauty, the truth of the aqidah basic principle of Islam itself. And that's why I think it is really important to recognize the goodness that exists while also being fully confident in saying that ethics needs Islam. That you cannot really have the idea of",
      "who created the world by rejecting that God or by neglecting the guidance from that God is incoherent. It's like rejecting the fundamental commandment. You could still be good and ethical in a way that a band of thieves could be very good at stealing, right? In our society you could say that people are very good ethical thieves. They share they're very good",
      "their loot very well but by the standards of the society they are thieves. They are taking people's property and both by religious and conventional standard, they're doing something really wrong in the same way we can identify wonderful skills of a society or a collection of human beings anywhere families societies that have so many good qualities",
      "task for which life is created, they are still responsible. Masha'Allah. Extremely well-worded. It's almost like criminal neglect, the legal term is kind of what I come back to. Everybody has a duty to sort of wrestle with these questions especially the fundamental gratitude. I think that's really very easy for lots of people to understand. You have to wrestle with that and if you abandon that quest",
      "you know it's very different from trying to grapple with it and getting it wrong right to abandon the quest for for to try to find out how to be grateful is in itself a very fundamentally sort of unethical thing um yes you did now i if you i can get to the second part of the question but i want your reflections",
      "So the second part, remember I said that I'll talk about whether we need ethics or to talk about ethics or this discipline of ethics now. And I believe that we need it in the same way that we mean disciplines about taskiyah meaning for practical purposes and the reason for that is that fiqh or Islamic jurisprudence as it has become established and institutionalized",
      "and often routinized practice, you find that people take fiqh and box it in a certain category. And they don't draw out the full implications of what it means to obey Allah SWT.",
      "how to pray properly or how to relate to other human beings properly and how to cultivate those habits is still important. In fact, one might even say it's necessary to develop now in the modern world because just as the fubqaha, the jurists are going back to the texts",
      "they are somewhat limited in the way they operate, precisely because it's a very rigorous method. To give you an example, I'll give you first a basic example. The question of prayer, a faqih, remember my usool al-fahq teacher was an azhari, he would tell me that I know everything about usool Al-Faqih read every book, you know, he thought in terms of lang, in terms",
      "comes to khushua when it comes to uh you know questions of love and emotion don't ask him because he doesn't know anything he wasn't at all saying that this they aren't important he was in fact they're saying he was saying they are important but you have to seek out somebody else who has developed that who knows enough that they can direct and help others",
      "So this kind of specialty does develop. And so there is one specific reason or objections that people often make, which is that somebody can be pious in the fiqhi sense, that they're doing the right things, they're trying to avoid haram, but they are not good, that",
      "you could answer that question by saying, well no it's not impossible they're not doing the fiqh right. Or you could ask for the following by saying yes, they are doing the externalities of fiqhi correctly but there is some parts that are missing that are better discussed and grown out in this other discourse. And I think that that's really still very important. So people Islamic these days you find people emphasizing",
      "ethics or whether it's on in the domain of fiqh and hadith and pointing out this their frustration with uh legalistic islam and i think that we should not dismiss their concerns even though conceptually you could answer them by saying that just as allah has commanded praying five times a day allah",
      "more so praying with khushu'ah, praying with presence. And Allah has commanded doing adl and ihsan. But that person may come back to you and say, well tell me which manual of fiqh will I learn that stuff in? And you wouldn't find it there. Similarly take the example of marriage. The fiqhi discussions of marriage are infamously dry because",
      "Because they are concerned with the questions of when marriages are breaking down. When marriages are not breaking down, when they're working according to Islam's imperatives and according to Urf and everybody is happy, nobody mentions Mahar. Give me this is my dowry, right? Dowry is mentioned or at least the mu'akhar part of the dowry would be mentioned",
      "things like that when things are not going well. So you need an ethics, an akhlaq of marriage, of marital life, marital behavior, mu'amala, that cannot be found in the conditions on what the husband owes, what the wife owes. But those conditions, that knowledge is very important. That's the structure, right? If it's not there, if the husband fails to do his part",
      "do his part and the wife fails to do her part, then being nice, being kind, being loving is not going to be enough. Those things are going to break down. And so both are necessary but I think that we don't need to dismiss the modern concerns with akhlaq. But we should still say that sometimes a modern concern",
      "comes without proper knowledge of what Islamic ethics was. It comes with almost a condemnation of fiqh as legalistic, as if law is bad, like almost a Christian attitude toward law that is very much part of our modern world which is really created by an ex-Christian, formerly Christian civilization so we're left with its remnants and signposts everywhere. And often people who consider themselves free thinkers",
      "free thinkers or freedom, and I'm a Muslim who is intellectual. They are simply washed-up copies of some Christian thinker of 18th, 19th century thinking that they're saying something new. And that's because they don't know their tradition very well. They don't",
      "vice versa some catholic critique of protestantism thinking that somehow they came up with it it's fascinating i'm not sure if you've had a chance to look at my forthcoming paper on perennialism but i go into just that so i'm excited if you haven't yet to uh give me some feedback on that that's one of the things uh that is discussed in that paper um it's extremely i don't think that can be overstated when it comes to living in north america",
      "is in the ether when it comes to reactions to Christianity and Christian structures and Christian concepts. We're still very much drowning in the wake of Europe and Euro-America's reaction to Christianity, and it colors so much of how even now we as Muslims are reacting to our faith, and that's a huge can of worms, but perhaps for",
      "if you'll permit me to get into some particular um there's two things on my mind and it segues sort of to the last thing that i'd like to discuss today which has to do with ethical knowledge I think one of the ways in which ethics has been divorced from modern society in a way that it wasn't traditionally in Islam and also in other traditions is the concept of of ethical knowledge you know we have",
      "which is you know allah which is absolutely just it just floors me when you think about the wisdom that is packed into this short dua because you know we're asking allah to teach us beneficial knowledge which is an implicit recognition that there is knowledge which does not benefit as inherently non-beneficial",
      "to benefit from even the beneficial knowledge okay so that means that even if you take beneficial knowledge there is a an ethical way to interact with it and there is an unethical way to inter act with it. And then after those two concerns are sorted out, then we ask for quantity right? So we don't put quantity at the front of the equation and say well I just need let's just accumulate knowledge which in our modern context it feels like",
      "frantic and directionless accumulation of information and knowledge without a concern for the quality and the direction of knowledge. So I get peppered with questions all the time about particular cases, whether it comes to testing things on animals or the use of pesticides or GMOs, even things like we have chemical and atomic weapons",
      "recent developments is AI. You get the sense living in 2023, in North America that it's just a ball rolling down the hill. Recently there was a couple of tech folks that came together and signed some sort of thing asking for the stuff on AI to be halted or at least temporarily but you don't get the",
      "animated by the spirit of if it can be done, it should be done. And I want to ask your take on first of all how can Islamic ethics or Islam in general if that is redundant solve this issue perhaps? And what would all these sorts of phenomena look like? Is there a case to be made in Islam for testing things on animals",
      "unethical? The same thing with AI, the same thing atomic weapons. How do we make sense of these things within a truly Islamic frame?\" Yeah so this is... I mean the question that you asked is really profound and I will split it into two questions. I don't think i can answer those questions with any kind of satisfaction but at least I can say there are two questions in my mind. One is the question of",
      "of what we ought to do and in light of what is driving this, let's say late modern capitalist civilization. And then there is the question of a more fundamental question of why has Allah given human beings capacities that",
      "are so self-destructive in other words why has god given us the rope enough rope to hang ourselves with i mean that itself is a metaphysical question right but we know you know to respond to or just to reflect on the second question first we know that allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has done that",
      "eat from but also it is part of the qadar that he will eat from and then he'll have to find a way to repent that curiosity will get the cat this is the nature of human beings so um on the second question i would simply say that",
      "that's part of allah's power and mystery and that's infinite that's beyond our understanding why is a nuclear bomb possible as somebody who studied physics since my childhood i've always asked this question you know what why why is it that it was possible to create a weapon that is so fundamentally so deeply destructive indiscriminate um but the same is true",
      "same is true of one could ask you know if one reduces the question do why is it possible to make weapons if allah had not revealed sent down iron which was really the revolution in the world that made possible far greater uh strength and and therefore um the creation of armies and creation of of weapons and swords things that are much harder than",
      "than earlier the kind of metals one finds in earlier history uh in earlier human history allah has something to say about right about that and zelda is created sent down hadith um an iron age came out of that right so it is a last man as if allah is referring",
      "is referring to their dawn of iron age when far weapons a far greater reach are possible and then why does allah sent down hadith uh iron um because to test us who will obey allah and who will be on allah's side and and who",
      "to use it. So, it seems to me that wrestling with this terrible might that is self-destructive is very much part of the imperative that God has given us and this is always a disruptive phenomenon meaning that you can never come up",
      "a peaceful loving system that is pious and righteous and expect that somebody will not discover that might that will end that system and somebody and then you'll have to struggle again. That's just the nature of how Allah has created this world it is not supposed to be perfect here but I don't know these reflections they're neither here nor there nevertheless, but your first question i would say these modern technologies AI for example",
      "for example, they are very much driven by a civilization that has the intellectual and spiritual maturity of a two-year old with a machine gun. And I don't think we should necessarily blame the machine guns. As I said in my first reflection,",
      "why it is possible to create machine guns nevertheless, the real question becomes can we grow up and can we take this enormous power from the hands of a two-year old? And that I think is what we ought to be thinking about as human beings and as Muslims. That's the idea that can we order in the world in a way that is more properly deeply Islamic so",
      "so that we can at least negotiate with the two-year-old, with a machine gun. Because that's what Western civilization is today. I think when I think about Islam's potential as a force in North America and in Europe, you know, the one word that I keep coming back to is redemption. I",
      "structural sort of quality of what Islam has to teach the world. And I almost feel sometimes as if Islam is the world's last hope, like yes we know in some sense that it's a doomed endeavor in the ultimate sense that the day of judgment has to happen, we know all these sorts of horrible things are going to happen. Yes but we also have the hadith that says that if you have you know the sapling in your hand and the day",
      "any sort of force that is still intact somewhat in the world, that has not lost its dedication, it's structural dedication to ethics. It would be Islam that is willing to reign in the pursuit of knowledge under a regime of ethical principles and be able to shut the door or to not eat from the tree. If anybody's going to be able instruct humanity how to not",
      "Or at least, you know I guess i'm less optimistic than you are. I think that Islam is there to teach us how to make tawbah because somebody's gonna eat from the tree. Right. Yeah. How to find a way back? No no that's interesting. That...I need to think about that more but it does take us to sort of where I wanted to end this conversation with which has",
      "specifically what we're doing at Yaqeen Institute. Now, you are the editor in chief and how long have you been in your role with Yaqen Institute? Oh, it's been about a year and a half. Okay so not very long. So tell us okay give us a sense as to what is the process in place currently if I'm writing",
      "that a paper has to traverse in order to get published with yakin institute as as it stands now um so let me i guess let me say something about coming into yakin what i envisioned that i had of what you can do when i came in i was already very much enamored by the wonderful people",
      "and it was already run as perhaps the best Muslim organization that I've been part of, and I've very much the spirit of Yaqeen and the deeply Islamic culture. And these deeply Islamic concerns were inspiring for me, and that's what won me over. And then I decided to really set aside some of my other academic endeavors at",
      "as editor-in-chief. Now my vision for Yaqeen was to produce beautiful defense, maw'ida hasana and jidal that is beautiful you know being at home with modern human beings and the problems of modern human",
      "But this being at home with guiding people rather than, you know, either talking down to people or alienating them from Islam. Talking to them in a way that is beautiful and grounded. And those things are difficult to fine tune, to get everything right. So how does the process work? We",
      "In fact, more recently one of the things that I want to do inshallah going forward is invite people to Yaqeen's kitchen. How stuff is cooked and inshAllah going forward we may be publishing something about that. So how did he come up with topics? Basically a bunch of researchers from different fields some Islamic studies, some social sciences imams, ulama traditionally trained shiur",
      "traditionally trained to get together in the room and say, well what are the most urgent problems that are facing the Muslim community? How have things changed since last year? And what do we need to focus on this year? Once we have a framework of what are topics that we feel need to be covered. And we feel that on the basis of more rigorous data-based work than any other",
      "It's still a feeling, but we look at the data. We collect data about what people are asking questions about, what people who are struggling with, people write to us and so on. I believe that we're the only organization where we have a data department which surveys and looks at what Muslims are thinking. So that's an important part of our method",
      "to play a greater role we really want to know in the more systematic way what is it that muslims and different kinds of muslim are wrestling with because sometimes when you go out go on social media depending on the friends that you have made you are in a bubble and you think that that's what everybody's worried about we don't know that your facebook or twitter what have you it is targeting you so that you will make more clicks based",
      "and you think that you have the world figured out. So we want to break that, and this means sometimes people are offended because they think that we should be covering only what's in their bubble. But that said, let's say we have our topics laid out. For instance, this last year one of the fundamental topics that came up was integrity of family",
      "extremism from the left and the right in American culture, and going deeper into Islamic traditional resources to offer guidance that makes sense. That inspires, that's beautiful, that compelling, that sagacious. Once we have those topics figured out,",
      "can put out a call we are also monitoring we have receiving um sometimes out of the blue submissions but more often it's through networking we will reach out to certain people like in one case for example reached out to you to write the paper about perennialism for instance because you know someone who knows someone and and we said you know what your mom tom we saw this youtube we saw his lecture this writing",
      "writing he has the qualifications let's get him on board so that's sort of how it works these three mechanisms we may produce something internally or to reach out based on our needs or just receive submissions from outside and but our we are quite demanding and that's something that sometimes people have complained of",
      "that our review, you know, is some... It goes through multiple review process. I edit an academic journal and I publish in academic journals. I can say with confidence that our reviewing process is far more rigorous than any academic journal. Academic journals just tend to reject whereas we tend to work with authors and that's what makes",
      "because we are invested in not only publishing good stuff, but we are investing in authors. So we want to work with authors and hope that they can come back to us now that they have learned how to write for us. So speaking of the kitchen, what are the three main ingredients that we look for when we are baking our cake? First is academic.",
      "academic rigor knowledge of the subject matter expertise second is the value alignment we're looking for people who are committed to Islam who have yaqeen um if you don't have it you cannot give it and that's one of the changes that i have uh encouraged at Yaqeen that people ought to be able to speak as Muslims",
      "Muslims in a way that's beautiful and rigorous and broad. Nevertheless, it's passionately Muslim. People should be comfortable declaring their commitment to Allah and the Messenger and the Book of Allah and Islamic tradition. So value alignment. The third thing is that even most people who may have value alignment or have academic rigor but they may not",
      "tone right. So in their heart they want to address some misunderstandings about Islam that are out there, they have the expertise but they don't know how to talk to Muslims and often that's something we work on quite a bit. These are the three ingredients that have",
      "academic expertise, value alignment and then the proper tone to be able to speak to the masses. Because we are basically saying... We're demanding quite a bit. We're demand good research but often we require familiarity with published research on the subject matter in Arabic and English when you can get that",
      "and sometimes other languages. In the West, that is non-Muslim academic as well as Islamic academic. So we require quite a bit depending on the nature of the subject matter. Value alignment, right? People should feel comfortable with declaring themselves to be Muslims. And that's something that I have been also encouraging academics, Muslim academics,",
      "Islam to Islamic tradition deliberately rather than writing in the same way that people are writing before. Your advisors who were non-Muslims, they were writing as outsiders and you sort of take up take on their style or the style of people that you like and you become based basically their copies. And I'm saying even to academics not writing for your king uh as Muslims you have to write as Muslims,",
      "thing as i said is you have to be able to give effectively give a khutbah based on research right you haveと be able talk to broad muslims who are looking for faith they may have doubts they certainly have doubts, they have questions but they also share iman and yakin so those cover and and you mentioned it really I'm gonna kind of",
      "changes that you have made and what you've seen before and after. But before that, you mentioned the actual process of review and peer review. How many eyes have to see it? Who's involved? Give us just a little bit more clarity on who are the people that are giving the AOK or the green light to a particular paper before it gets published. So you could say there are three levels of review. The first one is editorial review. I and my editorial team, Dr. Julio",
      "Dr. Julio, and any department heads if it falls in one of the departments take a quick look at it. Usually I'm first one and then based on the subject matter we do a quick editorial review. We decide whether it can move forward or not. If it can",
      "blind reviewers. It's a double-blind process, so the reviewers don't know who the author is and the author doesn't know what the reviewers were. And that takes of course quite a bit of time because finding qualified reviewers takes time and then they have their own limitations of time and whatnot. Then there is a process where we have ulama on our team",
      "will look at the islamic content we'll look at hadith references quranic references to translations and they will depending on the expertise they will do a check on orthodoxy check if you will so these are the three process uh three layers of review that any paper goes through",
      "there is a fourth layer which is less review but more uh rewriting where we may find for example that the content is wonderful but the writing doesn't flow so we have a ghost writing phase where we have hamdallah very very competent authors writers who will take your you know depending on how much work you need",
      "And they will rephrase. Sometimes, they will rearrange. Try to keep your voice as much as possible and the knowledge. So those are the four layers of review and correction that any article goes through. I see. Very good. Okay. So to go back, you mentioned that you've made changes, okay? And there have been, I think, other changes probably outside of you from before you joined the Akeen team and after.",
      "and after. Could you give us a sense, what was sort of... What was Yaqeen as an organization doing before your arrival? How did it understand itself? What was its mission? And how has that changed since you've joined? And, how has you joining been a deliberate part of that change? Okay so, Yaqen was born in the era of insane Islamophobic attacks",
      "where Muslims felt that there wasn't anything they could refer to. There were questions people were leaving Islam, people were attacking Islam. Our children were being attacked on questions such as well attack of the prophet's character Sharia and you know, Islam is barbaric and so on and so forth",
      "And you would see attacks by really multiple, multi-million dollar organizations that were doing just that. And this became very popular, very common and politicized in 2016 onwards. So that's when Yaqeen is born to get to basically the academics",
      "who have the wherewithal, who have academic rigor to bring truth, bringing scholarship from Islamic tradition as well as modern Western academic scholarship. Modern Western scholarly objections as well",
      "maybe we could talk about at a different time but that cannot be ignored often you find for example that if you go to a traditionally trained scholar on any given issue if they don't know western objections they don' t know intellectual history that's been produced they will have no idea how to respond and their response would look raw sophomoric because they don''t know that this problem the answer that they're giving has already been challenged um and perhaps",
      "perhaps uh sometimes debunked and sometimes merely um you know spun in such a way that people it will confuse people so if they do not know intellectual history right um they would be at a disadvantage if they don't know say a theory empirical theories in psychology for instance",
      "themselves said about a given problem. They will say, you know, X is the position of Islam on this issue and it's always been the same. And a non-Muslim undergraduate will say huh really? Well look at this I only have to google this position to say like five luminaries of your own madhhab have sent said something different so you cannot avoid that right it's usually uh you know a lazy Facebook post or whatever YouTube",
      "trying to elevate level Islamic discourse to the level where it can last outside of social media cycles. You have to take truth and method seriously. So that's one of the things that Yaqeen tried to do. However, Yaqen was produced again as I said in a time of rabid Islamophobia",
      "and I don't like the word Islamophobia, nevertheless everybody knows what it means now. It produced too much too quickly with less concern for quality control than its leadership realized it should have been the case before. So that's where I was brought in. People felt that too much was published",
      "was published, it was not of all the same qualities. Some were really wonderful and transformative, some were not so much. And also the other thing that people realized is that Alhamdulillah because of the success, and that's a challenge for any organization when it succeeds, it has to figure out what else to do now. A number of younger Duaat organizations grew up",
      "grew up that were doing brilliantly what Yaqeen started doing and provided, sometimes one could say the foundations of doing. So in other words there were now defense of Islam or attempts at defending Islam available in almost you know in the area of interfaith dialogue, in the are of science and atheism and all of those things. Those were the two things that were going on when",
      "I was brought in. One, figure out quality control and second as the organization itself is thinking about evolving its goal into something bigger, something deeper it grew too quickly, it was too successful in a very short period of time and therefore there was deep rethinking needed so those are two things that we",
      "we uh that i have been concerned with and one of the things that we decided immediately as i came in um was to radically slow down publications and focus on figuring out the process figuring out quality methods figuring out direction alhamdulillah i think we are at a stage where um we have done that we our publications last year and a half",
      "have been markedly more of a higher quality, I believe. And lower pace we have as we have tried to figure out the proper methods and authors. One final thing I'll say is that Biakin has moved toward an understanding particularly",
      "particularly through this COVID era, it grew so fast, so quickly. And people are looking at Yaqeen not only to answer doubts that are being created by outsiders but rather people are coming to Yaqen to find their basic guidance on Islam and every issue.",
      "This means a much bigger responsibility than just writing rebuttals. And that has led us to expand our focus, our research, you know, our survey of understanding Muslims. All of those things have had to adjust from what it was before which is yakin in the name of...yakin against external attacks",
      "daily life. In other words, we've gone from being antidote to daily nutrition as well. Yeah, that's very fascinating. So I mean, so there's a lot of change. So it's a dynamic organization and that's been my experience as well you know, I guess just two follow-ups what were the parts of the current sort of review process that are in place now that weren't part of it earlier on",
      "you know, before you were orthodoxy checks? Were they a thing or are they something that's sort of a recent sort of addition like what wasn't there right. That maybe people at a certain point the leadership decides like, you know what we really need this extra layer in order to achieve the results that you're mentioning. Yeah I think that like in any young organization as processes are not in place even though formally",
      "Formally, they are there but not institutionalized. For example, if somebody really important writes an article you want to get it out because there is a burning question and you don't ask yourself the question necessarily of would it work in a blind review for instance? An argument that's passionately felt by",
      "felt by an important person may not be a good argument to give you an example similarly sometimes my understanding is that the blind review process there's some kind of orthodoxy check already there because those who are involved were religiously educated to begin with they were experts both in",
      "and in traditional education um but there wasn't necessarily a uh tone um and so there is a there's a way which academics talk uh which is basically laid out you know the way you teach in a graduate seminar whether you are teaching muslims or non-muslims",
      "I'm concerned about how this is going to affect you. In fact, you present material that will challenge you. So you almost have the habit as an academic to highlighting what sounds... What would challenge your framework? What's a little bit shocking and that's part of academic rigor. That's part",
      "that you gotta lay it out, you gotta say everything. Especially if you're talking to graduate students, people who know where to get the right answer and so on. That's not how majority of our readers can read anymore for two reasons. One there are people",
      "you know who will consume it without regard whether it's antidote medicine or nutrition and there are people who will find what you're doing offensive for one reason another whether those reasons are good or bad we can set that aside and so they're going to assign absolutely the worst interpretations um that are available to what you do",
      "And to some degree, this is a fitna that exists in any Muslim community. In the most righteous Muslim communities, misunderstanding could emerge among good people. Among the Sahaba for example,. So as the scope grows so does the pressure to speak to a broader audience and to do more.",
      "That wasn't there before. At that point, when you're the only voice, when your trying to defend, when we feel that Muslim communities under attack, Islam is under attack You are going to think differently than when you feel well now we have those things covered and now we need to construct and build for the next generation. You have to put different kind of thought or more thought into it.",
      "Kean's understanding of itself and its strategy was to sort of give a platform for multiple positions and multiple voices on an issue without as much regard for trying to clarify what someone should come away believing. Would you say that that's accurate? That is correct. That is one major transformation because it has people realize that, or as the organization realizes that people are coming to us not for an academic opinion",
      "opinion, a way to resolve a problem or respond to a doubt that exists out there but to know what is the Islamic position on this issue so that is what created a lot of thinking how can we do this because",
      "only but rather it is a much more constructive and much more deliberate yeah and i think the recent sort of additions yourself included and myself included are sort of testament to kind of you know um we have a mandate i think right um sort of the the organization's change in direction i mean i visited sort of i went to dallas and you know took part",
      "started working full-time in March 1st. And I definitely felt like I was brought in to do a very sort of similar thing that you were brought in, which is achieve this change from going from maybe distinguishing it from an academic journal because in an academic Journal, that's what you do. You lay out all the opinions as you said, the professor mentality is to complicate things not necessarily clarify things. It's the challenge and",
      "let the person walk away with certainty and figure out that where we're going as an organization, we really want to be doing the latter. We have to clarify it. We need to instill certainty. We must express a singular voice on these sorts of issues. So that brings me to just the very last question, I think, and then this has gone on for a good time and we could probably have it go on all day but we do have to wrap up which is",
      "already in my short time had to go back and re-look at older works, and older papers that were published before these sorts of checks or before this sort of refinement of mission and strategy was done. So what's the strategy there? Do we have a criteria or a process in place if something",
      "deviation from that mission that warrants a mere edit versus an update, versus a complete retraction? How is that process unfolding? Yeah. So I should say that before I joined as Editor-in-Chief, I worked for about a year on a voluntary basis as part of the editorial review board whose purpose was precisely to",
      "constitute a group of experts within the organization, some without or some more marginally connected to have different voices to respond to any objections or critiques or requests for correction or removal of articles because people felt they were offensive or wrong or non-representative and so on.",
      "and we came up with this process which is basically when something, when an article is recommended for additional review after publication then we go through it and make a recommendation based on blind review again but that blind review is done with the new criteria in mind. And the new review process I should say",
      "process, I should say is just much more detailed and robust. So we used to just send people review this now we have very specific questions, we request reviewers to look at those and those people who reviewed our stuff over and over understand much better what we are looking for. So the review process is much more robust. As it goes through the more robust process then new recommendations are made and those could be",
      "remove an article or it could be keep it or could be that you keep it for the record that in case somebody searches but no longer circulated those are different recommendations i see and so this work is still ongoing right because um yes so it's a",
      "objective, offer us feedback, offer correction. And so long as we find it persuasive and in good faith, we will act on it. We will send it back to the editorial review board",
      "merely you know not quite up to our writing standards or not quite u pto our tone that's one thing but if it is something that we feel that as an organization um as an institution we uh either cannot stand behind it and or uh it has some benefit but its harm outweighs its benefit like",
      "think that the harm outweighs the benefit or not. So it may be that you see one of the things that we realize in the intellectual world, you can go and look at the works written by the greatest ulama of Islam, and you will find stuff that other people disagreed with and that the large majority of Muslims came to disagree with. But those every month",
      "you know every madhab has its um areas like skeletons let's say that other madhahib sometimes make fun of other times they know they think that uh that's scandalous similarly every scholar every individual scholar has said some things that they either would have retracted or changed their positions anybody who does history of islam or studies and properly knows this stuff",
      "knows this stuff um and so it is not our intention to say that in every article everything that anybody happens to disagree with uh we're going to remove but rather there's going to be an assessment of benefits and harms right um and So I think that we have a lot to look forward to uh and that's that's part of the reason that i you know believed in in in the vision going forward",
      "going forward to join forces and I'm obviously honored to work with yourself as long in addition to everybody else and really look forward to see what the future holds and what we can produce. Dr. Omer, I really thank you for your exhaustive treatment and your careful rendition of all these issues always a pleasure to have a conversation and hopefully inshallah we'll have another one soon"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Dr_ Ovamir Anjum - Community Talk _4_27_24__hUpmClIWoGE&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbdIHCQm-CQGHKiGM7w%3D%3D_1750787875.opus",
    "text": [
      "So yesterday I mentioned the unique and transformative place that the Muslim community today in America is. We have been maligned, we have been attacked but at the same time we are in an exceptionally historic place",
      "place. We are a small community and we're not, compared to some of the more established communities, we're now the most resourceful compared say to the Jews for instance, the Jewish community or the more-established white community but because our deen",
      "fact that we have community and family values, that the rest of the country and the rest",
      "also have them. Some of the people who come from, say Latin America have some of them but what makes Muslim communities especially powerful when this strong community comes together with these strong values and the deen of Islam, the universal part of the",
      "Let me remind ourselves of something that I often think the Muslims forget. And then we'll open up to Q&A, inshallah. We live... This is 2024. If you go back 100 years, 1900s, and look at the population of the world, 1910 specifically,",
      "time before the First World War. This was a time in which Muslims were all colonized, nearly all colonize. The people who are not colonized I'm talking 19 what? 1010. Ottomans those",
      "Those who were not colonized, were either a small portion in Turkey. Right? What is present-day Turkey. At that time there was no such thing as Turkey Anatolia. They were mentally dying to become like the West, like the elites in Istanbul and they were many people resisting no doubt but Muslims",
      "and vulnerable position, and not only that they did not have the basic skills for the modern world. They did not the basic skill for the world. In South Asia Muslims were struggling and in South Asian Muslim population was more than twice the population of all of the Arabs and Ottomans put together so then",
      "In terms of number, Muslims in South Asia are much bigger. But they had been colonized for longer because the British East India Company got there in 1757. That's when they made their first move and then 1857 they formally colonized India. Until then, India had been ruled by Muslims for 700 years.",
      "So it was a major shock for Muslims. So that's one major population of Muslims. The other major population was in the Ottoman Empire and the Ottoman empire had been reduced to something like 10% of its original size, and if you look at the total global population at this time before the first world war,",
      "the Islamists controlled what percentage of Muslim population? Any guesses? 10 to 15 percent. Which means that majority of Muslims were living as colonized by the British, British in South East Asia, which is Indonesia right, Malaysia, that region they were colonized",
      "and then you had the Middle East that was now colonized by Egypt or the French. Algeria was soon to be colonized, and Libya was soon colonized. Morocco was not formally colonized but effectively it was under the power of the French",
      "and other European powers. So, Muslims were extremely weak compared to today. Muslims were so much so that in South India, sorry, in India, South Asia they were looking for somebody a lawyer or somebody who could talk English",
      "English, like the British people to become their leader. That's why they imported somebody by the name of Muhammad Ali Jinnah from Britain who was a student there. This gives you a sense that Muslims lived in a world that for a thousand years they believed this was the most powerful world. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala had blessed them. They had all the power and so they never thought",
      "people's languages, other people's civilization and now they found themselves in the 1800s and early 1900s when they had all the disadvantages in the world. They did not have sciences. Those sciences were going on elsewhere. Their own books! Islamic civilization had produced more books than any other civilization before by ten times",
      "All of those books or the vast majority of those had been taken to Europe and were being put in museums, or they were being circulated among elites, lords, dukes as prizes. So this was the situation 100 years ago. Now, the number of people, number of Muslims in the world",
      "What is the number today? Let's start with the easy question. Was that... So what's the total number of Muslims in the world today? Close to, people say 2 billion, 1.8 to 2 billion. 1.7 billion. It's probably a more accurate number at this point but it's growing. So imagine about 2 billion people right?",
      "right? This is a big rounding up, let's round that up. Out of 8 billion people in the world. At that time there was a census done in 1910. Guess how many Muslims did you have? The total population of the world was 2 billion at that time and the number of Muslims was... Was that 750 what?",
      "750 what? 750 million. 200 million, who said that? Yes it was 200 million. Two hundred million out of two billion, what is that percentage? Ten percent right? What's the percentage today? So it's about 25% and",
      "and it's going up, and it is projected to be 30%. It's going from 1 tenth. It was 10% It's gone already from 10% to 25%.",
      "The absolute number has gone from 200 million to almost 2 billion, so 10 times. And now look at the resources Muslims have. Muslims know all the European languages, right? All Western languages, Eastern languages and any other languages, computer science languages, engineering language,",
      "Have you not seen Artugral? Okay, you gotta wait for your turn. Okay. Let other people talk too. So is there any field that you can say this is the field in which there are no Muslims? There isn't a field today.",
      "a specialized field, there isn't a body of knowledge that Muslims do not have comfortable access to. When it comes to money resources at that time Muslims did not have capital and the resources the Muslims had access to were you know physically Muslims",
      "few people could be found outside, right? That's not the case anymore. So the world situation has changed dramatically for Muslims despite the fact that there are all kinds of aggressive agendas against Islam, right but it's nothing compared to",
      "150 years ago, 100 years ago. And even 70, 80 years ago Even 50 years ago But that has been changing One of the major changes that has happened is of course the demographic success Muslims have increased in number both in absolute and relative terms right",
      "Well, a hundred years ago, a lot of people were talking about poverty and usually in poverty people tend to grieve for having their children.",
      "that they do not have resources, they tend to reproduce more. However historically wealth and population are correlated so for example the majority of people you had in the world were in India and China why because those were the richest lands because they could produce agricultural products",
      "in the pre-modern world, but it became true after modern medicine became available and the number of people began to increase. So it's kind of a complicated relationship. But Muslims were able to reproduce, have large families, and continue to have families. Whereas wherever",
      "as whatever modernity went and people became modernized, and lost their family values the fertility went down. Today you do not have replacement rate in most modern societies. In fact, in all modern societies you are below replacement rate which means that if things continue this way then economy is likely to",
      "to suffer because you will not have labor and they are importing people from other places. Yes, sir? That is true. So that is one of the biggest challenges, biggest threats what they call browning of America.",
      "Yes, yes sister. Absolutely. So you put if you will more concisely what I'm trying to get at which is that in our deen family is important. Zina is haram and the Prophet says that he loves",
      "He loves for you to have children. He loves children and Allah Ta'ala teaches us in the Quran honoring of parents which is a very central value because if you don't do that then people lose motivation to have",
      "honor my parents, my children are not going to honor and respect me. And it's not worth it for me to have children. So if you want to see whether family is strong, the strongest indicator of that is respect for parents. China is an example of a society where you had very strong respect for",
      "self-destructed their tradition through communism, through a modern ideology. And India you have a similar situation where there is great respect for ancestors, respect for parents but that's and so India actually remains one of the reasons why India remains",
      "India remains a strong, despite its poverty and all of the problems one of the reasons why it remains a force Indian Americans remain a strong force but Hindus included. And India is becoming a strong economic power because despite their problems are many they're very unequal society",
      "one of the most if you will merciless society and most unequal society in the world despite that they're able to economically punch above their weight so all this to say that in islam in islām you have a an enormous gift for us",
      "times what we were in absolute numbers and you've gone by 15% from 10 to 25 percent of the world population now often people talk to me about revival of Islam in history and whether we are doing well or not and often people feel that there is nothing but bad news",
      "the first rapid expansion was right after the Prophet and then in the Abbasid period, and then after the Mongol period. Those are like the two or three waves of expansion of Islam. And then the strongest wave expansion",
      "after the first one because first one you're going from zero to uh you know whatever number you have so that's a very uh that's so if you set that one aside this is the greatest way of expansion of Islam in history that we are living today and in terms of resources and wealth and skills of Muslims we have never had this much diversity and wealth",
      "The only thing that comes close to that is the height of the Abbasid period when Muslims were among the richest people in the world, but that's wealth and relative so we're not comparing to that. That was one of the richest points in human history as well per capita wealth But in terms of our access to different parts of the world and different languages and access to",
      "resourceful as today. And when and how does this happen? There are a number of factors at play, I gave you the most important factor. The most important is family values and deen because family values alone cannot be protected it's the deen that matters sometimes the two contradict and dee has to win but it is so important in Islam",
      "Wa abudullaha wa la tushrikubihi shay'in, wa bilwalidaini ihsana",
      "which is very interesting and counterintuitive. Instead of saying that forget about these pagan parents who are teaching you polytheism, Allah says, وَبِالْوَالِدَيْنِ احْسَانًا And Allah says if they ask you to worship anyone but Allah then do not follow them. But you still have to be good to them in this dunya. It's counterintuitive. If it was not from Allah SWT",
      "Allah, anybody who's designing a movement would have said forget about the old generation. This generation gap that we are seeing today in America and elsewhere, this would've been just as bad or worse in Mecca. Now think about Medina, same thing. Medina Muslims come and Prophet does brothers and sisters, brothers right between the Muhajirin and the Ansar become brothers",
      "And then Allah says in Surah Al-Ahzab, وَأُولُو الْأَرْحَامِ بَعْدُهُمْ أَوْلَىٰ بِبَعضٍ فِي كِتَابِ اللَّهِ That brotherhood system that the Prophet ﷺ created, it is limited in the Qur'an. That they are not going to inherit from each other.",
      "to keep them, even though this was a brotherhood of faith. Muslims could have become a brother hood, as a band of warriors that are connected by nothing but faith, nothing but Iman. Allah SWT cancels that system. You have to worry about your parents, your cousins, your clan to which you belong. Even though they're going to put negative pressure on you sometimes.",
      "فهذا من خلال التصميم الذي أعطى الله سبحانه وتعالى لنا دين شريعة مفيدة في كل مرات وفي كل مكان ولم يكن تسوية إذا كنت عامل الإسلام ستنظر إلى هذا كمركب لأنه لو كانوا قد أعضوا على إنساناً، فقد تصممون المجتمع للأحياء الأولى ولكن الله سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَى تصنيع المجسم لكل مرة وكل مكان",
      "And in that, respect for parents, love for parents and cousins is so important which is why our family system remains strong. And that's why I am really worried about our young generation in America as we are being assimilated. Young men and women do not want to get married. There is an epidemic that young men and",
      "They do not want to get married. They are straying from the Sunnah of 1400 years that has kept us strong When our rulers lost wars, militaries, right? We lost in technology, we lost in everything There's one thing that kept us going through the centuries of colonialism That was the strength of her families In fact if I could go one step further and say I grew up in Saudi Arabia One of the reasons why the Saudis proved so weak",
      "in front of Americanization is because their family system was destroyed by their Filipino and non-Muslim nannies that were being brought from outside, and their family systems are weak. And their generational gap is very strong. Whereas if you look at Muslims who lived under the British and French, so for example Muslims in Egypt or India they had much stronger",
      "stronger family ties, they developed immunity against westernization. And that allowed them to live and persist under conditions that were much worse. Saudis are doing it to themselves whereas in South Asia and Egypt and many of these countries where all of them are colonized, they could not do that to us because they could penetrate through our strongest defense system.",
      "The same thing applies to Palestinians and Israelis. The Palestinians and the Israelis hate that. They absolutely despise, they call them vermin, that these people reproduce and so on but this is because these are human beings who can sacrifice for others. What does family require? Sacrifice. What",
      "requires saying that instead of enjoying my own time and my own body for 30 more years, I'm going to stop that. And now I'm gonna share my time in my body with the next generation. That is sacrifice. We don't think of it in terms of that because alhamdulillah we have better terms to think of but if you turn in biological terms, that's what it is. It is a sacrifice that at 20,",
      "that I can have, all the wealth that I could enjoy and I'm going to have these little critters that are going to take away all of that time. And time and money from me right? For the rest of my life. That sacrifice now people are saying including among Muslims because we're becoming ideologically westernized We want to enjoy the same things",
      "But that would be the end of our race if everybody went that route. So, that's why is the second commandment after already in Mecca and then it's repeated in Medina. So that's the beauty of our deen and our sharia",
      "And so with that, inshallah, set up, I wanted to give more depth to what I said. That we as Muslims have to share to humanity and to the West what nobody else has. And we are punching much above our weight despite being the targets. So that's what I wanted",
      "say inshallah open with and then I'll open for any Q&A inshAllah that you have from what I said yesterday or today yes brother",
      "So the question is, beyond the romantic idea of the Khilafah and generalizations, are there serious studies of how it would look like? It's a very good question. That's what we're working on at omatics.org so you have, Alhamdulillah, asked just the right question.",
      "So I would say we don't have a lot of literature published on this yet. It's in the works, not to my satisfaction yet. However yes there is a lot more thinking that's going on now it's happening everywhere they're major Muslim centered populations particularly saying if you go to Istanbul and elsewhere you have a number of centers of research Arabic",
      "But particularly every Muslim majority or Muslim minority in the West, wherever there is freedom, you find that there are new centers popping up. So Omatics is one. You have at least four that I know of, four or five in Istanbul. And then you have some elsewhere as well in the UK and elsewhere. So the question of how any kind of unification would look like",
      "There are multiple theories and multiple pathways that are being explored. One, what I consider to be a definitive prerequisite, and that's economic integration. So whatever political integration is... Now I'm talking a little bit of theory and I don't want to... I'll make it short inshallah and we can take later if there are more questions about it. Political integration means that people actually come together in their administration",
      "they are administration and governance. And that is ultimately necessary because based on the studies that we have done, federations are not very stable. Total state mergers are much more stable. Like European Union is not as stable as United States of America for instance. So that seems to be true across the board.",
      "of United Arab Republic, Egypt, Syria and briefly Iraq. But this is not true elsewhere as well so that's why there's a strong case to be made that you need a merger but actually some people are studying mergers within... Some people are interested in looking at these multinational mergers",
      "complex systems to merge. And the other path that I just mentioned is economic regional integration. Currently, and I may have said this earlier, what percentage of trade of Muslim countries there are 50 plus Muslim countries, Muslim majority countries, what percent of their trade is with each other? I know I said it to some people earlier so",
      "earlier so. 3% of their trade is with each other, 97 percent of their tree is usually with colonizing or they're former colonizers or with great powers in the world in which they are in deficit because they are exporting raw materials as well as you know",
      "and they are buying products. And sometimes it's even worse, as in the case of Egypt your weed comes from outside. The breadbasket of the world that historically produced and fed all the people around is now dependent for its wheat on outsiders. You could not think of a worse nightmare for any kind of regional independence.",
      "that's the first step and not everything can be changed because obviously governments have investments in this but there is what we are studying for instance uh is how what's the",
      "the wealth today is based in the West which means Western Muslim communities have enormous power. How can we change that? So these kinds of things are being studied.",
      "And even that vision has been lost over time in the last century. So one of the things I really recommend people to do, to invest more in reading history is because things are not the same even though they look like they're always the same, they're not the",
      "same, we are where we were. That's not true that's what I tried to show right? So what is changing and how do you read these big changes and then systematically apply pressure and apply redirection where it's needed? That's what you talk about as I completely that's why we need",
      "of a large number of global community, large number people you realize the different opportunities and different dynamics which I can only very briefly talk about right now. The Jews were persecuted in Europe in the West for nearly 2,000 years as modernity arrived",
      "arrived in Europe a little earlier and that empowered Europeans to colonize the rest of the world, Jews who have been a persecuted minority living within Europe began to think that we can use first of all we want to become modernized and when they realized after Jews became modernized that they are still hated. In fact they're hated now in new ways",
      "And as they are realizing this in the 19th century, 18th century and 19th centuries. They are also absorbing the colonial mindset themselves. So what they begin to think is that we cannot live in Europe. We have to plan to colonize one of these other regions and Palestine because it's in their books",
      "on it, but they had other options as well. Well-known Rwanda, elsewhere they could have gone. These were secular atheist Jews, but the begin to plan. They have a vision. Not all of them planned. If you look at their plans none of it worked out, but there was a vision and that vision they kept at and in itself that vision would not have succeeded if not for the First World War and the Second World War",
      "the plan didn't work out, their vision worked out. Now I'm not saying that they are our role models because in many ways they were a colonial... They embraced British and French colonial mindset. They thought of Palestinians and other people as subhuman, that they could just be eliminated just the same way Europe is eliminating us.",
      "But there is something there to learn. Now if you learn more carefully the history, you will realize of course there are similarities and differences. Our...and like in anything, if you're planning a company or planning a business, if your planning construction, you look at similarities and difference as opportunities and threats. We have some opportunities available that are unprecedented which are",
      "We need to have Islam in our lives, not just private but also in our actual lives.",
      "to them about talking to her about her life in Egypt. She said she got married in the 40s and she was showing her wedding pictures to me in the forties, and her husband who had died at that time Allah has mercy on him, was a Sheikh of Qusool al-Sharia in Al Azhar, but she was not wearing hijab in her wedding picture so I asked",
      "and there is a belly dancer with almost no clothes on. I said, this is the 40s Egypt how is that possible? And this is The Wedding of Shaykh al-Azhar. And see she told me, that is what we did if you wanted to be respected.",
      "hurt him, it killed him to have a photographer take my picture. But he had to do it. So he told the photographer when you're taking the picture of my bride without hijab, do not look at her just take a picture and look somewhere else. These were the contradictions of the world that had just come out of colonialism.",
      "That is where Sahwa changed. When you go to Egypt in the 80s and especially then in the 90s, almost every Muslim woman is wearing hijab. And this is happening across the world at a different pace everywhere. It's happening in the rest of the Arab world, of course. The Gulf was much more conservative and now it's becoming westernized. In South Asia, to give you an example, India and Pakistan",
      "Again, another example. Just do you understand what's happening in the Muslim world? And how effort matters. How sahwa and revival matters. In Bangladesh, or Bengal at the time, which is one of the greatest populations of Muslims in India, there is in the 18th century and then 19th century a farazi movement. Anybody guess",
      "And the people who prayed five times a day were mullahs. So, this was the Muslim world. Today, this is very, very different. And I can go on and on. If you say what's happening with the Sahaba or Ihyaa or Tahreek Islami or they call it Tahreek Islamic, Harakat Islamia in Arabic but it's happening everywhere",
      "it's happening everywhere, that's what's happening. So alhamdulillah, what people do the effort people make is changing the world. Yes sister?",
      "Yeah, so both very good points. No no no, what I'm trying to give you is that these are waves and these are trends. And it is true that in Arab countries for example",
      "you are having some of the similar problems with replacement rate or that's not the case in some other places. But, and divorce rate is higher, that is true. Divorce rate goes up whenever there is increase in women education, women health and women resources. So these are larger phenomenon we have studied for example",
      "medieval Damascus, the studies that we have show that there were moments where divorce rate was very high. All I'm saying is that this is not if you're seeing a dip it doesn't mean it's the end of the world. We have seen many dips before and second try not to focus your attention",
      "For example, if you're looking at Egypt I can understand it's depressing. But Turkey is different Pakistan is different Malaysia is different Indonesia is different Western Muslim communities are Different places are going through different movements So for example we were really depressed at a point that in the United States Muslim community was vast majority were pro LGBT just 10 years ago",
      "Most people were saying we have no problem with LGBT. Whereas at the same time, when you surveyed UK Muslims, 95% of UK Muslims were against that and what now happened is that the wave turned even in the United States and the United State Muslim community, the rate is actually very different now. So this is not to say that the Arab Spring was not a heartbreak",
      "There was not a heartbreak, but simply to say that these are not necessarily permanent trends. There are different locales that have their own dynamics in general with the rise of education and modernity you're going to see increased turbulence in families. This was true actually in this Medina Rasulullah because there were wars",
      "wars and migrations, you had very high divorce rate. But when things became settled in the century after for Muslims, that changed. So whenever there is migration, there is war, and there are major social changes, divorce rates tend to go up. Yes, sister? Go ahead.",
      "separation of the wealth classes, even amongst most of the countries. Where it may be very difficult in some situations to actually get married and have families because people can't afford it because the cost of living has gone up without actually having an increase in wealth for the middle class. The rich are getting richer and more in their interest to stay rich and not share that wealth. So coming back to the theme",
      "because women are being more proactive about their rights as Muslim women who are married and when they're not getting what they need, they're speaking up and they're getting divorced. They're not staying in conflict situations. So how do we as a community other than you know I think there needs to be a bigger action when it comes to the implication of not having means",
      "it's actually causing a lot of suffering throughout, not just our families but in our worldwide community. Absolutely. So everything that you said I agree with. It's deen but Rasulullah says I'm going to end with this because I realize our time is up isn't it? How much time do we have? Ten more minutes? Okay. Let me just respond to her and then I'll come back to you.",
      "come back to you. Rasulullah says that Iman is seventy some branches. The highest branch of Iman",
      "Something as simple as simply cleaning the way for people to walk on or parking your car correctly so that it's not inconvenient for people. That's part of deen, that's part Iman. So our task is always to know which part of Deen is missing and it helps to know ourselves, to know the community, to talk to various parts of the community",
      "I can't talk about all of the world's problems. I do believe that let's not overemphasize deen or lack of deen, but rather focus on which part of deem is weak because you're right if women are feeling that they have opportunities outside the Muslim community and within the Muslim Community they are necessarily restricted and then sometimes unnecessarily restricted",
      "necessarily restricted and unnecessarily. Necessarily meaning by the requirement of deen and community, we are restricted. And if you do not want restrictions on your lifestyle, the Muslim community in the way of Islam is going to look to you restricted at first. And that's a big attraction out there. In the academy, my field, many young women for instance who come into the academy find",
      "Why do they love them? You can get jobs easy. Why? Because these old white men see that this is the way to get to the Muslim community. These women are not going to get leadership or important positions, or even decent spaces in their mosques but when they go and embrace feminism and abortion and LGBT on campuses",
      "And if I'm a woman, I'm going to say, look, I am going to look for another path. Right? So that's the problem. It is a problem in too many masjids. But if I am goign to go through the route of pleasing those white men, the rest of my life is going to be pleasing those White Men. I am just going to become a feminist just to please those White men. That's the route and then I am invited to masjid, I will be invited to important places, I may die alone",
      "alone. But that's the long term. In other words, fixing our communities, fixing of families is difficult at first and for women who are qualified and who have love for Islam, love for deen, Muslim communities are turning them off and that is a big loss for us. So those are structural problems we need to address.",
      "But at the same time, we're talking about Muslim communities, Muslim countries. The problem is political. Our as minorities, we do not have the power to decide. We live by the conditions created by it. So for example here you are here because of Intel. You were created by socioeconomic.",
      "This community is created by socio-economic conditions. We cannot control them. But the Muslim, you know nearly 2 billion Muslims are living in circumstances where these horrible conditions where they cannot live right? They cannot get married until as sister said absolutely if you're not getting married until late because you do not have housing, you do",
      "and children and everything. But those are political problems. Here we have certain opportunities, but these are always going to be limited. It's like you're living in Mecca, right? And the Rasulullah ﷺ didn't just say that I'm going to when I mean be living in Makkah as in the Prophet's Meccan period. The Prophet ﷺ is looking for sovereignty. He's looking to go out of there so he can create a community and live by the Sharia.",
      "And so we have to sort of keep those two things in mind. You have to make da'wah here, you have to do your best here but understand that you cannot apply full sharia without having some political sovereignty. Yes brother?",
      "Okay, so I completely agree that you have to worry about your children. But allow me to respect",
      "Allow me to respectfully disagree about the zero-sum scenario you created. The zero sum is, you can only win one or the other. As if Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and he's making da'wah. That's what I'm trying to create the picture is that Rasulallah Sallallaahu Alaihim is making daahwa in Makkah Is he saying let me not worry about where I might protect the community? He's doing both! And that's the way of Islam",
      "It's not everybody's job, but if you are only worried about small steps, baby steps, you are good and healthy if you have good leadership. But if that same leadership is going to exploit you, if you do not have the big picture, you",
      "to be exploited because all you're worried about is teaching my children the Quran, right? Which is great. Necessary. But these same children could be serving the military generals shooting at innocent people while telling them that yeah, the Quran Allah tells you to do it. Why? Because they have the Quran but they don't have the picture of the Ummah. So you cannot... Basically it's not a zero-sum game. You have",
      "The same thing today, for example, what we're seeing on campuses. If these young men and women said let me do my engineering, let me be a really good engineer even if that means that I'm participating in a genocide. No! These people said you know what? I have to worry about my job and my grades and whatnot but when my country is committing genocide",
      "is getting out of doing both. And as human beings, we are not sheep. We're not mice. We are not rabbits. We have the ability to envision in a way that other animals don't. When human beings find themselves in a situation where they cannot dream",
      "If you try to live without dreams, you will live in a nightmare forever. Because somebody else will come and use you and exploit you. So you have to have your own dreams. So that's all I'll say there inshallah. And this young man is very eager so I have to take his one last question.",
      "That's a very good question and can I just answer that question because I think it is really brilliant question. And you're absolutely correct, that 1.8 billion Muslims are not going to follow any single vision nor is the case they all going to pray and fast. They're always going to be bad apples right? But the good thing if you look at history or you look",
      "you do not have to have 100% perfect individuals for there to be a good community or a good polity, a good society. Right? So usually if you are in a situation where you do",
      "So for example, in the time of the Sahaba. Just to give you an example. Something to think with. How many of the sahaba of the Prophet ﷺ? Actually how many sahaba were there? Who can tell me? Was that? Okay very good question. So in the 10 years of Medina or Mecca. How may sahaba are there in Mecca? So yeah okay so these numbers are different.",
      "ومع ذلك يوجد سبعة منهم تتبع المنافق والسبعة تستمر مع النبي عليه السلام",
      "the conquest came and the number exploded. How many Sahaba did you have? 1,400. Hudaybiyah, 1,000. Followed the Prophet ﷺ. Some people say 1,500 but 1,100 that's the number that the ulama considered to be the golden number of the Sahaba because Allah says about them in the Quran in Surat Al-Fath, عَلِمُ اللَّهُ مَا فِي قُلُوبِهِمْ Allah knew what is in their hearts and Allah was pleased with what was in their",
      "in their hearts. Anyway, long story short of these how many people memorized the Quran? How many Sahaba had memorized the Qur'an in the lifetime of Prophet? Not later but in the life time of Prophet in Medina? 25 The vanguard of people who have",
      "and that's all there was at this time. Quran was the vision, Quran was knowledge, it was nothing else. It is 25. So you do not need... The Prophet didn't say that every one of the 1400 have to memorize the Quran before I do anything. We have to understand how these dynamics work. We tend to fall into this fallacies what I call the sequentialist fallacy",
      "things in which everybody first must become perfect and then I can think about a good community, and then i can think of a good polity and a good society and good ummah. That's not how it works. There will never be a point where there are no family problems. There is never a point when husband and wife are not going to fight or people in the community are not",
      "With that, I know there are lots of really good questions. And I'm learning tremendously from you all but I have to inshallah wrap it up as well so we ask Allah SWT to benefit us from what He has taught us and teach us which is a benefit to us We ask Allah to enlighten our hearts and minds",
      "in the ummah of His beloved Muhammad and the guidance of his beloved Prophet to our hearts. And may Allah give love and harmony in our communities, in our families. We will never be perfect but Allah forgives and overlooks. He is",
      "الأرض ويوم العرض عليك اللهم أنسر الإسلام والمسلمين يا رب العالمين وآخر دعوانا أن الحمد لله ربنا"
    ]
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  {
    "file": "anjum/Dr_ Ovamir Anjum First Ummatics Colloquium Present_6juLMXPToio&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750670456.opus",
    "text": [
      "So, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem. The argument that I have made in the Yaqeen article that came out in November 2019 of course I had thought about that article and that case for some 20 years that i've been working on this question of Islamic political thought And there I made the case that the political unification",
      "or spiritual solidarity, but political solidarity is religious obligation. Something that I lay out the case in my article, but also it is an urgent need and a feasible goal attaining such solidarity at social economic military cultural and political levels is not only important, but current under circumstances both an urgent task, but, also, I think particularly feasible.",
      "that we live in the age of de-globalization, environmental collapse and cultural nativism rising in the West. Major changes that many scholars argue are not like a 20 year flood or 100 year flood but they're more like a 500 year flood in human events",
      "to respond to these events thinking about the next couple hundred years rather than year-to-year and month-to month as many of us are forced to think given the events. And many tragedies that we live. So what I hear, simply want to reiterate but I think our key takeaways from that article",
      "from that article apart from the extensive case I made for some of the conceptual tools such as scholarly consensus or the idea of asymptotic ideal and the idea that the caliphate is not merely a political arrangement but also an aspiration and a place in Muslim imagination so that even after such a political system may be achieved, it is something that must be a fixture. The ideal must be",
      "religious thinking so that thinking about legitimate government accountable government, thinking about the Ummah those are things that should be as much part of Muslim thinking as you know rules about or you know making wudu. Those are things sort of course that all part of the religious discourse have always been there",
      "that are religiously quite important in the Quran and in the Sunnah, but they have become over time less important for historical reasons that I discuss in my book 2012 publication. So the argument, two propositions that I make one that we all look for religious and social reforms and identify many problems in different societies or an Islamic tradition",
      "But I think that problems ranging from these moral religious corruption, violence and justice against the weak and underprivileged at all different levels in Muslim societies and Muslim communities and Muslim households. We see those problems and some of them can be traced to theoretical, some to institutional traditional and some sort of behavioral problems that we have absorbed over the last century or so.",
      "the last century or so. And I argue that, and then of course you have the defense of persecuted Muslim minorities, the number of which is going up drastically, and other acute pathologies and traumas that afflict Muslims, I argue they cannot be overcome a result except within illegitimate Islamic political framework that transcends the current prevailing nation state model. So here I'm making the argument that our personal spiritual religious moral as well as communal lives",
      "lives are into integrally connected to our political well-being as well. The second, of course this proposition is well known since Aristotle and Plato to human thought. The Second Proposition I wish to highlight also is that there that such an institution will not in itself eliminate all these problems so rather than rather it would likely facilitate their amelioration or even resolution whereas without unity",
      "see each one is aggravating, pushing us toward the punishment that Allah inflicted on the Israelites. As Allah says in Surah Al-A'rafa, we seem to be going down that route so that a legitimate political order that transcends the current plethora of sovereign nation states and secures Muslims effective cooperation in areas such as defense economy and governance is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the revival of Islam",
      "of Islam and completion and sustainability of certain crucial reforms. I choose to call this project Ommatic, this is a term that I defend in my 2012 book the idea being that really it's thinking about the Ummah as the essence of Islamic politics just as thinking about The Polis, the city was where the word political comes from for the Greeks so to say ommatic political thought",
      "because really it's a dramatic thought. But nonetheless, dramatic political thought I think has certain logic to it because thinking about the ummah but also thinking about that territory that the ummuh must therefore govern and almost accept the fact that there are people living within us that are not part of the believing ummah, but nonetheless they are part of",
      "Similarly, we also embrace and deal with the fact that there are that is not always politically united. There are Muslims living outside and those were things that were dealt with early on in Islamic history and concepts such as Dar al-Islam, Dar al Kufr and others, Dar Al Harth, Dar ul Dawah, others that have been invented to deal with some of them. So why call such an imagined future entity?",
      "future entity, the caliphate. I think you provide some justification for that it's not self evident people would say why don't talk about Islamic State or some kind of Muslim Union like European Union but I argue that there is a need for us to use power, the power of history memory and all and the need for authenticity and continuity to the Prophet",
      "sometimes more compelling needs and more compelling argument than any rational or cerebral case we might make for it. I argue that there are new threats and opportunities that i pointed out, um and also I say that I'm going to just list the paragraphs as I have named them paragraph d the caliphate's past",
      "been various forms of the caliphate and so it's not a given recipe but nonetheless there is enough in agreed upon Islamic political jurisprudence and norms that require a certain political form. So, one could say that yes there is a great flexibility in Islam in what particular tools with",
      "how power might be distributed yet at the same time what is non-negotiable it seems to me in Islamic tradition, is that we are talking about loyalty to the Ummah governance of the Ummat and that is something that of course is necessarily lost in the current nation state model. In my article I provide a very brief",
      "past and existing efforts on the caliphate. That was not the main point of the article, but of course going forward any such effort will have to learn from existing efforts and critique them in a close fashion. I think that what i'm really looking to highlight here is paragraphs F and G moving forward and beyond that crucial points of debate among the Islamic movement",
      "the Islamic movements that have been committed to Islamizing politics, such as gradualism. Right? The people who say that well first you establish the family and community and then fix your nation states and then move toward a unification whereas this approach has been critiqued as well. People talk about bottom-up or top down states approaches to major change.",
      "The relationship to the West as a political other, or as a potential friend with whom we seek coexistence. Not complete assimilation but not clash either. Those are I think important points of debate that need to be continually dealt with in renewed tension.",
      "to Western bodies of knowledge and institutions. This I think is extremely important, and many existing scholars have dismissed Western bodies or bodies of as Western yet at the same time they're both compelling and they're not particularly Western. And I think that dismissing them often puts us at a great disadvantage.",
      "So we must have a mastery of certain empirical data and experiences, and fields of understanding in politics society. Otherwise, we are incapable of deconstructing this almost it's a fashionable decolonial anti-colonial third worldist approach among Muslim intellectuals",
      "intellectuals often leads to a foot in the words that I usually use, it leads to new god. So anti-modernity becomes a new God that we worship rather than Allah and being able to you know if it becomes a kind of religion where we have to romanticize the past against the present and i think that those are things",
      "Those are things that ought to be addressed when thinking about these future problems, the mechanisms of bringing about change. That's another thing right? People focus on a bottom up or top down relationship to non Muslim citizens and subjects as well as non-Muslim interlocutors. That is another thing that hasn't been sufficiently addressed.",
      "question of how to organize, how such a body would be organized. Would it be a pure sort of model from the past or something made up of existing elements of the present? So those are some of the points that I think that going forward, such an effort will have to necessarily engage and I do not pretend even",
      "I want to also point out in the next paragraph, why a new effort? My vision of why I think that you. Effort is needed. You're all here because well, you recognize that it is both needed and it's possible to have such a discussion but to articulate them.",
      "My point here is to explore the how of, how to get there collectively. How to actualize a nomadic political vision that addresses the aforementioned questions in such a way that is characterized by these few features that I think may be missing or not fully present in the current and past caliphate movements. One what is realistic and speaks to historical complexities as well",
      "as well as social and scientific bodies of knowledge available to us today. Many of the articulations of a nomadic vision in the 1950s, 60s, 70s I think are to some degree abased they were sort of post-World War developmentalist model",
      "state-based development and many of these movements sought to look at the world and their own organization of movements as political parties. And so they're very centralized, they were top down I think that those are things that need to be reviewed and we need a new articulation of the caliphate needs to also engage with our history of the Caliphate",
      "caliphate and political lessons that we learn. Second, um and this is an important thing for me as not only a goal but almost as a measure of how well we're doing which is that such an effort should speak equally to the various strata of Muslim life meaning are we engaging only energetic young men who are most easily attracted to audacious optimism right? And of course talking about the caliphates requires this kind of audacity",
      "But also, if you're not engaging nursing mothers and aging grandparents or community leaders and activists dedicated academics and scholars school teachers university professors who are committed to Islam and committed to the and committed UMA centered political thinking but might see. You know, my providers more sort of political",
      "sort of more realistic, more grain granular textured understanding of how change might occur. We are failing if you're not engaging all these types of groups of people in the ummah. Similarly efforts I think should be made to include in the conversation sympathetic non-Muslims within the Muslim lands and outside of it. Finally such a discourse should not be limited",
      "Islamic thought and life. So those were some of the things that I want to see as features of our intellectual movement, and whatever social movement that may come out of it. And then I will skip the next two paragraphs, the movement,",
      "some envision how I envision the Califol governance to be those are things that will necessarily be more practical questions um that will have to be treated by subgroups among us and many other future scholars and endeavors who want to take up the project so i will get to just the next steps paragraph j i propose that we hold another colloquium in two or three months",
      "three months in which two or three other scholars would present their views just as I've done mine. In this session, and then we similarly build on it, critique it. And finally, we also take step towards establishing a center for research or think tank. And or a website to advance what I have called dramatic political thought practice."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Dr_ Ovamir Anjum - Ibn Taymiyya and the Caliphate__w0BZJHAVFgQ&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750677154.opus",
    "text": [
      "I am humbled and honored by all of the erudite people who are present, and I am humble by your introduction. So Shaykh al-Islam ibn Taymiyyah is",
      "a phenomenon in Islamic history, not just a figure as many of you I'm sure know. People since his time have... You know don't quite know even those who disagree with him how to quite disagree with them because he was truly a remarkable remarkable",
      "not just a scholar, he was a scholar. He was an activist. He as philosopher, he's a theologian, he is jurist. He is linguists who had language theory which we are figuring out as we understand more of contemporary linguistic theory that if you just look at nothing that he is famous for, just his language theory, he one of most remarkable theorist and philosophers in entire history",
      "entire history, not just Islamic history. And I say that with the greatest admiration for him at the same time he is used for such terrifying projects as we see in Middle East today, such as whether it's ISIS or Al-Qaeda and also before that other movements.",
      "so the question i want to begin by addressing is why is that the case? Why is he so invoked? Is he uniquely amenable to misinterpretation or is there something substantive in his writings that leads to violence",
      "And so I'm going to address that question more in a very brief way, just pointing to some of the things that we should look at. And then I'm gonna talk a little bit about what I do with my book and finally end with more reflections on how people scholars have appropriated him in the West",
      "And of course, it's very common to say everybody has misappropriated someone we don't like. I'm not quite sure who has misappropriated or not but I'm going to try and make a few arguments on what I think is happening. So you know, Ibn Taymiyyah for the last two centuries since somebody like",
      "the Syrian scholars in the 19th century and then in the 20th century people like And Then she did law most of all and after that a number of other figures and now contemporary giant have all been fascinated by",
      "and have drawn on him so with such enthusiasm which is a remarkable contrast with the complete neglect of his works in the centuries before that. That is, in his lifetime he's a phenomenon but",
      "almost becomes a pariah so that people who draw on him, and people continue to draw on Him but people draw on with great care and sometimes without giving due credit. So for example there's some recent research that shows that Imam al-Shatabi copies the whole passages from Ibn Taymiyyah writings in his Al-Mu'afaqa't without giving credit because Ibn Tamiyyah is so has become so controversial by that time",
      "by that time, you know. It's a generation after Ibn Taymiyyah. The same is true there are some writings that shows and this needs to be more investigation that Ibn Khaldun also in some ways is influenced by Ibn Tamiyyah though this one is a claim I'm not quite sure about myself. This has been made in the dissertation so but then you find such diverse movements",
      "movements as some of the Indian scholars, people like Shaul Aliullah for example were such great admirers of Ibn Taymiyyah and Shaul Aliyullah if anybody knows him he's a giant. He is like he's Ghazali plus for his time and Shauli Allah has this capacity to admire both Ibn Tamia and Ibn Arabi at the same time but you have then",
      "You have then in the last two centuries, the particular appropriations of Ibn Taymiyyah and readings of Ibtaymiyya have been such diverse as diverse and varied as you have people like the reformists, modernist, militants, Wahabis all draw on Ibn Tamiyyah. So what is a particular attraction of Ibbat-Tamiyyah?",
      "who is very critical of entire Hadith literature and certainly one of the most brilliant scholars, regardless of disagreement we may have with him. Fazlur Rahman was no joke. And he is fascinated by Ibn Taymiyyah. Some of his last writings, he quotes passages after passages from Ibn Temiyyah as if this was a great discovery for him. A colleague is working on a dissertation right now in UK on that relationship between Fazlul Rahman,",
      "fascination with the Timya so what is what is I think that maybe to I guess just to deepen some of the comments even thing he has writings and his work was admired by",
      "even in his lifetime so asudki the father uh for example wrote and he confides this to who is a great scholar in his own right one of the greatest traditionalists of all times um who was not fully agreement with ibn timiya so when he writes or quotes something on about him he isn't simply doing that because he is trying to eulogize",
      "sort of ibn temiyya you know so he quotes from a subki that even tania is an ocean of knowledge and his piety his love for god is even more enormous than his knowledge so this is someone who is uh very much in disagreement with imitina on his theology and on his language theory",
      "And then you have the happy himself say similar thing which I'm not going to quote or go into detail because my purpose really here is to draw out the main themes We also know that even Timmya is something different about it, you know if you go look at the biographies of all the pop literature in history who find that By the fourth century most of the dilemma had become professors like us",
      "There are people who work for madrasas or they work for a madhub, you know, like a madrassa or an institution. You could say that supports one madhab or another but their daily bread comes from some, income from some land which some military commanders and rulers, sultan or governor owns and gives them as pious waqf. But their job",
      "is to write books with him to me and you get something almost a different phenomenon you get a someone who is an activist and a Phenomenon In the sense that I'll give you a quick anecdote to give you your sense of that You know, Emmanuel has added for example. Who is a great hero?",
      "and a great phenomenon Islamic history itself but he's an intellectual you know his life is life of an intellectual life of a professor all right with particular sensitive sensitivity to spiritual matters into the Nia but you know he's leading no armies he's threatening though Kings in fact it is the kings themselves who in his early",
      "to run away from the Salah Jaffa and so on. That's not the case with Ibn Timiyyah, you get with Ibb al-Timiyyah someone who single handedly prepares the Mamluk elite in Damascus to fight the Mongols in their very important... And he goes and he says to the rulers that if you do not fight don't come back we'll choose someone and we will fight",
      "who is the governor of Damascus at that time, has to stay and fight. And you know, at that he would go around and tell people that you are going to be victorious. And he would say, you know people would say at least say inshallah, sheikh. He said I say insha'Allah but not because I'm sure it's God's will. And the victory did come. This was a victory against the Mongols. It was no joke.",
      "And so his popularity in Damascus at the time was not so much one of a theorist or a theologian or philosopher. He was seen as a saint, he was seen a figure who was looked up by masses as someone who had great political clout even though he'd had no political ambition. So at that time the Mongol king Sultan in Cairo",
      "Cairo calls him and says people have been saying that you want my my throne And he says something. That is so perfect Such a perfect reflection of both of it to me, and it It's exactly what roomy Jalal the roomie said in the poet in a Persian couplet Or something similar he says that you know",
      "is not worth two to me. And the king says, yes I know that. But he felt relieved that Ibn Taymiyyah wasn't after a throne. But for the king to have suspected that Ibb al-Taymiyyyah was after a scholar was something very remarkable in Islamic history because scholars were intellectuals. Nobody should be threatened by me at a political level.",
      "to vote for me if my life depended on it. So this is the interesting sort of phenomenon of Ibn Taymiyyah, yet Ibn Tamiyyah, the centuries after he comes in 14th century 15 16 17 18 centuries you don't really hear much of Ibtaymiyya. He doesn't become a viable alternative. The late Sunni orthodoxy",
      "and theology in jurisprudence. In jurisprudent, Ibn Taymiyyah actually doesn't really interfere much with the Madhhab unlike the common understanding he doesn't have anything against the. But even language theory or you could say philosophy we don't really see Ibn Tamiyyah but certainly most importantly Kalam. You know Ibn Tamiyya is largely forgotten except for by",
      "by, you know he's taken seriously by some of the reformists and in a jurist that you find. In Ottoman Empire there are some reforms connected to contract law based on the fatah of Ibn Timya. There are some scholars in India who are inspired by Ibn Temiya. Then in the 20th century, in the 19th and 20th centuries things change and what's really interesting if you look at it is Syria and Iraq, some of these scholars were working",
      "followers of Ibn Arabi who are fascinated by Ibn Timiyya and that is when Ibn Temiyya was rediscovered. And then you have the other rediscovery of Ibin Temiyyya which is by the Wahabis. The Wahabis themselves don't really use Ibn Tamiyya very much at first, in fact Suleiman ibn Abdulwahab who is a brother of Sheikh Muhammad ibn al-Wahhab writes refutation of Muhammad abdul wahab using Ibn timiyya",
      "himself uses ibn Taymiyyah, right? And the Wahhabi answered at that time is that well yes Ibn Taymyyah may have disagreed but so what. We're not muqallids of Ibn Tamiyya. So the idea that Ibn Taimiyyat provided you know cannon fodder for or fuel for the Wahabi Islamic which is not entirely accurate in fact it could be used against the takfir, the general takfir that the Wahabis",
      "It was an innovation in Islamic history. After the first three centuries, you didn't really have general of Muslims until the Wahhabis. And that also disappeared by the way in the century after. So Wahhabi sort of calmed down after that. But Ibn Taymiyyah then reappears in a number of other projects and the most important project",
      "project intellectually is people like you know some degree the Syrian scholars, Alusi, Iraqi and Syrian scholars but most importantly the Egyptians like Ahmed Mohammed Shakir and Hamid al-Fiqhi and Rashid Ridha. These are the giants and each one of these scholars is a remarkable scholar. I mean Ahmed Mohammed Shaker if you read his or Mahmoud Mohammed Shakira, I'm sorry. Ahmed also, Mohammed Shakiro, but Mahmood Mohammed Shakiri,",
      "who was the literature, especially edits a number of works and sort of makes the philosophical and the jurists and Ibn Taymiyyah, the theologian Ibn Tamiyyah available to the people. But that takes a long time for people to begin to read his works. Then on the other hand, so let me switch gears and look at the Orientalist scholarship.",
      "are at first reading Ibn Taymiyyah in bits and pieces. And what they read, they're fascinated by but they don't quite know what to make of him. And the general trend is that whatever an Orientalist is working on you know, and then he reads Ibn Tamiyyah and says well Ibn Tamiyya is that. So for example Golziar is working Ibn Hazm. So he says Ibn Temiya is inspired by Ibn Hazzam and Izz al-Zahiri",
      "Whatever the orientalists say, by the way, you will hear in a few years some Muslim scholars repeating it. Then you have other people who say Ibn Taymiyyah was more of a Khariji because somebody's working on Kharijis and he reads Ibn Tamiyyah and says hey this guy is a Khrarji. But then, and then you have more recently Professor Yahya Mesho for example who is a scholar of Ibn Sina and he read Ibn Sinan and he really is a great scholar of the Ibn Taimiyyat unlike some of the others",
      "And he says that Benteimia is so heavily influenced by Ibn Sina. Also, if we were to look at Orientalists, one of the best scholars for Benteimiya in 1920s and 30s is Andre Louis or Laouste, who is truly... He has a limited number of works that are not edited many of them",
      "of them, so he makes some central big mistakes about Ibn Taymiyyah. Nonetheless, he is somebody who is a serious scholar. But even Western scholarship doesn't take Laos seriously and then there's a big gap between 1930s and 1980s and 90s when you begin to get Western scholars interested in Ibn Temiyyah again. And nothing serious happens until later in the 90s.",
      "Laust, let's turn to caliphate for example. Laust repeats something or says something that gets repeated by everyone including Muslim scholars who are reading Western scholarship which is the Ibn Taymiyyah rejected idea of a caliph and Ibn Tamia says that the Sunni idea, the Sunnis orthodoxy, the Caliphate is a dead horse as not an obligation on Sunnis and so on and so forth",
      "And that's a complete fiction. And you wonder how can such a victim, because in the Jumu'ah Fatawa he has very clear fatwa that not only that A, the Khilafah is an obligation B even stronger he says mulk or kingdom in Islam is haram But it is tolerable under certain circumstances right so that but is tolerableth part that everybody remembers",
      "haram and caliphate, therefore it's not a form of mulk. It's an obligation. It is something that is forgotten until very recently when people go back and look at what Ibn Tumayya really was saying. Now, what is interesting is that you can understand why Laus said what he said because if you read his which is the main pamphlet that he writes for the rulers",
      "It is a work that pays no attention to the Khilafah. Whereas if you read his Minhaj al-Sunnah and his Fatawa, he says very clearly that that khilafa is an obligation and so what I argue in my book really briefly Is that ibn Taymiyyah changes the notion of what the caliphate meant for people like Mawarid Ghazali and",
      "even as a contemporary of Ibn Taymiyyah for the first few centuries. Khilafah was not a question, it wasn't a debated question. This was essential to backbone of Sunni Islam but the way khilafat was understood was that its basic merit was its continuity with the Prophet. Its continuity with",
      "the Banu Abbas to the government established by the Prophet. So for even if this were the case, I would argue that if Ibn Taymiyyah had written at that time he would not have questioned Khilafat. But after the Mongols, the Khilafa ends in all of its power, even a symbolic power end so that is what forces Ibn Temiyyah to rethink. The second thing is that",
      "classical Islamic thought thinks of the Khilafah as primarily a top-down or a descending institution authorized by the Prophet in one hand and on the other hand is symbol of the unity of the Ummah. So that unity and that continuity those two things are so central for the ulama That to question the khilafa would have been nonsensical",
      "who have been self-defeating for the Sunni ulama, especially in the face of the anti caliphates or counter caliphate that are the Fatimids in Egypt and so on. Uri ibn Taymiyyah a new option opens up but this option opens out for a lot of people you know but other ulama do not take the cue there are people who continue to consider the Caliphate as legitimate",
      "and others who write about the great calamity of the Mongols in terms of the end times, in terms off the signs of the day of judgment literature. That the Mongol have spelled the end time",
      "And there's no rational way to respond to what has happened. Ibn Taymiyyah, and you'll find it quite remarkable that his own students, a minor student, younger student, Ibn Ghathiyyat is a major figure in this literature who writes about signs of the Day of Judgment and so on. And many people are writing at that time. This is a sign of these are times of Black Death. These are times",
      "are coming. Ibn Taymiyyah's response is quite remarkable that he doesn't, he has all the hadith in front of him, he doesn' write about end times literature. What he writes about is how can the intellectual heritage of the ummah can be, must be, should be reformed? This is a rational response this is an activist response and the way i like to put it this is optimistic response. This is",
      "They may not be near, but that is not what we are asked to do. So you find in Ibn Taymiyyah really no significant attention to the signs of the Day of Judgment literature. But rather what you have is it talks about how the philosophers have corrupted this part of our heritage. The linguists have messed up this part",
      "and we can fix this. By doing what? By doing rational reasoning, by arguing, by going back. So in short, Ibn Taymiyyah's project was to use the first three centuries of Islam as a way, as a foil to critique the next three centuries if Islam, and he's writing in the seventh and eighth centuries. That in short is what he's trying to do, and that in short one of the reasons why he is very, very attractive figure for any movement that comes later",
      "that, hey the great classical heritage is so great and so overburdening we can never question it. And we must...we are stuck to it. Ibn Taymiyyah provides a way out that is an equal weight to Ghazali and Razi. And that says, hey you know there's another way of doing kalam. There's another",
      "Is the reason why he is such an attractive figure to not only the Wahhabis But also to the reformists who are rational Reformist of the 19th century Syria and Iraq in 20th century Egypt until today Yet, he also provides that possibility because once you Disrupt",
      "Continuity of the tradition, the opening that is possible, the way it's going to be now resettled can be very ugly. In other words he allows you to open, open Ishtihad but Ishtihad is a double-edged sword You know? You could do Ishtiha by saying hey we want to become more modern But you can also do the same Ishtia and say we want you You know get rid of modernity altogether",
      "We want to live in different times. So this is the you see He provides that firepower to unsettle The weight of the classical heritage Which is found to be necessary by so many thinkers today, but you know if you if you were if it didn't have him in Kenya and In the kind of aura that comes with me you would have to say that",
      "you would have to say that anytime I disagree with something that has been agreed upon by the Asha'ara or the Maturidiyya, or the four madhhab in jurisprudence. This is Islam and there's no way out. And I think in a way, Abi Tamia provides, we are all indebted to Abi Tamian for his fiqh of uqud, for his questioning of the idea that triple divorce is effective.",
      "he opens up the possibility. Yet at the same time, does Ibn Taymiyyah blunder? Yeah of course, I think he does. Which is precisely to me the great problem in the way contemporary Salafis read Ibn Tamiyyah. They read Ibti'miya as a singular figure, as the only person who got Islam right whereas I believe the way to read Ibbin Tamiyya",
      "is in conversation with this great Islamic tradition, which he never denied, never rejected. In fact, he upheld the ulama and the respect for the ulamas all his life, more so than, in fact, the ulamas would conspire against him to use sort of a very practical anecdote, to have him killed when he comes out, you know, a devoted follower of his becomes the king,",
      "had you imprisoned and then trying to conspire to execute you. He turns against that king, and he says well how dare you say that you can imprison the ulama? These are ulama. And this King Qalawun now turns again Ibn Taymiyyah too because he said this dude is a loose cannon. You can't control him. But the point was that Ibn Tamiyyah is very reverent of the ulamas",
      "Yet, he is pushing back against the authority of the ulama that claims to be finalistic and so on. And that's something I argue in my book. My point is that if Ibn Taymiyyah is read in isolation as the final version of Islam then you have a problem. And as one of the intelligent commentators Saudi dissident Muhammad al-Mas'adi",
      "comments and he has a nice work on this where he says that you know his contemporary Saudis they read only Ibn Taymiyyah but they don't read what Ibn Tamiyya was arguing against. So in that sense, in a way some of the other users of Ibn Taimiyyah like Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Ahmed al-Raysuni are my view more loyal followers of Ibin Tamiyyya because they do what he recommends",
      "he recommends they should do. So these people would say that Ibn Taymiyyah is their role model, and they're very clear about this. But when Ibn Tamiyyah for example supports torture in his judiciary procedures and says it's okay, Yusuf al-Qaradawi says well we'll take the opinion of Al Ghazali. And that to me is necessary because Ibn Taimiyyya never claimed to be infallible and to do so",
      "Similarly, B'te'miyah's opinion on for example and I want to take a different point here that the often the idea that B'teymiyya is a literalist or a scripturalist actually he is a scripturist and literalist but he also has a theology. A theology in which divine love, love of God mercy of God plays such a central role that he has difficulty understanding how would God put anyone in hellfire forever so in one of his last fatwas",
      "prompting of his student, Ibn al-Qayyim he says that you know,, the eternity, the annihilation of hellfire. This was, he and ibn al Qayyim argue was one of the earlier opinions that hellfire comes to an end. Again there is so much scriptural data that would say just how could you ever reading this in Quran would ever say that",
      "Hellfire would come to an end, but he argues you look at his argument is arguing today said God with all his mercy So it would be Mia is not just a simple scripturalist. There are points at which she says this couldn't be the case either time So that's just a big picture now let me",
      "argue for what ibn Taymiyyah's political vision was and what it might mean today. I think if we want to understand ibn Tamiyyah quickly, in a nutshell the crucial thing for him was",
      "Worship God and love God actively. So anything, any theology, any jurisprudence that in his view contradicted the possibility of loving God and God loving you back had to be fought. And as we see that even in the annihilation of the fire this was by the way one of the last fatwas of Ibn Taymiyyah and it is controversial whether he wrote it or not. We know for sure that Ibn al-Qayyim held this opinion whether Ibn Tamiyyah did or not is controversial",
      "is controversial. But nonetheless, if you look at all of his teachings about God, the love of God, his biggest problem with Ash'ari theology was that Ash'aris made it impossible for God to be loved or love. And God could not love human beings and human beings could not really love God. And that was his biggest",
      "Love is a kind of weakness. God couldn't have it. So therefore, love has to be understood simply as a promise for reward in afterlife. But Ibn Taymiyyah says, well, promise for a reward is a different thing from love. And if you are not feeling love of God... In that sense he was a very Sufi figure and that's what people don't understand. Early Sufis were the enemies of Ahlul Kalam for precisely these reasons. As you know,",
      "Halaj was a Hanbali and the only people who supported Halaj when he was being executed were the Hanbalis. And this, in later medieval period there was sort of a marriage between Sufism and Kalam or Ash'arism by which as a result of which people think that they have always been together but in fact early Kalam and early Sabuf were mortal enemies.",
      "is against Ahlul Kalam by saying that no, God's love is real and God's Love on both directions is real. And if you tell me that your theology tells you God cannot love or God cannot act in time because God is eternal and timeless then there is something wrong with it. So this ability, this necessity to act out of love for God",
      "God in an active way is to me the central common as now what comes out of this is a word that I Think we could use with some caution, but it describes his thought well which is optimism. I Don't mean modern optimism.I mean religious optimism meaning the hope that things can be done hope that God This theology of Hope and as we know John Hope John Hoover a colleague of ours who's a Catholic",
      "who is a Catholic theologian and a very accomplished scholar of Ibn Taymiyyah, writes this book called Ibn Tamiyyah's Theology of Theological Optimism which i think is an appropriate term where he says that God's ability to act, God necessity to act in time is the crucial element of Ibtaymiyya which he's trying to save from both Ash'ari theology and philosophy at the time. What I argue my book is that Ibn Taimiyyah also",
      "also is a political there is that is also his Thought political thought is also the part of political act at optimism the possibility that The ummah the Muslims community Muslim community can act to change things That was it may it may sound like a completely given now that we have We live in a modern period but it is quite a significant",
      "a significant contribution if you want to be theologically serious about it that we can be politically effective and we can change things uh not wait for the messiah or not wait",
      "the ethical objectivism that's called in modern philosophical discourse. And this psychological optimism is fitrah. His theology of fitrah is quite remarkable because he says that ordinary human being, ordinary Muslim can know right from wrong, can know ethical truths whereas",
      "Whereas the ashaara, as we know famously held that they couldn't. And the maturidiyya were in between. But Ibn Taymiyyah says that ethical truths are accessible to him however his ethical he's not a muhtazili in the sense that he doesn't bind God to reward an afterlife for the ethical knowledge that can come to us as a result of rational effort no he said in other words if you can do good",
      "If you know good and evil, you're not going to be held accountable in afterlife until God sends a messenger and you become mukallaf in a different way. In that sense he agrees with the asha'ara. But on the other hand, in the human side, he agrees saying that human beings can know ethical truths and this is, in my view,",
      "a bottom-up political thought in which an ordinary Muslim can know the right thing to do. So he has this famous fatwa where he says that istihad is a divisible thing, so that if you are an expert",
      "can make ishtihad in that field. You don't have to be a mujtahid and everything. This, by the way, is also an opinion held by Imam al-Ghazali but it doesn't become popular or operationalized by Al Ghazali. But it is there in al-Hazali as well. But for Ibn Taymiyyah if you look at his especially his popular words like siyasa shira'iyyaa and al-hisba and so on this is very central then nasiha becomes central to his social vision.",
      "Finally, his political vision and his views on his caliphate in the last five minutes. How is he different in his theory of khilafah? I argue that there's no doubt that Ibn Taymiyyah says khilafa is an obligation for Muslims. That sort of foundation of Islamics in theology nobody has ever really disagreed in pre-modern period. What he says however is that khilfa is not a ritual obligation",
      "obligation but irrational obligation and that is where he disagrees with the Ash'ari theory. What he says, by the way when I'm saying Ash'ar theory it was really the predominant theory of Khilafah since before him until Al-Ghazali and Ibn Jamaa. The reason I'm calling Ash'ary theories because the majority of the best people who wrote this were all Ash'ara.",
      "accepted that theory, but the people who really contributed to it were all Shia. Now in that theory of caliphate, khilafat establish a khalifa was an obligation for the ummah regardless of whether the Khalifas had actual political power or not. As Imam Ghazali who is the most if you will the strongest advocate of the Sunni Khalifa he says that without a Khalifa",
      "All of Islamic life and all of the Muslims' contracts, including their marriages become invalid without a Khalifa. This statement he makes twice both once in Ihhaw al-Madeen and once in Al-Nustasfa. So this is the Ashari theory which is that Khilafah is a ritual obligation.",
      "Islamic life to be valid. Ibn Taymiyyah says no, it's not a ritual obligation in other words you know think of it as wudu You know how to just Ibn Rushd distinguishes between ritual obligation and rational obligation is in Gidayat al-Mujtahid you can look up there but basically the idea if you look at wuduu It's a ritual application if you have an element of wudoo missing It's invalid all of it is invalid you can't say",
      "You can't say that about rituals. Salah is already either valid or invalid. As opposed to a ritual, rational obligations such as putting the food on your family's table so they will live on. It's your responsibility as you know a man's responsibility to provide for them. If you don't have a job",
      "You cannot go pretend that you have a job And if you don't have a full-time job, you can get a part-time But what is intended by this? obligation is a very rational end So even Timmy basically says that he Latha is not the first kind of obligation. It's a second kind of it's an obligation that is there to protect the application of God's law and",
      "injustice if there isn't justice and if there Isn't God's law being upheld then the khilafah is worthless And that is where now what is required to make this argument? It's quite a bit because The theory that underpinned the Khilafa Theory was quite seriously, quite profound",
      "quite profound, quite serious and is grounded in theology. In other words to be a Sunni and then reject the Khilafat theory was not easy so that's why it will take you 300 pages to get my humble point which may be wrong but nonetheless I needed that space to make it and I can't make it in two minutes but to end this discussion",
      "What I think Ibn Taymiyyah made possible was a bottom-up theory of Islamic political action and bottom up theory for the Islamic political system. Meaning that he says, you know if you look at his siyasa shar'iyya and He does not argue about the The theory of why an Islamic government is necessary based on the past actions of Muslims but",
      "but based on the Quran and Hadith. And you would say, well that's completely uninteresting. Wasn't everybody doing that? And the answer is nobody was doing that. You read Ghazali, you read Mawardi. No one does no one says Islamic government or government is necessary based on",
      "because it is the history and continuity with that history. And perhaps if he lived at that time, it would have been, he would have done the same but because of the Mongol destruction of the Caliphate, he recreates a, an obliquely, if you will, the theory of Islamic political system bottom up by saying that look, Islamic government",
      "is nothing but and as such it is you can draw its obligation from the Quran or look at this Sunnah and you get the idea that if, you know, if you had three people traveling one of them should be the Ameer. He says well that means if he has all ummah must have an Ameera so he goes to the original sources and almost is unique in doing that because in my view of his a conjuncture both his own personal",
      "personal ijtihad and his courage, but also the times in which he lived. And that's why there is no book titled before Ibn Timya ever in the first seven centuries. Whereas after Ibn Temiya, there are many such books. And today this is the most common name you will hear,. But there is not a single book that's written in the",
      "Whatever I've said if there's any good it from Allah and I'm sure there are many things that have either misstated Or misunderstood, and that's for me And I invite you to comment and ask questions. Thank you very much for being wonderful audience"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Dr_ Ovamir Anjum _ ICNA-MAS Convention 2022 _ Balt_mGInkaEsg2c&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750671302.opus",
    "text": [
      "Today, my topic is Ummah One Body. And I want to begin by going back to the very roots of both the challenges and opportunities that our distinguished speakers have talked about. The challenge and opportunity of being the Ummah of Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam.",
      "The title of my talk that was chosen by Iqna very aptly is Ummah One Body. Do you know where that title comes from? It comes from a hadith of the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, a saying of the prophet",
      "says, that the example of the believers in their mutual love and mercy and emotions is like one body. When one part of the body hurts",
      "hurts, the rest of the body responds by staying up. By feeling the pain. By doing something to fix the pain and the hurt or the wound of one of its parts. This is a metaphor an example that the Prophet has given us",
      "And the reason is that he knew, he knew how great and the numbers of the Ummah are going to be. His Ummah is going to great and it's difficult sometimes for us to visualize what are we talking about when we think of the ummah of Muhammad. Who are we taking about? They aren't people who speak one language",
      "They don't look like one complexion, one color, one set of features. And they sometimes disagree passionately about what to do, what is right, what did the Prophet ﷺ want?",
      "So the Prophet ﷺ provided us a metaphor, an example that we could keep in mind when we are thinking about the Ummah of Muhammad ﷺ. Similarly I'll give you another metaphor, another example that Allah ﷻ provides in the Qur'an. A metaphor is something simple and easy that you witness, that you see",
      "see, to understand something that is more complex and hard to see. It's hard to understand the ummah but it's easy to understand how one body is connected",
      "cannot feel prosperous without the entire body being in harmony with it. There is no such thing as the success of one part of your body. So when the Prophet uses that metaphor, it is the Prophet ﷺ telling us",
      "into different groups and ethnicities and races and classes and nations. And then try to be happy at the expense, some at the expenses of others. That is impossible! That is what this metaphor is telling us. Allah in the Quran tells us uses another metaphor and that metaphor is",
      "Believers are brothers. So this other metaphor, an example of brotherhood and sisterhood. Now we're extremely... We're used to hearing brothers and sisters. Right? You see in the example of the companions",
      "as they would come to the Prophet and become Muslim, they would consider other Muslims who came from different tribes as their true brothers and sisters. And their true brother and sisters if they had not joined Islam, they will consider them outsiders",
      "outsiders, foreigners. But I want you to think deeper about this metaphor. The metaphor of brothers and sisters actually means that there is going to be conflict. If you have ever been a brother or sister",
      "children like I do, my children deeply love each other. They look like each other they're constantly in each others business but they are also constantly fighting and so when Allah says that the believers are brothers and sisters so make peace between them",
      "This means that what Allah is telling us through this metaphor, Is that being brothers and sisters does not mean that you're always going to agree. It means that peacemaking is going to be an active need, an active job That all of us must do and we must expect",
      "There are going to be conflicts in the Ummah. There are gonna be disagreements. So when we sign up being the Ummat, being the community of the Prophet these two things come immediately with that deal. The two testimonies when we say La ilaha illa Allah Muhammadur Rasulullah These two things comes with it.",
      "not prosper alone. It is not possible for the rich in the Ummah of Muhammad to prosper and there are some people that are left out as poor. For the people of one ethnicity, the Arabs to prosper but African Americans no they can be left out. South Asians",
      "Okay But white Americans poor no or the other way around that will not happen as soon as You become part of the ummah of Muhammad sallallaahu alayhi wasalam Your destinies become connected like the destiny and the feelings of one body And second",
      "just as brothers and sisters disagree with each other. And in fact, they learn about the world and they grow together by disagreeing, sometimes play fighting, sometimes really annoying each other but it is in that process that they learn to be successful human beings in the world",
      "Just like that, there are going to be conflicts in the Ummah. But then a question arises. Isn't it hard to care about so many people? And we heard about the persecution of the Uyghur",
      "that we wore in eastern Turkestan. We heard about Palestine, we heard about our brothers and sisters in India, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. But in fact it's not a burden,",
      "and an opportunity. You see, what it means to become an ummah is that you are no longer a frog in a well that sees its interests just by looking at its own needs. Think of yourself not as a frog",
      "by a small well but an eagle that travels thousands and thousands of miles over the course of its life, and sees the whole picture. In the same way the Ummah of Muhammad when we learn that each one of us no matter where you are born you're connected to Muslims in China, Muslims in India, Muslims",
      "Muslims in Detroit, Muslims in California. You are no longer a little frog in a well. You're that eagle. And you know it is... People say that if you're a parent",
      "You cannot be happier than the least happy of your child. Meaning, having children is complicated and you're always worried about the squeaky wheel. But that's only half the truth and not the interesting part of the truth. The truth is that when you become a parent",
      "your world expands so that you experience the world and the happiness and the complexities and the richness of life through each one of your children. In the same way, when you understand that you're a part of a global ummah, you have the opportunity now to experience the",
      "the world its richness through hundreds of these different ethnicities and people all around the world who are joined by these two testimonies. I will finally end with another story that",
      "And this is a story that appears as a great warning. Allah addresses the Israelites, the Banu Israel and Allah took a pledge from them saying that you shall not kill each other and you shall drive each other out of your houses. You will be like one people",
      "people. You will be brothers and sisters, you will be an ummah. This was a mandate that was given to them. And then in Surat Al-Baqarah verse 85 Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says",
      "هذا أحد الأمراض القوية التي أعطاها الله سبحانه وتعالى في القرآن لأي مجتمع أو أي شخص",
      "to any people. The story begins when Allah takes this pledge that you are one Ummah, the Israelites are the Muslims, the believers of their time they are the community of Prophet Musa. But here is the interesting thing",
      "into different tribes or into different nations and fought each other. So when it came to making alliances with others in their interest against their brothers, when it",
      "They split up based on their needs. But then, when some of them, some of the Israelites or the Jews would be captured and punished and taken as slaves and captives, then they would practice personal piety, Allah says, by giving charity",
      "charity and freeing those captives or giving them food. Why? Because they're Jews like us. So when it came to a political virtue, when it come to solidarity, when It came to standing with each other as an Ummah, they failed but when it comes to personal piety and Zakat and alms and Sadaqa, charity",
      "They were all over it. Does that remind you of someone? Is there an ummah like that today, that makes alliances against each other, that turns against each another when it comes to real life but when it",
      "exactly was the sin for which Allah says Do you believe in part of the book and reject the other part? This was their sin. They thought, oh solidarity that's politics Being one Ummah, that's Politics We will just do personal charity and give our zakat",
      "and give our zakat and charity, personal piety and purification and tazkiyah and tasawwuf. We're all over it. But when it comes to what my politics is going to be, how I'm going to set up my real solidarity, who am I going to first and foremost? That was whatever my interests were.",
      "And Allah says in punishment that what would be a punishment? What is a punishment other than humiliation in this world and in the day of judgment they will return to a worse punishment.",
      "This was for us a warning, a prophecy. And this is the essence of what we must avoid. To be an ummah means to be concerned,",
      "solidarity in all affairs, not just when it is convenient. And so finally I will wrap up by saying that what we need to do in order to respond to",
      "is we need to revive the sunnah, revive the prophetic guidance and the Qur'anic imperative of being an ummah. We need to create space in our minds and our hearts for being Ummatic. We are first and foremost the ummah of Muhammad.",
      "That is our identity. And that space needs to be in our minds and in our hearts. What does that mean? That means you cannot be a matic, you cannot think about Palestinians or help them or about Indian Muslims or Uyghur Muslims if you don't know about them. And you have to feel, you have",
      "to them. And you have to take the trouble to expand your mind to understand their history and the same goes for all of these different parts of the ummah. But your heart has to feel the love and the pain and the richness",
      "In the end then, I call for these few things to open up this space in our mind. A new box, a new window. When you think of yourself, think of your self as I belong to the Ummah of Muhammad. Anyone anywhere in the world who says the two testimonies",
      "Muhammad Rasulullah becomes my concern, my strength, my brother and my sister. Do not think of this as a burden but think of it as an honor. Think of this",
      "an opportunity to live your life in the most complete, rich sense here and meet with Allah SWT in the way that we have the richness of this entire Ummah in our favor, in our balance not against us.",
      "Because it makes us richer and deeper, sadder and happier as human beings. But it also must make us motivated. And you may specialize for one cause",
      "But all of those, anyone who is working for any of those becomes part of your problem. Even if you cannot do anything about them, someone has a task force on Uyghur, you pray for them, you help them. But find a cause, be umatic. And I'll end with this optimistic note that despite all the challenges",
      "the challenges that we see today. The Ummah of the Prophet is growing and I'll point to two facts. 100 years ago Muslims made something like 10% of the world population, ten to twelve percent. Today",
      "25% of the world's population. Despite all the colonialism and all the genocides, all the attacks and wars Muslims today are 25% off the world population and growing. Number two Not in recent memory can we find an Islamic history so many different Muslims talking to each other",
      "learning from each other, marrying each other worrying about each other as we see today. And that is a great place to start. The Ummah of the Prophet ﷺ is waking up it's rising and our time Our time the time for the Ummah Muhammad ﷺ",
      "inshallah is here again make sure that each one of you does your part thank you very much"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Dr Ovamir Anjum _ Is A Caliphate Viable in Today_s_fJ0paJlqxrk&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750680547.opus",
    "text": [
      "Blood Brothers Podcast, a Fire Pillars Production.",
      "to another episode of the Blood Brothers podcast with your host Dili Hussain. Before I introduce today's celebrated and esteemed guest, I would like you all to subscribe to the 5 Pillars YouTube channel, like this video, share this video leave a comment after you've finished watching it and of course for all the avid podcast listeners, you can find the Blood Brother's podcast on all the major platforms. Today's guest is the first guest where I have to have an actual bio in front of me",
      "whose works I personally follow very attentively especially because of the subject matter that we're going to talk about in today's podcast. Dr Oweymar Anjum is the Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at The University of Toledo, he obtained his PhD in Islamic Intellectual History in the Department Of History University of Wisconsin in Madison and he is also the Editor-in-Chief of Yaqeen Institute and these are just some",
      "We're honoured to have him on the show today, Dr. Uwe Maranjom. Assalamu alaikum and welcome to The Blood Brothers Podcast. Waalaikumsalam wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Thank you very much for having me. No, no, the honour is truly all ours, Alhamdulillah. Today's discussion is essentially about all things related to the caliphate. And I guess I know that the vast majority if not the entirety of your works where",
      "has been from an academic perspective whereas my exposure to this subject matter has been entirely from an activist point of view whether it be my exposure various groups in the UK who have discussed this topic or made it the centre of their Dao, whatever it may be and the works of those respective scholars which these groups associate themselves with Let me first posit this to you",
      "When you as an academic Who have written Discussed this topic From a particular standpoint of academia And then you see The various movements Or the calls for it In its various forms How do you distinguish Between What you've learnt, what you've taught What you're reading And what's happening on a grassroots level Mainly in the Muslim majority world",
      "Thank you very much again for having me. How do I distinguish between what I see and what's happening on the ground? Very good question.",
      "of the Ottomans in late 19th century but really early 20th century Muslims always fell have felt a gap and numerous groups have emerged to respond",
      "and have emphasized different things. Sometimes, as in the case of Muslim Brothers they try to emphasize a... if you will what they saw is the foundations of what is necessary before we get there And other groups especially those who were most directly hit by the loss of the Ottoman so as you know that after the Ottoman Caliphate",
      "the Ottoman Caliphate, a number of nation states emerged. At first these states are protected areas or direct colonies of the British and the French. Known as mandates, British mandate, French mandate. Right exactly and this is known as Britain's moment in the Middle East so this is when Britain has most power",
      "these various colonies and these then become states after the Second World War. But areas that did not get resolved, most importantly Palestine, that is where a certain kind of intensity seen in remembering and trying to recover the Caliphate and perhaps initially",
      "short-term movement to immediately recover after what happened in 1948 and the intention may have been not to launch a long term movement but rather you know, something like a movement or a coup almost",
      "glory when at least the Arabs could unify. So movements like Hizb ut-Tahrir for example only because that goal was not achieved did they become popular and multinational movements. And Muslim Brothers experience, Akhwan al-Muslimin's experience",
      "more and more that the goal is farther and farther than they thought. And of course there's immense persecution, and world history seems to be moving in the opposite direction than the one that Muslims had hoped for. Then these movements if you will, willy-nilly became what they became over time so it's almost never",
      "work out the way that it did um so that all said of course all of these movements are genuine expressions of islam and of muslims concerns and as such we must learn from them we must appreciate them and those who do fail to do so those who say that well we're going to start over",
      "You you see them often making the same mistakes over and over So it's important to understand what I mean by that people who say well, you know these reformists and these people were Changing Islam and we are the real champions of tradition, you five years later They're talking about exactly the same talking points because when you know civil rubber hits the road they see the reality they in fact borrow while also condemning",
      "condemning from the same movements. So I want to certainly emphasize that i do not intend to denigrate and merely criticize for the sake of criticism any of the groups. Now,",
      "70s and 80s, Muslim world increasingly moved away from this idea of returning or recovering some kind of unity. And movements like Hizb ut-Tahrir were much more successful on the margins, on the frontiers than in if you will in the heartlands but that I think has begun to change",
      "after really you could say that after 9-11 the engines of a different world order have been put in place and I could say in perhaps the briefest way that Samuel Huntington has won Francis Fukuyama has lost which means that after the first financial shock",
      "financial shock of 2007 and 8, you know there were popular movements that have been getting more and more intense and entrenched throughout Euro-America Australia the white world to recover a pre immigration,",
      "a stage that I call deglobalization. Can you elaborate on what deglobulization means, how you envisage what that means? All right so i guess for that we have to say a little bit about globalization. So what happens in the um and before globalization starts in 1980s or late 70s there is uh the cold war",
      "Cold War there are two parts of the world right, two rivals US and USSR and then their proxies but both powers are unified in one thing that they do not want certainly the United States and the United Nations established for that reason is that we do not a third World War. And for that we want to ensure that these popular movements populist",
      "and fascism will not take root again in these poor countries that will give us trouble again. So the economic model for the world but also in the central countries as well, in Europe, in America or the global north was one of managed capitalism whereas",
      "move to what is called the neoliberal policies. And neoliberalism meant that instead of politics and countries being important, now it is businesses that are important. When I say important, important from the perspective",
      "and World Bank, and so on. So if you're in the 70s and 80s there were in all these third world countries five-year development plans because governments were getting money and then they had the power. And who had government power or state power really mattered. They actually shaped the culture and economy and direction of the country to a large extent.",
      "economic movements took an increasingly statist form, meaning that they realized that capturing the state is important and you can take the country in different directions. Politics is important. In the era of globalization starting again early late 70s 80s, the global elite decide based on a number of economic or perceived failures",
      "you know there is a need for a different order and um this neoclassical neoliberal order is put into place which has which also called washington consensus the idea is that you're going to um there'll be no tariffs",
      "Governments cannot privilege their corporations and companies, businesses and economies that are local. You have to compete globally. Now this globalization is what then leads to a number of major conflicts in the Muslim world but also much more rapid moving of capital and peoples around the world as a result",
      "a large number of immigrants also come to the West. This, of course has been happening even before starting 60s and 70s but certainly in the 80s and 90s this intensifies. So globalization is defined as in textbooks as intensification of trade and social networks. But it's engine was economic but the results are often cultural and social",
      "and social, and political. One could say that politically disempowering the third world country elite may not have been a main purpose of these changes but that happened. Now what that meant is that for Islamic movements they became global and that is why you hear",
      "you hope for the caliphate in the Muslim world. But it's also meant that politics meant a little less and less now in the muslim world because, if your economy is in the hands of a few multinational corporations who employ tens of thousands of your upper middle class and middle-class and of course they're stuffing their pockets off those in power",
      "Crony capitalism is very easy. So basically everywhere in the Arab world and in the Muslim world, illa mashallah, crony capitalism becomes well established. There are few millionaires and billionaires and the rest suffer greatly. This is happening of course in the Islam world, it's happening in India, it is happening elsewhere. Another I guess important note here is that there are certain countries,",
      "well placed at this time to benefit from globalization. Again, I'm talking 80s and 90s still before most of your audience are born. What happens in this time is that almost everyone loses including the very global north, the very powers that had put this in place because it was big capitalists against small",
      "Capitalists lose, the society loses because you begin to now maximize profit by sending jobs overseas and so on. Which countries benefit then? The only countries that benefit from it were those that happen to have large economies and good infrastructure built up by this time. And China of course is number one and to some degree India as well.",
      "These were countries, not that they were good countries. They in fact had engaged in especially China in effectively a genocide and major massive killings of entire class of people and there was no tradition of rule of law or accountability of government but China does have a long-standing thousands of years old tradition of a strong state,",
      "which the Muslim world doesn't have, which the Middle East doesn't. Of course it was in Turkey and Istanbul for hundreds of years in the Middle-East but this meant that you have certain players that are well placed to take advantage of globalization and China did right? And India then we see the result of these movements in places like India which is rise of a fascist Hindu nationalism",
      "nationalism which is reacting against this accumulation of wealth in a few hands but also using it to its own power. Now where does this leave Muslims? Muslims were the worst placed to take advantage of globalization, what ended up happening in the Muslim world is that of course they are divided and so these divisions are extremely important if you...in being able",
      "um well in in losing all these opportunities right because what happens would you say certain uh would you said the khaliji states the oil rich petrol states that they also are disadvantaged well so they use their advantage to their greatly as did other despotic regimes but really what is happening is that",
      "really their rentier states. So there you didn't want either democracy or much free capitalism, although capitalism also is expanding there but elsewhere in the Muslim world you have the same tradition, same trend of increasing power of multinationals and global economy",
      "leeches on this trade and so they don't become less important in that they're still you know causing havoc but they become less importan,t hat if they want to do something they don t have much power. The only powers they have really is how much money they re going to make off this trade that is going on. So if you are somebody like Mubarak right then you have a few billionaires in Egypt",
      "The question is how much you're going to take off it. But culture is getting out of your hand and that is what we see in 2011 Arab Spring, that this neoliberal ideas and globalization leads to the spread of new ideals of what we need as well,",
      "that this kind of oppression is unreal and unsustainable. And so, this is a reaction against these neoliberal policies and great inequalities that are economic in nature but also there's all kinds of cultural effect. So, this sort of the background information that hopefully will allow us to both engage with this question",
      "In a more realistic way then we typically tend to so what is the globalization? Well in 2008 breaks are hit everybody knows or most people know what happens, but basically Global trade takes a hit and People There is a reaction against global",
      "reaction against globalism, global economy and the culture of globalism. And one of the things that everybody is seeing in plain sight because of internet and media and TV and whatnot is that there is a global elite that is emerging that is rich and powerful everywhere so billionaires in the world, the top 1% of the world if we go to India you go to Pakistan I don't know how many",
      "Pakistan, if you go to Egypt, you go Saudi they belong to the same culture. They buy same kind of yachts, they do same kinds of activities, they meet in same kinds Davos and whatnot. And then everywhere there is great inequality. The inequality and oppression is much greater in the third world than the peripheral countries because",
      "So there is a reaction against globalist culture. As a result, there is in move toward back to civilization. That's the interesting part that you come from nation states but now the move back is not back to nation-states but to civilizations. Give you an example",
      "who shot up the masjid in New Zealand was an Australian who had spent much of his time in Europe and America. And, um, in his manifesto which I teach in my seminars he talks about you know his image and view vision of the world was to get to start a civil war in America because it's too integrated there is no way",
      "get the Muslims back out there, right? And Australia is too integrated. New Zealand was shot up because it provides a threatening example of integration. So you have a global white Christian population, right that's his imagination even though the person who did it, he says he's not a Christian or not sure about it but it is a Christian civilization, Christian Europe that he wants to go back to and of course",
      "of course the united states and australia are considered part of it but not it's not it'S NOT like first world war second world war nation nationalism this is some different and this IS exactly i think what um huntington had predicted uh to some degree he was talking about other countries but really IT HAPPENED among the the rich white so THIS IS THE IDEA IS THAT JUST AS",
      "uh china is emerging as a civilizational state not just a nation-state india is being thought of as a civilization not just in nation and we can talk about the difference if you want and so my point is that um as these new changes are taking place muslims missing leadership intellectual and political leadership ought to think about where we're going next right",
      "When you mention civilizational states which aren't just nation-states, would you describe are there any prospective civilizatonal states or at least showing some kind of indication towards that direction from the Muslim majority world?",
      "Ottomans for several centuries, you know four or five centuries. And so that's a very sort of natural imagination right? It's only 100 years old and very easy to think about going back to something like an Ottoman regime even if the government may not be Ottoman or whatever but",
      "in people's memories you can find it in photographs and stories right so it's a cultural memory and cultural memories are extremely important um and of course for Muslims now in South Asia Pakistan and Malaysia and Iran they were not part of this uh disconnection but nonetheless",
      "movement even there to, in fact they're taking these countries are taking lead in creating some kind of cooperation cooperative initiatives. I don't know how far they're going to go but of course there is this kind of imagination of unity so even Saudis for example put together this army of 23-some countries led by a Pakistani general",
      "Pakistani general, which I think that what's interesting is Iran. I think it's not part of it and just being thought up as a Sunni coalition to fight terrorism. So it's Sunni Coalition against the Sunni terrorists perhaps and Shia terrorists and Shiism and whatnot? I don't know but the point is that even the idea for military unification is not off the table. It's not that you know we cannot imagine",
      "There's so much that you've said in your opening segment, Starter. I need to nitpick some of them. I'll try and pick some of the ones. You said Samuel P Huntington won and Fukuyama lost. Now when you say Fukuyma lost this is",
      "This is the thinker who said that we have reached the end of history. Man has reached the End of History, that the nation state, the liberal democracy is the pinnacle of governance. In short, that's in essence what he was saying. Why do you believe that he has lost? The nation state is I mean one could argue the nation State is looking as strong as ever with no other real meaningful alternative",
      "beyond romanticized or cultural memories of thinking the nation state is going as strong as it's going now i'm not saying that nation states are synonymous with liberal democracies but in terms of any kind of viable alternative it can be argued that uh fukuyama his his his he looked for a moment during the arab spring even looked irrespective",
      "seemed for a moment that perhaps Fukuyama's hypothesis was going to be smashed apart but the nation state and the public desire for democracy whatever it may mean in the west or in the Muslim majority world, that desire is still very much present and strong. So would it be accurate to say that Fukuyamah and his hypothesis and his conclusion were wrong or he had failed? Right I think those",
      "I think those observations you make are, let's say, I grant them. But Fukuyama himself, if we look at his recent books he is talking about how he has to curtail his thesis because he realizes that there is the rise of tribalism everywhere in the world. So that's not much of a problem.",
      "Earlier on, you said Fukuyama has failed and Huntington has won. When you said he has failed, was I correct in understanding that your reference was to the end of history? Yes, exactly. Okay. Right. So I think that the idea that liberal democracy is going to work for everybody has failed. That I have no doubt about. And the reason is that the environmental crisis has made it very clear to people, to scientists and people who would pay attention to science, right, even cynically for their own advantage,",
      "advantage that liberal democracy requires a level of consumerism, that if it really spreads to poor regions the world there is really going to be suicidal tendencies in the world because you have... You do not have the resources to feed all the mouths in the way and have the kind of waste that is produced and the kind",
      "years some billion people in the world are going to lose their houses, and it so happens that many of those regions are Egypt, Karachi, Bangladesh, Indonesia are Muslim. So as a result of that you have immigration crises and political wars",
      "everybody's anticipating and they're beginning to happen. So I don't think that any serious person would even come back and say, oh no Fukuyama has won. One could say that we still can try to sustain liberal democracy but in ways that some leftist philosophers envision in different ways. But really the way that he imagined it certainly is gone.",
      "is certainly gone. The question now, has Huntington won? First of all I'm not endorsing Huntington he was not a... He had a mean streak meaning that he really imagined clash as necessary and he wanted the Islamic and China civilizations to be at war so that they leave the west alone. So he couldn't really imagine a world where civilizations could coexist",
      "But in terms of, I think his powers of observation, I don't think that they have proven true. In that this was his basic idea that these economic ideologies that people adopt whether they're with capitalism or they're within socialism, this is what's going on in the world that he's studying and the 70s and 80s and 90s. And he made the observations that this is superficial",
      "this is superficial, that there's something deeper. To put it in one sentence he said culture is deeper than ideology so ideology economic ideology is going to come and go and when things don't work out people are gonna revert their to their culture to their civilization now he did not say the culture and civilization don't change so people you know",
      "criticism of popular thesis is good and especially because of the way that you know what he was pointing to a kind of very anti-globalist spirit uh very easy it was easy to criticize him but policy circles still took him very seriously um it may have been just as self-fulfilling prophecy be that as it may",
      "defined civilization very well, but he was right that ideologies are superficial. These nationalist ideologies or whether we're going to be with the USSR and the Arabs were all Arab nationalists and then there is this Arab socialism. All of that was very superficial. What he said is that there's something deeper that's going to stay. And that I think is absolutely true. I agree with you.",
      "I agree with you, definitely. Could that then be argued? So if we look at the 60s, the 70s and perhaps the beginning of the 80s when we look to the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the attempts at unification of the Arab world, the rise Ba'athism and these kind of things it was arguably short lived. Would you say that is a testimony to what Huntington saw as in the short-lived nature",
      "book where do you place what's commonly known or referred to as i don't like this term i don' know what the alternative term is um the salafi jihadi movement where do fit that thinking in the spectrum of the two other groups that you mentioned um i mean i guess i'm referring to perhaps the thinking about abdullah and others a prominent thing because",
      "jihadism with some modifications. And he is fighting in Afghanistan, which was the Kosher War, right? Which was where the United States completely supported the mujahideen. One thing we should remember by the way going back to the Cold War before the globalization era, The United States actively supported",
      "the rise of Islam as a political power. Not that the United States was the cause of it, and very clear that's not the case. You support a horse you think is going to win but what they were against is the left, the Soviet influence. If I may, just on a simple term, basically you're referring perhaps to",
      "a threat in arab socialism the left communist russus so in that regard it was better strategically at that time to back the kind of islamic alternative be the monarchies of the on the gulf or the resistance in afghanistan what you're basically referring to here exactly there is an interesting memo um or a letter that is sent by carter administration i believe to prince uh",
      "to King of Jordan, where it says that we see the rise of jihad and this Islam as really a positive development. We see something like development of a muscular Islam or Arabs. That's a good thing, right? Because the idea is that... The problem is the PLO. And against the PLL you want to back Hamas. Similarly",
      "in the and again i don't want to read all of this as some kind of nefarious that you know that all of that this was a conspiracy but it's important to see that there are all kinds of um you know opportunities and cracks in world among in the world elite in the",
      "human history and power struggles, and there are opportunities that emerge. In early Islam in fact Muslims when the Prophet and the Sahaba, when they fought, they took advantage of such an opportunity really between the Persians and the Romans. The problem is that of course people today often have no sense of agency. They see these developments",
      "these developments, everything is a part of a prefabricated conspiracy. Everybody you know the assumption that they all know everything but that's not the case right? The United States has been bungling the Middle East for from the very beginning of its involvement in the Cold War. The United states saw the Middle east and the Muslim world really as a chessboard",
      "really for the first time, the Islamic world as such came to the attention of these geopoliticians as a threat in 1979. After Iran's revolution. Iran, right? And then Egypt, Sadat's assassination. But there and then you know, the 90s and then finally in 2001",
      "2001 and 9-11. So those are the moments when this view and the relationship between the West and Islamic world takes a turn, and now I think to some degree it's going back because the Saudis and the Arabs are seen as completely in any global struggle they could be used as pawns for American strategy.",
      "So I want to get back to the earlier questions now with some of the perhaps boring background stuff out of the way on the question of the caliphate itself and why I forefront this information, these narratives political",
      "and economic narratives because Muslims tend to think especially activists who very sincerely think about wanting to bring back the caliphate, and that could be done simply by going back to the model of the Prophet ﷺ. There is certainly an element of truth in that but they don't often understand a model of The Prophet himself, that how he did in fact understand politics at his time",
      "political contingent responding to taking advantage of opportunities. He didn't have a plan that, you know, three years I'm going to do this seven years I am gonna do that and then there's gonna be real serious severe persecution And then I'm gonna do this and then I am going to migrate to Medina and then in Medina I am goign to have You know This struggle. This is not how Real-world struggles work Of course Rasulullah he dealt with the multi complex",
      "A complex of issues, some of which a lot of which he did not anticipate. Some of which when that opportunity arose, he dealt with it as it came. So you're definitely right in that regard and it's actually interesting because I want to refer to two articles that you've written one was in 2019 when you wrote who wants a caliphate? What inspired what was the thing in Yaqeen Institute? The link will be on the screen.",
      "in 2019, who wants a caliphate? Do you want a caliphate? Absolutely. Yes. And how does this caliph... How does Dr. Uwe Meraan Jom see this caliphe in his mind? How do you see such an institution or polity emerging? How I see it emerging or how do I see functioning? Those are two different things. Both! Okay. Do you see it like a confederation of Muslim majority nation states with one overarching leader",
      "overarching leader? Do you see it as a very centralized, widespread superpower, modern empire with one ruler? How do you see? So I think that's all up for grabs. And the reason is that this is my personal style of thinking and this sort of connects to what we were talking about the Prophet",
      "The kind of history that emerged, right? Of course Allah has foreknowledge of everything and it was Allah's plan. And the seerah of the Prophet ﷺ is absolutely the model for entirety of Islamic history to understand that you look at the seirah.",
      "Sahaba later in during the fitan and whatnot they would look at the Prophet's seerah and try to emulate his actions so doing so is by all means an important thing to do right which is what my next article is about, the question of the constitution of Medina. But there were important thinkers I'll name one that i have great respect for Dr Isra Rahmet who",
      "who, you know there were pamphlets when I was growing up about how there's going to be three years of secret struggle and then passive, you now there is passive struggle and active struggle. And there's gonna be jihad. And you had even years figured out of how many it's gonna take. So that kind of boxing of seerah,",
      "that's a great error of Ijtihad by some great scholars who are better than me. And the same goal continues, the same mentality continues until today among some very good otherwise groups and movements and thinkers. This includes some of my own friends who would help or who would endorse the idea of the catapult but they see",
      "is a struggle that is disconnected from a couple of things. It's disconnected from world history, it's disconnected form the scholarship of the ulama and it's disconnecting from the scholarship on Islamic studies and new historical developments and knowledge that we have today so it is as if none of that knowledge and none of the development in world history have anything to teach us about how you're going to do this. That we already... And who is at fault then?",
      "i mean it i mean when i have spoken to various senior activists and you know i've engaged some of them in my previous years one of the arguments is positive that well this is a situation in islamic history which we've not really faced or had before okay fine okay we're in 1258 the mongols sacked baghdad the mamluks did a comeback in 1261. okay for our history there was never this kind of very romanticized centralized",
      "state that's known as a caliphate yes there were periods the Umayyads had their time, the Abbasids had their times, the Ottomans had their times. There are some others who made the claimage but right now we're living at a time which the Ummah has not really experienced such a thing in the past so it is a time for ijtihad and so therefore if the ulama or the mashaikh of all the thinkers of Ikhwan al-Muslimin or Hizb ut-Tahrir",
      "I'm not saying that any of you or anyone else has done that, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is they would argue that we're trying to deal with a new reality here. We're trying dealing with a reality which is not being addressed by the traditional scholars, those who have seemed to have made their lives very comfortable with the nation-state model, that they don't want to be thinking outside of that box. What would your thoughts be on that? So I'd say two wrongs don't make one right",
      "don't make one right. They just make more and more wrongs, and then it's more and difficult to entangle them later. I don't mean to be smart aleck here but the point is that the idea that the ulama have given up on the ummah, it's clearly not true of course the ulma are various groups because ulama",
      "kind of organization. And there are ulama who are investigating various things such as the fiqh, in fact in the 20th century there is a great flowering of Islamic jurisprudence that doesn't fit in the model of reformist or traditionalists but there are ulamas and fuqaha",
      "and that knowledge is not being attended to as much as it ought to be but that's not my main point here. My main point is that the ulama are various groups, and you cannot have success in this ummah without the ilm of Rasulullah's deen and his ummah and his own style and his sunnah",
      "and his aqidah so all of those things you cannot compartmentalize them and say well none of this knowledge has anything to do with what I'm going to the second thing that i want to point out that i think in your question was assumed is that this is an entirely unprecedented situation. Well any situation",
      "was in some way unprecedented. But if you lived really in the stateless societies of... There were six centuries after the decline of the Abbasids when there were warring kingdoms and city-states, and petty princelets throughout the Muslim world where a bunch, a ragtag army of crusaders could walk through",
      "the Muslim world and take the third holiest shrine, Jerusalem. And then when the Mongols came, Muslims were completely unprepared. They were about some six centuries until the rise of the Ottomans and the Sakhwids and the Mughals when you had these relatively small kingdoms. At that time somebody said that Muslims are going to be",
      "power in Europe and Asia again, you just said well yeah that's really romantic. Look at what's happening when the Mongols came right? The 13th 14th centuries if you just look at 13th-14th century writings of Muslims very different there is a clear sense in the 13th, 14th early 15th century",
      "scholarly production at this time but in the Mamluk realm of East Syria and Egypt, this is where most of the great scholarship that we have today comes from. Conservative scholarship nonetheless. But this was also a period in which Sunnis Muslims particularly felt that they are on the edge that Islam is going to be eliminated because there",
      "four centuries story of one success after another and this is a very, very long time for there to be such prosperity and stability. It was not a perfect empire right it was but in terms of world powers it was a time that couldn't have been imagined you didn't think that so imagine that Constantinople was not conquered",
      "Al-Hassan and Al- Hussein, Abin Umar and Abdullah ibn Zubayr had been part of the army of Yazid. I'm not sure about Al- Hassan but the rest of them certainly were. Army of Yazeed that attacked Constantinople. All of these people Sahaba of the highest caliber and they couldn't take it? And imagine if somebody said you can take it in 1453. That's true. Right so a thousand years later",
      "years later you're gonna take it and so my point is that often we read history as having this kind of first of all, it's a black-and-white right? It's a cartoon. And second, it has this...it seems to already have these prefabricated lessons that either people think what the things were all great until now or they",
      "But you have instead what you see in history, and this is the reason why I'm writing and I take history very seriously and writing about it and teach about it. Because it really shows you that Muslims in the past haven't been sleeping. They have been doing what we are doing in different circumstances. And they have not been failing. So the great successes that you see",
      "today. The Hadith sciences for example, they were historical, they didn't exist on the Prophet or the Sahaba or the Tabi'een even right? They emerged later because somebody said this isn't okay we're going to do something about it. In fact Richard Bullitt I forget his first name, Richard Bullit at Columbia he has really interesting essay where he talks about",
      "these phases in history, in Islamic history that you know right now it's going through a terrible time but he gave all of these examples so there is this moment I don't forget the pair of words that he uses that there is expansion no there is crisis and then resolution those crises in Islamic",
      "period so and you could say that you know hadith and fiqh happened in the second third centuries right their height um and then there was decline and hide again right historical sciences by the way historical consciousness saw its height in the 14 15 centuries of common era so uh at the time of ibn temiya and ibn hajar right around that time",
      "and the most interesting and creative time was around this time, right? When you think there were some Muslim dark ages. But when you look at the political organization, you could say that what the Ottomans was doing was one of those high points. And so I don't think... So when you think of this as, you know,",
      "were winning, winning, and then all of a sudden in 1924 you lost. Then you're like okay how can you ever go back because you're just going down and there's no coming back? But if you think of Islamic history as people have been winning and losing, I mean for example the era of Al-Ghazali politically speaking was one of the lowest points whereas his own teacher",
      "teacher Al-Juwaini who was serving Nizam al-Mulk, one of the most brilliant viziers that Islamic world has ever seen. He saw possibilities and optimism so that was a very quick turnaround and then the Crusaders came and Imam Ghazali has nothing to say about them and they walked through the Islamic world and there is right Muslims are fighting each other and Muslims in fact were supporting or almost colluding with the",
      "against other Muslims. And then you had the rise of Salah ad-Din and Nur al-Bind Zayn Ji, and so on. Ustadh let me just ask you something then. So with those various historical ups and downs, granted I think it would be a huge mistake for any Muslim, even when I have the pleasure of addressing university ISOCs, I always say look brothers and sisters Islamic history is not a romanticised utopian history we need to move away from this because wallahi",
      "Because wallahi you're going to fall into big trouble when someone just has a cursory reading of what was happening in the Muslim majority world throughout the entirety of 13-14 centuries. It would be a colossal mistake to present Islamic history and Islamic civilization as hunky dory, and the only thing you are going to highlight is the sacking of Baghdad in 1924. You're in trouble if you're gonna present our history and our civilization as such. However, what I would want to ask you is",
      "the state of the ummah today with 57 plus muslim majority secular nation states um with military bases u.s and british but many us military bases scattered within many of these countries they way we are economically enslaved to powers outside of the muslim world are you saying that there has been situations like this because right now the almost question i mean",
      "umma's question i mean i guess one of the reasons why people go towards romanticism is because it makes you feel good in a very dark and you know depressing time where the humiliation oppression seems so widespread that a bit of romanticism helps a bit helps a",
      "things help if you think thinking back to these romanticized notions of these great figures who took islam to great lengths and then or like salahuddin ayubi or um sayf kutos these things help is the ummah to blame to want to go back to romanticized readings of history so i don't really see that as romanticized necessarily i think they're good and bad readings but",
      "But human beings cannot live without dreams. And you cannot achieve great things without dreams and I think of visions and dreams as a rather positive thing, right? The opposite of dreams is not... Of good dreams is that you become... You cannot... Imagination even of a nation it's just an imagination, right. It's...",
      "how much agency you put into this and I think that one of the things he asked me about this question of why wrote the article i guess it's time to answer that question I wrote this article because I was in the square 2011 interviewing the leadership and shabat when after has been water cat step down",
      "stepped down and I saw Egypt as alive. I saw egypt as just a very different kind of country than when i had visited earlier two times before um, And honestly, I saw Egyptians are really so deeply oppressed that I cried for them 2011 was the Egypt that I could rejoice about and I could talk to people everybody had a political opinion. I Saw Egyptians is alive Yet when I talked to their leadership about what was wrong",
      "wrong I felt and I gave a talk about this when I came back was basically was a letdown that I did not think this was going anywhere because there is no vision, there is understanding of world politics or world economics. There's no alternative and people thought that you know the problem was Hasting-e Barak. The problem was one guy who was bad and next time we're gonna have better",
      "this was a moment so basically this takes me back to my understanding of how change is more likely to happen given in this attention to history and to contemporary social sciences political science of how revolutions and social changes happen. So, one thing that I'm going to emphasize again and again to Islamic movements who are interested",
      "showing the caliphate is knowledge is not your enemy, it's your friend. Whether its knowledge of history or knowledge of contemporary social and political sciences don't convince yourself that all of this knowledge is being produced by your enemy. That's because often you're being secretly lazy or perhaps you misunderstand what knowledge is about. In fact this history is going to be extremely important",
      "forward. So going back now in Tahrir Square, when I'm talking to people, I realize that these people's understanding of what's going on in the world is extremely impoverished and this leads me several years to think about how to change",
      "bottom-up grassroots only or top down like those are the topic typical models that are presented right so Hezbollah had this model they're gonna write letters to generals military generals who were going to come take over and that's how Khilafah will be established whereas Muslim brothers have this model that they're going to educate, they're goi ng to work on society and then the society is going to choose better leaders",
      "perhaps move toward fundamental structural changes. The assumption is that... There is a third, the third is to fight and remove. There is that third option as well, which is more like the first one because really it's ultimate. I mean you could say ISIS, Daesh is another model, which",
      "the whoever it may be is to fight the the legitimate regimes that armies can't be trusted right you need to physically move these guys to establish it right and i think that um this is these are all models of change um that uh and i don't want to put them even in the same place same category",
      "Al-Qaeda. Al Qaida is a different level still, that goes wrong whereas Daesh is the pathology that's born out of Al-qaeda going wrong if you will but these people think of violence... You see all of these people have an imagination about the nuts and bolts of how the world works now those imagine that imagination is not known to us right so actually if you read",
      "if you read for example the manual that became the daesh if he will man in management of savagery this is a manual written in 2003 and four by a young al-qaeda operative on the way to becoming daesh anyway so if you look at they have a history of a theory of world politics and how to make change i'd bring change",
      "Ideologies don't matter as much. In some ways it's more competent than what you find in the textbooks in the Muslim world, certainly. But it's also one that is unstudied. It's like one dude wrote this and this became... This may be a result of some struggle or some conversations that are taking place in the barracks and whatnot but this guy probably had a bachelor's degree in agriculture",
      "culture is telling us how the world works you know because he's reading news. You don't have departments and scholars, universities and madrasas and Ibn Khaldun and Ibti Mia and Ghazali who are seriously helping us understand and Huntington and Fukuyama are not being engaged what you have",
      "because it gets picked up the right moment and then it goes downhill from there. But all change happens this way, and that's the point I want to make. Basically, neither top-down nor bottom-up nor violence only, all of these things are in fact part of historical change. And violence just because it is violence is not evil in itself,",
      "and knowledge of other Muslims real sensibilities, real ideas. That's the kind of knowledge that you need to live with. And so change in my view is... In fact this is a standard social movement theory that typically there are three or four things that come together to make social movements succeed. There is political opportunity or cracks",
      "in political elites whether it's global leader or national elite. There is resource mobilization meaning that for instance, in the Arab Spring the cell phones and Facebook and whatnot provided a certain new resource of instant connection that wasn't available before. It maybe was unnecessary but this became the means,",
      "is framing of the ideology and grievance. Because grievances itself, just because you're down low doesn't mean you're going to rebel, you're gonna engage in collective action that you're willing to challenge those in power. No! That in fact requires framing. Absolutely. Framing means right? That you decide what is wrong and who's responsible and how to act. And Arab Spring one of the reasons it succeeded",
      "was compelling with it was simple. It wasn't conspiracy theory, it identified problematic actors in a particular way and unified people in the way that it framed the problem. Anybody could agree that there is too much corruption, the Salafis, the Christians in Egypt to the left and the right. So my point now",
      "You do not know, right? You cannot write a pamphlet about how this is going to pan out. So that's my answer to your earlier question of how I think this will happen. The answer is that you have to remain open to other Muslim intellectuals, thinkers, social movements people who are concerned with the same thing because you don't know. That's one.",
      "The second question that you asked, which I deferred is the question of how do I see this working out? How do you see such a polity? Functioning. Right? How does it function? Will it for it to succeed in your thinking",
      "in your thinking, can it function in a world of nation states? Or would I have to smash this concept with nature that he would have to essentially go against the nations there you can't actually have a caliphate and nation state coexist. How do you see happening functioning? Yeah. So that's the question another question then I have all the questions in mind that I'm not ignoring them, which is that are we in the worst possible condition today? And our relatively to history was that",
      "was that yeah comparative so there's almost situation now is it the worst comparatively to the past is it a fair comparison right and so let me answer the second question and then we're going to look at if you will the final question of how it might look like in the age of nation states so is this really the worst that it has ever been",
      "that show us quite the opposite, that we haven't been as good for centuries as we are today. I'll tell you why. Today... Let's just look at brute numbers. In the beginning of 20th century, 1900s, the number of Muslims in the world, percentage of Muslims was... Take a guess.",
      "me surprisingly less than what many would think i don't know 70 million right so the percentage wise um a world population it's 10 to 12 percent okay today it is closer to 25 of the world okay so we've doubled roughly percentage yeah actual number",
      "The Prophet said that this message will spread and enter every household",
      "stuck only in one narrative. Yeah, of course. So is it? Surely? Yeah, he's pretty guess that's all I want to say for now. Secondly, the availability of Islamic sciences, Islamic knowledge or understanding of history in 20th century increasingly because of the activity of amazing scholars working",
      "and Riyadh, and elsewhere Morocco, Lebanon editing works and producing high quality critically edited works. And this is of course my good friend Ahmed Al Shamsi in his recent book Rediscovering Islamic Classics describes this change we are enormously incomparably more knowledgeable about",
      "the great Islamic history and tradition than Muslim intellectuals in the early 20th century, the 19th century 18th century and 17th century. These people were reading a hand a kind of text or number of texts about Islam that could fill my room here and that's it whereas today a library at Princeton Harvard and whatnot right you could fill entire floors and have only a section of it",
      "section of it so what does that tell you? That if you're looking at the civilization and Islam not only from, not simply from the perspective of executive power but from its staying in power about how it took the idea of Tawheed in the Quran and the Sunnah and it made it a universe then",
      "Another victory, right? The number of Muslims who are literate today that people who can actually read the Quran and the Hadith and memorize or ask scholars questions or are interested in learning about Islam or non-Arabs were interested in",
      "So, and finally Islam now is a global phenomenon as a result of globalization but really starts with the two world wars that Muslim armies and soldiers go everywhere and spread Islam.",
      "Islam is not a stranger in South Africa now. All these regions that were not reached by Islam in the earlier centuries, even as late as the 19th century. So in that sense, right? In many ways, Islam has greater strength numerically",
      "our own awareness of our tradition in terms of... Now there are many things that you could be depressed about the rise of atheism in the Muslim world and you talk about the crisis of authority in the Islam world but crisis of Authority comes from the fact that more people are learning from different perspectives. And rather than thinking this as is potential for creative synthesis, right? Because",
      "think that they already figured out the right answer to everything, they think there's a crisis of authority because nobody is listening to me. But that's a myopic worldview, right? That's really not how a great civilization thrives. Finally, Muslim... To some degree human access to knowledge and human understanding",
      "understanding of the world around us, the empirical understanding of our and of our own limitations is better today. Right? That's a human underst- that's a Human Possession but Muslims are increasingly part of it champions of it leaders of it in many fields right? That had not been the case before for very long time so Today you have Muslim",
      "experts, social scientists Islamic studies as well as social sciences and natural sciences which means that the possibility of Muslims thinking as Muslims and communicating with each other globally are greater than they have been in a very long time. And last but not least our ability to communicate",
      "Growing up, I saw them even in Pakistan but I didn't know much about them. But today I do. I know history of Islam in Africa and North Africa. Most of my friends are from the Middle East. Muslims are interacting with each other, intermarrying and realizing the existence of each other at a level that has never happened before.",
      "seen as a threat and you're seen as target populations, and you are vulnerable. So it is a result of the fact that Islam has succeeded in some respects, that it is seen as threat by Europe and now increasingly by China and India. I think that the mechanisms by which Muslims could now unify",
      "the cultural social unification requires communication shared language requires a public sphere which did not exist before and does now it didn't exist even in the abbasid ottoman periods um so i think that there are reasons for optimism so that's",
      "I'm very optimistic. The second question of whether we can, how such a state could function or such an entity could function in the age of nation states. First of all, we have to address down the nation state a little bit. What is a nation state? Nation state, the world of nation",
      "until after the Second World War. So it's not something that had existed, and people talk about the rise of it in 1648, Westphalia and whatnot. Give me a break! The world was made up empires until the Second world war. And then in the Cold War is just the mode of empire of imperial influence changed since the cold war. New ideals now because trade and other things took over but there were spheres of influence so you could very much say",
      "much say that American Empire continued to exert such influence at nation states even in this time were always a questionable construct. And there is, in fact scholars who say that. There are Stephen Krasner and Stanford University has an interesting book I like the title because it sort of lays out the point I want to make. It's called Sovereignty",
      "organized hypocrisy. And the idea that Stephen Krasner has is that, of course, sovereignty, the idea their nation stays and they're sovereign, it's just a construct that we always consistently violate. He in fact says there's nothing wrong with it. Just give up the hypocrisy! Not all states are equal. Never have been. Never will be.",
      "that nation-state is not a hundreds of year old construct. It's not what brought modernity, it is not synonymous with our existence. It is a construct that became increasingly popular even though even then questionable after the Cold War and it came under attack already in the 90s because we have to understand",
      "the end of nation-state. In the 90s people were writing about it because they saw globalization as the end at the nation state and to some degree now we're living a reaction to that perceived end of the nation-states, because people want to go back to this but the idea was that you see nation-State ideally is a territory where",
      "and the ideology, and the state, the government apparatus are all one abstraction. They're one thing. The state represents the territory and the people and it is sovereign. There is no other entity that claims the loyalty of these people",
      "to engage in total war against other such entities if need arises. That's the two lessons we learned from the two world wars. Now, nation-state in that sense is an extremely questionable construct. It doesn't exist anymore because people no longer...",
      "groups and peoples that are not in their own national boundaries. Their decisions, right? Are made often by United Nations IMF or some trade groups that will affect fundamentally what people can do now there is environmental groups that are international that are pushing",
      "But when we imagine the world of nation states and connect it to this idea of sovereignty, this theological idea of sovereignity, that is very... You could say under attack. You'd say it's rather mitigated because the nation state elite now have effectively become the military force for multinational corporations.",
      "So they are enforcers for global trade, but they don't claim the loyalties of their people. This was has always been the case in the Middle East and elsewhere with some exceptions. But now this is a case globally. And this means that this idea of this nation state as being a reality that is unquestionable it's just not true.",
      "Now, what does it mean for the caliphate? You see if you mean by nation-state and governments First of all there should be a clear difference we should make between state and government. Government is The apparatus of administration State is this ideological entity who has the right to decide who has a right to rule and Governments are",
      "are, by the way historically the majority of the world civilized world has lived under empires not nation states. Empires or smaller kingdoms city-states or empires now in the empire there was always this difference between government is local whereas the Empire which has these sovereignty if you will which has all",
      "That's somewhere in a one major city like Istanbul or Constantinople and whatnot. So, in a sense what we are talking about today moving toward today naturally not only because we want as Muslims but because it is good policy in my view in number ways economically and politically a combination of empire and nation state model or administration basically local administration local governments yet",
      "that are through our technology strongly connected. So there are some policies on which we need to act in a central way, in defense and for economy and movements of people and you know so on so forth. And in some things we need pay attention to local decisions that are made by people.",
      "for example, you could choose your local in my imagined caliphate. You could choose leader democratically because Tunisians like that or at least some Tunisian's like that so long as majority of Tunisias like that good for them they choose their leader that way. Yemen could choose a tribal Sheikh that most people agree on right Balochistan could have the leader of their Jarga",
      "You don't have to break all these local forms of power and impose one in order to establish a caliphate. And that's the mistake that often people make, they think of caliphates as blank slate, you have to erase peoples history and culture and local forms",
      "you're getting there, right? Somehow you will have this power to do so and I don't see that as necessary. It may happen because again you never can decide ahead of time how it will happen but you should theoretically in your discourse, in your understanding as Muslim intellectuals and activists and ulama who are thinking about this our discourse should rise",
      "study them debate them so that when they happen all around us we have you know appropriate reactions to them if i were to just engage you in this kind of possible hypothetical possibility uh the one that you mentioned about tunisians electing their ruler or their leader by democratic elections",
      "Then do you hypothetically in this situation, just as a running thought, if it has ever passed your thoughts, would it come to issues of war? Military cooperation. Not just defense by expansion. The source of governance. The Source of laws and these kind of things. Yes so I think that there are",
      "be great local autonomy. Now there is always a difference in Islamic history between siyasa and schools of fiqh and madhhab. Siyasah has always been a more flexible model whereas so, a good example of that is Nizam al-Mulk who was Ishafi'i endorsed Hanafis and Asharis else somewhere some places",
      "where plump places and humblies in Baghdad and elsewhere kind of guy who knows that siyasa is different from my personal beliefs right a ruler and this by the way isn't old this is why Imam al-Juwaini who wrote his famous and very important work Ghiyath ul Ummam fil Tiyathul Dhullam in the time of Nizam al Mulk uh and this is it might be one of the best treatises better than",
      "Al-Mawaridhi's which is more famous. Why do you think that's better? Because the most popular commonly cited was Al-Khamel Sultaniyah Right, now Ghiyas al-Ummam is more imaginative and more critical about its resources and it's about its claims so it wants to differentiate between what is definitive, what is merely conjectural So it criticizes Al-Mawardi for that reason",
      "Mawarabi's book is absolutely amazing. It's just not what people often take it to be, but Ghiyath al-Umam has this extra element of great imagination of what happens if this isn't there? What happens if that isn't? And there he talks about the rule of the Khalifa or Imam should be to uphold Aqidah only,",
      "and defend the lands of Islam, Hawdat al-Islam or something. The idea is Bayda as they use the word that there are these lands of Islams and the role of the ruler is to take care of the whole and not go individually and teach people or engage or persecute them you know do engage in inquisition about whether their Aqidah",
      "whether the Aqidah is right or basically let the ulama and the teachers and the parents do what they do best. They decide what needs to be taught, and you take care of the basics. Similarly, the job of the Khalifa or now one we should speak of I believe as a caliphal institution",
      "mutual interaction that there is fairness and justice, that if anyone is threatened from an outside source then all of the armies of the Muslim world need to be mobilized. That all of them are implementing Sharia in Islam in a way that locally is decided. It may be that there are places which are not ready",
      "understanding of local ulama and local people but once you see a model of successful um and compassionate and working application uh in one place then it expressed because muslims learn from each other of course so there needs to be this sort of practical understanding because",
      "the Ottoman Empire, most of all because that's the most detailed knowledge and most bureaucratically sophisticated empire we have ever had more so even than the Mughals and the Safavids or anything else they've had. So that obviously needs to be a point of reference You know what you just described as the Khalifal Institute's overarching responsibility to ensure fairness and justice in the lands of Islam",
      "to see that the sharia is being implemented in those lands where it is able uh to be implemented and of course to protect those lands from any external threats can you see such a responsibility or such an institute of polity fitting into this also very flexible and synergistic reality",
      "the tribal Sheikh, can you see a Khalifa on top of these regional and local leaders? So I think for that you need good institutional design. And for that, you need really good scholars minds constitutional scholars who can learn from history.",
      "of everything working out but also a great genius is the American Constitution which took really belligerent and different colonies and was able to put together a design that worked. So I think that institutional design is necessary, and when and where that moment will come I think for us to decide,",
      "I don't see any serious limitation other than our own imaginations and lack of courage. Bringing the podcast to a close, I really wanted to ask you whether you had read the following books? And if you have what are your very brief thoughts on these books as well as the authors? And also give you just get your thoughts on three case studies of three groups",
      "Have you read The Impossible State by Wael Halaq? Yes. And what's your general thoughts of the book, its arguments and its conclusion? I saw that book as a challenge, as throwing down the gauntlet rather than claims that are precise and accurate",
      "meaning that many observations in it can be challenged, but it's a passionate plea to think differently. Which is why I wrote a review of it in 2013, I believe and I almost knew 100% that people are going to misread the text. And so instead of reviewing it, I summarized it tonight pointed out these are the things that people",
      "misread precisely those things such as... What was the biggest thing that was misread or misunderstood? Some people saw Halakha as advocating a secular state because he is saying the impossibility of, right, the impossability of a nation, an Islamic State. He's not advocating a Secular State, certainly not a Secule Nation State. Other people were likely to read him as saying that",
      "the you know we need to go back to sort of a pre-modern model and there is no Muslim contemporary understanding that fits his model. And I felt that in fact he was drawing on Muslims who were more deeply critical of western civilization but uh",
      "a more sophisticated version of what some of the earlier Islamists were saying. He simply was very critical of Muslim brothers and others who want to Islamize the nation-state, but when it comes to you know the question of the possibility of an Islamic order... So this book is not impossibility of Islamic order",
      "of an Islamic nation state. People often misunderstood that and then, of course there were things that were questionable such as the idea that in the past Islamic tradition has been divorced from politics or that politics has not meant what it means today",
      "our understanding of politics is entirely different. I don't agree with those parts, I think that in my own book, a 2012 book, I try to respond to this problem and I argue that the politics political activity collective action has been in fact necessary from the very beginning to make room for Islamic law and Sharia that he talks about so but",
      "Recalling the Caliphate by As-Saeed",
      "and asks us to expand our imagination. So yeah, I have great respect for him, for Professor Salman Al Sayed and his book. This is an author who I believe actually wrote a rather warm response to your 2019 piece, Dr Reza Pankaj.",
      "dr reza pankhurst and his book the inevitable caliphate have you read this book yes i have read an amitabh caliph it i wrote a review of it as well uh and i know doctor is a pancrest we've engaged in conversations and continue to be obviously now obviously in case he's coming from a very specific context as someone who was a member of his jailed in egypt",
      "As well as being an academic And you've wrote a review of this book as well, yeah? Yes In terms of three political scenarios That have happened in our lifetime One that could be reflective of Not all but some of the groups That have made the caliphate Or at least Islamic governance Something central to their mission",
      "the freedom and justice parties electoral victory in egypt under dr muhammad morsi rahimahullah um and its subsequent failure or removal by a military coup what are your brief thoughts on this specific incident so i mean i have lots of thoughts it was very deeply touching and deeply at first deeply depressing",
      "turn of events. We all had great hopes in Egypt and Egypt broke our heart. And so the past, but that said Freedom and Justice Party you know we have plenty of criticisms for it was trying to imitate Turkey and going into the neoliberal direction partly perhaps because its leadership is",
      "insular to the goings-on in the world, a kind of fact phobia and knowledge phobia that we see in other Islamists I think really ails Egyptian Islamic Muslim Brotherhood more than perhaps anyone else. And so they always never fail to disappoint the expectations that they're going to do just",
      "out of sync thing. But that said, of course they never had a chance. That was very clear. ISIS's claim of the restructuring of the caliphate in June 2014 where certain borders between Syria and Iraq",
      "Iraq, certain nation states, nation state borders from the time of Sykes Pico were physically smashed by ISIS and disclaimed by them. Your thoughts on that incident? Yeah so I think that those borders uh and Sykes-Picot agreement and the opposition to it um you know those",
      "history of what happened, right? That should be known to our youth or high schoolers and they should be seen as offense to our identity as Muslims. Our self-respect or honor and they aren't, right so I think that",
      "leader should use nationalist rhetoric to bolster their claims. What about ISIS's specific claim in June 2014 that they had reestablished the caliphate? So, that was obviously completely ridiculous because the calipha requires bay'ah of and care",
      "and protection of the Ummah. You have to care for the majority of the ummah, and you have to be accepted by the caliphate in one way or another. So ISIS solved that problem in the most nefarious, most wicked way possible by doing takfir of everyone who didn't join them.",
      "So there was nothing to their claim that was credible because to be a caliph means first and foremost, to protect the borders of the Ummah, protect the Muslims. And who could they protect? Of course, they couldn't even resolve their problems with Al-Qaeda and Taliban.",
      "young and stupid murderers, you could still give them a chance. If they were not that, you can say okay what went wrong with them? Let's say they were better more compassionate people right? What would still be wrong with is that they could not work out differences",
      "If you cannot make a deal, if you cannot bring people to the table then you're a non-starter in the game that...the long term game that we have. Being from Pakistan yourself or being of Pakistani origin, we know that at least in the 90s onwards there was a high level of concentration by Hizb ut-Tahrir in Pakistan and where",
      "Pakistan is great potential because Pakistan, you know it's a relatively young country that doesn't still have any coherence in terms of its various ethnic models, various ethnic groupings and the only thing that can potentially bring them together is Islam but they've tried to nationalize Islam right? That's what the army wants to do. To use Islam",
      "do it for its own purpose nationally. Of course, all nation states do precisely that. It so happened that Pakistan's army's identity in history and contemporary interests align with Muslims' interests in general often not always. So it doesn't have an anti-Islam or anti-islamism",
      "Islamism even strain that you see in other armies. Dr. Uwe Maranjum, it was an absolute pleasure having you on. It was a great honor having you I know this conversation could have easily gone on for easily a few more hours and that's usually the case when Muslims discuss the caliphate and revival and stuff. And I pray to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala he blesses you and preserves you in this life and gives you the best in the next and keeps you as a source of benefit to Islam and Muslim and wider society.",
      "from the wider society. Ameen. Aameen. Same for you Jazakum Allah Khairan. Thank you very much for having me. BarakAllahu Feeq. Brothers and sisters, friends and foes out there I hope you thoroughly enjoyed this podcast as much as I did. You tend to know which podcasts I really like when it's me doing not much talking and doing a lot of listening and that's more than you know that as well those podcasts where I'm listening a lot is those ones which I can literally just sit here and just listen and I hope",
      "ground covered with a lot more that could have been covered and inshallah we hope to have dr anjam on in the future subscribe to the five pillars youtube channel please like this video share it leave a comment and until next time assalamu alaikum blood brothers podcast production"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Dr_ Ovamir Anjum on the end of the East-West dicho__1750787359.opus",
    "text": [
      "The East-West dichotomy, I argue is gone. We no longer have a cultural clash of the West and others, the West in the east or as Samuel Huntington would have it, the west versus the four, five six other civilizations that the west must keep divided and conquered but that distinction I'm afraid is gone in the world today what we'd rather have is a unified vulgar elite in every part of the world from the western core to India China and the Middle East",
      "rest of it, all persuaded the joining aspects of the capitalist liberal West is the only way to survive. A few elites in every country have become billionaires and the masses of humanity everywhere are dispossessed. Dispossessed not only at meaningful wealth and prospects but of their humanity of meaning, of respect, of virtue that they can understand. The world so the thesis goes has become deracinated. It is no wonder that the West itself has lost meaning an identity. It has conquered the world and nothing is left to conquer."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Ep_ 55 - Friday Night Live with Dr_ Ovamir Anjum __mRDRIe2UMP4&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750674827.opus",
    "text": [
      "As-salāmu ʿalaykum wa-rahmatullahi wa-barakātuh. Ahlan wa sahlan bikum. Welcome everyone to another session of our Friday Night Live program. Like always, it is an honor to be with you all on Friday night and making this program what it is. And continuing it is through your support, your du'as,",
      "regardless if it's live or later on may Allah make these programs a means of our increasing our knowledge, increasing our Iman increasing our brotherhood and sisterhood and also bringing us closer towards Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala every week the goal is to somehow rejuvenate our Imaan inspire us again through having different discussions hearing different lectures rather than just hearing a lecture",
      "The goal is that inshaAllah, that information can lead to some transformation to some extent. And we come back on every Friday and you all join us. May Allah reward you all. And hopefully this can continue happening. As you're joining, please say Assalamualaikum. And let us know that, you know, you can hear us and see us and all is good and all Is clear. Alhamdulillah. Once again, I think I'll be alone today. Not alone, of course, you",
      "with me so you won't just have me the entire time. I won't bore you all but Shaykh Abdullah will not be joining as a host, he's still traveling inshaAllah he'll be back very soon but we have a beautiful program planned today one of the topics that a lot of us listen to talk about want to learn more about during the month of Muharram and during the specific days",
      "In the situation that took place with Hussain and his blessed family The family of the Prophet ﷺ So we've spoken about Muharram as a month We've spoken Ashura as a day of fasting But we haven't gotten the chance to dive into the historical aspect Of the incident of Karbala in all these surrounding elements Obviously one session will not do what it deserves",
      "that, but it will at least touch upon the main topics that a lot of us wish to learn about, hear about and hopefully it can give us more perspective on why this took place how it took place. Of course, a lot times with these discussions we leave with more questions than answers so hopefully we'll leave with some more answers. We have an expert with us today Dr Anjung from Toledo Ohio not too far from us in Michigan before that I would like to bring on one of my dear friends who I have",
      "I've been meeting virtually the last two years. I've grown fond of him, his work, his voice, his character, his personality and inshaAllah we'll continue to bring him on. And I'm referring to none other than my friend brother Akhil Fareed. Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh. Waalaikumsalam warahmatoollahi wbarakatuh. How are you? Alhamdulillah I'm fine. How about you? 6am in the morning? 6.30 am now? Yes, 6.40.",
      "Alhamdulillah. May Allah reward you for staying up after Fajr. It's a Saturday, right? Not Friday. Yep, it's Saturday here. So do you have... Every time you come join and people enjoy it, I enjoy it. I know my mother enjoys it. Alhamdullilah. That's good. How is the Delta variant COVID anything happening in Pakistan or are things relaxed? The waves are coming and going.",
      "coming and going but overall it's fine. It's relaxed. Alhamdulillah. Everybody is getting vaccinated as well. I think like millions of people have got vaccinated already. So, inshallah. This vaccine is accessible to everyone pretty much now. Yup. Everyone for free here by the government. Okay that's great. Alhumdulillah protect you all and you are in where Islamabad Lahore? Where? Yep. Islamabad. The capital capital city. Yes. Protect you all InshaAllah.",
      "What do you what do you have in store for us today? What are you gonna start with? Okay, I'm going to start this uh with it's a of uh Dr. So it's basically the person is telling God that wherever I see I see you so it's about our love to our creator. You could say.",
      "Jaha dekhun tujhe dekh un, main chah hun bas tujh e cha hun.",
      "tu na ho toh mai mar jaun jaha dekhoon tuje dekhoon mai chahoon bas tujhe chaahoon",
      "I don't say it. Now, in me, I don' t live anymore. You have descended into my soul. You are the one who has come down from the dead.",
      "SubhanAllah. Takbir, Allahu Akbar. What a beautiful kalam. What an amazing poem by Alhamdulillah and sung so beautifully by you Aqibai. Honestly this is my first time hearing it from you. I don't think you've... Have you read this before as well? No. I'm planning to. InshaAllah. Please do.",
      "Please do. Again, for the audience, alhamdulillah everyone knows that every Friday we try to bring different artists on, different languages. Today we have Urdu but I'm pretty sure even people who didn't understand it still enjoyed it because of your tone and rhythm. And a lot of times sometimes you don't need to understand what's being said. We can just put ourselves in lock ourselves in and hopefully just benefit from the rhythm, the tone and I'll try to summarize it where",
      "the poet is talking about wherever I look, Ya Allah, I see you. You are... It's not talking about the physical sense. We know that لا تدرك الأبصار ويدرك الابصار That no one can... No eyesight in this world can encapsulate Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala and hence one of the biggest and most enjoyable luxuries of the Akhirah right? In Jannah is to finally see Allah Subchanahu Wa ta'ala هَذَا الجزاءُ الإحسانِ إلاَّ الإحْسَانِ لِلَّذِينَ أَحْثَنُوا الْحُسْنَةُ",
      "الْحُسْنَةِ وَزِيَادَةٍ People will actually be able to see Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Allah will say to the people of Jannah, after entering into Jannah do you have any other desire need or want? Like this is after getting into Janna. Imagine like we got our fruits, you got your families, you have your siblings and everyone's together and Allah says do you want anything else? So the response would be Ya Rabb, نجوتنا من النار ودخلتنا الجنة You've freed us from Jahannam and you've given us entrance into Jannah",
      "to Jannah, you've reunited us with our loved ones and family members I don't think there's anything else You can give us the curtains will be lifted and it'll be removed and at that moment the people of Jannah will be able to witness the beauty of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala and at this moment we will say Allah there is nothing else that We want in Jannah more than Your view there is nothng else as enjoyable anymore so in this world we can but inshaAllah",
      "we can't but inshaAllah in the akhirah we will. But the idea is that I find you Ya Allah, in everything. I find You in the hymning of the birds, I find Your in the sounds of the waves, I found You in beauty of the moon, I finds You in everything around me.\" And the poet says, وَفِي كُلِّ شَيْءٍ لَّهُ آيَةً تَدْلُو عَلَىٰ أَنَّهْ وَاحِدٌ Then everything in this world and every creation there's a sign that denotes that Allah is there, Allah is present. Obviously every line has its own summary",
      "has its own summary, but this is just a crux of what's being said. Akhirat, please add if there's anything else that you want to add for the audience to know what this poem is saying. Yeah, I think you've added enough. So the main concept is that wherever I see that maybe you could say that I see your signs. We can translate I see you into this. The mountains, the sky, everything is so beautiful. So how beautiful would be the creator of all these things?",
      "in store for us anything else they're gonna pull out of your pocket mashallah beautiful poems yep i can okay so it's uh",
      "of who is loving us Allah is loving Us a reminder that what truly matters is what Allah thinks of us before anything else was created Allah was there and after everything will be destroyed",
      "of Allah. And one day that Divine Presence will become a pure reality for us believers where Allah says, إِنَّ الْمُتَّقِينَ فِي جَنَّاتٍ وَنَهَرٍ The Believers the people of Taqwa will be in these gardens and they'll be enjoying next to these rivers. في مَقَعَةٍ صدقٍ عِندَ مَلِكٍ مُخْتَذِرٍ In the presence of the greatest King of the world and we'll be sitting with Him",
      "with him. The poem reminds me of the reality that we will also leave and only one that remains is Allah before there were stars, and the moon, and mountains in the creation that we're so in awe of it was only one Allah and everything comes back to Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala and wala ya'udhu hu hafidhuhumma the entire creation of this world depends upon Allah and this is the definition of Allahu Samad Allah is samad and we are all dependent but I keep reminding us",
      "May Allah reward you for reminding us of these feelings. One is to remind us of information, one is to reminds us of feelings and also these feelings are important.",
      "more for us today. which we have it's a.",
      "منور کر دیا جس نے فضا وہ رہنما دیکھوں تمنائے دل رسول اللہ تمنیے در حبیب اللہ بلندی کا نظارہ گمبد خزرا کی بستی میں",
      "دل حبیب اللہ قدم باہر مدینے سے تصور میں مدينہ ہے الہی یا الہ ہی عظمتوں کی انتہا دیکھو وہ شان خلق دو عالم درو دن پر سلام ان پر میرے مولا یہ موقع دے",
      "امبیاء دیکھوں تمنا اے دل رسول اللہ تمنا",
      "Very heavy words for people that understood",
      "Hopefully you enjoyed it. For those that didn't, I've been hoping and wishing for oh so long that I can finally come and visit you Ya Rasulullah. Just want to come visit you in your resting place and be in the presence of where you are laid to rest. For oh so",
      "We actually want to finally see you and embrace you. And enjoy your beauty. A beauty such as no eye has ever seen. Poet says, Oh Muhammad ﷺ, But no eye can ever see the beauty similar",
      "similar to the beauty of the Prophet ﷺ. No mother can ever give birth to such a beautiful child. خُلِقْتَ مُبَرَّأً مِّن كُلِّ عَيْمٍ Created free from all defects. كَأَنَّكِ قَدْ خُलِق்تَكَ مَا تَشَاءُ As if you were made the way you desire to be. لَوْ لَمْ تَكُنْ لَّهُ آيَةٌ مُّبَيِّنَةٍ لَكάνَ مانظوره يَأْتِيكَ بِالْخَضَرِ عبد الله بن رواحى says, رضي الله عنه لَا وَلَم تَکُن لَهُ اٰيَتٌ مَبَیِّنةٌ صلى الله عليه وسلم",
      "O Prophet of Allah, if you had no miracles to show us No Qur'an to read to us No words of Hadith To recite upon us Rather you sat in one place your entire life لَكَانَ مَنْظُرُهُ يَأْتِيكَ بِالْخَبْرِ Your sight would be enough for us to believe in Allah That's all we need So inshallah We're able to go back to Madina Munawwara One of our dear friends is there I think it's opened up For certain countries",
      "countries and they're sending us pictures and videos, never have I been envious in a good way of anyone similar to this manner. I wish we were able to go inshaAllah Allah accepts us it's in the hands of Allah to accept us to come to the blessed lands of Makkah tul Mukarramah Madinatul Munawwarah for those that have not gone and don't feel like they have that urge or that desire we should build it save up for it InshaAllah go visit the land of our Habib",
      "The beauty of the Prophet is entire lessons. It's what we call a shama'il. We can speak about it for a long time, but I think we'll suffice with that and inshaAllah hopefully through our sessions in the future we can speak more about it. It is one of my favorite subjects. Bulaqib do you have any other short ones or should we call it a night? It's up to you. I can do a short one if you... Okay, go on. InshaAllah we can do an short one Dr Anjum if you're on insha Allah if you are on then we will bring you on right after because perfect",
      "I think that's perfect. so a short one will be good and so the guest doesn't have to wait any longer.",
      "You had two about the greatness of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and our love for him. Then you had two poems about our love or our Habib shallallahu alayhi wasalam. May Allah allow us to continue benefiting from your work inshaAllah, and please continue joining us whenever you have time inshaAlllah. InshaAllah inshaAllaah. Everyone please say salam to Mulaaqib inshaALLAH. JazakAllah khair Mulaakib. Get some rest inshallah. Thank you. Thankyou so much.",
      "May Dr. Anjum wait for quite a bit and bring him on board. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh, Dr.",
      "Did I get it right? Awayn al-Anjum. Dr. Awaym al-ANJUM is joining us from Toledo, Ohio where he is a professor at the university. He received his PhD in Madison, Wisconsin. He's also an editor-in-chief for Yaqeen Institute and Imam in Toledo and has been serving the Muslim Ummah at various levels for many years and Alhamdulillah have been able to benefit from him at the Miftah platform even on a personal level",
      "and inshaAllah I hope to continue doing so. And Dr. Anjum from his many fields of expertise, one of his specific fields of expertize is history and he focuses on Islamic history and also general history. So InshaAllah today we're able to hopefully pick his brain on the specific incident that took place in Karbala and take some benefit and also hopefully some lessons from it as well. Dr.Anjum, I hope I didn't butcher your bio.",
      "Oh, you're good. Thank you very much. Alhamdulillah. How's the family? How's everyone? Very good, alhamdulillahi. Are you joining us from Toledo or are you traveling or are your home? I'm in Toledo. So Dr. Anjum we'll just jump right into it. I know you've been waiting and I think audience has also been waiting. We ended off the poems speaking about the Prophet ﷺ and now we're diving",
      "time of the year comes, I think people are always looking for some answers. And I know last year we were able to host a class with you. You can find it online on the portal as well where you gave a quick recap to some extent of the battle, the whole tragedy of Karbala. It was called Strength Through Trials as well. And today we're here again, pretty much one year later in a different setting to speak about this discussion again, this topic again",
      "Okay, JazakAllah khairan Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem Alhamdulillah wa salatu wasalam ala Rasulullah It's an honor to be here To be speaking to you all",
      "to you all and uh to be talking about a topic um which is dear to my heart that of the story of early Islam and the story ahlulbayt, the family of the Prophet ﷺ and the",
      "month of Muharram and it is the 11th of Muharrem depending on when you how you started your month. And we want to talk about Ashura which literally in Arabic means the 10th day of Muharam. When Rasulullah ﷺ moved Medina he found that the people of Medina, Ahl al-Kitab,",
      "that the Jews would fast on this day Ashura and the Prophet when he inquired, he learned that this was because Allah gave victory to the people of Musa This is one narration, one explanation of how fasting in fact began early on. And then these, the fast of Ashura at first was an obligation for Muslims",
      "only for a very short period of time until the verses came down for Ramadan and then Ramadan became a Fadiba but the days of Ashura remain highly rewarded and the Prophet ﷺ would fast on the day of Ashurua. And in order to distinguish Muslims from other people of the book,",
      "of religions he instructed us to add a day before or after the Day of Ashura. So an important lesson that we learn here is that on one hand, we follow the Sunnah of earlier prophets and Musa is our prophet. We are Ahakub bi-Musa, we have more right",
      "because we are on Tawheed and on the message that Musa alayhi salam brought. And the Qur'an, our book that Allah has honored this Ummah with mentions Musa aleyhis salaam 136 times. He is the most frequently mentioned prophet in the Qur-an. So the story of Ashura",
      "was a celebration of the victory that Allah gave to Musa against their own and against the people of their own. That story really features centrally in the Quran, it's very very important stories you could say a backbone of the Quranic narrative so a very good big chunk of the",
      "The story of Musa is the most frequently told story in the Qur'an. Why? Because it is such a complete story and it resembles the seerah of the Prophet ﷺ So Allah ﷻ used that story to instruct the Muslims, to instruct Muhammad ﷺ and his ummah until the end of times",
      "when he suffers before he is given prophethood and then when he is giving prophethood, he struggles against and challenges the great oppressor, the great tyrant. And then his story continues in a new phase when his struggle is one in which he becomes the leader. He becomes the judge and the leader and commander of his people",
      "people and then the struggle comes from the Muslims of their time, the believers of their times themselves. And that way Allah completes the guidance shows the lessons to be learned when Muslims are weak and lessons to learn when Muslims",
      "we celebrate and we fast on the day of Ashura. Some 60 years, 61 years after the hijrah of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, the grandson of the prophet ﷺ, al-Hussein was martyred by the Iraqi governor of the Umayyad dynasty whose ruler at the time was Yazid in the year 61. On this day 10th of Muharram",
      "Muharram, our beloved Imam Al-Hussain ibn Ali radiallahu anhu who was known al-hassan and hussein were known as sons of the prophet sallallaho alaihi wa sallam. And he was martyred by an unfortunate person who acted in the interest of his own short term political self assertion",
      "Al-Fatharshan, Ubaidullah ibn Ziyad. And since then Muslims have reflected on these events and that is what I want to talk about briefly because I suspect that most of you know the story and I've heard it many times I will only point out certain themes",
      "First, the story of al-Husayn is seen as a tragedy. But I disagree with this characterization. The word tragedy comes from Greek tradition of a story that is sad and one that is characterized with grief. It's a story of Greek theater. There would be stories or performances that would make people laugh. There will be comedies. And then there will be tragedies where",
      "tragedies where the end would be unsatisfying and people would cry, and your main character would die. But a crucial aspect of what makes a tragedy in Greek understanding and ever since in English understanding is that it is an unresolved grief. It is a loss",
      "that leaves the hero and those who are watching the drama or listening to the story without any resolution, in pain. It's not just death. It is rather death of someone that finds no resolution. So for instance, to give you an example, let's say your father lived a full life",
      "At the end of his full days, he died with his sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters in such a way that they brought him honor and respect. And if he dies, there is no tragedy in that. Tragedy is that if, let's say by mistake or in anger or in rage you killed your father",
      "you were wrong in doing so that's a tragedy tragedy is when there is no resolution it's not just any grief and that's why we use the word tragedy we misunderstand we misunderstand it and for ahlul sunnah wal jama'ah for the people of quran and the sunnah and people who follow the sahaba",
      "celebrates or mourns people's births and deaths, and certainly does not build its narrative, its story of salvation, its history. It is a story of truth around tragedies. Why? Because this Islamic story is not a story tragedy. You see if you look at the Christian story it's a tragic story. If you understand it from Christian perspective God sent his son and that son was crucified",
      "There could be no more unsatisfying, irresolvable, unrequited story than that. God's son came and died. But for Muslims in Islam Allah is very clear that Allah gives victory to his",
      "to his messengers. His prophets, anbiya may die but ghusl are always victorious. Allah says that this is a rule of Allah that Allah and His messengers are always victorius. Now the reason that story is that theological teaching is very important is that we understand",
      "life such that the result of our efforts, the efforts of the pious people who stand for Allah and fight for Allah, and suffer for Allah, it doesn't end in tragedy in this life. Like the story which is for Islam, the paradigmatic story, the story of Islam, which is the seerah of the Prophet. What happens in the seera?",
      "So Islam's story is the story of Nassrullah, the victory of Allah and people entering into deen of Allah. So that if you think about it, the ultimate truth and the affairs of this world they come together. It is the Prophet that is victorious. It",
      "We worship Allah by celebrating the great acts of the messengers of Allah, the great and pious worshippers and slaves of Allah and servants of Allah. Such as if you look at all the celebrations in Islam, the two Eids they are celebrations not of somebody's birth or somebody's death or mourning or some tragedy",
      "celebration of actions pious actions actions when human beings choose Allah so when Ibrahim chose Allah, when Hajar chose Allah and Ismail chose Allah that it became a celebration of the greatest Eid for us. That became our Hajj and Eid Al-Adha Similarly when we worship Allah for a whole month",
      "whole month then comes at the end celebrating the actions of all the righteous people since the time the prophet so we celebrate actions of uh of service to allah actions of devotion to allahu obedience and that is also the greatest and",
      "poems recited about the Messenger of Allah. May my father and mother be sacrificed for him and myself. Allah says to us that, إِن كُنتُمْ تُحَبُّونَ اللَّهُ Say O Prophet to them if you love Allah فاتَّبِعوني يُحْبِثْكُمُ الله Then follow me Allah will love you back. In other words Prophet is saying",
      "It is very good, it is important to sing about me, to talk about me To think about coming and visiting my grave But if you don't do any of that And you follow me You are mine If you do all of that and you don' t follow me Then you're not mine This is the rule Allah has given and Rasulullah This is why Ashura and martyrdom of Al-Husayn",
      "is not a mourning for us Islam has no mourning its nature in the nature of the Quran and the Sunnah and the story of Islam are contradictory to that understanding in which mourning and tragedy are the center a passion about loss and tragedy, that is not the spirit of Islam now",
      "Now, all that said, why is Ashura and the story of Al-Hussein ibn Ali still I believe very important for Muslims? And one of the important events of course out of many many others there were many people who were martyred.",
      "lived for Allah and died for what they believed to be true. And for enacting the message of Rasulullah ﷺ. That is not a tragedy, right? That is the greatest honor. We know that shuhada are alive with Allah ﷻ and those who are coward, they are truly dead. So we have no reason",
      "tragedy or more. So now I want to change tacks a little bit and think about a couple of particular incidents, the particular disputes that are often raised and I will give you my sense of why a few things should be brought up and especially I understand most of my audience today are from Ahlus Sunnah",
      "caution uh the sunni uh some of these students who are learning their being about a couple things because you'll find this this come up over and over first uh this notion that sunnah and shia have always been in conflict this is some kind of a you know eternal conflict and things could never be better and they could never",
      "and it's theologically false that in fact you've had cases when there is conflict, and yet also cases when There is collaboration and cooperation. And a better time for all these those when Muslims were able to set aside their Their differences and focus on what is more important so Sahaba of course the honor of the sahabah is extremely important",
      "of the Prophet ﷺ and belief in Allah and Qur'an, his message are more important. So in that sense, the wise thing to do for this Ummah going forward as it was in the past was to unify on things we agree on and try to mitigate the misunderstandings and the ignorance",
      "create hatred that is not warranted, that is based on lies. I'll give you a quick example in the time of the Mongols, of course, the Shia Rizir cooperated with the Mongol and that is often cited as an example of how the Shias always, they're always treacherous. And that is a historical incident and it is true but it doesn't create a general principle",
      "general principle because just before that for centuries in fact the Twelver Shia had been on the forefront of jihad against the Byzantines for the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate. Let me say that again, the area which is today northern Syria it was ruled by a Twelvershiya dynasty Hamdanites who fought",
      "against the Byzantines, which was the single greatest threat to Islam, to the Abbasid Empire. Defending so they were the province that faced the Byzantine and they were more the most warlike province that in fact defended the Abasids Sunni Caliphate against the byzantines. And when the Buyid who are also Shia took over",
      "They were less invested in this defense and then the crusaders came. But even during the Crusades, there are very interesting stories where in one case for example a few years after Jerusalem was taken, the world of Islam was split between the seven Shi'a, the Fatimids in Egypt",
      "Iraq and Iran and elsewhere. And the Fatimids did play a role in inviting and making it easy for the crusaders to come, but when the jihad against the crusader started some of the Shia ulema were in fact at the forefront encouraging soldiers of Turks, Sunnis, to fight and not run away from fighting",
      "Ibn Shabdad was the name of an alim, a 12-year shia'i alim who in fact was involved in this resistance that began the movement. And of course there were many, many ulama afterward and then Sunni ulama who led this jihad, this jihadi ilm.",
      "the knowledge, change the conversation of Muslims so that they will be they would believe in their ability to unify and make jihad before Salah ad-Din al-Ayubi and Nur ad-din Zanfi came. They are the ones these ulama prepared this ground So my point is simply to diffuse this narrative that a clash or hatred between Sunnis and Shia because we disagree about this issue",
      "This clash is necessary. That is not the case that you can we can disagree about this issue yet also agree to disagree and Also, of course insults that are Directed at The Sahaba and the wives of the Prophet Sallallahu alaihi wasallam are truly Offensive to not only",
      "to not only Sunnis because they are Sunnis and because they have some dogma. Anyone who reads the Qur'an knows that Allah in the Qur-an praises the Sahaba in a way that is completely clear, unadulterated, not at all confusing about Allah praising the Sahabah who are later accused. And so it is an offensive thing",
      "offensive thing for us. Nevertheless, this is the trick that we have to bring people to the truth through knowledge by mastering the knowledge rather than sort of taking refuge in fictions that are pleasing",
      "out the people who praise Yazid for instance are and denigrate or take away from the honor and struggle of Al-Hussein ibn Ali they call themselves Sunnis but they're not doing either Islam or truth any favor. The greatest of ulama",
      "cursed Yazid or stayed silent about cursing Yazid only because they did not want cursing to become their habit and religion, not because Yazid doesn't deserve it. And this is a saying of Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal in one of his sayings that he legitimates cursing another one. He simply says I don't curse them because I don' t curse anyone else.",
      "opinion of again Imam Shaykh al-Islam ibn Taymiyyah who is considered very harsh against those who attack the Sahaba. Nevertheless on this issue he says the ulama have two legitimate opinions, the greatest ulama of opinions whether you can curse Yazid or not. No one says that Yazid is a hero or he was a pious and righteous man whom we should follow and what he did at Karbala",
      "took place in medina a horrible instance incident which is also unleashed against the people of medina his army of muslim uh ibn hajjaj in order to bring them um bring them through submission both of these incidents are absolutely horrible and they should not be justified because the danger of justifying such actions is that we tolerate such oppression and tyranny",
      "in our rulers and that is not Islam. That is not the Islam of Musa. That is no Islam of Muhammad. So let us not kid ourselves, and let us give a pass to tyrants in the name of some kind of dogma, and we should stand for justice. So these are some reflections I have on this day of Isra because of Allah's will.",
      "running us through all those historical points and giving us those details I think I would just continue from there, and just throw a few questions out. Before I ask my questions, I feel like to give some backdrop to the audience that this month of Muharram one of the key characteristics of it is Adil Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala makes that clear in",
      "That no one should oppress one another at any level, not macro, neither micro. And... Another ayah... This month truly teaches us to be just even if it's against ourselves or our own families.",
      "Tanjum, you explained the entire background of why Muharram is important in a few words and then you dove into a topic that I think very few people feel comfortable speaking about to be honest. It's not everyone's comfort zone where they can speak about these to some extent sensitive topics and making clear statements about how we should or shouldn't react to certain individuals. How you spoke about Yazid and other things",
      "made something clear for the audience and myself that is the conflict is not, the conflict does not necessary. It was there sometimes, sometimes it wasn't there. And then the second backdrop for all of us is to truly understand the level in the reverence that our Ummah has for Hassan Hussain as Ahlul Sunnah wal Jama'a. Sometimes people think that perhaps we don't have that type of love and reverence",
      "A lot of times this happens where people champion certain individuals and it seems as if they're the only ones that love that person. That's not true. So regardless of how the Shi'is or the other people react to Hassan Hussain, that doesn't mean that we should not react in a way that we feel comfortable with, with expressing our love and so on and so forth. The Prophet ﷺ would say, هُمَا رَيْحَانَتَايَ فِي جَنَّةٍ And the Prophet ﷺ will say, مَن أَحَبَّهُمًا فإني أحبّهُ Whoever loves them, I also love them.",
      "the various narrations that speak about Hassan and Hussain playing on the back of the Prophet ﷺ. One day Abu Bakr ad-Dilaw enters into the home of the prophet, and Hassan & Hussin are riding the Prophet, and he enters the room and he says, نعم المركب What a beautiful ride! Like if you have nephews and nieces and children we know what that means. And the Prophet looks up in his mouth and says,",
      "One is Hassan, one is Hussain. Beautiful youngsters, the Sayyidah, Shababi, Ahlul Jannah, the leaders of Jannah. One is poisoned and one is murdered in cold blood. I know Dr. Nirmik you explained it very well that we should never call this a tragedy but the heart aches in these situations but of course there's something bigger that is happening in the Qadr of Allah. The Prophet at times would be giving khutbah and they would climb on the back of the Prophet",
      "Ibn Amr narrates that the children, these two kids were playing tag with a Prophet in the city of Medina. So there's such a love and attachment. And Dr. Anjum they're only seven six years old when the Prophet left this world but that attachment was built so early on. And so this is what we're referring to in Hussain right? And then fast forward so many years and 61 years after hijrah Dr.",
      "takes place. But Anjum, just to give us some type of... We don't have 15-20 minutes left perhaps but just to go back and forth on anything specific that is left. To give us a quick bird's eye view of the geopolitical affairs at that time. Why was Hussain going to Kufa? Why was he being called? Of course many people have probably heard this story but there is reason why he left Makkat al Mukarramah",
      "Makkatul Mukarrama, after sending his cousin Muslim Al-Aqeel. So perhaps in a few minutes we can speak about this if you feel comfortable, if you think it's beneficial and then we'll just go from there. If anyone has any questions please feel free to type them on the side inshaAllah if we have enough time we'll get to them Okay so there is no way to do justice to those events and the sources in this short time I want to only in fact take this time to warn people",
      "people that our deen is the deen of truth not feelings you may feel that you want to attribute something to the prophet because it sounds good you can attribute it to the Prophet right? The Prophet must have said that is one of the greatest things as you know whoever lies about me the Prophet says",
      "He should make his place in fire. Because the truth about the Prophet and truth about what happened, this is really crucial part of our Deen. This is not how many other religions and people think about their religion. They make up stories. In our deen we have to know what happened. What the Prophet said whether it's a matter of law or virtue or something else.",
      "This is how we preserve our Qur'an. It is preserved through the truthfulness of the community's verbal oral transmission. We trust our Salaf, our predecessors and ancestors because they were truthful people and they believed in this truth. Now a lot of lying became very common in the time of fitna, in times when people disagreed.",
      "massive fabrications were circulated both about the virtues of ali and ahlulbayt and the virtues uh and that sometimes the line got so bad that this it got out of hand so there are really we have volumes and volumes of fabricated about virtues",
      "virtues that the ulama later spent their lives and generations to figure out that these were lies how to separate right from wrong. The reason I'm talking about this is well known, everyone knows all ulama know that this was a big fitna of lying and therefore religion had to be saved just as it had to",
      "than others in Medina and then the other enemy. It had to be saved from the hands of the kadaaboon, those people. I mean if I could show up isn't this one of the reasons perhaps for the audience know that even the concept of sanad became dominant you know. Where Abdullah ibn al-Baghdadi would actually say this that prior",
      "it came from and who said it because everyone was telling the truth. And no one would lie about the Prophet ﷺ but only after these differences rose and these made up narrations came to light that we kind of clenched down on it, that okay now we have to figure out where everything is coming from. Exactly. So why I mentioned this problem is because many of the stories that you'll hear about Karbala they are written over a hundred, 150 years after the events",
      "the events and often they have no isn't especially the details have noticed that uh they are told by people whose credibility is questionable um in particular most of these stories come from really one or two narrators um abu meknaf yahya bin lukman is one of the main narrators",
      "So a lot of emotional stories that you hear about what happened, they're all made up. And then there are exaggerated centuries after century so that what was attributed to Abu Mikhnah in the second century is much more manageable. To give you an example, we have a small book about Maqt al-Husayn, The Death of Al Hussein,",
      "in the second century of Rakhnaf. But then you have seven centuries later, seven centuries Later, you have a much bigger book about much greater details of what was happening and exaggeration is crazy. So in one case for example Al Hussein or some brother has killed five men and later it was 500 men that he's single-handedly killing and facing.",
      "people think that you can exaggerate in order to increase emotional effect. So what often happens is that when we're talking to Sunni or Shia, even Shia scholars by the way of Hadith critics they recognize this is all later. This isn't just the Sunnis. Anyone who's a historian or a Hadith critic recognizes all this stuff is coming later and I'm mentioning this is that whether you are reading about",
      "about the some of the great virtues of muawiyah or of uh of other of ahlulbayt you should know that in general this is the saying of ibn al-qayyim that most of the hadith that are about and virtues of mawya are fabricated he's a sahabi no doubt about that but most of",
      "people who are on the side of mawya many of the hadith about the virtues of ali and hassan hussein are fabricated but after you remove all the fabricated ahadith on both sides still there are many authentic ahadi in virtues of aliyah that we of course in these circulate and we must know them um and uh but that exaggeration can",
      "can destroy our sense of balance, can destroy the deen and this kind of exaggeration takes over so much so that the actual message of the Qur'an and Sunnah is lost. So this I think is perhaps a more important reminder than history lesson which may be too short of time to go over right now.",
      "Am I echoing? No, you're fine. There's some static but it's not bad. Okay. So in regards to understanding that where of course there are authentic narrations about their virtue like Um A'awi radiyaAllahu anhu even the Prophet ﷺ when he saw him even as a youngster and he mentioned that this will be the kisra of the Arabs in the sense that he will be a great leader",
      "all the narrations of Hassan and Hussain that we mentioned, there's many more. But Dr Anjum for just for the sake of the discussion, Hussien when he gets through and travels certain people mention to him not to go like Ibn Abbas and other companions that the people of Iraq are not people that can be trusted in this matter. The famous story about",
      "During Hajj And they said to him What is the penalty of killing a mosquito? So what penalty do we have to pay? What diya Do we have? And he said to them Where are you from? And they say, we're from Iraq And he says, you guys are asking about The diya Of killing a mosquitoes And you were the ones that slaughtered the children of the Prophet Or the grandson of the prophet ﷺ",
      "There were certain rumblings around, right? That perhaps they will not host you correctly. And for the audience, people at this time, Yazid becomes khalifa after Muawiyah. And that is also disputed and why he became khalifah because the truth was which Hasan made with Muawiya that after you leave this world, khilafah will come back to the general public and it'll be chosen through the shura but it came to Yazid",
      "it was said that the people of Kufa wanted to do bay'ah to Hussain and so on and so forth. And he sends his cousin, Muslim ibn Aqeel, and he goes there and he says, People are here, they would like you to come, so on. But then why were certain people telling him not to go? If you can just perhaps give us some detail on that. And the fact that he still went was to stand for justice. There were people being oppressed, and",
      "Even reach Kufa in land, Karbala not too far from Kufah. He was made Shaheed Yeah so When the news of the passing of Muawiyah arrives in Medina The governor calls the elders if you will the community and both Al-Husayn and Abdullah ibn al Zubair",
      "60s of this time. Abdullah ibn Zubayr was a little older and they would, they immediately realized what was going to happen there is as I report in Al-Bukhari which suggests that in his lifetime Muawiyah had come to Medina and given it taken a pre-Bay'a so which was an odd thing but he",
      "a fitna that might come if Muslims are left without a ruler. This is in Bukhari, in which Abdullah ibn Abbas sorry, Abdullah ibb Omar radiallahu anhu in fact reports this story. So there was some understanding that Muawiyah radiallahi anhu is going to pass this on to Yazid and the reason for that we can't go into right now I have a book on this coming soon inshaAllah",
      "inshallah um so one of the things then uh if that this basically both al-hussein and abdullah these are the elders of the community the only people person who is elder than them older than them is more senior he's like but he is in his 70s and he's an old man who doesn't want to fight",
      "costs among Muslims. He saw the first fitna that took place 30 years earlier, 20 years and he did not want anything like that. However Al-Hussein and Abdullah ibn Zubayr said that accepting Yazid would be wrong, that we can launch a successful rebellion against him and they both go to Mecca. Abdullah ibb Zubai's main support is in Mecca whereas",
      "is allegedly in Kufa, in Iraq way far by the month where his father was he used to be at one point however people who witnessed what had happened in the time when Ali Rav Yalan was killed and then Al-Hassan his older brother was made Khalifa and then he was attacked and then",
      "That is what everybody remembered and they said these are not people that you should rely on. However, in terms of reports that we have from this era it is true that Abdullah ibn Abbas encouraged him not to go There are reports that everybody came to him and told him not To go Those are more questionable reports So again I'm speaking from the perspective of historical authenticity",
      "means of how many people told him not to go um so it's not sure it is possible that everybody told you not to know but we cannot be sure and hussein's reasoning in other words was not completely uh out of the in other ways he wasn't um uh you know irrational to go it seems that his support his supporters would have been in iraq",
      "the Ummah, if you will against Mu'mayyads in Syria, Yazid's army in Syria. Nevertheless he seriously underestimated the nature of politics in Iraq and how these same people who had invited him in fact joined the army against him. And these were the people who started this whole idea of mourning and there is a movement",
      "of Tawwabun. They call themselves Tawbubun, those are penitents which was a this was of course not a Shia movement in the sense you think it has no different theology. These are Muslims but they were on the party of Al-Hussein politically and then when they saw his martyrdom and they themselves were part of the army in which this martyrdom took place",
      "when you begin to see this tragedy narrative emerging. Now, this was a small group of people led by Suleiman ibn Surab who was a Sahabi who had been part of this. So he swore that we are going to avenge the death of al-Husayn or die trying and they died trying quickly but this was the first movement. Again, it's very important",
      "It's very important. They did not reject Umar and Abu Bakr, they did not condemn Umm al-Mu'mineen Aisha radiAllahu anha. All of this stuff was unknown among the general population at this time especially people in Medina. And one final thing I think we should always remember is that Ahlulbayt, people of the family of Prophet Muhammad, families of Al Hasan and Hussein and Muhammad ibn al-Hafia their younger brother,",
      "They all lived in Medina alongside the Umayyads and the Zubairids, and the family of Omar and the Abu Bakr. And they all intermarried. What's more, they all named their children after Abu Bakar and Omar and Uthman. Right? And they married among the Umays. Not sometimes happily, you know, but Al-Hassan was softer about this and Al- Hussain was more angry. He did not want to marry with the Umaiyads.",
      "But they did. It was a family business, right? It's very different They did not think of each other as enemies and of course Ali had the son Abu Bakr and Omar Then Al-Hassan and Hussein similarly had these so they thought all of these people as part of their families So we should",
      "This is the most concrete evidence. Historically, the evidence about people's names is the more concrete evidence because you can't cook this up. This is a solid evidence that the Sahaba and Ahlul Bayt were family and friends. They may have some disagreements in the same way we had disagreements with our brothers and cousins. Right? And sometimes what people have done is take a small disagreement",
      "disagreement that may appear in some report and exaggerate turned into a colossal metaphysical animosity if i say you know my brother is really lazy and you say you",
      "my son. That is the kind of exaggeration that has taken place unfortunately and this has happened fortunately through fabrication on both sides may Allah protect us from that",
      "somewhere between 70 to 120 casualties and the people that became shaheed amongst children of the family of the Prophet ﷺ. As you made very clear, the concept of saying things about sahabas and so on and so forth was not found in the first century or the first hundred years. These are things that came later on. And in no way do we need to shy away our love for the family",
      "that we tear down anyone else's virtue. Where Imam Shafi' Rahimahullah used to speak highly of the family of Prophet ﷺ and he would say if this means that I am a person that is not part of Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamaa then so be it because speaking about their love is perfectly fine as long as we keep it within the balance and that's the hope for Ahlus sunnah wal jamaa that wa qeem al-wazna bilqishti wa la tukhsirul mizan that we keep everything at a specific balance Allah reward you Dr. Anjum for joining us",
      "leave, you have to tell us inshaAllah if you don't mind a few books that people are asking if they could read in any language English Arabic or Urdu that they can benefit. I heard you mention that you are also coming out with some type of book in regards to this insha Allah that will definitely be something that should be on everyone's bookshelves but as of now anything that they could",
      "historical narrations as you know and I know that there's very difficult when it comes to historical narrators to find a perfect perspective because everyone narrates things based on their own bias but whatever book that you can comment on perhaps people can look forward to reading inshaAllah so, on the narrative of what happened especially on the story of Karbala",
      "There is, of course, a tremendous amount that has been written. And it's really specialist writing. It's difficult to find stuff that is a good narrative that does justice to the issue at hand for Muslims. Often Western authors in fact especially specialists not generalists",
      "not the generalist sometimes you know some one person writes this history of entire islam and they probably don't know much in the recent century um so honestly i start writing a book precisely because there's no not much out there there isn't much one thing out there that i could say this is a good place even to store uh usually",
      "book the Prophet and the age of the caliphates for this period it's a it talks about in my area of Maya history and the Abbasid history starts an early period but what it says about the sea off course you could mostly black that by",
      "not historically critical account, but a fairly good account of what the most reliable sources say. It doesn't discuss religious aspects, it doesn't religious hadith, it does not really discuss the weakness of the sources, but it gives a good overall first narrative. Once you have that then you can start digging into it. I would just add to that for anyone that's wondering",
      "that's one I'm wondering where to read. I think the first place to start is reading seerah. I see a lot of people, they get really excited right after Anjum and they want to read Baq Hussain and Al-Dilu'anu and Karbala and understandably so but we don't have necessarily a foundation to be able to digest some of the information that is coming from these discussions, right? Some of it may be hard to digest. So I always say to read these stories we need to take a pill of iman like you need to really rejuvenate yourself",
      "You know be ready for it. So we start from seerah and there's many books on seerat that you can read I think there's Many books out there in majority of them are a benefit There is Seeratul Mustafa in English, which is Written by Maulana Idris Kandali rahimallah Which has been translated into English as three volumes. I would say it's my favorite book is that People can read on the seerot and get a good understanding and perspective Of course, there's other books as well that you",
      "And then you have the lives of the four Khulafa that we need to read about before we get here. And books like Tariq al-Khulafa by Suyuti and others as well can be opened in red, they're translated into English if I remember correctly. Let me actually plug in for that as well. Suyoti's TariQ al- Kholafa has been translated in an abridged form. Okay good. So look for that. That is really a good place",
      "who have the stomach for some historical writing and some hadiths and report. So it's not one good, nice narrative but it's a very good place to start. Now there is an actual book that has been translated by an Orientalist author which is a 600 page book, very small print. You don't want that. It's been translated",
      "And it's much more readable and though for scholarly purposes smaller And a bridge and that may be a good place to start For this. What is that called? A Suyuti book translated and abridged in simpler English Actual original has also been translated",
      "but that's a bigger book of I think six to eight hundred pages in small print so that's for people who have the capacity for dealing with that kind of text, but the abridged translation I think it's easy to find and it's available online PDF as well, it would be a good place to start.",
      "And hopefully we're able to bring you back on and continue these discussions, and also other historical discussions that I personally think the entire Muslim audience can benefit from. You know, I think Western history can be a little dry and boring but Islamic history has… it's like a roller coaster. There is a lot to take from and there's a lot of benefit from and so much to learn. So hopefully we can give it more time, more space in our mind for it and hopefully more",
      "benefit from those stories. JazakAllah khidr Dr Anjum, may Allah bless you your family your children how many children do you have? You know me as Dr Anjam I have five You have five masha'Allah mashaAllah what is what is your how old is your eldest my older two are in college oh masha Allah and I met one of your sons he's your he's what uh 21 um this",
      "my daughter well my son is turning 21 and my daughter is 17. and then the three three are younger um 12 9 and 6. mashaallah protect them you always visit in michigan we're not that far from you uh sometimes it makes me feel like we're like you know in texas because you don't come visit us but when you invite you probably as well please inshallah",
      "is anyone else that can discuss this topic better than Dr. Anjum and if you look his writings up online and his different types of work that he has done, you'll understand that this is a field that he asked, he has chosen to try to master or he has mastered to a certain extent and may Allah give him more success in this field so people like all of us can benefit and take from it and that's the true reality of scholarship where you're able to identify who",
      "Not everyone is supposed to be an expert in everything. That's not possible. So may Allah reward him for joining us and reward you all for joining. InshaAllah, we'll hopefully have Shaykh Abdullah back next week. If we don't, I'm going to make sure inshaAllah request Mufti Abdul Rahman to join and be the second host alongside me so we'll have a lot of fun. And if you have any other requests please let us know and hopefully you enjoyed Dr Anjum's session, Akhtar Fareed. As I always mention, please feel free to give us different types of requests of who we can bring on.",
      "bring on. InshaAllah classes will be starting soon, very soon in September the online and the onsite classes I hope you all can join us for those Jazakallah khair, may Allah bless you all and hopefully we see you all next week and in between that as well Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh"
    ]
  },
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    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah Wa salamu Alaykum Wa Rahmatullahi Wa Barakatuh",
      "Inshallah, find your seat. We're going to start the program for tonight shortly. Sisters, please join us in the room. Yes, of course, inshallah.",
      "Shabab, we're going to start inshallah. Wrap up this final inshAllah. How are you? How are things? We're going",
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Please welcome our guest speaker, Dr. Uweimir Anjam.",
      "and endowed chair of Islamic studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Toledo. His work focuses on the nexus of theology, ethics, politics, and law in Islam with a comparative interest in Western thought. Trained as a historian, his work is essentially interdisciplinary drawing on the fields of classical Islamic studies, political philosophy,",
      "He obtained his PhD in Islamic Intellectual History in the Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Masters in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and Masters in Computer Science and Bachelors in Nuclear Engineering and Physics from the university of Wisconsin Madison.",
      "Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem. Alhamdulillah wa salatu wasalam ala Rasulullah. I love first of all, inshaAllah the VIP chairs. I want to be sitting on one of them. So today I want",
      "today as the Muslim community, the moment in which we find ourselves. I want to take stock of the American Muslim community and Muslims in the West but particularly Muslims in America. But let me start by talking about what's happening around the country. What's happening? What's",
      "Colombia. And along with Columbia, over two dozen schools in fact now their number is increasing and what's happening there? Protests! These protests are happening because of course of an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Just today earlier when I was talking to my daughter",
      "who is at Ohio State University where there are protests going on in Ohio State. She was there with the protesters and a number of them were arrested, but she was telling me this story and I thought I would start with that story. She said that these students mostly Muslim students or students for justice in Palestine",
      "and they decided that they're going to hold hands strongly like with each other, arms and make a circle. And increasingly so there's Muslim students and then a lot of non-Muslim students. And subhanAllah one thing that was really remarkable and a little embarrassing the most of the Muslim",
      "The Muslim students were sisters. Brothers were a little afraid. They weren't there, but mostly sisters, Muslim sisters showed up. Of course partly because the brothers know that they will be targeted, but nevertheless as something for us to think about. As the police came and they were not only",
      "not only police but snipers that apparently existed and it has been now confirmed. They had snipers with their guns pointed at the students. It didn't go off, but now it's been confirmed and parents are now working to sue the university for that. There is a lot we can do. But the point",
      "to go and protest. And at first the protests did not draw too much attention until the Muslim students among them began to pray. They decided to pray Isha right on the spot, in the middle. And as they were praying now the police who had been watching for a long time since in fact couple of days they have been watching the protests",
      "And what happened as a result is the protest is now getting louder and louder. The non-Muslim students are saying, let them pray, let then pray, that's their chant. Okay? And the police is now aggravated somehow of course they're trained often in Islamophobic tropes so they attack now as the prayer is going on",
      "and then you know after one night there let go but what's interesting the reason I want to draw your attention to this is that Islam is at the heart of this protest and Islam is",
      "and spreading like fire across the country in the top colleges in the world, in fact. Top colleges in a country and top colleges of the world. Now what percentage? What is the percentage of Muslims in the United States? Does anybody know? What's that? One to two percent. The statistics are",
      "The statistics are themselves contested. They're political. So Muslims are either 3 point some million to maximum number is 6 million, but that's most scholars and statisticians say that's exaggerated. God knows. But 1% to 2%, we have a very small percentage of the population. And yet",
      "Islam is becoming the centerpiece of major issues in this country. And this is not new. I want you to think back just a couple of years ago when the major thing in people's mind was not Gaza, but rather the LGBT and trans movement, right?",
      "And in this moment, nobody could speak back. Nobody could talk back to the wave that was taking over the universities, schools, right? Particularly the schools, the public schools were forcing",
      "forcing in various ways that are available to them an LGBTQ agenda, a trans-agenda. And that's still going on, that slowed down but the point is that this is a absolutely central and divisive issue in this nation. The issue of trans rights and",
      "because human beings have lived in a way that's natural for thousands of years. And that way of life, that is of marriage and the way men behave, the way women behave, these are things on which human life is based fundamentally. That being challenged, right?",
      "And you would think that Muslims have nothing to do with it. Christians, there are plenty of Christians who are against that, conservatives are against",
      "Where I am in Toledo is 15 minutes from Detroit, and that's one of the largest population of Muslims and particularly Arabs in the country. And in one town, Amtrak, you have majority of Muslims. And the government, the mayor is a Muslim as well. But their Muslims protested. Muslim parents began to protest the books that were being taught",
      "were being taught or books that were in the library. You guys remember that? Now what's interesting is that parents nowhere else in the country and Christians are very unhappy about this but nowhere do parents come out with such singular voice,",
      "board gives up and that becomes a turning point in based on which everyone else including Christians are bandwagoning with Muslims just this one to two percent population which is according to their own right-wing ideology they see us as you know violent or the fifth column",
      "to America and so on and so forth, but they are forced to realize that Muslims are leaders in that moment. So this becomes a talking point for Christians across the country. So what I'm trying to say is that despite our small number, Muslims have a leadership role",
      "potential in the United States and given that the United State is a cultural leader of the world. Today there is no culture that has the soft power, you know, there's military hard power and nobody comes close to the United states in the military hardpower but much more important or equally important is the American soft power",
      "transported everywhere else, that are exported. And Muslims we come from many different countries most of those countries were colonized and continue to be colonized. And yet despite all of that Allah has given this enormous disproportionate power to this Deen. That Muslim courage",
      "despite, you know we are just coming out of 20 years of brutal propaganda against us. Brutal false propaganda against Muslims after 9-11 2001 the global war on terror starts and this global war in terror it's a global phenomenon everywhere in the world tyrants whether its Myanmar or the occupied territories",
      "or whether it is India, or it is the Muslim countries themselves. These governments are using the tools provided by the United States. The global war on terror to China, of course, our brothers and sisters that we are being persecuted by this global war. What is a global war? It's a set of ideas and a set",
      "Ideas that if you have Muslim populations, you can go persecute them. Nobody will ask you so long as you can use magic words that these are terrorists. And then there are legal and institutional ramifications that go with that. Despite all of that, look at what is happening today. This was unthinkable 10 years ago.",
      "This was unthinkable five years ago. So we are living in historic times in which Allah is showing us, giving us a leadership role in the world. The example of parents protesting in Hamtrak,",
      "Muslim students and Students for Justice in Palestine, the example of people in Gaza. That is defining a new possibility in the world. As I talked about it in the khutbah today, this world feels hopeless against the power",
      "1% and the tiny percentage of the population that have the billions, that have their militaries. They can go to any country and buy off the military. They could buy businesses or dismantle local businesses and globalize it like that's called neoliberalism that has been going on since the 1980s. And local populations in those countries",
      "in those countries cannot resist what the Global North and the powers of the Global north, the multinational corporations are doing. So people feel helpless. And yet we are seeing a new form of power emerge and who would have thought that kind of power would emerge from Gaza?",
      "Gaza, a place that is a prison. You know people in I'm not sure how people keep up with the events in the Muslim world but this is not politics, this is the deen of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala because what these people are protecting, what the people of Palestine, what",
      "our holy mosques and the place where Allah took the Prophet before he took him to Mi'raj. The place where Rasulullah ﷺ led all the prophets in Jamaa, that's where Islam was made the leader of mankind. In Jerusalem, in the land of Al-Quds, right? In Masjid al-Aqsa",
      "who's protecting that is protecting the deen of Allah. Imagine Medina being attacked. If that is hard for you to imagine and you think that's too far off or that's terrible, too horrible a thought understand that what is being done today is just one step from Medinah right?",
      "And yet, despite that, since 2014-15, the Muslim countries, many of the leaders in the Muslim Countries had agreed to hand over effectively all the power to Israel. To normalize relations with Israel. In Arabic it's called which means to make Israel a normal country. Of course, Israel has never been interested in becoming a normal",
      "to expand their official ideology depends on keeping the Muslims weak and divided. This is not some kind of idea that I'm getting from the Quran and the Sunnah, of course it is there but this is in the official documents, this is",
      "to keep this entity occupied is to keep Muslims divided. And despite that, nearly all of Muslim rulers had decided that they are going to normalize relations with Israel and this was such a major thing for those of you who were young let me remind you or let me tell you",
      "or an Arab in the 50s, or the 60s,or the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000's first decade you could not imagine selling out Palestine. You could be an Arab secularist somebody who doesn't believe in Allah you would not talk about compromising Palestine. This was impossible and unthinkable",
      "You had come to a point, a low point after 2000 that starts with the global war on terror but especially after the counter revolution that starts after Arab Spring of 2001. You had came to a time in 2014-15-16 many of you were born and young at that time where majority of the Arab rulers were talking about normalizing ties with Israel",
      "There were the Abraham Accords. How many people know what Abraham Accord are? Abraham Accor is the agreement according to which all three religions are equal and legitimate in the Muslim world led by the UAE. Even today, in fact you probably know that",
      "is found in Dubai. One of the most expensive, if not the most expansive Hindu god, Ganesh, the elephant, is found here in Dubai and they had built a compound with three places of worship in which there is a church and a synagogue and masjid all equal. All the same on",
      "you go and you can go pray in any of those places, it's all the same. This is all going on and culturally we have come to a point and I'm somebody who grew up in Saudi Arabia, in Jeddah. I was just talking to my dear brother Mustafa about that both of us did. For the last 10 years or so",
      "You had such a massive cultural change in Saudi Arabia that in the talk shows, that are not important. Just the talk show nobody is controlling them. Muslims, Saudis are talking and calling and not just Saudis but other Arabs as well they will talk about Palestinians being leeches. About Palestinians being the problem and Israel being the solution.",
      "This is the Muslim world. These are Muslim people. That's what's happening. We had come to that point from the point where somebody like Nasser or the Ba'ath party, none of them would imagine selling Palestine. Now we have come to this point and people would ask me how could you reverse this?",
      "I have established an institute called the Ummatics Institute to discuss the issues of the ummah and bring scholars and experts to talk about ummah. When I would talk about the institute, it's online you can go and follow it, it is called ummatics.org.",
      "talk about the unity of the ummah and strength of the Ummah when even our Qibla, our first Qiblah is being sold and Muslims themselves are turning away from it. What you gonna do about it? And I had no answer other than to trust in Allah that I don't know but we have to plan and we have",
      "in Palestine, in Gaza where people who had been completely written off as you know this Prime Minister some of my Palestinians call him Satan Yahoo so Satan Yahoo went to the United Nations a United Nations meeting and held up",
      "there was no Palestine. Palestine was gone, and he was boasting that UAE and Bahrain have normalized, the rest are on the way, and Saudi Arabia is the next country to normalize, and when Saudi normalizes, it's the biggest country in the region, it' over. There's no resistance possible once Saudi neutralizes or at least that's the idea right? Once it naturalizes",
      "naturalizes. And all of that, the last ten years of betrayal, the ideological changes and there is so much going on I cannot go into it. So many conferences that are taking place in the world, so many backhanded deals in which unfortunately some of the Muslim scholars are also involved,",
      "is being erased. There are Muslims who are preparing to say Muslims should not only give up Palestine but also part of Masjid al-Aqsa, give it to the Jews if that's what makes them happy. Can you imagine that? And it's not because Jews don't have a place to pray. If there were Jews who are religious",
      "That's never the problem of Muslims. But that's not the issue. But these Muslim scholars are saying that basically those people who are protecting Masjid al-Aqsa and those Palestinians who go every year, especially during Ramadan to make sure that the extremists among the Jews who come and want to occupy they don't come take the Masjids al- Aqsa These people are extremists. That's what these Muslim Scholars are saying",
      "This is how far we had gone until the resistance began. And now, we have come to a point where the entire world, the entire global south has risen up. How did this happen? This is actually a question so I want you all think about it and",
      "Give me your thoughts. What do you think caused it? How is it possible that a group of people that are effectively living in an open-air prison, in a concentration camp, and this concentration camp",
      "for two years or so, Israelis did an experiment where they even calculated the number of calories that could come into Gaza. This is something you cannot even do in a prison. This worse than a prison and every year, every couple of years, they bomb these people. You know what they call it? I'm sure all of you now. What do they call? Mowing the lawn",
      "So these are people, and this is all coming out at that time. All of this is hidden, and they would deny everything, right? People who live under such conditions have changed what the greatest powers of the world with the greatest media power in the world, the greatest military powers in the",
      "together to decide that we want to erase these people and now they have nowhere to hide. They're on the defensive, and this is just the beginning so I want us to see in this the promise of Allah. I want to see",
      "promise from Allah I want us to see in this the power of Al-Haqq and I want",
      "Resistance is futile. Not only is resistance against injustice useless, it is the source of all the problems. That's what they were saying. They were saying that all of this violence, all of these struggles, why don't you just sit back and take it? Why don't to just disappear? These were religious scholars.",
      "clerics, people who use Islam. They were the true ulama, were always aware of the promise of Allah SWT and they have been many. They are the majority among the ulama. Nevertheless, they're not the ones who appear on the television, they are not the one's who have podium. So this is a promise of Allaah SWT that we are seeing coming through in our own lifetime",
      "Growing up, we used to read stories about the Sahaba that seemed impossible. How could these people defeat such great empires? How could they show such faith and such Iman? I'll end with one story and then I'll open the discussion inshaAllah. The story of Ali ibn Abi Talib radiallahu anhu and this is reported of other Sahaba as well",
      "is struck with an arrow. The arrow pierces through his body, they're trying to take out the arrow and it's hurting too much he's screaming in pain. Somebody says start praying because when Ali ibn Abi Talib prays he forgets about everything else. It is as if he will not feel any pain, take it out then. He starts to pray, they take out",
      "We have a ten-year old boy whose head is cut and they're stitching his head as it's bleeding. And he has been asked to read the Quran, and as he's reading the Quran they are stitching his",
      "in front of us. It is as if Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is forcing us to see and reminding us, you doubted that? Look at this. It's possible for us today. And I will end with this hadith of Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi wasallam. It''s a very beautiful hadith and I take great comfort in it.",
      "Their mutual ta'atuf is emotional synergy in their empathy. Tarahum, in their mutual mercy. Wa tawadin, their mutual love. They're like one body, right? We know this hadith. But the hadith that I want to focus on is Rasulullah says each Muslim believer is like a mirror to another believer. How is that? What does that mean?",
      "mean? You see, when you look at the mirror, you see yourself. You see an image of yourself and when you see something wrong in the mirror like my hair is sticking out in the mirro- what do I do? Do I fix the mirror? What do I fix? I fix myself right because once",
      "What's going to happen to the mirror? It's going fix itself. So this is the synergy of the believers that As-Sulah Al-Aslam captures in such a beautiful metaphor, such a beatiful example. That what one believer has, the other believer has. When I look at you and see your faults",
      "of those faults, I have to correct them. When I see your strength, I know that strength is in my heart as well. Why? Because what you're getting is from Iman. So what do you do when you see something wrong among the believers? You correct yourself and when you",
      "What they're showing, it's in each one of us. To the extent that we have la ilaha illallah Muhammad Rasulullah in our hearts, we have that strength. Right? And so, that's I go back to the claim with which I began, which is that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is preparing this community, this ummah in general but particularly",
      "Muslims who happen to be in America, we have a leadership role. Not only for the cities and communities of which we are part but globally we have to rise up for the Ummah because in many ways we have certain strengths that and opportunities that nobody else has. Which is not to say we don't have many weaknesses right?",
      "Right? But as the Rasulullah ﷺ said that this, the example of this ummah is like a fortress and you have to ensure that the enemy doesn't enter, doesn't break through it from your gate, from the gate that you are guarding. And this Muslim American community is guarding a very, very crucial role and let us make sure that we are prepared for that leadership which means when",
      "Which means when we go about and live our lives, let's make sure that we are not living our lives just for our own comfort. Because that's easy. That we are living for the community. We are living Dawa. We're living for Ummah. We'e living for Deen of Allah SWT.",
      "and share your questions. Should I just start taking questions? Okay, yes brother. I know I was just checking. I was asking for permission.",
      "I don't think it's out of the question.",
      "It is the Palestinians who have been leading. They are the ones hurting, they're the ones leading. We have to acknowledge that the rest of the Muslims have not been leading the issue and we need to but we need first put our money where our mouth is In many communities that I'm aware of including my own community",
      "until the ball gets rolling. Now things are rising, you know, things are boiling and that's different but it was the Palestinian kids and Palestinian families that are begging other people to come out to protest, to do something. And for years, decades has been going on so I want to acknowledge the fact that the Muslims feel like we have many",
      "that it's not our priority until things boil over and we realize that we have to. So what you were saying, brother, is absolutely the ideal. That should be the case. But let's recognize that that's not the case right now. And so also I want to acknowledge",
      "that Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi wa sallam acknowledged that people have closeness to their tribes. People have a loyalty and solidarity toward their tribes, and he used it in warfare for example. He would give banner of the Ansar separate from that of the Muhajireen so that if you're feeling like losing or something when",
      "it is not just me, but my entire clan and my neighborhood and my people are going to be embarrassed. You don't want to be embarrassing in front of Allah and His Messenger. You try harder. So in that sense, to recognize that this is an issue of Palestine and that Arab for example the Arabs are often much more affected by this. And today if you look at again I'm saying this with great pain in my heart",
      "South Asian myself, the people that are most likely to go make alliance with the opposite side visit Israel are South Asian Muslims. Embarrassment but we have to acknowledge that South Asian muslims are well established in America and Israeli lobby targets them because they happen to be in leadership",
      "to bypass Arab and Palestinian leadership. I'm saying this not because this is okay or acceptable, but so that we can be prepared and we can recognize the weaknesses that we have. But your point is well taken. That it is an issue of Muslim Ummah. And I also want to say that historically and even today,",
      "has risen up that historically for hundreds of years it is the Ottomans who protected the land, right? Protected all of the masajid and historically these things have not mattered to us but today as the brother correctly said the borders that divide us today",
      "us today were created by our sworn enemies in the First World War, right? When the Ottoman Empire is dismantled in 1914 through 1918, the First",
      "to each other, one of the things that they say explicitly, right? Sykes Pico. Does anybody understand what Sykes-Picot means? There are young people who don't know. Raise your hand. It's okay. I can talk about it. So Sykes and Picot. Picot French Sykes, Sir Mark Sykes was a British clerk if you will, political official who sat together and divided up the Ottoman Empire which became",
      "Middle East. So all of these countries were created by Sykes-Picot agreement and these people, so in this new document in which the clerks are talking to each other they're saying that you do not want... our goal is that these Muslims should",
      "But whenever they become united, they become a challenge. So you have to ensure that they are never united. So this was explicitly the plan to keep Muslims divided.",
      "Jordanian, you're Palestinian, you are Syrian, you Lebanese. These were all created for the purpose of dividing us by the people who are enemies of Allah and His Messenger, who are explicitly saying that we have to stay weak. And this is not secret, this is some kind of conspiracy theory, right?",
      "now. And yet, majority the majority of Muslim world particularly Arab world you go through high school and college curriculum you are taught these stories most of which are fabrications the story that instill in you loyalty to a royal family or this piece of land that was created by Sykes people so",
      "So through this knowledge we have to rise and alhamdulillah, this knowledge now is spreading in the ummah. And things are changing. Alhamdulilah. So any other questions or comments? You brother one two and three",
      "participating in presidential endorsements given that our track record of choosing the right people hasn't been so good. It has been so, no absolutely you're right when I say we are becoming the leaders you will note that I did not talk about electing president so that's your answer right it is when we stood up against the entire country the entire establishment for",
      "sake of what is truth for modesty in Michigan and elsewhere. That's when we became the leaders, we became a leader because even our sworn enemies, the fundamentalists right recognize that these people have got something real that even we don't have they have a backbone and similarly what's happening today",
      "That's going to last for decades. I'm not saying that's the end of it, that's a beginning of something. We can make it if those of you who are interested please go and study history of the 1960s and 70s protests in colleges and how they remade American culture. This time it is Muslims who are playing an important role but I am aware of the challenge",
      "and challenge that you posed, which is that these struggles can be hijacked by secular ideologies. Until today for example the Palestinian cause is backed by and supported by the left. And we cannot say no to the fact that they have a conscience and they happen to be opposed",
      "to the establishment. They happened to be, they ended up on the right side. In the next battle, they may be on the wrong side. We cannot make our alliances with the left as our end-all, be-all. But at the same time, this alliance, this depth, where is this, where are these kids around colleges who are exposing themselves",
      "Because there is such a thing as fitrah, because there is Such a thing that's truth and justice. And they have hearts, they are human beings and that is something beautiful Right? Many of the people That protected Islam in its infancy when Rasulullah ﷺ was protected in Mecca Who is the one protecting him?",
      "clan, not just his uncle but entire clan of people who are non-Muslim. Why? Because they're driven by two things. They're driven their asabiya. This is Banu Hashim. This my man and I'm not gonna let him go right? Not gonna... In the same way they say human rights that was the human rights at the time. They were using that discourse and the Prophet did not reject it. The prophet honored it.",
      "worried about and cried for his uncle on his deathbed. I wish he would come to Islam. And many of these people will come to islam, alhamdulillah that's happening right? But the point is that when they are supporting our cause you have to respect them, you have honor them, You have to encourage them, and acknowledge despite the fact that they have their idols that they worship Right so this is the beauty that Allah",
      "Allah gives us supporters. We should not take that support to be our God that we worship. Yes?",
      "So that's a very good question. How do we advocate for Palestinian rights when the Palestinian movements are recognized as or labeled as terrorists, or otherwise maligned? First of all educate yourself. There are and I'm sure",
      "I'm sure that, and I don't mean to target you but we have to educate ourselves. That's not the case actually so for example when I was asked in a faculty setting about Hamas I said what the United Nations says. The United Nations say it is not a terrorist group. The US says it is. All you have to say this is the United Nation opinion",
      "It is a resistance movement, and resistance movements by international law have a right to resist. So you have to educate yourself about how to engage in this dialogue. War crimes are not acceptable, but resistance is a protected right. So",
      "See, of course as you well know some of the best defenders of Palestinian rights are liberal Jews or Jewish scholars. And they're doing so because I understand them. Many of them are my friends and colleagues and they worry about Judaism. They worry about their community",
      "morality from within it, which means that all the good kids who are Jewish would not want to be part of it. And that is a massive change from what has been the case since at least the 60s and 70s when Jews, American Jews have put their stock in Israel as being their last refuge and a model",
      "goodness. That's really what they're taught, and this is one of the things that you have to understand why people behave the way they do. They live in this intense and the most successful propaganda in modern history. They are victims of that so they really genuinely believe what they are saying. They genuinely believe which is something that it sounds very strange",
      "You have to eliminate them all.",
      "but a decent person like Abu Talib or you could be a non-Muslim and be Abu Lahab. What turns them into Abu Lahaba is this kind of satanic ideology where they see human beings as their, as enemies right? They dehumanize Palestinians and they dehumanized Muslims and what that does is that it turns as Jews are",
      "Jews are waking up and realizing that they have done this, they're turning away from Judaism. They're turning way from Israel. And there are thoughtful Jewish scholars who are terrified of us. This is a religion that has lasted for 2,000 years. It has been persecuted by Christians.",
      "hijacked by a murderous ideology. So they have a good reason to be terrified and that's why they are some of the best critics of Israel. If you want to know the history of early Palestine in 1948, what is the best book? Or best set of books but... The one book, the one leading scholar is Ilan Pape who was an Israeli Jew or isn't",
      "or is an Israeli Jew. Ilan Pape's book is downright the best book that establishes by looking at specific documents from hour to hour, day to day place to place how they plan ethnic cleansing of Palestine this is something that nobody including Israel's propagandists can deny you have to know this right? read those books it's very easy especially if you're",
      "especially if you're looking for one place to start about early Palestine, there's a book called Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pape. If you want to know what's happening in Gaza today, the history of Israeli operation one after another and so on from the international perspective, from Israeli perspective,",
      "and realize what's happening. Many of my colleagues in the academy as well, so arm yourself with that knowledge. And I actually suggest a workshop maybe some of you who are more aware can invite some Palestinian scholars and I should say not Palestinian, I take the brothers point, I shouldn't say Palestinian scholars but the scholars of this Ummah",
      "for Gaza. Many of them happen to be Palestinians, right? That we have to change that. We have to do it. But invite them for workshops so that you can practice these arguments. So learn these arguments and figures and practice them especially for young people I think such workshops would be terrific. Now, I haven't seen a hand from here but I have Mustafa's question",
      "and impassioned and so desperately I should do?",
      "you have to feel what they are feeling, a measure of it and then do something about it. To your second question, Sahabiyaat even at the time of Rasulullah, they would come and want to go out with the Prophet and make jihad or ask how can we help? But in their Jihad was at home,",
      "raising children but raising children like the ones who grew up and conquered the world how did they do that because they were raised with memories of the lullabies that their mothers in those lullaby it was the Prophet it was a Sahaba it was or an Sunnah it was that the greatness of the Muslim ummah that is what created",
      "you, not that I am myself any kind of accomplishment but what drives me is my mother's lullabies. I remember when I was very little that my mother would say and for us it was Palestine as well as Kashmir. I grew up in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and she would pray for Palestine",
      "going out for a little military training and some people said this is very harsh conditions there. She says something like harsher than what they are living in Kashmir? And I remember just that comment is my standard. So, and I'll tell you subhanAllah how what my mother said and felt",
      "work she is at home right she's a very traditional woman how that passes on last night when my daughter called me and she said she's in a protest and we are getting arrested I remember and she says do you want me to go home Baba and I remembered what my mother said and I said getting arrested every now then it's not so bad for your health don't worry about",
      "And it's like big load was off her because she was more worried about what I would think than getting arrested. But the point is that, It is the seeds that our mothers plant That later become mighty trees so What you have to do as mothers and sisters and wives and yourself as speakers and writers",
      "That is enormous. That is what's going to create our future imams. So I often say that the change has to start with the lullabies. The change has",
      "How do we embody unity in our day-to-day dealings?",
      "in eastern Turkestan who are being persecuted by China or the 200 million Muslims in India that are on the verge of a kind of cultural genocide, one might say. There are lots of threats to Muslims. For you to become involved in one of them is not a zero-sum game",
      "I don't have time for Palestine.",
      "I have to worry about my streets, the homeless on my streets. I have a worry about the fact that there are Muslims in America being targeted but there was a fundamental error they were making that's known both in our modern scholarship social science shows us this was an error and our Aqeedah shows us most of all our AQEDAH tells us this is an error",
      "I cannot worry about our streets, that I cannot worried about the inequality in our communities. I cannot wory about African-American brothers and sisters. That's number one, that's wrong. Empirically that is wrong because usually when communities come together to mobilize about one issue they are much more likely to mobilize",
      "Whereas the communities that have never mobilized about anything, they don't know who to call when you want to start a protest. They actually will not know even when their own community and their own son is arrested, they would know who we call. They think that they are doing this for Palestine but what our Aqeedah tells us is that... And our social science also tells us it's called",
      "called resource mobilization. When you know who to call, when you know how to make up those protest signs, when we know how it would come together on a campus and hold hands together, you know have to do that for others right? You know how do that one group, you now how to do the other group, and you know that for yourself. So resource mobilisation is a skill",
      "communities have or don't have. And once we realize that we have it, we become available to each other. So the person that you met in a protest or a workshop about Palestine, when you have an issue with your child, you might call them. Right? It builds brotherhood and sisterhood in a way that wouldn't exist if you didn't have anything in common. So in a sense, the Palestine is a blessing from Allah SWT. As somebody who grew up both, I grew up in South Asia",
      "up in South Asia, who grew up in the Arab world. The Arabs would have sold out easily and embraced nation states if it were not for Palestine. Palestine is that one thorn that makes it impossible for Arabs to forget how this was all done. And you will see all of the Islamic movements",
      "Islamic movements and the intellectuals that speak for the Ummah, they usually are from Palestine or pass through Palestine or talking about it or were motivated by Palestine. So my point is simply that one cause of the Ummat does not mean that you cannot worry about other causes of the ummah. It doesn't mean you cannot",
      "I'll tell you one very small example. This year when we started Ramadan, we were sort of excited about Palestine and came together and I proposed one of the things that we want to do is remove water bottles from the masjid. Now this is very hard for Muslims to do. For some reason most Muslims especially immigrants come",
      "come from cultures where we never saw a water bottle and all of a sudden our Ramadan is not complete without... And many of those bottles are not even open, half open and they're thrown away. Somehow we come from culture that were zero waste. I remember my grandfather would go around after the weddings",
      "Because how could you leave bread out so that he would collect the bread and eat it for a long time? Because the bread is sacred. It's from Allah SWT. The Prophet SAW said, Hadith in Sahih Muslim When you eat, eat every single part of your food because you do not know which one has the barakah. We have gone from there to eating half water bottle and throwing away half the plate",
      "That's something I'm ready to cry about. Nothing funny about it. How does that happen? So we started this movement to remove water bottles. Alhamdulillah, I would say we failed. I wish I could tell you different but the number of bottles went down and then last 10 nights of Ramadan people are like okay now Allah give me all the reward",
      "And I will waste all the water bottles because we forget. So my point is that, you know, we started another movement with it and we have to keep on adding to it. And this was possible because people were excited and together, right? And once we realized we had something called agency, okay? I know I've gone past my time but I'm going to give you one word to remember. Agency.",
      "agency. When you think of the word agency, what do you think? What does that mean? Was that ability to do things? Now when social scientists study human communities they say that their human communities have grievances meaning that people are targeted",
      "injustice done against them. But if you study human communities, injustice and grievance—grievance is a fancy word for somebody doing wrong to us—when you have a grievance that does not lead to a social movement and protest movement and change. Why? Because most communities that have grievances do not have agency. They do not believe they can change things.",
      "So what leads to a social movement and the protest movement and change is not grievance, it's not the presence of grievance but the presence off a sense of agency. Many many groups in communities in human history have been obliterated, eliminated, killed by the thousands hundreds of thousands and millions. What is special about Palestinians?",
      "لقد وجدوا مجال لذلك من أين يأتي المجال؟ يأتون بسبب أنهم يقابلون في مسجد الأقصى، ويأتي من إسلام. تفضل، كان يسمى طوفان الأقسى. إنه سمع الحماية للأقصا والدين الله تعالى الذي يجعلهم خطيراً. فإنه لا يوجد أي شخص يتم إزالة الناس من قبل.",
      "So my point here is that we as Muslims in America, Muslims in Oregon and Portland every Muslim city we have a choice whether to acquire agency or to live without it. Where most of you know we live as individuals but as a community we have no agency right? That can change when you come around",
      "and then you do it again, and then You do it Again and you identify some leaders among you and Then you empower them and then since There are some other People who are better at Speaking Some Are Better at Praying and Memorizing the Quran Others are Better at Serving Food and Cooking food Others are better At Taking Care of people when They are sad and Exhausted in all of These Peoples Different Qualities Come out When you are doing something they will never come out",
      "out when you're doing nothing and the communities that discover the agency they become the change makers and all the change agency comes, all the changes come from them right so let us inshallah be that community and we ask Allah and I pray for you that maybe Portland will be that Community. We don't know which one would be the best so pastabiqul khairat Let's do our best wa jazakumullahu khayran",
      "verse discussion at 830 so please continue to join us through the program inshallah we're going to do then and then 10 inshAllah we are gonna pray with them Salam"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Friday Sermon with Ovamir Anjum January 27th _ Raj_852H2AbI3sU&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750673877.opus",
    "text": [
      "Allah is the greatest, Allah is",
      "I bear witness that there is no god but Allah. I bear testimony that Muhammad is His servant and Messenger. O Allah, bless and grant peace and blessing upon our Prophet Muhammad and all his family and companions and those who follow him in good conduct until the Day of Judgment.",
      "Islam, I begin by praising Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la bearing witness that there is none worthy of worship. There is noneworthy of devotion in your life. There's none worthy no center of life that is worthy to live for and die for but the Creator, The Master, the most merciful, the Most Gracious,",
      "and who will collect us at the end of our time. So we seek his guidance as we must for our travails, our difficulties, our challenges in this life. As each one of us has a soul that has been given to us that is eternal,",
      "that will go either to him or will be rejected. And it is that soul, it is the spirit that is real you that you must care for and cultivate and enrich and protect not your bodies",
      "And just as this body seeks comfort and it has certain conditions in which it thrives, in which is healthy. Just as this Body likes certain things, it has",
      "the Ru'h that Allah has given us also yearns for certain things. It becomes stronger, it draws closer to Allah in certain conditions and it is distant from Allah. It is rejected by Allah in other conditions",
      "And I want to talk about the most important of those conditions that are emphasized, that is emphasized in the Qur'an and in the Sunnah of Rasulullah ﷺ. And that is al-akhuwah fil Islam, siblinghood in Islam, being brothers and sisters in Islam and for the sake of Allah ﷻ.",
      "Allah says, إِنَّمَا الْمُؤْمِنُونَ إِخْوَةً The believers are brothers and sisters, are siblings. And إنما is a particle that adds the meaning of exclusivity in Arabic which means, إَنَّ مَا لْمَؤْبِنونَ اِخ்وَى Muslims are only brothers. Meaning, if they're not brothers,",
      "If you don't feel that siblinghood, that only brothers are truly believers. That is when you feel brotherhood and sisterhood with everyone who says la ilaha illallah Muhammadur Rasulullah, that is when",
      "you will feel the sweetness of faith. And my brothers and sisters, faith, Iman has sweetness. And it's hard for you to go on because the Iman is a challenge if you don't have the sweetness that's driving you to get up for Fajr, to sacrifice, to hold your tongue, to act in a certain way when nobody is watching,",
      "or surrounded by haram, if you do not have that sweetness it's going to be hard to hold on to it. You're not gonna grow in Iman if you don't have sweetness. So what are the three things that make Iman sweet? The first thing is to love Allah and His Messenger more than anything else.",
      "And the second condition that the Prophet ﷺ gave is what I want to talk about today, which is that you love someone for no other reason but Allah. Not because they can tell you jokes that are funny, not because you grew up together, not just because you're good at basketball. All of those things are okay!",
      "But you hang out with them, you care about them, and you take care of them only because they have Iman. All other things are good but this will give you sweetness of faith. This will make other things easy. I often teach there is no shortcut to Jannah. You got to do all the things Rasulullah taught us",
      "You got to be good to people. You got a good, be good your family. You gotta uphold this commandment and that commandment. But one there is one shortcut or as close as you can get the shortcut in Islam. And that is when the people that you hang out with people that like people that are friends with when they call you to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la,",
      "hang out together and they will hang out in the masjid, do qiyam al-layl after their basketball then qiyama lay is as much fun as basketball or going out for ice cream or watching a movie together. Imagine that! That is magical that happens because of the company that you choose. I know youth in our community, I come from Toledo Ohio it's hard to get them",
      "to get them out of the masjid. They don't come for Salatul Jama'ah, it's hard for them even to be on time for Juma'. But they're excited about Qiyam al-Layl when other youth are doing it. So the point is that's a nature that Allah put sweetness when you are together with",
      "So when you're wrestling with your own Iman or you're wresting with other problems in life, seek out good company. Value good company more than you value rich. You know richness often sometimes the masajid we care about donors because they are rich and if they are using their money for the good may Allah bless them but they",
      "important for a masjid than people who have iman, who will welcome other people that they don't know, who smile to people they don' t know because that person says la ilaha illallah muhammadur rasulullah. Those are the minarets on which masajids are built, community is built, ummah is built. Believers are brothers innama al-mu'minuna ikhwah. So be brothers and sisters",
      "for Allah and investigate your relationships, your social circles. Is there anybody who comes to your house for any other reason but because of your friends and relatives? Is there anyone who is invited to your home for Eid, Ramadan or gatherings because that person has Iman? Because you love the way they raise their children?",
      "because they are poor and there is nobody inviting them on the day of Eid. Perhaps, they're converts and they have nobody and you are watching out for them. If your house doesn't have that, if the only guests in your house and only people in your circle are those that you work with, you have a problem. You try to do it alone even if you try to come to the masajid",
      "by one thread but when you do it together that's the blessing. That's why Allah this is a sunnah of Allah to do it and the Ummah of Islam, anyone anywhere in the world who says la ilaha illallah Muhammadur Rasulullah has a demand on our love",
      "Demand on our heart has a place in our heart. And you know what that does? Imagine if 1.6 billion people have a place, in your heart, that heart has to be awfully big. That life is rich! There are people who live lives they're unable to love one person but as a believer, if you're doing it right,",
      "and I'm increasing, Alhamdulillah. That's the blessing of iman. That is the blessing that you can go to anywhere in the world. Go to the masjid, meet people in jum'ah and you will find people with whom you feel like you've known them all your lives.",
      "the beauty of belonging. You have to cultivate it in the masajid that you are in, you have to cultivated in your homes and your circles but it makes it worth living. There's some research recently I believe the name there is a journalist I think Jonathan Hari is his name who did research on depression which",
      "which is an epidemic in the West and in America. And of course we know that there is a whole cottage industry of therapists, people who are trying to say they will save you from depression. And what he found it's a lot of research that shows this, that the best way to lift people out of depression was their connectedness to other people. So the people who",
      "almost always those who are unable to connect for whatever reason. It's not their fault, always! Sometimes they could do something about it but other times nobody else reached out and solved their problem. That is the magic of community. And a lot of people... A lot of",
      "do not have Iman, so many people are looking for answers if they only knew the kind of beauty and Iman that Iman can provide. And if Muslims only opened up to their own faith there is a treasure that's available to each one of us. Innamal mu'minuna ikhwah. The believers are brothers and sisters",
      "and sisters. Let us ensure that we are investing in this brotherhood and in this sisterhood.",
      "As for the rest, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ summarizes these teachings so beautifully when he says",
      "حديث كما تخصص في البخاري وفي المكان الآخر حديد من الإسلام أن النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم قال إن المؤمنين في محبةهم والترحمة لبعضهم",
      "Rahmah means reaching out to those who are weak and forgiving those who have wronged you. Those two things go together in rahmah. Wa ta'atufihim Ta'ataf means to have emotions, shared emotions that you are happy about the same thing and you're sad about the",
      "all of the conspiracies that I'm sure each one of you can lecture me about. When Morocco won, the entire Muslim world, people who don't know anything about soccer, including myself, it made my day, it make my week, that Morocco or another Muslim country is doing well in soccer. That connection",
      "That connection is incredible. And you know what? Nobody plans it. This is Iman. And despite the fact that we are falling off sometimes, we're not ideal Muslims. But that is that connection that so beautifully captures what Rasulullah said. This Ta'atufihim. This Is ta'ahtuif that we have shared emotions. Wa tawadihim and their mutual love for each other",
      "for each other like they're like one body when one part of it hurts so the prophet especially mentions a heart because hurting that's when you really know your brotherhood and your sisterhood then the whole body reacts and the prophet uses the example of a body",
      "an immune reaction. There is response when the hand hurts, the whole body prepares to take care of it. That's that's the nature and we look at what Rasulullah ﷺ is saying in the ayah that I recited from Surat Al-Hujurat, إِنَّمَا الْمُؤْمِنُونَ They're actually talking about context in which there is conflict or pain",
      "So the ayah in Surat Al-Hujurat came in the context when some Muslims, the Sahaba disagreed with each other and almost were beginning to fight. There was a brawl so the Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam emphasized Brothers and sisters if you have children or if you had brothers and sisters you know one thing they're not always at peace",
      "at peace, they fight. They are in conflict. They test each other's limits. They're rivals. So this metaphor that Allah has used is very beautiful and powerful and instructive because it says for you to be brothers and sisters in a community elsewhere in the world, we're going to have conflicts that you have to do Islah so brotherhood comes with Islam",
      "making peace constantly. Because when you work with other people, your patience is going to be tested. A lot of people, especially the younger generation I find they will have all kinds of conflict at work that they tolerate because they make money but when there's a conflict with the masjid they have no patience for it. But that's not how brotherhood works. You know if you have children, if you're brothers and sisters",
      "you know as brothers and sisters, biological brothers and sister that you know you have the same parents at the end after you fight. You come back together right? But you have to constantly make Islah so the same way as having the same parent leads to you making Islah constantly Iman should be what you look at your Iman is the reason",
      "is the reason why you keep going back to each other and going to the masjid and making masajid in beautiful places even when there is conflict. That is Iman. That's the way to success, that is a way to beautiful communities, that it's the ways to lift lonely people out of depression, to bring people who are lost into the masajids when people will come and convert to Islam embrace Islam because they see that beauty in the masaja",
      "Sajid. And Alhamdulillah, despite all of her challenges, that is one thing that's still happening. That's one thing in which Islam is still winning. That even when we sometimes abandon many of the teachings of Islam, the beauty of Islam of Allah, when some people practice it, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala through their barakah brings the rest of us. So rejoice!",
      "and do your part. And don't think that caring about the ummah and a billion people is hard, it's a blessing. It makes your life rich and big. We ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to bring our ummah comfort and peace and justice and success and strength in this dunya. Our people whether they are",
      "Rohingya or the Uighur, or the Palestinians, or Kashmiris, or Pakistanis, Egyptians, Americans, white Americans, black Americans, Latino Americans. They're all our people! That's the beauty of Islam we ask Allah. O Allah, solve their problems. Lift them out of misery and poverty. O Allah allow us to love each other for Your sake.",
      "shade on the day of judgment because we loved each other for your sake. O Allah, draw us closer to you through our service to each other. My brothers and sisters,",
      "Community is your strongest rope to Iman. But we have to realize also that with this strength and the beauty comes responsibility, and that responsibility that we have for entire Ummah requires investment.",
      "That investment that you have to know your brother or your sister from a different country who speaks a different language. You have to invest and share in the communication, you have",
      "then you will find this news just annoying. People suffering, always fighting what's happening? I don't know. I don' care about it. That's these Kashmiris why are they? What's wrong with them? For a very long period of time Muslims in the last century were so divided that and have been so divided for reasons we won't go into whether",
      "it's politics, their commitment to this dunya that we abandoned each other. And when we abandon each other, each one of us suffers. To give you an example, our brothers and sisters in Kashmir. It is extremely hard today",
      "to be part of an oppressive, narrow-minded nation state which demonizes Islam and to struggle but not have anyone to care about. Anyone that cares about you.",
      "Many Kashmiris come to me and say, look we talk about Palestine all the time but nobody knows about us. And the effect of that is that there is an epidemic of drugs and suicide and just general depression in Kashmir among people, among youth because they feel abandoned.",
      "it when we started to do something and many other people are doing it I'm simply reporting on their behalf just for them to know that other Muslims around the world care about them or are talking about them that actually is what they want more than money and alhamdulillah now this cooperation",
      "so that they are now protesting when something happens in Palestine. And that increases, you know, these people who are suffering but they're suffering for the same reason because they say la ilaha illallah Muhammadur Rasulullah. But that is enough that now they're seeking strength in each other even when a lot of other Muslims are ignoring them. But",
      "to them as part of an institute that I have initiated with many other people alhamdulillah the ummatix Institute to bring the ummah together through knowledge, through this connection so that we know who we are and so we can think together about revival restoration just in its",
      "It's transformative for them just to think that there are Muslims in America, and America is the center of global power. What we can do here is just enormous. That starts a whole new movement there of hope.",
      "That is real, real love when your concerns are greater than yourself. Often as I teach at a university people who care most about what's happening in these poor countries it often and it breaks my heart to see",
      "are students, white students who are studying. They learn something about the region and they hear and they learn about absolutely terrifying situation and they become champions whereas Muslim kids are only concerned about making money being doctors and engineers nothing wrong with that but you don't care",
      "care about other Muslims, other people in the world when you're sitting at the center of power where most decisions are made. That is something that will be asked for my brothers and sisters. So educate yourself about issues of the Ummah.",
      "وحب العمل الذي يقربنا إلى حبك يا رب العالمين وأثر دعوانا أن الحمد لله رب عالمين أقيم الصلاة",
      "Allah is the Greatest, the Most Gracious. I bear witness that there is none worthy of worship except Allah. I bears witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.",
      "Please stand foot to foot and shoulder to shoulder and pray attentively as if this is the last prayer, it might very well be.",
      "الحمد لله رب العالمين الرحمن الرحيم مالك يوم الدين إياك نعبد وإياك لاستعين اهدنا الصراط المستقيم",
      "ونعمت عليهم غير المغضوب عليهم ولا الضالين",
      "وتنزع الهلك ممن تشاء وتعز من تشاه وتذل من تساوى بيدك الخير إنك على ذل شيء قدير تولج الليل في النهار وتولج المنار في الليل",
      "وتخرج الحي من الميت وتخر جو الميت من الحين وترزق من تشاء بغير حساب الله أكبر",
      "الحمد لله رب العالمين الرحمن الرحيم مالك يوم الدين إياك نعبد وإياك تستعين اهدنا الصراط المستقيم صراط الذين نعمت عليهم غير المغطوب عليهم ولا الضال",
      "ويتفكرون في خلق السماوات والأرض ربنا ما خلقت هذا باطلا سبحانك فقنا عذاب النار ربna إنك من تدخل النارة فقد أخزيته وما للظالمين من أنصار",
      "So, we're just going to go through our announcements very quickly.",
      "So join us after Isha tonight for our family night. We're going to be discussing the signs of the Day of Judgment, so this is gonna be tonight after Isya. Please don't forget. To all the young 7-16 year old boys and girls we are bringing you a soccer camp. This was supposed to happen last week but it got rescheduled to this weekend inshallah. This is gonna tomorrow from 10am to 12pm. So 10am-12pm please sign up through the link on WhatsApp group",
      "It was supposed to happen last weekend but it got rescheduled for this weekend inshallah. Tomorrow 10am-12pm Tuesday, January 31st at 7.30 am we are going to have a shuttle that is departing from Maryam Masjid and many other massages they're all gonna have the same as well that's heading to the Capitol building in Austin for the Texas Muslim Capital Day This is organized by CARE and a lot of other partners InshaAllah this is going to be",
      "730 a.m.. So please make sure you sign up for that as well We are blessed to have two Islamic conferences You know they're gonna be happening we have the Al-Maghrib Institute's Ilmfest This is going to be held this Saturday InshaAllah on the 28th also Rasala Foundation's conference on culture, creed and community will be held on Saturday February 4th so both these conferences have a beautiful lineup of scholars Please make sure your build this opportunity",
      "this opportunity again our maghrib institute's film fest is this weekend or this saturday and then uh foundation's culture creed community conference is going to be saturday next weekend we are running short of non-perishable items there's a car outside you can you know donate to the van please make dua shifa for muhammad please make duality and for all of the members of the community one last announcement inshaallah",
      "There is a request to write emails to the Fort Bend ISD superintendent and board of trustees before February 5th. This is to request aid as a school holiday. Let them know that they can get this information from the email addresses. You know, there's more information on the MariaMessage WhatsApp groups but again, the deadline is for February 5. So if you could all as community members",
      "the fortman ids isd superintendent and the board of trustees uh before the fifth to again inform them about eid and request that he'd be made a school holiday inshallah i guess the more number of people we have uh the more emails they get and the more encouragement they get to do this inshalla"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/From Revelation to Revolution _ Ovamir Anjum__1750680783.opus",
    "text": [
      "Sufi saint once put it that Muhammad when he met, God sent his message. God sent His light to him and He came down from the mountain to the world. If God had sent me that guidance I would never have come down because that's what I'm looking for. That's all I want. I want the pain and confusion of the world to go away and be one with God whereas our deen is well that is where your mission starts.",
      "Once you have received that message from God, now you go and change the world. So the Prophet never went back to Jabal al-Nur right? And that's a symbol of what Islamic worship is really about. It's with the people in your struggle and the highest form of worship is for the people or it is that of the people who are engaged in that struggle."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Halaqa_ The Path to Allah - Dr_ Ovamir Anjum_UAvVVmp5WNs&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750680237.opus",
    "text": [
      "In the name of God, and praise be to God, peace be upon him and his Messenger, and upon me and my companions, and those who are with me. May Allah bless you all.",
      "a guide to Allah and kind of reflecting on the book Madarij al-Salekeen, if I understood correctly. The book Madarej al- Salaqeen is an explanation of one of the Ummahatul Qutub, one of principal texts in the path of spirituality and that is Manazil al Saireen, the stations of the seekers. And Imam Al Harawi,",
      "to assess and consider. But you can imagine that Imam al-Harawi who existed in the 4th century speaks about this concept of being wakeful, and aware, and that the path towards Allah is being cognizant and mindful of who You are, where You are what You are and the list goes on. So I ask Allah to open up the hearing channels of our heart",
      "minds to be wakeful in this particular moment, to benefit from our esteemed guest and ask Allah SWT to expound upon us all of His mercies, His generosities. May He always grant our opportunities here in the house of Allah SWt to be a source of increase for us in this life in the next. BarakAllahu feekum. InshaAllah we ask Dr. Uweima to enlighten us this evening.",
      "Peace be upon all of you and the mercy and blessings of Allah.",
      "Allah calls him mercy for all the worlds",
      "way to know Allah. Today I want to talk about the path to Allah and I will bring some insights from Madarij As-Saliqeen, ranks of As- Saliqeens those who walk on the path of Allah.",
      "And the basic metaphor, the basic condition of life that Allah SWT has taught us this essence, the meaning of our life. The most important activity in our life, the most important undertaking of our lives",
      "of our life is to return to Allah and that's how I like to translate Tawbah sometimes we translate the word Tawba as repentance or penitence forgiveness but the basic meaning of Tawbah is returned which is why Allah SWT",
      "Allah loves those who make tawbah frequently",
      "We are tawwab and Allah is tawweb. We return to Allah SWT when we make tawbah. But, and this is what I want to talk about today, we cannot return to",
      "a servant of a human being is sandwiched between two tawbas from Allah. What does that mean? Before you make tawba, Allah returns to you and gives you the tawfiq, gives you",
      "So that you will make tawbah This is not something That you can do on your own Allah SWT closes the doors of tawdah Upon some people So they may say with their words That they are making tawbeh But they don't make tawa Because the door of tawa Is not open to them",
      "So when you make tawbah, before you make Tawbah ask Allah to open the door of tawba to you. So the first tawa comes from Allah then your tawa goes and if you do not have in mind this exchange, this relationship If you think that your tawbah is just a word that you have said",
      "that it will do its work, then you're mistaken. Your tawbah is ineffective because you haven't opened the door. Tawbah Is a very high station It is both the beginning and the end of the journey to Allah",
      "Which is why we begin with tawbah. And this we already, this we know it makes sense that we begin",
      "قال الله أنه سيكون هناك عذر لمن يؤمنون بالشرك أو يقتلون أو يقومون بزنا وإلا من يفعلون التوبة. فالتوبة هي بداية الطريقة، مهما كنت تؤمن بصنع الشرك أو ضد الآخرين أو ضدي",
      "against the rights of allah which is zina against the right of others which is the worst form of that is killing right so i'm reading from al-furqan toward the end allah says and then allah this is the beginning of your journey to allah begins it is with",
      "سأعود إلى هذا الآية في نهاية سورة الفرقان",
      "you engaged in sexual impropriety or zina. But then, تَابَ وَآمَنَ وعَمِلَ عَمَلًا صَالِحًا Allah promises him something that is beyond imagination which is يُبَدِّرُ اللَّهُ سَيِّئَاتِهِمْ حَسَنًا الله سبحانه وتعالى takes all of his bad deeds",
      "and turns them into good deeds. Not only does Allah SWT forgive them or eliminate the bad deeds, but turn them into Good Deeds so that the more unrighteous you were in the beginning, the more Good Deed's you have to start now. You get in the",
      "heart that allah doesn't just forgive but he gives you what you had going against you you were not only forgiven right so suppose you are in debt and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt your debt isn't just forgiven you're given those hundreds of",
      "journey that's the Tawbah of Allah SWT this is generosity that doesn't make sense, the ulema speculate. The Ulema say that is because someone who makes tawba against a mountain of sins because every sin is a hurdle every sin distances you from Allah SWt",
      "you commit small or big is not the sin itself but that it distances you from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala so that you are more likely to do more sins and so someone who is able to climb over that mountain of sins and come to Allah subhana wa ta-ala",
      "Turning that mountain of bad deeds into a mountain of good deeds. That's the beginning of tawbah But then Allah SWT also mentions tawba as The final and the highest and the noblest of stations so Who is the dearest person to Allah SWt",
      "Allah. Muhammad and when did he reach the epitome, the height of his nearness to Allah? Remember the iman of prophets is increasing. It continues to increase right? The iman",
      "increases with every moment. So at the end of the mission of Rasulullah ﷺ, this is when he is closest to Allah ﷻ. And what is the last complete surah that comes to the Prophet ﷺ? What is the",
      "Not ayah. Any guesses? إِذَا جَاءَ نَصْرُ اللَّهِ وَالْفَتْحِ There are some ayat that came after it, but إِذا جَأَ نصْرا الله والفتح was the last complete surah to be revealed. Now how does this surah, إِدَاجَاء نَسْروا اللَّها وَ الفتحِ How does it end?",
      "came about a year before the passing of Rasulullah ﷺ. Right? And when this surah came, إِذَا جَاءَ نَصُرُ اللَّهِ وَالْفَتْحِ أبو بكر began to cry because when the victory of Allah had come as the surah goes and people entered into the deen of Allah in battalions tribe after tribe then Allah ﷻ says",
      "Now you seek the glory of Allah. You sing the glory Of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala Ask for forgiveness For He loves to return Loves to forgive So Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam The dearest of mankind",
      "Dearest of creation at the highest moment this came in his last Hajj. At that time Allah tells him to do what? To make tawbah So the beginning for somebody who's starting at the bottom and has nothing but sins",
      "nothing but sins is tawbah and the end for someone who is the dearest of creation to Allah at the height and the completion of his mission, Allah ask them to make tawba. So tawbah is the beginning of the journey to Allah and the",
      "So I want to talk about Tawbah today. And I want mention three aspects of Tawba. Number one, what to make Tawbah from? Number two, how to make tawbah?",
      "as individuals and number three that your tawbah is not complete without other people so that tawa is not an individual act these three things number one the most important thing",
      "thing to begin with and all that's important is to understand la ilaha illallah. So every act of tawbah that you make, everything that you commit is connected to some violation of, some limitation in your understanding of or some limitation",
      "So Tawheed. Tawheeed. And I don't mean by Tawheen not worshipping idols, I mean by tawheeed making Allah your soul concern, your soul ultimate love so that you live for Allah in all moments of your life",
      "life and I don't mean that you don't have ghafla everybody falls into ghaflah, into heedlessness right but the tawbah that we all need to make is that we have divided up our lives into two three four divisions",
      "And the problem is not that we fall into ghafla, because we all do. Ghafala is natural. It happens. But there is a bigger problem which is we have a chunk of life. We have chunks of our life in which we have told ourselves that Allah SWT, the love of Allah, fear of Allah, hope in Allah",
      "mention of Allah, it doesn't belong in this chunk of life. It belongs in the masjid. It Belongs when I'm meeting certain kind of people but We have chunked our lives For convenience So that without noticing without trying",
      "When you walk out of the masjid, walk into your car, you go home. Maybe you have Quran running in the car, right? Which is not necessary for you to be pious. But then you walk into work or school, college or the mall and you meet people who are your friends, who value you but they value you differently",
      "They know you as a different kind of person. Not somebody who is devoted to Allah first and foremost, but rather you're that really cool guy who knows how to play basketball really well or tells good jokes. Or they know you",
      "part. Student, right? As a student you go to campus and the way you talk, the way carry yourself changes so that you have compromised your Tawheed in a way without noticing,",
      "into a part of your life in which things like tawbah, even saying the name of Allah you know you catch yourself with non-Muslims or friends who don't really do this kind of thing so I'm going to be shy about being super religious. So that I develop multiple personalities",
      "At home, depending on the kind of environment we have at home, we do the same thing. So it's okay to talk about love and forgiveness and tolerance in the masjid but at home with your wife or husband or children something else kicks in. It's like a different person operating now. That is",
      "a compromise of Tawheed and a compromise Of Tawbah that really kills our lives, that really Kills our spiritual life, our journey to Allah. So when you say La ilaha illallah You have to say la ilaha ilallah in all of those aspects of life. Think of yourself as you know I had you have hundred personalities inside of you",
      "And each one of those comes out in different times and different places. And each on of them has to go through these stages, each one has to become a Muslim. Muslim is the first stage when you surrender to Allah, when you just accept.",
      "Each one of them has to become mu'min. When iman is tasdik and id'aan, when you rush to do what Allah wants, that is the definition of iman. Tasdik wal id'aan, that you acknowledge the truth of Allah with deepest in your heart",
      "most dangerous one my brothers and sisters i know it this is the most dangerous, one the kind of personality that comes out when you're bored. When you just want some fun. That's the most Dangerous Personality that none of us acknowledges. That' s the personality that goes and does things haram without thinking about it because you just need some stimulus",
      "And each one of us has that person inside of us. That person inside if us, when somebody annoys you and you have to respond. Many of us when we walk into the masjid We notice all the bad things because the critic comes out of us in the Masjid When we are dealing with other Muslims everybody has different kinds of problems",
      "of problems and so that personality all each one of them has to become a Muslim and a mu'min and then Muhsin. Then you have to what is the Muhsin? What is Ihsan? Anybody? What's Ihsan Let's translate it literally first",
      "Excellence is one way. JazakAllah khair. Excellence, another way that I like to remind myself, ihsan, is to make something hasan. What is hasan? Good or beautiful. Right? So ihsan is seek beauty. To make this beautiful, this thing that you're doing with Allah, make it not just a burden on you. You start with a burden.",
      "Like praying is a burden at first, and then when you're in a movement it becomes something that you are motivated from inside to do. And then it becomes beautiful, that's something that we enjoy and seek. But this should happen to all of those hundred people inside of you. Not just the one in the masjid because that's very easy. Not only on Fridays but also the ones in malls, the ones who are at night in bed who are bored",
      "who's bored, right? The one who is alone. The one with friends. That person has to become a Muslim. Sometimes he's not even Muslim or sheikh. Let alone mu'min and muhsin. Which is why the ulama divide up this path into 100 stations. It's very easy to say I am a Muslim now. Or I am born Muslim. That's even worse because you never go through this kind of thinking. You are born Muslim",
      "Muslim but nothing inside of you acts like that, nothing outside of you act like that. This is why you divide up your this journey into many stations and each journey you bring out a new aspect of you and you focus on it. So that's number one Tawbah from",
      "Shirk. And shirk, run from shirk to tawheed but I don't mean by shirk not worshipping idols because none of us worship idols unless some of you are really into these celebrities or what not and that is the case, that does happen. But we never acknowledge formally that we are worshipping these people or these ideas",
      "or this wealth, or this beauty right? Or the status that we have Allama Iqbal is a great Indian Muslim poet and philosopher He used to say it's really hard to do Sajdah to Allah alone because every time you go down your desire",
      "makes 100 idols. It's very difficult to go pass through hundred idols, to actually make one sajdah to Allah. It's Very Difficult To Be Ibrahim So Run From Shirk To Allah, Allah Says So Run Escape Flee",
      "flee to Allah SWT وَنَفِرُ مِنَ اللَّهِ إِلَى اللَّـهِ We run from Allah SWt but we run to whom? We run to Allah In fact the very meaning of The word Allah when you say Allah, where does it come from? What is the word Allah mean",
      "It comes from Al-Ilah. The one who is Allah, the only deity worthy of worship. There are two theories on this linguistic theory. The ones that's more likely and more correct is that it is Al-ilah. What does the word Allah come from?",
      "a baby ran to her mother for refuge and support instinctively when scared that is aliha when a baby runs instinctively to right or anyone when you run instinctively the someone",
      "whom you don't have to think about. You don't need to reason or calculate whether this person, this authority is going to help me or not. It's instinctive and I understood this in my own life when I had a baby one of my son Ahmed was a year-and-a-half and I was using water hose to water my plants",
      "year and a half running around. And being the father that I am, I had to have fun. Right? I had scare him so I started throwing water around him and he was scared but when he got scared...and mama is not around...when he's got... otherwise I wouldn't be able to do these things right?...when he got",
      "He ran to me. He is scared from me and he runs to me, and that is when I understood Allah. That is Allah. So if you understand the sense of awe that you have for Allah so that anything that happens to me",
      "lose, anything that I fear, anything",
      "Nothing in this life can be as ugly as human acts. Other ugliness, physical ugleness, you can take the scariest thing and get used to it but human acts can be so ugly that they tear you apart. You don't understand how can this happen? Where do you run? What do you think of? If you run to a psychologist maybe that's your ilah",
      "which is not to say psychology is haram or shirk with anything. But the point is that your psychological healing, first and foremost, somebody may help you with it, right? A sheikh, a brother, a sister, a husband, a wife may help find Allah but the healing is to run to Allah for everything whether something you encounter that's beautiful",
      "ugly, powerful right? scary so that is the first thing you make tawbah from the kind of shirk that we commit without knowing and without acknowledging when you say la ilaha illallah it's not just saying you know that there is one God and there are no two gods but it's also saying my God my Ilah is only one",
      "one and that people forget is not just that there is one ilah out there but my ilah is only one and so to worship allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is to love allah more than anyone else and love for the sake of allah three things if they are found in you you will find the sweetness",
      "sweetness of faith and the sweetness of Faith is very important because faith is burdened and difficult orders from outside until it becomes sweetness then it becomes your own so three things you have to have if you want to enjoy faith. Three things number one that you love Allah and his messenger",
      "messenger more than anything else other than that. Number two, the second, that you love someone only for the sake of Allah and third, that",
      "you go back from Allah as much as you hate to be thrown physically into the fire, as instinctively. You see all of the three parts are they relate to your effect, your emotion. They have to do with love and fear because it's when your emotions not just the knowledge in your mind but emotion when",
      "That's when you begin to enjoy. That's what it becomes beautiful to be a mu'min and then you look forward to see being a Muhsin. Your prayer, your salah is a burden until You begin to go past this and you have you begin To have Iman Right? And then it becomes something in your life It becomes the most beautiful thing and when you have Ihsan The second thing Second part of Tawbah and I have to hurry",
      "because I do want to take your questions and your reflections inshallah the second part of tawbah, this journey to Allah SWT return to Allah is that",
      "You don't choose when you worship Allah. You don'y choose when to return to Allah. It is Allah who chooses when you do that. What do I mean by that? Most of us, who have been Muslim want to be close to Allah but we all wait for a spiritual vacation",
      "vacation. I want to go on a rahlah with Shaykh Fulan, Ibn Fulan then I will be close to Allah but then Allah is saying okay there is Salatul Fajr and Salat al-Dhuhr and Salatal Athar and Salata Maghrib and Salatu Isha' oh no no no I don't have time for that That I'm gonna do in quick time three minutes right? Time it! So when am i going",
      "My spiritual vacation when I go to this place or that place. Because I want to choose when I will be close to Allah, when I would return to Allah When I will make tawbah to Allah That tawba just doesn't happen then you're just doing vacation This is not real You ask Allah, you return to allah when Allah says return to me five times a day and Then on top of that",
      "that you do other things. That show your love for Allah. So, you have to do more to show love. Allah has asked us these five times for instance but that's the beginning of wilaya. That's a beginning of nearness to Allah and you can't go to that level",
      "or something else until you have done this. Otherwise, you will be kidding yourself. You're just putting up a show because you have turned down the invitation from Allah SWT. You have turned",
      "that Allah wants you first. You submit to Allah SWT in the way Allah wants and then you will see many other things become much, much easier than they look. Number three, you cannot make tawbah, you can not return to Allah, you",
      "Most people fail because they fail in their interaction with other people. So we divide up what our understanding is, divide up our understanding of justice, of truth, of righteousness so that it becomes my world becomes divided,",
      "So all of my Islam becomes a struggle between groups in this life. Identities that belong to here, my interests here.",
      "Islam and my activity right is overwhelmed by the fact that I am young or that I'm born here versus those people who are not born they don't understand me or the fact, that I a middle class and then there are people were super poor in super rich and I don't identify with any of them. Or that I mean an academic and others were preachers and they don' know as much as I do and therefore",
      "to attract people that I can't say and therefore I'm angry with them. Or, that I am a woman and I think the entire history of humankind is a conspiracy by men against women. Or I'm a man and I thinks every fitna in the world is created by women. Right? So generations... This is.. so I divide up the world according to my interest in this world",
      "pose them on the deen and I say that until everybody else agrees with me so you can say la ilaha illallah muhammadur rasulullah, you can pray, you give charity but i have no soft spot for you until you do things my way right? So that's not a journey to Allah SWT. That is just your class interest, your gender interest,",
      "your spiritual life upon a book that you read in college or upon the people that you hung out with here and there. That's not worshipping Allah SWT and loving for the sake of Allah SWt, hating for the",
      "You need something to unpack and you go to the masjid. So spirituality is something that you pick up from a shelf. So you have to break these idols and understand that even Rasulullah ﷺ, he would have somebody else recite Quran to him.",
      "The Qur'an is revealed to him, but Prophet ﷺ would say to Abdullah ibn Mas'ud, recite the Qur'aan to me. I love to hear the Qurʾān from other people. And he is directed by Allah ﷻ, He didn't need anyone. You know there is a great Sufi who used to say,",
      "who used to say that Muhammad went to Jabal al-Nur, Allah spoke to him. Realities became unveiled to him the truth was his but then what did he do? He came back like that's the most remarkable and revolutionary thing why would you come",
      "after experiencing Allah SWT, after talking to Jibreel. This world, right? For those of us who want spirituality for ourselves, doesn't make sense that he came back. And in fact, he didn't go back again. So he says, Muhammad SAW came back, I would never have come back.",
      "And some of us want that spirituality. And there is nothing wrong with moments of that, right? To cut off from the rest of the world and spending some time with Allah SWT at night, that is part, that was an obligation for Rasulullah SAW. And it is a sunnah of all the ulama'a and the du'aat. Anyone who wants to be anyone in this deen has to do tahajjud and has to",
      "to spend time cut off from other people with Allah SWT, but it is all still in the middle of the people. And what I mean by that, what I meant to say and inshaAllah going to wrap up, when you are contributing in some way to some kind of good whether because you're a khateeb, you're an alim, you'r a scholar,",
      "you're an activist, you have to understand that there are other people that you need for yourself and for whatever mission, whatever thing that you have in mind so that not everybody can be a scholar. Right? Somebody needs to do other things in order for some people to be able to preach.",
      "Not everybody can be a popular speaker. Somehow I noticed that especially in American Muslim community because of this rise of the celebrity culture, being a good muslim is somehow becomes synonymous with one day being a really popular celebrity preacher as if there is...the real life is very different so we have to understand",
      "We understand the necessity of many ways of doing things, including with people who are disagreeing with us. There are sometimes genuine disagreements but a lot of times our disagreement comes out of either misunderstanding or closed-mindedness or jealousy. Just misunderstanding and jealousy",
      "And we become very critical of everybody else. Every other trend in Islam becomes a problem except my trend, right? Every other generation becomes a problems other than my generation and American Muslims partake in American exceptionalism more than anybody else in the world. American Muslims thinks that we are superior to everybody else It's crazy because",
      "according to data we have, one in five Muslims in America is not going to grow up as a Muslim. 23% of people, of children who are born in this country will abandon Islam or at least that's the rate now. We are threatened and so arrogant. We have no reason",
      "So there is reason for us to be humble and be worried. And use the great advantages that we have. There's no doubt that we are having great advantages as American Muslims, more resourceful than most Muslims in the world but our threat... The likelihood that many of the children I know",
      "are not going to follow this path that is so dear to me. And so many, that's very real likelihood. So we have to understand at a very basic spiritual level our need for each other, our need",
      "different classes right, different classes of people meaning different level of money, different level education means that you people need different approaches. Right some people are more influenced and more interested in kind of Islam that is strict and law-oriented others",
      "because our basic needs are met and we're looking for something higher other people are interested in well somebody stop these people from killing me so i need a strong army and a strong economy so i can live on right but so people develop different values within islam",
      "to simplify is that to understand that your tawbah to Allah SWT, your journey to Allah SPAW is a collective journey. Which is why when we say and I'm going to sum this up in Al Fatiha When we say we pray to Allah S.W.T which is the most important prayer Most important dua is Al-Fatihah It is Ummul Kitab and Ummul Quran it is the mother of the book",
      "through this prayer, we see, اهدنا الصراط المستقيم والله guide us and not me, guide us to the straight path. صراط الذين نعمت عليهم The next step is that I connect myself to a tradition. I say, the path of those whom you have blessed already. Meaning I'm not inventing something new, I'm",
      "أنني وجدت أني بسرعة أريد أن أكون مثل الناس قبلنا",
      "We ask Allah to raise us on the Day of Judgment in the company of Muhammad ﷺ, in a way that he is pleased to see us and be pleased with us on this day that we meet you."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/ISIS and the Future of Islam by Dr_ Ovamir Anjum_GezZHB2srgo&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750680338.opus",
    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Wa rahmatullah salam. Thank you very much everyone for being here. Alhamdulillah, wasalat wa salam ala Rasulullah. I have quite a bit packed here so I'm going to jump right into it. ISIS and the future of Islam but resources that Islamic... does Islamic tradition have to understand and respond",
      "to the phenomenon of ISIS and what is at stake. I'm going through this presentation look at each part of that statement, and inshallah invite you later to comment on it. One thing I should preface my talk with is that this is very much research in progress and this is not something that... So for instance",
      "my knee-jerk reaction to the phenomenon of ISIS is just as much disgust and many sleepless nights, as for many other Muslims. But when you take a process something that's a subject of your study, you develop a different relationship to it. And therefore I'm going to answer",
      "Islamic or not with a pause. I don't know yet because i have to see. Here what I'm going to see here is that, is... well I'm gong to present the elements of that answer and so please come on with me on this journey of trying",
      "and see even if we come to a judgment that was also over knee jerk reaction, hopefully will be better enlightened about why that is the case. I'm going to look at first ISIS's self-representation and then how to understand ISIS some common but what I argue are bad answers to why it is not Islamic. I am going to",
      "which appeared for some time 2014 and 15. I am not sure if it's still appearing, it is quite dangerous to do research on ISIS you can get caught, you could be put in prison by FBI for downloading wrong kind of material so we don't live in a perfect world where academics are beyond approach that world probably existed at some point in time no longer in fact back then if you remember McCarthyism",
      "academia has never been as free and we like to think nonetheless it is fortunately freer than most other domains of life so topic I'm going to look at these issues to what extent do they really truly represent Isis as a scholar I have to say well this is the best I could do I am not entirely sure",
      "of the DAVEQ issues in fact are made available by American research institutes so that is obviously a limitation of what I can do here. That said, of course there are many other sources by which one knows what's going on through personal friends relatives but also you know YouTube and",
      "So I'm fairly confident that Dabiq represents what they think, but there is a little bit an element of conjecture involved here. One thing that one finds in this issue for example the laws of Allah or the laws man, the absolute central claim ISIS makes is that it is implementing Sharia and nobody else is.",
      "images are from their magazines. So here you'll see the aftermath of this strike on the Rafidi Temple in Kuwait. So Rafidi temple means a Shia masjid and these are the people who engaged in that bombing, suicide bombing so they very much own up to it and take pride in it. These are on the caravan of Islamic State the Knights",
      "So the Crusaders here, you may not be able to fully read it but that's what this says here and these are if you will Western operatives. That is those people that they are young men who join ISIS ideology in western societies. They call them in the lands of crusader so presenting representing West as Crusaders is also something that is crucial to their ideology if you want",
      "Waiting war against the Khilafah is apostasy. That's a theme that appears in many of these issues and many of the claims I've read the Arabic declaration of the Caliphate authored by someone who's not known as a scholar, but most likely some editor whose name was put there so this is Just to go back a little bit",
      "little bit Saddam Hussein so there are two sources from which one can if you will want one can relate Isis's roots to Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussain. And I like to argue that ISIS is more Saddam hussein 2.0 than al-Qaida 2.2 although of course",
      "one could say ISIS is neither. In other words, it's not...it's something entirely new. It combines elements but there are many other parts to it that I think require us understanding it as a phenomenon in itself. Saddam had moved toward religion in the 70s and 80s. The Baathist party was very secularist.",
      "for here, for example the Baptist party these are his words must oppose the institutionalization of religion in the state and society let us return to the roots of our religion glorifying them but not introduce it into politics by 1990s there was a rigorous faith campaign new Islamic schools religious training centers and mosques and murals of the present of the president in prayer there was Quran written in his blood",
      "in his blood. So after, if you will the Western Crusaders quote unquote 1990-91 invaded Iraq he turned to religion we're still not sure to what degree that was sincere but nonetheless there is a clear clearly Iraqi society changed under those barbaric sanctions that United Nations and United States placed on",
      "seething anger at what ordinary people is going through and we have to remember that the majority of people who joined ISIS are folks who grew up under those conditions. And while Saddam Hussein has been neutered, they see their leader oppressive an authoritarian murderer as he was nonetheless he was",
      "their institutions, healthcare hospitals and so on were also destroyed. 1996 as we know famously Madeleine Albright was given this number that half a million children have died in Iraq as a result of the sanctions she thought it was worth it. And so obviously Iraqis did not think it was worthy right? And you can't blame them for that. So those are some of the background under which this phenomenon emerges.",
      "Moving back to ISIS's self-presentation, one thing... so one finds that what I call fratricide. They kill their parents in the sense that both Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda are to them apostates. Right? So one finds for example enforcing the repentance of school teachers guilty of apostasy for upholding Baathist principles.",
      "right one sees the apostate leader of Hamas with his ally Khomeini, leader of Dar al-Fidha. And then on top you see Ayman al-Zawahiri a leader with no real authority so these Islamist other Islamist movements and Saddam are both called apostates. The absolute exclusivism of ISIS to emphasize it's really central",
      "they write and they say. And I'm going to emphasize it because I think it's quite important in trying to understand everything else that they do. So for example, one sees on the top left you'll see the label here is too small so I'm gonna read it, the Mujahideen of Khorasan give bay'ah to the khalifa",
      "Taliban had claimed to be the Amir and Al-Qaeda accepted that Mullah Omar was the Amr of all Muslims, and so on. ISIS rejects that authority and has if you will divided Taliban as well and many of them are joining or many former Taliban are joining ISIS. The allies of Al Qaeda in Sham here also",
      "Here also, if you look here it says the Murtad Zahran Alush calls to democracy. So calling to democracy even by someone this person over here was killed by Bashar's forces in 2014 he led one of the Mujahideen factions that allied with al-Nusra group not where we're not al- Nusra per se but nonetheless But my point is that folks who are Salafi",
      "jihadi mujahideen fighting but so long as they disagree and fail to give allegiance to Isis, they become not simply another group. They become murtad. They come outside the pale of Islam. Here of course the wretched Druze an apostate sect under the protection",
      "logical problem if Jawalani Front and Al-Qaeda and everybody is apostate, what is so special about Druze being apostates? But nonetheless because they are giving protection to Druze, they also become apostates. And here again more Murtaddeen and more Tawagheed.",
      "to be worshipped other than God, if you will literally speaking. So and you see there's a whole sweep of history and ideology so we know of course what they think about Iran and Shia but also the Sunni scholars that are called Murtaddin here, the crusader Obama and his Ta'hut ally Salman ibn Abdulaziz the Saudi king. Here",
      "to Abdullah ibn Ubayy, Al-Salul the Medinan hypocrite. So Al Saud are called as Salul as a way to remind if you will the world of their hypocrisy and then this is Faisal Ibn Hussein the French King son of Sharif Hussein sorry that the Saudi king",
      "I'm sorry, Faisal was the king of Iraq placed by the British before the First World War and ultimately used by the british so that if you will that narrative of how",
      "is central to the narrative that is presented here. You'll see that the doctrine of al-wala' wa'al bara', which is alliance for faith and disavowal of all those who lack faith,",
      "Prince and Erdogan are called the Tahut of Qatar together with the Tahout of Turkey. And pro-Nusayri scholar Mohammad Said Ramadan al-Bulti who supported Bashar until he died, and was killed in fact here they say that until he was killed by the Mujahideen,",
      "And here the Murtaddin of Nur party, that is a Salafi party in Egyptian parliament. The Murtadin of that party so everyone is Murtadh, everyone is an impostor who does not join them. So now you know you might wonder why is what what is the relationship with this presentation",
      "their self-representation to what they're doing and I think that is it one thing that one learns from it, is there is this really explosive combination of a certain doctrines that I think are the source of very powerful if short term nonetheless a very powerful message that we can talk about little bit later. So talked about exclusivism but also technological prowess administrative",
      "meaning they're very good administrators in the regions that they are controlling. I'm not going to have a chance to talk about that, but I can give you references if you need. They're martial skills. But also importantly an upbeat message of easy victory as opposed to Al-Qaeda. If you look at the self presentation of Al- Qaeda it was almost like moaning about how the Ummah is suffering whereas ISIS is not moaning,",
      "We are killing them, we are winning. And that is what wins if you will converts people who have lost hope or people who were angry at their own societies want that message it's a very attractive method it's the message of happy hope and easy victory rather than Al Qaeda's message of an unknown journey into the unknown trying to wake up the Ummah by doing these terrorist acts",
      "Another message that one finds here is a messianic end times vision. You find what's going to happen at the end, the Prophet has several hadiths some weak and some strong but nonetheless they appear in very strange combination you'll see there is a tank, there is perfect storm which is an English idiom",
      "to a hadith about the end times. And there on the rights here, I copy this part of an article that actually has a fairly sophisticated analysis of how ordinary Muslims misunderstand what's going on and so let me read a little bit.",
      "to the kuffar, their intelligence agencies research technology and co-conspirators. Conspiracy theories have thereby become an excuse to abandon jihad, to have great awe for the kufar, to forsake the obligation of bai'a allegiance and to pursue the dunya all in the name of political awareness.\" In other words what they're saying is that these conspiracy",
      "is really being done either by the Jews or the Americans and we can't do anything. And one of the worst aspects of those theories I read on here, is that they require no evidence just foolish deductions so you see a fairly good realpolitik, a very good sense of what's going on combined with an explosive end times vision",
      "of modern technology, media and any other things that they can get their hands on. Also a very strict application of what they believe to be medieval reading of Islamic law. And no concession to the attempts of ijtihad and reform of the last century and a half that characterize most other groups including Al-Qaeda",
      "and all other Islamist movements are in fact, they promote a friendship toward compromise toward modern institutions. Not ISIS. Whatever modern tools they use ideologically they do not want to give any ground to modernity.",
      "One, just more of the same. This is a Brookings article that does a little bit research and shows that there is one of the attractions of ISIS is that corruption which is such a terrible problem in Saudi, in Syria and Iraq and elsewhere in Muslim world significantly disappears from the regime's",
      "the regions that they control, at least in the short term. And that is a big attraction for people who are living there. Okay another element and there are so many things that one could and should talk about when looking at ISIS. One thing that I single out because it is such an again important part of how they present themselves their videos and images is child soldiers.",
      "their ranks are filled with people who have converted to Islam just to join ISIS. Meaning folks who have a clean slate before, in other words they don't know much about Islam it's really important to them that if you will they raise warriors these are people who were converting to Islam to join Isis",
      "to be jihadi wives. The soldiers as well as a great deal of leaders are young including many westerners and teaching violence and murder to children, that's another aspect right so you'll see here a child who has just killed someone shot someone another child and I have in the in their YouTube videos that I've seen that's",
      "that's the message they're sending to the world outside. That, you know every last one of us will kill. Now all that said and horrifying as it is I want to give some context to this kind of violence. You might be wondering why do so many Iraqis and Syrians at least temporarily tolerate ISIS? Right, so this graph on the right hand side shows",
      "shows a graph by Syrian Network for Human Rights. Here you have the number of people killed by government forces and here you have ISIS forces. Alright, so we're talking about a lot of violence but the number people killed are nowhere close to what Bashar's government is doing. Total Syrian toll according to PBS and other places that I've seen",
      "is 470,000 of which 400,000 are killed. It's half a million people where ISIS toll it's 20,000. It may be certainly growing but it's not growing at the same rate as Bashar. It is also worth remembering that 82 to 97% of ISIS victims are Muslim. If you watch only Western media",
      "In fact, only people they killed are in France and elsewhere. But those are the only people that count. U.S. sanctions, again to give context, U. S. sanctions on Iraq in 1990s caused half a million children's deaths and totaled two million. These are conservative numbers by UN figures. So putting this context does not mean",
      "mean that what they're doing is okay but you have to understand the bigger context of why people would say i would rather take 20 000 debts and you know be okay with what they are doing horrifying as they are uh as opposed to something else now you might say well this is just a middle east problem or just just syria now so i want to just sort of burst the bubble",
      "not i hate to whine about stuff but just to put things in context all right secular doctrines have by far killed more people in the last century and a half more people are killed in one entirely secular and modern war the first world war 1914-18 then all religious wars of history put together before and after so if you collect the numbers of all wars prior to 1914",
      "1914. Just that first world war killed more people in the name of nationalism, progress, love for the country, for the flag and so on. The French Revolution, the quintessential secular liberal revolution led to the execution not killing, not death by starvation, execution by guillotine and other ways of 41 000",
      "So we are not talking about Muslims or ISIS or Iraqis being exceptionally violent. This happens all the time in history. One could recite many such facts, the total number of people killed in modern wars during the 20th century for the two world wars and reaction and after effects of two world",
      "under Stalin mostly 28 million in China, 12 million in Nazi Germany and so on and so forth. Again just put give remember the context U.S similarly dropped nuclear bomb 1945 knowing now we have evidence knowing that the Japanese wanted to surrender",
      "Nobody here has clothes on. So let's discuss this issue with the proper context in mind. The more rule of thumb, and also of course one should remember that Muslim modern nation states for nationalist reasons have done the same thing. Pakistani army killed I don't know 70,000 100,000 people in Bangladesh. Turkish Turks killed Armenians very large number for modern secular nationalistic reasons",
      "So this is not limited to Kuffar. A rule of thumb, the more secular an ideology, the people that it has killed. That said now let's get back to well actually before we get back twice there's one more thing that is quite irrelevant here. Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot had a very similar sort of circumstance or operated under very similar set of circumstances as ISIS so it's worth remembering",
      "Now Cambodia 1975 to 1979, in four years this man led a movement that killed 1.5 million to 3 million Cambodians out of a total population 7 to 8 million. This was a communist secular modernist",
      "revolutionary movement. Never brought to justice, but what's much more remarkable is that the way...the reason Khamel Rouge and Pol Pot arose was because of the Vietnam bombing. What happened is that at the end of Vietnam when this North Vietnam",
      "Vietnam that was, if you will, an American ally. They weren't. South Vietnam wasn't entirely sure if the United States had the will to enforce the terms of the treaty. So Kissinger and Nixon sent secret bombers that bombed a neutral country with no declaration",
      "ultimatum of war. They bombed Cambodia and killed hundreds of thousands of people only to show that yes, United States can kill anyone they want. Kissinger won Nobel Prize, Nobel Peace Prize in the years to come for ending the Vietnam War all right but you could not imagine",
      "what happened in Cambodia if that massacre had not been undertaken, likely only to make a political point. With this context why are we then worried about an Islamic critique of ISIS? And I want to say that my reason for Islamic critique",
      "what I consider purely Islamic moral reasons. Now, which is why we must go beyond complaining about Western hypocrisy and talk about what are these people doing? And why is it problematic? Now again, I emphasize this because as I talked to some of my friends Muslim scholars in fact, Muslim academics",
      "the one you begin to talk about Islamic, if you will an Islamic condemnation or critique of ISIS as if you're saying that Islam is responsible. It may be a bad sort of political argument right? I it may be that if you are talking about this stuff in a sound bite it would sound like that but i think that's not a sufficient reason to give up our moral agency and moral critique",
      "It cannot be denied that ISIS mobilizes Islam as identity and inspiration. Yet it violates Islamic teachings, and we still have to figure out exactly what those teachings are. And I will argue that it ignores the proper method of norm production in Islam but I would also argue a lot of other people are doing that as well.",
      "have killed far more and if Middle Eastern autocrats continue to kill far more people, why critique ISIS once again? Because all the human life is sacred. And to kill one according to the Quran is to kill entire humanity unjustly. And also because for utilitarian, if you will reason it's a slippery slope 20,000 can turn into 2 million",
      "It starts everything in all of these numbers start with 20,000 and then further justifications are provided to kill Now the argument is why must this critique be Islamic? Rather than political and economic but obviously there are political and Economic reasons for why this is happening I will argue that An Islamic theological legal and ethical critique does not mean that the critique is not also political and economical",
      "and economic. And that's the argument that I will go toward. Okay, now when I talk to most Muslims and look at what most Muslims are writing unless they're",
      "This is the most common explanation, that ISIS is a Western conspiracy. They do not accept Muslims in the Muslim world, do not on the whole accept that ISIS Is a problem that emerged from within Muslims In fact, most people do not except 9-11 as a Muslim responsibility either but ISIS certainly is just beyond what they can accept",
      "Except of course people who have direct contact or somehow involved which is a relatively small number, but nonetheless. Another common claim inspired by religious polemics is that it is a Wahabi phenomenon. Okay so you find this both among Shia some the Shia scholars and some the Ash'ari Sunni scholars that it's a Wahhabi",
      "In the same vein, some people would say that ISIS was inspired by Ibn Taymiyyah. So this is sort of these are the Islamic mostly the Islamic scholars who have a fish to fry they would either say it's a conspiracy or it is another group that they don't like that's doing it. Western scholars and you give an example Bernhard Heichel at Princeton has been writing about this a number of other",
      "ISIS is as Islamic as any other group. There is just no consistent ground for saying it's not Islamic. Now the Sunni ulama who have engaged in a, who are sort of directly involved with what's going on and I'm using the example of Sheikh Yaqubi who wrote this famous fatwa against ISIS they argue that this is ISIS",
      "And in this case, even the Shia scholars as far as I know are in agreement. That ISIS are Khawarij which means nothing to the vast majority of people and in part I want to explain what that means. And whether is this diagnosis valid? Is it useful? And what does it mean? Well you all know this so I'm just going to move on why.",
      "that it you learn nothing from what is happening. You shirk responsibility and you score some theological points against whatever favorite enemy you have in the sort of, you know your uh the sectarian enemy um and for this purpose only because I think that these explanations are so",
      "little bit of an analysis. What does it mean to say for example that they're Wahabi? Right, this irja is a doctrine that says let's tolerate sin and not adherence to Islam. This was an animosity there so they were the Wahhabi scholars condemned irja that is religious laxness if you will libertarianism",
      "So this is something that ISIS propaganda certainly shares with the Wahhabis, no doubt about it. Excommunication of other Muslims also is shared with early Wahhabi's. This practice of the Wahabi's sort of seized early 20th century but nonetheless earlier on it was a major... in fact even in the 19th century",
      "when the movement began, the Wahhabis excommunicated other Muslims. Emphasis on Tawheed and Jihad, monotheism and fighting. So those are things that certainly are shared with Wahhabism. Hatred of the Shia no doubt is shared with the Wahabis. Use of the fatwas of Ibn Taymiyyah",
      "is shared by ISIS with the Wahhabis. Alright? So why do I then say that Wahhabism doesn't really explain what's going on? And for that, I'm gonna take you back to a thousand years earlier to the story of ibn Tumart and the Al-Mohid movement or al-Muwahhidoon movement. Ibn Tumaq...",
      "philosophical, claimed to be a disciple of Al-Ghazali certainly followed his ideas whether he actually met him and got his blessing or not is questioned by scholars. His message was absolute uncompromising monotheism opposition to Taqlid, opposition to the Maliki Madhhab in North Africa, in the North African region where he operated.",
      "to wage war or jihad against the Maliki al-Murabitun. His successor, his Khalifa Abdul Mu'min succeeded in establishing an empire that lasted about a century. They were uncompromising by the duty of Abu'l Maruf al-Nahyan al-Monkar. They proclaimed Ibn Tumart to be a Mahdi, the rightly guided one who will herald",
      "that he was infallible because he was influenced by Shia doctrines as well. Zahiri and Shafi'i madhhab were followed against Maliki jurists who were considered muqallids, and hence bad. He had compromised and corrupted the true message of Islam. That is, the Malikis were seen as having compromised the true Message. He forced his creed on pain of death sometimes onto other Muslims, allegedly persecuted and force-converted Jews and Christians.",
      "to Jews and Christians as well. A century later, Ibn Tumar's successors give up on his purist doctrine, rejected his claim to Mahdism to ward off their other Muslim neighbors. They made a deal with Christian King Ferdinand III and borrowed his troops, gave concessions to Christians in their capital Marrakesh. A Christian would not be allowed to convert to Islam according to this deal but a Muslim was free",
      "in the century they were overrun by the Marini's Berber tribal dynasty. This is deja vu, this is what the Wahhabis if you will have done in some respects yet there is an absolutely crucial difference between the Wahabis and these guys and what is that difference? Well the Wahabis came from the Salafi Athari Kambali branch of Islam",
      "of Islam, these guys came from absolutely anti-Athari, anti-Salafi, pro-Kalam and pro-philosophy branch of Sunni Islam. Right? So they opposed Madhabism, they upheld Tawheed and Tanzeeh, the transcendental interpretation of Tawaheed. They used blessings of great well known ulama'a",
      "In the case of Wahabis, we find Ibn Taymiyyah. Well they use al-Ghazali. They wage war against other Muslims for their beliefs. Later when they were weakened, they made deals with Christians against Muslims to stay in power. So what I'm arguing here is that it's essentially you know you could very well say the Wahabis were the Al Mubahhidun of a thousand years earlier in many respects. My point",
      "doesn't happen just in the Hanbali branch or the Atharis, or just in in the jazeera, in the Arabian Peninsula. Or when inspired by the teachings of Ibn Taymiyyah. It happens all the time everywhere. Again is it only Sunni Islam? And one finds that's not",
      "as a Sunni Sufi Tariqah and went on to conquer the region that is now Iran or Persia, and presided over what is now the only recorded mass conversion of a major region from one sect of Islam to another. Iran was forcibly converted to Imam-e-Shiasm. And so was Iraq.",
      "And so was Iraq, or parts of Iraq. They chose 12-verse Shi'ism. Initially they were not 12-verses, they're not Imami's, they chose it because otherwise their troops, the Turkmen, were unlikely to fight against the Sunni Ottomans. So Imami Shi'iism was chosen as appropriate ideology for the empire and in terms",
      "of the number of people that he killed and tyranny and so on, it was I mean the whole entire region. That was the vast majority of Iran where Sunni was converted to Shias. And my point is doesn't happen only in Sunni Islam. Doesn't happen in Islam. Happens all the time. Now that said just sum up what I've been saying is when you look at the Sunnis or",
      "or Sufis, or Shia, or secular liberalism, or Secular Communism, Or modern democracy. They have all produced comparable phenomena at some point or another. There's something else we got to look at it may be that these doctrines contribute but they don't contributed I mean that they don' t lead to them necessarily. I can also talk about whether Ibn Taymiyyah teachings are responsible for ISIS.",
      "Dr. Ermeen, just before he left, he asked me, he sent me an email with this question. So I wanted to answer this question just for him and now that he's not here, I'll just say this. When earlier in the Wahhabi controversies when Muhammad ibn Abdulwahab did takfir or excommunication of his opponents, his brother Suleiman ibn Abd al-Wahab wrote his refutation",
      "refutation. And if you read the refutation, most interesting thing is that he was using Ibn al-Qayyim and Ibn Taymiyyah to refute Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab. And Muhammad's response was well it doesn't matter we're not Muqallids of Ibn Tamiyyah. So the point is that in the same way as Ibn Tumart could use Al Ghazali people could use Ibn Taimiyya. And I'm not necessarily saying because",
      "I'm simply saying this use and reinterpretation, misrepresentation, and misinterpretation happens all the time. The radicals use whatever authority will unify and inspire their base but their real appeal often is not the theological argument but in something else or at least in something as well. And that is this...",
      "Okay, let's skip a little further. Their appeal is and I'm going to read from an earlier revolutionary who wrote virtue without which terror is destructive",
      "Virtue is impotent. You need both virtue and terror to effect a real change, a real revolution. This was not Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, this was Rob Spear, this the French Revolution. ISIS is a revolution. I'm reading from a French American anthropologist Scott Atron wrote a wonderful article based on his research and it's a book called Talking To The Enemy.",
      "recommended the service. Great guy. ISIS is a revolution all world altering revolutions are born in danger and death, brotherhood and joy how can this one be stopped? Meaning it's not easy to stop it because all the conditions are there he goes on to say asymmetric operations involve spectacular killings to destabilize",
      "as long as recorded history. You kill, but you don't just kill, you kill in order to give a message, political killing. In Arabic it's called mutla. You can and distort your victims, you destroy them, you destroyed their corpses, you cut them up to show, to send a psychological message. The Prophet forbade prohibited mutla, but what ISIS is doing",
      "tactic. Perhaps never in the history of conflict have so few people with so few actual means and capabilities frightened so many.\" So ISIS is what other people have done in the past but the social media that is at their disposal has simply exploded the efficacy of the tactics",
      "How much time do I have? You went a little bit over. Okay, well so I'm going to move on maybe a little beyond methodological points of why I think that secular versus religious explanation the idea that this is their just political group not Islamic group that is not a sufficient explanation. I can talk about it later if you have questions",
      "if you have questions. In general, what I've tried to establish so far is that all religions are open to a range of valid interpretations. This is the point that has been beaten to death by liberal pluralism and that's not what I mean. What I mean to say is that... And just the last bottom line is what I'd like to draw your attention to. The question rather is how does a moral system",
      "like Islam, decide the boundaries of valid reasoning and practice? And did Islamic tradition develop reasoning to deal with phenomena like this? Because my time is up I'm going to sort of get to the bottom, get to just if you will, the conclusion. Khawarij were a group that emerged earlier on in history",
      "And Islamic theology developed a technique which was to dehistoricize Khawarij, extract from the phenomenon of Khawarij, which was very similar to ISIS. They extracted few principles and they said whoever, whichever group has these principles is un-Islamic. This is not a matter of interpretation.",
      "interpretation. So al-Khawarij were considered outside the pale of Islamic normativity, that is what is acceptable Islamic argument, without saying that they are kuffar, at least they're unbelievers. The majority of Muslims did not say that Al-Khawarij are non-Muslims but rather they said that this is beyond",
      "were the grounds on which Muslim scholars develop this reasoning you might the reason it is a real issue is that disagreement is completely accepted in Islam on any issue theology law there's disagreement every issue how can you say that you cannot accept",
      "of agreement by all groups. This is one thing that we're not going to do. Alright? And so those of us like me who are arguing on behalf of Islamic tradition, we have to show that ISIS is crossing certain boundaries that historically all Muslim groups have agreed shall not be crossed. What are those boundaries? Number 1, most importantly",
      "importantly mass excommunication of other Muslims. When you say all are the Muslims but my group is not Muslim, it's different from saying they're all wrong or mistaken or in error when you say that they are an all non-muslim a group that does that is halfway khawarij",
      "of that reasoning they are 100% Khawarij. So Khawaj is a if you will, a technical term that has come to mean people who end debate and discourse in Islamic tradition by this particular means. By saying that disagreement is anybody disagrees with me is not only wrong but",
      "but not Muslim and on that basis I'm going to fight. Last point I want to make, and... I just wanted to move on, but the last point I wanted to make is that ISIS has engaged, has drawn on many existing",
      "religious doctrines. They draw on Islamism, they draw on modern technology, they draws on Saddam's infrastructure, they drawn on Wahhabism, and they draw Ibn Taymiyyah but they also draw on Al-Shafi'i, they",
      "the alive, the Jordanian pilot. They used the example of Ali radiallahu anhu allegedly doing the same thing in a weak tradition. My point they draw on everyone that will serve their purpose it is not sufficient to say from an Islamic discursive perspective methodological perspective",
      "perspective that, oh they don't follow this verse of the Quran about mercy and therefore they're not Muslim. If you followed this reasoning nobody would be Muslim because everybody has to qualify. No every group qualifies some hadith or some verse right? And that's why the knee-jerk reaction of most Muslims although it may be valid ethically",
      "Islamic judgment. In order to reach a methodologically sound Islamic judgment, you have to do something like what I have done. I may not have persuaded you once I'm and I may or might not be going the right direction but my hope is that we as Muslim scholars begin to develop this kind of critique that is historically valid, contextually valid does not reduce these problems",
      "it's just the Wahhabis or just the Muslims, or just a religious violence, or is just the Middle Easterners or just Arabs. But brings Islamic tradition to bear systematically on these problems. Thank you very much."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/_ISIS _ The Future of Islam_ with Ovamir Anjum_L3HU5vUHRYo&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750612626.opus",
    "text": [
      "Greetings everybody. Welcome to the Center for",
      "to the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. I'm Jonathan Brown, the director and we're very fortunate to have today a presentation by someone I've learned a lot from over the years. Yeah, someone I have learned a great deal from over years, Ovemer Anjam who is the Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies at University of Toledo. Although this is the one in Ohio not in Spain.",
      "He's the author, his book Politics Law and Community in Islamic Thought from Cambridge University Press is an excellent, excellent book. I'd really recommend it for anybody who's interested in political theory and law and notions of law and community in the Islamic tradition. It's a very good book. And unlike a lot of scholars, you know, in Islam studies, Ovarma is also, you",
      "trying to think about how Muslims think about these issues today. And he's recently finished a book, which took him 10 years. I'm a slow reader myself so I understand... No, he translated the book called Madad-e Jasaal Akeen, which is a very famous Sufi manual from the 14th century translated into English and he's also working on a monograph on issues of violence and legitimacy raised by the phenomenon of ISIS, which he will be talking about today. Thank you very much, Rav Amr please go ahead.",
      "Thank you. Can everybody hear me? Okay, well good afternoon everyone. Pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for having me and for being here. I'll spare you the preliminaries and get right to it. ISIS as we know is an armed group that can be described as terrorist. That is it uses violence as a political and psychological tool. It's territorial unlike say Al-Qaeda. It' s missionary and expansionist rather than say nationalist",
      "It's apocalyptic as it gives immediate political meaning to the widely expected accepted end times traditions in Traditions that are accepted and also in Islam and otherwise And takfiri. So these are some of the adjectives that are used Takfiri means one that operates on the basis of an exclusionary base, it excludes other Muslims from being part of Islam",
      "And its material and ideological roots go back to Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist state as well as Al Qaeda, but many analysts increasingly point out that it is more Saddam 2.0 than Al-Qaida 2. 0. Its ideological genealogy is said to include primarily not only the Jihadi Salafi trend of the last quarter of the 20th century,",
      "going all the way back to early Islam or to Ibn Taymiyyah. I explained why I think such explanations are unhelpful, but first let me state my problem more precisely. My interest is first and foremost in understanding the challenge the ISIS phenomenon poses to the Islamic tradition and the cracks in Islamic tradition or its contemporary recensions that it exposes.",
      "Muslim scholars and students must understand this problem from within Islamic tradition in order to respond to it, but also to advance the traditions capacity to the larger problem of political legitimacy and social integration plaguing with some societies. The first part of my talk therefore is an apology for why I pose a problem this way. Second part explores how to frame this problem in terms of Islamic norms and possibly if",
      "in this kind of talk, returns to my initial question namely what ISIS poses and exposes. I hope we can get to it in Q&A. The people I am addressing first and foremost are fellow scholars and students of Islam both who identify as Muslims as well as those who are willing to take Islam's normative framework seriously. First the apology, thank you. Whenever I pose the question",
      "So the two most common objections are raised by thoughtful people, both Muslim and otherwise. First, by proposing to understand ISIS through the lens of Islamic tradition I might be proposing that first ISIS is somehow Islamic, that is ISIS's violence and acts are justified by Islamic norms. And second, I'm thereby ignoring the direct and immediate role of Western imperialism, the two Gulf Wars and intervening sanctions on Iraq and so on in giving rise to ISIS.",
      "both of these possible misunderstandings, though I acknowledge that they possibility exist. Let me begin by questioning the question is ISIS Islamic famously articulated by Graham Woods article in The Atlantic what ISIS really wants in March 2015? This is how the problem is presented in the media and I do not mean only the Trump Times of world but also the great bastions of liberalism and objective reporting like",
      "times where ISIS is represented as a uniquely horrifying problem, precisely because it is justified in the name of religion. As Talal Assad has argued on suicide bombing violence that cannot be classified according to the terms so we understand especially horrifies us. To the secular mind therefore violence justified",
      "particularly horrifying, whereas violence justified in secular terms such as national security or economic expansion or collateral damage is understandable if not always justified. For instance no major sources as far as I'm aware question the claim by the Syrian human rights group that Assad's regime but Bashar Assad's a regime kills seven people for every one person killed",
      "has killed between 20 and 40,000 dwarfs compared to say the two American wars in the Gulf. This number of dwarves also when we compare it to a similar monstrosity Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge which killed 1.5 million also created directly as a result of another American war. Similarly, the secular Middle Eastern regimes many US backed have for decades killed and imprisoned a far greater number of people.",
      "people. With a few enlightening exceptions, what is implied in such analyses is that ISIS' claim to its Islamicness is somehow more fundamentally valid than say the TKK's claim to it's Americaness. But to constantly speak of Western power or hypocrisy has become a distraction that threatens our self-understanding and the well being I believe of Islamic tradition. Besides no amount of investigation of politicals economic or social factors necessary as it",
      "as it is, can do away with the moral human responsibility something that a secular social theorist cannot quite account for but that is the focal point for Islamic tradition. It is the focus point not only for understanding the private sphere and private judgment but the world and God's plan in it at large which is why the two traditions are in some limited respects incommensurable",
      "commensurable. My case for why ISIS, even though an abomination by any standard is best understood from within Islamic tradition is not quite complete yet. I'm simply trying to lay out the qualifications and disclaimers but I think the best proof is in the pudding to which now I turn. When speaking to a wide variety of Western Muslims,",
      "that I have found is horror and disgust. The response is slightly different in the Muslim world, the reaction to...it's not fundamentally different but there, and I spent a year teaching in the Middle East and have some spent some time in South Asia Pakistan. There are two additional elements that are quite pronounced in the muslim world which is number one ISIS is not",
      "therefore it doesn't appear as a sort of crisis that appears for Western Muslims. Secondly, there is much greater level of disbelief or conspiracy theory whatever you know however you characterize them but I'll set aside that for now and turn to mostly Western Muslims concerns regardless when confronted with the conduct devices",
      "The common Muslim responses in brief to the phenomenon of ISIS are as follows. I'll classify them into four. Number one, it's ultimately a Western conspiracy therefore Islam bears no... not only Islam but Muslims nobody bears any responsibility. Second that they are a political group after power",
      "It's inspired by Islam and certainly not adherent to Islamic norms. In other words, that because they have a political social economic and so on agenda, somehow Islam should not be brought to understand them. Third, they are more or less natural manifestation of the Wahhabi or Salafi ideology and fourth,",
      "I'm my own situatedness, yet I cannot help being alarmed by how frequent and widespread the first explanation is,\" meaning conspiracy theory. Despite the undoubted Western role in creating the conditions in which ISIS arose and the constant attempts to manipulate the masses at home and abroad it is irresponsible and damaging to take comfort in the view that ISIS is not Islamic because",
      "Conspiracy theories, fake news and truthiness are not the preserve of Muslims alone. Of course in a country where a majority denies unanimously established scientific facts you should know. The tendency to prefer comforting paradigms over disturbing data that is to prefer truths over facts is a general human trait I submit or weakness but people's receptivity",
      "based on both intellectual and socio-political conditions. Allow me to shelve this problem of what we might call the epistemological crisis, although I'm not quite comfortable with this label yet in part because I think we overuse the word crisis and in part, because what is at stake? At stake is in part social institutions are not only epistemology",
      "and what, you know, who is responsible for so on and so forth. The second common explanation that the rise of ISIS is a political enhanced secular phenomenon I think makes two kinds of errors first at the level of social causation unless one is materialist who sees ideology religion and culture as mere epiphenomena one cannot use material causes to deny any role to ideas and doctrines.",
      "Second, Islamic normative tradition is as invested in judging earthly quote unquote secular phenomena as it is in judging or understanding the attributes of God. Islamic law in fact is precisely this. The enterprise to discover divine judgment on earthly phenomena no matter what the inspiration or intention is what Islamic law does and in order to make a judgement",
      "in fact not permissible and evil, one must take a position vis-a-vis Islamic moral tradition either by belonging to it or somehow taking a position which I'll come back to later. The third is a description that means the idea that it's a Salafi jihadi and Mojave doctrine",
      "But as an explanation, I think it's trivial. That is to say that ISIS is Salafi Jihadi or has elements of the Wahhabi doctrine is undeniable but it explains little. True, ISIS ideologues claim to be truly Salafis and appear to be obsessed with some of the signature Wahabi doctrines such as strict interpretation of tawheed, rejection of irja which",
      "laxity towards sinfulness, strict enforcement of morality and again takfir or excommunication of its opponents in fact all other Muslims. Do these remarkable similarities not give us definitive clues? ISIS it is said is a child of Wahhabism and Wahhabis embodiment of a distinctive literalist anti-rationalist hadith centered anti Kalam interpretation of Islam. Now this of course",
      "This, of course we maintain this despite the fact that most Salafi and Wahhabi authorities in fact even Salafis Jihadis including Al-Qaeda theorists have vehemently and as far as I've examined consistently and systematically rejected ISIS's key claims and condemned its distinctive use of brutality and violence. Of course this does not demonstrate that ISIS does not represent one plausible interpretation of Wahabi or Salafy doctrine but then as Bernard Haikal has famously argued",
      "of Islam in general. Wahhabism would appear to be simply a closer cousin of ISIS in the family of Islam. I want to show the futility of this type of argument by asking the question another way, what is the class of phenomena of which ISIS is an instance? To illustrate let's consider the following example and imagine that a boy beat up another boy in the schoolyard. Let us say his father went into middle school had a similar instance on record.",
      "for the kid's behavior is his genealogy, genetics or family history? Or could we say equally that quarreling and bullying are something kids under certain conditions engage in everywhere. Given that the use of military violence to take over territories and exploit or establish new ideologies ideological regimes is not at all an exceptional phenomenon",
      "So why single out this one boy's parents as a good explanation for his violence when boys do it all the time? Let us now consider the following scenario. A charismatic figure, that is in Islamic history...",
      "against existing regime and peoples for their loose practices, sternly and violently imposes moral norms, condemns taqlid and most crucially calls his Muslim opponents disbelievers and uses that to declare jihad against them. Condemns the doctrine of irja or laxity towards sin. Ultimately his successors succeed in establishing a powerful dynasty over a large and prosperous stretch",
      "stretch of territory. If you thought that I'm describing ibn Abdul Wahab of Arabia in the 18th century, you guessed wrong. I had in mind another powerful reformer of the 12th century Maghrib, North Africa, that is al-Mahdi ibn Tumart. The self appointed Mahdi al-Ma'asom, the infallible guided one, ibn tumart differed from ibn abdul wahhab in only one chief respect. He was an ashari a student",
      "the Nizamiya madrasa of Baghdad and also a student if you will indirectly of Ibn Sina. And in contrast to ibn Abdul Wahab who was inspired by the anti-Kalam or pro-Hadith traditionalist Ibn Taymiyyah, in fact even the name the two charismatic reformers used for their movements",
      "the ones who hold to the doctrine of Tawheed. In both wings of Sunni Islam, therefore that is the pro-Kalam and anti-Kalam we have seen such movements one may be tempted to say that it is just maybe the Sunnis until then one considers the more radical Shiite militants such as the Safavids and other Ghulat who have Ghulab movements",
      "blame Islam for this particular kind of ideological violence, we would do well to recall any number of modern revolutions and state formations. As Charles Tilly famously put it after his history of a thousand years of state formation that the rise of the modern nation-state can be described as states make wars, wars makes states, states make",
      "Or rather wars make states, make wars make States. In other words foundational violence and we know this is at least since Machiavelli, foundational violence is a real thing. If you are tempted to them to blame what some might call closed societies let's not forget the French Revolution just in one year of French Revolution 30,000 people were executed which",
      "were executed, which is possibly more than ISIS's tenure total. If such foundational violence is so common in history again what do we gain by comparing it to such manifestations in Islamic history? Be it the Wahhabis, the Al-Mohads, Safavids or Basis or Kharijis. I argue that we do gain something but not what we often assume. In other words when saying that aha they have",
      "They have, they're the Wahhabis or the Salafi. We don't understand what we think we understand but rather this is a beginning of a kind of if you will an Islamic theory of foundation foundational violence and how to if you would morally restrain it. So what I'm after therefore is a coherent and consistent normative framework within which to evaluate these similar but yet distinctive movements in Islamic history.",
      "I argue that such a framework exists and it is the job of those historians, scholars, theologians, jurists of Islam to advance such a frame work while first drawing on it or learning from it. And that takes me to the fourth explanation which is that ISIS are Khawarij.",
      "How much time do I have? Forty-five minutes, including questions. And how far am I? You are... How long have you been talking to me? Twenty-five more. Okay. Twenty more? I'll take ten more then with the questions. So at first when you hear the word well it is a khawarit it sounds like number one ikhap out",
      "It's a movement that's been dead for, you know, 1200 1300 years. Why talk about it now? What does it even mean? It's completely ahistorical and that's the point. It is ahistorial. Islamic theology is not a primarily historicist enterprise. In other words there are what theologians very early on as early as the Shah Rastani",
      "began to say is that the movement that emerged in the wake of the Battle of Safin between Ali and Muawiyah was, in fact, they came to be called the Khawarij but they were a manifestation",
      "whose traits are described in fact, in Hadith traditions. And it is famously if you look at some of the more influential reputations of ISIS, the one that's most popular being Sheikh Muhammad Ali Akhobi, the Syrian jurist who has written this reputation where he says they are the Khawarij, that is his fatwa. Although what he doesn't quite do is explain",
      "explained so what then that's because he understands that in islamic tradition it is known and understood that once you classify someone as khawarij uh what does it do what does say well for one it says they are khawari and hence not islami yet we are not necessarily saying they're not muslim in other words let's look at the question i'm not going to go into hadith and other detailed discussions if you're interested we can talk about",
      "talk about the content of that charge, but I'm going to go back to the initial problem of what do we gain when we say that they are khawarij? And what are the limitations of this charge? In other words, how far does it get us and what we still need to do.",
      "famous article in The Atlantic where he says, well ISIS is as Islamic as anything else. Because of course he understands well that Islam is a discursive tradition there are many different interpretations on any issue. In fact the Sunni Islam as we know makes a virtue of it. There are four equally valid interpretations on",
      "if you will, corporate entities but there are many more opinions on an issue possible. Therefore to say that something is wrong and I disagree with it, that's easy. To say that some thing is beyond the pale of any possible legitimate interpretation is very, very difficult. To",
      "they seem to know more or less is not Islamic, it's very difficult. Yet it is possible only in this one instance when you say somebody is a Khariji because there is complete and unanimous agreement over that developed an Islamic history and held by not only the old Sunnis and Shia but also by the later if you will descendants of Kharij themselves",
      "themselves the Ibadis scholars themselves incidentally say that Isis are Khawarij and what if you look at whether they mean is they mean like the Azariqa, the bad khawarija not the good khawaj. And so my objection to the claim that Isiss",
      "because as a social scientist or as historian, or is an outsider. All I care about is what kind of claims they're making and if it falls within you know similar kinds of claims other Muslims are making then there are Islamic. I would argue that if a tradition has consistently",
      "as outside the pale, then there is a reason even for an outsider to take that claim seriously and say well yes this is not Islamic in the same way that many reasonable people could say that KKK's claims are not American. Although you're right I might",
      "that patriotism is just as important element of where they seek legitimacy. But the point I'm trying to make is, there is a reason to say that but then where does that leave us? If you look at the kind of justifications ISIS has and reasons for both its rise and its success",
      "It is a group that draws on very legitimate set of grievances. And the response, though to their rejection of these people as Khawarij comes from Mauts",
      "who create the conditions. And this is their, if you talk to them, this is there major rebuttal. Who are you talking about? Who are these people who are calling us khawarij? These people who were serving these rulers whom they excommunicate but even if you don't excommunicated them, there is no doubt that these people have committed great acts of violence that most of these are illegitimate governments and so",
      "And so there is a crisis of, if you will, a reasonable discursive solution or at least a platform where the two sides can come together because both sides, those who say that well you are Khawarij and rightly so I think but also those who",
      "legitimate point but more importantly this asks us to ask asks us if you will this points us to the problem of legitimacy and the certainly a frenzied debate that has been going on for decades about between reformists",
      "between reformists and traditionalists on whether modern nation state, whether democracy, constitutionalism, and so on are legitimate additions to the Islamic political apparatus. I think that that debate is more important than ever before, and it needs to be taken more seriously.",
      "those traditionalist scholars have failed to respond to the concerns that reformists have had. Yet at the same time, the reformers by that I mean the tradition that starts with Muhammad Abdu but includes such luminaries as a Yusuf al-Qaradawi present day luminaries in Islamic jurisprudence all of them continue",
      "continue to skirt certain central issues and what they are we can talk about it later but i would leave it at that and look forward to your questions thank you very much"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Islam and the Inner Self with Dr_ Ovamir Anjum_ZxZa1odyWGo&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750673978.opus",
    "text": [
      "In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Peace and blessings be upon our Prophet Muhammad and his family and companions all over the world.",
      "Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at The University of Toledo. His work focuses on the nexus of theology, ethics, politics, and law in Islam with comparative interest in Western thought. Trained as a historian his work is essentially interdisciplinary drawing on the fields of classical Islamic studies political philosophy and cultural anthropology he obtained his PhD in Islamic intellectual history in the department of history",
      "Madison, a master's in social sciences from the University of Chicago and masters in computer science and bachelors in nuclear engineering and physics from the university of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Awaymir has authored several books. In fact he translated the brilliant and renowned work of Ibn Qayyim Madaj al-Sarikin which we at OCIF have been going through for the past two years. Also i gave",
      "Allah is the greatest, praise be to Allah. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem",
      "the inner self and how have Muslims historically approached this topic? The topic of inner self, of course is essential in Islam. In a sense you could think about it historically Islam is the final message of Allah SWT and there are two sister religions if he will, traditions Judaism and Christianity",
      "in the same tradition starting with Ibrahim alayhi salam and it's interesting to put Islam in perspective as Muslims believe that both the Old Testament and the New Testament have important elements of the truth from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and much guidance for people but the complete guidance comes",
      "from error but also it is the final message of Allah. Allah says in the Quran in Surah Al-Ma'idah, اليوم أكملت لكم دينكم. So deen has been completed. But if Allah also describes this Ummah as ummatan wasapan a middle Ummah, an Ummah of the Middle Way and what's interesting is that you look at this interesting polemic between Jews and Christians. The Jews are seen as people of law and Christians as people",
      "and spirit, Paul famously deviated from the teaching of Jesus alaihis salam. And really inaugurated Christianity historically as we know it which is to if you will liquidate the law of Jesus particularly that this dietary restrictions and others and mass marketed if you well a certain kind of Judaism that then became Christianity.",
      "Islam emphasizes both love and law, right? And the love part is what I want to talk about today. Is that unlike other religions including Judaism where God commands Allah commands and you carry out those commands as meticulously as you can but there's no heart in there. There is no sense of feeling in there",
      "feeling in there, right? It's something that your intention doesn't matter. It's what you do where you are how we do it that matters and to the point that this became a major problem and the Quran mentions that how people were using tricks and stratagems to get out of commandments of Allah as if when they're trying to fool Allah that they were carrying out for example",
      "The commandment is about Saturday. Yalma stepped the North Fish on Saturday so they would set their traps on Friday and so on. But Allah emphasize that there is an inner life that's more important than the outer life, but you cannot separate it. You cannot disconnect it from law.",
      "form, the way you dress, the ways you behave all of those are connected but what is more important is how you feel toward Allah. Those who believe are stronger in their love for Allah than non-believers are for their God. So as if Allah said a competition that you Muslims, you believers must be, must love Allah because people, all people are going to love their religion, their objects",
      "And so there, and then there is of course, all acts as the Prophet ﷺ said in a famous hadith are based on intention. So it is as if Allah ﷻ in the Qur'an and Prophet ﷺ in the Sunnah again and again drew attention to something outside of something more than just the actions that you're supposed to do. You're supposed",
      "presence and humility before Allah SWT. And Allah SWS says in a hadith, Sahih Muslim, that Allah does not look at your faces, how beautiful they are or your bodies, you know, how healthy or strong",
      "looks at is your heart, which is how it feels what it loves, how it connects itself to Allah and then at your actions. So actions and heart both matter and so that's really right at the outset Islam declares as in this great historical context",
      "has sent in his final message a balance between law actions external reform justice social justice all of these things that are outwardly that are important but then at the same time you have to feel that love for Allah otherwise you're doing good for the dunya but nothing for yourself and you're going to break",
      "And so now let me quickly switch gears and speak more simply about how Allah in the Quran and the Prophet ﷺ in the Sunnah refer to what we are calling inner self. There are three words that are used, and there's nafs, ruuh, and qalb. Nafs and ruuh right? The word nafs in Arabic",
      "Arabic is simply a reference to itself and then there is about which the Quran does not say anything except that the Quran uses the word for Jibreel so it's not the same thing that we're talking about and then when they ask Allah says in the Quran as if saying",
      "This is not something you can understand. Whether this reference is to Jibreel or to the Ru'h that is inside of us, we do not know. But in the Hadith and some of them, numerous of them are Sahih Hadith no doubt about it, there is a Rasulullah ﷺ refers to Nafs and Ru'ah interchangeably.",
      "uses the word nafs in a number of interesting ways, in a way that later literature starting with actually with the Prophet ﷺ we began to use the word ru'ah which is something that is separable from the body that is the essence of what human beings are and that will survive after human beings die. And if you are a shaheed, if you're a martyr, may Allah make all of us among those who struggle",
      "and that's the highest status that many of us could achieve they're invited to love we are supposed to love this as if it gives extra incentive by saying that the arwah of the believers are going to be like birds in paradise so the idea here is",
      "Ru'ah is something separable from the body and it survives, and it's a real thing. And it will be reunited with the body in the Day of Judgment and so on. Nafs as the Qur'an uses is sometimes it's used like ru'ah So for example Allah says in the Qur-an in Surat al-Zumar when we sleep our nafs",
      "received by Allah and then it is returned to us when we wake up. And those of us who die, their nafs is taken for forever and not returned so there is veritable evidence both in the Quran and the Sunnah in how of the existence of ruh and now the functions",
      "I think we should attend to. Famously, the Qur'an speaks of three kinds of nafs. Now this is not a typical typology but rather in different contexts Allah speaks of that the nature of your nafs is that it commands what is bad or evil in the sense that it wants to fulfill its desires and that's",
      "That's what is bad about it. So, it's not that nafs in itself is evil but it is given to commanding the fulfilling of its desires without looking at the limits, without looking for what is good. But nafs is also a lawama. There is a state of nafs.",
      "nafs, it's best to look at these are different states of the same entity that we are, nafs. That sometimes it commands us to do evil but then sometimes it regrets what it has done and then wants to turn to Allah SWT to make tawbah and finally if it succeeds in obeying Allah SWt and turning to Allah and receiving Allah SWт and His light",
      "it becomes al-nafs al-muqma'inna so there will be three kinds of nafs or three states of nafsa lawwama the blaming nafs ammaratu bisu the one that evokes and commands evil, and one that is finally reconciled to Allah SWT what's interesting in Surah Al-Fajr",
      "يَا أَيَّتُهَا النَّفْسِ الْمُقْمَئِنَّةُ O tranquil soul, soul or nafs that is now at rest. ارجعي, return إلى ربك to your Lord. So this idea that the soul is returning to the Lord, to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, suggests that it came from Allah subhana wa ta'ta'ala. Right? So that's the beautiful, really beautiful subtle point here",
      "here that as Allah speaks another verse, وَنَفَخْتُ فِيهِمَا الرُّوحِ That Allah ﷻ breathed His ruh, His breath. The word ruh in Arabic literally just means a subtle kind of breath. So Allah breathes into Adam and in a sense human beings have this divine spark something from Allah",
      "only be pleased with happy with tranquil with allah and that's why allah says in the quran only in the remembrance of allah do hearts find peace and rest so it is as if uh the image here the story here is that allah created these bodies",
      "can only be pleased with Allah that is from Allah that it's pure and that we can destroy by doing bad deeds and by turning away from Allah and by rejecting Allah and that um we will succeed if we purify it and ultimately this nafs is",
      "be successful if it goes back to where it came from so we should think of our nafs as something that again nafs and ruh are used interchangeably but when they're used in a positive sense, they usually call ruh. And when it is used in the sense that's blameworthy, it's used uh in Islamic literature with the term nafs. And finally qalb",
      "Qalb is used in a slightly different way in the Quran than nafs. Qalbi is the center of human understanding, now this may be surprising to some because qalb of course where what pumps blood in our bodies as we understand it but Allah SWT in the Qur'an makes qalab",
      "emotions and center of commitments. And in that sense, it is the word that we use today, mind. The mind is in the heart in the Quranic vocabulary. Now you may say well we know the mind is brain right? But in fact I'm not going to go into biology of it but in a very phenomenal sense the way we experience our bodies and ourselves if you really love someone where do you feel it",
      "you feel it? Nobody says, in my head I'm feeling love. You feel love here in your heart because your heart is where the emotions are sensed physically. Similarly, your hatred or fear or trepidation, all these things",
      "Qalb is the organ of true understanding",
      "Understanding is one which goes past thoughts and ideas, and becomes a feeling and a commitment that changes the way we behave and feel toward others. So these are three key words that you should look out for when reading some literature or thinking about inner self.",
      "Beautiful, Professor. So basically what I'm understanding here is that there are certain parts of our selves by which we experience. This includes the heart, includes the soul, includes these self and in the inner self is a branch of Islamic studies that seeks to understand this",
      "to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Very, very beautiful. Now, anyone who's grown up in America, been educated in America this is never spoken about. We never hear anything about the importance of the heart when it comes to experiencing life. The importance of our emotion when it come to understanding and in fact it's quite the opposite you got to remove the emotions you gotta remove these things or else you're not being objective yet now we find a lot of new fads in America such as yoga meditation",
      "meditation, what's going on here in the West? Why is the West starting to focus on this and psychology for example 100 years ago it was there but it was never popular. Now it's extremely popular I mean is there a connection here? Is the Western world starting to understand that you know there's something going on so there's some thing we're missing or there's somthing else when it comes to the human experience that we really need to focus",
      "Well, first of all, it's a great question. And particularly thinking about yoga and meditation, I think that it's an symptom of our times. Yoga is, Ithink reflection of this slogan spiritual not religious. Many increasing number of Americans but people in the world generally identify themselves as spiritual but not religious so spirituality something that is considered good",
      "and religiosity because there's commandments, community rituals and limits are involved. And that is what is seen as a bad thing or negative thing right? It's not cool to limit your nafs yourself by anything. So spirituality then simply becomes a word for how I do",
      "I do how do i feel good without committing to anything without it is as if spirituality is experience without the mind that might tell you what is good or bad and yoga right in its modern form right of course yoga is a ancient practice derived from Hinduism",
      "These are all Christian words that we're applying to Hinduism. The idea in modern yoga is that, which is detached from its Hindu background, is that you can fill that role, that hole that Allah has put you in your heart so that you will search for Him. That is our fitrah, to yearn to Allah, to ask about Allah,",
      "and love what is good, you can feel that as if by drugging yourself without believing in submitting. By merely bringing your physical body to rest and it is as if taking painkillers for something that is rotting inside of you rather than treating it and curing it rather than responding through the call",
      "that you want to attend to, you are simply covering it up. So whatever wisdom that there may be as a different tradition that yoga may have, modern yoga is merely a way to avoid this responsibility.",
      "we came here starting in particularly in the long 19th century, the world, the Western world became both ironically secularized. The word that's used in social sense is disenchanted meaning that the elite not the people, not the masses but people but the elite turn against organized religions Christianity and others even though where they may be using",
      "though where they may be using Christianity, they may call themselves Christian. But now reaction against Christianity is centuries old particularly the established church but in the 19th century it's a turn against Christianity as a whole and not just Catholic Church. And with the rise of Darwinism and atheism and philosophy takes increasingly secular",
      "term, the term secularism was in fact just a euphemism for atheism in the 19th century when it was discovered or when it first used. At this time some major shift happens which is in human psychology and I want to go back to this issue later of what psychology is because we're... Psychology's really connected",
      "branch of theology for us. It's a branch of Usul ad-Din because it is something so important in religion, it's central in Islam and to make it a secular science itself is a sign of times. Itself is an acceptance of defeat to some degree. So I want to go back to it but let's stick to it for now. Psychology in the 19th century becomes secularized",
      "the modern term psychology is born with this secular birth of a new idea, right? If you go to the pre-modern Christian world or Islamic world, you have self. That self is tempted by evil forces and it's called to do good by God and by good sources. This is true for Islam,",
      "tradition. So going back to Greeks, and this is a crucial idea for Greeks, reason judges right and wrong. Reason has control over passion. Reason can tell you what desires are good and what desires",
      "God who tells you what is good and reason agrees with it. And so there is a general agreement on this fundamental point about desire, like the desire is not in itself good. It is not the sovereign. It rather mahkum. It's governed by the mind for the Greeks or by scripture for scriptural religions.",
      "century a revolution is taking place which is that as Nietzsche famously said God is dead from such childish thoughts on which modern western civilization is based now with gone out of the picture, a big question emerges in western mind, western philosophy which is where does this desire",
      "does this desire come from if we are merely physical beings? Our desires seems to be completely incomprehensible. And the most important theory that really cements under this new understanding, new post-God now with that understanding is Freud.",
      "Your desire is sovereign and your desire is beyond what our reason knows of your desire. What we understand consciously of our desire is a very, very small part of our design. And he uses the metaphor of a city of barbarians in which you have one house, if you will write that enlightened.",
      "that are knocking at the door and wanting to take over even this house. So what Freud, he had this insight right? He used this insight in a very destructive way but the insight was how limited our reason is in controlling our desire and therefore",
      "the great religions of the world and the true religion, Allah is that because our reason is limited as Imam al-Ghazali famously says, reason is the vizier and heart is the king. And that heart must cleanse itself to allow the light of Allah to enter. And",
      "heart well when that whole story is gone there is no right and wrong and there is uh if you will complete chaos the reason desire becomes the tyrant that cannot be controlled it cannot even be understood and it's not rational now freud was also rejecting not only islam and or religions and and greek tradition but",
      "is sovereign. The reason, in fact, can solve all the problems and so on. Freud was, in a sense, a prophet of the modern postmodern rather post-modern age as sometimes it's called. Allama Iqbal, rahimahullah, the great Muslim poet and philosopher once said that God sent prophets and Shaytan sends prophets and",
      "And really, that's a very interesting insight because Sigmund Freud was both prophetic in the sense that he saw through the darkness that had taken over but also gave humans tools to control or use that darkness.",
      "deployment, first use of this new science if you will the dark sciences. This is the true black magic of our times was advertisement industry. You know old advertisements if you pay attention to this history of advertisement they're selling you a drug or a new product they would say this is what the scientists say somebody will appear with big glasses and a white coat",
      "white coat showing you the authority of science and will read the ingredients that, you know this is what's good about it there's vitamins in here there's this and that and science shows this is good. Well they realize this is completely not how a human mind works. That in fact you need to control the dark forces so the new kind of advertisement that has been influenced by this science of psychology",
      "standing next to the man who is using the product, whether it's a shaving product or you know. And people are going to be attracted to show a really rich person, a really handsome beautiful person smoking and smoking was the single most important powerful industry that used this model then popularized this subliminal idea of advertisement and that it of course took over and that now defines the age",
      "goes back to this destruction of the old teaching, the teaching of religion's teaching of Allah and the teaching about reason. About the need to discipline our nafs, discipline our desire by using our reason and revelation. So that's really the fundamental revolution that has taken place in the 20th century.",
      "I think that as I was saying psychology is really part of usool ad-deen. It should be taught by Muslims in theology departments, in Muslim seminaries and schools And it should be directly connected to the sources of our deen and Quran and Sunnah",
      "kind of piggybacking on that into the next or segwaying to the next question um you did mention it i think i caught at least one uh point but what is the difference or what are some of the primary differences between the inner self and according to islam according to the west you mentioned that with islam scripture plays a fundamental role scriptures what disciplines itself whereas in the west there was reason and now it seems like maybe nothing at all let me just let your desires be right absolutely so in islam",
      "merely scripture but it's community, it's society. It is the wisdom that we learn and reason as well. All of those things in fact work together in Islam. Uthman said Allah achieves by means of an Islamic authority what he doesn't achieve by means",
      "to understand it, interpret it and apply it. So in fact the family and community are really central in Islam and in other pre-modern traditions because this community is necessary to forming a virtuous being right? This is where the whole idea of virtue ethics comes from and Islam is distinct from it but it's very close to the idea of",
      "Whereas modern liberal ideologies, and liberalism of course is the master paradigm that has many different children that appear in different forms. That may be critical of liberalism in some ways but they are nonetheless all liberals. So what is liberalism? Liberalism is the fundamental idea that human beings are free from any external constraint",
      "be free and that it comes down to this, that our desire has no objective rational limit. There's no one who can tell you that you are wrong in desiring this. The only limit you can have is not harming someone. So long as you don't harm anyone else you can desire anything",
      "You can do so privately on your own time, but public and private should be separated. In the public sphere only reason no religion, but even reason sorry in the public's fear is not some kind of transcendent reason philosophical reason that knows the fundamental truth, but rather only publicly agreed upon rules. That's what reason means. That is called public reason. So whatever people agree on in the",
      "You can worship the devil if you want, you can worship God if you and the two selves if you will have nothing in common. Now this is the great tragedy that has led to our contemporary age where Allah says in the Qur'an,",
      "his lust as his God. Well, liberalism takes that error which even the ancients would have recognized as an error. Even the pagan Muccans would have recognize that's wrong to let your desire run free and run amok. Liberalism says in fact that's all you have. That in fact your desire cannot be disciplined",
      "your desire that it's wrong in a sense this is the per this is definition of god with a small g right it's the definition of the it's what you turn to be to understand who you truly are what you ought to do it's your desire becomes your identity whether it's sexual desires or whether what you eat or what you want to conquer and whatnot so long as you can pay",
      "Pay, if you will, pay attention to some kind of legal rules that embody the no harm principle. You can do whatever. So liberalism is the justificatory ideology that allows the nafs to be free from reason as well as revelation. I want to emphasize this. Liberalism is nothing",
      "nothing and our contemporary age cannot be understood if you do not understand that it frees nafs and desire, not only from revelation but also from reason. We can talk more about this if you want. So that is what in the modern west liberalism where nafs has become a god and therefore you can define your identity by",
      "by how you want to use your nafs. It could be your sexual life, it could be any other aspect of your life that you can define yourself. In Islam we are told our very purpose of creation is to submit that self and by doing that return it to infinitude",
      "return it to the unlimited expanse of Allah. You come from Allah and you return to Allah, so your nafs must be controlled and disciplined for it to meet its Lord, and rise to new heights. The liberalism is truly a huge challenge as someone who talks with the youths, engages",
      "with them, you always get the question, what's so wrong about dating? I mean, I understand, okay, fine. Certain consequences can occur but if we avoid the means to that, what is so wrong a young man and woman expressing their love for one another comforting each other emotionally. And so you have this many of these challenges in your experience, what are some of the primary challenges Muslims in the West are facing when it comes to the inner self and perhaps some recommendations",
      "you can offer us to overcome those challenges? Well, I think as you said the challenges are that living in a society which has destroyed any sense of any kind of disciplining of soul, disciplining",
      "almost as a matter of principle, I think that the most destructive effect of liberalism has been destroying the extended family and community. And this idea that I can do whatever I want even rationally because many of us accept revelation what we have trouble with young people but not so young people in fact",
      "liberal Muslims, have difficulty submitting their desires to scripture, to revelation, to wisdom from Allah. They are quicker to challenge revelation or say if they get a little bit higher maybe they take a few classes and begin to talk about reinterpreting scripture so that it fits 21st century norms",
      "norms and whatnot. So we do not accept any limitations on our desire. And if, you know, depending on what kind of crowd you fall in with, you may get into sort of social justice which is really good and beautiful thing but it becomes a playground for pure speculative desire without",
      "that you want social justice, but how do you define social justice? How do you know what other people want and need? What is really good for people. So what happens is that if whatever happens to be the popular movement on campuses or what some new theorist comes up with, then you decide based on that this is what needs liberation. Now, some of this is really",
      "into American very much structure and it must be fought. But, it doesn't stop there because there are no limits. So one of the most destructive ways in which this liberalism operates is that it mixes really good desires with really bad ones and takes away any standard",
      "sift through what is good and what is not good. So for instance, if somebody wants to save the world, feed the poor that's attractive you want equality of any kind and all kinds that sounds great to anybody but there is no distinction between",
      "can be accepted and the one that has to be rejected because it is truly destructive of reason, it's truly destructive revelation, it is really destructive of what human beings... What makes humans as humans. So this actually destroys any basis for ethical behavior. So ethical behavior, moral behavior becomes a fad, becomes complete almost a tyrant. What I mean by that you know",
      "American value, the fundamental American value is it's a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. All human beings are created equals. But this is a fundamental liberal value, that human beings were equal. Where does it come from? It does not come from reason. It does NOT come from science. There is no evidence for it that all human beings",
      "and groups are different about everything. So there is nothing in reason or empirical experience that tells us human beings are special, or human beings... well maybe we can argue that human beings our special because we reason as the Greeks did before Revelation but they didn't say that human being are all equal right? The idea that human",
      "tradition. It comes from Christianity and Islam, and you destroy that foundational basis from which your idea is based so now you have this ethic that has no feet, right? That has no grounding, that has not pillars, that is simply something that is mythical. So",
      "all would want to hold on to is that of reciprocity and equality. We ought to all be equal, but then pretty soon there's no reason for us to say that people who want to have sex with brothers and sisters or with animals, that they are any different, that desire any difference because there is nothing that says rationally so long as you're pleasuring yourself anything is wrong.",
      "And so there is no, there is this mixing of what is good with what is evil and absence of any differentiation. Any grounding for difference. Any way to agree between people that when you disagree abortion is good others say the version is bad. There is no ground on which you can come together and agree because you don't believe in a single revelation",
      "in any kind of unifying universal reason. And that so you have the only thing that happens at the end, if you all disagree and all you have different desires is that desire wins. And the structural form of desire is capitalism. So capitalism runs amok. Whoever can sell whatever they want to maximum number",
      "That's the only religion that is left because this desire ran amok. To fight back, if you will, we have to go back to the basics of our deen and it sounds simple but I think that it really cuts across and cuts through all of these spheres which I've talked about which are rebuild family and community. When children are born",
      "and they live in a family when they learn ethics and norms and family and community. They understand other people's desires and emotions, and then they begin to suppress their own subordinate their own through ethical norms that is what can teach us to suppress liberalism right? That's why Allah teaches us after",
      "Ya or illa Allah that you do not worship anyone but Allah, wa bilwalidini ihsan. Again and again the second commandment of course in the 10 commandments is that you honor your parents. And once you honor you parents then you gotta honor your children because there's this reciprocal relationship and then you're going to honor your brothers and sisters and cousins and community and uncles and aunts. So if you start with Islam",
      "changing it, reinterpreting it because it doesn't fit your desire. If you submit to its basic commandments, it is a great way to start fighting back. Beautiful stuff, Professor. You mentioned this capitalism has become kind of the structure that really drags our desires and this segues perfectly into the next question",
      "question i mean does economics and consumer culture affect the inner self if so how right there is in fact um there is no other force left other than economics right other than making profit and the urge to make a profit is something that is limitless and it doesn't have uh any",
      "It doesn't have any rational breaks on it. And usually human beings find out what they have done in pursuit of making profits decades or centuries later. So, what people were doing in the 18th and 19th century has now come back to bite us entire humanity with this ecological apocalypse that we are all facing and our planet is changing",
      "is changing and a very large number of people are under threat. So economics or capitalism is the single most important, single most powerful force but it's blind force. It's not somebody that two people are sitting and pulling strings",
      "that we can take them over and defeat them, and it will be over. Capitalism is the triumph of desire. Capitalist appeals to the lowest basis, the basic nafs al-amaratu bisu. Capitalists speaks to it directly and says there's nothing wrong with you. In fact, you must be strengthened so",
      "that the economy is going to be strong. As you know, in the entire human history, the only ideology, the one culture and religion – I shouldn't say capitalism as a religion in an ordinary sense of the word – but the only system of thought that said greed was good was capitalism. Nobody, not Islam, of course, not Christianity,",
      "lasted in human history did so without finding some way to discipline and suppress desire for more. Greed is supposed to be a bad thing. Capitalism is based on the idea that greed, as long as you're not harming, it's going to help because you are going to maximize your wealth and in the process you will be inventive",
      "more and more of the world. And today this force has, I mean it's become almost a truism in academia in any discipline of how destructive capitalism is but the capitalism has made allies and in fact capitalism has",
      "because Christians got there first and they think that you know as you may know Christianity, a certain kind of Christianity I should say benefited from well it benefited in the superficial sense. The idea that many evangelical Christians have and if you're interested there is a great book",
      "which shows the beginning of this, what is called prosperity gospel and rather taking its history in America in the 20th century. To serve God at Walmart is really how many religious people see their wealth. So some of them get wealthy and they use that wealth to preach and to proselytize, to missionize",
      "the very humanity by destroying communities and family, by destroying the environment. So long as they can score a few converts, they're doing good. Now Islam is not quite the same but the rising capitalist class in the Muslim world are just as vicious and heartless as these Christian capitalists",
      "And that's why when I, you know, we often religious people tend to say well it's secularism. Yes, secularism gave birth to it and it remains a secular enterprise, right? It's worldly but religious people have provided very strongly and from the beginning justification for it so there is a corruption of religion that is really central to capitalism that we don't often appreciate.",
      "So please do forgive me. Now getting into the last and final question, Professor, you know, please feel free to address this in terms of your experience, your expertise, your knowledge. And this isn't directly connected to our topic, just kind of a question that we would like to know as people who participate in DomestJID and maybe lead some aspects of DomestjID. According to your expertise and experience, what do you hope to see more",
      "I think that a younger generation has to go back to the masajid. A first-generation, if you will, of the 70s and 80s came and established the masjid in the 90s and many people, may Allah bless them and reward them for it did so because they were saving their children",
      "other from the society at large and because they felt now of course i'm talking about the immigrant community but at the same time the african-american community uh is growing starting of course in the 70s um and the idea for that generation was that you want to save your children",
      "as a third generation, second in fact and that's the third generation. And people have abandoned masajid. Young people have abandon masajd. There has been unmasking going on and that needs to stop. You need to go back to it but now deliberately as a plan with intention not because you're afraid of the world outside right? Because you don't know it. Not because",
      "and you don't have any friends so you are compelled to be at the masjid, and you may fight with each other in all of that but still there's the only place where you could socialize. That's the one place where can play social status games and so on. You could do that all over the world, all around outside now. So the next generation those who concern about Allah SWT and those who are concerned about bringing our nafs back",
      "if you will, bringing the qalb, polishing our qalbs now must take back the masajid go back to the masjid but also take back from the kind of environment of exclusivism and other problems that exist. But there is no alternative to the Masajid right? There is third spaces may be good but only as if you well halfway solutions to the real issue",
      "and discipline your nafs. And if you cannot discipline your Nafs, there is a fad which is this new fancy ways of doing retreats or third spaces or whatnot where you can... You don't have to discipline your Nafs because you will go to the preacher that you like that speaks your language that has these fancy and class appropriate symbols and language. If you're fancy went to college",
      "to hear you know that kind of language or that's all understandable but that all has to come back to the masjid because must it is where you learn when an auntie or an uncle or an amo or an older brother their needs can limit your needs and that is a bigger lesson for your nafs than the entire retreat that you go to spain for uh or somewhere else in in the mountains",
      "in the mountains when somebody comes and tells you to lower your voice or to be this or that, or they tell you that you're not dressed the right way. And you realize that maybe their fit is different from yours and they may be wrong in doing so, or maybe they're inappropriate. But all of a sudden you have to realize either you can go and make a big post about self-righteous post about how all Muslims are terrible",
      "are terrible or you could suppress your nafs and control your nafas and learn to be like the Prophet ﷺ was somebody who tolerated adha harm and annoyance",
      "and establishing and building communities and families, we are defeating the forces that are destroying our world both physically as well as what's most important in relation to Allah that are",
      "So whatever your actual struggle, your job is it has to be connected to community and family because that is where you learn most naturally to discipline your nafs. Of course this is not to say that your worship with Allah SWT is not important as the word for that is exclusive worship to Allah SW Tawatt",
      "when you cut off from everyone else like in the last nights of Ramadan that's extremely important as Allah tells the Prophet ﷺ in Surah Al-Inshirah When you're done with your day job and the Prophet's day job by the way was not like ours his day job was to disseminate guidance",
      "and to make da'wah in jihad for the sake of Allah. But even that is a job compared to then what's coming next. Allah says, when you're done with all of that, now you need to focus even more and try even harder. Exert yourself. Turn alone to your Lord in worship. So we ask Allah to make us among those. This is the time. Make us among",
      "those who purify their qalb, who revive their quloob by the worship of Allah SWT, by the Qur'an, by salawat on the Prophet ﷺ and by thinking about the blessings of Allah and our own deficiencies and sins. This is how you revive your nafs. Alhamdulillah wa biallahi.",
      "history of Islam at the University of Toledo, Ohio. Also a visiting faculty at Bayan. So when I had the privilege of learning directly under and taking from all of Islam or most of Islamic history JazakAllah khair You can visit his social media page on Facebook It's in the description below Professor JazakAllahu Khair May Allah bless you, bless your family may he give you the tawfiq during the rest of Ramadan to really come close to him and worship Him And may He accept your good deeds and all of our good deeds JazakAllaKhir"
    ]
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    "text": [
      "So, one of the sunnahs, the ways of Allah SWT is that when time passes our commitments get old. Rasulullah SAW says, إِنَّ الْإِيمَانَ لَيَخْلَقُ كَمَا يَخلَqُ الثَّوءِ That your iman gets worn out",
      "Your Iman gets worn out just like your clothes get worn out. So, Iman is not something that you once claim that you have it and then it stays forever but rather as Muslims our commitment to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala gets old if its not renewed.",
      "You should renew your Iman so the Sahaba asked how does one do that? And and Rasulullah said and this is also repeated in a different hadith. So I'm going to combine two Hadith into a little Rasulallah says that Aksiru min qawli la ilaha illa Allah they say increase your saying of La Ilaha illallah Just like that when you go move to the level of the Ummah",
      "Ummah and community, the level of the whole community goes down. And we need to remind ourselves, remind each other to come back to Allah. So my discussion at the MCA where I'm talking about whole history, 14 centuries of history",
      "It's about looking at every century and looking at the major events in scholarship, politics and society. And to see what can we learn from the revival, from the decline and rise of Islam",
      "when we make da'wah, when we in our way work to revive Islam. So let me begin by talking about the terminology that has been used in the Qur'an and the Sunnah. And then we often hear, we use the word Ihyaa which is bringing something back to life.",
      "It uses the word جدد That is to renew تجديد Allah says in Surah Al-Hadeed",
      "In this ayah Allah uses the word giving life to earth and how Allah gives life to Earth every year when in the winter all things green, when it gets cold",
      "Sometimes there is drought. And then Allah gives as if life back to earth in the spring or when water and rain become available again So what is really amazing and powerful, I find this ayah to be really moving Is that Allah uses this terminology of Ahya giving life back To Earth to describe The spiritual state of human beings",
      "So, has not the time come for the believers that their hearts now be humbled before the remembrance of Allah. Now remember this ayah is coming to the Sahaba, to the best of generations, to",
      "when both Muhajireen and Ansar have spent everything that they have, their lives and wealth in the path of Allah. And now Allah is challenging them again. أَلَمْ يَأْنِ لِلَّذِينَ آمَنُوا Has not the time come yet! أَن تَخْشَعَ قُلُوبُهُمْ And Allah is calling them للذين آمنوا for the believers. So the challenge is for the believer. The challenge is given to those who are believers.",
      "That their hearts humble themselves before Allah SWT, before the remembrance of Allah. And let them not be like those who were given the book before. Because we are given the Book now. There were those before us who were giving the Book before and what happened to them? Like their story, what happened",
      "time passed over them, qasat qulubuhum. Their hearts became hard. Wa kathirun minhum fasiqoon and most of them are now wicked. And this is Allah SWT saying 6th century of common era that is Christianity at this time is 6 centuries old. And Allah SWt is saying that the people who were given the book before",
      "Their lives, their hearts have become hardened. And most of them are wicked. And Allah is saying let you O Muslims companions of Muhammad who have sacrificed everything for the sake of Allah even you are in the danger that your hearts will become hard when the Quran will be like an old story.",
      "So Allah is challenging them. And then, Allah is saying in this name the next ayah Know that Allah gives life to earth after its death. That means Allah is telling just like Allah gives Life to Earth, Allah will give life to the hearts of those whose hearts are dead.",
      "The people of the book if they come to Allah SWT, Allah will give life to their hearts and It's a really hopeful ayah because it is as if it is speaking to us If you look around Yourself and you look at the state of the world There's every reason to be disappointed in every reason To lose hope if you do not Have the hope from Allah SWt When you read this Ayat",
      "You read this ayah, it is as if Allah SWT is talking to us and saying look even you people. That Allah SWt brings hearts back to life so that some of you will find the same pleasure",
      "And that is our Ihyaat, that is out Tajdeed That is our revival, that's our reform Rasool Allah says",
      "someone for this Ummah or some, some or those for this ummah so man in Arabic could mean either one or many. Man yujadid lah dinaha Those who will renew its deen for this umma Now of course when we talk about revival and reform in Islam today often people talk about reforming Islam right but nobody Allah this hadith is not talking",
      "it is talking about من يجدد لها دينها that was renewing for the ummah its deen, meaning its commitment to Islam. Now of course today people and how do we renew the commitment, renew the deen of the ummuh for it? So let us look now at what is involved in this thing",
      "involved in this Tajdeed, in this renewal or rejuvenation or Ihyaa bringing back to life. The first revival that ever took place the first reform and first Tajdeeed, first",
      "When the Prophet ﷺ died, Abu Bakr used to live in a suburb of Medina. He wasn't there and Umar and Uthman and Ali and everybody was around and the Prophet sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam died. And the Sahaba did not know how to accept it.",
      "It wasn't that they knew what, you know, they didn't think the Prophet ﷺ will die. But their love for the Prophet was overwhelming. They could not imagine their life after the Prophet. So they thought he is sick and going to get over it. And it was Abu Umar stood up at the time and said that Prophet has gone to meet his Lord like Musa went and he will come back",
      "and he will come back. If anybody says that Prophet is dead, I'm going to chop off his head. Uthman said that he couldn't talk, he couldn'y say anything Ali similarly agreed. The Sahaba did not know how to handle the news of the death of the Prophet. And they were feeling that they are left without guidance, they're left in the dark.",
      "and he told Omar to sit down. And Omar was going off about how he's going to be chopped off everybody's head if they say that. This is his reaction, he's a very strong man who doesn't know how to take this kind of grief. And so Abu Bakr then goes to a different corner of the masjid and says",
      "Muhammad is but a messenger and before him messengers have passed. If he dies or is killed, will you turn away from Islam? And whoever does so will harm only himself. This ayah had come after the battle of Uhud when Muslims",
      "And some thought that Prophet ﷺ had died. And they said, okay we're not going to fight anymore. What is there to fight? And then this ayah came. Now this ayat spoke directly to this situation. This ayat said look Muhammad ﷺ is a messenger he might die. And what are you going to do then?",
      "as if by lightning and Amr said when Abu Bakar recited this ayah it is as if first time I heard this ayat. It is as If this Ayah was being revealed and none of us knew, of course, all of us had knew this Ayat and then all of a sudden there was this light and everybody understood what they were supposed to do. Everybody understood that",
      "to carry the message of Muhammad ﷺ and that Muhammad ﷺ had died. But what had happened to this community of the Sahaba was that because of their grief, they had forgotten what ayah applies to this situation right now. And Abu Bakr all he had to do is to recite the right ayah. And that was the revival.",
      "of all reform in Islam. To know the situation where you stand, your trouble, your difficulty and know what Allah says about it. What ayah applies to this situation? For those who are believers and those who have the right background, this is enough. This is what it takes. And they may be ulama",
      "Maybe they have done tafsir of this ayah, but somebody needs to remind them of this Ayah at the time when it is needed. And that is reform. That is revival. That's the first Tajdeed of Islam, first renewal of Islam and also it establishes for us the method and the essence of how do we go and return to Allah SWT",
      "is by returning to the Book of Allah and by reminding each other of the Book Of Allah. Another thing that always happens after revival when people come back to Allah is they are tested. So, when Muslims come back with Abu Bakr in less than two years",
      "than two years that he ruled they were tested one test after another allah separates those who will face the reality guided and energized by the quran and those who run away because it's too difficult so this was the first revival let me now uh talk about",
      "talk about the next revival that took place. A century later, let's fast forward to a century later and let me describe the context. The Umayyads of Banu Umayyah had come to power after the death of Ali radiallahu anhu",
      "Rasulullah ﷺ actually had predicted in a prophecy, in a beautiful Hadith he says that the knots of Islam will be undone one by one. The first one that will be Undone is Government Islamic government, Islamic rule",
      "one that will be undone is Salah because when Salah is undone nothing is left of Islam so Rasulullah had predicted what would happen and by the time toward the end of this one century there had been as we know, there had",
      "over but many things had changed so that Muslims were now ruled by kings or people who ruled like Kings, who sat in royal courts, who considered the Baytul Maal, the Treasury their personal bank account. Who were more interested in ruling than calling people to Allah even though they are Muslims",
      "And they had confused Islam with Arabness. So that they thought it was the Quraysh and Arabs who owned Islam in a very same way that many Muslims today do. In fact, so for example if you go to Pakistan people talk about religion or deen and nation",
      "of Pakistan and the religion of Islam all together so that our if we do this our nation and our religion is going to prosper or this is what our religion in our nation want. If you go to Egypt, the same exact thing. The Ummah when they say when the Arabs today say ummah they deliberately don't make clear are you talking about the Ummah Misriya",
      "As if they are the same thing. And they are not. And this confusion was used by the rulers to their advantage at the time. To the point that they would discourage people from becoming Muslims. Imagine, this is when people say, that is non-Muslims claim that Islam, people came to Islam, you know, people converted, people were converted to Islam by force.",
      "which is completely false historically. But what the Umayyads are doing is the exact opposite, they're actually saying we don't want you to become Muslim so if the poor peasants in the middle of Persia or Egypt became Muslims, the Umaiyad say will you say thanks but no",
      "and do what you're doing, and you will be taxed as if you are non-Muslims. So they were indirectly equating Islam with Arabness because Islam was now the ruling ideology, if you will, and they were reaping the advantage. And the more people that become Muslim, you have less tax coming in and you have to distribute your wealth more and so on and so forth. So at this point...and there were many Muslims very, very pious Muslims some of the great ulema were not Arab",
      "Persians, especially Persians who had come to Islam and like Abu Hanifa for example. He's a Persian and many people, many great ulama of Islam at the time were from Khorasan or different parts of the world that were not Arab but they were treated as second-class citizens",
      "times they're simply their claim of being Muslim was not accepted so this it was this was the time when Omar radiallahu anhu, Omar ibn Abdulaziz who came to power and Omar as we know he's called Omar al-Thani the second Omar after Omar ibna Al Khattab and he is also called a fifth rightly guided caliph",
      "So there were four, Abu Bakr and Umar and Uthman and Ali. And Umar radiallahu anhu, Umar ibn Abdulaziz is considered the fifth rightly guided caliph. Khalifa. Why is that? Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala gave him wisdom and heart and guidance that Subhanallah came out of nowhere. If you look at his life he was an Umayyad prince who lived in splendor and luxury.",
      "He was the Umayyad prince. He was a poster boy. He's somebody who is extremely handsome, who would wear these clothes once that were the best clothes and he will not touch them again. No new clothes. And everywhere he would go heads would turn. And he's raised in luxury but when",
      "But when he becomes the Khalifa, and the way it happens is that, you know, when it's announced because the Umayyads had turned Khilafah into mulk, into kingdom. And every Khalifa who was dying, he would nominate or designate his successor. So somebody nominated him as a successor. In fact, he was the second successor,",
      "because the first one died so he came next and when he came something changed Allah gave this guidance and He went to the people and said we this burden of Khilafah has come down to me but it doesn't belong to me",
      "It is Muslims who must decide their ruler by Shura and therefore he goes to the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and says, I am stepping down. You choose a Khalifa with your own Shura. And then everybody of course they are surprised because this is not what they're used to from the Umays. So everybody reaffirms and says that we give our Bay'ah to you so Omar is elected.",
      "first step. The second thing that he does, he refuses to use the royal ride to his governor's palace, to gubernatorial or gubernational palace and he says that I... you know, he takes his donkey to his own house and returns all the money that the Umayyads had, the Umayed princes",
      "So this was the second thing that had gone wrong with Muslim rule. That number one, they did not rule by Shura. They did not come to power by Shula. So he corrected that and that they considered Baitul Maal their personal treasury. He corrected that. And then he reformed. The next thing that he did",
      "called the armies back from the Roman border. Stopped the jihad on the Roman Border. Now why would he stop Jihad and why would that be a good thing? Because Jihad for the Umayyads had become an excuse to justify their domestic policies. On the Roman Borders, Muslim soldiers were dying in vain",
      "without making any progress. And Umar said, I cannot spill one innocent blood of one Muslim soldier in vain. So he calls the armies and back on but the other armies that are fighting in Central Asia they continue. So what he establishes is the true idea of jihad.",
      "Which was that you fight only for the sake of Allah SWT, only if there is a just cause and only if you see legitimate use. Legitimate possibility that Muslims will have some advantage. You don't do that in order to say that you are Mujahid.",
      "your domestic failures because you have a foreign policy of war which is exactly how the Umayyads were using jihad and which is why today people use wars to cover up their domestic policy failures. When people have difficulty, when they want to win elections often you start a",
      "In the same way, Umayyads were using jihad and Omar rolled back that policy. And he of course cancelled a policy that denied the new Muslims the right to convert to Islam and move as they wished.",
      "not as text collectors. So these were the elements of reform of Omar everything that had gone wrong with Islam, this was the most complete revival and the ulama of Islam say that this was perfect and most comprehensive revival of Islam. One aspect I haven't talked about Omar was the",
      "where everything began was his personal relationship, personal connection to Allah SWT. Where he had his prayer and people, Umayyad governors had begun to deviate in their prayers just that they have deviated in other respects so it is said that the prayer of Omar was most similar",
      "of the Prophet than anybody else. He would pray exactly like the Prophet in how long he prayed and how softly he prayed, and how he recited the Quran, and Al-Fatiha, Ameen. So there were very few Sahaba left at that time who remember the Prophet.",
      "which set the standards for what it means to be a Muslim ruler or a Muslim who is in charge of anything was his wara, his sense of his fear of sin. The word waraa in Arabic, it means the fear of thing. Fear of getting anything small wrong and he had so much fear of Allah that",
      "That at night, for instance, when he would sleep his wife would say that his chest sounded like a boiling pot. Out of the fear of what he had done in the past and all the fear on the responsibility that he has toward Muslims. And it is said that when he will be working at night",
      "for Muslims reviewing their judgments and records and reports from everywhere around the world. If a personal guest came to see him, he would go and turn off the lamp that was given to him by the Baitul Maal and go turn on his personal lamp and then meet and receive his guest. And then when they left,",
      "with what he had before. So, he was so careful that he wasn't using even that light that is provided for by Muslims for anything but for the work of, for the sake of Islam, forthe sake of Muslims and people would say that when he would pray at night he would cry as if the hellfire was created personally especially for him and he would fear",
      "that in fact even toward groups that were seen as deviant including the Shia and Khawarij at the time he feared Allah so instead of sending his army against the Khawarij in one of their revolts He said I will go talk to them and he sent somebody and eventually the Khwarij actually agreed",
      "they came and met Umar toward the end, the very end of his life because he was poisoned later according to reports by his own wife. Because the Banu Umayya people could not take him. He had taken and destroyed all of their advantage and they were afraid that he is going to leave also without designating another Umayyad. So the Khilafah",
      "the house of Banu Umayyah. And in fact, if you read Al-Tabari, the conversation that is reported between him and the Khawarij is precisely about this. So the Khwariz asked him many questions and he answered every question according to the Quran and he silenced them. And he said okay. So they were going to submit and give up their revolt. They asked this last question. He said who is the Khalifa after",
      "How are you going to leave this matter? And he said, the Khalifa before me left a designation that I must follow. This is my Ahad. So they said, what would you do, Khalifa, if a man left a property that did not belong to him? If a man",
      "Umar ibn Aziz could not answer that. And he said, give me three days. Give me three day and he died the next day. So so Umar, and he ruled only for a couple of years. He died in year 101 Hijrah. But in this from the beginning to the end,",
      "brought a revolution, a one-man revolution which was possible because people's hearts were ready. They were still connected to Allah. They were searching. All they needed was a ruler who could overcome and who could have the kind of piety that the Sahaba had so that everything came to place.",
      "his contribution to the sciences of Islam. If you look at Hadith and many other sciences of Fiqh, they all start with Umar radiallahu anhu because one of the things that was happening at this time is because of the corruption of the rulers, the pious ulama were moving away from the rulers and establishing their own circles where they learned Fiqah from the Sahaba or the Tab'een or they were themselves the Tab-een",
      "And Umar R.A invited them and he himself was learned in Medina He was taught in Medinah, the same school where Malik came from later In fact Imam Malik was if you will part of the school of Umar Abdul Aziz So he applied the fiqh of Medinat to his governance This is why also by the way he rolled back Jihad because the scholars of Medina were insistent that",
      "there is such and such justification. But one of the things that he did, is that he invited the scholars, and he essentially told the people, ordinary Muslims, whoever knows the book of Allah, and the sunnah of his messenger, can be involved in judging what a government does. And this is when ulama began to write fiqh that related to public matters.",
      "commissioned the scholars of hadith like al-Zuhri and al-Shu'ba and many others to collect hadith. So this is the beginning of serious efforts of collection of hadit with Omar. And finally he revived the science or the ilm of seerah. Now seerat is something very interesting because the Umayyads were afraid of seera so they would",
      "They encouraged the Quran and they themselves learned the Quran. And they had no problem with Hadith, even though they did not encourage so much the Hadith. But they had a lot of people who were afraid of Seerah. Why would they be afraid of seerah? Anybody who wasn't there today. Yes?",
      "Because of what happened to the Prophet?",
      "By keeping the knowledge, and there is a story when Abdul Malik and the son of Abdul Malek went to his father because he talked to Zuhri. And Zuhari taught him about Sira. So he went to this father and said, you know, Father there's this wonderful science we should teach this to people. And Abdul Malick said don't get out, you don't know what you're talking about. And Umar commissioned the teaching of Sira and the collection of Sera.",
      "but also it was extremely important science. Why? Because it put the Qur'an and Hadith all in perspective. And, it is an extremely important sign because if you're reading the Qur-an right? But if you are reading in bits and pieces and don't have that context of when these ayat came, You don't fully understand the mission of the Prophet. So, Umar commissioned this so that Muslims will know... In other words he was a man who feared Allah",
      "Allah and he was not afraid of anything. He didn't care about the honor of his family, he didn't cared about the wealth of his Family, he did'nt care about what people thought of him, he didnt care about people thought about him as scared, not want making jihad and all that stuff. He did not care, he cared and feared only Allah. And within a period of two years he turned around the Muslim world",
      "who came after him, they went back to the path of their you know a path before Umar so they rolled back all of the reforms of Umar but what he showed to the Ummah and with him begins all of this scholarship. The Muhaddithin and the Fuqaha and the scholars of Seerah, Mu'arrikhun, all of them start at the time and because of the acts of Umr ibn Abdul Aziz.",
      "So this was a perfect and complete revival that gives us sense. Now I am afraid that I'm running out of time. 20 minutes? Okay, so... Are there any questions by the way so far? If I may take questions. Is it okay right now or should I continue?",
      "After Isha? Okay. I'm told the questions after Isha, inshallah, so please keep them and remember them. Next, I want to talk about the seerah of Imam Abu Hanifa and Imam Malik, the four great imams. And the world in which they lived.",
      "real quick version of it. And how the fiqh that we know today, how did begin to be written down? Imam Abu Hanifa as we know was a Persian who lived in Kufa and Kufah and Basra were the cities of Iraq established by Umar radiallahu anhu where the nomadic armies",
      "were conquering, the Muslim armies that were making jihad. That's where they were established and there were many movements against the Quraish rule in Medina They came from these cities when these armies got unsettled So Abu Hanifa was living in Kufa and Iraq which was a city if you will on the frontier",
      "the frontier. Whereas scholars of Medina like Imam Malik and Al-Awza'i in Damascus, they were living in different kinds of cities where so there began two circles many different circles of scholars but two of them became prominent. The circle of the scholars of Kufa who were collecting fiqh",
      "based on the Quran, mostly based on Quran they were collecting questions of fiqh so that they were beginning to systematize fiqhh into a coherent system. And these people came to be known as Ahlul Ra'id, the people of speculative opinion. The people of Medina did not like...so there was this dispute",
      "of scholars, Ahlul Ra'i and Ahl al-Athar. The people of Medina were living in the same time and the same traditions as the Prophet ﷺ changing as little as possible and there were many Sahaba that were living there. People still could trace the place where the Prophet laid he took a nap here he fought a war here so the people in Medina want to freeze time and live with the Prophet",
      "of Kufa are living like sort of in the west today, in today's west. They're living on the frontier. There are all kinds of new things that are coming to Kufu, all kinds fitna, all kind of trials are coming. So Abu Hanifa is a faqih who is living in Kufah and so Abu Hanifah because he's dealing with so many new situations then there are very few ahadith available",
      "and to come up with answers to the questions that people have. Both of them, by the way, are away from government. They want nothing to do with government. they're both critical of government. So with, of course, the energy that ulama got with Omar ibn Abdulaziz,",
      "their fiqh and establishing, if you will what later became known as Hanafi Fiqh or Maliki Fiq. However they disliked each other The Ahlul Athar people of Medina said that the people of Kufa are people of fitna They make up their opinions when they don't know They're ignorant and they just make up opinion according to their desire Right? So this was their criticism of Ahl al Ra'i",
      "where the people of Kufa and again they were great scholars students of Abdullah ibn Mas'ud and his student Ibrahim al-Nakha'i who was a great faqih and a tab'i and then Ahmad and then Abu Hanifa so these were great",
      "know how to derive law from the Quran. So one is saying, it's like the debate between if you will the Salafis and the Fuqaha today that some people want to use Hadith for everything other people say no there is this Fiqh rules and so on and so forth. So this debate existed in a similar way. And I want",
      "scholarly differences back then. What happened is Imam Al-Shafi'i, who was a student of Imam Malik first, he learned the hadith and traditions from there, and then he went to Iraq and became a student",
      "became his student and so he then learned from both schools, and then he created his own fiqh. But in creating his own Fiqh, he created the first masterpiece of Islamic knowledge by bringing both Ahlul Athar and Ahlur Ra'i together in his Usool al-Fiqh What did he do? He said that",
      "Their criticism of Ahlul Athar Is correct That they use Hadith And sometimes They don't know Where this Athar is coming from And Sometimes They misuse it Where it's not supposed to be Right? And then They agreed He agreed with the Criticism Of The people of Medina That Their criticism Of people of Iraq They said Yeah He said agree Yes You cannot Just come up With your own opinion On what the answer",
      "answer should be to any given question, you have to find a rationale for this. So he said look the opinion there is no more free opinion but rather you must have some analogical reasoning for why you come up with an opinion which became known as Qiyas. If you want to say something in Deen you have",
      "that this is a new opinion that applies to this case. Similarly, you can't simply use the report and say the Sahaba used to say that. You have to use Hadith with the Isnad and you have to prove that these Hadith actually Isnad go back to the Prophet ﷺ and then you have",
      "read on the Quran, the second source of Isul al-Fiqh became what? Hadith. There is a Sunnah. What is the difference between Sunnah and Hadith? Can somebody tell me? Sunnah is the way, Hadith is the sayings. Sunnah",
      "Because the Maliki, the people of Medina they said that they had a different way of knowing the Sunnah. What was their way? Is there any Malikis here? Yes, Amal Ahl Al-Madinah They said whatever the people in Madinah did that is the best way to know the Sunna But Imam al-Shafi'i said no You have to find a Hadith with the Isnad To establish the Sunnah",
      "the Sunnah. So that they didn't agree that the Sunna is there, is the way to go what they agreed on what is the best way to get to know the Sunnah and later so so and then so this is a second the first asal, the first principle or source of Islam Islamic rulings is Quran the second one is Sunnah which",
      "Ijma' was known to Muslims but Ibn al-Shafi'i gave the arguments from the Quran and the Sunnah for the authority of Ijman. Now what is the argument? I'm going to stop here. What is the Argument for the authenticity of IJMA'? For the Authority, I'm sorry, for the Authority of Ijmah that we must follow the Ijmah? What is The Argument that Is used for That?",
      "What is Ijmaa? Is it all or most?",
      "It has to be all Muslims who are capable of giving an opinion on the matter. Which means, all of the ulama... So it's the opinion of all of them on a certain matter.",
      "The role of the Ijtihad is to establish the group.",
      "Al-Shafi'i, you're right. He has many people who are as qualified as him who are disagreeing with him. So he has to find a proof from the Quran. What is his proof either from the Qur'an or the Sunnah for Hujjiyat al-Ijmaa? The Qur'aan. What part of the Qurʾān? It doesn't say anything about Ijma'ah. It's unity.",
      "Wahda But it's not Ijma' Again It's not ijmaa Okay Let's do that And we'll do it after the Q&A In the Q & A Sure inshallah Well I want to finish The last source if I have one more minute The last resource of Asul al-fiqh That Imam Shafi established in his Risala was",
      "Qiyas means analogy, analogical extrapolation. Through analogy. Now qiyas was a way to tell the people of Iraq that yes we have",
      "opinion. It's an opinion that is closely tied to the Quran and the Sunnah. So he basically, by bringing back, he brought the people of Iraq and the people Medina and Dimash together by saying you've got a point and you've go a point And in his Ar-Risalah, he established these four basic principles of what's called Usul al Fiqh. And then later schools all of the schools, so Hanafis took Hadith",
      "they took Qiyas and the Malikis and Hanbalis, even though they did not all merge, they did no all become his students but they took all of his method. And this is one of the reasons why all of the four schools of Ahl as-Sunnah have so much in common. Alright? So I'll stop here inshaAllah. Jazakum Allah khairan wa salamu alaikum wa rahmatullah"
    ]
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    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh, everyone. Welcome back to Quran 30 for 30. Alhamdulillah Rabbil Ameen. We are now in Juz 22. Obviously as we are now into the last 10 nights, we want to remind you all inshaAllah ta'ala to please keep us near duaa and to please inshaAllahu ta'alah donate to Yaqeen in these last ten nights. Al Hamdulillah. We had the Webathon",
      "webathon, we have multiple calls to action and we understand that there are so many deserving efforts and we hope that you support them all bithnillah. And we hope Yaqeen has been an essential resource for you in bringing you closer to Allah as it certainly has been for so many people around the world with Alhamdulillah. So reminder inshallah please donate. Alhamdullilah we're blessed with our editor-in-chief Dr. Uweymur Anjam with us today alhamdulillahi and of course Sheikh Abdullah",
      "Dr. Uyemer, how are you? Alhamdulillah, very good. Jazakum Allah khairan. How are you? So I don't know if many people around the world know where Toledo is. Can you tell us a little bit about Toledo Ohio? Yes it's not Toledo in Spain usually people are markedly disappointed when i tell them it's Toledo ohio not toledo spain um and yeah we are by lake erie",
      "Abdullah and I without telling you that you should tell us a dad joke. A dad joke? Yeah. So my daughter Safa, who is 11, whenever I tell a dad jokes she makes this face and says well there are dad jokes and then there are Baba jokes and Baba jokes are like far worse than even dad jokes. Sheikh Abdullah calls them granddad jokes from my perspective. Yes these are grand, mine are granddad",
      "bad jokes. I love your family. I remember one time when you were here, you said that your kids personified they name things in the house right? I think that's pretty endearing Alhamdulillah. Yeah so we they named their stuffed animals and named plants. So you know plant we say with chimneys watering but you know this Jacqueline",
      "Jack Lynn died. I think Sheikh Abdullah should start naming his weight machines. He's killed a lot of those. Right. You can walk in the gym and say that this person is dead, and this person's dead. Alhamdulillah. We're blessed to have you Dr. Awaymir and alhamdulillahi as we're getting into the last 10. Mashallah, I think the paper that you had written on divine worship which",
      "which Alhamdulillah is one of the featured papers right now on our website. I think it's profound because a lot of people disconnect the idea of worship from any type of structure and sequence, and we forget that we're the people of five salas in the month of Ramadan and the nisaab and zakah. And I think its profound when you talk about those means by which we connect to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la as was taught to us by Ibn al Qayyim Rahimullah in this regard. And of course, he also translated madarij asalakeen",
      "Salikin, which is a phenomenal work by Ibn al-Qayyim rahimallah and people can benefit from that bidhna. So JazakAllah khair for all of the work you've done Alhamdulillah And you've written about Khilafah while residing in Toledo Ohio This is just a sign that the Ummah is indeed Ummatic Indeed, that's the idea To me the two things are really connected because Allah teaches us Taqwa",
      "orienting us to the world and telling us to go change it for me, remind people of me. And the best of the believers as the ulema say, الذي يحب بالناس إلى الله ويحب بلله إلى الناس To make Allah beloved to people by telling them of Allah and by making people beloved to Allah by telling",
      "And one more thing for everyone to check out, Ummatics. Alhamdulillah, Ummotics is a wonderful initiative that has launched now with Dr. Oweiman as well. So please do check out their work and support it inshaAllah ta'ala this Ramadan as well. We'll go ahead and we'll get started with the juz. Bismillahi wa alhamdullilah wasalatu wasalamu ala rasulillah wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa man wala You know Subhanallah, one of the things that we are focusing on in these last 10 is this idea of what makes people praiseworthy? What makes you praiseworthy",
      "side of allah and says to us just a few suras before this that the only thing that makes you praiseworthy in the sight of allahu is your worship and allah has no care for the one who does not worship him for the",
      "Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. And in this Juz, we have the story of kingdoms and then the king of all kings. So Allah Azawajal gives us the example of a Sabah, a destroyed kingdom. And then Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala gives us an example of praiseworthy kingdom in the case of Dawud alayhi salam and Sulaiman alayhis salam. And Allah Subhaanahu wa Ta-a'la brings us back to the King of All Kings Al-Fatir,",
      "and how any favor that descends on this earth is through him. And we are only praiseworthy to the extent that we ascribe those favors to him, and we use those blessings to please him. So in As-Sabah Allah says All praises is due to Allah,",
      "And he is the all-wise and the all aware. And look at this beautiful, subtle yet SubhanAllah imposing portion of the ayah. To him belongs all of the praise in the hereafter which shows you and many of the scholars mentioned that when Allah Azawajal says",
      "and the one bestowed with all honor, that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la is the One who makes you aziz if you turn back to al-'aziz. He makes you dignified when you turn Back to Him so you become azizin bi izzatillah You become dignified by honoring Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala And Alhamid, the one who is praiseworthy whether you praise him or not, you become praiseworthy By your praise of Allah Subhaanahu wa Ta'ala So Allah Azawajal is saying here",
      "Praise is due to him in the hereafter specifically while everything belongs to him. Therefore, the only way you will find yourself amongst the praiseworthy in the Hereafter is if you are among those who praise Allah. And the only King in the HEREAFTER is Allah, the king of all kings. Then Allah mentions to us, if you go to verse 15 of Surah As-Sabah",
      "him, that verily in the tribe of Sheba, Sabah al-Sheba, in their homeland there is an ayat, there is a sign. Two gardens one on the right and one on left so they had gardens that were provided to them in this life and Allah says eat from the sustenance of your Lord and be grateful to Him",
      "a good pure land and a forgiving lord subhanallah your lord did not give you this in order to condemn you to doom you your lord gave you this so that you could be grateful and you will find not only the blessing and what has been provided to you but that you have a forgiving for your inability to properly thank him fully for everything that he",
      "that refuses to ascribe its blessing to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. And so the protection for it actually becomes a source of punishment. The dam breaks and then it becomes flooded, and the kingdom is destroyed. Then Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta-'A'La also gives us the example, and this is actually a little bit earlier, of Dawud and Sulaiman. وَلَقَدْ آتَيْنَا دَعُودٌ مِنَّا فَضْلًا That we have given to Dawud ﷺ a great bounty from us. يَا جِبَال أَوِّبِي مَعَه",
      "O Jibbal, O mountains, respond to his command. And the birds as well. And we made the iron moldable for Dawud alayhi salam. And Allah Azawajal continues to the blessings of Dawud Alayhi Salam and the blessings Of Sulaiman alayhis salaam in the surah and all that Allah Azwajal has provided For Dawud and Sulaimani and how they ascribe those blessings To Allah the entire time.",
      "the size of the kingdom matters here. You know, Sabah had a larger kingdom. It's harder when you become more wealthy. It is harder when your kingdom grows for you to ascribe that to Allah and be grateful. But no human king had what Sulaiman alayhi salam and Dawood alayhis salaam had yet look how grateful they were. Look how distinguished they were in their worship. And therefore it is not just that they have the kingdom of this world but they also have a close position to Allah.",
      "and a high elevation on the Day of Judgment. So they become praiseworthy in the Day Of Judgment because they praised Allah with those blessings that were given to them. Finally, we move onto Surah Al-Fatir, The Originator. And this was prevalent especially in the previous Juz where we talked about how Allah mentions to us all that is in a seed. In Surah Ar-Rum, Surah Luqman, Surat As-Sajda We mentioned this in the last Juz, in Juz 21",
      "to al-Fātir, the originator of all. And Allah says, مَا يَفْتَحِ اللَّهُ لِلنَّاسِ مِن رَحْمَةٍ فَلَا مُمْسِكَ لَهَا That whatever mercy Allah gives to a people nothing can withhold that mercy. وَمَا یُمسِقْ فَلا مُرْسِّلَ لَّهِ And what Allah withholds no one is going to be able to release after Him من بعده وهو العزيز الحكيم He is the Almighty. He is",
      "Finally, يَا أَيُّهَا النَّاسُ اذْكُرُوا نِعْمَةَ اللَّهِ عَلَيْكٌ O people! Oh humanity! Remember Allah's favors upon you. Remember all of these blessings and favors upon You. هَلْ مِنْ خَالِقٍ غَيِّرُ اللَّـٰهِ يَرْزُقُكُمْ مِّنَ السَّمَاءِ وَالْأَرَّضِ Is there any Creator other than Allah that provides you from the heavens and the earth? لَا إِلَهَ إِلاَّهُ There is no God but Him. فَأَنَّا تُؤْفَكُونَ",
      "how are you then deluded from the truth and subhanallah of the greatest blessings and the greatest blessing is indeed that allah sends us revelation he sends us rusul he sends his messengers so he doesn't just send us what gives us life to our crops but he sends",
      "There's no doubt that understanding the oneness of Allah by learning who He is, glory to Him, the Exalted, is what brings life to the hearts. And many of the scholars have spoken about this. SubhanAllah we even spoke about how Allah gives a comparison of agriculture that Allah, that Allah brings life",
      "words and that is the heart as well understanding the oneness of allah subhanahu wa ta'ala the creator of the heavens and the earth and acting upon that is what is incumbent upon the human being the muslim and non-muslim is for them to recognize who their creator is in an act to act accordingly and to know that allah has given us this ahad or this agreement that we have had with him when he created all of us",
      "that is in the chapter of al-A'raf. We're going to mention this inshallah ta'ala, but what I want to talk about is a verse in a series of verses in the Chapter of Faltir where Allah subhanahu wa ta'la from verses five to eight, Allah subhana wa ta'ta'ala talks about the reality of shaitan, but then shaitans effect on us as human beings and how Allah subhaana wa ta'da responds to that. And this is the Quranic perception or the Quran worldview in regards to guidance",
      "guidance and some of the signs of that. Allah says here, O people, assuredly Allah's promise is true so let the life of the world not delude you and let not the deluder delude",
      "Allah continues to say, surely Shaytan is an enemy to you. So take him as your enemy. And it's interesting here that Allah says that he's an enemy. So you would know automatically to take him but then he ensures that and says, so take him",
      "be among the inmates of the fire. And that is Satan's goal, to call you to the fire by calling you to do actions that will displease Allah. Therefore with Allah's justice being punished for that maybe in this life or being delayed till the next life. May Allah protect us from that.",
      "Allah says in verse number seven, a severe chastisement lies in store for those that disbelieve but there is pardon and a great reward for those who believe and work righteous deeds. So Allah is showing the ones that believe and do righteous deeds, the reward is for them because they are keeping away from Shaytan and the different ways which we will talk about inshaAllah. Allah says, in verse 8, this is the verse we want to capitalize on, into four parts inshallah.",
      "أَفَمَنْ زُيِّنَ لَهُ سُوءُ عَمِلِهِ فَرَآهُ حَسَنًا فَإِنَّ اللَّهَ يُضِلُّ مَن يَشَاءُ وَيَهْدِي مَン يَ شَاءَ فَلَا تَذْهَبْ نَفْسُكَ عَلAYhiM حَصَرًا إِنِّ اللَّـهَ عاليمٌ بِمَا يَصْنَعُونَ Allah Subh'ana Wa Ta-A'la says, Then is the one for whom the evil his deed has been made attractive so he considers it good. أَfَمْنْزُيَّنَ Lَهュ سُؤُ عْمَلِحِ فِرَأَاهُ حْسَنا The one that his actions has been beautified or beautified him. This is a passive verb.",
      "verb to show that the action was beautified and put in front of him. Who was the muzayyin? The scholars mentioned that it was shaitan bi-iznillah, that shaitaan was the one that influenced your nafs or influenced you by the permission of Allah liktibar wa ibtila'a, that Allah allowed this to happen as a test. We say Allah tests us. Well, this is one of the manifestations of his test. He will beautify something to you",
      "And this is important that the Muhassin and the Muqabbih is Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. This is so important for us to understand that Allah is the one that shows us what are the good deeds and what are evil deeds, and he has sent messengers to ensure that over periods of time to remind us of the agreement that we had with Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta-'Ala where Allah Subhaanahu wa ta-ala says in the chapter Al Aaraf",
      "When Allah says, and recall when your Lord brought forth descendants from the loins of the sons of Adam. And made them witnesses amongst their own selves, against their own cells. Asking them, He asked him, am I not your Lord? And they said, yes we do testify. So all, every single individual from the creation of Adam till the day of judgment in front of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Their souls in front Allah subhahna hu wa ta-ala. And he asked them, what was their response?",
      "response that they acknowledge that. They acknowledge it and they said we did so lest you should claim on the day of resurrection that we were unaware of this, that there is no hujah, there was no argument for us all of creation and this is the Quranic worldview that all of human beings were put in front of Allah upon the creation of Adam and they acknowledged the presence of their creator. So that's",
      "the souls announced the presence of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la and His greatness. Then He sent messengers to remind all of us with His Rahmah and His Lutf, with His mercy and His kindness and His love for all of his creation as Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala says And we have sent messangers upon this earth to worship Allah and to stay away from transgression or those that may transgress the bounds by worshipping other than Allah Subhaanahu",
      "than allah subhanahu wa ta'ala so allah first says here the one that his uh his actions were made beautiful to him and he considers it good the evil actions then allah says after that verily it is a loss from who causes those to error and shows the right way to whom he wills the question may arise how can allah misguide someone if allah gives us the message then he misguides them",
      "guides them, it's important for us to understand this beautiful sharia of the deen of Islam. And I want to give us due to time an asl and a ta'ida which is very important for",
      "Whoever follows my guidance, they will not be misguided. It's following the guidance of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la and the ones that remind us of that are the messengers. But then Allah says beautifully in the chapter of Tawbah. This verse is clear. Allah says it is not Allah's way to cause people",
      "He has guided them until he has made clear to them what they should guard against. Surely Allah knows everything. Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la is Al-'Adl, He is just. This is so important for us to know in regards to our Iman Bil Ghayb Allatheena Yu'minuna bil ghayb Belief in the unseen Meaning that family member that you have told about Islam That co-worker your best friend Your own brother that you've told about",
      "Are you told to do the right thing? And you're wondering why they're not accepting it when you know their personality, who they are. Allah knows the unseen. Allah loves what their hearts conceal and reveal. This is so important for us to rely on when it comes to things in front of us, the tangible things that we have told to reliance on indirectly sometimes to where we don't understand why this person is acting this way",
      "message due to our relationship etc this is so important for us that allah is al-hadi and he is the one that guides people he shows them the way and then gives them tawfiq for going the but the tawfeeq is given the success to move on to accept the message has to be with total submission to allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and that the word huda even comes from muyul like",
      "to want some kind of guidance from their maker. And then Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la continues on to say, so O Prophet, let not your life go to waste sorrowing over them. And this is important as well. This is the third part, do not sorrow over them Allah is not saying do not have mercy but He's saying the message that you had it's understandable that you are sad that they are not coming to what you value",
      "All of these ayats, even their selves. They have to have a moment to ponder and ask who created that? Who created this? And then on top of that what is my responsibility regarding that? With the fact that there are messengers telling them and reminding them of that. So it's important to realize that when Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala may seem there may be verses that may seem harsh we should know that it is rahmah because Allah subhana wa taal",
      "is Ar-Rahman but at the same time he's Shadeen Al-Niqab and that is built upon knowledge perfect knowledge, perfect wisdom which we will never be able to encompass therefore he says at the very end that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la Inna Allaha Aleem Bima Yasna'un That Allah is well aware of what they do. We are not well aware",
      "Ameen. JazakAllah khair Sheikh Abdullah Beautiful words Insha'Allah Ta'a will now turn to Dr. Uweimer Alhamdulillah, was-salatu wa salamu ala rasool Allah So Alhamdullilah both of you left for me Surat Yaseen which is",
      "It is a surah that the Ummah has a special relationship to. Everybody loves Surat Yaseen and in Muslim cultures it has a specific place so I get to talk about that Jazakum Allah Khairan. Yasin is said to be one of the names of Rasulullah ﷺ, and one of feelings that one has when reading Surat Yasin",
      "that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la shows in this surah. Yasin wa Quranil hakeem innaka lamina al mursaleena ala firatim mustakeen tanzeelal aziza arraheem Yasin, this by the wise Qur'an, wise recitation you surely are among the mursalin and you are on the right path of Prophet and then toward the end Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala says",
      "Do not be sad about it because the Prophet ﷺ was a personality of really great compassion. He worried about people, he worried that people rejected him. He wasn't hard-hearted and you find this elsewhere in the Qur'an that his opponents or detractors or hypocrites who would be around him they would call him huwa uzun, he is an ear, you could tell him anything he will believe. And Allah ﷻ comes to His defense and says huwa uðunu khayrin lakum",
      "He is the ear of goodness for you. He believes in Allah and he believes the believers, whatever they tell him. He doesn't second guess them. He does not have anything going on in his mind that he's not displaying. He is most crystal clear person that you can hurt. You get around him, you can heard but when you are around him you fall in love with him and you want to please him. So that was the authority of Prophet and the Quran",
      "speaks to each of the prophets by the way displays their personalities Allah addresses Musa in a certain way because Musa is hard and emotional and tough and strong on the truth and our messenger Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam is such that he really deeply cares about people and even the hypocrites and people with bad intentions could hurt him",
      "And so Allah reminds him again and again in the Quran. Allah says in Surah Al-Kahf, O Prophet, you're going to lose your life in worry and sorrow that they are not believing and harming themselves. So that's the first theme that is very clear in Surat Yasin.",
      "So this surah is recited to people, the believers who are dying.",
      "So that means we should all memorize it so that we can say to ourselves when we are ready to meet or meet Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la, or to say it to comfort our loved ones when it's their time. So it's a surah that's very special in that regard. It's the surah of preparation to meet Allah",
      "that appears in Surah Yaseen and that's the story, verses 20 through 28. The story of a man. The Story is of a Rajul, a man who comes in the middle of argument that's going on between apostles,",
      "people. People are rejecting, people are saying to the prophets that you guys are bad news, that you have infected us with ill almond, you are bad, religion is bad, being is bad revelation is bad and this man whom Allah identifies as a rajul just that's all he is, he is a man who comes from outskirts of",
      "of the town and addresses, gets in the middle of this supporting the messengers and gives an argument. And that argument Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala loved so much that he eternalized it in his final book. And the argument is follow the prophets, follow people who are calling you know they're calling you to guidance and they're not asking you for anything in return.",
      "immediately after this, there is a scene as an abrupt scene where you see this man in Jannah. It is as if Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la saying and that's what the Mufassirin say that he's martyred people are react by killing him and he enters Jannah",
      "The first thing that he says upon entering Jannah, I wish my people who have just killed me they knew what they are missing. What Allah has given me of this reward. So this surah indicates as couple other Suras as well that when we go to Jannah and Insha'Allah may Allah make us all among those of Ahlul-Jannah",
      "the believers, we will think about them and we will pray for them in Jannah. And this is the kind of Jannah, one of interpretations is that if you're a Shaheed then you enter right away into Jannah or your soul enters Jannah and waits in Janna like a bird or something. And I know Sheikh Omar would have more to say about this but what I want to focus on here is this,",
      "doesn't end with his death he doesn't go to jannah and say well look at those losers they will get what they deserve but rather a lot they he says and this is what makes it die this is",
      "I wish they knew what happened to me. Because if they knew this, they will not be rejecting the messengers. The other thing that the ulama observe about this is that whenever Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la mentions the word rajul in the Quran, it is always a similar kind of act. It is as if Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta-'A' la is intimating what true manhood is.",
      "The manhood in this for this man was to get into the middle of an argument between truth and falsehood, and stand up for what is right or with this integrity. Similarly we hear of another man a rajul in the story of Musa when similar man comes and he argues on behalf of Mus' in front of Pharaoh",
      "an act of courage which is bound to get you in trouble but it's truthfulness right so that's a courage manhood in other words is not without compassion manhood is defined by compassion and courage at the same time unfortunately some of the notions of manhood that we have",
      "this beautiful connection that is at the heart of our book, our Muhammad, our message. Muhammad SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam, our messenger, that their courage and he was the most courageous of man but he didn't have to be mean. He didn't need to be hard. He did not have to put down people. He wasn't even invulnerable all of that. And he was most manly of men",
      "And that's what it means to be a man in Surah Yasin and in the Quran and in this Sira and the Sunnah of Muhammad. JazakAllah khair. For the powerful reflection, Subhanallah. The Qala ya layta qawmi ya'lamoon. The man enters into Jannah and he said if only my people knew better. When the Prophet was being struck in Uhud, he said Allahumma ghafir liqaumi fa innahum la ya'laamoon",
      "oh Allah forgive my people they don't know any better yeah and the fact that they on the occasion of Ta'if yes when he is rejected and stoned by people yeah",
      "on behalf of the people so that the continuation of rahmah can be for them. And they're trying to continue to call them to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. I think that's something that a lot of times we mistake some of our spiritual diseases for good qualities and so the ability to shut someone down very quickly well, the Prophets did not come to just shut people down. So that would be looked at as a brave",
      "as a brave act of courage, the Prophets came to save people. Sometimes that involves shutting people down for the sake of not letting their corruption spread but I just think about the culture even today like if you go to YouTube what are the most popular videos? So and so destroys so-and-so. As if that's a win. Sometimes Allah Azza wa Jalla perished nations or destroyed nations",
      "nations but look at the excuses, look at amount of chances that were given to them to be saved. And that is from his rahmah, his fadl, his ni'ma all three words that are used in this juz, his mercy, his bounty, his blessing to them none greater than revelation. JazakAllah khair for the beautiful reflections. Final thoughts Sheikh Abdullah, Dr. Uweimer any final thought inshallah as we close off? Dr. Raymoud, what's your feeling?",
      "Well, first you go inshallah then I will say. No, I really like how you pointed out the different signs of manhood and masculinity debunking what is known as a man nowadays and also the notion of toxic masculinity as though it's inherently toxic but showing that with our prophets alayhi mustalam and also individually in surya hasin",
      "Yeah, and SubhanAllah this is your topic. Your neck of the woods to talk about that beautiful masculinity Mashallah",
      "and we are all waiting for that series that you're doing, inshallah. I remember it was in the 90s that a sheikh was visiting us, I believe from Iraq, and he had just written a book on rujuliyah, on manhood in Islam. And there's a most beautiful and powerful khatira that he gave about his book. And he looked at all of the places that in the Quran and in the Sunnah where the word rajul is mentioned",
      "And he looked at those attributes. And all of those attributes are even, you know, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala mentions that prophets, all prophets are men. We didn't send prophethood except to men. But it's a place of responsibility. That's what men have to do.",
      "very clear in fact, in the way that the concept is treated. That in some of the instances, the word Lissuru Juliya is an ideal that even women can have. It's not something that's just for men but it is special to men if men are first and foremost called to show this compassionate strength",
      "When other people are likely to chicken out, we do not have that ujuliyya. In other words, this manhood is connected to sacrifice for the truth and that's the special feature of men and that why Allah has chosen men for this burden and responsibility to carry the message but there is no",
      "there's no chauvinism it is manhood of compassion and self-sacrifice. It's the manhood where Rasulullah ﷺ always brings tears to my eyes when I look at how the Prophet ﷺ is being insulted and he is eager and earnest",
      "stories about the Prophet ﷺ when he's going in Medina, like when he arrived in Medinanew and he's to people talking to them. And Abdullah ibn Ubayy is sitting and he says you know after the Prophet begins talking and he really opens himself up because the best way to go uh and get yourself make yourself vulnerable is to talk to a people that you don't know and open your heart to them and Abdullah ibin Ubay takes that chance and he",
      "If somebody goes to you and they want to sit and talk about your message, your religion, your God, you can talk about that. But don't come to our gatherings and start talking about your stuff. And the Prophet ﷺ is heartbroken. It's an insult. The Prophet ﷺ, it's visible on his face. As he leaves, a sincere Muslim from that clan follows him.",
      "ibn samit i believe is the one and makes the prophet salallahu alayhi wa sallam feels better by saying you know he's just angry because he wanted to be the leader but the point of the prophet is always putting himself in that situation and he's believing when people come and make excuses to him where other people who are clever less clever than the prophet less wise than the",
      "his acts as if he believes them and um he wants to believe them what would you know and that's the character of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam that i find most uh you know most endearing for those beautiful reflections inshallah we will go ahead and end there and ask allah to allow us",
      "to the greatest manifestation of it, Muhammad ﷺ in his everyday life and to grant us closeness to him ﷺ. In the highest level of Jarmuid al-Firdaw sallAllahu alayhi wa sallam. Jazakum Allah khaira. Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh."
    ]
  },
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    "text": [
      "Welcome back to Quran 30 for 30. Of course, as we get into the final stretch inshallah ta'ala before we get started I wanted to remind everyone inshaAllah to please donate bismillah ta'alah this is of course the most critical part of our fundraising campaign but more importantly it's the most crucial part of Ramadan. I pray that Allah allow us all to catch Laylatul Qadr and write it down for us fully",
      "Alhamdulillah, Rabi'al Ameen. We have with us my beloved dear friend Dr. Awiman Anjam, our editor-in-chief. How are you, doctor? Alhamdullilah, Rabbi'al Ameen. How's Ramadan been there in Toledo? Very good, Hamza. Ramadan is generous everywhere. Sheikh Abdullah, how are you? Alhumdulillah phenomenal. Glad to be here. So, Dr.",
      "It's been causing me great stress as to like, what am I going to open up with you? Then I realized, I was like, you know, you wrote that paper. Your first paper on Yaqeen was about the Khilafah and who wants the Khirafa? Clearly Sheikh Abdullah wants the Khalifa. Like, I'm ready to go. But if you were the Khalifasheikh, all right, if you are the Khalifeh, would you mandate people to be a strong as me or stronger Sheikh Abdullah?",
      "is it okay to offend you because i met you know when i spent a lot i went to dallas and i had seen sheikh abdullah in his jalebiya and you know mashallah very very immaculate always but i always saw his face so it's for the first time when i saw him in person i said subhanallah you know um i wouldn't say i was intimidated but something close to it",
      "so uh yeah exactly so you know there's my answer i guess we all have to so that's going to be a deterrent you know we all need to lift as much as you should uh so sheikh abdullah has got up i don't know man are you ready for that you're gonna have to train everybody in the oma man oh bismillah junaid's garage let's go do this right down the street from your house",
      "down the street from your house. Mashallah, mashallah. Alright Sheikh Abdullah because we're getting to the end too I got a joke for you too alright? Okay. Why did the gym close? Why did why did the Jim close? Yes. COVID the equipment was bad. Because it just wasn't working out. We're in the last days of Ramadan",
      "I got to get you to... You got the doctor to smile, man. So that's successful. That was a good one. I'll give you that one. We're very happy to have you. And obviously to everyone that's been tuning in, it's been honestly it's one of the sad things when we finish Ramadan on 30 for 30. Sheikh Abdullah doesn't call me anymore. It just becomes very sad for me.",
      "very sad for me but obviously it's the community field that we built here. We pray that Allah unite us always around the Qur'an May Allah unite is always around Qur'aan on a serious note I was reflecting on that idea of hablullah, we talked about it in Sayyidul Khatib this idea of the rope of Allah and the Quran unites in every way and if you were to gather the believers to do tadaabur on the Quran every single day they would not finish they would",
      "Inshallah, Dr. Uweimir, because we're so happy to have you, we're going to ask you to start us off inshallah ta'ala So bismillah, we are in juz 26 Okay, inshaAllah Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem, Alhamdulillah Wa salatu wa Salam ala Rasulullah In Juz 26 there are so many surahs that are full of gems that are easy to pick Of course the Qur'an is all",
      "is a reflection of the perfect wisdom of allah but in this uh juice there are suras that are very easily relatable and i picked two uh surat muhammad and the one right after that also known as it is a sura that the topic or the theme of the surah",
      "is to encourage Muslims to make jihad but armed jihad. This came at a time, this is almost an appendix to Surat Al-Baqarah it's coming very early on in Medina and when Muslims moved to Medina in fact rather were expelled from Mecca leaving everything behind",
      "to intercept the caravans of Quraysh in order to seek justice. And some people question whether they should, the Prophet shallallahu alaihi wa sallam should actively intercept, actively do anything. So this surah has a very strong powerful message and tone and even the rhythm of this sura is",
      "is very uniquely suited to this strong message. So, a very powerful direct surah it doesn't start with any introductions you know usually suras begin by praising Allah or the book of",
      "or the book of Allah SWT, this one goes right to the heart of the struggle that Allah SWt is asking Muslims to be strong in. And it appears as I said that this is first year possibly most likely first year, possibly even first few months of the Medinan period. Surah Al-Fath",
      "also is a distinctive surah that relates to the seerah of the Prophet ﷺ, to the biography of the prophet ﷺ. So some of these suras in the Qur'an are almost direct commentaries on some significant events in the seera of the Prophets ﷺ and both of these Surahs are like that so they kind of fit together. Surat Muhammad comes at the beginning",
      "The opening, the victory from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala comes in the sixth year on the occasion of Al-Hudaibiyah when Rasulullah ﷺ is shown the dream by Allah subhana wa ta'ta'ala that he's making Umrah and there He ends up Making a peace treaty with the Meccans but a peace Treaty that he makes with strength and",
      "alayhi salatu wasalam and the companions around him. The 1400 companions according to the strongest narration, there are some say they were 1800 but 1400 companions that went with the Prophet sallallaahu wa sallam and they set their arms aside when they arrived in Mecca with the intention of making Umrah",
      "interesting and intense moments in the seerah of the Prophet ﷺ on a number of occasions, a number ways. The Prophet ﷺ made a peace treaty and the peace treaty was so hard on Muslims because it was unequal and inequality and humiliation was something that Islam had separated from them and expelled from them. So they will not accept humiliation as Muslims.",
      "Rasulullah ﷺ accepted the term that appeared on the surface, that this was... Dr. Uyghur, we lost your sound. Sorry. Okay, sorry. Go ahead. Okay. So the Treaty of al-Hudaybiyyah was on the outside humiliating because it was unequal terms.",
      "The Muslims who came to Medina had to be returned, but if anybody left Medina, left Islam they didn't have to be return. Of course ultimately the wisdom became open and clear to everyone. But the treaty was made peace treaty in Islam like the most important peace treaty that Allah sent a whole surah, Surat Al-Fath Inna Fatahnaka Fathan Mubeena",
      "according to most Mufassireen and in my view the correct opinion of Allah it was not the conquest of Mecca but it was the conquest peace treaty that was made but that peace treaty was made with strength this is when 1400 companions of the Prophet made a pledge with Allah",
      "And that pledge, which became known in the tradition is Bay'at Ridwan. Because Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says and refers to it, يَضُلَّ اللَّهِ فَوْقَ أَغْدِيهِمْ When they're making a pledge with you, O Prophet, Allah's hand is above them. Meaning that Allah subhana wa ta'ta'ala... This is a deal they're makeing with Allah subhana wa ta'da. And then Allah says, رَقَطْ لَقْرَ رَضِيَ اللَّـهُ عَلَى الْمُؤْمِنِينَ إِذْ يُبَايِّعُونَكَ تَحْتَ الشَّجَرَةِ فِعَلِمَ مَا فِي قُلُوبِهِنْ",
      "Allah knew what is in their hearts of these 1400 companions. Allah says, Allah made this deal with them and Allah knew What is in Their Hearts and This Is the greatest tazkiyah Of Any Community And any Ummah In The Quran Because Allah Says That Allah Knew The Hearts of Those 1400 Companions and",
      "their very interesting story with um who was once saying something less than uh flattering about the especially and one of the one of his teachers said as far as i know ali radiallahu anhu was there in that bayah",
      "tells you that Allah did not know his heart and then you can criticize him, then you go and criticize him. But if there is no other revelation and this is the final revelation, the Qur'an, then know that Allah knew the hearts of those 1400 companions. This included all of the Sahaba, all of four rightly guided Caliphs,",
      "community in history that Allah says Allah knew what's in their hearts and he loved it and he gave them victory for it truly Allah would say yeah the Allah was pleased with them and so when we're saying all the Allahu anhum about the companions were affirming",
      "Exactly. This is Ta'weel al-Qur'an. We are implementing directly the Qur'an",
      "when they have the upper hand. So with the anger and the outrage, and the harm that has been done to the Prophet ﷺ, that is alluded to, that strong sense of injustice, that it's alluded to in Surah Muhammad, and then look what happens in Al-Fatih, which becomes just the ultimate example of moral superiority. And that was something blessed. It's actually one of the very first research projects that we worked on at Yaqeen",
      "that Sheikh Muhammad al-Shanawi and myself wrote about, Moments of Moral Greatness of the Prophet ﷺ. When we wrote this paper it was just digging deep and deep and you find the Prophet as he has this situation after situation after situatio,n he always acts with the Akhirah in front of him and leads in the best way. And as we've been talking about character being refined by taqwa and the remembrance of the Akhira,",
      "and time and time again. And subhanAllah, in this juz', you find the tarteeb of the surah in this regard. So you have first and foremost as Dr. Waymer just mentioned, you have Surah Muhammad. You have Al-Ahqaf actually prior to that. Al- Ahqaf is the warning. Al Ahqa literally gives you the scene about a prophet standing at the heights giving a warning",
      "standing on Safa and calling the people. And then after, the messenger is run out. Right? And Allah gives victory on the hand of the Messenger whether it was the previous Prophets and then of course the Prophet, victory is given to him. So you have Al-Ahqaf, the warning, then you have al-Qital, you have fight, and then you Al-Fath, you've the opening. And SubhanAllah right after that you have the Hujurat which as many of the scholars point out",
      "it is your adab with the Prophet ﷺ as an ummah we're just talking about affirming the love that we have for the family and the companions of the Messenger ﷺ, it is you adab of the Prophet with his sunnah, with his legacy, with this example that is going to determine whether his victory stays with you or not so just the tarteeb of that all about the adab that we had with the prophet and with everyone else",
      "is around us in accordance with that and then you have Qaf and Adhariyat so Surah Qaf is of course I think it's one of the most underutilized suras in our discourse, and I say that based on the seerah of the Prophet right? So Surah Khaf the Prophet used to recite it in Fajr he used to recite it in Salatul Eid now of course there are often narrations that give us choices",
      "and we always choose the shorter version, right? Al-A'la and al-Ghashiyah is a sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ in Eid. And we also have an authentic narration that Qaf and Al-Qamar. So Qafand Al-Kamar. The Prophet ﷺ would recite them in their Eid prayer. So you have our Eid Prayer where you have Al-a'la & Al-ghaishyah which are very powerful of course and speak to remembrance of the hereafter, right?. These concepts of the Hereafter being better",
      "longer version if you think about it right in salatul eid the prophet says some reciting qaf and surah al-qamar which are also surrounding the exact same themes of the hereafter and the preference of the Hereafter and beyond that you know subhanallah imagine the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasalam would recite it leading salat ul aed and also you have the daughter of alharitha bin nu'man who actually says that she memorized surah qaf just from",
      "his mouth, alayhi salatu wasalam in his khutbatul juma'ah so the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam would recite this to the large gatherings right? Salatul Eid being the annual large gatherings the weekly gatherings he would recite Surah Qaf and if you recite Surat Qaf it covers literally the beginning to the end you know the beginning of our life cycle the beginning",
      "And Surah Al-Dhariyat is إِنَّمَا تُعْدُونَ لَصَادِقٍ وَإِذْنَ دِينًا لَوَاقِرٌ That what you've been promised is true. You clearly know that now and, you know, that the day of judgment has been established and Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala talks about those people that stand up and pray at night and those people who give charity during the day waiting once again بِالآخرة هم يوقنون So just the Tarteep, the organization of these surahs, subhanAllah how they lead us to this place",
      "to this place is very profound. And it's probably the perfect fusion of the seerah and the hereafter, the seeraa and the akhirah here right? Because ultimately, the believers are principled in positions of power because they fear the day that they will stand before Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la complete vulnerability, right? They fear that day. Why is it that people wrong? They don't fear Allah and the day",
      "becomes so intoxicated by their own tyranny. Is that they don't fear the day, that they will stand before one who is far greater than them and the One Who endowed them with any power that they then abused and abused with. So SubhanAllah it's this perfect lacing of seerah and the akhirah that the moral calling of the believer is that they believe in Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala watching them and they believe",
      "the mentions of heaven and hell constantly throughout this as part of the moral duty and the calling for the believers. And then SubhanAllah, I was just going to focus on just the beauty of this. Allah Azza wa Jal, as He talks about Surah Al-Ahqaf, and Al- Ahqaf splits up the two. And Subhanallah it splits up a group of those that accept the Prophet and then the group of",
      "And then it splits up the righteous child from the child that is disobedient. Okay, so you have the child... I believe that's verse 16 of Surah Al-Ahqaf. I don't actually have it in front of me right now. So you have",
      "So in Surah Al-Ahqaf, you have the child that is righteous and that is recognizing the blessings of Allah upon them. And making Dua'a that Allah SWT blessed them with righteousness and a great reward.",
      "a fahish person, shameless even with their parents. وَالَّذِي قَالَ لِوَارِدَهِ أُفٍّ لَكُمَا أَتَعِيدَانِنِي أَنْ أُخْرَجَ وَقَدْ خَلَتِ الْقُرُونُ مِنْ قَبْلِي You know like you have the scene of the parents begging their child please do what's good for you. Do what's right for you and what does he use? أُحْفٍ لَکُمًا Leave me alone. أَطَعِّيدَANِنی أَνْ أَخْ رَجْ Are you telling me I'm going to come back out or are you telling about a hereafter? وَقطْ خُلَطِ الـقُسْرُ مَن قَدِلِ And all those nations have passed before",
      "وَهُمَا يَسْتَغِيثَانِ اللَّهِ وَإِلَكَ آمِنُ It's actually one of the most heartbreaking verses in the Quran to me, honestly. This verse comes to my mind so often when I see parents that are begging their child to do what's right for themselves and the child is fighting them as if they're their enemies and the parents are please don't mess your life up, don't ruin your afterlife. وَہُمَّا يَّسْtَغِّيثًا لَّهُ وَ إِلَّكَ أَمِنيًّا إنَّ وَعْدَ اللَّـهِ حَبٌّ It's true. Look, I'm trying",
      "protect you in the hereafter and trying to protect you this life. And this person says, it's only asatir al awaleen these are just the fables of the past. Then subhanAllah you move into surah Muhammad, the next surah so you had the group of people that disbelieved and the group who believed and you have the obedient child, the righteous child that grew up to become a righteous parent and you've got the wicked child whose life kind of stops there and in surah Muhammed verse 12",
      "So Allah mentions the admitting of those who believe and do good into gardens under which rivers flow. And as for those who rejected, they enjoy or you know, they carry on and they feed like cattle but the fire is their home. They're completely lost. And lastly here, and I went over time but just because Dr. Uwemir mentioned",
      "And it's very important. SubhanAllah how Allah Azza wa Jal in verse 15 of Surah Muhammad mentions the different anhar, the different rivers over Jannah which we'll talk about inshaAllah Ta'ala in a future time in detail because it's just so powerful that you look at. Allah Azze wa Jalal mentions anharun min maa inghaybi asin wa anharu min nabinin nam yatghayir ta'mu wa anhrum min khamrin laddatin li sharibin wa anharu min aslin musaffa Allah Azzu Wa Jalla mentions rivers of fresh water. So the water has no odor to it. It never",
      "to it, it never... It's ghayri asa and it doesn't have an odor and it does not get polluted. Then you have the river of milk that never changes in its taste. There is no expiration date on the milk of Avjanma. Then we have the rivers of wine. They do not cause headache or intoxication. There are no after effects that come with that wine. And then you have rivers of pure honey, not from the bellies of bees but from the mercy of your Lord in Paradise constantly flowing in complete purity. May Allah allow us",
      "us to achieve that fate. Allahumma ameen. Fadhr Sheikh Abdullah.",
      "we can be from the people of the quran ahlullah the family of allah subhanahu wa ta'ala as the prophet mentioned the people that we are the individuals that do our best and are diligent in acting out the verses or manifesting the meanings of the verses because really when we talk about half of the is not just a memorizer rather it is the preserver",
      "verses of what is being stated you make making the phonetical sounds and the Tejweed but most importantly or the second stage after that is Hibba Manee is to memorize the meanings of the Quran what are the actual meanings that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la is uh bringing forth what are they implying what are The Different implications of these meanings to where we can act upon them accordingly and that is the ultimate goal is to act upon these beautiful verses",
      "An ayah literally means a sign. It is a sign of something. So if we see a sign, a sign is there to address or to tell you something, to give you a message about something for you to act according to that sign, to act accordingly. When you see a stop sign, it is giving you the signal to stop, to where if you don't stop, it could be detrimental to your well-being.",
      "it's an ayah Qur'aniya or it's a Ayat Qawniyyah. If it's in ayah of the Quran as we are covering now, or it is an ayat that exists within our physical essence right now in our presence that we see these are signs from Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la but do we allow these signs to be a reminder for us? A sign of what? And that's why Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala when he consistently talks about being remembered",
      "person of remembrance or a person of virtue, he gives a certain characteristic, al-sifah, a certain name that this name carries certain qualities that are earned. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala talks about in the chapter of Dariyat when He mentions in verses 20 to roughly verse number 23. Before these verses, Allah mentions the people that were of disbelief and then He talks about",
      "It talks about the believers in the people that are the mutakeen. They're in jannatin, they're in Jannah. They are the people who are taking for what their Lord has given them and they were the people they wake up at dawn and ask for forgiveness from Allah. After mentioning these two groups of people he starts to talk about certain ayat. He says",
      "And on the earth are signs for the ones that are certain. They have the yaqeen. When we look at the earth, they look at it in a different way through a different lens with different expectations, with different hopes, with fears, with a different type of love of Allah knowing He is the creator. So when we talk about tawhid and the oneness of Allah",
      "We know that he is the Lord and he has these names and attributes. The Lord meaning that he brings anything from one state to another. That's where we get the word tarbiyah from. He raises one thing, a form of creation, to be from one stage to another, from a seed to a plant, from",
      "So when we look on the earth, whether we look at a plant or whether we Look at cement or whether We look at our children anything that we look At we can take it down to its essence and realize That Allah is He is its creator he is Its maintainer and sustainer and he has Ultimate authority over it so when Allah says In the earth are signs for people that Are certain for people",
      "have ghafla and they are spiritually negligent, they may look at these signs and not even be thankful. It doesn't lead to anything that is fruitful for their well-being in this life and definitely not in the next. They may look it and contemplate over it and make a statement that shows a level of acknowledgement but it doesn't leads to gratitude. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala continues on after saying talking about the earth and its sign for the ones who are certain",
      "And in your own selves, do you not then see? Some beautiful benefits here. Firstly, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, and he doesn't say ayat. He says,",
      "in your own self. And in your onself are ayat, epheletubusidon. In your ownself are signs. You yourself are a sign. So think of you yourself. It is composed of anatomy and physiology, cells, organisms that come to form different features in your body that have different functions. And all of these functions, you have no ultimate control over. Just",
      "That reality is a sign. So when we look at our eyes or our psychology and behaviors, each and every one of these features are signs. But does the individual ponder over it? This is why dhikr is so important. A tadabur is so",
      "love, awe of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. And each one of these that I mentioned is an aspect of worship if it's directed to Allah alone because you recognize when looking at these ayats that it is Allah that brings it, maintains it, sustains it starting with yourself. Don't go far. Start with yourself and then he says أَفَلَىٰ تُبْصِرُونَ",
      "contemplation and thinking over what you're looking at. It's not just مُجَرَّد النظر. It is looking with contemplation, and pondering. So when you look at these ayahs, you ponder over it. And this is why SubhanAllah, when you know, you look the child in Arabic is called قُرَّة عينٍ. And even in the Quran قُرا means something that stays stationary or at rest",
      "So when you look at your children, it is though you don't want to look away because there's so much joy when you're looking at them. And you look and then you say it's an ayah of Allah. You look deeper and you say this child has a short temper he got that from me, got that form his mother. You start to ponder over just this form of creation and then stop and you see Subhanal Khalid, Subhanar Raziq, Subhannamudabbir This is what Allah wants from you",
      "communicates with you through these ayat. So when Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la can all conclude in this last verse, وَفِي السَّمَاءِ رِزْقُكُمْ وَمَا تُوْعَدُونَ Allah says, and in the heavens is your provision and whatever you are promised. Allah says and in heaven is your provisional how? بِإِن زَالَ الْمَطْرِ And all the other with the bringing, the sending down of the rain. Allah allows the rain to descend also in the wind whatever He brings from the sky is a form of rizq for you",
      "or form of provision. When we think about the farmer, subhanAllah, they rely on Allah directly when they see the agriculture will not grow unless Allah causes the rain to come down to let the ecosystem process take place. This is important for the individual to take a step back from the dunya and to ponder",
      "signs and allow these signs to be a means of reflection and allow the science to be amines of the different types of worship that we talked about. May Allah make us of those, that when we look at these signs, we allow it to strengthen our Iman via worshipping him in different aspects of our lives.",
      "as alluded to and elaborated upon but it's when the angels come to Ibrahim alayhis salam, layfi Ibrahim. And what is the... When the bushra is given after 13 years of Ismail alayhi salam being born to Sarah that she's going to finally have a child. She starts to hit her face. Wait a minute, how's this going to happen? How's he going to be able to produce",
      "be reproduced i'm old he's old what's happening here and the answer is right uh so your lord has pronounced it in your lord is most wise and all-powerful so subhanallah it's as much as we have the process of risk that is so obvious to us that allah is not limited to the process",
      "think that allah operates within any bounds because allah even created that process that he's calling you to ponder upon dr wayman i'd love to hear your reflections uh on anything that's been said inshallah yeah there is so much to think about surat al-dariyat is so full of really easy reminders that we need to think",
      "And this is such a reality that is so close and immediate to you when you're talking. Allah says, by the Lord of the heaven and the earth, it is, that is the day of judgment, is true just as the fact that you are speaking right now. Just as the",
      "it is going to happen. And of all the examples, this always goes deep into me because how immediate can you get? And just start through reflection. Think about how real it is that you are speaking here in the middle of it right now and the day of judgment is just as real and you will stand before Allah SWT. And, of course, at the end of Surah Al-Dariyat, the two ayats",
      "ayat that we often remind ourselves of in the khutab and so on which is So remind them because reminder helps believers. And this is such an important set of ayat. Dhikr and a believer are connected",
      "So a believer loves to be reminded. But a munafiq or somebody whose belief is not acting and is not active, they dislike being reminded. And when you ever feel that you dislike being minded, you question your iman.",
      "men and jinn, except that they worship me. So Allah SWT has given most clearly in this surah the purpose of all creation that has mind and intelligence. Jinn and men, their purpose is to worship Allah SWt. Everything else is secondary. This is the purpose.",
      "or engaged in an act of looking at Allah with awe and thinking about the ayat of Allah SWT, it doesn't need to be only in prayer as Sheikh Abdullah said. It could be whenever you are arrested by your body or your child and you're thinking not about the thing itself but Allah SWt, you enter into worship. رِجَالٌ لَا تُلْهِيهِمْ تِجارةً وَلا بَيَّرٍ عَن ذِكْرِ اللَّهِ وَإِقَامِ الصَّلَاةُ وَأِتَاءِ الزَّكَابِ",
      "And by the way, for the audience, obviously we always try to start off a little lighthearted. Alhamdulillah, we enjoy being with our brothers and sisters. You wrote a paper, The Art of Worship, last Ramadan, right Sheikh? Yeah. Last Ramadan that we published. And alhamdulilah, some of you may have seen the infographics for it as well. Very powerful. Go look up The Art Of Worship on Yapim's website. Actually two of my favorite papers are Ramadan papers. I know people don't like to read papers in Ramadan",
      "read papers in Ramadan typically. But The Art of Worship by Dr. Erwayman and then the Qista Tadabbur by Sheikh Yusuf Laha bin Sheikh Muhammad Al-Shanawi. Those two papers are just beautiful gems, mashallah. So please do go to the website, look up The Art Of Worship and Qista 2 Tadabbur because that is essentially what we are trying our best to do with the night as we go into these last days. So Dr. Arwayman so happy you could have joined us and alhamdulillah that you were able to make it with us. JazakAllah khair",
      "i got one more with for you though me and sheikh abdullah are going to a ping pong match right now inshallah so who do you have ping pong just ping pong ping pong yeah i'll give you ping pong pink pong doesn't matter no you can't say that we'll edit the audio left like uh clip the audio where he says it doesn't",
      "give you something so your favorite is showing chef your favoritism is showing that's okay we'll let it go but ping pong is a real sport i mean it's an olympic olympics sport right so it's a thing so superior athleticism next time i'm in dallas are you good at ping-pong i'm not dead no okay okay well maybe you could be check out",
      "we will definitely see coming up we appreciate you and by the way one more thing if we could ask the audience make that for shift there would be check that was actually supposed to be with us as well to discuss some some swiss he is ill may allah give him shefa so inshallah we'll have him in a future episode we'll see you all tomorrow",
      "to observe the day of Qadr and have Ramadan accepted for us."
    ]
  },
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    "text": [
      "The rise and the absence of Islam in the country that I know for a long time have been wanting to visit but now I've seen it with my eyes such blessing. And I have seen that people are turning to Allah's Ta'ala whether you go to the streets or to the malls",
      "Everywhere you see people praying, people wearing hijab and people being kind to each other. And all of these are signs of the blessing that Allah has given through scholars like yourself, through the teachers of the Quran. Which takes me to my point which is I want to make some reminders about the Quran",
      "Quran but I want to acknowledge that I am speaking as your student rather than a teacher because I was told you are all teachers and tansir of the Quran wa khayru huwa anta'allama al-Qurana wa a'yuma and you have that blessing and that honor so i speak to you",
      "as a reminder about things that you are already familiar with and know better than I do. I also want to say that, I come from the United States of America and lived there for nearly 30 years of my life before that I was born in Pakistan and raised in Suratiyya, in Jeddah And the United states",
      "The United States of America is a country that you all know as one from which a lot of things come to the Muslim world that we do not like. However, which I will not go into detail about them but",
      "ونحن سعيدون أننا نعتقد بأن الإسلام هو شيء مفهوم في الولايات المتحدة كل يوم تأتي الكثير من الأشخاص إلى الإسلام ومن أجل المسلمين هناك نعم هناك الكثيرة من الشباب الذين يؤثرون على إسلامهم ولكن الكثرة من الشابين الأصغرون",
      "Many many young people are learning the deen of Allah SWT, traveling to various parts of the Muslim world and learning our Quran, learning Qatari, learning Arabic language.",
      "you have never seen Muslims outside the land of Islam learn with such passion and that passion for the knowledge of Allah SWT is gives me a great hope in what is happening in the world",
      "and we are very grateful to be Muslims in the United States. And one of things that we find in the US is that Muslims there are aware of what is happening to other Muslims in world. To give you one example, in our district where I pray and teach and live",
      "of Ohio we do Dua for the people of Gaza every Fajr and every Ishaq and this is a reminder that the Ummah is one Ummah and as the Prophet said, we are one body",
      "our self-discipline with this connection",
      "فإن أميتكم من ديارهم وظاهرون عليهم بالفتوى العظيمة إن يأتوا بكسارا فالله محمر عليهم لخراجه أفتمنون ببعض الاتام والذكرون بابعض فما جزاؤهم إلا خزين في الحياة الدنيا ويوم القيامة يردون منها الشف العذاب ومن ضغط رافل عن ما تعملون",
      "Allah mentions three covenants in Surah Al Baqarah with the Banu Isra'il. The first one is to hold on to the Book of Allah.",
      "Tawheed and kindness to parents, kindness to everyone else. And this is the third covenant that Allah SWT mentions which is to mention the covenant of the Ummah The Ummah Al-Fara'i So first thing is the Book of Allah SWt saying it's tawheeed and kindness for people and the third one is this covenant",
      "which is the covenant of being like a body. Do not, Allah said to them, do not kill each other and do not expel each other out of your lives. And before I share some reflections about this ayah",
      "Allah mentions some, reminds us of the mighty or some principles of seer. When Allah mentions the people especially the Israeel, Allah is talking about our future, the future of this world. You see the Quran tells the stories of the past but the Quran also",
      "Allah also teaches us about the future of Muhammad by talking about the past. So we should not think that the stories in the Quran are stories of the past only.",
      "كل ما يعرفه سيكون قصة هذا القرآن ستكون لديه أسئلة للقرآين في هذه القراءات فكل قصتي في القران هي قصته التي تحتوي على أسألة للفضل خاصة أي شيء يشارك به الإسراعيل لأنهم الأقرب من القرى المحبة للقوة المحمد صلى الله عليه وسلم",
      "And especially in Surah Al-Baqarah, if you look at as some of the ulama have said. Surat al-BaQarah has a summary, a summation of the entire Quran and it has two halves. The first half of Surat Al- Baqarah is the story of Banu Isra'il and the second half is the law and instruction for this month",
      "It has 286 ayat. The first 243 and then the second 243, and right in the middle, the 243rd ayah is the Ayah of Al-Akhweel al-Qibla In which Allah says And then the next ayah talks about",
      "about the changing of the leadership of humankind from Banu Isra'il to the Ummah of Muhammad. So it is such perfectly balanced Surah in which Allah talks about the people who were CEOs of guidance. They were in charge of the guidance",
      "human beings before and in the surah al-baqarah, this surah Allah gives them a result card or report card for what they did wrong why they are being fired. And that second round Allah talks about what this ummah must do in order to succeed",
      "and it talks about all of the major ahgabs of sharia and so the five pillars of Islam and jihad and laws of marriage and divorce and so on are all mentioned in Surat Al Baqarah. And in the first half of Surah Al Baqurah, that's what I want to talk about Allah mentions these three covenants",
      "And of those covenants, the covenant that is mentioned with the greatest warning is the one in the verses I have just recited. It is Allah telling us that they failed in doing this covenant, in fulfilling this covenant for which they were fired. What was that covenant?",
      "The covenant was that they would hold on to each other. They will honor the lives and properties of each other Second thing I want you say before I go into the act itself is We sometimes read the praham like a book of poetry",
      "Sometimes we read the Quran like a book of blessings. We sometimes read the Qur'an for its beauty and sometimes we read it for its stories",
      "The Quran is greater than anything, any human experience. But the real part of the Quran, the most important part and the most reading of the Qur'an is the reading like a workbook I often tell my students if you take a book of mathematics or algebra or calculus",
      "and read a book of mathematics with all the problems? What's going to happen? Does anybody remember reading a book on mathematics? Can you lay back and read the book from problem to problem, what will happen? Do you think people understand mathematics that way? I'll talk to young people. Is this how we do mathematics? You cannot do mathematics.",
      "So what do you have to do? You have to solve the problems. You have take out your pen and you have try to answer a problem. And then on the exam, you're not going to get the exact problem that you have there.",
      "different quantities and so you have to read the Quran like a book, a workbook in which you solve the problems of life according to what Allah has given us that's the number one reading of the Quran. That is the most important reading of Quran this is not my opinion",
      "This is Allah SWT says in the Quran in Surah Yusuf",
      "and I call to Allah with wisdom, with guidance, with insight. I am anyone who follows me has to follow this path so this is you have to be a Dala'een and you all know this better than I do You all teach this So it's a warning for myself because the Quran is going to be",
      "I could judge either for us or against us and that's why we have to read the Quran asking how do i change my life? How do I transform people around me through the Quran",
      "The Mufassir would say, as you all know concerning these ayat in Surah Al-Qaherah that there were three Jewish tribes in Medina before the Prophet came and these three tribes",
      "lived with two Arab tribes, Aus and Khadrach. And Aus and Khadrach were at war with each other. So these Jewish tribes allied themselves to these two Arabs, Arab tribes and they would fight each other and they will finance the war",
      "participated in the war and this is the ayah that says to them how could you be people who follow allah and his prophet musa alaihi salam and all the prophets who came after him",
      "This one, they are coming in living with not that. They were splitting tribes of nations and fight each other to abandon each other. And then Allah says what they were doing is they would go to war with each other for political reasons because they wanted their allies to be happy.",
      "to be happy so they were allied themselves they were friends with pagans against other believers and then after the war they would be taken as slaves as prisoners of war and then they would ransom the jews that came ransomed them because in their book",
      "and you disobey when Allah says be united but believe when it comes to your private worship when its a matter of piety to give money to ransom Jews you would do that but when Allah say politically its your duty to never be united you disbelieve",
      "So when it came to their duty to each other publicly, they rejected that. And when it comes to their private duties like their worship, you know, they were told about not working on the day of Sabbath and giving charity and so on.",
      "Allah is saying you are being punished and the punishment is very harsh one of the harshest punishments given in Quran which is punishment in this dunya humiliation weakness rejection",
      "and then in the name of judgment a harsher punishment would be served. Does this sound like something familiar to us today? Does it sound like the Quran is talking to us about ourselves? Because it is! And this Ummah",
      "as Rasulullah ﷺ warned us that this ummah will be tempted to follow the footsteps of Prophet for us but at the same time, this ummuh also has some special qualities that were not given to the ummah before among them is the quality of",
      "And the fact that this ummah stands vis-a-vis humanity before humanity like the Prophet himself stood to us. Meaning Allah has given me this ummuh ma'suha not in itself but through the practice of",
      "وعلماءه يجعلون منهم شهداء على الناس",
      "سوف يكون هناك بعض مننا سيقف لأعيد الطريق الصحيح",
      "So I want to say that this ummah to which we belong, it has an engine. The engine of this ummuh is the task that you have left us with. Teachers and elders and brothers and sisters, have taken upon themselves",
      "I am so honored to be speaking to this blessed Jama'iyah of Muhammadiyyah. I am pleased by what I have learned from my dear friend and other people about Islam in Indonesia, and the effect of Muhammadiya on Islam in Egypt.",
      "Simply understand how important your work is not only to you and each other but also to the Ummah. The Ummah is going through very, very difficult times. Many things that you have achieved, the peace that you had, the blessings that you've had, wisdom that you'd have, the protection you had from attack.",
      "So do not keep it to yourself. Share it with the world of Islam. Share and learn, teach Allah's Muslims and learn from them. Be connected. And remember we cannot abandon or forget about Muslims in Gaza or India who are facing a genocide",
      "facing a genocide as well or in bolivia or elsewhere because that is instruction from the california so i will end here with again my gratitude",
      "Thanks to what I have seen in Indonesia, this kind of Islam that is beautiful. And I know we all will always have a long way to go and many things to improve. But what I see here is uplifting for me, it's encouraging for me",
      "have to spread and then you will also remember and open to the umma",
      "Thank you very much Dr. Anjung and this is what I like about Dr.Anjung he's a scholar, he's an historian, he is anthropologist but on the top of that he is also a diary you ask him to speak in conference course he is a scholar",
      "Kami senang, kami menikmati leksur. Kita mendapat banyak pelajaran dari apa yang dia katakan kepada kita.",
      "kita pernah kawal berbicara tentang Banul Sahil dan setengah sisanya berbicarakan hukum-hukum untuk umat Islam. Dan ada satu refleksi tadi, kita perlu mendekati Al-Quran dengan satu perspektif, kita ingin mencari solusi untuk permasalahan manusia hari ini. Jadi kita membaca Al-quran untuk mentransformasi diri kita dan mentranspormasikan masyarakat kita.",
      "Mereka stick dengan aturan tak boleh keluar sama misalnya Tapi berpecah belah satu sama lain Salik mempunyai bulan satu sama lagi Bahkan tadi apa namanya, merumpakan keadaan orang lain Jadi itu sama dengan beriman pada sebagian dari Allah tapi ukur pada sebaik yang lain",
      "Kepenjelitaan yang lain, terutama banyak tadi disebut untuk Tengah Gaza. Tapi umat Islam itu punya satu keunggian di tempat-tempat yang lain. Kita adalah tempat yang maksud. Secara politik kita tidak akan jatuh kepada kesalahannya sama secara bersama-sama. Pasti ada sebagian dari kita yang bangkit menginginkan dan menerangkan konsep nomor 1 untuk TNI Bukalapakit.",
      "Alhamdulillah, saya bisa berpindah sekali. Damai, tenang, rukun satu sama lain. Di awal video tadi cerita, beliau masuk mall, orang sekolah, apa namanya... Nah pesan Dr. Angga Ranjum, ajarkan, sampaikan apa yang Anda katakan disini kepada",
      "Indonesia memiliki kelebihan, distinsi. Kelebihaannya harus dibagikan kepada yang lain untuk kita punya pengaruh di global",
      "Saya merasa sangat termotivasi dan saya optimis ke depan banyak orang positif. Untuk umumnya secara global, terutama fenomena yang selalu di Indonesia sangat berkegirakan. Jadi itu sekedar summary mungkin ada kekurangan lebihnya tapi kita membuka tanya jawab satu atau dua ada tiga orang penanya silahkan ikut menanyainya. Boleh dari bahasa Inggris, boleh dari Bahasa Arab atau dari Indonesia.",
      "am nah katina atas sirih lah kainan aku nangkat ilah tafsir akar liyunasi pihak dalam sejarah",
      "Shri Mataji, so I'll make it very short inshaAllah. My view is that when we understand the sharia and sometimes we don't understand aspects of the shariah but we should work to fill the conditions in which the shai'a can be included",
      "and studies of the sciences and history, one of the things that becomes clear is the idea of progress. The idea that the world has changed so that the law yesterday did not apply. That idea is based on the idea progress. And that idea is now in place",
      "and discredit it or at least question even in the West. Human nature is always the same, human nature does not change and Allah knows human nature best but it is important for us to prioritize, to give priority to bigger powers so for instance if we live in states that are divided up",
      "and we because they are the final we are all recipients of influence from outside from West or from China or Russia so we are not able to implement to live in a way that Allah SWT commands us",
      "our economy, as well as our politics is indebted to ideas and institutions that are foreign to us now. So in my view it's important to work on multiple fronts but its important to the unity of strength economic strength social strength and political strength",
      "Tapi jawaban pendek untuk pertanyaan ini adalah, syariah tidak pernah terbuka.",
      "Konsep kongres itu secara filosofis bahkan berganti kepada orang-orang sendiri. Itu jawaban filosofinya, di luar itu dia terangkan untuk uang yang perlengkapan seperti kita cekirkan ada satu rumah, ekonomi, politik dan syariah akan besar.",
      "berupaya menciptakan kemungkinan semua syaitan Allah itu bisa kita terapkan.",
      "وخاصة في هذه الحرمة الجامعية الممتعة بسورة كنتا فأنا لسجد محمدكم ثانيا وتقدم أو تقدم لكالي الشكر والتقدير على ما قدم لنا من الله القيمة والميناء أسأل الله تعالى لهم الإفلاح والسجاد والتوفيع لخدمة الدستار والنصومين",
      "السؤال ما هي أو هل تتنمى لنا من أكبر التحديات التي واجهتمها بنشرة دعوة الإسلامية في الدولة المدينة الأمريكية؟",
      "So yeah, the challenges that we have in the United States or in the West in general. They are very, very significant. Many problems, many challenges. Why? Because",
      "the west is very strong and Muslims are we as human beings either influencing or we are being influenced",
      "or we are madura there is no third possibility but either calling or you're being called you're making da'wah, or da'wa will be made to you and what I mean by that is we have many people young people among Muslims that are leaving Islam according to one study which is somewhat old",
      "number of Muslims who potentially lead Islam. The number is somewhat exaggerated according to some other studies, but we don't have any other good studies that can show that. But let us assume this is the case 23%. And this number is high for all religions. That's why this number",
      "It's dangerous to live in the West.",
      "They are not safe, they're leaving Islam. On the other hand those who are putting in the Al-Jazara, they are causing people to come into Islam. So a lot of people are coming into Islam and then some people are leaving Islam And we hope that if Allah wills it even though we don't have data that number of people coming into islam is much greater than the number which we need.",
      "Number two, danger that you have and we hope to Allah that you do not have in this society is the issue of LGBT. To whom have a good human being? And these problems unfortunately when they grow in the society living in perfect distance. Not because students begin to do those things",
      "you are wanted, you're repressed and you are the same as people who are killing them if you are not giving them their identity so we have to stand by our laws and come together even in the West this is one of the things that we are seeing which is that Muslims",
      "Muslim scholars in America came together and wrote the Al-Qadba together. Initially it was 20 of us, I was one of them, and now alhamdulillah there are 300 of us who signed their main statement and said that this is the Islamic ruling on LGBT",
      "and because of that statement even non-Muslims, Christians, this is only 1% of society in America, very small but because of the statement even Christians became encouraged to fight back. And Muslims became known in America as people who stand for their values and are fighting for their children",
      "Because Americans are looking at Westerners, people in Britain and Europe and France they see how these people are being killed and massacred. There is a genocide happening",
      "But their demand is so strong that even the children and women, old people do not give up. Right? They come out and say, oh it hurts too much. They lose their lives. And this is very strange for people in the West because they cannot get enough of pain.",
      "They cannot understand these people who are suffering and they don't blame Allah. And what happens to the rest? When they suffer, they lose jobs or they have a divorce or they get really tired. They blame Allah because their akhila is broken. It's not happening for man. It does not happen. So even when they're Christians, they leave Christianity if they get hurt.",
      "This is what happens when people become modern and they think of Allah and the Deen as their service. Rather than thinking of Allah SWT as the master who has all of the rights, and He has given us this body and this life, and if we take it back to His, they don't have a chance at all. So when you see the people in Gaza, now thousands and thousands of Americans are really equal",
      "Tens of thousands are willing to read the Quran because of what they see, of the courage of people who listen. So there are many things that you know and many people also I will give one last example Many Arab scholars when they come into Indonesia or Malaysia they say this Islam is beautiful and peaceful And this encourages them to become Muslim so don't think that you can be a just man",
      "Nah, saya ingin mengingatkan ke mereka, karena itu bahaya untuk mereka. Kalau tidak akan diberikan sebuah perintah yang sangat terdapat dari masyarakat luas, pindahan mereka dengan cekatan ekonomi, itu pasti akan beruntung kepada nasib yang salah. Akhir-akhirnya menyebabkan kesalahan, pertama kemasih kedua, kemasihan ketiga. Kemudian, masalah kedua adalah masalah ini dan masalah lainnya juga masalah Indonesia.",
      "Nah masalahnya itu kering, ketika kita tidak terima LGBT maka seram disebut intoleran, disebut kengis. Tidak bisa menerima normal dan berkualitas lain. Tapi begini, Muslim diantara yang kuat sekali untuk mempertahankan nilai-nilainya moralitas bukan mengolah LGBT. Dan ini adalah kekurangannya karena pengolahan pada LGBT ialah orang bergurau-gurung dengan sosial",
      "Saya pikir satu pertanyaan terakhir.",
      "Thank you. Do you believe in what Pope William said about the end of history?",
      "I believe, I will answer you with a statement that a Christian fundamentalist preacher one of the most famous preachers in America, Patrick Buchanan he wrote about Islam in the 90s. In an article he wrote books about it as well and he said",
      "Islam is an idea whose time has come. Islam is a Christian who is looking at the world as a Christian",
      "He knows what's happening to the God",
      "It's not a break. It's just a break, it's just. It happened before when was under crusaders for 87 years before he was taken back and then we had similar weakness when we were defeated or when half of Islamic world was taken by",
      "the Mongols and destroy it. But we recover, so I believe that Islam is not a civilization that can ever end until the end of time. Why? Because Islam is NOT a civilization like Romans based on paganism or Greeks based on Pagan philosophy. Islam is basically letting everything go up in the world of Allah",
      "If we abandon it, if we give it up what will happen? Allah will find better people who would not give it Up. Who would love Allah more than they loved the pleasure of this dunya and they would carry on because Islam is a civilization that is not dependent on discovery or science or whatever as important as well",
      "I can tell you as somebody who studies the West and all my colleagues in my university are Indians, and I talk to Western students that people need sand like they need water and air. And they're suffering",
      "And we see their suffering day and night.",
      "and she her professor taught her Islam in the worst possible way gave her books, the ayat about you know 434 he would assign all the ayats so that students will debate Islam but she said",
      "When she realized, she said she was angry.",
      "her reaction was anger why was she angry? I asked her and this is a very strange thing because i asked her, we've been married for 15 years now but I wonder what I told her. I asked why were you angry about Ishaan She said because I know how much I suffer",
      "Why do you not love Islam? Why did you never tell us about Islam before? So the anger was, all the suffering that we have. That Muslims cannot understand. Muslims who have not seen Tufl, who've not experienced... We don't Sahaba love Islam because they had experienced Tufi and sometimes it's really hard",
      "I used to say, afraid of the other generations you will not understand Islam. We don't know Islam because we do not know who. So it's important sometimes to hear from others and but anyway this is why I believe that there is no now in fact there is end of history that Sheikh mentioned that the famous book by Francis de Briand",
      "the end of history. Francis Fukuyama himself in his book, in his more recent book called Prize rolls back a thesis because even America has changed and the world is moving to multi-corder direction and not everybody accepts that",
      "a civilization once again because otherwise we would be divided between different poles and hit against each other like we are already seeing. And I also think that this is a great opportunity that the world is putting from unipolar to a multipolar system again but you know, we have many opportunities and many weaknesses",
      "And one final thing I would say that, Talbata al-Hilm, ulama of Islam unfortunately statistically speaking as we look at the world seem to be people who have the knowledge of Allah SWT but they are not ready to leave.",
      "And often some of the people who have even signed will be oppressors against Islam because they don't have hope. This is happening in America, some people are citing Zionists, this is happening on the Middle East and it's very powerful for our young people that non-Muslims",
      "are ahead of them in fighting for justice. Even for Palestine, non-Muslims are fighting other people are fighting with the ulama of Islam young Muslims are fighting but the ulamas of Islam are not always some ulama are hard don't get me wrong but some ulamas understand Islam in a way that they're very hopeless and hopelessness is not about",
      "Hopelessness is not a quality of belief. Very strange. He used to love optimism. He had hope in the worst of times, so I don't know how we as a Buddha have learned and yes, hopelessness. When other people are afraid of us, other people have hope in us",
      "Tapi kita punya pertanyaan. Pertanyaan terakhir, apa yang bisa kita lakukan seperti di perjalanan sebelumnya?"
    ]
  },
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    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. There's several announcements today. First, the Islamic Society of Orange County continues their Family Ummah Night Fund is the acronym that's been given to this. Tonight we'll have Dr.",
      "Tonight we'll have Dr. Ovemir Anjum from Toledo University as our special guest. He'll be talking about the qualities of a believer. Planned to arrive around 6.30 p.m., enjoy some good food, and the talks will begin after Isha prayer, inshallah. We also welcome back Sister Iman Sidki tomorrow morning at 11 a.m. to 1 p. m. She will be talking",
      "to 1 p.m., and every second Saturday of the month, we'll be having a special Islamic studies class for our Spanish-speaking brothers and sisters. Flyers are available at the ISOC booth outside. Tomorrow evening, MPAC, the Muslim Public Affairs Council will be holding the annual convention. Dr. Maher Hathout is expected to make a brief appearance. For complete details, please visit their website",
      "Mommy and Me, the classes for Mommy and me will be having their end of the year event at 10 a.m. to noon. Toddlers ages 2-5 years old can take part in a butterfly story as nature artist Samaware takes children through a journey with animals. The fee is $5. On December 21st Islamic Relief will be holding a gala to offer gratitude to its supporters. Tickets are available",
      "main office for this event iso sees in the final weeks of its winter sock drive if you've seen the boxes outside please participate and donate there this is in cooperation with the uplift charity and we'll be distributing these packages containing jackets sweaters shoes and socks on December 24th if you'd like to take part of this please also stop by the ISOC booth inshallah",
      "you move your car after your prayers and so you're not holding back anybody else that needs to get to work inshallah.",
      "السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته",
      "نستغفره ونتوب إليه أشهد أن لا إله إلا الله وأشهד أن محمدا عبده ورسوله أرسله الله بالهدى ودين الحق ليظهره على الدين كله اللهم صل وسلم وزيد وبارك على نبينا وسيدنا ومولانا وقدوتنا وحبيبنا محمد وعلى آله وسحبه أجمعين ومن تابعاه بإحسان إلى يوم الدين وأنا معهم يا رب العالمين",
      "I begin by praising Allah SWT, bearing witness that there is no worthy of worship. There is no worth of our ultimate devotion. There's no worthy being our ultimate source of reference and our ultimate",
      "the one to whom we turn for support and succor and guidance. And Muhammad, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him is his servant and his messenger and our guide and our love. Whomsoever Allah guides cannot be misled and whosoever Allah allows to go astray cannot be guided. It's a pleasure and an honor for me to be speaking at this masjid",
      "at this masjid, at the masjids of so many of you my brothers and sisters and that is my topic today but especially the Masjid of Sheikh Muzammil Siddiqui whom I have great respect and admiration for. My topic today is brotherhood and sisterhood in Islam",
      "talking tonight and tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow for the seminar on revival and reform in Islam. My purpose today is to say something about the importance of brotherhood toward reform. That is how our brotherhood and sisterhood is central, it's crucial",
      "and the reform of the Muslim community, and then reform of Ummah, and reform of humanity at large, and of creation of Allah. These are concentric circles. Concentric circles meaning they're circles of our responsibility to our communities, and to the Ummah at large and all of Allah's creation.",
      "All of that begins with an openness to others. With love for others. And Allah uses this metaphor in the Quran of brotherhood and sisterhood. The believers are brothers. In fact, innama in Arabic means an exclusive definition.",
      "are only brothers that's the only way you can understand brothers and how do we treat our brothers with despite maybe differences you might have little disagreements you fight with each other but if you are natural if your nature your fitra the way Allah has created it hasn't been corrupted then for your brothers and sisters you have love that is much bigger than any disagreements",
      "matter even if you haven't seen your brothers and sisters for a long time when they need you will do everything including sacrificing your own wealth and yourself in order to help your brothers & sisters so brother this is the image Allah uses to describe the relationship between believers",
      "that was initiated, inaugurated by the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ began with the creation of brotherhood as Allah ﷻ says وَأَلَّفَ بَيْنَ قُلُوبِهِمْ وَلَوْ أَنفَقْتَ مَا فِي الْأَرْضِ جَمِيعًا مَعَ أَلّفْتُ بَیْن قُولُوبٍ وَلاكِنَّ اللَّهَ أَّلَّфَ بِيْناهُمْ Allah says in the Qur'an that Allah joined the hearts brought together the hearts of them. That means",
      "war that would go on for decades. On small petty things like that and these people's hearts were joined by Allah SWT and Allah says that O Prophet had you spent everything in the world ما في الأرض جميعا ما ألفت بين قلوبهم You would not have been able to join their hearts together but Allah SWt joined their hearts by Iman إنما المؤمنون إخوة فأصلحوا بين أخويكم And because believers are brothers then it becomes each of",
      "then it becomes each of our responsibility to do Islah, to be peacemaking. And we as believers immediately become by definition peacemakers first between brothers in Iman and those who are brothers of course in biologically brothers sisters or cousins they have even a greater right to love each other and if they are in disagreement to make peace between them becomes even more of our",
      "We all as Muslims are active peacemakers. And then our responsibility toward each other extends to all of our community of Muslims in any locality, in any place and then to the whole of the Ummah and then",
      "of the Ummah. Like it was a case with the companions of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, Islah reform begins with brotherhood and sisterhood. It begins... And what is involved in brotherhood or sisterhood? In ukhwah or in this ta'leef, brotherhood, or this bringing of hearts together. That is we must do. And now we must invest time",
      "understanding and implementing this. Our path to Jannah is difficult. The Prophet ﷺ says that Allah has made the Jannah, and then surrounded it with things that are very hard to do. And then there is Jahannam which is surrounded by things that",
      "looks at the Jannah one feels that no human being who has been informed about it should stay ever stay out of it even if after they have to sacrifice everything for it but when one looks at difficulties and the traps the snares the deception around around it one thinks that no one will enter this Jenna",
      "the reality of Jahannam one knows what eternal despair is. No one who has any ounce of reason would ever enter but if you look at the traps around it, if you looked at how attractive it is, it seems that no one will be saved from it. Life is difficult",
      "Allah says in the Quran, O man you are toiling on toward your Lord. A difficult toil until you will see Him. There is no shortcut to Jannah except one. There's no shortcut there's no shortcuts to Janna except one shortcut which is this which is brotherhood and sisterhood for the sake of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Why is that a shortcut?",
      "Well, imagine yourself living alone and believing in Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala upholding the truth. Upholding the five pillars of Islam not engaging in haram all by yourself praying fajr all by yourselves giving charity very difficult",
      "And add to that picture other people. You become part of a community. You have brothers and sisters, husbands, wives, parents, a community, a masjid that is beautiful, a place that you want to be in. Other people who can remind you of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and all of a sudden this very difficult task of being moral, being right, being truthful in a very deceptive world",
      "becomes much easier. In fact, it becomes difficult for you to do wrong if you have good brothers and sisters who will remind you. Try standing up and praying at night all by yourself and say, You know what? Two nights a week where I'm going to pray at night to get close to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala which is the best thing to do to get closer to Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. Try doing that yourself",
      "that yourself and then try doing it maybe in a masjid and say make an announcement, say you know what? A few brothers and sisters are going to gather in this place and you're going to do qiyam al-layl. And compare the two. Which one is likely to be more successful? You're going your success rate is going to be incomparable to your own personal effort if you have brothers and",
      "and start memorizing Quran. And that very difficult effort to memorize the Quran, you have to spend time every day. You have to discipline yourself. You need to learn Tajweed and you have use your memory. Your brain gets bigger but it's hard to do that on your own. But when an effort with brothers and sisters begins, it becomes so much easier to memorize Quran and to live with the Quran. So brotherhood",
      "And sisterhood is a shortcut to Jannah. If there is a short cut in this world to Janna, it is to have brothers and sisters. Now let me talk about the four levels of brotherhood and sisterhood that I referred to earlier. The first and most important and intense is to love a brother or a sister whether that's related to you or not for the sake of Allah alone. This is one of the greatest pleasures",
      "greatest pleasures in the world Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi wasallam says three things if they're found in a person has found the sweetness of faith where Iman believing in Allah struggling for the sake of Allah and Iman by the way is not just empty abstract",
      "faith, to do faith. But Iman becomes sweet if you have one of these three things. If you had three things first One that Allah and His Messenger become beloved to you than anything else. You have that you find sweetness of faith. The second one is",
      "that you love someone for no other reason but because that person has Iman. That person makes you think of Allah SWT and that brings you closer. And finally",
      "or that he hates to go back to kufr in a very physical way. That is, to not be a believer, to NOT be a Muslim, is something that is so physically painful for you the idea just like and as impossible to imagine as that you would voluntarily throw yourself into the fire. That's physical. So if you have these three things you found the sweetness of faith",
      "acquire or one of the easiest things to acquire is to have that connection with somebody whom you love for the sake of allah because that makes all the other things easier so this is the first circle the most intense kind of brotherhood and sisterhood in islam and it is something that does not come easy very few of us are fortunate",
      "by if you struggle in the path of Allah and suffer in the Path of Allah with someone. Whether you struggle, in upholding truth doing something or bringing a masjid together or learning Talabul Ilm If you learn with someone and struggle to learn either the Quran or that is when you begin to really love and know someone So if you have that you are fortunate The second level",
      "Is the love and harmony within the community. People who are your community, these are the people with whom you want to raise your children. The masjid that is going to help raise your children. That's your community. These are the pople whose faces you see may not know their names. And this is something without which we cannot live as believers. Very very difficult.",
      "And it is this that we need to invest in. This brotherhood and sisterhood in Islam. Rasulullah ﷺ says in a hadith, That a man was visiting someone, And Allah sends an angel and asks, Why are you visiting? For business? For collecting some debt? The man says, No only because I love this man for the sake of Allah. The angel says, This is in Sahih Muslim,",
      "wanting to visit that man for the sake of Allah. So visiting each other, caring for each other helping each other people that you know and people that do not know That can have a transformative effect on your life, your inner life your life of Iman You can become a happy person happier than you would be if you bought a much more expensive car or a much bigger house",
      "wife or much richer husband than if you have people around you who love you for the sake of Allah whom you can give for the sakes of Allah and who will help you in your time of need. And finally, humanity at large. You cannot make da'wah to people that you do not love.",
      "Which equates non-Muslims with kufr and then kufir with hatred. So somehow you're supposed to make da'wah to people that you hate. Whereas the Prophet ﷺ is described in the Qur'an as almost killing himself out of concern for his people, and his people are non-Muslims of Arabia. وَلَعَلَّكَ بَاخِعُ النَّفْسَكَ عَلٰى آثَارِهِمِ لَّمْ يُؤْمِنُوا بِهَذَا الْحَدِيثِ أَسَفًا",
      "It is a hadith, a sahih hadith which I'm sure that many of us know. A Muslim is one from whose hands and whose tongue other Muslims are safe. But there's a second part of this hadith that is less well known.",
      "A believer in the same hadith, a Muslim is somebody who saves other Muslims from his hands and his tongue. So it's a very basic requirement. But then a mu'min which is a higher level is one to whom people, annasu not al-muslimun, annas, people are willing to entrust their bloods, their lives and their wealth. That is a mu'tmin.",
      "So the ulama here reflect on the difference between a Muslim, which is the entry-level job with Allah. It's just entry- level where a mu'min is where you want to be if you look at throughout the Quran all reward is promised to only the mu'minoon very few in fact there is only a couple of mentions indirect of muslimoon but all of the rewards are promised to the mu'tminoon",
      "people, not just Muslims are willing to entrust their lives and their wealth. So all of our humanity, all the creation of Allah, humans and non-humans must be recipients of our mercy as was the case with our Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam وَمَا رُسَلْنَاكَ إِلَّا رَحْمَةً لِّلْعَالَمِينَ I ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to make us among those who love each other and who love Him and who draw near to each other",
      "who become examples for the humanity at large, for what it means to be good people. I will leave you with this hadith of Rasulullah ﷺ",
      "what it means to live a good life. A life that is pleasing to Allah SWT. Spread peace, spread greetings of peace. Spread greetings of with Muslims and greetings of",
      "have to understand so make greetings to them gestures that they understand you have to differentiate between believers and non-believers no doubt about it muslims are non-muslims but not all non-Muslims rejecters of truth they're not kuffar they are the people that you were concerned about because they can be much better Muslims than you are they can",
      "So you have to start with the brotherhood and sisterhood within your community. But not, our brotherhood is not self-righteous in the sense that I'm going to on the day of judgment laugh at the people who are non-Muslim.",
      "in Surah Yasin that with this man the story in Surat Yasin who when he is he makes da'wah prophets come to a people, people reject these prophets. A man comes and then advocates on behalf of the prophets People kill this man He's a martyr by his own people He goes to Jannah And his dua to Allah there in Jannah",
      "In Jannah, he is praying and wishing that my people knew what is it that has brought me this salvation and reward so that they would do the same. These people who had martyred him. This is the ethic of the Prophet. This isthe morality of the prophet and this is a believer is a mu'min to whom people will be willing to entrust their lives and their wealths.",
      "is in a state of deep profound crisis you look at the economy, you look as the environment, you looked military conflicts. You look at greed of those who do not have, the worship of wealth, the worshipping power, the things that disappear in the emptiness spiritual intellectual emptiness of the world and how could it be we do not contribute?",
      "How could it be that we have that path to safety but we do not share it with others? And to do that, brotherhood and sisterhood in Islam is the way. It's the beginning.",
      "يا أرحم الراحمين اللهم أعز الإسلام والمسلمين الله منصري الإسلم والم مسلمين الله أرحمن فوق الأرض وتحت الأرض ويوم العرض إليك وأخر دعوانا أن الحمد لله رب العالمين وأقيم الصلاة",
      "shoulder to shoulder and pray attentively as if this is your last prayer for it might very well be.",
      "الرحمن الرحيم مالك يوم الدين إياك نعبد وإياك تستعين اهدنا الصراط المستقيم صراط الذين نعمت عليهم غير المغضوب عليهم ولا الضالين",
      "فآوى ووجدك ضلا فهدا فأما اليتيم فلا تقهر وأما السائل فلا أنهر",
      "الله أكبر الحمد لله رب العالمين الرحمن الرحيم مالك يوم التقوى",
      "ولم نشرح لك صدرك ووضعنا عنك وزرك الذي أنقذ ظهرك ورفعنا لك ذكرك فإن مع العسر يسرا إن مع الع سر يوسرا فإذا فروت فانصب وإلى ربي كفرغب",
      "ہم اپنے دوستان کو بہترین مسجد کے لئے عمر انجم کی شکریہ کرتے ہیں۔ اللہ سبحانہ وتعالیٰ اس سے محبت کرے اور ہمیں یہاں سے پڑھنا جائے گا اور ہاتھیوں کا ایک دوسرا رضا اور بھارت میں ہمارے کسی کے ساتھ تعلق ہے",
      "for themselves as well as their family members. So, Sister Ruksana Yousuf is suffering from cancer. Sister Zubaydah Sattar is critically ill in Karachi. Sister Laura is not feeling well. Sister Rafia Mir Ali is critically",
      "My Mutiullah Saqi is also not very well. Please pray for the health of all these people. May Allah give them Shifa. Also, for the Maghfira of our brother Anwar Hassan's younger brother Afaq Hassan passed away in Karachi. Also Ustaz Hassan Alwan's father passed away",
      "May Allah give them forgiveness.",
      "اس کے لئے ہماری مسجد میں بھی سوچیں اور انہوں نے اشااللہ میسج سے مفید کرتے ہیں"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Liberalism _ Dr_ Ovamir Anjum _ Ramadan Sessions 2_GqP8M5cEUT8&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750671085.opus",
    "text": [
      "Ramadan Kareem for all, for each and everyone those who are attending and those who aren't. Ramadan Kureem for Muslims May Allah make it a different Ramadan and may Allah make the next Ramadan even better This is our 11th series of Ramadan session program started 10 years ago It started differently at home and then at masjid and then masjids and zoom",
      "zoom and now because of the pandemic we are doing it only through zoom we hope inshallah that allah will uplift this pandemic and go back also to a masjid and they will still also streaming through zoom and facebook uh ramadan sessions are meant to be just to give some background about it are meant",
      "we are discussing spiritual, intellectual and political issues because these things are not antagonist. We don't view them as antagonistic to each other. We do not have differences between separation between matter and spirit and politics Alhamdulillah Rabbil Alameen Every year we choose different topics and for this year last year we addressed atheism issue of evil",
      "This year, after mutual discussion and consultation with different people in different areas, we chose these four important topics which are mentioned in the program, in the announcement of the program. We received some notes from different people, different places in the world regarding this program. Let me share with you just one letter we got about this year's program.",
      "year's program. The brother said quote, for those interested in getting a critical introduction to the some of the ideological concepts of the world today is constructed by this series starting today with Dr Anjum presenting liberalism it's always refreshing to read and listen to Dr Anjam as he always strikes me with his ability",
      "concepts in any, in an easy yet critical way. He mentioned one note that we should be aware of the time difference which is very really difficult and inshallah I mean the team will take this not in consideration for the future and not to he says this should not be approached as indoctrination all caps for or against",
      "It's best to be approached as an opportunity to stimulate your mind and to build or revisit your own views on this particular version of dunya, as Allah destined us to live through. And I'm very sure that all our great speakers will keep this in their minds. I don't think anyone of them will use the indoctrination approach.",
      "indoctrination approach with this i will leave it to the our moderator brother zaid hannini everyone for attending um institute's 11th annual ramadan series inshallah today is the first session out of four that we have for this month where we're going to be covering insha'Allah the topic",
      "our way, but I want to take care of a couple of housekeeping rules. So if you guys could please keep your microphones off throughout the entirety of the session as to not disturb the speaker or to cause a distraction during the session and also if you have any questions throughout the entire day of the section, please message the host called Q&A. We will keep track of all the questions that you have throughout this session and we'll be able to answer them and address them in a time period after the speaker is done so",
      "at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He's the author of a few notable works, one being Politics, Law and Community in Islamic Thought, The Daymian Moment. And he has translated Madarija al-Sadiqeen by Ibn Al Qayyim. So without further ado, Dr. Oweymir, the floor is yours inshaAllah.",
      "This is such a blessed month to be speaking to brothers and sisters and elders who are interested in learning about the world from the perspective of the deen of Allah. And it is a blessed gathering as said Abu Tariq said, when we look at the world you know Rasulullah",
      "engaged in policy and war during this month as we know the very first battle on the most blessed of them was waged during the month of Ramadan. And that is very much the essence of our deen. I will have quite a bit to say,",
      "say the topic of liberalism is one that is quite complicated and difficult to grasp, not because it is unfamiliar but because it's too familiar. So it's kind of like you can't really distinguish it from many things that you don't have much",
      "if you grew up in it. And many ideas, even when you think critically, you may be thinking from within a liberal paradigm. So it's kind of like, you know, if everything was blue, you would really not be able to tell the color blue. You simply would see a void.",
      "for the last couple of centuries, it is difficult to identify its influence be good or bad. So I'm going to have to go into some technical discussion of liberalism and I'll require your patience and to bear with me",
      "to bear with me as I read some thoughts that I jotted down because I felt that given the time we have, I want to read it quickly and then revisit issues that you may like to touch on in the question-answer session. So is liberalism an ideology?",
      "Now, when we are talking about liberalism, are we talking about an ideology or an attitude or set of sensibilities or a condition? And here's the difference between them.",
      "It's no longer a challenge. You have defeated it. Similarly, if you're defending an ideology, all you have to show is that this ideology, these basic set of ideas are good and they're compelling and reasonable. But then there is a different aspect of our life where we live most of our lives not thinking cerebrally about right and wrong",
      "live my life, but rather we live with sensibilities and attitudes of all my choices that are very much part of my style of decision making. My style of preferring one thing over another the things that I love and as the ulama of the past will talk about it your alwala and what baraq, the things you take to be basis of your solidarity",
      "and things that you fear instinctively, things that love instinctively. So if that is something that people can... If liberalism is also an attitude and a set of sensibilities then it is something or that can be adopted and enacted in practices even if you don't rationally assent to its key ideas because there's no one set",
      "one set of key ideas, but many different justifications people use to justify their attitude. And that attitude is then what becomes the key issue. So you have to understand what is it that we're talking about. A third possibility is that a liberalism is a condition. It's merely, if you will, the water in which we swim or the air we breathe, such as no definite",
      "as ever present reality that criticism of its basic ideas doesn't eliminate its reality in the institutions and the habits of people, in the technologies that we all depend on and so on. And I argue that liberalism because it has been very successful, it is each one of these three things",
      "important as it is, it is never sufficient. And the same by the way goes for Islam as well and I'm going to compare Islam to liberalism because liberalism offers an alternative to Islam which is not to say that Islam and liberalism are at loggerheads in every possible step in every detail but that liberalism makes fundamental claims about life",
      "And not about God, but about what place belief in God should have in our life. And as such it is a competing ideology and all successful ideas in Islam including that shape human behavior are such that they're no longer ideas because reason or conscious thinking alone is a weak force",
      "in determining human behavior. This means that success of liberalism, which may have been an ideology whose roots can be traced to John Locke or John Stuart Mill or John Rawls, as you can notice, Johns are the problem. So if you remove all the Johns in the world we may get rid of liberalist. No, that's a joke. But from Locke and Mill to Rawls you have a progression",
      "liberal ideology means that it's no longer merely an ideology whose defeat can lead to the end of its influence. So what is liberal ideology? Well, of course, the word liberalism comes from liberty or freedom of humans from external constraints be that government or community or society or religion. Now, of",
      "The idea of freedom itself is an innovation in human history. People now try to talk about freedom as an Islamic idea, but of course we don't even have a word for freedom in the way that freedom is understood in liberalism until the modern period when it's translated from after French Revolution into Arabic and other Islamic languages. The word for Freedom in Islam is freedom from slavery",
      "from slavery, from servitude, from domination of others. But there isn't... if you're not a slave of someone then there was no word for freedom the word hurriya is new so the same is incidentally true in Christianity that the word freedom exists but its meanings are entirely different and Christians historically understood that in the same way that Muslims would use other words to express",
      "For Christians, freedom would be only used as in the sense of freedom from one's desire and one's passion in order to serve Christ. Similarly, Muslims would say, as in",
      "That to take humanity, the servants of God out of the servitude to other servants, other slaves to the service of God alone and so on. So that is the concept of freedom which is always intimate if you would indirect and oblique. In the modern sense",
      "positive freedom, as opposed to the negative freedom which is a modern liberal freedom. Negative freedom means that it's freedom from external constraints on your desire, on your choices and your choice has no external constraint. The only principle that liberalism ultimately can accept is the no harm principle",
      "to do whatever you want. Now, of course the problem becomes the million dollar question becomes what is harm? And then a very advanced system of law and state and all kinds of human decisions and choices are enter into this making deciding what is a harm and what isn't harmed whether your environment harming the environment and therefore harming others and whether your behavior is inappropriate because it's harming some people by freedom",
      "freedom of speech and so on. So the no harm principle, if you will, brings in all the baggage that liberalism wants to get rid of but nonetheless in its simple form freedom from external constraints is the liberal ideal as opposed to the positive freedom of freedom to be a better person, freedom to",
      "understand traditional Islam. Now there are three or four key and interrelated liberal ideas that articulate this set of, this worldview. Autonomy, individualism, public reason, and human rights. So the first one is autonomy meaning literally autonomy means a kind",
      "more specific, it's the idea is auto-know me, meaning I give myself my norms, my right and wrong. So literally it means that it's opposition to heteronomy which is the idea that appears in Kant and early Enlightenment thinkers that people who believe in religion or people",
      "have uh sort of they follow blindly some other authority by the be it a government or be it some sheikh or murshid or something uh they are unfree and um and therefore not able to think for themselves and autonomy then is a condition opposed to both in",
      "both institutionalized religion as well as community influence and so on. Individualism is similarly opposed to, and it's overlapping idea, it is opposed to the idea of whether there's any kind of collectivism. So whether it's communitarianism or communalism or communism or socialism that individuals are first",
      "part of a group and their rights are decided based on that belonging. Well, individualism rejects that collectivism and affirms the absolute primacy of the individual. And public reason. So unlike the kind of reason that may be philosophical and metaphysical that believes it asks the question of what is the purpose of life?",
      "of life what ought we do to our lives those are not questions that can be asked in liberalism uh in as a political system now i i want to emphasize here that liberalism is often seen as a critical system but it if you accept that it's a political",
      "Grant its best wishes. You have very little chance of critiquing it or understanding if we're defending, if you will another system, if your grant that is in fact merely a political system because the fundamental project it has is precisely to make the claim that the political sphere can be separated from the ethical private sphere and",
      "And you can have private beliefs where you want whatever beliefs you want, so long as you don't harm others and so long. You can live within the constraints of a public reason. And finally, the modern particularly 20th century form of liberalism that has come to dominate the language of liberal is human rights which are with belong to individuals",
      "individuals and which are supposed to be inalienable. All right, so what we need to understand is how liberalism functions rather than it's merely its basic claim. So it's important to know its basic claims but you don't know anything about liberalism if all you know is its basic clients. If you were to read the self-description for instance of nationalist socialism like Nazism or fascism or any conservative ideology you would find them all compelling",
      "compelling you know, you find them all as a mixed bag. You know some ideas are interesting others you don't maybe agree with so there is no human ideology that lays out or system that lays outs at stakes or even understands them because as a human as human system you have to understand where this is going to go and new stakes and new understandings evolve but there are few common threads in liberal thought",
      "liberal thought and has common consequences. And one of the almost universal consequence of liberalism is dissolution of community, and to some degree, dissolution family in some of its forms and phases. Liberalism considers religious institutions and community it's mortal enemies but when that enemy has been defeated,",
      "Meaning that the free individuals that liberalism creates get into all sorts of problems, and then religion can be tolerated as providing solace. Similarly, family provides solace to those individuals. Liberalism presupposes and proposes a psychology, a theory of human nature and of human feeling",
      "is that its desires are not subordinated to rationality or religion, or any other transcendent ordering force. That desire comes out of a source that is completely beyond our understanding because liberalism assumes that we cannot understand the world outside the physical impulses and physical behavior which means that you cannot say certain desires",
      "desires are evil, but other desires are good. And this also means that people often equate rationalism to liberalism. But in fact, liberalism is opposed to thoroughgoing rationalism of the kind that you would find in Aristotle or Plato or any other philosophers because those people discoursed about what is good.",
      "for anyone who makes universal rationalist claims about what is good. The only thing that's good for liberalism is what it says is good, which is human freedom and desire. So that's why liberalism by its very fundamental premise, it has to be empty of particular content. It cannot tell you specific things.",
      "So it doesn't tell you specific goods, things that are good to believe this or do this or eat that. But it can only tell you general things such as freedom is good and rights, for example, human rights. They do not depend on people doing what is right, what is good or what is in accordance with a religion.",
      "to put differently against transcendence, which means that any authority that is beyond and above the society. Now liberalism lives among and it's shaped by many sister ideologies such as secularism modernism and now postmodernism and radical democratic left. And each of these has if you will a slightly different set of ideas like",
      "Usually they're lumped together. But secularism, for example, there can be liberalism, there is no liberalism without secularism. So you could say that liberalism is a species of secularism because it's hard to imagine any kind of liberal society",
      "level secularism. Finally, democracy for example which is at times at odds with liberalism people usually you know of course we use the word liberal democracy but in fact there are many cases where you can have democracy without liberalism right this was the very first original Greek democracy does not have any concept of liberalism or individualism also even",
      "people spoke of the question of tyranny of the majority. So you could have a democracy that does not protect rights of the minority or individuals and similarly, you can have liberalism that is not democratic. For example many enlightened despotisms in late 19th century Europe were of this kind.",
      "In fact, there is I argue a fundamental tension between the idea of human rights liberalism which requires constant limitation of democracy constant guarding of democracy because democracy can overstep those right. So we shouldn't become tied to hard and fast definitions and versions of these ideologies but because they're transforming and evolving",
      "Heuristically speaking, to make your life simpler, the triangle of these three ideologies, liberalism, secularism and capitalism, they usually go together. And they are thought to go together, usually when Western policymakers are talking about liberalizing a region, a government, a people. They are inevitably talking about secularizing it, about sending market economy there and capitalism.",
      "These three things go together. Democracy, not so much. Democracy can be separated from the mix. Particularly it's very important to understand the relationship between capitalism and liberalism. Liberalism has enabled and defined conditions of modern capitalism",
      "You could think of them as twin ideologies, right? So liberalism does in the political social sphere what capitalism does in economic sphere. But they do not determinatively decide reality. In fact, they can't because they are by nature open to challenge and change and experimentation.",
      "has famously talked about internal contradictions of capitalism and one thing that one has to say is that Marx was wrong about almost everything that he said in terms of positive statements that he made about human society impossibility but he was right about almost every criticism of capitalism that he",
      "because humans are not free thinkers by nature we are tribal and i will talk about the consequences of that it becomes a liberal pathology uh because liberalism misunderstands human nature the second question and this is the biggest killer's heel of liberalism is its claim of neutrality",
      "It provides the mask behind which those in power and those with money, capital can hide. Third observation, critical observation of liberalism that encourages systemic hypocrisy because the actual reasons people behave are hidden behind the dice of public reason. Since liberal psychology is fundamentally mistaken,",
      "always results in the slavery of the many by the few, or enslavement of the money by the view. And these people are always the rich and powerful and as such they're best described by the Qur'anic term Mutrafiha, as Allah says in the Quran, of the extravagant or decadent elite. You might be... so there's an interesting tidbit",
      "in almost every human society before the rise of modern capitalism when greed was held up as the engine of the new kind of progress and liberalism very much mirrors that in the socio-political sphere. So, liberalism is also most responsible ideology in my view for letting capitalism run amok",
      "and through basically worshipping human desire, not letting it be constrained by a unifying transcendent ideology. In fact if we were to do this thing all over again liberalism's idealization of human desire and of the fiction of free human choice is so central that it would make the same choices",
      "of this civilization as we speak in the next few decades if the scientists are even half right um so liberalism is the ultimate ideology of howa that is as allah speaks of hawa as desire and desire",
      "self-serving ideologies. And Allah says in the Quran, that it is something that people can take as their God. And it's always, however, in liberalism and capitalism, the Hawa of the elite, the Hawa of a few. But the way they're defined, the way these few elites are decided",
      "elite are decided is through a game that is seen as open game. The game is going to have some winners, many losers but the game is something that those who are most ambitious can play as opposed to say an ideology that is more closed that says you know particular priesthood or maybe only the comrades in the communist party can play this game and decide everybody else wants according to some system capitalism and liberalism do it differently",
      "do it differently. There are also, how am I doing on time by the way? Okay just let me know when I have so i want to speak for about 15 minutes and let me go out of 10 minutes left okay all right now there are modern and post-modern forms of liberalism and this is important to understand because",
      "first makes people think that there is a deep discussion going on of which we can then become apart. So modernity was to briefly summarize what the three century long Eurocentric ideology of reason and progress, whereas postmodernity over the last 70 or so years has become strong. And it picked up as a critique of modernity as a",
      "under two main ideas. It's a critique of essentialism and of universalism, right? So these are two things that were central to modernity. Essentialism is necessary for building systems out of rational propositions. You decide what the nature of things are and you rationally decide how they ought to be put together in order to get perfect rational results. That was the age of reason.",
      "Amir Asadi – Organized politics or society, or even you know religion in a sense could be seen as a an organization of good and evil so good and Evil are essential eyes. Whereas, and then the second ideology and modernity that the postmodern friends question is universalism.",
      "that what it's speaking about reason and speaking through reason, it has the authority of reason. And reason is completely universal. All human beings have it or ought to have it. Anybody who has less reason therefore is less as a human. Now postmodernity thrives on the particular, on the local and the native. Post-modernists include various schools",
      "schools, I will enumerate four or five. So there are those who are critical of universalism of modernity and then there are Those were critical of aspects of modernities such as patriarchy so feminism for example is something that is a school that has taken on very much postmodernist discourse if not in its leadership value fragmentation so there",
      "of postmodernists who question modernity in the name of value fragmentation, that there isn't something unifying for society and community. And even democracy and republic are suffering as a result and so on. And these tend to be more traditionalist or conservative critics that are post-modern but they're critical and they're",
      "Fourth, they're the capitalist critiques of modernity but they are themselves very much the children of enlightenment and they're very much modern themselves. And finally there are fifth those who center western hegemony as the central problem of modernism and they call themselves decolonialists, decolonials theorists. So postmodernists are on this spectrum",
      "most post-modernists are ultra liberal critics of liberalism so they would critique liberalism but they're not really critiquing liberalism the way an outsider would critique their criticism. They were they're critiqued liberalism, the way Osama you know not Noam Chomsky would critique the United States right? Not the way that uh that liberalism is not being true to itself um now",
      "Is liberalism compatible with the truth of Allah and the life of righteousness, the life that is focused on the pleasure of Allah rather than deciding it for you in the foregoing what I have talked. I've tried to teach you to fish rather than giving you a fish but now at the end I want to serve if you will the fish as I bake it meaning by",
      "Meaning why I think that Islam is incompatible with liberalism as a way of life, even though there are many points of conversation and dialogue and learning. And certainly liberalism has tremendous success that Islam as a",
      "that we have to worry about. As I speak about this from the Islamic perspective, I want to remind you of a couple of common mistakes when Muslims speak about liberalism. First of all, people think Muslims who justify liberalism tend to say that liberalism is neutral vis-a-vis religion and it is so only if religions are neutral",
      "only if religion is understood in strictly secularized terms. Liberalism privileges, sorry it privatizes religion and only Protestant Christianity which was born about the same time as liberalism or shortly before even that, even Protestantism only in its tame secular form ever fit the model of what liberalism defines",
      "Islam as a system, as a way of life which demands to shape public life according to a moral imperative. But philosophically liberalism says if you will I could radically simplify liberalism said ask the question of how to live separately from asking the question what life is",
      "nature, purpose, morality or moral of life. Those two questions are separate one is a question of fact the other of value and the two cannot meet whereas Islam begins by saying Allah created you in order to worship him so the very first fact demands that you worship Allah Life is fundamentally",
      "not be separated between fact and uh and value between you know uh you can do you can organize your society in politics in one way and morality another way this is not only the case only with Islam but every religion, every ideology, every system of thought whether it's pre-modern Greek philosophies or Christianity or Judaism or Islam or Hinduism all ways of thinking",
      "think of fact and value together. But once you start thinking the way that liberalism does, then there is no way to put fact and values back together. And that's a problem in philosophy that I don't want to get into. But it's a",
      "or kill, or rape, or maim. Other than merely personal choice there can be no grounding, no rational grounding for any moral imperative. The reason Allah commands us to shape our public life in accordance with His commands which we call Islam",
      "and it's important in our discourse to not equate Islam to just a system of life that among many right the Islam is what Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala, the creator, the master, the sustainer demands and loves. And so it is the reason that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la doesn't allow us to separate public and private lives because human life cannot be compartmentalized between",
      "personal commitments are always important in making our public life. And similarly, what happens in public life shapes the personal desires and moralities of individuals all everywhere. And this is true in the United States as anywhere else. US is the only country with a disestablishment clause but nearly every significant phase",
      "every part of Islamic society, of American society is reflective of the religious or ideological commitments. You cannot understand the killing and looting of Native Americans to slavery, to capitalism without understanding the religious struggle and religious commitments in America. So this is merely to say that public and private have never been separate in American history.",
      "Liberalism incidentally was also heavily used in justifying colonialism as an ideology of tolerance. It is fundamentally prone to weeding out those who are intolerant or illiberal, or otherwise they fail in some sense of being fully human universally.",
      "ideology that defines the ultimate good for all obviously has to be universal. And if liberalism says, the ultimate Good For All is that no one tell you what is good for you, you decide we're going to simply construct a neutral system in which you can let your hawa decides whatever it is you want your, you know,",
      "be pious in your personal private life and you can be impious as you want, you worship Satan if you want. We will have nothing to do with it right? This fundamental claim of liberalism is false at every level but it becomes the deception through which those with the strongest hawa and the strongest power to institutionalize their hawa",
      "their hawa, their desire. They become the strongest if you will players in the society and unlike other societies where some ideology there are other kinds of oppression that may come as a result of letting people decide everybody's personal choices certainly so that was the reason why liberalism seemed so attractive because it makes this very strong",
      "that people are thirsty for especially people that are suffering but those in the third world uh those today but also in in uh in uh late medieval early modern europe of civil wars people um got to god here because they felt that this promise of liberalism was something that it was as it was a mirage",
      "I'm almost done. So, in fact this in a nutshell is what i wanted to say about liberalism that liberalism is an not only an ideology but also it is an attitude and sensibility",
      "and there is a lot of useful insights that liberalism has allowed, it is very difficult to turn away from it. It's not something you can merely defeat because liberalism and capitalism have together created such an attitude of exploration and openness",
      "And as a result, there have been scientific advancement and open societies that have shown many virtues of these societies while at the same time also showing the many evils of those societies.",
      "as perfect and or not in need of any serious critique, and that we merely want to go back. And I think that one ought to make very strong critiques of liberalism. And these critiques have to be deeper because liberalism is such a triumphalist ideology, and it's also one of the most destructive ideologies. Paradoxically, it is destructive because of its success",
      "in manipulating material conditions, in allowing human desire to thrive at least among some. And it has led to loss of meaning, loss of family, loss community, loss very home that humanity has which is the planet Earth.",
      "for non-Muslims, right? Most academics today if not most I would say a significant portion of non-religious academics or not particularly religious scholars in history or sociology or anthropology are extremely critical of liberalism. Often those critiques are within liberalism because there is no other place for them to stand",
      "For Muslims, our critique of liberalism has to be distinctly Islamic because we have to appreciate what is good about liberalism from a distinctly Islam perspective and we have the critique which is evil about liberalist from a perspective that is distinctly Islamic. I'll give you one example how one may try to critique liberalism as a Muslim but in fact",
      "This is only somewhat superficially Islamic, or almost you could say there really no Islamic content. People for example criticize liberalism for being universalistic right so Islam that universalism the liberalism is bad because it presents a universal reason right? The universal truth now per se this is not an Islamic critique this is a critique that many postmodernists and atheists have made",
      "But Muslims pick it up and they say, well, liberalism is bad because it is universalistic. But being universally universalist in itself, if it were bad, then Islam's claim as well as Christianity's claim that these are both universally true religions that are open to all human beings and that look for salvation of all human things. Right? That would be a problem. There was no doubt that Islam in this sense is deeply universalistic there the fundamental",
      "There's a fundamental difference between Islamic universalism and liberal universalism in that Islam recognizes that in order to fully participate in an Islamic system, you have to believe in Islam. And if you don't believe in islam, if you remain a non-Muslim then we will tolerate you. I'm talking about classical Islamic fiqh right? I'm not talking about what Muslims might do in future in conversation with liberalism",
      "saying that historically Islam from the very beginning tolerated error, tolerated theological error. Communities that are based in falsehood are allowed to live and thrive and are to be protected by Muslims. That is a remarkable feat of tolerance but this claim is based on",
      "recognition of the universal truth that is not empty of content right that truth is and it comes with its requirements um and if you don't accept that truth then uh you may live as demi and whatnot so um Islamic Universalism if he will is in accordance with human psychology",
      "of universalism that we are making is one that some people will accept and other people will be wrong and will not accept. Whereas liberalism wants to say that you can believe in any religion you want, but you can still be liberal. You can still adopt our system. You",
      "as well. American Christians thought that they're looking there, what they are getting into is freedom of their religion from government interference which is an important principle that liberalism has underscored but that is not what liberalism can be reduced to so I will stop here inshallah and look forward to a lively conversation and questions inshAllah",
      "Just to give everyone a heads up, we do have quite a few questions. So if you find yourself not able to stay throughout the entirety of the session just know that this is being recorded and will be posted on both Facebook and YouTube so you can check them out on Al-Arqam's page insha'Allah.",
      "with human rights, which are based on the premise that they're universal? You said liberalism that rejects universalism. Well no, so liberalism does not reject universalism, liberalism's actually fundamental claim is universalism it is in fact ultra-universalist ideology. Okay then the next question we have",
      "question we have is, can you comment on how liberalism began as a revolt against pre-modern political structures like monarchy? Liberalism promised to bring an end to political and economic aristocracy but has merely replaced the old aristocracy with a new liberal aristocracy. For example, the top 1% in the USA owns more than 50% of the country's wealth. Right so I think that your question kind of answers itself",
      "In answering the question, you brought in a couple of long, first of all, three or four centuries of development and you brought together liberalism with capitalism which I think is the right thing to do but we have to be aware that's what we're doing. It's late modern capitalism that has created this enormous inequality and liberalism because of the way it cannot create",
      "create universal consensus outside of particular people's, particular groups' choices. It cannot stand against capitalism. I think that one of the reasons, one of deepest criticisms of liberalism is that as a political ideology it provides cover for worst kind of accesses of capitalism.",
      "I think that I'll stop here because I hear there are many questions, but it's a very good question and one that requires recognizing that yes, there are different forms of capitalism. Early capitalism was different from late capitalism, but ultimately liberalism by unleashing human desire by if you will disqualifying both religion and reason from disciplining the human desire",
      "human desire in any kind of public fashion, it allows for the worst accesses of the most ruthless people. In other words liberalism is a heaven of people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. These people are the elite they are likely to win in liberalism and capitalism because",
      "such thing as immoral, deeply speaking. You can privately think it's immoral but there is no way to give public voice to the fact that these are immoral people with immoral projects. Okay so uh the next question insha'Allah is you noted earlier that the pervasive nature of liberalism has caused most if not all of us to be unaware",
      "while staying true to our deen? That's a brilliant question Jazakumullahu khair for asking it because I wanted to talk about it and I was hoping somebody will ask it. And I remember there was a great scholar, a great intellectual and a friend of mine who once told me this story about 20 years ago that he was in Egypt and he thought about the Qur'an",
      "secularism, right? As many Islamic movements were and have been for decades. And he remember, he said that he was in this at the Cairo University of where there was a gathering of women, some 50-some women who are all religious. And He said how many of you are liberal or secular? I think he used the word liberal or",
      "he meant liberalism anyway. So yeah, I asked the question how many of you believe that they are secular? And none of them raised their hands and then he said How many of You would be willing to live with your mother or your husband's mother after your marriage? And almost one or two raise their hands. And he said that is liberalism",
      "And that is secularism. That it is how our structure of our desire has changed so that we are unable to suppress our personal choices in order to be a community. Now, remember, this is Cairo where there are no apartments available and there is a crisis of marriage and there's a crisis",
      "you know, without getting married because there are no apartments and no salaries and so on and so forth. But despite all of that, this individualism is so central, right? That people aren't willing to live with their own parents or with their in-laws. So this is what I mean when I say that we all have embraced many liberal values. How do you fight that? Well, if you follow the basics",
      "the basics of the Quran without manipulating it whether it's your salawat or the basic you are by praying to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala this is a great step against your Hawa. By teaching others to pray, you're violating liberalism's idea that let everybody follow",
      "Everybody follow their desire. You are shaping others desires, your children and your friends and relatives and anyone who listen by honoring your parents. And that's a really big one because that creates an intergenerational link that liberalism hates and cannot tolerate and vice versa family. Intergenerational families",
      "because they tie you to your parents and your children, and then as a result to your brothers and your sisters and your cousins and your neighbors in a way that... So Islam in a very fundamental sense breaks the basic if he will structure of this. And that's why you'll see that when society is liberalized, when people become integrated",
      "family and religiosity go down together there's a ton of data on this if you're interested i highly recommend to everyone who is interested in this question a catholic scholar's book on this is called how the west really lost god the name is mary aberstodt how the West really lost God and there she documents with great detail how",
      "is directly related to, directly proportional to the loss of religiosity. Of course she's talking about Christian church attendance but the idea basically is that people who lose family connection, people who loose this sense of what it means to care for others,",
      "They can intuitively believe in God who is compassionate and caring. Whereas people who haven't had that experience, they find it emotionally difficult to believe in god. And that is why a lot of atheism is, in fact, an emotional reaction, not an intellectual conclusion. So intellectual ideas of Darwinism or scientism and other things, in",
      "atheists they only create um an atmosphere in which it's really the emotional coldness that people feel in a liberal societies that drives them against or away from religion all right uh so next up we have what do you make of the current muslim embrace of the democratic party and vice versa while noting",
      "as an ideology? Yeah, very good. Liberalism also the conservative party or liberal party also embraces classical form of liberalism I think that's something we tend to forget because in culture wars people tend to equate liberalism to LGBTQ and there is no doubt that",
      "you can choose your not your sexual desire but and your sexual identity uh freely without even your biology like not only now now you haven't only thrown out god when i was left and reasoned you have also thrown out nature you have thrown out biology of turn against everything which also incidentally by reverse in or conversely shows I think how",
      "how reason, revelation and nature this triangle that it goes together. And if you want to throw out God ultimately you throw out reason and then you also throw out nature as liberalism has in its final phase done. So I think that you have two very bad options and I think",
      "Muslims may choose the lesser evil, whatever they think is a lesser evil in politics. But living in a society that is, you know, there are not only kufr but immat al-kufr in the world. If you want to have your cake and eat it too, you can't. So in a sense I think that we have to make these compromises because even if",
      "it you're going to have cousins and friends and community members uh i do who who grew up seeing you know islamophobia for example and they want to be democrats and and they um they'd do anything to being gratiaated to the liberal left elite that allows them some room to breathe but and that's not something you can stop in america",
      "you can do is use the opportunity that we have in the United States, the freedom that we",
      "I don't think that there should be the bitter wars between the left, Democratic versus Republican Muslims as they are today because what that shows is that people's true loyalty, true love lies in their political interests or their alliances and constructions not in Islam.",
      "are people who ally themselves to one side or another in such an ugly way that you have to openly speak against them. And that I think ought to be done more of so people on both sides, left and right. Right? So there are people for example, who would say that we're more feminist than the feminists, that we are absolutely intolerant of any conservative opinions because they limit",
      "the choices of abortion and whatnot, or LGBTQ are brothers and sisters. Well, people like that, Muslims have to take them to account and punish them politically and intellectually as much as possible to save their religion. On the other hand, there are people on the right who would throw other Muslims under the bus, who do not care about what's happening to Muslims in China or Syria or in India, Kashmir, Palestine,",
      "because all they care about is your, you know, bigger LGBTQ. And because they would say that well, because these people who talk about Palestine also have alliances with LGBTQ hell with Palestine, right? So people create this false dichotomy and people on either side in my view are indistinguishable",
      "that they create a very ugly version of Muslim politics. Okay, so the next question is can you elaborate on the fiction of free choice and how that functions in liberal societies given the proliferation proliferate English as a hard language proliferation of knowledge via modern technology?",
      "Yeah, so free choice was a problem even before social media. Of course, social media creates new possibilities and new kinds of problems and new kind of destruction of organic natural communities it allows in natural life but it also allows new kinds community building. So I don't want to see social media as the problem. Remember some people want",
      "want to reduce problems to some ideology or something that... But there is really no problem that is ultimately the problem other than turning away from Allah. And so everything else has good and evil in it, good and bad in it. So modernity, there are many good things and many, many bad things. There are postmodern critique, there're good things",
      "and bad things. Our true enemy is Shaypan, our true enemy are people who are advocates of Fahisha or evil in the unadulterated form People who turn away from Iman and belief in Allah SWT and explicitly ally themselves to it But that said freedom of choice of course on one hand you have freedom of",
      "that is realistic than that. But liberal freedom of choice has become a new tahut, a new god that is worshipped and therefore we must work to destroy it. And because it is an intellectual construction you have to also work at the intellectual roots of this. It is based on an incidentally empirically debunked",
      "debunked idea that humans make their choices freely. Empirically, scientists, psychologists, social psychologists, anthropologists find almost invariably, almost always in every study that how human beings do not act through cold rationality. The human beings",
      "is morally good or even what is in their interest, but rather they act as tribes, as groups. They are influenced by irrational things. We know this since... In fact that was Freud's insight which Sigmund Freud, by the way, as Allama Iqbal rahimahullah famously said that God sent his prophets and Shaytan sent his prophet and Sigmun Freud was one of those prophets of Shaytan.",
      "um but as a prophet you observed the behavior of his people quite well and one of the things that he said is how um uh the subconscious the un the unconscious the unthinking mind works and much of modern advertisement industry is based on this idea of subconscious",
      "that we make things that we like and we dislike are not done because they're good for your health or because they are beneficial but based on our subconscious choices, our subconscious longings. And this has of course there many things that",
      "told us this truth about the relationship between the inside and the outside. The taqwa that is inside also it is found outside as Allah says in the Quran وَمَن يُعَذِّمْ شَاعِرَ اللَّهِ فَإِنَّهَا مِن تَقْوَى الْقُلُوبِ Your outward reverence of the sha'air of Allah, of the signs and symbols of Allah such as the Quran or such as",
      "pious person such as a sheikh who is the teacher, such as Kaaba and Mecca and Medina and Jerusalem. These are signs of taqwa inside of you. There are many hadith in Quran that speak of this relationship between inside and outside which means",
      "that you know which is a recognition in our deen of the um that how choice is complex that you cannot force people just by giving them reasons this is why when the sahaba and they when they went and made da'wah they did not go and argue with every individual after everybody knew what Islam",
      "but they showed them the victory, the triumph of Islam and gave them the choice. And then slowly as people encountered Islam, they realized that this was going to be it. And this was something found in the character of Prophet already. So there is a great wisdom in our deen which is confirmed by modern empirical observations",
      "is very complicated. And you have to use, it depends on culture, it depending on feeling, it depend on perception more than it does on merely rational. The rational arguments are important but they're not sufficient. Now by the way let me take that turn and talk also a little bit about the consent. The ideology of consent which is a cornerstone",
      "current form of liberalism is also philosophically and scientifically debunked that human beings so for example the question of rape um it's a such a major problem but you cannot define what is consentful and what isn't outside of the contextual factors which is again precisely the wisdom of our deem that the only way to avoid harassment",
      "by segregating men and women, which is the wisdom of our deen that Allah has taught us. Alhamdulillah. That's all I want to say. Go ahead. In The Myth of Religious Violence, William Cavanaugh observes that liberalism legitimized itself by painting religion as inherently violent and irrational while liberalism is painted as rational self-evident producing prosperity etc. This myth",
      "to banish religion from the public sphere? How should we discredit this age-old myth and retake the public square?\" Ah, I mean that's a great question. I think that you have in asking the question pointed to the answer already what William Kavanagh does is retrace history and try to beat the liberals at their game",
      "I think Kavanaugh is showing the mirror, if you will to liberal history which is or rather I should say secular history. It's not really against merely liberalism but it's rather set against secularism and secular ideologies are responsible for",
      "the greatest killing sprees of modern history. And it usually helps to remember that just a number of people killed in the First World War, and that was completely modern war, modern war of nation states and ideologies. This war killed more people than all the other wars",
      "put together. And let that sink in a little bit, if you look at all the other killings of human beings that we know since ancient Egypt, if add up all the numbers, the First World War killed more people and then Second World War many times more. So the 20th century has been a century of modern killing. And so in that sense I think Kavanaugh's point is absolutely",
      "absolutely untouchable. But liberalism has the podium, it has many other advantages that I don't want to go into right now but starting with this kind of deconstruction for Muslims speaking from a clear and solid understanding of Islam is absolutely necessary.",
      "can you please provide a couple of examples, maybe social and political, of how liberalism manifests in the context of modernism and post-modernism? Okay so liberalism is seen as a modern ideology um and postmodernists often began as critics or enemies of liberalism. And there were of course people like, if you take people like Nietzsche for example",
      "and Heidegger, these were some of the most brilliant philosophers and critics of liberalism and modernity. Foucault who spoke of if you will, the relationship of knowledge to power and in that sense he did more than anybody else",
      "define postmodernist philosophy of the last half century by calling into question all the knowledge that has been produced by modernity, by modern institutions as knowledge that is biased and knowledge that geared toward holding keeping those who are in power right in power.",
      "The problem is that liberalism and secularism, the way they function as twin ideologies, they do not mind self-critique. And that's an odd thing. Their criticism, so long as you are participating in the institutions of liberalism",
      "truth that you hold on to, right? Because you have given up the idea of truth. And that's why not all kinds of postmodernist critiques are offensive to liberalism. In fact, liberalism thrives on them because in some sense many postmodernists question",
      "further so that desire is all that's left and postmodernism valorizes particular desire. There is one way of looking at postmodernity, postmodernist as a continuation of modernity meaning that it is simply internal developments within modernity that led to postmoderns when I think there is some truth to it. Now",
      "Now, you can critique. Let's say if you are somebody like Zygmunt Bauman who criticizes universalism, who is a sociologist, who talks about how modernity has created this these destroyed the sense of community and nearness and so on. Now all of this is",
      "can become a very much a private sensibility of individuals who are liberal or living in a liberal system and they can respond perhaps by creating some communities. And liberalism has no problem with that because liberalism's basic logic is inscribed in its institutional arrangement, and it's very much part of human... Because it is hooked into the",
      "hooked into the power source of liberalism and capitalism is that it will satisfy your desire. And so long as your desires are being satisfied, people are not going to make a choice that would go against their desire. So give you an example environmentalist movement that started very strong 70s 80s has absolutely done nothing to stop the complete environmental disaster",
      "global warming, even though that knowledge has existed for some 50 years and the alarming sounds have been, have existed voices alarm, alarming theories have existed since the eighties at least because people at the end are in the very ways",
      "houses they live in their suburbs, the way very cars that they drive are all fueled by a system which they benefit from. And post liberal elite also ultimately are human beings who benefit from it. There is nothing that is short of a collapse,",
      "of this prosperity that will make people think differently. And in that sense, the collapse of the American empire is not different from the collapse 200 other empires in world history that have risen and fallen. It's just that number is in fact from an article by Alfred McCoy I think The Decline of the America Empire you can Google it, it's a great article",
      "McCoy was my professor at Wisconsin. And like the fall of the Roman Empire and any other empires, people can see that it's happening but the people that are benefiting from it are benefiting enough until the end. And this is something of course you find in the Quran very clearly Allah says in the Qur'an that when we decide",
      "decide to punish a people, a town we command its mutrafiha it's decadent class. It's elite that throw away they have so much and this is what wallahu'alam this is What we see as a cycle now This doesn't mean that we should rejoice in that decline but that we ought to present Islam",
      "way, in a more passionate way as the alternative. Because I think that Americans and Westerners or people who have been created by liberal and modern and postmodern mindset are also people human beings were looking for truth. They're also people who are who have many good virtues. For instance, you know Muslims lived in India for 700 years but couldn't convert all",
      "convert all or even a good portion of the Hindus because the family system punishes any, you know, any freedom and any free impulse so harshly that most people couldn't imagine leaving their families in communities no matter how oppressive Hinduism was. Liberalism is the exact opposite of Hinduism right? It allows great freedom but at the same time it destabilizes every religion that that is not,",
      "know very well founded in community and family. American religion is extremely fluid as we know from the numbers people change religions all the time Muslim Americans are no different or maybe only slightly different from other religions in that many people are leaving Islam and many people entering Islam so and that is very much a sign of a liberal",
      "individual choice to join, individual choice leave. And that's the nature of the world in which we live. So just a quick reminder, we're at 530 mark. Dr. Oluwamad if you are comfortable going for another 30 minutes because we have quite a few more questions to get through, if that is all right with you? Sure I will check my prayer time.",
      "Okay, inshallah. And for anyone else who can't stay for the extra 30 minutes just a reminder that we are recording this session and we will have it posted on all our social media platforms inshAllah so keep an eye out for that. Okay, so to jump into the next question Muslims in the West tend to have an inferiority complex with respect to our Islamic tradition you will then find Muslims looking towards alternatives through a liberal framework what are some short-term",
      "inferiority complex that Muslims in the West have? That's an excellent question. First of all, I want to take an issue with a question of vis-a-vis liberalism vis-à-vis Islamic tradition or liberalism visa be Islam. I don't think that we should equate Islamic tradition to Islam because Islamic tradition is extremely diverse and there are traditions and sub traditions that are extremely ugly",
      "should allow us to make this admission, right? That there are many bad things that Muslims did and became committed to. And that became part of some tradition. So it is Islam that we should hold onto. And the truth from Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la that absolutely admits of no confusion",
      "and how we should instill that confidence is well i think ultimately many people are doing great work in preaching in teaching uh and you all are examples of people who care um so i see reasons for optimism what i do think that there is a",
      "there is a need for it. No deen spreads without sacrifices, without if you will the unsung heroes. So the question is are you willing to be an unsung hero of the deen yourself? Because ultimately it is those individual choices that make up history, make up the future trajectory.",
      "We have the possibility of turning the tables against any system of evil or against any that has lost its way because people can come and join Islam. And that's not a strength that anyone else has, that people can join Islam but that requires being a beautiful community, that requires",
      "And that requires heroes, that requires people who will go above and beyond their career trajectory. And they're required if you will level of... People are Muslim, an ordinary person is Muslim today because they come from a Muslim identity. These are Muslims",
      "the kalima la ilaha illallah that resides in their heart but these people are at best followers and them or their children if there are no strong efforts to make da'wah",
      "do something that will change the social scientific predictions um you have to act in a way that is heroic and i have to ask in ways that make no no economic sense uh you cannot follow the example of cowards and um you cannot live on licenses and um",
      "a room for that in our as well but i think that those two things i will emphasize one stick to islam go back to and learn islam but also embody islam the prophet sallallaahu alaihi both in mecca and in medina put himself out um and took chances and you know he is our role model usually you know sometimes there's there's a kind of thick that",
      "dwells in rather I should say an understanding of Islam whether it's other that is built on a series of compromises especially in the modern world when the entire world is made up of institutions that our deen does not recognize then all you have is you get used to so many compromises, you don't realize an opportunity",
      "an opportunity when it hits you. And that is, I think what we ought to invest in that kind of knowledge that we will know that this is something we ought take that with the, this has no compromise on. So I'll stop here. How is liberalism creeping undetected into Muslim thought around the world especially",
      "to Muslims in the West? There are two different ways in which liberalism creeps in the Muslim world and in the west. The western Muslims, as they become more educated particularly in humanities and social sciences or just become more into the society, they lose the great haybah, the great awe of the west that the rest of the Muslims have",
      "But the same very, these same Muslims us we have imbibed so many liberal values. And again there are some very good liberal values that we have in bite but there are many bad ones that we are unable to recognize and unable to extricate ourselves from. That",
      "that if you go and talk to Muslims in the Muslim world, it's almost shocking to what degree we have become individualistic. The way that many people in the muslim world care about each other sacrifice on how they build their lives around other people and religious ceremonies and how they care about parents and children",
      "people telling you what to do or, you know. These are things that we have lost. You know, we have become extremely individualistic. We are very pampered. But at the same time in the Muslim world particularly the elite are incredibly impressed with the West in a sense that really what you can only describe that sense as a kind of worship and these elites",
      "At this point, these people are a small elite but not so small that they don't matter. But there are upper echelons of media and upper echelsons of entertainment industry and politics and so on. These people's values are among the lowest of the low. It is not like they're as bad as people in Hollywood or Washington DC. They are far worse because you go to somebody",
      "because you go to somebody in hollywood they at least have ethics of their own even if uh they they have completely embraced the liberal value right so they're showing their body and selling sexuality but at the same time they may have some ethic ethical sense of how they are being ethical well among the muslim elite uh liberalism is it takes a different form it's extremely ugly",
      "elite among the Indian elites that these people are um contemptuous they're contemptuous of other people like them uh other Muslims and poor and people in their own country and so on. So there you have to look at how liberalism is creeping in different places then you have",
      "just the communication with Muslims between Muslims in from between Muslims and the West and the East people who have been disenchanted a little bit like people in the west, like us. And those in the Muslim world who are still enchanted but they have at least they live in societies where those values have not completely disappeared there is a possibility of a collaboration",
      "of a collaboration to bring the best out right so i think that uh i personally feel invested in uh in being strong contacts with the muslim world not because there are some hidden treasures that you can go and find and there are sitting there who will tell you solutions to every problem that isn't the case unfortunately or",
      "that we have learned here and recovered here, and values of Islam that the people in the Muslim world have far better handle on. And recognizing them right? And cultivating both of them I think those can be... That can be a way to fight back.",
      "Sorry, so repeat the first part of the question.",
      "and spreads immorality as a tool to expand and solidify its dominance of the world? That's a great question. So you have this analysis that liberalism is destructive of morality and religion, and it's expansive, it's imperialist but... And you want to say well how do you make this case to others particularly perhaps other Muslims who may be more",
      "great question and there isn't I don't, I'm afraid there isn' t a single answer. But I would say this is a struggle for all of us to be better prepared with our arguments which means knowing you know learning history learning learning I think that there is increasing literature within as",
      "in as i said post-modernity is very critical of liberalism uh many post-modernists especially decolonial thinkers who are very um critical of western hegemony and now often the problem with that is when you're reading the colonial literature or you're",
      "of Western hegemony in some forms, but then by internalizing the dialogue it actually may project the hegemomy because now people are even fighting the West by adopting the ideologies from the West. So I think that can become a vicious circle, which is cycle, which in order to break that you have to bring Islam and you have be real about it",
      "about it that you have to recognize that many Muslim elites including many ulema are part of the problem and you have recognized this was a case even in traditional societies not everything is good just because it's traditional so you have I think in order to do give-and-take it's easy to be reactionary much more difficult",
      "because that requires being grounded in Islam, which is an abstraction. And the difficulty of being an abstraction is that it's not real somewhere that you can show people. So it's very important that you live it wherever you are in your communities, that you embody it and it is through this embodiment",
      "embodiment that you will drive the power of the message of Allah not through references to some past imagined paths that people do but I think that our question is great and and the answer is really that this is a quest that we all that we should have how can i make better argument for Islam in a way that is confident rather than reactionary",
      "that so there's actually a comment on facebook and we wanted to see your thoughts on it uh the key difference between islamic universalism and liberal universalism is that islami universalism in the language of responsibilities and obligations whereas liberal universe universalism",
      "Islamic liberalism is grounded in duties? Islamic universalism is rooted in the language of responsibilities and obligations. Whereas liberal universalism, is written rights and liberties. No I wouldn't say that that's the main difference.",
      "the main difference is that Islam begins by recognizing that Allah is how you enter the community, that there is a community. That people who do not acknowledge it, they cannot go on and build a system of brotherhood and solidarity with them as if saying",
      "as if saying that, yes, you don't have to accept that karima and you can join. And everything that we will do in Islam is rational. So we pray five times a day. You know, you can pray if you want. Don't pray if people don't want. But there isn't a prerequisite to join the community. In other words, you have to step out of that universalist claim and embrace a particular man's particular message",
      "as the best expression of God's universal truth. You have to believe in Muhammad, you have to say that Kaaba is not like any other building, you must say this Quran is not just like any book and when you make those claims you are violating basic liberal universal principles at a public level",
      "public level, not merely as your private choice. Okay inshallah we're almost there how do we combat the claim that only liberal values can secure rights for religious minorities as opposed to Islam? Well I think that this claim requires a deconstruction and",
      "and historical understanding, but ultimately it requires for the vast majority of people who are not persuaded just by rational argument. It required embodiment, right? It requires Muslims actually doing it. And then other Muslims recording it and taking up the idea",
      "the idea of tolerant coexistence as an important value. And in fact, Muslim governments where they have implemented this and there are many examples where Muslims do precisely that, that they do uphold and tolerate it. But of course if you just look at history, to the extent that history provides a compelling argument for some,",
      "Muslim communities and non-Muslim Christian communities lived, and have lived right for 14 centuries throughout the land of Islam. And have often prospered whereas the opposite has not been true. The Muslim communities are very new in the West because Muslims never could live in Europe. Nobody could live without Jews did and of course that was",
      "that was easy. So I think there are a number of challenges in making this argument, historical arguments, theoretical arguments. You can look at Muslims who tried to do well but also you have to pare down the claims of liberalism. The claim is that we lose nothing by belonging",
      "belonging to a liberal system, whereas you lose something when you're living in a system that has some value. And when you can demonstrate that when people are living without values, that in fact they're living under values that are undercover values of some other systems. So for example, liberalism uses, smuggles in values from Abrahamic traditions and from Christianity",
      "from Christianity. For instance, the idea that all men are created equal right? That's absolutely unclear it's not grounded in any kind of empirical data. It is something that comes from Allah. It comes from the Abrahamic tradition so the entire fundamental argument of liberalism",
      "an uncredited source. It's plagiarism, it's the kind of thing that should be failed in an undergraduate paper but liberalism is based on this absolutely egregious claim that it is somehow rational truth that people all people are created equal. People are not created equal or that human life is important again human life important is not something that can be demonstrated at all in any kind of scientific",
      "or objective fashion. So once you pare down, and this kind of what I call by the way, just liberalism's attitude toward ethics is what I called levitating ethics. It's a set of mores instead of norms that have no grounding there as if levitated in the air. And they're just as realistic",
      "is just as realistic as a castle in the air, somebody flying today. And the result of that is postmodernity has demonstrated again and again, right? And that's why I think postmodernism is a very important development destructive as it is of many other things but it was an important development in modernity that shows all the things",
      "except that it leaves us in a very dark place at the end because now you have lost God and reason, and even your belief in goodness. And that's the society in which we live. That is the condition, the social condition of an ordinary person. They live on darkness and they only... They may adopt some particularist message but the public life that they live is destructive",
      "And now it is not even a matter of opinion. After the trajectory of the environmental crisis has become clear, I don't think that any conscientious person can question that the current modern Western liberal civilization had run aground,",
      "that people may have sacrificed children in ancient religions, but at least they left the rest of the planet for other people to come and rehabilitate. But these people have left no home for millions of people who are likely to be homeless in the next century. So I think that we should really feel the immorality of liberalism in that sense without overstating",
      "stating of course the individual responsibility but as a whole we live in very immoral times and you should not underestimate how significant that is dr this is where actually right we're going to cut off the questions inshallah because it's getting late uh so sorry to",
      "JazakAllah khair again. May Allah reward you for taking your time out to give this wonderful presentation and to address some of the questions that we had. Insha'Allah next week, we're going to be addressing the topic of feminism with Dr Aisha Hassan. So inshallah, we'll catch you all next week."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Rapid Fire with Dr_ Ovamir Anjum _ Season 1_BHHJfL5mUBo&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750677125.opus",
    "text": [
      "So Dr. Uwe Mer, JazakAllah khair for joining us on Double Take. First things first, can you take off your jacket? Because this session is going to be a bit more casual. Okay. That was a joke. Perfect, perfect. Yes. All right, JazakhAllah khayr. Question number one. Your favorite Qara'i reciter of the Qur'an. Ah, my favorite reciter.",
      "my favorite reciter. These days, I love Al-Manshawi but my sort of default favorite is Saad Al Ghamdi. Mashallah! Okay and it's honestly refreshing that he got a job at the Haram. I think it's very befitting of someone who has been in most people's homes. Oh my God, he did? Yeah, in Medina. Recently? For yeah, the last few years. I don't know about last Ramadan",
      "the last um you know three or four years he's you know he was asked to be at uh for some time ago but he didn't do that you know why because no because he had to be close to his parents oh mashallah so yeah now he finally made it he turned that down a number of times for that reason i don't know what happened now maybe his parents moved with him but uh you know i love that that that about him",
      "that about him. MashaAllah. Okay, that's number one. Number two, if you were to have dinner with someone who's passed away and it obviously can't be the Prophet ﷺ, who would you choose from history? Modern or ancient? And why? If I could have dinner",
      "Why Ali and not someone else? Well, for one I love the personality of Ali and I have many questions for him too. You know if you expect...I mean I'm writing about him and about the fitna and you know I...of course he's very eloquent,",
      "He's a warrior poet. It's somebody who doesn't have much time for diplomacy, it seems from his personality. So I've spent so much time trying to understand the personalities of the Khulafa Rashidun and writing about it. And he's the one who strikes me as you know...I want to confirm whether I'm right about him.",
      "I mean, what can you say? Of course. By the way, I have a question about that after this recording. Like it's a burning question. Okay. If you were to have dinner with someone who's alive, who would it be and why? Dinner with somebody who is alive? Gosh, that's a tough one. Maybe Rashid Ghanoushi to tell him that he's misusing the Sahifa.",
      "the Sahifa? I would rather write about it and have him read. Sheikh Rashid's nephew, in fact went to school with me in Madison, Wisconsin so we were close in a certain sense. So no one comes to mind for dinner? You know...I mean there are many people but",
      "Well, I'll tell you the sheikh that I really admire is Salman Al-Hawda who's in prison and I would love to have him out of prison and have dinner with him. I mean we love our food on Double Take so we've moved from dinner breakfast if you were to have your ideal breakfast no one involved no one is looking what breakfast would you be having?",
      "That's an easy one. Turkish breakfast and in Turkey I was visiting once, and one of my students took me to this district in Istanbul called Bulat District which is really remarkable it has very colorful houses that are just really amazing and there we had this distinctive Turkish breakfast from a particular region",
      "that's like these, you know, 20 different little plates. One has some yogurt and another has the jam of this thing or that thing. And it's just so luxurious yet so authentic. Simple. Yeah. So I could sit and eat all day. I think we did that almost. Dr. Awaymir, the last book that you read was?",
      "Jonathan Lawrence, Coping with Defeat Islam and Catholicism. I was just reading it. And it's a story of how over the last two centuries, Islam and catholicism, Sunni Islam and Catholique Christianity have exchanged places. In 19th century, Suni Islam was seen vibrant and progressive accepted modernity even championing",
      "even championing modernity, whereas Catholicism was reactionary and resisting modernity. And now they have changed places. So that's the account. And I'm trying to wrap my head around it. Mashallah. And the final question, if I were to say embarrassing masjid moment with Dr. Awaymir, what comes to mind? Embarrassing masjids moment.",
      "Oh yeah, this is so embarrassing. I think it happens to everybody but anyway when you were starting off which is when you are correcting an imam right? When they're reading. I remember one brother who was mashallah very good reciter and he was reciting I think Surat Al-An'am",
      "I corrected him because in my mind he was reading Surat Al-I'raf and after Salah, he says Salaam. And he turned to me and he says, yes, we all know you memorize a lot of Quran. And that is the most embarrassing moment I can imagine. So now I never correct Imam. JazakAllah khair, BarakAllahu feekh"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Sincerely_ Ovamir Anjum_wm2oRicgusQ&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750786298.opus",
    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Jazakum Allah khair for joining us for another episode of Sincerely Yours. This is your host Ibrahim Hindi with my co-host Sheikh Abdullah Aduru. Sheikh Abdullah, how are you feeling? Alhamdulillah, technical difficulties solved. We are here and we are healthy. Alhamdullilah Rabbil Alameen. Alhumdulillah. You got the bright video going and the lights and everything. MashaAllah. It's amazing on your end.",
      "For everyone out there, this is our third week together. We're so happy to be coming to you live every week with our guests. We have an amazing slate of guests throughout every single week inshallah joining us. We want to hear from you. This is your chance to connect with us and the guests we bring on. We wanna hear your questions and comments inshAllah. Let us know where you are coming from or watching us.",
      "We have Sister Salma already. She's telling us she's from London and it's 12 a.m. Masha'Allah, look at the commitment. The commitment, Shaykh. They're with us at midnight, alhamdulillah. So we'd love to hear where you're from. Any questions that you have for our guests, insha'Allah. We'd love for you to put them in the chat. There's also a link in the description if you ever have any feedback, anything you want to add or you want us to know or you",
      "We have awesome vlog coming from Cincinnati, Ohio. Assalamu alaikum. Brother Adam from London as well, mashallah. Lots of people from London joining us. So just let us know where you're coming from as well. Here's a comment from brother Hassan. I can't believe we're already in the sacred month of Rajab. We have two months until Ramadan. That is a very important point, subhanAllah. It's coming up so quickly.",
      "Sister Huma from Illinois and she says it's Maghrib time there, mashallah. And sister Basma from Ottawa, Canada. Mashallah more Ottawa coming in. And Sister Valerie from Texas so that's on your end, Sheikh. That's on my end, yes sir. Fellow Texan. How is Texas doing today, Sheikh? It's funny you ask. Today there's supposed to be a freeze so we're expecting some kind of freeze actually now.",
      "So that's the expected time. It's a little drizzle, but it's kind of looking a little sleetish turning into ice. So I think Thursday and Friday we're supposed to stay inside. Oh, subhanAllah. Yeah, we've had... We're being told there might be another storm coming in Toronto with more snow. SubhanAllah khairullah. Allah preserve us insha'Allah. We have some serena coming from Brooklyn on New York. Masha'Allah And",
      "I think from Canada as well. So we have some good Canadian representation in here, some people folks from London, folks from New York, folks form Washington. It's great to see you know we're hoping to build a community with all of you inshallah and like I said when we get started with our guests if you guys have questions you want to ask something you know please go ahead put your questions in the chat hopefully we'll be able to see it we won't be able",
      "and bachelors in nuclear engineering and physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And on top of that, he has also extensive Islamic training from scholars in Pakistan, Egypt, and Syria studying fiqh and usur and qira'at as well. And above all of that he is also the editor-in-chief at Yaqeen Institute. Sheikh Uymer Jazakallah khair for joining us.",
      "I'm happy my parents weren't in earshot of that introduction so they would ask me why I don't have more degrees. Shaykh, we had to cut down the amount of accomplishments on your biography. It's just confusion but it's fun. I actually should've added in your biography as well that you have a beautiful translation of Madadjah Sariqeen by Ibn Qayyim",
      "which actually recently won some awards. And I encourage everyone who is with us to maybe purchase that book and give it a read because it's a beautiful book, and Dr. Wayman did an exceptional job translating it. So Sheikh, before we get into our topic in our discussions and the questions we want to ask you, you know, the marketing team told us that you are the DIY king, the king of do-it-yourself.",
      "and what you've been up to, Sheikh. What are the secrets you've hiding? MashaAllah our marketing team is good at taking a mole and making hail out of it but Alhamdulillah it's good. I do wish to be a carpenter. I want in my... You know, I do some woodwork. I've done wood floors and I sort of like made a room in a basement once.",
      "nothing fancy, but this is something I like to do. So we're assuming that you made that background that you have there. This is my wife's doing. It's actually an important skill.",
      "and skill like i'm i have to admit i mean i'm embarrassing myself a little bit but i have no toolsmanship whatsoever um but recently i broke one of the tiles in my kitchen and i determined myself i'm gonna fix it myself so i you know i watched like hundreds of youtube videos and i figured out how to pop up this tile and replace it with the other one and um you know it's like i felt the satisfaction after doing it",
      "that we have other Moshiach who are quite good at it. Yeah, I know I'm not good at this but I do it every now and then. So Shaykh let us know, we want to learn more about you and the whole purpose of these live sessions is for us to know more about",
      "the viewers to learn more about you as well. And so let us know, when did you decide to pursue knowledge? Mashallah, you have all these degrees and you've studied with all these scholars but when was that decision made for you? When did you decided I want to study Islam? Jazakumullahu khairan astaghfirullah for all the praise. But Alhamdulillah, I was born in a religious household and my grandmother Allah Ya Rahamha was a scholar",
      "a scholar and uh you know she had mashallah of personality so she was a preacher um and my grandfather also on my mother's side allah had a big library which um of all the grandchildren and children even i was the only one who used so",
      "and I read the Tafasir and Tarikh, those are two things that I read. And Fiqh! But I never thought that I will do this for a living. I was more interested in science and I was interested in physics and advanced physics and whatnot. I've been inspired by these Pakistani Nobel Prize winning physicists, Abdus Salam and also Abdul Qadiri",
      "also Abdul Qadir Khan, who is responsible for Pakistan's nuclear program. So I was fascinated by science very much but religious studies are something that I did almost as a part of who I was never as you know, something that i wanted to do professionally. That happened when I came to Madison, Wisconsin to pursue my degree in physics and engineering.",
      "society more. I never thought that I'll be doing Islamic studies in a Western university and I know many people that I talked to have this reservation, you know, why would you do Islam here? And I had the same but alhamdulillah I had enough background and connections that I didn't go to a Western University to learn Islam. I really went there thinking what do I do now? You know, how do I take the next step?",
      "So I became interested in social sciences, not in Islamic studies per se. And so I did Social Science University of Chicago and then long story short, I ended up doing intellectual history at Madison, Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin-Madison to pursue some of the questions that have been with me from the very beginning",
      "And so you could say it's a very, alhamdulillah an organic process from the beginning. I grew up...I think much more important to my formation was the condition of the Ummah right? So I was...I grew up in Pakistan and in Karachi and Jeddah. Seeing those two societies seeing the state of Muslims was much worse you know that was my formative if you were concerned",
      "And coming to the United States, meeting many more Muslims. So I often tell people that more than university it was the Islamic Center and the people that I met there in Madison. That was my real schooling.",
      "then incline you to want to study more? Ah, so those are two different questions. The first person I met there, I'll tell you the way things work. I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, in the middle of a blizzard and we have a blizzard here in Toledo today but Madison is on the snow belt so much bigger blizzards and it's the first time I saw snow in my life and so it was such an unsettling experience",
      "I went in my dorm, it's the first time and this is really odd. It was the first that I saw growing up in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in fairly conservative environments where I saw boys and girls mixing. And that was like at the beginning and to me it was a shock. There was no Avan or anything.",
      "back to my room and I just go left looking for somebody who could point me to a masjid. Now nobody knows where Masjid is, it's the middle of a blizzard so I go to the student office there ask them if there is any Muslim name that they could point you to some student who had a Muslim organization or whatnot so they said okay there's a Pakistani Student Association guy he lives on such-and-such street so I walked like I don't know",
      "knock on his door and he comes out and he's drunk. And he has no idea where Masjid is, but he has only a guess. He thinks that Masjids may be a few streets down mercifully. So I ultimately ended up at the masjid. The masjids for me was very personally my home. That's where I spent most of my time. It is there that I met just a large number of people from Turkey, Tunisia, Georgia",
      "Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia. At that time the makeup of graduate students these are all graduate students who were mature who had good background often religiously and they were here to finish their PhD so there are mature people the kind of environment that sort of disappeared after 9-11 2001. Sheikh do you think when you came",
      "different was that something that made you consciously say like this religion is important to me whereas before maybe you didn't think about it too much um no actually I'll tell you when I felt such a passion that I actually cried physically cried not one time but a number of times um I think there were two such things going on around the time I was in high school uh one is the Kashmir crisis",
      "crisis and you just felt so helpless. And of course there was Felicity, we all grew up with this issue but for me these are very personal issues the other thing was in 91 when I was in Jeddah and there were American troops coming to Serbia now this again it sounds to many of us like a political thing",
      "a very deep challenge. It was almost such a humiliation to Muslims that to defend our holy places, we're inviting non-Muslim troops to fight other Muslims and then there was lots of you know... And as a high schooler, to me this was a really formative moment of helplessness. There's something deeply wrong so I think",
      "I would have nightmare, I think for years. And the nightmare was that there were some missiles that had been directed at us and it wasn't so much that it was Iraq doing it or the US doing it but it was just a feeling that we were so helpless as Muslims. SubhanAllah. That's powerful",
      "Powerful, powerful memory. I think you know, I feel something similar in my life. Like I remember being a kid and I went to Islamic school in the Toronto area and young kid. And I remember just vividly television stations coming with their cameras and everything they want to interview the kids about the crisis in Bosnia and the genocide that was happening at that time. And",
      "SubhanAllah, people want to kill some Muslims just because they're Muslim. And it made me really think about my deen and who I am and things like that. So I think a lot of young Muslims would really connect with that idea, subhanAllah. Shaykh, let me ask you, was there ever a moment in your life where you experienced doubt, for instance, about this path, about",
      "up and how did you overcome them if you did? Yeah, it's a great question. And I don't remember there being any serious kind of crisis. What I do remember is in graduate school, especially if you don't have community of scholars and students",
      "would happen is that you are reading very, very broadly and you're reading everything. And what would happen? Is that some doubt enters your mind and you don't even know it. So it's not like a crisis immediately. Oh I don't have a response to this but it's like a month later in the back of my mind. I'm still thinking that I haven't resolved that problem and then something else hits and then",
      "these doubts work. You know, it's not often the acute crises are relatively rare but what happens when you're doing this kind of reading in graduate school or an academic work is that if you are not aware, if your heart isn't ready and rather I should say it's no sensitive that at the first minute that a doubt comes and you deal with immediately then it grows",
      "don't deal with it, it becomes much bigger because you so what happens is kind of like you lose the pointer to if you can't name it anymore. Right? Wow. There's I mean, you touched on something very important and I think you're the most qualified people to give this advice because there's a lot of you know, it's kind of a two part question because I kind of want to rewind for a minute how when you came to America, you know you always find people say",
      "you know in america you find muslims with no islam but another country found islam with no muslim right being that i think all of us we've lived overseas for a while and uh coming to the tell me to america, you had a choice to make when you i mean it was a blizzard shaitan could have affected you in many different steps in that process yo it's too cold you gotta go find this it's psa it's pakistani you know organization are they really muslim you get there the guy's drunk you could have been like well just whatever you could",
      "and just solved your problems temporarily, you know, and kind of got warm with, you Know Jack Daniels or whatever the case may be. Right? But you kept going. The first question is was it particularly that foundation that you mentioned from a religious family that served as an effect for you and kind Of kept you I'll generically use the word strong and motivated and steadfast when you were alone in America at that time. Yeah, I would say Alhamdulillah",
      "I would say Alhamdulillah, it was propelled. I couldn't do anything else and it was... You know that iman is one thing right? Obviously it's very important but it's the habitation of iman if you're used to something and you're comfortable with it. That's something when iman becomes a habit",
      "Alhamdulillah, I've had that. So to me it was...I know I couldn't find peace anywhere unless something fundamentally changed about me. Okay. So what often happens of course in my life at times when you're tested is when you are out of source like when you were extremely anxious or",
      "you know, something creates a great sense of insecurity in you that no longer yourself. And then you would do things or say things that are out of habit and then maybe take you in a different direction. But Alhamdulillah at that moment I remember one of the earliest couple of brothers I found there was a Kashmiri brother who was an engineer pursuing his PhD there and just really, really soft spoken",
      "spoken and he memorized the Quran or good parts of the Quran. And he would lead salah. He was not the only one, but... And so I just found very much fulfilled at home. MashaAllah. The second part, the second question is how you mentioned, and this is important for you collegiates and parents of those that want to go to college. We have a professor in front of us, mashaAllah,",
      "in front of us mashallah tabarak allah he's of the best to give the advice to those muslim youth that may be confused or have some lingering doubts and they just leave it and for the parents to know that when they're going into this environment it can be challenging you mentioned how you know it's not something that is acute it's something that has over a long period of time it's some small doubt that you have and it builds up",
      "men and women that are freshmen or you know their first year and to the parents in regards to islamic education pre-college yeah you know i would say alhamdulillah this isn't there are many better ways of doing it than the way i did it so i don't mean to say that this is the way to do it but one of the ways that hamdullah my training in the past really helped is that i re i read debates among the ulema of all different kinds",
      "And it is, even the way I read fiqh, there's a lot of ikhtilaf literature. I know some people don't like it but to me and this was literature of ikhteelaf in akidah, in other things and these are ulama on both sides. I was very comfortable dealing with complexity in deen. Okay. And so that was not... So I think that you know if deen is taught to you as",
      "to you as a list of things to do, which is the case with most people. I just tended to be somebody who read more things than almost anybody else around me but there are always people, there are kids like that who doing that so I think that presenting deen and the complexity of our deen is especially important in preparing",
      "is you know it's always just very simple then what ends up happening is that when a complex problem arises you don't think that in your dean there is any way to deal with it so i think that the way you train and this is something by the way i should say i learned also from a christian philosopher alistair mcintyre has a really good article which summed up my experience",
      "which is where he says that the way to build a personality that is ethically and morally strong, he was not talking about religion but he's talking about morality. And the theoretical experiment that he does in this article is that take that guy who was operating Nazi gas chambers. And this guy probably grew up in a Christian family. He had an idea of morality. But he says,",
      "But he says, what would make this guy stand up and say, no, I will not do this? And he says – look, you know, he had the idea that this is good. But he also could justify what he was doing by saying that, look, I'm simply following orders. But there's a practice of objecting to each other, especially to your elders morally, right? Asking questions",
      "So your parents tell you not to lie. And then you notice, when a phone call comes and your mom tells you or just tell them I'm not home right? Or your dad at that point, you say no dad that's lying. And the father instead of slapping you being angry says well, I'm really proud and I'm touched and I move it out correct what I just did.",
      "and forth is what builds courage to use your ethics, your commitment to the level and brings it to the of practice. So this Nazi gas chamber operator, what would have given him courage to object at the time to what the state was telling him to do if he was not only aware of moral what is right to do but he practiced with his superiors in the past? Grew up",
      "past grew up practicing it in the same way when you think about learning the deen of allah if you learn the dean of allahu in such a way that you can ask questions and this is a beautiful um incident uh when ibn abbas um you know uh radiallahu anhu you know the sahaba were sitting",
      "What is the most hopeful ayah in the Quran? And everybody gave their answer and Ibn Abbas' answer was, The most hopeful Ayah in Qur'an for me is when Ibrahim asks Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala,",
      "for asking this question, O Allah show me how you bring the dead to life instead of punishing Allah answered him by demonstrating and if he said if a prophet could ask for more evidence right then that is we who sometimes have doubts have so much more hope and so this is the most hopeful ayah in the Quran Subhanallah",
      "I want to remind all of our viewers, inshallah, if you have any questions you'd like for us to ask Sheikh Umer, please put it in the chat and hopefully we'll be able to flag it and bring it to him, inshaAllah, later in the segment. So any questions, please let me know.",
      "he was saying we have to teach the youth usool al-fiqh and you know, you talking about the complexity understanding the complexity of the deen. And actually it was something I tried in when I was teaching in high school Islamic High School that same question. I would tell the kids ask me whatever you want. And if they asked me a question, I wouldn't just give them an answer like this is halal or this is haram. I Would say okay, let's look at how the scholars dealt with this question. Let's look",
      "Islam is not just right or wrong, halal or haram. There's a mechanism behind it and when you understand that mechanism maybe you have even more respect for the religion. That was just my thinking and kind of fits with what you and Sheikh Yahya were saying but just to go off of that I think a lot of young Muslims sometimes they go to university and they think you know what would be a really easy course for me to take? Islam 101 Let me go take Islam 101 in my",
      "them 101 in my university. I'm going to get straight A's and then they go to those classes and it depends on who the professor is, but they might get doubt after doubt after just thrown at them. So what advice would you give those youth or what advice could you give the parents especially if their kids are gonna go to University and about taking these courses? And how do you prepare themselves because even if they don't go to university take those courses, they'll get the doubts on YouTube right in their pockets on YouTube there might be a video that they watch so",
      "So what advice would you give them? I think that the most important thing is that people have to be connected to the Qur'an and, you know, the basis of the tradition of our deen which is the seerah and the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ. And this is something that we have to learn to teach better meaning that we",
      "to learn kids to read Qur'an. And reading Qur'ans is very difficult, Ark. It is not easy because so many people do it almost everybody seems to know how to read the Qur'aan and memorize you know some we think that it's easy and it's frustrating when kids can't do that and there is a almost a certain personality of a Qur'ani teacher that's almost a cultural stereotype. We need to change that",
      "And the Qur'an, so there are alhamdulillah better methods that are developing but we really need to read the Qur-an and do so with love and patience and meaning. But going to the question of doubts I mean first thing that helps is that doubts are not an exception",
      "they're not an exception to the process of believing that if you think that you are dirty for having a doubt, that you have lost your faith for having it out right then you don't understand Iman and because you have understood and equated Islam to just this cerebral sort of connection that you know if i have no doubt but Allah always connects",
      "as well as to this mental state and all these things go together. And sometimes you're having a mental doubt, but your habit and your habits and your sensibilities the things that you love right? They will keep you going to seek answers to those questions because doubts are natural especially if you're being exposed to number of questions of different kinds",
      "in the world who has perfect upbringing, right? Sometimes we take the idea of, you know, oh, your mother may have yelled at you once and that's why you're traumatized. And that's where you're going to become an atheist. That's not how it works. All of us have holes in our hearts. All nobody is perfect and nobody is going to be without doubts about this or that question.",
      "doesn't become a but so but you respond to that immediately and um if of course you didn't and it becomes a bigger problem meaning that you know it's a like you feel distant from your deen right then you need to do more work but it's there is no point when you're too far gone",
      "man and the best of us are like that. Like if I, like Sheikh Abdullah for instance. So there is no we should not think of iman as something that is an outside doctrine that we are teaching people rather iman is something that they would love if they could only see it. And so the way we deal with doubt should be you know by first of all",
      "of all accepting that it's not a big deal i'm going to answer your questions but it's",
      "that when you find a problem in something, it's not exactly doubt but you may find a problems and stuff. You may not understand it. You might challenge it internally. You make challenges with someone else. And a lot of times where people are challenging is because of the doubt which made them ask the question or to challenge instructor, the parents etc.. I like how you mentioned earlier even the parent admitting that they made a mistake. The Imam says or whatever scholar or parent even says tell him I'm not here",
      "acknowledge that mistake to allow the process of their youth, their students to go through seeing something contradictory to what they may have learned which will further expand their education and their educational process. But it's beautiful how you mentioned that doubt is something that is normal and that it's something that we all grow through so for those out there that maybe having their doubt in their faith just as you said Sheikh, you're not dirty for that or you know you're someone",
      "or you're someone that shouldn't come to the masjid because of a doubt in a particular issue uh it's just a part of would you say it's part of the learning the life process within learning religion um yeah so i wanted to you know something as you were talking something came to mind if you don't you know when when you look at this",
      "at this um sometimes this modern parenting which sort of gets into classroom as well the style of protecting and sanitizing everything but there is actually research that shows that children who for instance see their parents disagree argue or resolve things are much better prepared to deal with uh real life marriage",
      "image of a perfect marriage right because this is how parents are supposed to be they never disagree. They're actually likely to be more problematic as spouses and it works this way as well indeed when you learn about Dean and so disagreement is a big thing that people are scared of these days, and I think that one example or one metaphor you could use is vaccination",
      "What does vaccination do? It basically creates a weaker cousin of the actual culprit and let your body create an immune system, immunity to that. In the same way it's important to teach children about what is out there",
      "let them deal with it. Sheikh, you know I want to go back to something you mentioned. You mentioned your grandmother being herself a person of knowledge and preaching to people about Islam and related to that I wanted to ask you who had the greatest impact on your life? Is that then your grandmother or other people as well you felt had a big impact on",
      "If you're talking about my family, yes. I think that she had a significant impact. But Alhamdulillah, I come from a Pakistani family where my uncles and aunts are very close. And all of them have been important in different ways. MashaAllah. I mean, it's interesting to have a grandmother that was involved in da'wah on a big scale at that time.",
      "MashaAllah. Shaykh, is there an ayah or hadith that you wanted to share with our audience that can bring them benefits at this time? Yeah, so I guess I was just reading in As-Salatul Maghrib, I was reciting Surah Al-Baqarah, and it sort of connects so well to our discussion of doubt, which is that Allah ﷻ begins by saying",
      "that this is the book in which there is no doubt for those who have taqwa and for those mindful of Allah SWT and those who fear. And then Allah goes on to describe the features of these people for whom this book is guidance, and there is not doubt in this book that this book will give you healing and cure from your doubts.",
      "you believe in the unseen and you believe what has been revealed to Rasulullah ﷺ and act. So these three elements are all sort of part of maintaining faith, and they appear in this ayah which is that it's not just what you believe cerebrally mentally but also what you love and what you fear",
      "Who are your people? All of these things. What are your practices, right? What is your body used to doing? Are you used to getting up for Salah? Are comfortable giving Zakat or parting with your money or dealing with loss? All Of These Things They're all connected to Iman. They're All Part of Iman and so i really love this ayat It's like Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala Begins the Book",
      "the book with the most pertinent question for a believer. You know, the most pertenant question for believers is this you ask in Surah Al-Fatiha, guide us to the right path and Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala begins by saying this is the book in which there is no doubt guidance and this is what you need to do. You need to start practicing",
      "missing. And sometimes doubt is resolved when you overcome your shahwat, right? So there is a complex connection in our... between our environment and our sensitivities and sensibilities things we love, things we do, and our mental states. This is modern psychology and philosophical works show this also confirm",
      "deep connection between our habitus and in our outer state, and our mental states. And we should not think of doubt as merely a mental state which means that sometimes when you are doubting it's because perhaps you're hanging out with the wrong people, because you are lazy in your salah,",
      "right and as a result you know shaytan is putting doubts in you. And the best way to resolve that perhaps, is not you know to read a philosophy book but to go back and do what you do, do what",
      "So anyway, this ayah is something that I always find very comforting. Absolutely, subhanAllah. You know just like something you said reminded me of the hadith of the Prophet ﷺ when he said shaytan will come to the person and tell him من خلق هذا ومن خلقة هذا Who created this? Who created the heavens? Who create the mountains? Who creates the trees? And then shaytaan will ask",
      "Shaytan will ask the person, من خلق الله Who created Allah And then the Prophet says فإذا بلغ ذلك If it comes to this point He doesn't give you an intellectual answer He doesn'T give you a rational response To this even though there's many responses to this He tells you فليستعب بالله Seek refuge in Allah سبحانه وتعالى He knew This is divine wisdom Exactly because it's not Even if you got the intellectual Answer it's NOT going to quell your heart",
      "quell your heart because the problem is in your heart you need to seek refuge from shaitan shaitaan is influencing you one way or the other so exactly as you said sheikh subhanallah so sheikh there's a number of questions um let's see subhanAllah i was i had one question flagged right here the brother brought up specifically about the ayah he mentioned so without you even seeing the question that he was bringing",
      "about doubt related to it so you answered his question without even seeing the question that he asked subhanallah i just wanted i just thought that was interesting can i ask one question i'm not gonna it's i know we have a lot of questions sheikh you mentioned one thing hafizukum allah you mentioned",
      "and you know generally what happens what's happened to muslims worldwide and it reminds me of something that when i was a new muslim my father pulled me in the room one time and this was during the iraqi war and he asked do you call me abdul he said abdul why did you become a muslim when the muslim are being held like this yes he did this right i didn't have an answer i i had this belief in my heart but i was okay outside the muslins",
      "vulnerabilities are being taken advantage of when you saw that and you cried i mean you'll see that the driving force behind a lot of the youth going to join in going to fight right into to you know to fight overseas from so the examples of isis and al-qaeda these youth that go and do that there's a level of iman that is in their hearts is there a level",
      "for the ummah as we all should be which is a sign of iman why didn't it lead you to just go and fight grounded i think that what helped me allahu alam is precisely because i was aware of the debates and the history",
      "realize that the real problem is not simply more people doing this there. There is time and place for that but there was a deeper problem you know in our societies because ultimately wars are won not just by bravery,",
      "won the battle of Badr because of those 13 years or 14 years prior. That is when Badrs, soldiers are created and this understanding was something that I already had even though not that i had all the answers but I already have this understanding that we know we are living in times",
      "there are such deep problems among Muslims. One of the things that really broke my heart was, you know, I was between Jeddah and Karachi. And in Karachi, I'm very familiar with what's going on in Pakistan even though I lived in Jeddah. And there was ethnic violence between immigrants from India who had settled to my family. In fact originally came from India, my grandparents.",
      "and then the locals, various local ethnicities. And this was turning just a few years before I was in high school, this had become a really ugly ethnic violence. That to me was just that I had no romantic ideas about how to do things. To me there were problems that I was aware of",
      "was aware of and alhamdulillah i think that was beneficial because to me it was you know you could win wars but you could still lose and when your societies are not able to create they're not able",
      "When there is racism, for example, in Muslim society. It's just a form of racism, right? When you have racism, when you have classism, then the community to which you're calling people to is an ugly place. So it's important that we needed to... Those were problems and so many of those problems came because",
      "ethnicity, ethnic problems which are very much an Indian thing. India is a very ethnic communalistic place and Muslims sort of were just falling along. Similarly racist problem something that we absorb from others or Islam is weak. So those were problems that already in my mind were serious problems the other problem that I was quite acutely aware of was science. And I think that the only thing that changed over time",
      "time with that i realized science was important uh a very important you know new body of knowledge that muslims need but there is something else that we need much more right that's why ultimately changed course but in a sense even when i went into science my ideas were you know how can i use this to do something for the muslim",
      "education that you had, the methodology that you mentioned of studying different ways of thoughts and how they would I guess you could lack a better word debate or exchange their ideas with one another. Did that kind of have you ground you and served as your anchor somewhat when faced with these challenges? Is that what I'm hearing? Yeah it was debates in different perspectives and it wasn't just theoretical debates of reading books. In fact I was aware of so there is Jamaat-e-Islami, there's Tablighi Jamaat,",
      "there are other people who are and you go to everybody and you listen to everybody ahli hadith movement the braille louise and all of those people are and so knowing that they you know these are their arguments and these are there are arguments i remember in fact going back to my grandmother allah she wanted me to give bayat to her shaykh who was an ahl-e-hadith sheikh and i remember you know i was only 12 at the time and i was like her favorite uh",
      "uh grandchild and she wanted me to be this and i said i can't do that just because somebody wants me too so i had a rev i had to revel in me in the same way that she did right to me it was i had defined my own way but you know go with everybody and see what they were saying so",
      "that gave me, I think a sense of maturity. So when you know, when I talk about Islam and when I talked about Muslims it's not out of any kind of romantic view that never existed is very much, this is Allah has given us this deen And there are so many people in this Ummah who are suffering Who have less than us? And then they need our help",
      "to feel that responsibility of now the images that we see in our social media, whether it's Syrians or Palestinians or Uyghurs or Kashmiris. We should never feel helpless. We consider these as data points like this is my world and my plan is not going to be what I can do in a year or perhaps go and join this or that. My",
      "that my plan is i have allah has given me perhaps what 30 40 50 60 70 years and my plan should be how i'm going to respond to this situation comprehensively in that time so it started at 12.",
      "Sheikh, we have a few questions for you. This question from Sister Nur Zahan, she says, my sons are now pursuing master's program in Sharia but they now are facing more trials that make it more difficult for them to join Jama'at, Saladaa, be early at the masjid etc. As their mom I was hoping that they would have easier path to be better students. She continues asking what could she do to support her sons to be more committed? Yes, subhanAllah",
      "That's really tough and may Allah bless you sister for worrying about this. I think that ultimately, you are going to be inshaAllah their asset and I pray that one day they will be sitting here and people will be asking them how is it that they became such great scholars and teachers? And I'm sure that insha'Allah they will remember what you did for them.",
      "also say that uh you know young people go through phases and so the fact that you know they aren't very good right now doesn't mean that this is right this is going to be the case as a you know father of five kids myself and my oldest is hamdallah and my",
      "and if with your dua inshallah they're going to come back and inshAllah make you proud but generally it's important to understand that the process of learning and teaching is one thing and the habits in which they grow up, they are different",
      "when they're going to study Islam in the West, in particular. Now your case is different so I'll come back to it but when they want to study Islamic at a Western university and people go there to find their identity like they are not sure you know there are Sunnis and Shia and then there are Salafis and Ash'aris and Sufis and I wanna figure this out at a University This is the worst idea",
      "find your identity you're not going to go find yourself in Islamic studies and the Eastern Studies department in the West that's not what those programs are for they in fact are designed to allow you doubt, to empower you to doubt and so your identity has to be formed based on your fitrah well before",
      "Your fitrah has to be strengthened. So if those of you who are planning to go, make sure that you have your connection to the Qur'an, that you memorize the Qur-an and that you're aware of the Sunnah and Hadith very well. And that you pray Fajr and Isha at the masjid with all those Pakistani and Palestinian and Somali taxi drivers. If you cannot do that then do us all a favor and don't go and don t do Islamic studies. Not at least at a Western university",
      "at a western university take care of those things first because it is the case that many people leave iman i'm not saying islam but you can no longer say that they have iman after they go through this process they become good at talking about stuff",
      "us especially in the West. Now for you, sister, in this case they're pursuing a program in Sharia. I didn't say where but I'm going to assume that this is a Muslim context and all I can say it does happen sometimes that they feel that what they are studying in theory is not connecting them to practice",
      "practice, right? And that's something there is a serious lack in the mentorship in many Islamic studies programs that are taught like anything else. And if you have bad teachers sometimes you end up and I'm not saying this is the case with your case but sometimes teachers turn you off. Sometimes often I hear that people go",
      "the character of the teachers. And they're not mature themselves, they are young and so rather than understanding the complexity of human nature, they're disheartened because they see people you know a Sheikh smoking cigarette or perhaps having conduct that isn't fitting for them. So I think those are tests that are part of the pamphlet learning",
      "but mashallah your concern for them I think is one of their biggest assets it seems another question the person's asking, is it possible to disagree with certain stuff in Islam yet still be Muslim? like for example a certain topic that you view differently but you keep it as your own opinion but you still follow Islam yes because from your context it seems that",
      "seems that you don't know if it's against Islam but it's again the opinions that you have heard and you cannot bring yourself to believe it. Now, the right way it would seem is to learn, right? And to learn in such a way, learn with people who have the wisdom to treat your questions respectfully,",
      "there are cases when the opinion that you have may be disrespectful or offensive. It doesn't seem like that is the case with you, that you want to keep it to yourself and start keep practicing Islam even though you have some doubts. And I think the short answer your question is yes, it is possible for you to continue to grow in areas in Islam that you are part of those practices",
      "those practices. But seek, you know, my advice to you is don't let doubts get bigger. Just seek the right kinds of teachers. So if you find that somebody doesn't have the compassion or perhaps they don't have your experience, so you come from a certain culture, you maybe have a sheikh from a different generation who sees, who doesn't see why this would be even a doubt, then",
      "then it's not their problem, it's your problem. There is just no match and you need to look for somebody who can understand your context better but don't let it grow if you can afford to find somebody. Alhamdulillah, you have many places where you can reach out and for instance at Yaqeen there are many such opportunities feel free to reach out.",
      "absolutely i like how you mentioned just a small thing i like what you mentioned i mean the last answer you give there's a number of things but mashallah it's about like how he mentioned it's not your fault it's his fault it is just not a match you know you'll find sometimes if they don't get the answer from that sheikh and there's something wrong with this right sometimes the sheikh will say what's wrong with the student because of these how dare he you know ask these kinds of questions i love how you mention compassion with their particular thought process and their journey",
      "their journey. Masha'Allah Jazakallah khair. Sheikh, would you say something really important here also is to maintain humility in terms of that? You don't understand it. You think it might not be correct. You're still following it but you don't know maybe just say to yourself maybe there's an explanation I don't like just to have that humility rather than saying I disagree this must be wrong even in our minds",
      "that, right? Yeah. And I want to add that I cannot tell you how many times people's problems are merely contextual. For example, you see certain practice in Islam and you're like this is unethical, this is wrong but you go take a class in anthropology and you learn about the radically different ways human societies have been set up in the past and even today",
      "day, right? And once you learn that, you realize that your ethical formation, right, you feel really, really strongly about when people should be able to get married. Because in your state the age is 18 and if you did otherwise you might end up in prison, it would be rape or something. You go to a different country in the West",
      "Christian West, the whole everything is same but the age is 14 or 12. And until recently there was no such age. You go learn about medieval India for example among Hindus if a girl did not get married by the time she was 10 the village elders would think that this is a kind of abuse because the father is keeping the girl in his house to do his housework",
      "his housework, whereas he should be finding a husband for her and the village elder could take your girl away. So just like these anthropology in history are often that lack of knowledge and arrogance that often Westerners have more than anybody else which is we have reached the end of history. We know the right answers to all such questions so",
      "you know we raise questions that is in the west that nobody's ever raised before because people recognize differences uh and people are usually recognized that you know this this happens in our uh in our neck of the wood other people do it differently but my point is simply that our not that there are no moral standards",
      "Look at the Sharia, look at the flexibility of the Shariah. Those moral standards and these cultural habits Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la provides such great leeway. And that's something also you see in Islamic history that from Southeast Asia, South Asia, Africa there are so many different radically different cultures all practice Islam in many, many different ways. Sometimes they would even do it in a way that would be considered wrong but they were comfortable with it",
      "comfortable with it and people basically adjusted to sometimes in extreme geographic conditions or whatnot. So, to speak again, to reaffirm what you were saying Sheikh Ibrahim humility just knowing that we don't even know what other human beings do and you know or what they were doing 100 years ago or even 50 years ago that really helps",
      "I wanted to end, but then people keep putting up questions that are quite interesting. This is just a point that someone raised I thought was important for us to mention as well. Sister Wafat said, I also think it's very important to reflect on why doubts come to the mind. Sometimes people may have doubts due to traumatic experiences, insecurities, etc., so seeking professional help may help. That's definitely a point we should be making as well",
      "as well. One question here I thought was interesting, as well, Sheikh. Brother Jad said, I noticed some young Muslims take the back home culture as the way to go which I find not typical. What advice to give about culture slash Islam confusion back home? And I guess he is saying some people think that the way practice Islam is the way it's practiced in their country back home, which sometimes might be right but sometimes may not be.",
      "may not be and causes some confusion for those who are living in diaspora, living in the United States or Canada or Europe and so on and so forth. What would you say to this brother? Yeah. Culture and religion. It's a, it's a whopper. It is a question we won't get at the end right. And answer it quickly. In brief people say that look, this is your religion. This is your culture. And let's separate that now often the problem is",
      "that this doesn't work this way because culture and religion are big together. And they're separated often in conditions of like, you know as Muslims in the West our diaspora community relatively new community and culture and religious haven't sort of fused together yet so we have a lot more questions about that. And of course in the global world we're dealing with this problem",
      "cultures come together and they contradict. And sometimes I feel very strongly morally about a cultural, but a religious problem which is really just my cultural conditioning versus somebody else's spiritual condition. So being sensitive about that is really important. I don't want to say that what's happening in Pakistan or Egypt or Indonesia their cultural habits are culture whereas my cultural habits",
      "American Muslims fall into this exceptionalist tendencies that are part of American narrative. American self-narration is that America is the city on the hill, America is home of progress, America where history ends and therefore this sort of translates into Islam. Our Islam is the true Islam and other people's Islam is cultural Islam. I think that is something we should be aware of",
      "aware of. But at the same time, and the other thing that helps, I guess I can't perhaps provide any solace that there is an easy solution to any cultural problem that you're facing but knowing that almost every community goes through it, every generation goes through It is part of the test that Allah has placed in this world for us when Rasulullah",
      "the Sahaba moved from Mecca to Medina, they found that women are culturally different. They talk back more, you know, they have different habits and this was something that led to some raised voices in the houses of the Prophet ﷺ and the companions. This is part of the test that Allah ﷻ has given us these differences.",
      "your time with us is really valuable and i learned a lot personally um before we can conclude you know a question from our side uh the question we like to ask all of our guests truly is that if you can go back in time what advice would you give your younger self ah that would be a book i think that",
      "it's not any advice i guess but it's rather the attitude i would tell myself you know the hadith of prophet which i knew but i didn't fully appreciate in that rift that gentleness is something then when you add to something",
      "adds a beauty to it no matter what it is and when you take away from something it spoils it so add gentleness to everything take it easy i think that um there are many conversations or moments where had i followed the prophetic advice uh i would have been less regretful or embarrassed but",
      "But, you know, so that's really it's really no easy way to tell people the challenge. Take it easy, kid. If you don't mind, if you can just, you",
      "of the times i think i can safely say that it comes from this book so shake if you can just give us a brief overview of this book and you know please mention to the world how long it took you not just translate this book but to you know with the commentary and everything on this book as well just let the world know really about this book in the greatness of this books i don't think people realize it yes exactly lucky",
      "you know when i it took me about 20 years to translate and uh two first two volumes are out and and two more are on the way in several years later inshallah but um each of the volumes is like a you know a thousand pages so you have plenty to read inshAllah it's Arabic English to Arabic face-to-face book in fact I have the copy here I can show you um",
      "the book then the translation see there's Arabic and English face to face I don't know if you can see but what i wanted to also mention is that when Grill was publishing this, I told them the only condition I have is that When you publish a paperback version The price is going to be within the range of ordinary mortals and $40-$50 so they actually are very pleased",
      "that they kept there, the end of the bargain and the paperback version has just come out. And it's only well $59 for a thousand pages this hardback version is 170. And so that was beyond most people's range. And I really wanted to make that available to people but this book Madari Jaselekin is a commentary on",
      "and traditions. And there were many, many different tradition right? is sort of what I tell people it's like a Kleenex you know, it's the title, the brand name that was given to many,many different movements in Islam but and,and, or and, and. There are many different movements",
      "of the history of those movements but not historically, but rather it's just you know, it brings together all that wisdom and this is written as a commentary on an earlier work by Abu Ismail al-Harawi al-Ansari rahimallah which was who was the leading Sufi of his time if you lived in the 5th century or afterward any time it is his book that is Abu Isma'il al-Insari's book",
      "al-Sali's book that you would memorize as a initiate, as a saliq. So that's why this book in a sense really gives you a critical commentary from the perspective of the Qur'an and the Sunnah and it's written as the tafsir of Iyaka na'budu wa iyakana sta'inah. Right so it's a tafsira of this one ayat of Surah Al Fatiha",
      "of suluq, of faqr and zuhd and love and patience and gratitude to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la and there are hundreds such stations. All of them come out of our commitment to Allah that we proclaim in Surah Al Fatiha, You alone we worship and you alone seek for help. And it is accessible, you know, in the way that I've translated",
      "intellectually challenging books. But with footnotes and, you know, with some sort of modern terminology, I think that, you don't... You read as a companion to your life. If it's a path of suluq, if it's the path of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la that you want then it's book that you can read from month to month, Ramadan to Ramadan and benefit from it",
      "benefit from it and I guess the last thing I would say about it is that this is a book that puts me to shame so it's a book That was hard to write because um you when you compare yourself to it and it's not a kind of book that you can read like any other book it's the kind of Book that puts you to shame and sometimes that's a good thing there's so many questions I'm holding myself back",
      "really appreciate your time and I know the audience did as well and hopefully inshallah we can have you back at some point in the future inshAllah thank you very much for having me thank you"
    ]
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    "text": [
      "We'll add to stream. Assalamu alaikum and welcome. We just begin with the recitation of Surah Al-Fatihah.",
      "As-salamu alaykum and welcome, and thank you for being here. My name is Mahjabeen Islam. I'm vice president of the Islamic Center Council. Dr. Saleh Jabareen was unable to be here, and Dr. Amjad Hussain is traveling, so I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Anjum.",
      "I want to first express gratitude and tribute to Drs. Amjad Hussain and Saleh Jabarin for perpetuating a wonderful lecture series that has a wide range of subjects from law, medicine up to religion. The three most important entities in Islam are Allah, Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him, and the Quran. There's a very tender verse in Surah Baqarah, verse 186 which says",
      "In which Allah is saying to Prophet Muhammad that they will ask you where I am and tell them that I am near. Fortunate are people who feel the presence of Allah, the fact is that Allah though is not physically visible for us.",
      "He is not among us. But the Quran, in all its originality, is with us. We need to create a relationship with the Quran. Read it for even 15 minutes every day and read a translation or commentary, not just the original text. Though there's a lot of barakah in the original texts, of course. And you will notice that it will address your issues. It's really remarkable how it does.",
      "and it will address your issues in real time, and it would be a life-changing experience. It is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Omer Anjum, Professor of Philosophy and Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies at the University of Toledo. He has been a frequent contributor in our lecture series, and today we will be discussing preservation of the Quran. Welcome, Dr. Anjom.",
      "Thank you very much. Beautiful words, I could not agree more. The Qur'an and the connection with the Qur'aan is the greatest spiritual treasure that you will find. Today I want to talk about how the Qur-an has been preserved.",
      "informal conversational um and if you have any specific technical questions i'm happy to get to that so let me start by asking you raise your hand and answer the question feel free to how has the quran been preserved what answer comes to your mind",
      "mind yes please okay so people have been memorizing okay very good yes okay so a very interesting word the word means um when you hear something or when you see something or you encounter something over and over and",
      "and when you have many people tell you like if if you if you're running out or you know here at the masjid somebody comes and tells you there is a fire outside dr islam told you there's a fire and you know if you are me that's enough for you to believe that there is the fire but that's not enough dr jim andre or tim andrey comes and says hey there is",
      "After that, the rest of you, people you know, people who don't know, all people that are trustworthy come and tell you one after another. So many that you can't even count that there is a fire outside. We're sure there's a fire on site, right? These people have no reason to lie but there is an additional factor if it's a possibility that for some reason these people just want to get you out of the mess gym and they have all conspired together",
      "You have a reason to doubt that they have met together They all know each other and they are conspired To get you out of the mustard because you just wouldn't get out. And so they're just saying they're making this up If that's the case, then this is not tawakkur So tawakkul is a word that means recurrent reports that confirm each other there is no possibility of conspiracy",
      "and they could have come together to make up this report so what dr. Abdul Wahab said is that there is tawatur is the means by which we know the Quran has been preserved I'm going to explain how that works so both answers happen right on one is hufadh",
      "transmission through memory, right? It's oral and aural transmissions. There are two words, oral which is when you say something and aurel is when hear it. A-W, so A-U-R-A-L So the Quran has been preserved through aural recitation and aura transmission. Aura transmission takes place when let's say I am the memorizer of the Quran You come and recite to me and I say yes, you got it. That's aural transmission",
      "So the Quran has been preserved through oral. That is, I recited to you and then you recited back to me. That's oral and aural translation. So that's absolutely correct. What else? Does anything else come to mind? Yes sir. Khalifa Uthman. Ah okay. Right to the jugular. Nobody's wasting time anymore. Which is that Uthmann, the third caliph,",
      "or rather not preserved. He did something that gave his name to this process of transmission. What he did, does anybody want to venture what he did? What was the work of Uthman, the third caliph, Uthmann ibn Affan in the presentation on the Quran?",
      "Got it printed. Well, you're close but there was no printing press at the time. They wrote it but they had already written it. In fact, the Quran was written at the times of Prophet Muhammad himself so that's not what he did. He compiled it. Oh, so warm because",
      "Because the Quran was compiled in times of Abu Bakr already. So what did Uthman do? Yes sir, back there. He compounded one narration. Ah, very good. He standardized it. So in other words, they were people writing their private copies of various parts of the Quran. You've got Surah Yaseen written,",
      "written you've got so that Baha written you're a poor man so you got only Alif Las written and it matters because there's no paper where is paper invented by Egyptians right nobody is there but sorry you missed out a little bit",
      "paper is invented in China. But when the Chinese used paper, they use it only for diplomatic state business. It's not public property. It expensive and there is no great need to disseminate anything so it's really written as to do formal official communication. When Muslims",
      "in a war, in a battle. They defeat some Chinese warlord and they come into possession of paper in that raid. And they find something really interesting which is something lighter than what they were used to writing on. So they got Chinese involved",
      "the abbasid period in uh the ninth century second century late second century of islam which is the ninth centur y of common era and an explosion happens at this time an explosion of paper making in baghdad in the city of baghdat for the first",
      "of the Quran or some prayers right and that actually is one of the main sources of documentary early Islamic history because you don't have a lot of written stuff from that period but these stones are really handy but it takes a long time to write the car on stone right and it's hard to carry them so what else very good animal skin untanned goat",
      "They would write on that or, and this is creative, on camel's shoulder blade which is really wide you dry that bone and you write on it. So yes sir back there? Tree bark Yes except that there is not a lot of trees in Arabia so what you actually do is because if you are rich you would import paper or leaf dried leaf",
      "leaf from Egypt but these people aren't rich so you do have that but it's not very widespread and that's where what by the word by the way the word Bible comes from the name for the leaf of that tree that Egyptians used to dry and write on a virus",
      "in other words writing is expensive and rare it's hard so what is happening as the quran is being revealed you have plenty of sources that show that the prophet himself wrote uh and instructed the writing of the qur'an even though himself he was not a scribe did not know how to write or read um how do we know that how do",
      "and writing was involved in the time of the Prophet, what was the first verse or first set of verses to be revealed? Iqra' To recite. But reciting could be just from memory. Right? But then In that verse it says",
      "So in the very first five verses, you will notice that these five verses are just addressing this 40-year-old man who is a pious merchant of Mecca. Who had no expectation that he is going to receive God's message, right? What he's told is recite in the name of your Lord and He is not a reader.",
      "There were people who used to recite and read in Mecca, but he wasn't one of them. So he is surprised by that. And then that very first set of verses say, Recite in the name of your Lord, the One Who created you from blood clot, and The One Who taught men, Who taught man by the pen.",
      "not just about reciting from memory, that the pen was referred to right from the beginning. Right from the begining and then there is another surah in the Quran which some scholars say is probably a second surah to be revealed after this first one. And some say it came a little later but among the very earliest ones is called Surat Nun.",
      "noon and the pen and i follow swears by the pen with which they're writing which means their writing right so the idea of writing is there in the quran from the very beginning in fact some scholars say the writing isn't introduced before allah is introduced i mean you could say the name allah because it does not mention what it does",
      "the name of Allah. It says, The Lord who created it. Right? But it mentions the pen. Allah is introduced first when in Surah Al-Fatiha. That's when. Now of course Muhammad peace be upon him was aware of Allah as the deity. All Arabs knew Allah as",
      "the deity in fact for thousands of years before islam the near eastern people called the creator deity the one who created the heaven they call that deity allah even when they were polytheists they recognized that as allah and the christians and the jews also who spoke semitic languages used the word allah jesus who spoke aramaic would have called",
      "called God Allah or the Arabic version of it which is very similar, very close. Moses and Abraham would have called God a lot so the Quran begins by mentioning writing",
      "that the Prophet had scribes who would write down the Quran as soon as it comes to him. He recites it, it is written down and then we know from the story like the famous story of the conversion of Umar ibn Taffaf where he goes and overhears his sister being taught the Quran right? And he is angry he is the enemy of Islam at the time, the man and he goes inside and she hides away",
      "pages of the Quran. So we know that this was happening from very early on. However, first of all, the Quran is coming down. It's being recited. Majority of people do not know how to read and write. According to reports in Quraysh, in the city of Mecca which was the most important city in Arabia. It was the holy city. It wasn't a center of trade precisely because it was a sanctuary and people could be safe there. They were only",
      "there were only 17 individuals who could read and write. And so a few people, it was elite knowledge that the population of Mecca probably was over 5,000 at the time. So there is writing down taking place but writing down is taking place only for the benefit of a small number of people",
      "But people are mostly memorizing the Quran. The Arabs were amazing at memorizing and in fact it is a witness phenomenon even today you go to deserts of Mauritania, you have people that I have met personally, you recite something to them once and they will repeat it right back to you.",
      "One such scholar has memorized not only the Quran, but all books of hadith. The six books of Hadith. And you know what that is? There are literally thousands, like tens of thousands of hadif in these volumes put together. But they appear in different versions and different chains of narration. So when you say somebody has memorized a book of hadit, that means they have memorized the chains along with the text.",
      "with the text and the variations of the texts these people are able to memorize with amazing precision not everybody so this is a gift like some people have more than others but it is not uncommon for the human mind to you don't have the distractions your mind is not involved in abstract calculations your mind",
      "You're out in the desert, you have a great sense of various spaces and paths. And you actually memorize by attaching words to those spaces. And so these people have amazing memories. This is how preservation on the Qur'an takes place. What is it that Uthman do that is different? Well,",
      "Quran is a live text. It's coming down and people are reciting it, and then people begin to recite it at night. So that's another thing that we know from internal evidence in the Quran. One of the earliest surahs to be revealed is Surat Al-Muzzammil. How does it start? Somebody remind me.",
      "Wake up, stay up at night and recite the Quran. وَرَتِّلِ الْقُرْآنَ تَبْتِيلًا So you have a few verses revealed or a few surahs revealed that are increasing every day but Muslims are being told to do what? To stay up all night and recite those verses in the Quran right?",
      "the Quran at night. It is an art, it is something that Muslims are really proud of and as soon as somebody becomes a Muslim we have some evidence that they're assigned a mentor who will teach them the Quran. In Medina by the way majority of the Quran is revealed in Mecca. Slight majority of it. When you go to Medina",
      "The Prophet is clearly concerned with the process of preservation. So a famous incident takes place in the Battle of Bethlehem, the first battle against the Meccans. A number of Meccan elite are captured as prisoners of war and one of the things the Prophet asks them that could be used as ransom is what?",
      "Teach 10 of our kids to read and write. And you can go home. This is how important reading and writing is to the Prophet, peace be upon him. So at this time in fact the Prophet is also encountering Jews who have a much more developed culture of writing than anything the Matkans had. So basically there is a lot more literature",
      "lot more literature, a lot more writing involved in the deen. But the Quran is not put together as one book because there is no concept of book and also imagine making a book out of camel shoulder blades. It doesn't work. So what you have is people, different people have different pieces of writing they're memorizing it but how do we know that the Quran exists?",
      "How do we know? The Quran exists because it's recited in the five daily prayers. And especially during Ramadan, the whole Quran would be recited. In order. So for there to be a book you have to have order. Right?",
      "time the prophet as he as the quran is coming down and he recites it in a certain order and the last year that he died according to tradition he recited three times a disease beginning to end so that's how we know the qur'an exists in the minds of people in memory they know what comes first what comes next but it is not a book in one single place after the death of the prophet muhammad there is",
      "a battle um rebellion in arabia anti-state rebellion by both against islam and some cases just against the state political power of islam called the riddha wars or apostasy wars where a lot of companions of the prophet who had memorized the quran are killed which is what prompts omar ibn khattab to begin",
      "people who memorize the quran are dying and what if the young the future generation was the kind of man worried about the future there are many instances of that so anyway he goes to abu bakr and says compile the qura'an and what he meant by that is bring all the pieces of the qur'an in order and put them together in one place didn't mean book or printing because that didn't exist",
      "And Abu Bakr said, the Prophet didn't do that. I don't feel comfortable doing that. It's an innovation. And Abu Baker in particular was a man who saw himself as an extension of the Prophet. If the Prophet did not do it, I'm not going to do it. But Ammar keeps coming back to him and makes arguments that look, times are different. People are dying. Revelation has stopped. The Prophet is gone.",
      "gone, alayhi salam. We have to do something until Abu Bakr feels that you know what? You got a point. Let us do that. So then he makes a committee of people who were some are young and they were with the Prophet. They were known for their best memory. And some were older who were with The Prophet all the way from the beginning in Mecca. People like Abdullah ibn Masrud who were early Meccan companions who was master of the Quran",
      "of the quran and zaid ibn thabit who is a young man amazing memory uh and he was with the prophet all the time as the prophet recited the qur'an and then a couple others abdullah bin obayy and a couple other people are put together and they say you know basically write down every verse in the qura but for every verse that you write make sure that",
      "doesn't play tricks on you make sure that there are two other people outside of you who witness that this is the verse and this is decoder now there is some dispute among Muslims about whether the order ordering up the Quran was for the word that's used as though Tifi meaning that it is divinely commanded or is it that these surahs could be changed",
      "fee that is it was given from the beginning and others who say that wasn't um at least based in recent research that i have seen it seems that the order was known now whether it was stable or not that's still i think uh i don't have an opinion on but there was an order but whether you could you know some people could disagree about that there is some evidence that not everybody knew",
      "the exact quarter. Anyway, that aside all the verses are put together and they fill a small room. This is not a book. These are all things that are piled together. That's what happened in the time of Abu Bakr. Now at this time Islam expands soon after. At this point Medina is the center",
      "All the important people lived there. But soon afterward, within 30 years of the passing of the Prophet Muhammad alayhi salam, Muslims have conquered all of the Persian Empire and two-thirds, 75% of... Sorry. Anybody who does math just should have noticed that this was an error. 66% of the Roman Empire was conquered.",
      "was conquered so what is present-day turkey anatolia is the historical name of the place and it's only i was not conquered because of the mountains the arabs couldn't take the camels across from that but um the syria in egypt with greater syria the entire lebanon and egypt were uh conquered",
      "land and the companions of the prophet Muhammad are spreading to different cities. The major cities at this time are, I'm going to test you on this five Mecca Medina Baghdad in Cairo no thank you neither of them exist at this",
      "Khufa and Basra. Khufah and Basar. In Egypt, it's called Bustat at the time. Bustan is where Cairo was later established centuries later. So tell me now the names again. Khutbah, Basrah, and both are in Iraq? Bustad in Egypt. How did you forget that? And what else?",
      "What else? Damascus, Mecca, Medina. So Mecca and Medina together are called Hijaz. And then Cuspat in Egypt which almost serves as like an attachment to Damascus. And the you have centers like Kufa and Basra so those are the main places where Muslims have spread. Those are the mean centers. Those also both be military centers or detainment centers they're call Amsar by the way",
      "by the way. Each of these is called Misr. Misr just means a military camp or garrison as in old language. Garrison town. So each of these are garrisons towns and in each of this Amsar you have various companions who go and spread and settle there and they begin to teach Quran to the people that are coming to them. Their people are converting to Islam particularly from Arabia",
      "and they are moving to one of these cities, and they're learning the Quran. Now a problem emerges which is that you have these companions who are separated from each other in different Ansar who are reciting the Quran, and if there is a disagreement among them well that disagreement becomes stabilized rather than being corrected",
      "Arabic language, like any other language before the modern period is not a standard one single standard. You see, one of the things that we don't often appreciate is that human language is constantly changing, constantly evolving. According to scholars of linguistic geography every 12 miles language changes. There's different dialect and new words",
      "what a typical human being in the past would this is how far they would go um and beyond that right you're there's a different village that you almost never visit in your life right so basically different words emerge and then it gets slightly different usages that's happening everywhere in fact if you try to read english right from 300 years ago you will find difficulty 500 years",
      "modern language in the modern world english becomes standardized is because government becomes big people begin to move you have steamboat you have the ability to travel long distances and this allows language to become standardized and then modern academies are born modern dictionaries lexicons were born a couple hundred years ago and today the internet right that standardizes the english language so we shouldn't take for granted that everybody spoke the same arabic",
      "right in the arabian peninsula they have same families of words but everybody speaks a slightly different language so when the prophet is speaking if he spoke only the quranic only dialect his own personal dialect what happens is that if he did that well arabs are extremely jealous all people all tribal people particularly are um and",
      "And the more limited you are in your movement, the more jealous you are. So Arabs would feel if the Prophet only spoke Quraysh dialect they would feel every time they heard a word that was Qurayshi's word but not us in Yemen who were superior to those Qurayish what do they know? Every time the Prophet is talking about cotton he is using the word we have got something better",
      "have got something better our word is open so what you're going to do you feel something for it so what happened is that when the prophet recited the quran he asked jibri according to the tradition to bring down the qur'an in the language of people that he's residing too so words change so for example you hear the word um in uh in a presentation about",
      "of Al-Fatiha, Malik Yaumiti. Another recitation is Maliki Yaumitin because God knows what but because some people did not have the word malik and for them malik was a foreign or foreign word we say malik so Maliki yaumiti Maliki Yawmiti similarly",
      "is a word that the arabs used uh sorry qurashis used but other people use the word and so the prophet asked jibril according to tradition to recite to him so that he could recite to people in that dialect",
      "received the Qur'an in seven ahruf. Literally, it means seven words or seven letters. And scholars still dispute how exactly to interpret this idea of seven letters because it just means the Qurʾān has been revealed in multiple forms without changing the meaning. Therefore, if you hear a slightly different recitation do not fight.",
      "do not disagree is there were cases when one companion would hear somebody else recite slightly differently and would start fighting he said no you don't know how to recite it and they would go to the prophet like uh and then the prophet would say both of those both of them are correct so um now after this process",
      "of people now in the world are not majority of Muslims now certainly majority of people that was the drool over or non-non Arabs but many people who are converting to Islam they don't care what original dialect you have just tell us the right thing right it's kind of like if you've started to if you never tried to learn Arabic one thing that you realize is that there is no such thing as one Arabic everybody can talk everybody isn't different dialect and so",
      "what happens is that if you're a student and you want to learn Arabic, you want the learn one standard dialect. And thanks to Arab scholars many of whom actually were 19th century Christian Arabs who helped standardized help standardized one Arabic dialect one standard Arabic which could be used in like news broadcasts",
      "In any of these different places, Morocco, I don't understand Moroccan accent. I can understand almost all others because it's so different. Most people who are, say, Moroccan, if they talk to somebody from the Gulf, they wouldn't be able to understand the Moroccan accents. Everybody will understand the Gulf accent. So it's different. Well, how do you deal with this problem at this time which is really in terms of technology",
      "really fundamental, really primitive. So the Prophet created a tolerance for different words but now because non-Arabic speaking people are converting and they're learning Arabic they don't care about those differences they just want one Arabic so increasingly there is a pressure to standardize the Quran and those dialectical",
      "So that is where Uthman comes in. Uthuman says, we're going to write, take Abu Bakr's compilation. Now also because you are richer, you have better technology available. You can use just light skin and bring it all together and write it in one script. In one script,",
      "the different dialects are accommodated now sometimes the differences most of the differences by the way within the quranic recitations can be accommodated in writing if you look at how malik is written how maliki's written the difference is only the vowels that you add not the basic structure what is called skeleton the skeleton is the same all that's different is",
      "right so the with monic codex a copy of a manuscript is called a codex the what monic kodak's incorporates writing just this skeleton and allows different people to recite those skeletons differently some of those differences are at required skeleton difference",
      "difference okay now we're getting technical like if you go from the words are different the skeleton is different so how is that accommodating according to scholars now we don't have othmanic codex available to us it doesn't survive so how do we know what was done um it's a better it's matter of scholarly reconstruction but according to the best reconstruction we have",
      "we have, some scholars say that different Usman created a number of quodasis. Five up to five and those differences could be accommodated there so one place would have one and the other place would had the other skeleton Now comes the question of ira'at The actual recitations that people have preserved until today If you go to a scholar",
      "scholar of the quran somebody who memorizes that we're at in an expert way not like you know you memorize one recitation a to z that's a great beginning but that's just the beginning because normally what you do is you have to memorize all the 10 recitations so a typical reciter from al-azhar university or medina or damascus they when",
      "all the ten main verse or there and there are more that are considered shahada or unusual so you actually memorize all of them all of the 10 recitations along with the chains of where this recitation how it was preserved so now people say look the Quran is completely",
      "a harakal it's not a dot that you could uh that has been changed right what do you think of that have dots been changed or added and later yeah could people change or take away dots they couldn't tell me more",
      "yeah exactly so the harakat were actually added later because harakat like right or for persians and south asians it's those are added later to help uh",
      "who's it's not their language so they wouldn't know how to read. So what is preserved as a sound recite the actual writing right? The actual writing is if you will, the human...it's a mnemonic device. It's a device to memorize, to remember. It' s a mneumonic device and the more people need that today for example",
      "to the different ways in which you're going to recite, to say a letter. That is the same kind of thing that they were doing back then as non-Arabs are converting, non-arabs are reciting, they need to know how to recite this so we'll add haraket. Similarly dots often writing was very laborious enterprise and dots would have been very difficult",
      "have a stable than a ticked annotation so basically these things are added but the standard was always oral and our own transmission that's why writing even though it's happening from the beginning but writing is just a way to aid overall transmission of the book how can it be said",
      "Continues because it's happening constantly right people are memorizing and people are reciting already from the early Meccan period so anyway, that's the role of the Uthmanic codex or what's called Mus'haf Uthmein The Codex of Uthmen Alright, so that's all I have to say questions additions yes",
      "Yeah, that's a wonderful question. At the Ohio State University Professor Ahmed Jalad is an expert on that question",
      "My daughter who goes there is taking a course with him and excited about it. The Arabic language existed, Arabic poetry existed so it's not that the language did not exist but it was fairly well developed language But there are these variations And how the Qur'an dealt with those variations is part of what the scholars say is a miracle of the Qur-an",
      "variations in such a way that one part of the Quran clarifies other parts of the Qur'an. There is almost no word in the Quran that is used only once in what context so that by Quran using its words in different places, the Quran explains what it means by certain words. The only words that are strange, that are new and",
      "and not repeated are those that are describing like natural phenomena if you don't understand the reference like what it means you're okay um there is a story of omar who was one of the readers and writers of one of them when he heard the word uh in surah right he said what is that i've never heard that word but",
      "It's he said it doesn't actually hurt me at all. It's just say it's just talking about when The snow falls precipitation, but its ice how it hits the ground You never seen it and We know it we can understand the phenomenon much better But in her understanding of the plan so there words like that but any word that is",
      "that is crucial to the meaning of the Quran, it's always repeated. And that's why those scholars point out some people who don't know enough Arabic and don't have context they might say the Quran repeats itself a lot but actually the Quran almost never repeats itself in the same context every time sometimes even the same verse would be repeated but its meaning",
      "the first verse and so it almost becomes a uh almost become a new meaning a new appreciation but also it is a hermeneutic device because it allows the first first to be explained without reference to an external lexicon because the lexical doesn't exist so you could say that the quran creates its own lexican similarly in grammar of course there's",
      "course grammar exists now the rules of right language and wrong language they do exist they are actually a little more stable than vocabulary um but the quran uses vocabulary in such a way sorry grammatical concept in such",
      "explain what they are because that will only benefit those who know but the Quran constantly shifts between past tense and present tense when describing God. Because the concept that the Quran is capturing is that God is about time, God is not limited by time. Sometimes the Day of Judgment is described as already having happened",
      "And sometimes past is described in the present tense. So, grammar, grammatical rules also settle in this way. Sometimes, and that's another very, very important feature of the Quran, final thing I will say. The only way to understand, to finally settle and tie down these meanings",
      "if the Quran is talking about something that everybody sees. So then you would know, aha! This is what it's talking about, right? So that's why the Quran can only be understood properly in the context of what is happening to the Prophet. So the Quran",
      "the Quran will come and start explaining like you know God has heard the complaint of the woman who is arguing with you about her husband. The Quran doesn't say what the argument was, the Quran comes right in the middle and says everybody saw this woman come to the Prophet and complain and the Quran starts right there. Now everybody will understand from this",
      "mean to say that a woman what is the samia uh what is right that she's arguing they know what these words mean now because they saw the phenomenon and they heard them or heard the quran comment on that and then the qur'an resolves this problem so this way if you don't know",
      "which the quran came right if you don't know this seerah you can actually radically misunderstand the qur'an and that's why it's really important uh and this happened right from the beginning early scholars of islam they preserved two things to make quran accessible otherwise the qura'n will not be accessible to you two things one pre-islamic poetry",
      "not be able to triangulate and understand how the word language is used because remember there are no lexicons, there are dictionaries that are printed by Oxford. So the only way you can know how words are used is by because people have memorized Arabic poetry before and so they know this is how these words are second way in which the Quran ties down its meaning is by referring to concrete events",
      "We have two questions from online. First, one person wants to know if you could talk about the non-Arabic words in the Quran and then the second question first he sends his salaams and he wants to",
      "I don't know. I'll be in London, actually Oxford and Cambridge next week or first week of March And the event at Oxford, I believe will be live but it's always the organizers who decide those things Now non-Arabic words in the Quran",
      "non-Arabic words in the Quran. Because the Quran often insists, frequently that it is an Arabic text and the reason this insisting became important was because the Arab, Quraysh his opponents would often say that he is learning these stories, myths of what happened to Adam and Moses and Jesus. He's learning this mythology from",
      "great storytellers of persia and there were storytellings all persia who are well known uh and then these great myths um but great wrestlers and great emperors so on an arabian press pilot and so the quran is clear and emphasizes that no they're talking about you know a different mythology a non-arabic language",
      "language whereas this is an Arabic Quran how could it be just recited, how could we just copy from it but also the Quran emphasizes this is a Arabic text. Masha'if in fact had a very clear position that all words of the Quran are Arabic but the problem is how do you define what is Arabic remember language is always fluid language is",
      "so you do have words in the Quran such as pinwan and sinwan which the Arabs didn't know we seem to have come from elsewhere um and so it's in my view of the resolution of that debate is that there",
      "that has not been arabicized and its meaning has not become settled among parents because sometimes you use words that people don't know it's just a different look you know in english you could use the meaning of a word right or you could",
      "And the meaning of liberalism could be protecting private property or it could mean sexual liberty. Different people will use it differently. And who controls the word? Well, it's not an Arabic word and Arabs don't control the word. But if a word that has become part of the Arabic language and the Arabs now have a meaning regardless of what the original language does with them",
      "does with that word the meaning has become our own of meaning now we're not gonna so if the meaning changes in that language the Arabic is not going to be affected that's what it means to say the word has to become arabized in order to use Quran and that is the case you don't have any work in the Quran that the Arabs of some dialect do not recognize as their",
      "own has a stable thank you very much"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Sunday Lecture _10-30-22_ w_Dr_ Ovamir Anjum_4A3kTcY1Lx8&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750786098.opus",
    "text": [
      "So today is the second of the lectures in the series of history of Islam",
      "Our speaker did a fantastic job on his first lecture about a month ago. Just those of you who are not familiar with this series, it would be the last Sunday of every month and you will get, both of you on the mailing list, you will",
      "Usually they say that our speaker does not need any introduction and this speaker clearly does not use an introduction. And I'm not going to spend half an hour to introduce him anyway, because usually people end up doing that. Very briefly Dr. Awameen Anjum is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toledo and holds the chair of Imam Tattal Chair in Islamic Studies",
      "Islamic studies at the university and been a professor now for few years. And last week, week and half ago we had a very nice program around his latest scholarly work in which he translated an old Arabic text, Madaraj al-Taliki",
      "discussion on that this is a monumental work that he has done but I am grateful to him personally that he had committed to give this video the place thank you very much all right there trying to make it",
      "Maybe something on my end? Okay, good. Okay.",
      "Today my topic is Islamic history, why and what? What counts as Islamic history and why ought we to learn Islamic history. Some justification some philosophical reflections on history and what might call theory of Islamic history What does history mean? If you don't mind I'll make it a little interactive so",
      "yeah it's his story his story okay that's the series of facts linked by your story okay one um as somebody said uh one damn fact after another what else it's an attitude of the flesh",
      "talking about facts and we have narrative there is a little tension between fact and narrative the thing is that we don't ever have all the facts about the past and not only do we not have all of the facts, we have in fact a very narrow version or selection of facts that somebody has collected",
      "History can be done better or worse, but it's never merely a matter of one damn fact after another because nobody would want to learn it. For instance, how many people know how many blades of grass are there outside in the parking lot? It's a fact, but I doubt anybody ever even thought about knowing. So we don't wanna know facts. We wanna know the facts that fit into some narrative",
      "of what is important in life, right? So the ancient way of doing it, pre-modern way if history was called tarikh for the Arabs. And from tarikh, it went from Arabic,",
      "and Turkish, Urdu, and all of these different Islamic languages. And I use the word Islamic kit right there's a little trick there when you say something is Islamic that means it somehow geologically has to do with belief in God and the Prophet Muhammad. When I say something an Islamic kit that's the way people use the work italic hit meaning related",
      "So Islamic kit means all of these cultural phenomena that are not necessarily religiously Islamic, but historically they've been connected to Islamic civilization. And Persian for example is an Islamic kit language. It's not Islamic because you could be just as good as a Muslim if you don't know Persian.",
      "if Islamic in the sense that there is a good portion of the riches of Islamic tradition available in Persian or Urdu and Turkish, so on. So in Islamicate languages, the word we use is tarikh which comes from dating things. In English it is called chronicles. Chroniclers, old historians were usually court chronicler who would",
      "who would write important dates when the conquest happened, which king defeated which king. And usually how many people were killed, how many were in each army and when you look at ancient records this is usually the kind of stuff that is preserved in Egyptian history, Assyrian history,",
      "Usually when you look at the record, you realize that different people are reporting the same event completely differently. Meaning who won usually depends on who's writing history. So even if such a simple thing as a fact of a war taking place one side usually killing off the other but when the court historians of both sides would write it they would write differently who won.",
      "Modern history, I guess before modern history, the emergence of modern history is a result of human beings learning writing but also developing a sense of other people and a sense or passage of time. And then there's always a theory about how time passes. So ancient Greeks for example thought of time as",
      "as cyclical meaning people go up and then come down and the same story repeats itself so there's victories there are defeats their triumphs there are failures and the thing starts over again with the introduction of at least that's a standard narrative",
      "of monotheism and the idea particularly, the idea of one God who is watching over history. And then with the idea specifically of a day of judgment, of a final destination. And we don't know which one came first. But Greeks would believe in a circular history going indefinitely, same kind of things happening over and over.",
      "and over whereas in the biblical tradition the abrahamic tradition as you might call it you get a linear history in which humanity is moving toward a certain end certain conclusion right um the other thing that we find in the",
      "choose certain people and make them his favorite people, and do so without explanation. So Israelites become his favorite People. This is not something that you could predict based on some law or norm, something more universal than just the fact that God chose certain people. Now if",
      "history changes because you don't know what's going to happen next. Who is going to be chosen by God next? Similarly, if you read the Old Testament, you often find a view of history in which God is choosing certain people, punishing certain people and God is somewhat unpredictable. And then at the end, God promises that there is going",
      "either a kingdom of heaven for Christians or some kind of day of judgment and the world in which people are going to be morally judged and evaluated. This introduces the idea of linear history, history moving toward a certain end. This is different from the Greeks because the Greeks believed that history is circular, just keeps happening over and over. Same thing is happening.",
      "humanity moving toward anything okay now it is in this context that i'm going to place Islamic or Quranic view of history and talk about why this is why it's especially interesting so let's go back to our question what is history history is a factual story but not just story it is factual story",
      "about events of some significance before one's time otherwise it's journalism or you know a contestation of what's happening history usually is what has passed and the main facts uh in narratives have settled which is reconstructed history is always reconstructed this tree is never just there it's always retold some people would take certain facts and would say",
      "say this or that fact is central to the story with consideration of chronology through reports and other data. So usually history has to depend on reports so these are one, two, three, four, five points in the definition of history that I have pointed out as being significant which we're going",
      "passage of time, reconstruction, chronology and reports. The writing of history is known since ancient times the first major work of history that Western civilization possesses and because of the universality of the western civilization as a result of colonialism other civilizations histories have been identified",
      "have been either eliminated sometimes completely or otherwise subordinated to Western history and therefore even when we as Muslims talk about history, we often have to start by at least translating our history into western terms. Now I'm going",
      "between Islam and the West, which is not as straightforward as an opposition merely. Meaning that Islam draws on the same basic elements as the Western civilization, which it's very different say if you were to do Chinese civilization or Indian civilization",
      "Western civilization is often said, it's a tension between two traditions. Two cities. Anybody guess what I'm talking about? What are the two cities? Sparta. We have martial spirit here.",
      "the twain shall never meet it's said about them athens and jerusalem right athena jerusalem that's often said about the western civilization that it comes its foundations are in two cities right so jerusalem is what gave christianity and before that judaism uh and true athENS gave philosophy now what's interesting is that an islamic civilization",
      "athens is central sorry jerusalem is central right and when you read the quran do you find any mention of the story of jerusalem no mention of anything that happened in jerusalem about jesus",
      "Well, I'm talking about the narrative of Jerusalem. Of course, Al-Qudus, Swayt al-Maqdis or Al-Arta allathee barakna fiha that's all about Jerusalem. So Jerusalem is mentioned by other names. But the point is when I say the narrative to Jerusalem, I don't mean the story of the city of Jerusalem but that story of prophets,",
      "Sending a prophet, whether it's Abraham or Moses or Jesus, any of the other prophets. That story is one of the pillars of the Western civilization. And guess what? The Quran does the Quran concern itself with Jerusalem. The story of Isa, the story of Musa, Jesus and Moses and Abraham. Right now, does the Qur'an mention ethics?",
      "Athens is there anything in about Athens that's mentioned in the Quran Aristotle you know Or free proclives these are major figures of the Near East In the West but not mention in the time at all and it actually is a very significant fact",
      "is because the quran comes in the near east remember we talked about the uh fertile crescent or what i call the corridor where humanity is born the corridor of humanity going from egypt all the way to persia and in between you have syria and iraq that corridor",
      "where the first cities are born and nearly every civilization either comes from there or goes in conquerors those cities that city uh that corridor is what islam comes very close to it slump is born in one of the wings of that corridor remember we talked about that so this corridor has two wings think of it as a butterfly one of",
      "wings is the arabian peninsula and the other is the greek world right the greeks world greece is very you know if you if you start from some a place like syria you go in one direction you'll end up in greeCE or turkey right if you go",
      "As Islam is born, very quickly Islam and Islam is connected to this corridor. Right? And not only that the most remarkable thing is that the Quran is familiar with the stories that are taking place here. Okay?",
      "And let me actually share with you a",
      "I will have trouble finding it. I don't want to waste your time. So, I think about last month, I saw a description of an academic conference where one",
      "where one of the main thesis of the conference, conference or paltry papers for scholars of early Islam was you just have to trust me because I can't show you the writing. And as historians we're very skeptical of people just talking so I'm familiar with the...I'm aware of this problem. This professor at Oregon State University",
      "He says that here is the problem we have with early Islam. Many of the stories in the Quran that are polemics with Christianity, with various Christian groups, they show an enormous awareness of a deep awareness of what is going on in Christian theology. The various groups that are Nestorians, the Jacobites, the Copts, the Chalcedonians.",
      "They are debating the nature of Christ. They're debating Trinity. They have problems with preservation, what goes in the canon and what is not in the Canon. And the Quran seems to know all that there. And we also know for a fact now that the Arabs did not know this stuff. So it starts with these two premises. And then it says, therefore the Quran could not have been composed by a man like Muhammad.",
      "man like muhammad because this information was simply not available to anybody in arabic arabic was barely a literate language and therefore the quran must have been written in the 9th century and not the 7th century so you start with a problem the problem is that",
      "at that time, because you are isolated from this corridor and you have a language that simply does not have any such knowledge. On the other hand, we also insist that well, the only source of knowledge that is available is historical and therefore the Qur'an must not have been written in the 7th century Arabia in Mecca, a very, very isolated place.",
      "right so what this conference is doing is it's calling it's taking a premise there is a promise that is a hidden premise that we are supposed to not challenge what is that anybody tell me",
      "In which part? Formulation of the problem. The formulation of the problems for the conference is, the Quran contains information that Muhammad couldn't have had as a man. What's been revealed? Well... But that's not a possibility according to the way the call is formulated. Directly by God.",
      "it was revealed therefore we must look for it in ninth century when muslims actually conquer this corridor and become aware of the knowledge is contained there right but for muslim um and really for any unbiased historian that would be a possibility at least",
      "Now we do have in fact carbon dated copies of pages of the Quran that go all the way back to the 7th century. Right? So at Birmingham University there is recently, there were some copies of the",
      "to seventh century arabia or 7th century within you know 30 years give or take but that places the quran squarely in the 7th very close to the life of the prophet muhammad uh but my point is that the way this the call for papers this academic call for",
      "the only way you can explain this quranic information the quran of this awareness of these profound christological debates is by saying that it came later after muslims already conquered this corridor yes wasn't there a sizable presence of christians within",
      "and that is fact, there were tribes, Christian tribes. And those tribes most likely were the custodians of those traditions and debates in Christianity. So first part is correct, second part is not. That is these Arab Christians,",
      "and we had in the jiran which is close to yemen on the way from hijas to yamen um you had christians but the if you look at their christological sophistication it's not not comparable to what you have in the syriac language for example or greek languages",
      "in the north, in the corridor if you will. So these people could not have been the source of the sophisticated knowledge, not that Christianity exists but what are the problems with Trinity? What are these ancient interpretation of texts that most Christians had even forgotten about? What were these ancient references in the Old Testament which were in fact",
      "many of them were not even available to scholars at that time and became available only later all kinds of issues that again this is not my formulation of the problem this is the formulation in in the field of scholars who are operating outside of the religious tradition and my point is simply to point out the way that these narratives are constructed even in the academy even today",
      "even today where we should know better yes yeah this one is contemporary yes very contemporary this was this year a couple months ago you can give us a link yeah i wish i if i have a few minutes i could go and find it now but they were not isolated",
      "Right, great question. Wonderful question. So you have... That is correct. No, those are wonderful questions. But these people at the time did not possess the kind of knowledge about debates in Christianity, historical debates in Christianity. It's one thing to be an Arab who converted to Christianity and learn somewhere, right?",
      "where you would learn one or two versions of what the debate is about Trinity. But to say that early Christians, in fact, as we know now were Jewish who did not believe in the divinity of Jesus until Paul and you have these problems in the Bible you have this problem since early Christian history Where does this come from? In the Quran",
      "these people would not have known uh and if those debates were the base existed in order to be able to give an authoritative account of what is going wrong you needed to have mastered that uh that literature not merely passing from familiarity so that's the question right so it's not that",
      "challenge required now of course these scholars are not saying that the Quran is right of course they're atheists often there's no their concern it's not who is right their concern is how would have to put and known that these debates existed now what's also interesting then my original point is that the or an is very directly engaged with this one half",
      "western civilization jerusalem but completely leaves out the other half ethics there's no mention of any uh philosopher now you might say okay so what well fine makes sense okay the quran is interested only in jerusalem",
      "this corridor, right? And this is a modern scholarship of late antiquity. The centuries before Islam, two or three centuries before Islamic that is the fourth fifth and sixth centuries of common era they're called late antiquities. Late antiquities scholarship that is now much more available than it was say even 50 years ago. It shows us that this corridor especially Iraq",
      "especially Iraq, northern Syria. They were rife with philosophical debates among Christians and between Christians and Buddhist Christians or Durascanist Christians and pagans. And they were using... Christianity had become totally Platonized. Christianity had understood itself through Platonism, through Plato. The idea of Trinity could not make sense except if you",
      "if you understood certain versions of Plato. It's not there, you can't understand the theory of hypostasis and so on in the Bible. My point is, the Quran rejects or ignores all of that completely. In the same mix, the",
      "what's going on and completely leaves out the other tradition. Once you know late antiquity, then you have new light on what the Quran is trying to do. And that's what modern exciting actually is by exciting scholarship about Quranic exegesis. But the point is that a same story where the Quran seems to know extremely well its sources",
      "that is very deliberate and not accidental. You find that in the way history is understood. Remember I said, Greeks understood their history as what? Cyclical. And the biblical tradition understood its history as linear moving toward you could say this modern version in secular world of progress, history of progress human beings are constantly improving",
      "well you don't have the idea of progress but we do have an idea of history moving inexorably toward towards now the quranic history is very deliberately both so there is a linear element in quranistic meaning that there is",
      "Unlike God in the Old Testament, God in Qur'an is predictable. Knowable through attributes. You see sifat or hasmat in the Quran. The 99 names of God that appear in the tradition are not actually 99 in the Qur'ans. The idea that there are 99 names actually comes from hadiths of the Prophet but the Qurana gives names of the Qur-an, of God",
      "of god right what does a name mean a name is an attribute with reference to an attribute god is all merciful god is always merciful god gives holds people accountable god is just what do they say what do these attributes say that god does same things always in other words god is not fickle",
      "fickle and changing and unpredictable but Robert God is always the same this idea does not appear in divine you don't have names of God in the Bible where in the foot whereas in the poor at this the center of theology that God is knowable through these attributes of how God relates to humans so dad adds a Greek element",
      "How? Because history becomes predictable. If there is a conflict going on, you could know that God is always going to support certain kind of people. And then the Quran in fact says,",
      "time by the time comes it's not going to move back and forth similarly god always supports certain kind of people they're oppressors and disbelievers that are always punished and so on this adds predictability but also in fact now the quran goes and gives a new version muslims would say",
      "Abraham is chosen, not arbitrarily, but because he was a righteous man. Israelites are a chosen people, but they were chosen not because of their genetics or DNA or because they had a special deal with God, but",
      "that he was given a pledge and that pledge was only given to people of his children who were truthful and righteous not because of their biology or their tribal superiority so the quran takes an old testament story and now changes it",
      "arbitrary. Covenant is bi-natural, whereas if you look at the Jewish interpretations of why the Jewish people are chosen, well, Jewish people were chosen because Abraham is a man who makes a deal with God. Abraham in fact is not even clearly monotheist in the Bible. There is debate among scholars whether Abraham was a monotheism. The Bible is unclear about it. People would",
      "People would say that he had one God, but the idea that there is no other God that exists, that doesn't appear in the Bible. That's why he was an enotheist and not a monotheist. In the Quran, Abraham is a monothelist and ethical and moral and he makes a covenant with God and keeps it and that is when he's given this promise.",
      "is doing, is that it's taking a biblical story and giving it a universal ethical interpretation. So that's why when I say the Quran brings both the Athenian content which is trying to, Greeks are trying to look for universal laws things that always happening and",
      "which god is directly intervening in unpredictable ways they're both brought together in the quran so now when you look at Islamic history or Quranic history, you find that both of these elements are in fact present in every story that is told. That God is in charge yes but also God acts according to certain patterns",
      "وَلَنْ تَجِدَ لِسُنَّةٍ إِلَّهِ تَبِدِيلًا You will not find a change in alteration or disruption in divine pattern of action. That appears as the Qur'anic version. Now that plays an important role in how Muslims understand history and the culmination of that reflection on history appears in Ibn Khaldun who is called the first social scientist and the first philosopher",
      "because before that history is often understood. There's before Ibn Khaldun who lived in the 14th century of Qamon era, 8th century, of Hijri calendar. History is seen as either one damn thing after another or",
      "a pattern of cyclical action that you can follow in the quran and what you find is that both the moral element the linear progress and the laws of history interact um so that is",
      "the philosophy of islamic history is that it places itself deliberately between these two traditions but does so very uh deliberately and carefully okay so now i'm going to ask the question what is islami",
      "The history of Muslims What makes history what makes facts Islamic Qualified how? Islamic history, okay. Let's hold that thought we come back to it. Yes",
      "Okay, so the history of Islamic civilization. Okay? Yes? Excellent! Right?",
      "Right? So that's a very important point, which is that the Qur'an does not talk about the history of Muslim people. Does it? Muslim people if you understand Islam is starting with the Prophet Muhammad and the 14th centuries after until today. The Qur'ans doesn't talk about that, does it? What does the Qurana talk about? All nations before Prophet Muhammad.",
      "but not all nations, not quite all nations. Mostly Christians and Jews. Mostly Abrahamic tradition. Right? It is primarily with some exceptions it is primarily concerned with the biblical tradition. The story of Abraham and before Abraham Noah and Adam and after Abraham. And then there are some Arab prophets that are not in the Bible such as Uth",
      "uh and in salah the arab prophets but all of them are joined together by one thing which is that god sent the same message to people and then people responded in different ways most mostly they rejected and then the end came god's judgment came so the quranic story is the quronic heroes",
      "eras of material history or civilizational history the quranic heroes are prophets quranical heroes are profits now which one what is the most frequently mentioned frequently repeated story in the qur'an",
      "of musa and pharaoh now if you look at that story it's actually quite significant once you understand the law the history behind it if you think about it what is pharaoh who is pharoah pharaoh is",
      "exactly pharaoh is um the name of the kings of the most advanced civilization up till that point in human history it's egyptian civilization right and what would their answer here can you clarify uh clarify that book is he the most influential at that time worldwide or just in that region",
      "in that region pharaoh because he was a tiger and he was okay so i don't know what worldwide means the world hasn't globalized yet but people are living in different parts of the world but this is the center of the word right this is a center of world civilization as well as world populations the middle east which doesn't mean that people in china or you know wherever else they're living",
      "the richest, the most powerful and the most technologically advanced nation at the time. Which is about 4,000 years or 3,000 year ago that Moses would have come. 3200-3400 according to if you put the numbers together. So on the one hand we have this great civilization, the greatest civilization of",
      "describes a very sophisticated political mechanism as well as the gardens and irrigation mechanism either described or Quran refers to it, and the fact that they could build really high towers, pyramids. This was technological marvel. But then you look at the Quranic story",
      "look at the Quranic story and what is that about? What is the Quran story? Who is the hero of the Quranics story? Musa. Moses. Moses is the Hero, right? Who's Moses? Is he an engineer? Is",
      "and not only a prophet he's a fugitive right he's at future and he belongs to people the Israelites were oppressed and enslaved and he goes to challenge these challenged Pharaoh and Pharaoh when he is arguing against Moses",
      "is told that you are just a fugitive, you ran away. Look at us! Look at these beautiful gardens, look at this immaculate engineering. What do you have to contribute? So the Qur'an if you will does not mince words. The Qur'aan puts all of the greatest civilization at the time and against its message of monotheism",
      "and basically says all of this knowledge of engineering in politics. In fact, if you look at it through the description of how Pharaoh acts in the Quran rather than the stereotypes that sometimes Muslims have which is that he was just a tyrant but he was also a very sophisticated political mechanism. He was in a way you could say this was a kind of republic",
      "How do we know that? Well, whenever the Quran mentions Pharaoh, Pharaoh doesn't just give a command. He actually asks his ministers and he convinces them using arguments in a way that the president or prime minister today would. They have to bind his argument and they do bind his",
      "have to ensure you see what mosaic with Pharaoh says when Moses challenges him in sort of Baha for example is that these people have come to destroy your way of life Leah how about the body but they will must laugh they have come destroyed your way up like he's making exact kind of argument that perhaps familiar to us isn't it yes",
      "Yeah, yeah exactly that's great where it deconstructs in fact",
      "In Surah Ash-Shu'ara, sorry I don't remember the name of this surah. If you look at a dialogue between Moses and Pharaoh it's very interesting. Moses shows up and says God has called upon me to invite you to God and stop oppressing these people, the Israelites. And Moses and pharaoh says who are you? You're a fugitive and we raised you in our palace.",
      "so you're a criminal we have all if you will the legal legitimacy the civilization the technology and then moses his answer is so remarkable it is exactly as he said this deconstruction he says as for your favors that you're talking to me about",
      "The blessing that you're talking about is that you have enslaved my people. So he cuts through the fat and he says, You're talking abut oh we have favors upon you? You have enslaved My People! That's the reality of it.",
      "almost does a political critique of pharaoh's claim that we are you know we are the lords of your people we raised him in our palace right he is he is doing exactly what all imperialists and colonizers do choose certain people and use them to divide use them",
      "with his people and said, you have enslaved my people. That's that. So going back to the larger point about Quranic history, Quranic History is hence the greatest civilization against a man who has nothing but truth, monotheism, and oppression.",
      "oppression that he's fighting against. And the hero of the Qur'an is not Pharaoh. When you hear a lot of Muslim preachers and Muslim stories, you would think that Pharaoh should be their hero because all that matters is power, what matters is civilization, what",
      "Quran inverse all of that expectation and it is a man who has nothing but this message of monotheism truth that becomes the ironic hero and then Pharaoh becomes the villain so that those are just some reflections on what",
      "When Marxists do history, one of the major impetus in modern period doing history was Marxist history. And when they do history what did they look at? They looked at modes of production, they looked at economic conditions. Those become the most important facts. When enlightenment folks, enlightenment historians did history, Gibbon and others, Toynbee,",
      "because as uh is often british or you know british french historians that's what they were colonizing the world that's how they wanted to look at the world much of history that we do today is history written from those perspectives from material perspective of who won the wars and the subversion",
      "at the proletariat, more of the production who has been persecuted economically. When you look at the Quranic history that heroes are and the real struggle is between truth and falsehood, the truth of God, truth in monotheism and false... Now when that becomes clear then the answer to the question of what is Islamic history is not that history about Muslims only because it's",
      "Because it happened before Islam, right? Was the story of Moses with Pharaoh, is it Islamic history? It's in the Quran. How much more Islamic could it be? Jesus, is that Islamic history? So those are the models or paradigms of Islamic history. And so what makes history Islamic,",
      "words is that what is your central story, what is you're central paradigm. And this could happen outside of the circle of Islam and you can have Muslims who do not care about truth and their story is just a story of Prince Fulan ibn Fulan killing and fighting Prince Fulani bin Fulan and there's nothing Islamic about that right so you could learn everything",
      "and you will learn very little about Islam. Right? And their struggle. So that is my way to say that we should think about Islamic history in new light, and in the light that is given to us by the Quran. Thank you very much.",
      "Yes, sir. As far as the Hebrew Bible goes, I think obviously at the time of Abraham, the whole thing of absolute monotheism was not fully developed yet. But I think you can say that through the Hebrew",
      "Yeah, so that's a great question."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Sunday lecture with Dr_ Ovamir Anjum_orv53T7LlO4&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750670178.opus",
    "text": [
      "I want to welcome you all. We are restarting the Sunday programs as all of you know Imam Ali is not here, he has resigned so the Sunday program will revert back to what we used to do that and that is it will be",
      "every sunday a different speaker some subjects will be of general interest and some of them will be released uh the pattern we have i don't think your mind is working it's working now get it close it is working now no it's not funny but okay it's on it works when you just said that",
      "So we're going to restart our Sunday programs and that will be as we had the first six months of 2003. And that is that we will alternate, mix up different topics, religious and non-religious topics. And Dr. Anjum I'm not gonna ask you to give a talk every Saturday, every Sunday. Thank you.",
      "him recruited to give a talk every month and he did that for long time. Anyway, many of you know Dr Anjum rather well it's my pleasure to introduce him I just have jotted down You can hear me right? Yes okay",
      "Okay. He's going to talk to us about how Gaza is restoring faith in God and saving the world. Dr. Anjum is from Karachi, he spent time in the Persian Gulf",
      "and in the United States. He has a PhD in Islamic intellectual history from University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is a well published author. One of the most important books, I mean not that his other books are not important but to me, Politics Law and Community in Islamic Thought,",
      "Thank you very much. You're getting there. Okay. It's getting brief for every time I come.",
      "So I'm waiting for the day when Dr. Amjad will be like, he's here again. I'll like that. That's what I'm shooting for. Okay.",
      "about Gaza, but I'm going to expand the topic a little bit and talk about Palestine and the problem just for if there are questions about what's happening and what has been happening. But I want to say a little about Gaza. First of all, I am not here to help you process a genocide. There is no way to do that. I don't have the capacity to process it myself.",
      "This is the first televised, recorded and celebrated genocide where the entire Western world in particular, entire global North is supporting it, backing it, arming it. And not only that but penalizing for a long time, penalizing anyone who dared to talk about it, to call it genocide.",
      "genocide. So this has shown the world what the colonized people of the world over the last three centuries or so have known forever, which is the dark underbelly and a dark under belly of the other side of the gun of Western colonialism,",
      "and the Zionist project reminds us every day that the project is not over. And if there is good news in the middle of an ongoing genocide when the entire media machine in the Western world, as opposed to the entire global South",
      "global South and this is one of the most amazing things, is that nearly the entire global south. The people who have been once colonized whether it's South America Africa, the Middle East Asia everywhere stood up against",
      "this global bully that is the Zionist entity and its backer, unfortunately our own country. That is a moment of shame. It is a great consternation. It's a reminder what happened to Native Americans in this country.",
      "for 400 years, the projects of domination despite all the talk of human rights, talk of international law, the talk moral superiority, the only democracy in the Middle East. All of that has been exposed and",
      "And we have a country, unfortunately, that is actively, openly, unabashedly backing a genocide. This has never happened before, meaning that there have been, of course, terrible chapters in human history. But we always thought that if you knew what was happening, if the world only knew,",
      "they could stop it. They could act in time. And if we knew, if you were there in 1930s and the 30s and 40s that we could have done something about what was happening to the Jews in Nazi Germany human beings do not seem to work that way",
      "So I don't know how to help you process it because I do not know how.",
      "the people of this brief short strip of Gaza, or Gaza. The way that they have responded to their suffering has been so exceptionally beautiful and elegant",
      "that they have shaken up the world. There is a phenomenon, as far as we can tell. There have been some studies about their reaction to being abandoned and massacred. Their reaction is not one of hopelessness. It is not ones of rage and anger.",
      "There is something beautiful and trusting that they are displaying. I'm not sure how many of you are following it, but if you follow what's happening, the events in Arabic and English both, you get the full picture.",
      "But tens of thousands of people are changing their view of God. It is a great, one might say, a theological revolution. We have some studies done of Americans, of how Americans are responding, not to the political problem, but American Muslim studies show, for example,",
      "faith in God has increased as a result of what they have seen in Gaza. That is a very large effect for a phenomenon like this. Usually, you know, the ups and downs are far lower. So there's a major... But also there are some",
      "established evidence, I haven't seen a lot of studies but as one sees in the news analysis and recordings there is a major change in the attitude toward Islam in the global south and among younger generations in the United States itself.",
      "The security industry in the United States after 9-11 spent enormous amount of money and all the moral capital that the sympathy that would have come to the Americans.",
      "against people who had very little to do with it. But what people know less about is the global war on terror became a global phenomenon and countries around the world justified their policies against their Muslim citizens around the World, India, Myanmar, Israel, and worst of all Arab dictatorships themselves",
      "But what I want to say is that in the process, there was a fundamental narrative that is established after 9-11 in which you knew what a bad guy looked like. Every other Hollywood movie, if there is a Middle Eastern or Muslim looking character and he shows, it's always clear that the terrorist looks like a Muslim",
      "And in fact, I've had my own friends sometimes even in my own department. I must say Chris our friend have said to me with great sympathy and understanding that yes most Muslims are not terrorists but why is it that most terrorists are Muslim? So this narrative which only people",
      "um people who had enough knowledge of the region and um uh who could see the muslim the the modern world from the margins if you will could decipher most people did not have any ability to fight off the ma the mainstream media narrative",
      "Everybody learned what a terrorist, a bad guy looks like. And studies show that Muslims themselves internalized Islamophobia, meaning Muslims were afraid of themselves. If you ask Muslims themselves what terrorists look like, they would depict a picture of people that looked like them. But it was completely false by data.",
      "By the 2000, you know after what happened in 2016 was a rude awakening that majority of terrorists. In fact were majority of terror attacks and majority of threat came from white nationalism. And the FBI Homeland Security missed those threats precisely because they were laser focused on",
      "focused on either catching Muslims, but that almost never happened by but in sting operations. Meaning they were targeting vulnerable Muslims people around the mosques people who had mental problems. Now this became a systematic problem that law enforcement if you wanted to go and get",
      "get promoted you would create your own sting operation find some muslim who is not feeling well psychologically and talk to them about blowing things up uh and get a promotion so that's that was the successful uh there has there hasn't been more",
      "any group of people as after 9-11 occurred against Muslims. Scholars in the academy began to study this after 2011, 2012 where these phenomena got out of hand and Islamophobia became a field of study in the same way that people study racism and violence against women and so on. So we began to studied, begin to collect data",
      "data and so on. And now we have, in fact, quite a bit of study which is not reflected in the mainstream narratives but what happened was that after President Donald Trump in 2016, the narrative changed and the establishment's focus turned to white nationalism and all of a sudden Muslims starting that 2016 became",
      "became, if you will, the secondary targets. But I want to... If you think about what was happening to Muslims particularly young Muslims there are a number of studies that show that young Muslim youths are among the most depressed group in the United States. There were some studies about suicide as well but",
      "there was some question about them. So the suicide ideation was twice as much among young Muslims, as among any other group. So you have major problems that Muslims are facing because the world is convinced that what a terrorist looks like is a bearded man who looks like Taliban and I think that what has",
      "One of the things that has transpired over the last four months is that narrative has come under attack like never before, so much so that among college-age Americans you have a massive sweeping change of opinion.",
      "If you look at the data, the older Americans are still pro-Israel and younger Americans. In fact, according to some studies, younger American Jews, American Muslims, other Americans show a consistent trend. So it's not just among American Muslims but across the board there is a sweeping",
      "turn toward a sympathetic view of the Palestinian cause, a recognition especially after ICJ, the International Court of Justice's ruling and South Africa's case against Israel that this is a plausible case of genocide. That has changed",
      "But what I want to talk about is the number one cause of that change in opinions is TikTok. What began to happen is that Palestinians began to record what was happening to them so that they don't have the words, they don t have the media pundits, they d n t have billions of dollars but they do have this new industry social media",
      "to create this completely new way that bypassed established narrative formations. And Palestinians could show, even while other people were telling you otherwise, Palestinians could and people could see that Israeli government was saying that we are going to kill everyone, that we mow the lawn. Mowing the lawn is a phrase in Israeli government.",
      "If it happens at any other government, any other time this would be considered an unacceptable genocidal intent. But Israeli leaders have been saying it openly especially on Israeli media but they were able to show how it was being carried out. So that's one aspect that the Palestinians instead of losing hope you find",
      "you find that there is almost a misunderstanding after 17 years of constant life in a concentration camp. Some scholars debate whether Gaza should be called a concentration camps or an open air prison, but I think it's really more than that now, it's a death camp.",
      "in Gaza is greater than it was in Auschwitz. Let me repeat that, the number of children that are being killed every day in Gaza but what was happening in Auswitz was under was in the dark this has been televised and justified so that's one thing that the Palestinians began to record especially",
      "especially young people for young people. So I want to say that one of the greatest things that has happened, uh, that is a silver lining in the middle of an ongoing genocide is that I see arise in the young people rebelling against this, this colonial, this oppressive, uh neocolonial world order and this is happening among my students in, in the United States. This is happening",
      "happening uh across the Arab world and this is happening um in uh in Palestine and so as there's these people began to and tick-tock used to be a very different animal and still is in many respects depending on the algorithm it would mostly dance videos kids you know young people doing silly things right but all of a sudden this this became Tick Tock and Instagram YouTube and other things",
      "became a mechanism to record, right? So this is you could say TikTok wasn't designed for it. But there's always unintended consequences of every technology and the unintended consequence of social media was that you cannot hide a genocide. You may be able to get away with it. We still live in",
      "you cannot hide it. And so that's one the other thing that these TikToks showed, these little clips showed was that the Palestinians particularly the people of Gaza are holding each other they are praying to God",
      "they are taking care of each other. They haven't lost hope, they're talking about faith, they are talking about God taking care them and they are reciting the Quran. You've had many cases where children in Gaza and Gaza is one of the",
      "the greatest concentrations of Quran readers and Quran reciters in the world because of the last 20 years or so, a number of Quran schools are established. And that has led to a rise sort of a faith revival in Gaza that shows in cases for example where children",
      "operated an open wound in the head without anesthesia because their bombs, their hospitals have been bombed and they would recite the Quran as they are being operated on to manage their pain. And so people are seeing this and saying there is something",
      "this religion, something in this faith, something that we need, we want, we don't have it. And there is this sweeping trend, there are Quran study groups, online study groups with tens of thousands of people and I don't know how many groups there are, we haven't seen a comprehensive study, they're just partial studies",
      "of people number of people are converting to islam joining online muslim communities support communities for people and these are people who have not often met a muslim this is happening in middle america this is uh in south america and elsewhere so",
      "not being directly bombed when we are not the target of a genocide, we in fact have better lives materially some of us than human beings have had in history before but we see more mental disease, more despair, more meaninglessness, more emptiness then perhaps ever before. And that's why this display of faith and purpose in Gaza",
      "in Gaza is, I think, been transformative for people. I wrote a short reflection piece on that online. I'm happy to share that with you. I shared that with Imam Abilaila. So that's why I didn't want to do a whole presentation. If you're interested, you can go read it. It's called How Gaza Is.",
      "restoring faith in God and saving the world or something like that. But that's my, I'm happy to answer questions about anything I said. So the floor is open. I'd love to hear your thoughts, questions.",
      "Yes. If you just say how Gaza is saving the world and my name, you will find it. It's at the Yaqeen Institute. I was talking with a Jewish person in England.",
      "he was not seeing he was saying the word genocide is being thrown around incorrectly i had no response to him because i didn't really know the official definition of genocide right but that was his it's a thing you know you know all this killing like you said oh killing going on over in the sunset",
      "people were using the word incorrectly. Is there something like that? Is there a proper definition of the word genocide? You've talked about the ICJ, they said it was genocide. Yes, so let's do it. You can't see it right now but you can Google it, right? So UN definition of genocide I'm going to read it out to you. Okay. So the definition is the first result that turns up",
      "According to the United Nations, genocide is a crime that involves the intentional destruction of a national, racial, ethnic or religious group. Four of these. National, racial ethnic or religion group and intentional destruction. So we can understand what national,",
      "group is so let's say all we need to know is whether it's intentional destruction is what is happening destruction there's no question about that um israeli media israel government international institutions all accept the death toll that is coming out in fact israel media nearly always lies about the tolls so much so that israelis analysts themselves",
      "themselves look at the numbers that are coming out of Gaza health ministry because they're always accurate and later people realize that there's no point in listening to Israeli media. Now, Israeli media themselves are reporting the numbers",
      "Is Israel just accidentally bombing people? Is it merely self-defense or is it a plan to eliminate this group? Now, this definition doesn't say whether you are doing so because you hate them. Although there is evidence that Israeli society has moved extreme, extreme far right",
      "So that up to 80% of Israelis, 70-80% of Israelis think that Israel is not using enough violence. That is Israeli society. If something like this... I mean, this is far worse in terms of just population dynamics than anything we have seen.",
      "Is this a genocide? This was the entire case of South Africa, the South African extensively detailed document. And this case has been made by scholars all over the world including in the United States. An Israeli American professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Professor what's his name?",
      "Raz, who is of all things studies genocides. So his name is Raz Segal, he's an Israeli historian this is also Raz Seagal's Wikipedia.",
      "residing in the United States, who's an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies. An endowed professor, brother-in-arms, in the study of modern genocide at Stockton University where he said in the first week when this began to happen that this is a textbook definition of genocide.",
      "this was what was happening there has never been a clearer case of genocide while it is happening because that kind of information hasn't been available when the holocaust was happening in fact uh people were not so sure about what was and where in fact still did not want to welcome jewish refugees for example in the united states and britain and elsewhere but this was very very well documented happening so",
      "mind, there is absolutely no doubt that if there is such a thing as genocide to this is what it is. One other question. So he claimed the same person he claimed out of 30,000 10,000 were Hamas fighters? Any I mean how do they report the fighters that are being killed part of the 30,001 or not",
      "thousand or not? If we were talking about the analysts, there is according to what analysts are saying on both sides including objective analysts outside American military commanders like people who are doing analysis they're saying that a very few Hamas soldiers have been killed. I don't consider them terrorists. To call",
      "Call Hamas terrorism is part of Israeli genocidal propaganda. They are a resistance movement. You like them, you don't like them. They ought to be a resistance and it's an international legal right to resist occupation. But how many of the members of Hamas are being killed? The problem is what Israel has shown, the Israeli military IDF",
      "It does not seem like the number of people who have been killed is very large. There are some disputes, but 14,000, half of them, more than half are women and children. But if you look at Hamas operations, Hamas is doing extremely well. That's very clear from Israeli media itself.",
      "media itself. And that's actually what I often listen to the Arabic media, Israeli media and English media you find that there is consensus on this that Israelis themselves are questioning Israeli analysts Arab analysts in fact are emerging as some of the best analysts that they are establishing that in fact majority of people vast majority how",
      "vast majority how many are hamas terrorists nobody can tell members of hamas resistance nobody can say there's no way to um there is no way establish that but almost every region in the north israel said that uh you know first it evacu right so",
      "And now the very last region, Rafah where people are concentrated is being bombed actively. So this is another issue but the regions where IDF had purportedly taken control you find that that is where Hamas is not only fighting back and but it's actually taking control",
      "and IDF is the one that's being pulled back. So there is no way that Hamas has been, according to the numbers that were given by IDF if I recall correctly 80% of the tunnels are intact this number given by both Israeli and American analysts",
      "And 80% means majority of them. And Palestinian analysts, Arab analysts are saying that the number is much larger, that less than 5% of the tunnels have been affected. So in all of this massacre, Hamas is not the one that has been affected at all.",
      "the events of October 7th, which triggered all this. So what were the events on October 7? What were they even how do we know them? But what happened on October seven I have read the UN report that recorded",
      "is reporting. The entire United States US media is simply repeating the talking points that are coming from Tel Aviv, so we have to talk about what has been established versus what is being said. There is no evidence of mass rape whatsoever I've read each one of those reports there are some videos that was recorded not a single instance is recorded and what is",
      "being said are words of tendentious and mutually contradicting accounts. Now, does this mean that there were isolated instances of either rape or murder? Quite possible it happens in every war and its horrible cannot be justified in Islamic law. It cannot be justify international law.",
      "if it happened, even one of them. However what analysts are saying is that if you analyze the data that's available that the United Nations is presenting as a case that it's possible that there was this... You actually find there is no evidence of mass war crimes on the part of Hamas. On the other hand,",
      "the evidence on the part of war crimes committed by the idf is abundant undeniable daily constant that was not really uh the question we are not comparing what hamas did as compared to what the retaliation was my question was more specific is according to international law",
      "the Hamas attack in Israel and the killing which happened, and we can argue about the numbers of course. How do you put that in context to then what Israel did? Now it happened... So I am... Is there right of resistance is an international right. International law,",
      "Resistance is a recognized right. They're justified to resist, they are not justified to commit war crimes while doing it. Those are two different things.",
      "go there and attack, would that still be resistance? Yes. Absolutely. What's that? Ah, so that's a tricky issue. If you're fighting, what is the ethics of resistance? In Islamic law, you don't kill non-combatants.",
      "as non-combatants is, however, the question. Killing children and people who are not capable of fighting is different from killing people who draftees, people who there to fight being part of military. So killing people that are non-combattance is a crime",
      "Attacking your captors, attacking people who are violating your fundamental rights is not a war crime. Now in the process you have to show intention that you intended to kill non-civilians sorry civilians non-combatants if that is the case then that would be a war",
      "And so what happened on October 7th, there is some evidence, good evidence that some of it was war crimes. But a very large number of people that are killed are military out of 1400 right? Israel says about 900 were citizens",
      "And that is, now the question is that, and I want to, that's a separate discussion, that Hamas has a different definition. Hamas considers Israeli citizens as occupiers and combatants, men and women included. Only non-combatants, that is people who are too old to fight or children,",
      "still even by Hamas definition as combatants. For Hamas, everybody who lived in Israel is a combatant? That's Israeli norm that everyone has to be trained every Israeli. You're talking about everyone including children? No not children and old... I'm trying to understand your statement",
      "I can see that because they have registration and people in reserve, and there can be called upon for duty anytime. So they become combatants by some definition. But older people and the children... Right. But you say that Hamas' definition",
      "Does Hamas definition also includes everyone who lives in Israel is a combatant?",
      "a much more evolved understanding, which is much more in line with international law. They were making claims that we did not commit crimes, we did kill non-combatants or we did intend to kill non combatants, that Israeli forces came... Our intention was to take hostages. Israeli forces used overwhelming force, the Hannibal directive,",
      "Israelis be taken hostages and killed them all. That's what Israeli military used, the helicopters and tanks. That is where majority of civilian casualties were. Part of this account has been verified by independent media and this does not perhaps explain all of the casualties.",
      "saying internally, and this is not something they can say perhaps openly because that shows their incompetence, is that first of all, they did not expect to succeed this much. They did not expand to...they did not accept that they will have several hours most of the day. And once they broke the barriers people who are not part of disciplined Hamas army entered",
      "they began to do looting and killing. And that is part of the reason why Hamas lost control for a while. But those are the reports that explain... So this is, for example, by one American-Israeli journalist I believe",
      "I believe the report is published in The Nation, one of the best journalist sites and newspapers. They say that there are two factions within Hamas and this was part of that kind of tussle. One is much more hardline and one is much go by international law",
      "international law. So that may be part of what's happening here, but what has become clear over the months is that resistance by Hamas which has been going on for a while you know",
      "put people in a uh in an open-air prison and you expect that some of them will blow up and then you use that excuse to mow the lawn this has been happening right since over the last 17 years or so this turned out to be a much more successful much better organized",
      "that are organized attack, which is justified if the war crimes are not committed. Resistance to occupation is justified If war crimes were not committed.\" Yeah?",
      "kind of like you know significant depression because we don't know how to process it. Because then, we couldn't have thought that we would witness a pandemic like in front of us. We used to read books on the street and that we are witnessing a genocide and now with them concentrated in the south in Rafah and impending starvation which also incidentally the Palestinian people are so amazing that if you see starvation in other countries they are",
      "are completely absolute chaos. These people are still standing in line, it's like absolutely amazing but my question is that how and where does a genocide with mass starvation stop? I mean like now it's the crystal ball thing. Yeah unfortunately every expectation that i had",
      "Every frustration, everything that I thought, right? That there would be a stronger reaction from the neighbors. The political pressure will build up in Jordan and Egypt, Turkey has been frustrated. And unfortunately nearly all Arab neighbors but particularly Saudi Arabia and UAE",
      "UAE are abetting the genocide. The Houthis have blocked, obviously, you know, they have blocked the Red Sea route but the Saudis and UAE allowing trucks from the Persian Gulf to pass and that means that pressure on Israel to stop it has not really developed",
      "So at this point, there is what I can see happening and I don't want to admit it that that's what's likely. But basically, this is going to be a successful genocide. I don' t want to think that. I do not want to say that but I don´t see... There is obviously ethnic cleansing which itself is a war crime",
      "how many people are going to be expelled? It seems, this is if you will the worst case scenario that you have of the 1.4 million people in Rafah, you're going to have some pushed over to a concentration camp in Egypt by the way. What Egypt is building unfortunately is walls so that Palestinians could be contained",
      "in conditions that are going to be very similar to what's happening in Rafah. Perhaps they will not be bombed there, but even that's just a passing hope. And then the rest are going meet this fate. But again as I said, I'm not even at a place where I can process that. Those words came out of my mouth",
      "mouth, but they stop just there. I cannot think that that's... But there is nothing at this point that's in place that I see that is going to stop it.",
      "It's a crystal ball thing. I don't know if... Israel usually mows the lawn in Ramadan.",
      "Does this mean that it's one of another phase in negotiation? I don't know. I could make case either way, it seems to me as I said Hamas fighting capacity has not been affected much",
      "But Hamas is unable to defend the million, you know, a million and a half people. Where is international output? Even in the Muslim world that he would threaten people with mass genocide during the Holy month. I don't understand the American government's resistance to just coming out flatly and saying",
      "saying, you can't do this. We're not going to allow you to do it because that's what the expectation was after World War II at the Nuremberg trial and this whole idea of genocide in its broad definition came from those trials. That's how they got people who were soldiers and hunted them down for years. I wish I'm asking the same thing",
      "asking the same thing myself every day, every night. I mean there are moments where I just can't hold it because it's... So I guess if we can be practical, I think that penalizing Biden should be a priority for Muslims today. That's one thing that we can do is make it very clear",
      "this is going to the muslims have to act muslim and not only muslim but of course i think progressives um and and people against genocide are generally coming together on this abandoned biden movement uh i think my my hunch is i mean this is a fact but i think that my hunch",
      "a deep seated, he's a Christian Zionist. He has been for decades. So at the end of the day we might have seen different behavior if somebody like Obama were in office for instance. We would've seen very different behavior I think but I think that Biden justifies it in deeply religious terms. That's my gut because you just have to become blind",
      "blind to facts blind to feelings for some something greater that is happening and and that's the christian zionist view of history which is uh that for the armageddon to come for jesus to come back in uh and so on but are you sorry there are a number of questions",
      "the Muslim governments here at heart are and how culpable are the Muslim public in all of the Muslim countries? So I think that's a great question. I think there has been increasing gulf between Muslim public and Muslim rulers, and that gulf has only increased and become very clear in the wake of this issue right",
      "I think that Israel would not have dared to do this 20 years ago. It is the Abraham Accords that are single-handedly responsible for what is happening today. In my view, it is the United Arab Emirates UAE leadership led by one man, Mohammed bin Zayed",
      "Mohammed bin Zayed, with this vision whose vision became consolidated after 2011 Arab Spring when he saw people rising up against dictatorship and autocracy in the region. His view and the view of elites in the Arab Gulf states and Egypt and elsewhere was that you needed to ensure that Muslim populations do not rise,",
      "what led to a complete marginalization of the Palestinian issue. The Palestinians were just written off because now you're making a deal with UAE and Saudi Arabia, who have nothing to do with this. Now, of course, the Arab nations had historically come together to support the Palestinians. This has been one of the fundamental issues for decades",
      "But that issue was given up, betrayed over the last couple of decades, particularly after 2011. And the Arab-Abraham Accords were the idea that you needed to normalize Israel.",
      "for InvestBank, they just need to be written off. And weeks before this event, before October, Netanyahu shows a map of the world, map of Middle East in which from the river to the sea is all Israel there is no Palestine right?",
      "not 1967 borders, then nothing. So it is basically the signal was that Palestinian issue is resolved. They are gone. They're written off completely even despite all... I mean really since 1948 if the world were a fair place the borders we would demand would be 1948, not 1967.",
      "1948. Israel is an occupied territory. Everything from the river to the sea is occupied. Absolute fact. But we could talk about, can people who are now Israelis, Jews, can they become citizens of that place? Equal citizens with people? Yes. But that's not... That to me would be the only fair solution. What people call",
      "what people call one state solution but um what the world was moving toward is absolute erasure of palestine and so the short answer is 100 responsibility is the arab autocrats in the region i just wanted to piggyback on an idea of promenade approaching",
      "in the Muslim world to speak out as we move towards Ramadan. What I am also most shocked about, I grew up in a my youth was I was raised in a Presbyterian church and what's shocking to me is the number of my extended family and friends who did not really wake up to the severity of the situation until",
      "have their Christmas and Easter celebrations. And now in solidarity with the Muslims, I think Bethlehem chose to not have the displays, to have the normal outside exterior illuminations, the presentations that they would have. I thought for sure that more of the world would wake up to his stand when Bethlehema took that stance. That I just wanted to share with that equally shocked me",
      "and have but it also opened dialogue with people who wouldn't ordinarily know what was totally happening and now they're reading and you know the beauty of the palestinians with their faith is really awakening more eyes to their faith to the muslim world i just i want to thank you for sharing that i think there was a chris had a question",
      "Yeah, I just wanted to know why with the mosque and what they did. It was called a war crime. They were excited for it but the legislators have been doing it for years. And you mentioned social media there's been videos on social media of them killing several civilians walking into mosques and churches when people are praying in children. For example, it was called critical damage, I mean... Collateral damage. Sorry. And with most of it, it",
      "That just shows you the state of the world. There's no justification for it, right? There is no explanation for it. It's just because some people control the media and have absolutely endless immunity to their crimes.",
      "is oversimplified, but from my understanding it's about the future of Hamas in Gaza versus the West Bank. So from my understandings, just from what I understand, Hamas has historically been poor at their leadership for the Palestinian population specifically with education, economic development they pursued military purposes at the expense of these things from what",
      "or Hamas is sitting on resources, medical water fuel that could help a number of the Palestinians and they're not allocating it to the Palestinian population. Part of me wonders as an e-hypothetic, is there a future here? To what extent is it conceivable that there's a future that the Muslim Palestinian population turns on Hamas",
      "and I know this is historically very complicated, but a kind of negotiated ceasefire where the governing structure of Gaza minus Hamas might be something that's more collaborative or education oriented economic development oriented etc. Is that a conceivable future scenario way out of this conflict? Or does that seem like not because I think you're right. The alternative to me does seem genocidal",
      "And so I'd really like to know if you have any thoughts on this naive conceivability future being negotiated in the room situation. I don't know what you would do with the three generations of your family, 75 years, if you had seen an enemy come take your land and then blame you for it",
      "it and then every few years kill your children uh and then get away with it and somebody comes and says we will fight on your behalf who would you put where would you Put Your Eggs remember if if we know anything about Israel it has broken every treaty it has lied about almost everything including the treaties that were made like Oslo what happened in Oslo",
      "As a scholar 5,000 miles away I have absolutely no trust in Israel. I actually believe that Israeli society is an extremist society now it's moving towards the right they're wanting a genocide if you look at their TikTok videos if you",
      "children, Israeli children are celebrating the genocide. They're singing their number one song for months has been a song that talks about genocide. So would you have any trust, any hope that you can negotiate peace with people that have no constraints? They can get away with the genocide",
      "away with the genocide they have not kept any treaty in the past and unlike you know uh then even the 90s when you had a one could say a more middle of the road israeli society now the number of jews on the ultra right is gone from four or five percent you know at that time to 13",
      "13% and they are the most motivated voters. So, the moderates are leaving Israel or being silenced even with a very few exceptions there are you know you cannot talk about apartheid you couldn't talk about",
      "in Israeli media without being completely marginalized. There used to be a time until 10 years ago, until few years ago even when some of the best analysis of what was happening came from Israel not from America you couldn't have that kind of critique of Israel in the United States not in New York Times right? You couldn't",
      "uh you could even have it in the times of israel now that is completely silenced now that's becoming so i don't see that as a realistic hope if i were a palestinian if i wanted my children to live and have any hope i wouldn't think that israel would be my partner at this time well join me please",
      "to thank Professor Anjum for what a wonderful conversation. Thank you very much."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Taqwa _ the World _ Dr_ Ovamir Anjum _ Ramadan Ses_6kAZeE-lrag&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750786726.opus",
    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. Ramadan Mubarak to everyone. Jazakallahu khairan to everyone for joining once again on this blessed month. InshaAllah it's a month of immense benefit. I ask Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la to make our Isliyyat and our Qiyam a means of forgiveness for all that preceded it, and I ask Allaah Subh Anhu Wa Ta-'Ala to keep our Muslim brothers and sisters in Palestine and our Dua inshaAllah. May Allah allow them to continue to return to the masjid even if the occupiers despise",
      "the virus despise it. But with that in mind, I believe today's topic is especially pertinent which is taqwa and the world. As a brief reminder we began this month with Brother Yadhilal introducing the topic of taqwā how it's understood and how it functions vis-a-vis the ahkam shar'iyyah We then had Dr. Rahman al-Sarar speak about the topic",
      "on better conceptualizing that and he talked about both the Quranic discourses on taqwa as well as positioning it in relation to human experience. He also added the dimension of taqwā and self-restraint today we'll be talking about taqawah and the community which is how can the community be a site of cultivating taqwah? And how's that removed from dominant trends, which may portray taqwwas as a more individualistic exercise that's threatened by questions of community or questions",
      "session as well as the coming sessions will be posted on our different social media outlets and i'll go ahead and send them in the chat right now uh and before i introduce today's speaker inshallah we'll have brother haris and saudi start us off with some brief recitation of the quran insha allah we'll just be reciting swat al-asr",
      "believe, do good deeds, urge one another to the truth and urge one other to steadfastness. JazakAllah khairan. So today we're joined by Dr. Aweem Al Anjum. Dr.Aweem al Anjom is the Imam Khattab Indiraud Chair of Islamic Studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at The University of Toledo. His work focuses on the nexus of theology, ethics, politics and law in Islam with a comparative interest in Western thought.",
      "Dr. Anjum obtained his PhD in Islamic intellectual history and the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Master's of Social Science from UChicago, and a Masters in Computer Science and Bachelors in Nuclear Engineering and Physics from the University Wisconsin- Madison. In addition to the Academy, Dr. Enjim has studied with a wide range of scholars in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. Some of his works include Politics Law and Community in Islamic Thought, The Taimi'in Moment,",
      "Dr. Ameer Anjum, Dr. Anjuma, Dr and Jim additionally serves as the editor in chief for your institute and is the founder and chief research officer of a Maddox. Dr. As reminder before we begin today's session make sure to direct all questions to the moderator labeled Zia Q amp a and we'll go ahead and have a chance to have a bit of q&a after the talk and without further ado engine floors yours.",
      "Today my topic is Taqwa and the World.",
      "world. So let me start by reminding ourselves of the call in the Quran by our Lord Almighty Subhanahu wa ta'ala to cultivate this thing called Taqwa, to cultivate",
      "Feeling that Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala calls to it more than any other when directly addressing the believers.",
      "that you are in the state of Islam and submission to Allah.",
      "is to all humanity have taqwa one of Allah who created you from one being and then a pair and then distributed you throughout the world and then especially Allah says fear the one in whose name you ask of each other's rights this is very interesting construction that Allah",
      "in speaking about taqwa talks about himself in a way that is unique as far as I know in the Quran which is he is the one in whose name we ask each other of our rights. We should have taqwah of the one Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala",
      "in whose name we build our relations. Building of relationships is the building of the world. World as human beings conceive of it, as we interact with it, is relationships and those relationships Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says are built",
      "means to be a Muslim, to build the world in the name of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala by the name Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la and ask each other of our rights, our duties according in accordance with the word of Allah and in the Name of Allah. So it is as if in our very DNA of the world",
      "it is the name of allah and then allah mentions if you will the other glue which is al-arham the wounds of our mothers may allah forgive and have mercy on those who have passed away of our mother's and fathers and uh may allahu give comfort and give long life to those of our",
      "the fact that we come from the wombs of our mothers and that's the second sign as if allah says you have to fear you have be mindful of have to be conscious of those relationships because that's if you will the second glue through which a world is created",
      "This pattern of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la calling us to taqwa, but calling us in the middle if you will, in the battle of life rather than escape from it. So Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala says for example in Surah Al-Taraq when speaking of how to divorce",
      "divorce and this is a time that is one of the most painful experiences in the life of any human being to part from someone you've loved. And it is in that experience that Allah says that if whoever fears Allah, whoever has the taqwa of Allah",
      "and I'm going to define taqwa inshallah fear is one component of it but it's perhaps the most powerful component of Allah will make a way out in the world again, it's taqva in the word that is having remembering Allah while you're in the middle of pursuing goals of this world sometimes failing",
      "failing, sometimes succeeding. Sometimes you're triumphant. Sometimes um you lose and um you bite the dust and um, you know, you regret, you have guilt, unresolved feelings, no closures, a sense of worthlessness and it is at that time that people when they are angry and hurt that they tend to strike",
      "most cruelly and without concern for others, without concern Allah, without concern the glue that holds us together, and without concerns for the relationships we have built. And that Allah says وَمَنْ يَتَّقِ اللّٰهُ يَجْعَل لَّهُ مَخْرَجًا That whoever at this point Allah reminds us just to write in perfect time",
      "out and the way out is not to set taqwa aside, the fear of Allah piety of Allah, love of Allah aside in favor of raw expression of raw anger and revenge but rather it is precisely at that time when you are injured a wounded animal",
      "because that is the best way to find relief so that taqwa becomes connected in our minds, in our hearts, in out experience to relief. To weigh out of conundrums that seem to be intractable and impossible. So this is the feature of taqwā that I want to talk about today insha'Allah a little more",
      "inshallah, a little more. Which is how Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala teaches taqwa in the Quran through practical struggles by orienting us to the world rather than orienting as away from the world and there is a deep this is a characteristic feature of Islam of the truth from Allah subhana wa ta-ta'ala",
      "in perfect harmony with how Allah has created us that we are creatures that grow with experience. We are capable of fooling ourselves in isolation but as soon as we interact with others, with real life when we are challenged, we're tested it becomes much more difficult to hold on",
      "alphabetical constructs are abstractions and that is why there's a it's a beautiful saying I believe in quotes from someone that having or having fear of Allah being nearness to Allah by engaging in isolationist exercises by isolated practices of training for worship",
      "and in the ma'iyya of Allah, the witness of Allah in the company of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la that is a long path to Allah. That's the long path in the journey to Allah Subhanahu wa ta-Aala You can do exercise of self reflection which is very important but the way many mystics, many religious people have done both in Islam and particularly other religions",
      "religions, particularly Christianity which Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala refers to in particular, Rahbaniya monasticism of Christians. In isolation people take pride in abandoning the world leaving off the world I was just reading recently an account of some Greek monk you know in Eastern Europe there are these",
      "of these monasteries that still are functional, where this monk lived for 80 years and never saw the face of a woman. And that was the greatest praise on the obituary that this was a man who never saw women. But that is not our deen. That's the most remarkable thing,",
      "and beautiful, engaging in what brings to us multiple dimensions of life is not the way that Allah in the Quran teaches us Taqwa. When some of the Sahaba as I'm sure all of you are aware of this famous story when a few of the sahabah came and of course the sahaba were living",
      "of piety, righteousness around them. They may have been influenced by what other people talk about and the stories of maybe great saints of the past and so on about taqwa they came to the Prophet's wife mother believers asked about his practice and his worship",
      "they thought this wasn't much. It was easy, and they said, you know, Allah has forgiven all your sins, O Prophet ﷺ. There is no need for you to do those things, but we are sinful creatures. We must... So therefore one of them pledged to celibacy. They're never going to get married. Others said that they're not going to seek shelter. That means they're going to be homeless and out in the sun.",
      "out in the sun as a form of self-mortification, punishment of the flesh because sins are supposed to come out of flesh in that tradition. And a third one said I'm not going to eat meat and when the Prophet ﷺ... and I think in one tradition it's also that I'm going to pray at night and not sleep so the Prophet and he heard that",
      "heard that, it displeased him visibly. And he said, I marry women, I take shelter and I sleep and I pray and I eat meat and whoever abandons my sunnah is not from me. So this is the way of the Prophet ﷺ to get involved with the world, to partake in the",
      "then find a way to be, if you will, engage with the world. Be lured by it. Be attracted by it, try to construct it in accordance with the plan of Allah. In accordance to the vision given to us by Allah, in the Qur'an, in the Sunnah and fiqh",
      "And it is then, when you get involved in it, you love some of it. You hate some of that. You have opinions about it because you're involved now. You made up of those experiences and then you abandon it partially selectively as and when asked of you like in the practice of the beautiful month that we are in, the most miraculous month I often think to myself",
      "My kids who are unable to stay away from food, from dessert, from treat. The minute it comes, it disappears, right? If you have good food, they jump on it. They can't wait for dinner to be set up. And it is these same kids who fast for 14 hours, 16 hours straight and are not tempted in the same way.",
      "I tell them that it's almost like a superhuman that comes out of you guys because resisting candy is a superpower that you never have. But that's the kind of power that Allah gives in this month and in this practice of fasting, in this commitment to Allah.",
      "It's a partial deprivation, a partial renunciation. And then we go back and Allah says You will not reach piety, benevolence and piety which is a synonym for taqwa in the Quran until you spend from that which you love",
      "and similarly allah says they spend they feed others even though they love it so they gave from what they loved and they give so much that it hurts but",
      "describing the believer says, you do love it. You do love this wealth. This ayah makes sense or these instructions make sense to people who love life, who love beautiful things in life,",
      "They are asked to invest in those relationships, and the more you invest in these relationships, the harder it is to abandon them. And then they give to Allah both by way of their time and wealth so much that it hurts. So it is as if this strategy of the Qur'an and the Ahkam al-Hakimeen,",
      "taqwa not by abandoning the world but by going to it, by reconstructing it, and then always ensuring that Allah is above all of those commitments. I recall a story from Madarij al-Salekeen or couple examples in fact that Imam ibn Al Qayyim gives in order to make similar point when speaking",
      "the Shara'i Quranic way of drawing close to Allah SWT rather than intense isolated exercises for long periods of time which are not given in our sharia although, of course if those who have time who can make worship at night is that kind of isolation",
      "that is highly encouraged in our deen and we ask Allah to make us among those who engage in Qiyam al-Layl because there is a sweetness of being alone with Allah that is not in other things. There's no doubt about that. And there's a beautiful virtue of Tabattu, cutting off, severing yourself from the world and some of the greatest people particularly greatest women in our tradition",
      "in our tradition are called Batul. The daughter of the Prophet ﷺ, Fatima al-Zahra was a Batul and Maryam was a batool in the sense that she severed herself from the world in order to worship Allah alone so there is beauty in that but um",
      "There is Tabathul. But then the Prophet ﷺ also tells us and the Qur'an tells us to go out to the world. Tawasaw bil-haqq, tawasow bisabr Surat al-'Asr that was just recited It's engagement with the community. And the Prophet says",
      "The believer who mingles with people and then is patient at the harm that comes as a result of that mingling, as a",
      "Allah is saying socializing, going out, mixing with people. And so much you could say, right? And this fitna comes out of mixing with the people. So you have to, of course, be careful about choosing your company. But the instructive thing here is that that is better. That is the path of Islam. That",
      "engage with the world you have to try to construct with the World um and when you talk to people you have sort of lure them you have learn manners how to talk to them anyway so going back to the point he said that Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala as if Allah has given us a shortcut to those higher stations of nearness to him on this journey to Allah and that is",
      "good character, courteousness in engaging with people. It gives you a shortcut to paradise, shortcut to those higher stations. How? Because in isolation, as I said at the beginning, you may learn tremendous insights and you ought to spend time with the Quran in isolation.",
      "in isolation and reflect on deen by yourself when you're praying at night or even when you are praying by daytime, even in the masjid that is a part of you that is connected to Allah alone. But then you go out, you say As-salamu alaykum and then you have to interact with people and then",
      "prayed for so long and you are so knowledgeable, and this person puts you in your place and tells you not to do this or tells you to do that. Or doesn't call you by the right title or doesn't address you in the right way or corrects your mistake perhaps even in a way that's incorrect challenges you on social media. Right? That's the biggest weakness of people these days",
      "and all of a sudden, all this training you had, all these time of self-discipline, all that built up in you your own image of being a pious knowledgeable somebody. And all of the sudden you're nobody. To be able to be prophetic character, akhlaq of the Prophet ﷺ in that moment, it gives you 10 years",
      "10 years of isolation in one interaction. You have to use all of that if it was any good, your nearness to Allah, your worship of Allah, if it is effective, if you truly gave humility, if they made you an servant and slave of Allah, then it would show. And if you had cracks in the edifice that you built for yourself in your own mind",
      "that then you will crumble in one social media tweet or in one person being rude to you or challenging you, you will lose your temper or you will try to put them down. And you realize at that moment what you needed in this interaction was so much more. And the Prophet ﷺ, our Prophet ﷺ often when you look at their",
      "and the kind of uh that a kind of harm and challenge that he had much more than the physical harm that he experienced you know his teeth were broken and things were thrown at him um and he was hurt in other ways but nothing was more hurtful then when people humiliated",
      "him. He was a very sensitive being. That's one of the most interesting things about the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, that he was as a human being a very sensible person. So what people said mattered to him and that very character of being sensitive and gentle made him so endearing to people because he genuinely cared about people. He",
      "and the hypocrites, the munafiqin would say to each other huwa uzun he is an ear you know as Allah relates in the Quran He is an Ear meaning he hears everything. You tell him anything he will hear or believe you. He's that kind of person As if they're saying that he's gullible. He wasn't gullable. He was just sensitive. He cared about people And it was possible therefore to hurt him",
      "walls around us because we feel that we might be hurt and so we don't make ourselves available to other people. So the Prophet ﷺ wasn't like that. And people whom he may have suspected were not good people or hypocrites, but even what they said when they insulted him, the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam wanted good for them and because he wanted good",
      "Allah responds on his behalf and he says, He is the ear of goodness for you who believes in Allah and believes the believers. He believes in Allãh Subhanahu wa Ta'ala يؤمن بالله ويؤمن للمؤمنين And he believes the Believers whatever they tell him he takes in the best faith good faith the best Faith um and that is the character of the Prophet ﷺ that was",
      "that practice taqwa, right? Because when he is hurt by people then he's able to show his character. And people are insulting him, people are insults in his family, people who are insulting all things that are dear to him and Allah. Sometimes you in fact hear that concern that Almighty has for His most beloved creature Muhammad, He says",
      "he says, O Prophet they're not insulting you. They are insulting the Quran. They're insulting their own creator. It's not you.",
      "you're taking it so personally that you are harming yourself because of their um intransigence their their intransigents their refusal to believe out of their own folly so their folly is hurting you or prophet sallallaahu and that why that is why the prophet's suffering profit struggle was",
      "quickly hit him and um and that is what that was part of his training that was Part of His Training he was concerned about people in fact at first when the Wahi came to him according to some traditions um he wanted to throw himself off uh off a cliff because",
      "he has lost his mind um and that was such a great dishonor uh it would be so hurtful for him um and so it is at this time that the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam you know in this in this way that allah trains the prophet through it is as if through the harm that he receives from people",
      "And even in those moments, often he prays for them rather than praying against them.",
      "to decide whether Allah will punish them or not. So this is the way in which Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala teaches us Taqwa, to complete other examples and then I will stop inshaAllah, other examples that Imam ibn al-Qayyim gives and this in fact he says that",
      "Ibn Taymiyyah, Rahimahullah, about this problem of muhasabah, self-reckoning, self examination, self criticism that we are supposed to engage in. What is the best way to do it? And it is very easy when you are in that mindset,",
      "when you're alone, when you are isolated and you're thinking about your flaws to lose if you will a sense of balance. And to see nothing but bad things and try to remove them from the way by training yourself. If you will by isolating yourself from the world and from action then by saying let me become perfect first",
      "That is a tendency that many of us fall into. And Ibn Taymiyyah gave him a beautiful example. He gave an example, two examples in fact. One he gave an exampl e of walk let's say walk in the park. He said when you go out for a walk in",
      "do you do? One thing that you could do is, you find a snake or scorpion or something dangerous and you decide that you will not continue your walk in the park until you have rid the park of all the snakes and all the scorpions and all potential dangers and all thorns that might get in your way. So instead of continuing",
      "and the scorpions, and the thorns, and all the things that you dislike about the park. And you're unable to continue the journey. So the way you in fact continue the Journey is you just take care of maybe kick away the one thing that was in your way, and then you continue, you go on. You know that you cannot send snakes into extinction",
      "continue your journey. That is an example of human nature. You cannot remove all your ills and all your shortcomings or those of other people before you do what Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la calls you to do. You have to continue walking the path knowing that you are imperfect and other people are imperfect as our Prophet SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam did. And, as you are in this walk, in this journey,",
      "this journey you're going to encounter and then you take care of those threats that you encounter, those encumbrances that you encountered in that journey. And then you continue. The other example that he gave I think is also a very productive example to think about and think with is that of... Think of your nafs as batus. Batus is grindmill",
      "on which people, you know, made of really compressed and, you known cooked clay. And you use it to grind your spices and whatnot but let's say you decide that before you're going to grind the spice, before you go into use your vatuz, you are going to clean it up.",
      "and you bring the biggest chemicals out, and you're scrubbing your batus. And the more you do so, the more dirt comes out of it because it is nothing but dirt all the way to the end. It is made of dirt. So try to clean, cleanse your nafs of all possible errors and all possible shortcomings before you engage in using it to serve Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. It's like cleaning the batus with a sandpaper.",
      "with a sandpaper. You're not going to find an end until there is no Bapus left because you are made of shortcomings and errors, and it's only in Allah that you seek refuge and you seek direction and you continue your journey. In fact the Prophet says if you stop sinning Allah will remove you people",
      "you people and bring those who do sin, and then do make tawbah to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la. Because Allah knows how He has created us, and He loves to hear and accept our tawba. So this is a short if you will... This would be my answer, my long answer to people when they ask me, you know, you talk about politics and the Ummah,",
      "talk about Madarij as-Salikin and journey to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la and taqwa. And what is the relationship in short between taqwah and the world? In my view, as a humble and flawed follower of Muhammad SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam and of the Sahaba, this is the only way I know. This is the way we go about constructing the world that we have to have our journey or true north is Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala",
      "and it is through these experiences even when we fail but trying to change the world in the way that allah has demanded us that we acquire taqwa",
      "So the traditional format is if anyone has any questions, feel free to send them to Zia Q&A and we'll go ahead and try and prioritize those questions. But if you would also like to unmute or raise your hand and unmute and ask your question live, feel fee to raise your head and we will give you that option. So if anyone have any questions right off the bat please let me know. While you're thinking of them inshallah we'll move on to Q&As.",
      "Q&A. The first question is, if not secluding from others, how do you maintain that self-reflectiveness to continuously keep the nafs in check? It's harder to see problems and enoughs in the moment as opposed to being removed from the situation. Yeah, it's a great question. It is hard to see the problems of the nafas both when you're in isolation or you haven't interacted",
      "moment you're overwhelmed by emotion as you correctly suggest and when you are when you have not interacted or you have forgotten what interaction is like you do not have any motivation um so what you need is something in between right we need something that you need to be principled about uh when you in about investigating",
      "How did I interact? What did I do? Or how did I even deal with the situation in my own self? And this is the way that you know where you stand. And this, by the way, is a general situation vis-à-vis Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala but also in our own relationship. I often advise couples that you have this problem that when you guys are happy together, you're not going to address your problems.",
      "your problems because you don't want to ruin it. When you are not happy together, then the emotions are too high to discuss what you don t like about the other person or what annoys you. You have to have discipline in being able to correct yourself and be able to express",
      "that requires muhasabah if you want to improve a relationship. The same is true for our relationship with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and our training of our nafs, that you cannot go to either extreme. And, you know, as of course famously this is a story that it's a popular story but that goes with the earlier point I've made",
      "point I have made that Rasulullah did his isolation and as the Arabs used to know at the time before revelation came to him but when's when Revelation came to Him he never went back there. The point is not that he never factually went back, he might have gone back to the Mount of Hira but that he",
      "tells him when things were hard in surah al-inshara for example when you're done with your daily duty of calling to Allah then focus establish yourself even more with greater focus and attention and turn to your Lord alone so that",
      "aloneness with Allah is very important. That's what Qiyamul Layl was an obligation for the Prophet and early Muslims, and Surah Al-Muzzammil, Allah tells the Prophet to pray all night most of the night half of the",
      "that the Prophet ﷺ had been praying and a group of believers among them all night almost or two-thirds of the night and so on. So this was their isolation. And all da'is, so this is as a matter of principle, all du'at, anyone who takes up the cause of Allah ﷻ has a higher duty, higher responsibility",
      "that time with Allah. So my talk wasn't at all to discourage alone time with Allāh, but rather to say that we do both, we must do both in order to acquire taqwa properly. Alright, JazakAllah khairan. We do have Brother Iyad with his hand raised so we'll invite you if you'd like to chime in.",
      "I just have a minor comment i would like to mention regarding a very side point it was not of course related to the main theme which is about the prophet sallallaahu alaihi",
      "trying to throw himself from the cliff or from a hill actually I went over the reports that mentioned this it's mentioned you can find it in three books At-Tabaqat by ibn Sa'd and actually he reported it from Al Waqidi and Al Waqud is weak as it is known. The second report is from Tabari",
      "accepted because there is problem in the matin. He talks about the Wahi that came to the Prophet. The very beginning of the Wahiy was just when Jibril came to him, it was a dream which cannot be accepted he came physically while he was in the cave. Now regarding the third book is Al-Bukhari.",
      "books as you know in his Sahih. In one chapter he brought this incident, he didn't mention it in all other chapters but Ibn Hajar commented on this, he said this is from Balaghat al-Zuhri He said the way the report is mentioned",
      "balak from Zuhri, the declaration from Zohri without mentioning the Sanad for this. And of course, this cannot be accepted. Another point it was mentioned that Sayyid Aisha asked Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam let me read from my computer.",
      "Did you go through a day in your mission more severe than the Day of Uhud, in which he was wounded? He said I went through a lot of things from your people. The worst was in the night of Al-Aqaba",
      "when he was to meet the Ansar, to take the bay'ah from them. So he said I approached some people and he didn't respond. He said, he did not respond positively to me. And so I went and I was sad",
      "and I slept, didn't wake up except in a certain area he calls in that territory surrounding Zuma Qarnith al-Aalib. So it means if that attempt was mentioned or was recalled by the Prophet, he would still say about it let alone that the concept of Rasulullah's attempted suicide actually goes",
      "Do you think the learned helplessness you've described with respect to the Ummah and its affairs emanates from the same tension between practicing taqwa in a concrete moment versus isolation? In other words, it's easier to maintain taqwā without working, dealing with others, and confronting tricky situations. So, quote, siyasa is najasa. Yeah, that's an interesting connection. I have not made that in my mind but I will think about it.",
      "think about it inshallah the next question is in what ways does secularism play into the disconnect between taqwa and the community that's a very good question and i believe that secularism has naturally the seeds of making this problem which is not",
      "this in our history already all the way back to the Sahaba that Taqwa was connected to self-mortification and abandoning the world. And Rasulullah brought them back to balance. That was something that, in other words, that's a natural human instinct or a natural",
      "misunderstand the true source of Taqwa. Because the way I think of Taquah, or one way to think about Taqwah is like you want to do bodybuilding right? If you want a strong body, one possibility, one way and some people in the past perhaps thought that way is to just eat a lot. Eat a lot of good great food, strong food better food than anybody else",
      "any of your energy. Just lay around and eat food. That would not make you a bodybuilder, right? That will not make stronger. What makes you stronger is when you challenge your body to lift weights that are slightly beyond its comfort zone but not too far beyond. If it's too far then your body is unable to do it and reacts to it in different ways either by breaking or",
      "So I think that this is a natural misunderstanding of what Taqwa truly is and what Allah has given us in the Quran, if you will, the best bodybuilding mechanism. The best taqwa building mechanism is to go out and do tawassul bil haqq and do amal salih",
      "muscle that is needed to continue to do it. But secularism is interesting as a condition and a challenge because it comes from a perspective that separates the world from taqwa. Secularism has no problem if you are engaging in piety, in your private life but you're not trying",
      "if you will, the fundamental term of secularism is you do not change the world according to your taqwa unless your taquah is the secular taqwah. Unless you have accepted all the terms of this is how you're going to construct the public society and if you want to hail Caesar or you want build up your nation as part of your religion good for you. You can do that in fact secularism loves",
      "to put religion under its yoke and conscript it for its own purpose. That, in fact, is the proper definition of the proper workings of secularism not to separate religion from politics but rather to put religious to work in service of secular this-worldly goals given by the state and the state elite",
      "elite. So because of that, it's very important to have Taqwa of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la not have Taquah of the state or if your goal is...if your fear is that you simply fear falling behind in the race for civilization and development as unfortunately has happened",
      "to some trends among Muslims that they have taqwa. So this is different kinds of maladies, if you will, that assail us today as Muslims. There are some for whom taqw has to remain only private and the world is constructed by forces of kufr and shirk and so on",
      "And they don't let the two mix. The model is, this is my private life, that's my public life. That's convenient, but it always fails and they always become servants of a system that is godless.",
      "they want to train themselves but their goal becomes civilization and so on. And they measure everything in the deen of Allah by measuring how their actions or their projects or their strategies match up with those goals of worldly development. Now this is not to say that worldly development isn't important,",
      "to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and this is secularism threatens that in perhaps unique ways",
      "similar topics but we can start with the first one uh somewhat of a tangent but why is asceticism or abandonment of the world such a commonly accepted means of attaining higher spirituality or religiosity i think this has been a i mean i can give you the intellectual historian's answer which has to do with some really powerful ideas in the pre-modern world",
      "world. You find that in Plato's ideas, but particularly after Plato, in the centuries after there is Neoplatonism begins to take Plato's teachings and turn them from a philosophical way of life if you will, through religion. So Neopatolianism was really a philosophical religious tradition",
      "And those traditions and other such traditions, they were mystery religions where there was this idea which may have been even older than Plato that this world is made up of this matter which is evil created by the evil God.",
      "Spirit is a good God, the creator of the spirit is a Good God and everything that pertains to this world is evil created by if you will Evil God. There are these two forces at war so these are the two sources one is if you want Zoroastrianism and the other is Platonic ideas both of them are anti-materialist as a religious commitment",
      "religious commitment. And those ideals may have affected how many religions, particularly Christianity which is really rethought after its encounter with Platonism very little of actual messages left the philosophical nuts and bolts of Christianity are all Neoplatonic Trinity cannot be understood without understanding Neopatolism so that's why",
      "That's why I think this is a very popular and powerful idea that matter is bad, and you are punishing the body in order to strengthen its spirit or its soul. And this idea creeps into even Muslim traditions in various forms. Allahu akbar. Okay, well then moving on to the next question then.",
      "more specifically, how did Sufism alter or influence the concept of Taqwa? So Sufisim one could argue that Sufisme doesn't have a single vision of Taquah but if one thinks of mystical Sufisms and I differentiate between what might call Orthodox Sufismo from mystical Sufsims. Mystical Sufismus is one that has a clear philosophical",
      "clear philosophical foundation for what it's trying to do, as opposed to those Sufis like Junaid ibn Muhammad and others, rahimahumullah, who were reflecting on the movements of the soul. And they certainly had ideas that may be extra Islamic, but they were in deep conversation with the Quran and the Sunnah. But the philosophical mystical Sufism",
      "does change if you will the goal of worship. The goal of Worship is to attain a kind of union that is here and now whereas in Ibadah what we find in the Quran",
      "Unveiling of truth, there is always an element of time. Meaning that you will know the truth after this struggle. You have to struggle now. You need to worship Allah. You have submit and then there'll be a day of judgment. There will be death or maybe even in this very life there will be moments of truth in which, as Allah calls them,",
      "unfolds in time worship Allah until Yaqeen which is death comes to you right so death there is time but the notion that emerges in philosophical Sufism which is taken from Neoplatonism is the idea",
      "and now. So knowledge will set you free, literally the idea that appears in Christian tradition as well, knowledge sets you free. It's used metaphorically these days but it actually this was one thing that mystics took literally. Knowledge will literally set you Free in the sense that there is a secret, there is mystery that if you know that you are no longer constrained by limitations of this life",
      "life and that's why the idea that you do not have to follow the sharia, the antinomianism right. The idea that You don't follow the Shariah, that Shari'a obligations do not apply to you it was very common it is extremely common shockingly common in Muslim history among various groups precisely because well first of all it's very attractive",
      "you know uh worship allah until certitude comes to you so you translate as certitude and if you're certain then you no longer have to do that similarly you could use idea of qadr for example the mystery man who meets musa well he was above the sharia why because he was waliullah and therefore wilaya is superior to prophethood there is knowledge of prophethood that is external",
      "that is external, that is internal secret or botany in inner knowledge that is higher superior that raises you above those restrictions. So those were all ideas that could be mobilized to take the idea of worship in a different direction.",
      "have been liberated in this life or you could use worship that is a different tradition. Worship not as a means an obligation to Allah and as a constant need that you have but rather as training so that your thinking could be clear. So philosophers particularly",
      "that training, ibadah is a kind of riadah, is a type of training in order to clear thinking. Intellect is the... Of course this is an idea that comes from Plato and Aristotle, that intellect is the essence, it's the most important existence, it is the most",
      "And so long as you could clearly think and intellect the truths, real truth of the world then worship was no longer necessary or it was even generally said that these things were for the commoners who did not have the training to know the right thing. Allah is the Greatest. There's a quick comment",
      "This is why I appreciate Professor Anjum's insights as his thoughts and talks are always making connections to our worldly civic life with any aspect of Islam, unlike other scholars or ustads who keep parroting and recycling what others have said in the past about giving it much thought. I'd never heard about taqwa in a more interesting way which also gives answers to the questions and maybe misplaced understandings of apolitical pietists. The example of a walk in the park was very apt. Any reflections on that?",
      "Reflections on that or? Alhamdulillah, I hope you're right and make dua for me. We also had a comment by Brother Arimad. I will allow you to unmute now if you would like to and you can go ahead and ask your question. Jazakum Allah Khair Professor Anjam, jazakumullah khair for your presentation. You introduced this concept that there are two paths",
      "and the short one, the long one is the ibadat. And the short on is the actual interaction with people in the society facing a challenge to do that too in compliance with the Deen of Allah. My humble observation in studying or contemplating this subject came to a different conclusion I would like you to comment on.",
      "the ibadat, the prayer, you know, also the contemplating the creation of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala reading the Quran. These are the practices that strengthens our relationship with Allah gets us closer to Allah. They are not actually the Taqwa or the manifestation",
      "or the manifestation of taqwa and that the taqw is actually where you call it along the short path which is actually is the byproduct, the result of qurb to Allah is that you will be able to interact in the society in the right way based on the deen of Allah. And that it's not one or the other and that there is no need to take time off as if",
      "as if you're we allah prescribed the prayer and reading of the quran and all of those things can be done in parallel uh i don't know what what do you think about this but it seems that uh there this is different and i don' t know how you would think about it if you give me feedback",
      "in case there is any misunderstanding, I want to clarify that. I didn't mean to say that the two paths are one is a path of ibadah and then the other path of akhlaq. That's not at all what I meant. The context of that question in Ibn al-Qayyim's treatment of this is isolation. And in both cases you're doing ibadat but one ibaduh is an isolation by abandoning the people. You know, people used to do that for 40 years or 40 days",
      "weeks or what have you that was the way to acquire taqwa is by isolating yourself and uh or by becoming for example not engaging in earning money the world you know just receiving money from people begging because you're involved in worshipping allah so those were the traditions that were the background of that comment that instead of isolating yourself",
      "our prayers require building masjids together, making jama'ah together, deciding who is the imam, who is a leader, who makes mistakes. So it's very communal, right? You're always interacting with people. So ibadah is not isolation in our case. Similarly fasting, it requires interacting with the world. It requires fighting with people about when Ramadan is starting, when Eid is starting. Right?",
      "engagement with the world, hajj more than anything else. Zakat, knowing about people who is poor right so all of our ibadat are engagement with The World while also giving us time as different kinds of opportunities to show our commitment to Allah SWT nor do I want to put down tabattul or isolated one-on-one time with Allah SWt",
      "practice of worshipping Allah for a long period of time alone with concentration. These things are the nuts and bolts of taqwa if we don't have them then our activism or our construction of the world is going to greatly suffer it's going to be hollowed out, it's gonna become shallow so we must also invest in dhikr and qiyam al-layl and reading of the Qur'an different people prefer different things",
      "different things the best is to do all of those things with a balance but those are not the two different paths right in both you have to master the practice of ibadah of Allah SWT, you have love to do it but the other path was isolation which if I understand from your comment you're in agreement with",
      "JazakAllah Khairan. And it seems like the final question we have for now is, how do you see the early Meccansuras relating to the dual message of Tazkiyah as well as improving society? Very good question. So early Mecansuras are, if you read early Mecnasuras they're almost remarkable in how strongly",
      "strongly they connect. Like it is as if taqwa, tazkiyah and your practice of giving to the poor caring about the poor sharing your things as simple as sharing your sugar and salt with",
      "with your neighbors, those practices are so intertwined that you can't separate them in the Meccan surahs already. So engagement with the world is not any less in the meccan surah it's just form is different right its form is not in medina and suras the form is more collective um",
      "that come from building a community in Mecca, they are much more immediate conundrums, ethical practical conundrums that people face. But Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la even in the Makkan Surah is very strongly connects action in the world, charity and helping the poor",
      "the poor as so strongly justice, what we might call economic justice, so strongly with piety. Okay. So it seems like those are all the questions we have for today. So inshallah we'll go ahead and conclude just a little bit early. I want to say to Dr. Anjum or taking the time out to give us that talk",
      "or questions um inshallah next week we also have dr othman will be talking about taqwa in times of hardship and how your relationship with allah and your image of allah impacts how you view hardship and",
      "والجعل تفرقنا من بعده تفارقا محروما ولا تدع فينا بين ناشطين ولا محرومة والعصر إن الإنسان لفي خسر إلا الذين آمنوا وعملوا الصالحات وتواصلوا بالحق وتوصلوا بالسلم السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته السلام عليه وسلام رحمة اللهم وبرکاته"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/Testimonial of Dr_ Ovamir Anjum_INtISDF6mLo&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbdIHCQm-CQGHKiGM7w%3D%3D_1750786535.opus",
    "text": [
      "مفکر ہیں دعی ہیں اور ان کا تخصص سنت رسول صلی اللہ علیہ وسلم ہے ساری زندگی انہوں نے نبی صلوٰا صلام کی سنت کی تعلیم حاصل کی اور تعلق دی بلکہ اس سے بھی زیادہ وہ سنت نبے کا عملی نمونہ بن گئے ہیں اور اُن کے دل میں مسلمانوں کا درد ہے دوسرے علماء کے مقابلے میں بھی سب سے زیADہ اُناں کی نمائیا خصوصیاتی ہیں کہ اُؤن کی فکر میں ایک احتدال ہے",
      "انہوں نے کافروں سے مسلمانوں کے خلاف مدد لینے کی شریعت مخالفت کی وہ یہ سمجھتے تھے کہ مسلمن حرمین شریفین کی خود حفاظت کر سکتے ہیں اسی کی وجہ سے ان کو گرفتاری اور بہت تشدد کا سامنا ہوا سالوں تک کئی سال تک رہے لیکن وہ بدلے نہیں",
      "کہ پیغام کے بجائے اعتدال اور یک جہتی اور اسلام کی گہری سمجھ کا پیگام دیا اور دعوت دی اب دوبارہ ظلم اور تشدد اور ایک نئی فراہونیت کا سامنا ہے سارے مسلمانوں کو",
      "بیت المقدس کو بھی فرخت کرنے کے لئے تیار ہیں ان کے خلاف حضرت کھڑے ہو گئے ہیں اور ایک علماء کا جہاد کا علم بن گئی ہے کہ حق کی بات کریں گے ظالموں کے سامنے تو یہ وجہ ہے",
      "ایک مثالی عالم اور مفکر اور مسلمانوں کے رہنما ہیں جس کی وجہ سے سارے مسلمans ساری دنیا سے ان سے محبت کرتے ہیں ان کے لئے دعائیں کر رہے ہیں اور ابھی ان کو سامنا ہے گرفتار ہیں اللہ کرے کہ ان کی زنجیریں کٹیں اور وہ واپس آئیں",
      "ان کے نقشے قدم پر چلیں السلام علیکم ورحمت اللہ وبرکاتہ"
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/The Crusades Part 1_2 by Dr_ Ovamir Anjum_gAgRQukA5LE&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750785922.opus",
    "text": [
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu. Alhamdulillah, alhamdulillahi rabbil alameen, wassalatu wassalam ala ashrafi anbiya wa sayyada almursaleen. A'udhu billahi minash shaitani rajim, bismillahirrahmanirrahim, wal asr inna alinsana lafee khusri illa allatheena amanoo wa amiloo ssalihaati",
      "On behalf of the Muslim Center of Middlesex County, MCMC I would like to welcome everyone to our session today. Today's session is going to be a little bit different than in terms of programming then what we have been doing in the past",
      "Historical knowledge, historical understanding, historical literacy is very important for us on so many levels. So we are supplementing our programming by inviting scholars of history and scholars of religion to help us understand and make sense of the past. The topic we have chosen for today and next Saturday",
      "is immense, the Crusades. And we can't think of anyone better than our guest to help us in this regard. Our speaker tonight, Professor Anjum, is Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at The University of Toledo. His focus and areas of research are diverse",
      "Siyasa, politics, fiqh, law, qalam, theology, falsafah, Islamic philosophy, tazkiyah, mysticism, spirituality. All of these areas. Dr. Anjum's educational background as well as his work is interdisciplinary. Before he embarked on his higher education",
      "Dr. Anjum studied fiqh and qirat from scholars from South Asia, Egypt, and Syria. He has a master's in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a master in social sciences from the university of Chicago and a PhD in Islamic intellectual history in the department of history at the University",
      "educational background, his work is truly interdisciplinary and draws on fields of classical Islamic studies, political philosophy, and cultural anthropology. He is the author of Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought, The Taimiyyan Moment. He also recently completed a decade-long project",
      "and theological classic, the Madarij as-Salikin or the Ranks of the Divine Seekers by Ibn al-Qayyim rahimahumullah. This book has the distinction of being the largest single author translation of a classical Islamic text. Dr. Anjum is also editor in chief of Yaqeen Institute, a trailblazing initiative which is filling a critical need of understanding for so many of us.",
      "At MCMC's inaugural discussion forum, we use Dr. Anjum's article, Who Needs the Khilafah? Who Need the Caliphate?, as the basis of our discussion which was moderated by Dr. Hatim Al-Hajj. He has also recently written an article on The Covenant of Medina which is also on Yaqeen Institute. So mashallah, we're very honored to have Dr.Anjum. The one thing I would say is",
      "From a schedule perspective, I know we said we would begin at six o'clock. We did but we just need to take a five minute break as Dr Anjum is going to pray Maghrib and then on the dot at 630 Eastern Standard Time inshaAllah Dr Anju will join us. The way the program will work is there will be about 45 minutes to an hour talk that Dr Anjoom will start talking about the Crusades.",
      "The session is split into two sessions. We have a session tonight and then inshallah exactly a week from now we'll have session number 2 where we will conclude our discussion. So both sessions will be about 45 minutes give or take in length, 45 minutes in length of a talk by Dr Anjum followed by somewhere around half an hour of Q&A.",
      "on ending by 7.30 p.m. Eastern Time. So with that, I ask all of you to please stick around with us. In the meantime, I want to display a very provocative quote about the Crusades which we can share until Dr. Anjum comes back.",
      "So, Professor thank you so much. Alhamdulillah I went through a very nice introduction for you and uh you have the floor now again MCMC is honored to have you help us understand such a vast subject that we've chosen",
      "We have benefited, I personally have benefited greatly from the course that you're offering at Al-Balagh Institute and really looking forward to this talk. So the floor is yours. Thank you very much. Jazakumullah khairan. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar- Raheem. Alhamdulillahi wassalatu wassalaamu ala rasulillah.",
      "important and current topic because it is a story of confrontation between two great civilizations both Abrahamic, both monotheistic traditions that are both missionary. And",
      "The significance of the Crusades, of course, is that it has since the colonial period come back to the Muslim consciousness in a new way. And Muslims have understood crusades often in light of these of the colonial conquest and while not entirely inaccurate",
      "there is a better and I think it's very important to understand the Crusades in a better light, in more historical sense. And also I think that understanding the Crusade in proper historic light allows us to draw",
      "draw many lessons but also to understand our current predicament in a much more accurate fashion. To some degree, understanding Crusades in the way that it is presented often, the way it's crafted by secular post-enlightenment historians has been a",
      "a drawback in our understanding of East-West relations, of Islam Christianity relations. And today I hope that we will dispel some of those stereotypes and misconceptions. Let me begin then with a short introduction to the very idea of history. See the idea of History of Facts in the past",
      "is very important in Islam. It's already grounded, in fact, in the Qur'an because the Qur-an has a historical sense of historical accuracy in a way that does not necessarily exist in other religious traditions. The Qur'aan speaks of other people of the book changing their tradition so Muslims",
      "start with this consciousness that is possible for one to misunderstand and misconstrue the past, and as a result lose ones way. Similarly, the Qur'an speaks at length of history stories that the Qur-an picks out as being the most instructive but the Qurr'an teaches through storytelling",
      "of fact to Muslims, which of course manifests itself in Islamic civilization in the form of historical hadith criticism. That merely because something sounds good does not mean that it in fact can be attributed to the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ or to God. That in fact lying about God and lying about the Prophet",
      "the prophet are among the greatest sins as the prophet um repeatedly said so understanding uh the significance of history because islam is grounded in a statement about the truth about actual message of god in history and not merely in",
      "in a myth, not merely in a story that makes sense but may not have historical grounding. Islam has this dual foundation that you can look in nature and find God, but you can also—and you must also—look in history and find god. Finally, history is perhaps the most compelling way in which we learn our creed, learn our Aqidah. So people",
      "So people teach aqidah or what Muslims believe and what we ought to believe through statements and, you know, catechisms of sorts. You know, statements of aqida. But the really felt aqidas, the one that we really live is taught through stories of which we are made, you",
      "our consciousness is made up of narratives in which we place ourselves and our motivations, our hopes and fears, their memories and desires come from our location in those narratives. Which narrative we are part of and which narratives challenge us.",
      "since knowing history itself is a part of Muslims' religious duty. All right, so let me give you a short overview of the Crusades and let me in fact begin for those who",
      "do not have much background in islamic history or whose history may just be dusty a simple a simplified periodization of islami history and i'm going to divide up islamist history in three century periods the first three centuries the next three centuries and next three",
      "period, second period or second era. So the first period I'm going to call the formative period and it is a period of the Prophet alayhi salam al-Khulafa ar-Rashidun, the Rashidun caliphs and one what might call what one might call imperial caliphate, the Umayyads and the high Abbasids or the Abbasis when they were actually in power",
      "ends with the fragmentation of the Abbasid power and takeover of Baghdad by some warlords from northern Iran in the year 334 of Hijrah or 946 of the Common Era. So I'm going to be speaking mostly in common era years",
      "era years. So you'll see that date is given in two forms, 338 and the 334 that represents a Hijri year and then 946, a common era but in order to go back and forth between them you only have to add six centuries approximately to the Hijri calendar",
      "that should be good enough. The next three centuries in Islam, a century that would be in Hijra calendar it would be four fourth fifth and sixth centuries and in the common era it would 10th 11th and 12th centuries this is called early middle period or also classical period and it is",
      "dealing with. This period is characterized by fragmentation of the Abbasid Khilafah and the rule is split, if you will between the symbolic power which unifies all Muslims",
      "place of the Prophet and rules over the Prophet's Ummah. So in a sense, the Khilafah which is in the hands of the Abbasids at this point provides that unification and symbolic meaning to Muslims but the actual rule is in",
      "mostly of Turkic origin, Turkish invaders who came after already having converted to Islam and they came and took over central lands of Islam Iran and Iraq. They're known as the Saljuks who are ruling over the eastern half and the central part",
      "Saudi Arabia and, you know, to choose modern states. Iraq, Iran to the east, and then Syria to the center west, and Egypt to the west, North Africa. So this is the period that we're going to be talking about, classical period or early-middle period.",
      "To give you an overview of this period, from the caliphate to military patronage state. This period is characterized by the end of Islamic unity. That's the most important feature that we're going to notice as we tell the story of the Crusades.",
      "centralized governance comes to an end with the fragmentation of the Abbasid power in the mid-4th or 10th century. The following century after that is called by historians, the Shiite Century because it saw a rise of successor states, that means various provinces of the abasid empire each of them sees their rebellion and most of those rebellions are",
      "lodged in the name of some Shiite Imam, one Shiite imam or another. The most important provinces here are Syria, Syrian province, Greater Syria which is in the hands of Hamdaniyun or Hamdanites, which is a Shiite Arab tribe",
      "Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. So I want us to remember that this often people speak of internal Muslim sectarianism and That, of course is going to play an important role here but I also want to point out that it was not a determining factor and the Hamdanites in fact Saif-ud-Dawla being very important Arab king who patronized Arabic language",
      "Arabic language, you know, and whatnot was acting on behalf of the Abbasid caliph and defending against an aggressive Byzantine empire. Then there were buyids in Baghdad who were also Shiite, were Persian warlords who dominated the Abasid Caliph in his own province which was Baghdad yet they did not depose him or kill him, they put him in house arrests",
      "So you have the situation where for nearly a century, the Abbasid caliph, Sunni Caliph was in house arrest by some Shia warlords. And that was certainly something that must've inspired a sense of urgency and crisis among",
      "among Sunnis. But then a much greater challenge was the Fatimids in Cairo. Now, the Fatmids were seven Shiites and that were seen by 12 or Imami Shiites or 12 Shiites as extremists. And their claim to have been descended from Fatima,",
      "prophet was rejected by all including by other ismailis other seveners such as the karamata and by 12 verse in every and the sunnis as well nonetheless the name fatimid had stuck although muslim historians call them obaidiyun and these fathomines in cairo in fact didn't not only they didn't make a deal with the abbas and the abasid caliphs and not only",
      "didn't, you know, simply oppose them but rather in fact they challenged their very basic claim to legitimacy and claimed the caliphate for themselves and engaged in active propaganda against the Abbasids and created a sense of real fundamental existential threat to the Sunni world. So just because there were Hamdanites",
      "create the sense of crisis. But the Fatimids claim that they were the legitimate caliphs only and active work against the active da'wah, missionizing in the realms of the Abbasid Khalifa in Iraq, in Iran. That is what created a sense of",
      "al-Ghazali, rahimahullah you know that he is immensely worried about the botanies or the esotericists which is another name for the Fatimids and then there are Qaramita which is an other sect of the same seveners Shia but another group among them they're also gulat or extremists",
      "rather than you know they don't have a state and a major state but they are nomadic terrorists of source and that has um a resurgence in the crusader era uh under an imam named nizar and so nazari they're called nazaris and they are also known in western literature as assassins because and and the muslims call them hashishiyun",
      "there is a lot of rebellion in this era of Abbasid weakness and fragmentation, and that has created the perfect conditions for internal disputes and weakness. Starting in the mid-5th century or mid-11th century, Sunni groups such as Mahmoud of Ghazna",
      "Mahmoud of Ghazna, Mahmood Ghaznawi. Of Afghanistan who expanded east into India and Turkic tribesmen from Central Asia. Seljuks begin to come into the Muslim world. So these Seljuqs who have already converted to Islam they're coming into the lands of Islam. They push the Ghaznarids eastward into India",
      "and eliminate the Druid rule. So at the time that we are talking about, end of the 11th century this is when the crusaders are cooking in Europe, end-of-the-11th century it's the Seljuks who are ruling northern part and central part of the Islamic world whereas the Fatimids have the western part of Islamic world particularly Egypt",
      "Now, one thing that is different about this world compared to the formative period is that the Rashidun as well as the Umayyads and the early Abbasids had upheld as non-negotiable the imperative of Muslim unity. They fought about this but one thing they did not agree about was that we can simply split the difference",
      "after one, you know, after a caliph dies, you can parcel out lands of Islam to some between sons and cousins and so on. That you couldn't do. You have to be unified. And if you couldn t find one caliph then there had to be war but nonetheless the principle of unity was held very important. Now this principle in theory remains as strong as ever nonetheless by these new rulers Turks mostly of Turkish extraction",
      "extraction, they follow their Central Asian tradition of dividing up provinces between their sons and brothers. So this new state, the Sultanates that if there are Sunni Sultanate as in the case of the Seljuks, they accept the symbolic role of the Abbasid Caliphs",
      "acid caliph kind of like the british queen today or perhaps in in in heyday of the britlish empire um the the britdish queen today for instance um present represents the great uh continuity with the past even though actual power now is wielded by",
      "to that so the sultan's the the sultans needed and and requested sometimes demanded sometimes took a letter of investiture appointing them to rule on behalf of the caliph in various territories all right so this is the overview of this period classical period that we are talking about let us now look",
      "now look at the arrival of the saljuks which is also called the sunni revival between mid-fourth to mid fifth century in hijri calendar or mid 10th to 11th century and a common era is called the shiite century after that shia century came century of sunni",
      "11th century i'm just going to use common era so mid-11th century the suljoks are coming in now as we said these are turkish muslim converts who defeat and oust the buits push the ghaznavids eastward and they pose themselves present themselves",
      "in Baghdad and they are struggling for legitimacy. The way that they're able to establish their legitimacy is by providing one thing that the Abbasid Caliph could not himself provide in this state, which is to defend the lands of Islam. The Byzantines threat, Byzantine threat, and Byzantine meaning East Roman Empire,",
      "And it was increasing as the Abbasid caliphate fragmented, the Byzantine power was growing and they were pushing back into Syria. The Byzantines had taken Antioch and the Buyids who were warlords who really just wanted to enjoy the power,",
      "weakness of the Abbasid caliph really were local Caliphs and they had no interest in fighting the Byzantine Empire. And this had led to an increasing emboldening of the Byzantium empire. So, the Seljuks now as they come in and defeat the Bilyeids, they assert their legitimacy through",
      "victory they have against the Byzantines in the year 1071, which is at the Battle of Monsecour. And this is a short but really important period because what you see here is in this period end of the 11th century. Basically it's a time before Imam al-Ghazali becomes active",
      "becomes active around that time and it is the time his teacher abu al-ma'ali al juwaini is um is active and he is in fact empowered and the reason he's such an important figure in islam is because he is made professor of newly established madrasas by this brilliant vizier the persian was",
      "who when the when the soldiers come to the muslim lands uh they don't know how to govern they are you know these are very sophisticated ancient civilizations many people great culture great literate civilizations so they recruit persian secretaries and persian vizier nizam al-mulk is the epitome of such uh secretaries in fact he's legendary",
      "legendary in Islamic history for his ability to manage this fragmented post-Abbasid successor states and bring a semblance of order, peace, and Sunni orthodoxy back. And again, Sunni Orthodoxy provided an umbrella kind of Islam so you could have different schools of law",
      "of law in that and Nizam al-Mulk was this kind of ideal ruler effectively. And some people argue that Imam Juwaini wrote his Ghiyath al-Ummum fil Tiyath ul Zulm addressed to Nizami al- Mulk as if telling him that you should now take power and become the Caliph, if you will, in some interpretation but even if not effectively Nizama al- Mulq",
      "had brought order. However, all of that ended tragically in the year 1092 when the Nizari Ghulat Shia assassinated both the Vazir Nizam al-Mulk and the Seljuk King Malik Shah. And with that, Seljuk unity ended and there was chaos in the north.",
      "the north chaos in iraq and iran so we'll back up a little bit and note that one of the major things that place the salju turks on the map as rulers of muslims and protectors of islam was",
      "uh christian perspective on what had happened of course internal rivalries and rebellions within the byzantine empire had weakened it um and um the emperor romanus who was who had led this",
      "Constantinople and what now he was defeated by the soldiers. The soldiers did not kill him in fact they sent him back with a you know humiliating after having signed an humiliating treaty but the elite in Constantinopole imprisoned and then killed him so this was something that had shaken up the Byzantine Empire",
      "empire and these Turks that had come into the lands of Islam presented to Byzantines a new threat. Okay, so now let me give you a sense of the beginning of the Crusades on the Christian side.",
      "and 11th centuries of common era roman latin church was getting stronger and by the christian world is divided roughly into two east and west west is latin speaking roman or now post-roman empire roman empire had been invaded by the barbarians and someone but um",
      "outdated terminology whereas the Eastern Roman Empire which is also called Byzantine Empire centered at Constantinople was still a vibrant empire when Muslims conquered earlier on in the time of the Rashidun and then the Umayyads men Muslims conquered east the Byzantine",
      "uh muslims conquered about two-thirds or 75 of the empire so or if you look at the mediterranean all these lands that were in the hands of the romans muslim's took most of them but not constantinople the city itself was impregnable and it was believed legendary power and its strategic location constantinopol could not be taken",
      "empire survived and it was the most important thing because everything else for these empires was simply taxation so with constantinople standing intact over time it began to expand again um but what was happening now in 10th and 11th centuries is that latin west",
      "in Europe, which is present-day France and Germany. There's a clash between church and kings in Europe. You have France and Holy Roman Empire, which was the name for what Germany or which occupied the land that is Germany, Holy Roman empire as established by Charlemagne were two most powerful realms",
      "powerful realms and as you can see this in yellow here holy roman empire and france there is a lot of internal movement going on so william the conqueror of normandy which is northern france crosses the channel and invades england in year 1066. pope urban ii",
      "II now becomes a major player. He seeks to strengthen relations with the Byzantine Empire and lifts the excommunication of Byzantine Emperor Alexius by the Latin Church in 1089, and excommunicates French King Philip for adultery. So there's a lot that's going on but all of this comes down to is what one scholar has called",
      "Roman peace or new peace. There's a peacemaking movement that is trying to unify Christians as Christians at the expense of any outsiders, and we're going to see that those outsiders ended up being Muslim but also at the",
      "um holy roman empire uh emperor henry iv had in fact clashed just 10 years earlier with the pope and replaced pope gregory with urban's predecessor with another pope so",
      "the Crusades, and calling for unity of all Christians. Especially unification with Greek Christians or Eastern Christians. Between there were two major centers of Christianity Rome and Constantinople that had been rivaled and by unifying these two Pope Urban was doing something that would ultimately lead to crusades",
      "Another very interesting link is what's happening in Spain. Let's look at Spain here, if you can see my arrow. There is a Reconquista movement in Spain that is in full swing right now. And a powerful ally of the Pope",
      "calling for the Crusades is a man by the name of Raymond of Toulouse. Raymond, one of the richest counts of Europe, is an enormously powerful and religious man who had campaigned against the now increasingly fragmented realm of Muslims in Al-Andalus or Islamic Spain. And he had married the daughter of Alfonso VI.",
      "leading Reconquista or you could say basically Spanish Crusades for a long time before crusades started elsewhere. Similar and we're going to see another important player here was Godfrey of Bullion,",
      "So this is what's happening in Europe. We're going to come back to this. Then on the Turkish side, you have Turkish nomads invading the lands of Islam as Muslims. They are coming as tribes but as conquering tribes and as such they are quickly assimilated. But now we will see these Seljuks who start here in Trans-Oxiana",
      "are moving east westward and then you have the fatimids their power is based in egypt but by this time they have extended their influence over hijaz and beleda sham or greater syria another incident that led to or helped the pope's propaganda",
      "propaganda is a century earlier in the year 1009, a mad caliph or what is known in literature as the Mad Caliph Al-Hakim was a Fatimid countercaliph and he acted arbitrarily did lots of crazy things such as for example prohibiting people from going out",
      "night or prohibiting women from wearing shoes and acted just in ways that were insane. And he also commanded for reasons that historians do not agree about the burning down of the Church of Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which was really an exceptional event. The Muslims simply didn't do that. His successor in Cairo rebuilt the church",
      "the church but the propaganda and of course, the shock of this kind of burning up the church had gone and spread through Rome to the rest of Europe. Sorry, through Constantinople and to Rome and the rest",
      "as well as some grievances against Muslim rule. This is the famous proclamation at Clermont, which is southern France in 1095 Pope Urban II makes this from the confines of Jerusalem and the city of Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequently has been brought to our ears he may be referring here to the burning of the church in a century earlier",
      "Namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians. And a cursed race. A race and by kingdom of Persians probably he means the Turks because as far as they're concerned, Turks were Persians from far away.",
      "As much here that's not true, that hasn't in fact happened but nonetheless his speech is extremely powerful and spreads like wildfire throughout Europe. This is the first crusade. You'll notice here there are three main paths and these 3 or 4 major figures who start Raymond",
      "who starred Raymond of Toulouse, who is the biggest champion of crusades. He starts and in this show his army is in red and Robert Flanders in yellow and Godfrey of bullion in blue",
      "of Toronto here in light yellow. They all meet in Constantinople and we're going to pick up that story from there. So contrary to the popular image created by secular enlightenment biased Western historians of 19th, then even early 20th century and accepted by modern Christian and Muslims both careful research,",
      "establishes that the crusaders were motivated largely by religious passion and church doctrine, not simply material gain or madness. In fact often they had to lose a lot in order to engage in crusades. Popular preachers like Peter the Hermit were riling up the masses and this was a mob-ish kind of religious sentiment. They actually led",
      "state that horrified the authorities in constantinople um who diverted his plundering this plundered mob eastward uh and then muslim turkey turkish ruler of nicaea quickly intercepted them and and set them off kill him but that was they underestimated what was coming right in fact",
      "more interested in internal warfare and rivalry, and didn't know what was coming. So the actual first crusade was better planned and led by church-blessed, church-authorized leaders rather than criminals or bumbling idiots or people simply who wanted wealth and power. It was more than that.",
      "The crusaders stopped at Constantinople. With some alarm, Emperor Alexius supported the crusaders, joining them in taking Nicaea, which was a city that had been taken by Muslims and it was close to Constantinopol on eastern side. Now, in fact, let me show you Nicaeae right here.",
      "Nicaea right here. So, right after Constantinople is Nicaeaea but between Nicaeea and the next major Muslim destination here in northern Syria you have a long journey which is very hostile and this crusade crusaders had to go through that",
      "that is two years after Pope's declaration, Seljuk Emir Kilic Arsalan who was away at the time. He was not in Nicaea. He tried to attack the besieging army but was easily routed and then there followed a long hard march through Anatolia or present-day Turkey",
      "of edessa which is today or turkish urfa or arabic this was the first major muslim city which was now uh now became a crusader state under balba um next came the most important siege and the most",
      "city of Antioch or in Arabic, Antakya which is just on the border of Turkey and northern Syria. Which was one of the most well fortified cities, it was considered impregnable. And their crusaders met extremely tough conditions. Many fled including the small Byzantine army so the Byzantines were not as excited about fighting and they in fact were not motivated much by faith",
      "by faith it wasn't part of the but latin christians had they were led in fact by the masses one very interesting thing is that often uh latin Christians these masses would themselves consult and decide when their leaders were not moving fast enough",
      "Finally, when Antioch is taken Crusaders morale is boosted immeasurably. The commoners led the leaders by their religious passion and here Muslim internal division shows fatally for the Fatimids in Egypt were in fact sending messages to the crusaders To march against the Seljuks and wanted to make a deal with them so long as they didn't take Jerusalem because",
      "take Jerusalem because Jerusalem was under Fatimid control at this time. Quite remarkable here is the Crusader writings about what they were doing so when they actually saw the Muslim army scatter and flee before them, they were in such a state I'm reading here from Karen Armstrong's Holy War that they were",
      "that they were not surprised. They thought that God had guaranteed them victory, and after Antioch a new mood had emerged where the Turks and Muslims were no longer a feared enemy. They were in fact now seen as enemies of God. They",
      "On the way from Antioch to Jerusalem, there is amazing show of religious fanaticism. And also on the Muslim side, there were Turkish rulers who in fact would send supplies and guides to the Crusaders so long as the Crusader didn't come take money",
      "didn't come take my city, go to Jerusalem, leave me alone. So this was something and the same is true of the Fatimids in Egypt so that this was a situation where internal Muslim division and the single-minded passion of these masses had made them",
      "to this unstoppable juggernaut. I'm going to end in a few minutes with, at this point, I'm not going to talk about the Muslim response to the Crusades that will be inshallah next week but I think this is worth reading about how crusaders were writing about themselves and thinking about themselves.",
      "On July 15th, 1099 the Crusaders forced an entry to the city and conquered it. For two days they fell upon the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem. They killed all the Saracens and the Turks they found says the author of Gesta. They skilled everyone whether male or female And then they climbed to the roof of Al-Aqsa and in cold blood they killed Muslims including those whom",
      "whom one of their leaders, Tancred had granted sanctuary. And a famous eyewitness account, Raymond of Achilles shows the Joshua spirit and by Joshua's spirit it is a book of Joshua in the Old Testament.",
      "so that they fell from the towers. Others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was necessary to pick one's way over the bodies of men and horses but these were small matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon a place where religious services are normally chanted. What happened there if I tell you the truth it will exceed your powers of belief so let it suffice to say",
      "The mutilation of Saracens, that's Crusader self-images.",
      "Crusaders accounts mentioned mutilation and cannibalism even, at least at the conquest of Antioch. They were hungry, they were angry, and they felt justified by their sacred texts. Muslim accounts in fact mention this same great carnage but do not mention cannibalisms. Christian accounts are more detailed.",
      "the enemies were called at first turks but in syria when they uh went when starting with antioch the arab muslims were encountered and they were known by the same name that romans had used for them for a long time which is saracens which isn't since before islam uh the desert dwellers were called saracen some people think it means or easterners but nonetheless there were turks and saracenes arabs who call saracense",
      "A relatively recent historian, Tomas Masnack says that thinking about what had led to Crusades was the holy peace. The peace of God.",
      "they make up central france that pax the attorney led to the estrangement establishment of the true gadia the truths of god yet these uh peacemaking efforts together resulted in the crusade at the end of the 11th century so peace within led to a unification and war outside um",
      "The book, I think it came out in 2002, Crusading Peace. An interesting thesis to think about. Also, I won't have time too much to talk about it but I can take any questions about it which is the comparison of laws of war in the Quran and in the Book of Joshua in the Bible. And that in fact what was happening in crusades to some degree reflected religious doctrine.",
      "So this is just the first crusade. A dozen more crusades followed, almost all failed. As a rule of thumb, the odd crusades, the first one, the third one, fifth one, seventh one, ninth one tended to be a little more significant than even ones were often done. So only first crusades failed after that internal divisions as well as internal greed. The loss of that early passion, religious passion",
      "and instead now the nobles in Europe realized that this could be a very successful lucrative business, and that led to lots of internal problems. And ultimately even though the crusaders stayed in their eastern kingdoms that they established for two centuries,",
      "and taking far more. But Europe is born as a continent, as a self-consciousness with the Crusades. And Crusaders defined...Crusades define European life religion culture for two centuries. There were Crusades in all kinds of you know professions and every aspect of life. There are boys crusade there were children's",
      "The crusade itself turned against their corrupted Christian brethren of Byzantine Empire in Istanbul or Constantinople. There were crusades against Jews that were pogroms, that were among the worst pogrom's in Christian history at this time. The only Crusades that succeeded were the ones against Muslim rule in Spain",
      "and killing, and then forced conversion of the rest of Jews and Muslims. And arguably, the Crusades form the backdrop of Protestant Reformation and reaction against the overpowered, which could be seen as reaction against overpowered and aggressive church. The Crusaders were extremely important on European side, less so on Christian side. But we're going to look at the Muslim response next time I'm going to take any questions.",
      "Any questions, comments, thoughts? Sure. Professor, can you hear me? Yes, I can. Okay. So we have a few questions. I'll just go in order and I'll read them. A couple of questions have come asking about the concept of unity within or on the European side, right? You have the Byzantines, you have the Pope, you",
      "knights how are they all able to unite i guess is one of the questions that's coming in specifically also with the byzantines and europe so a couple of questions will come on that topic do you want me to answer that please okay",
      "The best answer to that question is there's a book on that crusading piece, that shows exactly how this movement for internal Christian unification starts in southern France. The church is very interested in doing that, the Roman Church that is and it begins with this reversal of excommunication of the Byzantine emperor.",
      "They're less excited about it. They do seek Latin Christian soldiers in their armies against Muslims, but they are also more practical.",
      "they want to keep relations with them but when they see the passion and when this uh christian movement gets started it seems that the folks in byzantine among the byzantine elite also accept at least in a very pragmatic way this kind of unity um there is",
      "is a you could say it's a confluence of events in europe um holy roman empire uh you know that's present-day germany being at the center and in france there is a weakening of secular power",
      "is seeing an opportunity to provide unity within Europe. And its own doctrines are preaching, but there is in fact a struggle within the church as well.",
      "It's a very strong doctrine of papal power, of plenitude of papaled power. Which is that Pope in fact has total power in a very similar way to Byzantine empires. There were two theories of Christian power. In the typical doctrine in Rome had been Christ had two swords, power and papacy. Whereas in Byzantium",
      "in Byzantine, the theory of power was that the same person, the emperor held both swords or it was the same power. So the emperor was head of the church as well. But in late 10th or 11th century, the Roman theorists of the Church are pushing for a very strong power",
      "for the church over the secular princes and the princess themselves are at this point unable to resist pope's uh or the church's aggrandizement um so i guess it's a confluence of a number of factors and i'm not an expert in european history at this time so i'd say crusading peace by thomas masnach would be a good place",
      "would be a good place to start okay thank you so there's another question and i'll read it as they're coming why do you think the crusades is narrated today as a defense against muslim aggression but it was the byzantines who had a conflict with the muslims not the western europeans ah great great question i think that",
      "that goes back to the idea of God's peace. And it's God's piece, all Christians are part of God peace right? So the Byzantine Empire sees the initial expansion of Islam as the initial aggression even though you know",
      "really depends on how far you want to go but even with the with with this story which again which is how the uh byzantine empire saw it and and this is part of the propaganda that it's muslims who took over our lands which is of course ultimately there is a an element of truth in it but muslim saw it differently there were a couple things of course that historians acknowledge",
      "was discriminatory and oppressive toward Eastern Christians for a long time. Christians in Syria and Egypt belonged to Jacobite church, had a different doctrine of Trinity which led to them, in fact, in some cases welcoming Muslim rule because Muslims were very tolerant",
      "tolerant um they so long as you pay taxes didn't matter what kind of christian you were and also the way these empires worked is that you know they had their center con their uh cosmopolis their metropolis constantinople that is real that is what empires cared about that's where the emperor lived",
      "were simply agricultural sources for taxation. And when Muslims had come earlier on offering jizya, which was fairer than Byzantine taxation, local Christians had not put up great resistance and Muslims offered religious tolerance and protection to churches.",
      "In some ways, this protection was better than what offered and sometimes significantly better than What was offered by Byzantine Empire because you belong to the wrong church So the idea that Muslims had come and this expansion had been Muslim aggression is questionable even though not entirely wrong Of course this has happened",
      "Even from sort of a secular historian perspective, it is a questionable account. But from Muslim perspective, true religion was Islam and true religion of Isa alayhi salam, Jesus was Islam. And in that sense, they were bringing the truth and they were bring Christians an opportunity to go back to the true religion Of Isa. And as such Muslims of course did not see that as aggression when Muslims didn't behave that they have to eliminate Christians",
      "One final thing that in fact Muslims have to, that complicates this account is that Europe had become Christian relatively recently. That is European, the urban centers had been Christian for some time but the rural areas generally remained pagan until only a century or two before Muslim conquest",
      "know before muslim conquests and and so this idea in many of the muslims themselves were converts right so this ideal that muslim came from outside and conquered and we are coming to defend our sort of ancient lands is there's a lot that wrong with it but nonetheless that was narrative okay another question",
      "question why didn't the seljuks want to take arabia because it was really not part of any empire and they could have increased their legitimacy in the muslim world like how the ottomans did uh made themselves custodians of the two holy mosques well it's not a matter whether they wanted to take or not so either they could take it or not that arabia over hijaz was under",
      "under Fatimid control and the Seljuks could not maintain their unity after in particular after Balik Shah. And they were suffering from lots of internal challenges especially the Nizari assassins",
      "posed a serious threat to them as well as to you know the fatimids and the crusaders but they were closest to the suljuks and and the soldiers uh um you know what internally they didn't have in mechanism of course you could say that there is a problem in uh in in muslim lands here there is no good institutionalization of power such that",
      "that when one you know when a ruler is killed the next one is somehow chosen and or elected or something or otherwise installed you don't have that mechanism in place because uh that mechanism even when it's theorized is directed toward the abbasid caliph the caliph doesn't actually have power the actual power is held by these turkish tribes who",
      "ways and they follow their own traditional ways rather than any kind of sort of Islamic norms of governance. Now this is not to say that they don't apply the Sharia, let's be very clear. They are Muslims who are applying the hudud doing the things that Abbasid Caliph would do. They're mainly a military arm so you have a kind of crisis of power which I discuss in my book for those if you were interested",
      "those if you're interested in medieval period political thought and Islam. The book is called Politics, Law and Community in Islamic Thought the Taimiyyan moment came out of Cambridge 2012. Okay there are a couple of questions around the point that you mentioned that some Muslim either governors or warlords actually attempted to make",
      "make a deal with the Crusaders and if they would leave them alone, right? The specific question... two questions. One is how widespread was that? And then the second one is can we safely conclude that the Crusader's did not take the Fatimid offer of teaming up against the Seljuqs? If so why? Well it's a great question. First one I'm just going to defer to next session",
      "session, inshallah. We're going to talk about the Muslim side. As far as the Fatimids, you know, the Fatims are well, the simple answer is Fatims they're thinking in terms of secular terms, right? They're thinking In terms of sectarian terms whereas the Crusaders are filled with religious passion so Crusaders came for Jerusalem. They did not come to make deals when Fatimid realized that",
      "realized that these guys are not going to give up Jerusalem, they did put up some fighting. They did try to fight the crusaders but it was too little too late and they simply were no match for the crusader's. Okay there is another question here. Do you see similarities between right-wing extremists and the way they use the faith with what we're seeing today",
      "thing today versus what happened leading up to the Crusades? No, I think that's a very distortive analogy even though it's very tempting. You see, the crusaders were not as far as they understood, they were not twisting Christianity in order to play some power game. Most of those masses seem to have sincerely understood Christianity",
      "Christianity or the order of the church. The church had given them this doctrine, A to Z. They were, if you will, from... If you were a Christian at this time, whether you look at the doctrine or popular understanding of Christian high doctrine, low doctrine, you were doing good. You were crusading for love. You're",
      "cleansing filth. And you were doing, and if you look at the laws of war in the Bible, here this is the book of Joshua, Deuteronomy 20. This is what the book says. It says,",
      "You shall annihilate them. And then it names specific people, the Hittites, the Amorites, and the Canaanites, The Perizzites, Highbites, Jebusites as the Lord your God has commanded. So they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods. And you thus sin against the Lord, your God. I mean compare that to the Quran, the so-called sword verses that are harshest.",
      "I mean, if you look at them, it says fight in the name of Allah those who fight you but do not transgress. Indeed, Allah does not like transgressors and kill them wherever you overtake them and expel them from whatever they have expelled you. And fitna is worse than killing. And do not fight them at Masjid al-Haram until they fight you there. But if they fight to then that killed him such as the recompense of this believers.",
      "If they seize, then indeed Allah is forgiving and merciful. Fight them until there is no more fitna and until worship is acknowledged to be for Allah. But if they seize then there is not aggression except against the oppressors. Again, if any of the polytheists... This is about polytheist in Surah At-Tawbah which is a harshest surah at the very end against polytheism. It says,",
      "place of safety. This is because there are people who do not know so you're fighting them because they are people that don't know, because they're aggressors, because the have driven you out and then the final verse 928-29, 929 is often considered the final sword verse",
      "So even there, if they choose not to believe you take jizya and jizy is a very fair poll tax. And I call it fair because empires at this time Byzantine Empire the Persian Empire whether you were Christian or",
      "Christian or whatever, you know for minority there was a slightly different tax but you had to pay taxes. So you could see that the Crusaders were doing in many ways was reading the Old Testament and applying it. Okay so as you're mentioning Jizya question",
      "jizya, a question came up on jizyia. You're saying it was a very fair poll tax, right? These questions often come up for a peasant or a minor, I don't know if the term middle class applies, but for the masses how fair or unfair was the jizyo compared to what other empires at that time would levy?",
      "There is a study by an Israeli author, in fact on Jizya. Her name I think is Milka Ruby Robin which does some of these comparisons and I think that ultimately what she finds is that it's very comparable to what peasants were paying before Islam and after Islam. And the way the jizya would be levied",
      "is that you would do a head count in the village, rough headcount. And based on that, you'd apply this is every year the village is going to pay this much or this. Then as the administration became more bureaucratically advanced there would be a difference between the rich, the poor, the middle class",
      "um and this remained the case throughout so until the ottoman empire the way they offered their to their jizya was extremely fair and they would have these categories of rich and poor but but the jizia was not um you know such an enormous amount that would break your back and it because it is a whole village that is paying roughly the same it is something that",
      "that I mean, that's just like a collective tax. And there are cases in the time of Umar when he, when Christians joined Muslims in fighting which was you know not a widespread practice but nonetheless it did happen then no jizya was applied to them so",
      "So clearly jizya was in return for military service that was being provided. Now, military service itself is seen as a matter of honor. So Muslims had military duty so they were honorable. Those who were sitting and doing peasant work or trading, they were in some ways lesser because Muslims were the military conquering class but in terms of its economic burden",
      "its economic burden uh in some ways i mean christians are doing trading and they're they're not christian but pagans or christians or astrians whereas muslims cannot do that you cannot be called to you know war four months a year or whatever um and have a full profession so in there were cases when",
      "the Ahl al-Dimma would become very rich, whereas Muslims would be... So it's not, it wasn't something that was calculated to break your back because the Prophet had specifically commanded to not take jizya more than what they can reasonably give. And when of course, when people became poor and they couldn't earn then",
      "then not only jizya was forgiven but there were cases when they would be given a stipend from baytul mal as we know from the tradition of uh i don't know how far this went um but this was certainly in theory practice so we're coming up against um the bottom of the hour",
      "you uh the last word professor if you could summarize for us what we what you discussed today the most important point that you would want us to walk away from and then inshallah will be back same time next saturday where you will talk about the muslim response and what happened so with that i turn it over to you if you",
      "We are very honored and we appreciate you making the time for this. So I think that the main point that I've made today is unity, unity of Muslims and in fact Muslims' ability to defend themselves go hand-in-hand, number one.",
      "the ability to defend yourself and you lack unity, you in fact bring violence upon yourself. And you cause more violence that in fact unity and the ability of defense tends to secure peace and order far better both for Muslims and for those under Muslim protection and for Muslim neighbors but when",
      "When you have Muslim rulers that are divided, then often they are unprincipled and violent toward Muslims as well as non-Muslims. A third thing that I tried to point out is that a principled commitment to unity actually mattered a lot.",
      "So it wasn't merely a matter of realpolitik that, you know, now, you couldn't be unified anymore because there was Turks. They could actually have been unified had this been a strong commitment. And so theory matters. What people believe is important matters.",
      "matters. Now, what's happening on the European side is also I think indicative of the same general truths which is that ideas matter. Commitment to unity, commitment to war, commitment peace those things translate into real world policies. They don't translate in a linear fashion so that",
      "so that you write a book about it and immediately comes to reality. But there are moments, cracks, openings in history that you do not foresee but when they come new ideas can be put in place. So what happens when there is this idea of peace of God on the one hand in Europe like internal Christian unification?",
      "unification does happen. But you do not have a theory of warfare, of just war. What you have in your holy book is annihilate everything that breeds. Well, that also happens. So theory matters. Belief in unity matters, right? And people, sometimes historians,",
      "ordinary Muslims, sometimes even ulema fall into thinking that all this is all realpolitik. That what we believe doesn't matter. That simply you know those are in power who going to do what they want. That is completely false and I think that finally there are deep lessons to be learned from the passion that Christian peasants commoners felt",
      "felt for their faith. What alternative futures might have been available had Muslims been in better touch with the Christian world, had there been better knowledge of Islam? We do not know, of course. And finally I want to reiterate",
      "I want to reiterate what i began with is that this idea that Muslims always thought of crusades as some kind of colonizers, as secular colonizers who were motivated by material greed like the British and the French and the Americans. That is not true in fact Muslims historically had a very self-confident",
      "very self-confident understanding of themselves and they did not see the crusaders as uh as you know as victims they in fact saw crusaders challenge um and in the case of crusaders they met the challenge albeit a century later and we're going to see that next uh next week inshallah so we should not",
      "We should not accept European retelling, even if it's superficially sympathetic of our history because that changes who we are. That changes the way we talk about ourselves. It is important to understand that Muslims understood the morality of strength, the morality",
      "they felt that we had done something wrong. We were not unified, that in fact we could be unified and when we were unified, we engaged in proper jihad, we could take things back rather than just complaining about or those greedy looters came and they had no religious motive. And of course the fact that you know, when you have religious justifications, religious beliefs other people have their beliefs right",
      "their beliefs right or wrong religious beliefs ideologies whether they're religious beliefs or ideologies about economics or ideologies of bad democracy they drive people to do great things to do terrible things and if muslims believe that uh they um that they value islamic have to be able to defend themselves and have to",
      "Alright, so with this I end today inshaAllah. Hopefully we'll see many of you next week. We ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to teach us that which benefits us and to benefit us from what He has taught us. وآخر دعوانا الحمد لله رب العالمين السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته عليكم السلام ورحمن الله For all the folks who are on inshaAllah will be back next week same time around 6 p.m eastern time and we will do the second",
      "second portion of this and we look forward to Professor Anjum talking to us next week as well."
    ]
  },
  {
    "file": "anjum/The Crusades Part 2_2 by Dr_ Ovamir Anjum_5mffGUKmzt4&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750676880.opus",
    "text": [
      "Alhamdulillah Rabbil Alameen. Wassalatu wassalamu ala ashrafi anbiya wa sayyidil mursaleen. AlhamduliAllah wassalaatu wassalamu alaa rasoolillah. Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuhu On behalf of the Muslim Center of Middlesex County, I would like to welcome everyone to our second and final session of the program on Crusades with Professor Ovemeir Anjum.",
      "Anjum helped us understand the world around 1100 Christian era or the fourth, fifth century of the Hijrah. If you didn't attend the first session I encourage you to visit our YouTube channel MCMCNJ.org or our Facebook page Muslim Center of Middlesex County and listen to his lecture which will help you contextualize where we are. Tonight's session will be similar",
      "speak for about 40 to 45 minutes, and then we will open up for question and answers. I encourage everyone to type your questions, and we will address them in the order received. There will be a small break of about five to seven minutes around 645 p.m. Eastern time for Maghrib Salah for those people who are joining us west of the East Coast. Now it is my honor and privilege to once again introduce our speaker, Dr. Anjum.",
      "Dr. Anjum. Professor Dr.Anjum is Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Toledo. His focus areas of research are diverse from politics law theology philosophy and spirituality his educational background as well as his work is interdisciplinary before he embarked on his higher education",
      "fiqh and qirat from scholars from South Asia, Egypt, and Syria. He has a master's in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a masterís in social sciences from the university of Chicago, and a PhD in Islamic intellectual history from the Univeristy of Wisconsin Madison. He is the author of Politics Law and Community in Islamic Thought The Taimi'in Moment. He also recently completed a decade long project of translating",
      "and theological classic, Madarij as-Salikin, The Ranks of the Divine Seekers by Ibn al-Qayyim rahimahumullah. This translation has the distinction of being the largest single author English translation of a classic Islamic text. In addition, Dr. Anjum is also editor in chief of Yaqeen Institute, a trailblazing initiative which is filling a critical need of understanding for so many of us. Mashallah, he is extremely busy.",
      "extremely busy his itinerary this week a lecture yesterday on the importance of Islamic history a lecture with Mifta Institute earlier today on The Covenant or the Sahifa of Medina this talk on the Crusades now and tomorrow multiple sessions on Islamic history Islamic history and politics so we are honored and blessed to have Professor Anjum with us and with that I turn it over to uh Professor Anjam",
      "Today we'll continue with our story of the Crusades,",
      "the latin west latin speaking west and that took the world by surprise muslims were not prepared and uh were caught in about the most um internally divided and weakened state that could be imagined and in response",
      "to think about what had happened people responded in different ways um not immediately when in you know they didn't immediately whip into action because the prerequisites for collective action are",
      "toward that build up, toward the action where that collective action was possible. And Muslims typically remember of course the climax when Salah ad-Din al-Ayyubi rahimallah took back Jerusalem and drove out the main crusader kingdom",
      "Crusader Kingdom. But the journey is much more exciting and one thing that I want to preface this talk with is the typical idea that Muslims today who feel as we indeed are beleaguered and besieged, as the Prophet ﷺ said that there will be a time when nations will invite each other",
      "upon Muslims in a way that wild dogs or wolves invite each other to prey upon their kill. And when the companions asked, was it because Muslims will be so few that they would not be able to defend themselves? So the Prophet said no, you'll be many but you'll",
      "on top of water or flood, meaning that numbers will not matter because just as that dirt that is moved and taken from place to place by a flood has no foundation. It has no structure. So it is moved by someone else.",
      "the integrity of this dirt and in the same way you will be helpless. And when the companions asked, the Prophet said it would be because you have a weakness as well and that weakness will be that you love this life too much and hate death too much. The point is not that",
      "not that loving life is in itself bad of course we have from the quran and the sunnah very clear instruction that life is greatest gift of allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and the life is sacred whoever killed a person has killed entire humanity because they cannot be a price put on human life but when you love lights life so much that you do not value truth when you do",
      "anything above short-term pleasure for it what ends up happening is that you lose life so the ironic lesson in that hadith and one that we witness in Islamic history over and over is that when you are willing to lay down your life",
      "you find most life, most fulfilling worthy life. That's when you save lives of innocent. Whereas when you for short-term benefit prefer peace over justice and truth and morality, when you make this false dichotomy that I will choose justice",
      "sorry, I'll choose peace. I'll chose short-term security over the security of those who are oppressed, over my own long term commitment, over deeper and greater values. Then you expose not only yourself but all that you love and all that is meaningful to danger violence and death.",
      "All right, so with that let us begin with this buildup of the Muslim response to the Crusades. This map shows a picture of major crusades in red you will see the first crusade we talked about how the crusade was generated in southern France",
      "and how over a period of a couple of years, the entire Europe was ready to find an external enemy. Which was readied by, ironically in a Christian peace movement that was internal to Europe, Christian unification",
      "in which there had been attempts to, you know from Latin speaking Western Christendom and some kind of rapprochement with Eastern Christians in Istanbul as well. And internally that peace movement in fact sought an external enemy.",
      "crusades we learned was very much driven by church's doctrine but lay piety and lay passion. And it was successful precisely because it was driven by this kind of lay uncalculating piety even though the leaders or at least some of the leaders were clearly looking out just for themselves",
      "just for themselves but they did not dominate the first crusade and that kind of passion was what allowed these crusaders to succeed against great odds now of course i wouldn't say against all odds because muslims were quite divided but nonetheless there",
      "the belief of the crusaders. At first, crusaders went through Constantinople and the first victory they tasted was at Nicaea although it was relatively small one because Nicaeaea was not guarded by Kilij Arsalan, the Roman, the Seljuk ruler who was from the same family as the Salajans",
      "as the Salajaka of the great Seljuks of Baghdad and who ruled over Iraq and Iran. But this was a different branch of family, and there was family rivalry as things typically are between the greater Seljuqs and Roman Seljuques. Khalid Jar Salan had been away, and when he came back,",
      "surrounded Nicaea and he left. Or rather, he did not see the point in defending it. He had only recently taken Nicaeaea and in fact it was because of this activity that Alexius, the Roman emperor, had sent a letter to the pope and to western Christians to come help him. So his",
      "His ambition seems to have been rather limited. Send me some Latin soldiers so that I can fight this Turkish menace because it's getting too close. But what he received in return was a flood of Christian piety, which was ready to sort of purify itself",
      "through violence and purify the holy land through enormous violence. And violence was understood entirely differently from the way that we moderns understand. Violence is understood in this European imagination at the time as a purgatory for Christians who participated",
      "christians who participate in it but also um to purify the land of uh the undesirable pagans and muslims who are at first turks and saracens serra'son being the name for the arabs turks an arab who are seen as feared but respected enemy about whom very little is known",
      "in Antioch and are defeated ultimately, especially Antioche. A great massacre takes place and that massacre feeds a great frenzy of thirst for blood but also a sense of a great antipathy toward Muslims and Arabs",
      "enemies that are feared they become filth and that filth that must be then cleaned up um uh cleaned out so the holy land could be reclaimed so that's the from there from antioch the crusade continues and finally through tripoli and acre takes jerusalem and great",
      "a great massacre of Muslims and Jews takes place in Jerusalem. Now, the first crusade is the only one that sees such spectacular success and it sees Muslims completely hapless. It finds that Muslim rulers are",
      "they put up ineffective defense and as soon as the big ones are defeated smaller towns they are in fact hoping to make deals with some of them in fact offer help sue the crusaders on their way um to show them the way to jerusalem hoping that they won't turn on us",
      "the muslim world as we will see is divided between the salju influence in the north and and the fatimids uh in egypt in the southwest and on the way the soldiers and the crusaders even feel welcomed by",
      "Turkish Seljuks in the north. It will allow them to take control of Jerusalem and so on. The first crusade is the only one that is spectacularly successful, the second crusade",
      "and then the taking of Jerusalem by Salah al-Din. On the whole, there are about a dozen crusades of which each odd numbered crusade is somewhat significant first, third, fifth, seventh, and even numbered ones are less significant but none",
      "none after the very first one is successful that Muslims begin to resist even though that resistance is usually limited and fragmented but enough resistance that there is no great success after that. But crusaders continue to pose a significant threat",
      "to the Muslims for two centuries until they're finally routed by the Mamluks, a period that we will not go into today. So let me start with recapitulating the status quo in 1099 what the Muslim world looked like in 10 99",
      "arrived in Jerusalem. The Seljuk rule was in disarray and disunity after the Nizaris had assassinated Malik Shah in the year 1092. So notice here, in blue Iraq and Iran and Transoxiana great Seljuq lands were now without a",
      "a central rule um the fatimids in who had been in egypt since about more than a century earlier 969 is when they came to egypt from they started in what is presently tunisia and then",
      "um conquered egypt and then since about 1003 they had moved to syria as well and taken jerusalem as well as pijaz but now they were facing the suljuk rivals since 1071 sorry i mean they were they were",
      "suljouks at months occurred against the byzantine uh put saljuks on the map and um posed a threat to the fatimid control of the great of the levitine uh levantine cities which means the city is in greater syria there was a third thing to notice here in this map",
      "That is Al-Andalus or Islamic Spain. In the north, you have Christian kingdoms and in the south, the various Muslim kingdoms. The three Christian kingdoms in the north are expanding since the year 1000 which in fact is going on right so about a century or so before",
      "And so you could say that Reconquista in Andalus or Islamic Spain had already provided an inspiration and first episode of the Crusades.",
      "what had happened. Some took the mission to reignite this spirit of jihad and unity among Muslims, and that is the story we'll learn today. Local Christians in the Muslim lands, there were significant populations of them in Islamic lands that thrived in bureaucracy especially as scribes and as physicians for example in Egypt, Copts dominated fiscal bureaucracy Armenian Christians",
      "Christians were army officers. Their loyalties were split based on which group and sect they belong to, so Malkites for example were loyal to the Byzantine emperor. Jacobite Nestorians and Maronites were freer under Muslim rule than they would have been under Byzantine and so they preferred that. This is a map of the Reconquista movement in Andalusia",
      "So first, it was conquered under the Umayyad Khalifa al-Walid in 711. And Islamic Spain became a province of the Umayed Khalifa but suffered from Berber and Arab tension. There was no unity, different tribes.",
      "And of course, Berbers who were now Muslim converts but not treated equally by the Arabs. There was these tensions that were then brought under control as an Umayyad prince Abd al-Rahman arrived there in 756 only six years after the Abbasids took over Baghdad and massacred the Umayyyads in Damascus and surrounding regions. And so Baghdad was established",
      "was established as the new center of khilafah. The Umayyads in fact did not claim the Khilafa, so despite the great rivalry and if despite having been butchered by the Abbasids one thing that all Muslims took for granted is that you really can have only one Khalifa. So they called themselves Amirs of Spain",
      "effectively lost power two centuries later to their Turkish slaves. The Umayyad Khalifa or Amir at the time, Abdurrahman III declared himself a Khalifa in Qurtuba. But this great Umayyyid Caliphate only lasted for about a century and 1031 it was split into",
      "into taifa kingdoms and many kings made deals with christians against each other and by the 11th century reconquest movement intensified under castilian king um alfonso so if you if you remember there are three kingdoms castilia um bastille leon and calica",
      "calico this one castilian king who took toledo from muslims in 1085 he probably some historians speculate was accompanied by raymond or ramon of toulouse and this raymond was a right-hand man for",
      "pope urban ii who declared the crusades so it's quite possible that what was happening happening in spain was provided inspiration and direction to the crusaders um so this is a big picture the main things that are happening after the crusade uh had financial crusade had succeeded muslim internal divisions",
      "there was a Seljuk rule that, as we said, had been managed by great Nizam al-Mulk. It was now in disarray since the Nizaris known in the West as assassins had assassinated Malik Shah and Nizom al-mulk in 1092. Now Malik shah's two sons Barq Yaruk and Muhammad Tapar were fighting each other for power and unable to respond",
      "Khalifa al-Mustadhir's call to help Muslims in Jerusalem. Seljuk rule, in fact, had become split between various petty kingdoms and even calling them kingdoms is somewhat of a glorification because you know, you had main Seljuks in Iraq and Syria and Iran and Transylvania but you, in",
      "this region seemed to have its own especially in syria seem to have it's own ruler and these petty rulers vacillated precariously between the fatimids and saljuks a local militia for example triply which was mostly 12 or shea rebelled against the fatima the sevenersian",
      "fall to the crusaders a few decades later in 1109. Similarly, northern Syrian town of Shaizar was under a 12-er Arab Shi'a dynasty of Banu Munkith and the reason we know about Banu Munqith is because Osama Ibn Munkit,",
      "we in fact know quite a bit about how Muslims received the Franks and their day-to-day interactions. And that account, in fact has been translated and published. Jerusalem was taken from the Fatimids so it had been in the hands of the Fatmins since the beginning of the century but now it was taken by a Turkish general in 1071",
      "But taking the advantage of the Crusaders coming from the north, the Fatimids retook it only a year before it was captured by the Crusader again. So 1098. So Muslims were deeply divided at every level. The first decades Khalifa al-Mustadhir tried to mediate between warring Seljuk brothers",
      "while also trying to regain his lost power. And he was unsuccessful on both accounts. We learned already that Kilij Arsalan, who Saljuk Rum having defeated an earlier army of ragtags that arrived in 1096 felt quite safe about the future and underestimated the threat. This is the immediate",
      "the immediate impression that the crusaders would have seen, that the Seljuqs' room are rivals with greater Seljuks or great Seljuques in Iran and Iraq. And Syria in particular is split between numerous city-states which does not have any kind of deep",
      "and stable government. Fatimids even welcome, if not invite the crusaders at first because of Fatimid who were known by Muslims as Ubaydiyun because to call them Fatimis was a false claim that they had made but the name has stuck. They in fact were not from the line of Fatima bint Muhammad radiallahu anha wa alaihi sharat",
      "alayhi salatu wasalam um because of adamant uh rivalry with the sunni suljus and 12 russia were on the suni side in this as we have seen the fatimids invited the romans and perhaps the franks to attack thinking that this will give them the opportunity to secure jerusalem in 1098 the fathom it's got",
      "engaged the Seljuk rulers. Many petty rulers along the way were quick to make deals with the crusaders once their power became clear, some even aided them with guides and supplies showing them the way to Jerusalem. When Tepar tried to fight back compelled by popular protests in Baghdad",
      "crusade or jihad in fact is being driven bottom up by popular opinion and by some of the ulama. So when he tries to fight back, the Sunni Turkmen rulers of Syria in fact feared unification under one Seljuk rule and feared losing their power so they sided with the Crusaders. The Fatimids engaged the Crusader's",
      "intention and power became clear that is at first the fathomings were um took advantage hoping that uh either side that that whatever whoever wins will be weak enough that they can take advantage but uh they were quite wrong and when they in fact engaged the crusaders",
      "alliances with some Sunni rulers against the crusaders, but it was too little too late. The ulama and the popular Muslim sentiment was quite important at first that is all you notice of the reaction so chief Qadi of Damascus al-Harawi led a delegation of refugees from Jerusalem to ask for the khalifa",
      "And as we said, the Khalifa asked for Bar-Karouk's help but who is busy fighting his brother. Nothing came of it. In 1110 another 11 years later, the Shia Qadi of Aleppo Ibn al Khashab was a 12 year Shia came to the Khalifah to stir opinion in favor of concerted Jihad",
      "But of course, nothing comes of it as well. But we'll see the important role that Ibn al-Khashab would play in another victory against... In one of the earliest victories against the Crusaders. But even as the ulama recalled the earlier culture of Muslims, right? Of the Salaf, of the Sahaba, the companions fighting and being victorious and unity and all of those images.",
      "those images, but they were centuries old by now. And the actual Muslim culture, the decadent Muslim elite culture of the time seemed to have received the news in passive and pensive mood, more wishful thinking and writing and reflection that more sophisticated cultures are used to doing. So this was expressed",
      "the Mughals at their height of sophistication received the British colonizers Bahadur Shah Zafar was a Mughal emperor who wrote poetry, loved poetry not somebody who could really take on British troops and geopolitics On the right you will see a couple of",
      "excerpts, poems that Muslims are expressing. The first one shows this desire for action so how the eye sleeps between the lids at a time of disasters that would awaken any sleepers while your Syrian brothers can only sleep on the backs of their chargers or in vultures' bellies but perhaps more typical at first was",
      "The one typical at first was the next one here.",
      "who creates a discourse of jihad, who creates the discourse of unity and solidarity and concern for Muslims is Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami rahimahullah, who is a Shafi'i scholar from Damascus who leads the delegation to Baghdad. And he also writes a very important text. You'll see manuscript",
      "famous Kitab al-Jihad on the side. So what we learn is that the ulama and common Muslims' powerful appeals forced the rulers to act. Often, the rulers themselves were not capable of acting for internal reasons but also the common people had no other way to hold the rulers accountable than to make appeals. Those appeals",
      "those appeals were important, were powerful. But at first as they're discordant and few, they could be ignored. The ulama in fact, and the a'yan of the people had began calling for help in 1098 before Jerusalem fell 1099 when they were on their way from Antioch to Jerusalem.",
      "in his Kitab al-Jihad noted that the Franks were waging a Christian jihad. He saw it as part of the Reconquista in Spain and Sicily at a time when most Muslim scholars or Muslim rulers had no idea what was happening in the broader world. So this was quite perceptive, and he calls for renewing jihad starting with inner jihad, and this was...he presented the crusaders",
      "god's punishment to muslims so this call for jihad was very much in the spirit of uh of the quran and the sunnah and what the jihad is about that you must start within yourself and that external punishment and affliction of this world is only a",
      "deeper that had gone wrong. But what's significant is that he saw it, you know, he sees the punishment for Muslims' distance from Allah and their religion but the way back was both inner and outer jihad. And it wasn't simply that because of the punishment from Allah therefore we should make deals with the crusaders, make deals",
      "muslims and uh wait till you're all perfect in the inner sense but rather both kinds of jihad are needed he in fact also suggested um that the franks had been sent to fulfill a prophecy whereby a group of muslim will reconquer jerusalem and then go to take constantinople and rome",
      "so it's this is very interesting to me i haven't read the book itself so i can't quite analyze what he meant and whether he refers to a hadith or something but that's quite remarkable of course that muslims did a few centuries later take constantinople as well um some saw this as as a corruption of christianity both possibly local christians understood they said you know this is not real christianality but others did understand that this was",
      "that these people were in fact quite religiously motivated. Ibn al-Athir identified this as a debased form of jihad, motivated by glory and wealth but of course Ibn Al-Ahtir is writing later so he would have been witness to later crusades in which religious passion had already given way to worldly glory among the crusaders. One of the earliest",
      "victories, although small at first was in this uh at Aleppo when Muslims appealed to the Turkic ruler Turkmen ruler of Mardin To come help them in Aleppo because the defenders were away and whatnot. So this man Ilghazi",
      "In fact, attacks them in this battle which is known as Field of Blood or the Battle of Balak. The Muslims are, the Turkmen are aroused to fight and persevere by Ibn al-Khashab, the same man, the 12th Shia",
      "shiite qadi who had presented the case to uh the khalifa in baghdad a few years earlier and they were victorious but el ghazi hesitated or failed to capitalize on it some sources accuse him of partying and wine drinking to celebrate for a week instead of following",
      "by crusaders who retook some of the territory. Now this is important because this false dichotomy and this narrative that is created, that the Shia are always enemies of Sunnis and Sunnis of Shia, and that the Shiite have always betrayed the Muslims and the Sunnis it is clearly false in this case it is the Turkmen Sunni ruler",
      "And it is a 12-year Shi'i Qadi who is trying to defend the Muslims or encouraging them to do so. Now, of course, we're going to see in the Mongol when the Mongols came that role that the Shia vizier did in fact play a role in inviting the Monguls and but",
      "role and relationship that's possible. So we must not let this kind of historical propaganda or this historical myopia to limit the possibilities. There is no reason why Sunnis and Shia cannot coexist, and even support each other against external enemies and internal enemies as has happened here.",
      "has happened here. The first real response to the crusaders starts with Zangids who were Atabegs, atabeg is a term in Turkish which kind of like means a military nanny that when a prince",
      "a master and teacher rules on his behalf in most cases becomes the ruler himself so the zangids were ruled atabic of saljuq prince and governor of mosul but this zhangid imad uddin zangi uh himself is not particularly pious and spends most of his life fighting other neighboring saljouks neighboring muslims",
      "for a Mujahid, the savior pin their hopes on him. But it is his son, Nuruddin who is raised in those circles of the ulama and ulama who are preaching and the common Muslims were feeling the pain of others and the refugees who had come from Jerusalem if you will, right?",
      "The Palestinians of the time. It is they who are the real teachers of nuruddin. And as he grows up seeing their suffering, he is determined to bring Jerusalem back. Professor, sorry to interrupt but it's about 645 so would now be a good time",
      "or do you want to go for another few minutes? I will go for 10 minutes and then take a break. Okay, that's fine. Thank you. So Nur ad-Din, his policies because now they are driven clearly by his moral commitment to Islam instead of fighting his brother when his father dies he peacefully shared his father's territories and he had to fight the Seljuks of Rum but his intention was",
      "to fight for the crusaders. And in his politics and his conduct, people could already see a difference. As a new crusade is heading toward Damascus in 1147, at this time also there are serious Imame disputes among the Fatimids in Egypt which is weakening it against potential crusaders so crusaders are looking at Egypt as well",
      "as a direct port to attack. So Nur ad-Din has to worry about now if he's going to do something, he's gonna have to find... He's going up to take Damascus because Nur ad Din in Aleppo needs to go down south and Damascus is the main center but Damascus ruled by Mu'ayyaduddin, a Turk men who in fact had united with the Crusader kingdom against Nur ad Dina",
      "against Nur ad-Din's father. But Nur ad Din, again so this diplomatic victory is very significant that Nur ad din is able to join with Mu'ayyaduddin unlike his father right he's able to joint with him against the crusaders and the second crusade is defeated from inside Damascus. The Muslims are fighting from inside and Nur ad Dina comes from outside and disperses the crusader",
      "this kind, this first act of unity and trust and religious commitment also gives the first great significant victory. Another thing that's happening is that Nizaris are getting stronger and they're using assassinations as well as conventional warfare and taking advantage of Eastern Seljuqs' weaknesses. And",
      "And anyone who is acting at this time has to worry about the assassins as well. Nur ad-Din, after he takes Damascus a few years later in 1154, he authorizes a pulpit, a mimbar for Jerusalem and that is a symbolic act that shows his commitment to jihad for Jerusalem.",
      "And he establishes some of the things that are well known, such as madrasas and khanakas in Damascus. But also Dar al-Adl, a house of justice where he or his representative would appear twice a week to hear and address the grievances of the people. So there is a sense in which Nur ad-Din... There are certain things that committed Muslim rulers do",
      "Nuruddin's actions clearly show a different side to the, a different possibility. And that is being driven to some degree, you know, Nurudin is certainly driving change but he's also being driven by a discourse, the ulama, the common people. So I keep, you",
      "or Salahuddin came and defeated everyone. Or we often think about when is our Salahuddin coming? As we will see very clearly that nothing could be farther from the truth, that in fact it wasn't Salahiddin who came and saved but rather there were many, many nameless ulama'a and people and refugees who created a discourse in which people like Nur-ud-Din would be inspired",
      "and then they would be driven to fight, and fight for unity, and fighting for Islam. We talked about the Second Crusade. I don't have time to talk about it too much. We also talked about Fatimid weakness. Nur al-Bin finds that taking Egypt is necessary",
      "Egypt is necessary before confronting the Crusader Kingdom. Franks had already taken Escalon, sorry it's a typo. So Escalan is a port city just north of Gaza west of Jerusalem and Fatimids had become themselves impotent pawns of feuding military viziers and ethnically divided regiments. Some factions within",
      "within the Fatimids wanted to in fact ally with the crusader kingdom, to save the Fatimi regime whereas others looked to Nur ad-Din. Nur ad Din at this time sends an army officered by Turks and Kurds which included the Kurdish general Salah al-Ddin. In 1171 Fatimid Khalifa dies, the incumbent Khalifa",
      "takes over and Friday sermons are now preached in the name of the Abbasid Khalifa in Baghdad and Nur al-Din in Damascus as the Sultan. Now because Fatimid Savenerism, the Ismailism had been limited to elite only and even that not all elite because there were Christians and Jews and Sunnis among the elite as well it is relatively easy for Salah ad-Dina to make this move",
      "even though he is swift and there is hard action involved as well. Salahuddin ensures the return of Sunni teachings by patronizing madrassas and khanqas. This is both realpolitik and true belief, both things go together. Tension is now building up between Salahuddin who is hesitant to send support to Nur ad-Din. Nur ad Din is expecting support, now let's get started but Salah ud-Dinn is hesitant. Fortunately for Salah ur-Diinn,",
      "Nur ad-Din dies, rahimahullah. And Saladin now takes the opportunity removes Nur ad Din's son and marries his widow that is what then creates this unity of Egypt and Damascus which allows Saladin to take over and hand defeat the decisive defeat at Hittin to the crusader kingdom",
      "And the rest is history. I am going to, inshallah, pick up on this after break. Let me... At that point, I will perhaps finish with conclusions and then take any questions. Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.",
      "Inshallah, we're going to take a five-minute break and we will start. See it's 6 53 so we'll start right before or around 7 pm inshallah",
      "all right are we ready i'm happy to take any questions we we are ready if you could just uh share your screen again",
      "your screen again. Right now we don't have any questions from the audience, I have a question but I would defer to you and if you can just go ahead and finish what you had first. Okay well so instead of doing anything else uh i will skip what's happening in Maghreb right now or Islamic Spain and North Africa and we'll sum up the lessons from the crusades",
      "lessons from the crusades of course we saw mass destruction and killing of people including muslims jews and christians in jerusalem and elsewhere near destruction of the byzantine empire by the crusaders uh and crusaders brought to the latin west cultural and social habits from the muslim world such as soap and cotton and that sort of thing but not much intellectual heritage",
      "non-existent or not even trivial but it was limited except for tales of horror and suspicion of westerners. And there was also a limited revival of jihad and unity. I say limited, but certainly significant for the time being. And then Eastern Christians continue to live as usual. So looking from Muslim view why is it that the crusaders succeeded? And how were they defeated?",
      "uh the short answer is disunity within the suljuks fragmentation after the initial saljo conquests staying united was not a strong value by among the sultans both as sort of a matter of tribal practice that they had but also to some degree",
      "political tradition did not emphasize enough this task, in other words Islamic tradition itself had turned away from politics. So that's more complex and deeper reasons",
      "and deeper reasons why this disunity was tolerated, but there are more immediate manifestations of it. There is with the intra-Suljuk rivalry and there is a Fatimid-Sulkuk rivalry, and generally there is loss of group feeling or asabiya in the positive sense that Ibn Khaldun talks about. Another lesson that we learn",
      "Stated is that nur ad-din and salah ad-dine were great leaders and warriors, but they did not single handedly win They were not angels. They were flawless They did not come from heaven and give victory to Muslims the idea that a Salah ad-Din will come and give save us all is an inexcusable fiction That in fact Salah al-Deen was in some ways I mean he's pious But he was also if you follow his career somebody who is also concerned with shoring up",
      "enough lands for his Ayyubid family. And to some degree, at least according to some historians he is engaged in the Crusades, in the jihad as a personal commitment as well but to a large degree also because there's very strong sentiment from the people and many of the pious, the ulama. So it wasn't you know",
      "It takes two to make a clap. And in this case, this was very clear that Salahuddin who is... The reason why historians say that Salihuddin was not somebody who you know, that this was his singular goal in life was the way he treated the other crusaders. Removing the crusaders from their political power was not his only goal.",
      "But that is something I haven't discussed enough to start a discussion on. One thing we can very clearly say is that crusades were not won by one man, it was some of the great ulama including and starting rather with people like Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami rahimahullah",
      "People like a Sulami, in fact the ulama who are aware of what's happening to the ummah. What's happening around the world? The sulami wrote what he wrote and he knew what's happened in Spain. He understood what's happen crusaders. Ulama like this are the ones who are on the right side of history",
      "possible for the ummah to survive. And an example of that is Ibn Timiyyah in the Mongol period, somebody who was extremely well informed about what's happening to who the Mongols are how they're dealing with in fact making deals with crusaders even after converting to Islam formally at least some of them and all of this stuff he's aware of similarly As-Sulami is aware of this and he's writing and then he's",
      "before jihad which is the mark of a true scholar in contrast there are many other scholars who in fact did not write a single word about the crusades so al-ghazali for example he died in the year 1111 and there's not anything written about crusades about jihad in any of his writings",
      "very clear that some of the ulama i mean he writes against the fatimids quite a bit he wrote a book and uh against the botania and so on but this great threat that had wiped out one the third holiest site um of islam and threatened to take away further i mean",
      "because they had become so inward-looking at internal Muslim theological disputes and sectarianism that they couldn't look at the big picture. And so, that was one thing that whenever that happens, Muslims suffer. Finally, an entire culture of solidarity, sacrifice, repentance, jihad, and concerted action have to be created",
      "for two centuries to repel the Crusades. If you read the accounts written by, of what's happening in during Second Crusade and Damascus by Ibn al-Athir, Ibn Al-Jawzi and others they give you a sense of how Muslims responded. That's all I have to say. I'm happy to take questions if there are any. May Allah ask us to teach us that which benefits us and benefit us from what He has taught us.",
      "Maybe you can shed light on the historical authenticity of these. The French general is often quoted back in 1920, he's reported to have gone to the tomb of Salahuddin and said that now the crusades are over or Salahuddin we have returned. General Allenby saying, the Crusades have ended when Jerusalem was occupied",
      "leaders of either europe or the united states use the word crusade so in your estimation um where does where does this conflict stand um in the pre-modern or maybe in the you know in the 20th century and now it's a great question i think that there is always an element um uh european and western civilization",
      "that is conscious of that civilization. And civilization is nothing but that kind of consciousness, right? When that consciousness is born in the 10th and 11th centuries in Europe, that is when it turns against the Muslim world. Now, of course, one could argue that that consciousness of peacemaking among Christians could have led to less destructive results. That's quite possible and quite desirable.",
      "Nonetheless, that consciousness is a real threat, a real existence. It's not something that is a fluke. It goes away and anyone who is committed to the West, Western tradition, Christianity in its traditional form,",
      "It has become a part of European civilization. Anyone who takes that civilizational project as fundamental remembers it, right? So it's not just a few references to crusades here and there but rather as Muhammad Asad the author of The Road to Mecca Rahimahullah and the father of Talal Asad wrote very clearly",
      "very perceptively, something that modern historians now take for granted. That Europe was born with the Crusades. The idea that Europe is an entity was born when a common enemy was found outside and common peace was found against a common internal solidarity was found",
      "up again and again. Not only those particular instances, you find that in British politics against the Ottoman Empire this was central. Some people were less religious and didn't think about the Crusades but there's always another conversation that's taking place for British Prime Minister Gladstone",
      "Minister Gladstone, for example, is a Zionist and who thought of these things. Christian Zionists who thought it in this way. And this is true of the neoconservatives in Bush era President Bush II. And so today people like Steve Bannon but many others who are less belligerent and less coarse have this consciousness that",
      "that Muslims are invading the West. And I think that's not something we should underestimate, usually leftist historians and leftists commentators tend to because they don't necessarily have that feeling sometimes on their own or themselves",
      "the validity or the power and the pull of these sentiments. But they exist. Jazakumullah khair. So we have a question here where someone is asking from our viewpoint, our Muslim communities here, can you think of should we be engaged in any collective efforts and use the true history of the Crusades in dawah efforts?",
      "I mean, I think that any information so long as you master it to a degree that you can engage in a conversation about. It tells you something about the truth some element by which you become more better person, more capable of understanding reality and better capable of engaging in a",
      "a conversation um as for particularly dawah efforts i don't um i don t tend to think of history in that narrow sense and i think that you make dawa to people because it's the truth you know if you have you're presenting the truth and if somebody happens",
      "never been violent and west is not violent and so on then of course you can present the crusades um as an example but do so compassionately and do so with this with it in mind that uh um that it's it's the way that muslim apologetics often would present this stuff in my view is too crass often the muslim apologetic has looked there was this violence",
      "Not really. That's not why Muslims disagree with Christianity, because as far as violence is concerned it could come out of any ideology that is strongly felt and in the Old Testament yes there are references that are quite horrendous in the sense that they talk about killing everyone everything",
      "in cool comparison done even by Christian scholars and Western scholars recognizes that the Quran is a text which speaks of jihad in a very restrained and principled and peaceful way where peace is always around the corner and always desirable. And that's not how the Old Testament speaks of it. But this argument",
      "always is qualified right because it's not like you've sort of discovered some essence of christianity which is always or always violent that's not what it is right but it can deflate some arguments that people are that people aren't presenting uh based on these completely false propaganda that muslims have been violent throughout and christians haven't",
      "and so on. So those accounts need to be countered with the truth, but the truth is often captured by this today rather I should say this it's hijacked by the secular liberal logic that well religion is always violent see we told you Christianity is violent Islam is violent and the story of course that's not where this should end up because that's truly",
      "That's not the case. Any ideology that human beings have had long enough, that is strongly felt, has created violence. And competition, if you will, of ideologies and quest for the truth needs to take place on its own grounds. But this is usually helpful in deconstructing the false narrative.",
      "How do we make inroads against the same old linguistic, ethnic identities and work towards the solidarity and sacrifice that was required back then? Yeah. So I thought at that point was something that I wrote very much with reference to the common Muslim misunderstanding of how change occurs.",
      "and one that is entirely relevant today because people feel helpless. People, Muslims tend to all people in fact who have lost who feel the change is too difficult fall into the same kind of learned helplessness not unique to Muslims but Muslims have their own sort of trademark versions",
      "So they talk about sort of, you know, pietism. But pietisim as a way to say that you must start with personal individual piety and that somehow will magically lead to salvation or change in success and so on. And it doesn't. Personal piety is not separable from communal piety",
      "in any kind of reasonable understanding of social life. So what made response to crusades possible? We just look at the discourse of the ulama, they are... You see the people are in the same way that is happening today. You have people who were refugees from the cities",
      "from the cities that were taken by the crusaders, Jerusalem and Antioch and elsewhere. And these people are resettling and they're bringing their tales of suffering and death. And they are trying to wake up those who are in power, those who enjoying the status quo just the same way as you have Palestinians today and Rohingya and Uyghur whereas",
      "the Muslims who haven't yet been hit are sleeping. Now, of course, Muslims were not nearly as bad of a shape at that time as they are today in terms of their... It wasn't one... We seem to have a dozen Jerusalems and many, many different crusades going on. But at the same",
      "are in many other ways much more numerous, much more empowered. Much more empowered in the sense that we have access to global discourse and to each other and to Islamic tradition in a way that wasn't possible in the past. So we have different tools available but the basis which remains as Prophet said, the people will be weak because they will suffer from this disease of.",
      "Do you love life so much and you hate death so much that you cannot stand up for what is right? That your both personal conduct and your ideology are all about concession and recapitulation. And, oh, let us accept peace even if it is at the expense of having our brothers massacred.",
      "that culture always produces enormous misery and violence. And in fact, it kills morality. People stop believing in good things when those in power, the ulama and the umara act like might is right.",
      "Zengi or Salahuddin Al-Ayubi out of this morass. In order to have people like that, you need to have a culture, a discourse of solidarity and sacrifice and repentance and struggle, jihad as in both moral, social political struggle and concerted action which is collective action. So yeah I will end inshallah with that",
      "that very much this is where we are today and there are great lessons to be learned from the Crusades and ultimately Muslim victory against it. And inshallah, the Crusade's that we are confronting today will end with insha'Allah even greater and more spectacular victory.",
      "that. Jazakumullah khair, Professor Anjum for helping us these past two weeks understand such a momentous event in history you helped us learn so much and for that we are grateful we would love to host you again later this year on different topics",
      "these sessions so uh we would um we would love to host you again and inshallah uh we can uh we thank you for making time as i said you uh i think you have one two three four five six seven seven or eight sessions that you've done that you will do this weekend may allah put blessing and baraka in your work in uh and everything that you do zakamullahu khair"
    ]
  },
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    "text": [
      "Looking at the critical and contemporary issues Facing the Muslim world from different perspectives Generating new ideas Bringing to you all this, and a lot more in Voices From The Muslim World",
      "in that ayah is a failing in a political obligation. Having a single ummah and a single political entity was to the Sahaba so important that they went to war for it. He makes the claim that the imamah is an obligation both by reason and revelation. Modernity can do nothing right in the modern world, that is human beings. Anything that's new has to be evil by default.",
      "Only 3% of Muslim trade is intra-Muslim trade. So I don't use the word Islamic State, you will notice because that's a technical issue.",
      "Assalamu alaikum and welcome from Ilkay Foundation Istanbul. We are back with another guest for a series of verses from the Muslim world. We're honored to be joined by an esteemed figure from University of Toledo, a young scholar very influential among Muslims in the United States and other parts of the world Dr. Ovamir Anjum. Dr. Ovamir is a prophetic writer and articulate speaker",
      "As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah, and thank you for your precious time Dr. Ram Ameer. Wa alaikum as salam wa rahmahullah, thank you very much. With your permission we can switch to questions right away? Sure. So if I may refer to some of the scholars which we have hosted under the same program",
      "is that it roots from certain factors and the most important of them, what we understood are that the lack of proper institutions in the Muslim world and then the loss of political power from the Muslim bloc. And thirdly, the intellectual strife which is going on in the Muslims. So if I may put the same question to you, do you think these are the primary reason or",
      "the most important reason for this plight? Thank you very much for having me and for this really whopper of a question. To think about the greatest problem, the biggest problem is in fact a religious question because there's no empirical way by which",
      "the greatest problem that he or she has, right? This is almost a matter of. Small problems that you can tinker with day-to-day problems. Those are problems that one knows rationally, one knows empirically but the greatest of life which then affects everything else. The greatest failures,",
      "successes. Those are non-falsifiable questions or propositions and so I always begin answer to this question to myself with saying of Rasulullah that faith is 70 some branches",
      "and the lowest one is to remove harm from people's way. These are all branches of faith, and so the problem is always faith. And the job of good intellectual inquiry",
      "is to know which branch, which branches need what kind of care. Now, to the question of Muslim... Which branches I think need care? I think that always the crucial branch that needs care is the collective iman, collective faith but the weakness then appears in various forms.",
      "Sometimes the weakness is political and it requires action that is collective. And political, sometimes weakness has to do with individuals, their inability to reform what is within themselves.",
      "the state of a people unless they change what is within themselves, between themselves. And so I think that from this perspective political legitimacy in the Muslim world",
      "the real problem that is the greatest problem, which is Iman. And it cannot be solved by merely acute alert systematic political analysis. It requires going back to the covenant with Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la that Muslims made.",
      "Let's touch upon all of them one by one. So since you started with the political,",
      "of the political power and I know that you very articulately explain in many of your lectures about the reinvigoration of caliphate. So if I may start with asking that, do you think that the political reinvigation of Islam or Islamic state is required? And secondly, if it is does Islam outlay a specific political system?",
      "Let's begin with first things first. In the Quran, Allah in Surah Al-Baqarah verse 84 or 85, Allah censures the Israelites for an important failing. Surat al-Baqurah is a charge sheet meaning it lists",
      "all respects in which they failed, in order to then deserve Allah's wrath. And now they were being in the form of Islam, being given another chance to believe and follow the Prophet. And so what Allah mentions in that ayah is a failing in a political obligation",
      "that is made against them. Do you believe in part of the book and reject part of it? And what's the recompense for someone who does that except that they are humiliated in this world, and by Allah",
      "go back to a worse punishment in afterlife. Allah protect us and our Ummah from that. This charge is given in Al-Baqarah because it is a mirror to the future of the new Ummah that was now being given this Tafdeel, this superior place not because we are special genetically biologically",
      "but because we have the Book and the Message of Allah. And, the deal that Allah makes, the covenant Allah makes with His chosen people is different. The Israelites could never thrive in history when they turn away from the message of Allah when others could. Why? Not because Allah hated them, but because Allah loved them",
      "Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la loved them. And what was in this particular case, what was their failing? The failing was not that they were not spiritual enough, not that there were you know, not you know failing in some particular aspect. They in fact seem to live by the Torah",
      "and were the only ones who resisted paganism in fact, in Arabia. Nearly all other communities had made concessions to having for instance their idols, their god worshipped as idols in the Kaaba. The Jews didn't but Allah has commanded them in the covenant to not kill yourself",
      "yourself and not drive yourself out of your houses. Meaning in the very primitive pre-state world, this was the essence of political solidarity. And it is in this test that they failed even though out of piety when they would betray other tribes, other believers after the betrayal they would sell them",
      "they would sell them, you know, when people, when Israelites or Jews are lost and sold in slavery. They would purchase them and free them. That was a commandment they had. But they're the ones who have been responsible for their loss and their killing and their being driven out of their houses. So they were following the part",
      "part of the commandment in the book that was easy, that was spiritual, that personal. That was something you could do easily but they were abandoning the larger commandment of political solidarity and our Islamic terms this would be they were failing in umatic solidarity and in the political responsibility",
      "So Muslim preachers today speak of the priority of being spiritual, getting legal minutiae right. They were doing all that.",
      "to change the status quo there needs to be something pragmatic so in the presence of the nation states which exist today if we are talking about some caliphate or if you're talking about islamic political system what what are the step stones for that let me let me suggest that there are other questions prior to that that that we should address first",
      "There are of course all kinds of reasons that one may not make it once personal priority to think about politics, to work for reinvigorating politics. So I'm not going to address the personal projects and missions that scholars and preachers have",
      "But the idea that this is not a priority, that this not a collective obligation,, let me first sort of set that in context. For throughout Islamic history from very beginning until today",
      "beginning until the end of the 19th century and then in the 20th century, this was one obligation that all ulama of all schools, Hanafi, Shafi'i, Maliki, Hanbali, Shiite, Sunni even Ibadis, the remaining sect of the Khawarij. All Muslims agreed on",
      "a single text that represents an authoritative opinion in any century, that I have been able to trace with couple exceptions. I'll talk about that says that this obligation of the reestablishment of the caliphate, of course, that's a modern phrase of it but what they mean by is that the way they phrase it is an imamate having an Imam is not an obligation and there's",
      "obligation. There's no one who says that the exceptions being some of the Khawarij in the first century, whether they were Khawari or Mu'tazila there was some debate about that but even their opinion was not that we can have a secular government what they meant to say is there is no need for any government at all. They were nomadic sort of people in case of Khawaris and in case",
      "should be they were like extreme libertarians or something, or anarchists. And their opinion by the way some of these same Khawarij in this era also believe that there are only three prayers not five so if you're going to take outliers and question consensus of the Ummah",
      "a new opinion or some outliers, then nothing remains in the right. And so what I find remarkable is with the ease with which some modern ulama or preachers are able to set aside",
      "matter of ijma among the ulama and what is claimed by all the ulmah to be ijna of the sahaba. So Sunni Islam, if you will, is based on this foundation that this is the consensus of the Sahabas and this is what explains the actions of Abu Bakr as-Siddiq and Omar and then between there is a later between Ali and Muawiyah, they rather go",
      "split the difference and say, you know, you keep Sham I keep Iraq. And let's be happy about it. Having a single ummah and a single political entity was to the Sahaba so important that they went to war for it in the case of, you",
      "They rushed, of course to the portico of Banu Sa'idah before even Prophet was buried. And so the ulama have always understood this to be not only ijmaa but the paradigmatic case of ijmā'at, the Sahaba. So if you read in any book what is ijmat of Sahaba? What's the cases of ijmā' and Sahaba, this would be the most paradigmatic",
      "the great Ash'ari theologian who was teacher of Al-Ghazali, rahimahumullah. In his book, Ghiyath al-Umam fil Tiyath tulam, The Most Important and Authoritative Text on the Subject, although it's less influential or less popular than Ahkam as Sultaniyah of Al Mawaridhi. Nevertheless, it's more detailed and for the ulama specialist,",
      "more authoritative, it bases the case of the Khilafah and of the obligation of an imam not on a hadith. Why? Because as in Ash'ari he held that ahad hadith do not are not sufficient for ilm qatai for definitive knowledge",
      "this is an arch obligation in a matter of Aqidah, it needed to be established with something stronger than Ahad Hadith. That is why he the book is much of the book if you will construct it around Ijma' and showing the Ijmah of the Sahaba on this matter as a paradigmatic Ijama'. And then going from there",
      "going from there and saying, well what happens if you don't have a Salifah? If you don t have an Imam. And then, you know, what happens is any political leadership, you now, the ulama take over it, the ulamas are missing, then what happens? So it's really an amazing treatise but the point is that this is a paradigmatic position I have not",
      "I have not seen any scholar of repute who is followed among any Muslims decry it, disagree with it, provide an alternative opinion on this question. On most other questions of detail there is disagreement. That's the purpose of this book by the way to separate matters that are definitive from matters that",
      "because he is an athari, he does accept hadith as leading to definitive knowledge. He makes the claim that the imamah is an obligation both by reason and revelation. And then he goes to show the revelation proof in his book Minhaj al-Sunnah Hadith and also rational proofs.",
      "And then you can see that in every century, you know, every era that the ulama who are followed. Now of course there are sometimes ulama'a who are sort of secretary of some state secretaries people who are literators and not proper ulama', who will sometimes make more imaginative comments, not questioning this but rather talking about well a khalifa now is",
      "you know, this or that position which I'm not going to go into. But my question is that if you take this bedrock of Sunni Islam and you dismiss it like a fly sitting on your nose, and then you come to us and talk about hijab, you talk about spirituality, find me a word for spirituality in Arabic actually.",
      "actually. But that becomes your focus, but what appears in the Quran and in the Sunnah and is ijma' of the Sahaba as a bedrock of Ahl al-Sunna if that becomes so it's just dismissed right then why would you not allow anybody else to do with Islam whatever they wanted? So there may be somebody who says",
      "You know, the ayat of hijab were contextual. They're not clear anyway. Wearing bikini is just as good if so long as you do that modestly, you know, just on the beaches or something. Somebody else will say, well, perhaps prayers. The number of prayers can be questioned because, you",
      "The health of a tradition that you were talking about, people who say we follow the tradition. The health depends on this methodological commitment to the roots of the tradition, to the trunk of the traditional before the branches. But if you are",
      "are picking and choosing from a tradition based on a logic that is extraneous to the tradition, based on your personal convenience or perhaps some new book that you read or perhaps your own personal political social circumstance. And all of us Muslims today in the era of nation-state find ourselves having to make compromises. But if",
      "don't negotiate with the tradition on its own terms, then there is no such thing as tradition. It's just your view versus my view. And so I don't think that people... Now why am I saying this? In the 20th century, as you know famously in 1926 an Egyptian politician and scholar who was trained also at Oxford",
      "trained also at Oxford, Ali Abdurraza wrote this book rejecting the same you know the obligation of the Imam or that Islam has any political obligation. Thankfully he was a scholar and he knew what he was talking about and he did not mince his words. He knew that in order to attack the political nature of Islam he had to attack Abu Bakr himself, the Sahaba himself because",
      "And it was very clear from the Sahaba that this agreement was clear. Now, as a result of Ali Abdul Razif's treatise, as is well known, dozens of authoritative treatises by Muslim ulema from all corners of the Muslim world were written.",
      "forced the articulation of a new 20th century Ijma' in his refutation. Almost everyone agreed that in opposition to him. Are there any popular refutations like, you know, from the figures which are popular today? Like, you obviously not living ones but the ones which were the popular refuterations back then. All the ulama and",
      "And that's the interesting thing. If you look at the literature, all the ulama, who is who of the ulma in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s wrote a book or some kind of reputation. This stopped around the seventies when of course you could say the horse was dead or at least it seemed like it was dead but basically Ibn Ashur, Muhammad Bakhith al-Mutai'i",
      "you know, Azharis, Baqid Hussein and then later the Adina Reyes, Abdul Wahab Khalaf. All of these great scholars from all different schools, traditionalists, reformists, Egyptians, Tunisians, Syrians, and South Asians were sort of, you know...",
      "but they were sort of a little bit advanced on this question already. So yeah, this was remarkably this force the articulation of the consensus in fact if you look at Muslim political thought in the immediate decades after this for three or four decades proving",
      "The political obligation of Islam, the political nature of Islam was the dominant theme of literature whether it's being written by anybody but especially the ulama. The only other current in the field if you will was Sayyid Qutb's current who was concerned with the attack of secularity and trying to push that back with a strong claim about what Muslim",
      "what Muslim societies had become. So that provided a second discursive strand in Muslim discourse, but the dominant strain until the 70s was this and then after that, after the 70's authors usually just took for granted that this was the Ijmaa.",
      "calls for the divorce between religion or legend and the state so if you're refuting it to if if we rightly understand it that ways and if someone is refuting, it is not the same as you know reinvigorating the Islamic State. So I don't use the word Islamic State you will notice because that's a technical issue but going back to your question yes it is what",
      "a higher order question, a question that is beyond. In other words it takes this for granted but then it says um it looks at the current world and the state of you know of Muslim subjugation to western imperialism and most importantly western cultural imperialism. And so its question becomes different but it takes for granted that answer. But there are certain intellectual",
      "I'm asking if modernity or modernism contradicts Islam. Modernity is not really a well-defined ideology, it's a number of different things and I don't think that one should demonize any age, any era. The Prophet said that",
      "says that if someone says that people are ruined, you know because everything is so bad and everybody has lost it then he is the most ruined of them or he's the one ruining them. And so in the interest of nuance I would say there are many things in the modern period that are good",
      "Some have come from outside the Muslim world and have hit us in the face. And some are a result of Muslims' own efforts. Muslims have not been sitting back, thankfully unlike the preachers of secularism. In fact, Muslims have been fighting back 19th century, 20th century",
      "ensured that the world had to come back to religion. This is true of other religions as well, even though the terms on which other religions sort of come back are often those of secular nation-state and neoliberal capitalism. Nevertheless,",
      "Christianity has seen a rebound other religions and the first religion in the most profoundly grounded religion was Islam. And this was not because Islam was sitting in the books but because people stood up and fought back and you know contributed with their blood and sweat so modernity is",
      "Modernity is not a sort of single facet. Now, there are, there's a specific claim of modernity particularly a progressivist understanding of history in particular a moral kind of progressivism which holds something like this that human beings",
      "beings have made such progress or perhaps can make such progress that the limitations of human morality and human society, in human social structure and human nature all of these limitations there are slightly different but related. Nature revelation of past with you know great religions Islam Christianity",
      "Christianity, Judaism. So that all of the limitations which require people to look back for guidance for some point in history, right? 1400 years back 2000 years back longer, all of these limitations and all of this constraints on human nature or human morality can be overcome with either reason or technology",
      "or perhaps some evolutionary struggle. This particular doctrine is the, you could say for many, the underlying assumption that drives what we may call modernism or a modernist interpretation of Islam. But if your purpose is to say look, modernity has done something very good things but then",
      "divine revelation that is the Quran declares itself to be perfect and therefore you must look at that and then embrace modernity, then that's not in it. I don't see that there can be a judgment against it. Then if you will an internal Muslim affair Muslims always have had diversity some people are going",
      "medieval centuries were better. Some people say, no, early classical period was better and others... And that should be what should form our model for how to sort of restore a better time and better state of the ummah. So progressivism but particularly a certain kind of progressivist, that's I think the problem now there are",
      "There is a current, perhaps minor current among Muslims that demonizes modernity. And you can sometimes sympathize with them for what modernity has done to the world. Modern age has resulted in many respects whether it's environmental apocalypse or economic inequality or most importantly the materialism and rise of atheists, atheism and agnosticism but even more important",
      "even more importantly, secularism. That your personal belief in God is no longer operative in the world. You could blame modernity for that or aspects of modernity are for that but I think that as I mentioned earlier what you consider to be the greatest problem and how you explain a greatest problem is an expression of your A'pidah. And to some people",
      "the demonization of modernity becomes a matter of Aqidah itself so that Modernity can do nothing right in the modern world. That is human beings anything that's new has to be evil by default and Sometimes the converse also applies, so all traditional societies are become good By this logic what liberalism actually is because you know we hosted a scholar",
      "Right. The word liberal, of course comes from liberty, freedom and in any kind of historical or academic setting it's a",
      "you know, modern development and 17th century American and French revolutions were its earliest manifestations in the social form. They were of course thinkers and ideas that become champions of liberalism for instance John Locke, John Stuart Mill",
      "Mill and the 20th century John Rawls. They're all Johns, by the way. But liberalism is as it has evolved as a doctrine is not merely that you have some rights. The idea of right itself or",
      "to choose your religion, that's not liberalism. Because that has always existed and no liberal scholar or no liberal actual political project would accept your definition of liberalism if that's what you mean by liberalism having... If you say that in the Quran says la ikraha fit deem and therefore it is liberalism but you could say that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la in the Qur'an",
      "and through then in the formulation of Islamic law and Sharia, there is a strong emphasis on rights of human beings rights of God's servants. And never at the expense... So there is also it's balanced with, the rights of Allah but rights discourse is one of the characteristic discourses of liberalism",
      "liberal rights have a particular genealogy and precondition. Liberal rights are inalienable, and they're not given by a sort of religious entity, a religious system. They exist as facts, as primary facts in the world. And so you cannot ask where they come from? What are their preconditions",
      "conditions. By virtue of humans being humans, there are these rights and God cannot take them away even if right so even if God wanted. So then what is the list of rights that's involved? That becomes a big question. The biggest question is how to prioritize various claimed rights and whose rights come first and so on. And all of these questions",
      "these questions, Islamic law has its characteristic answers. That's what make it Islamic. That is what makes it God's Law but liberalism does not as a precondition does not accept that its rights are defined by a revelation they come from or their authorized by a",
      "But there are, theoretically speaking three main principles if you will of liberalism. One is autonomy, public reason and individual freedom, individual over community these three things. And then fourth is the rights discourse human rights discourse that sort of",
      "that sort of culminates in, that sort is crescendoes that liberal tradition in the post-World War era. So autonomy literally the word autonomy means I give myself my norms. I do not accept norms that are coming from outside. I don't accept authority that is outside of me and now this is",
      "this is sorry that includes religion of course that includes primarily religion this is what this is kantian idea who is a protestant um uh protestant christian pietist who is trying precisely to articulate where how you know",
      "authoritative because rationally I can derive them and impose on myself. I give myself these norms, divine revelation from outside that tells you what to do even if you don't understand it. That is called heteronomy right? That is the bad guy in liberalism. That's the opposite of liberalism is heteronomous reason",
      "Second, public reason which in the question of political life people cannot use revelation any transcendent authority as reasons for their public propositions and be validly accepted.",
      "For instance, you want to say that homosexuality is wrong. It should be illegal. You cannot say that what the Quran says so or the Bible says so. You can rather give a secular public reason such as well it might lead to certain problems and diseases, AIDS",
      "AIDS or other problems that are good for the nation. But if you can talk about the nation in various forms, the public sphere, the nation what's good for society and that is why when people who know this stuff, when they talk about The Nation-State, they fear that The Nation State is a new God. It has replaced God as the final",
      "as the final criterion of rights, of the right even to life. So if you betray the nation state or are deemed dangerous by the nation-state, you are killed. You are called upon by the Nation State to come sacrifice their life for its protection, for the protection of the state.",
      "to protect the nation state. So all the ultimate rights that used to belong to God now are transferred to the nation-state and so in a sense liberalism requires the nation's state it limits some of the powers in some of its forms depending on which version of liberalism you're talking about earlier liberals were wary of the",
      "You cannot really have liberalism. So in a sense, liberalism and secularism are... Liberalism requires secularism but not the other way around. So you can have an authoritarian non-liberal secularism like China and Russia, but you cannot have liberal without secularism. I've been insisting on the pragmatic way of the reinvigoration of the state. Related to that is one concept",
      "that has come from several scholars and academicians and professionals within the Muslim ranks. And that is, the integration of certain countries or converging their economic interests in terms of an economic bloc. The example they give us is from European Union. And the reason defined is that once you converge their economic interest within the bloc",
      "come together and do mutually beneficial things like it has happened in the European Union. So, do you agree with such practical first steps or do you think that thinking of the material way of converging these countries or their targets is itself falling astray to the axioms of the system that is contrary to Islam?",
      "These efforts by, you know, literally there are some 1.8-1.7 billion Muslims and literally hundreds of thousands of Muslims who are concerned and have different potentialities, different perspectives. And frankly, you are not going to...",
      "Even if there is some kind of unification, the question of technical know-how and pragmatic ability to deliver services, to keep promises, to be prices down for example. To keep exploitation from internal chaos as we are seeing for example in Taliban or to",
      "some degree in Turkey, to find solutions to that. That would be absolutely necessary. So I think that I believe in parallel efforts where from different perspectives there needs to be a discursive change where people, Muslims embrace enigmatic thinking, where Muslims",
      "You know, there are some people perhaps who should emphasize social solidarity. Others, you know how to create a design of political institutions that could represent large numbers of Muslims in such a way that their local autonomy, of course I'm using the word in a more banal sense,",
      "local self-government is not taken away. As you know, there was in 1958 a unification of three Arab countries UAR Syria Egypt and Iraq and it didn't go well for partly because the reasons weren't good but also",
      "power is going to exploit the others. And so, and it lasted only for three years. So I think that practical questions are important than economic integration is extremely important. And I think",
      "Currently, I was told this number only 3% of Muslim trade is intra-Muslim trade. And I think that regional economic institutions and regional economic activity is going to be important if we are going to move forward with any kind",
      "kind of building up of Islamic civilization that is autonomous. Okay, thank you very much Dr. Awami. Thank you for your precious time. Hope to see you again in a similar program again. JazakAllah khair.",
      "Generating new ideas. Bringing to you all this and a lot more in Voices from the Muslim World."
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    "text": [
      "في القلب مشاعر مخفيها قد أشرقت الشمس عليها عن خطط لم أعبأ فيها ستكون بأيامي فرقة فحياتي قبل الحلقات تيهن بضياع بشتاتي من دون نعيم"
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    "file": "anjum/Who wants the Caliphate_ with Dr Ovamir Anjum_5SnB_23PLJA&pp=ygUTT3ZhbWlyIEFuanVtICBpc2xhbQ%3D%3D_1750784720.opus",
    "text": [
      "The Caliphate has in recent years acquired a meaning beyond its original conception. This is partly because of the rise of the terror group ISIS and its claims to legitimacy.",
      "As Shadi Hamid reluctantly argues in the Atlantic magazine,",
      "Although polling on the matter is contradictory at times, most analysts of the Muslim world would surmise that religiosity is on the increase and with it a demand to see Islamic scripture reflected in public policy. My guest this week, Dr. Omer Anjam, although abhorring all that ISIS may stand for, suggests that its brief rise to notoriety has opened up",
      "world with a just caliphate. Undoubtedly, the appeal of this concept is enduring. The late professor of Islamic studies and neo-conservative protagonist Bernard Lewis placed the institution at the centre of Muslim thinking since the death of the Messenger. He posits it remained a potent symbol of Muslim unity even identity and its abolition under",
      "was felt throughout the Muslim world. For Lewis, the loss of the caliphate is seen by Muslim majorities as a symbol of a century of humiliation, disunity, colonization and despotic rule. And you can see why Muslims observe the institution of the Caliphate to be intertwined with the deep-seated memory of Islam's golden age and illustrious past. The Muslim world that once saw itself at the center of innovation, toleration, culture and wealth",
      "and wealth is now synonymous with civil strife, poverty, inequality and terror for which the Syrian Civil War and the deafening silence over the plight of the Rohingyas and the Uyghur genocides is just the latest in a long line of disasters. So how can a reimagination of Muslim political order help the current Muslim condition? Dr Anjum argues",
      "that not only is there an urgent requirement for Muslim intelligentsia and civil society to debate the form a modern caliphate would take, but to seriously place it at the centre of Muslim social and political activism. He argues that Islam's challenge has to be framed in the context of the broader tumults faced by the liberal world order namely the process of de-globalisation and the rise of populist nativism.",
      "The caliphate surely does need more attention. There have been some laudable attempts in recent years to conceptualize a modern Islamic order, most notably in Pakistan by Dr Isra Ahmed",
      "Isra Ahmed and in the Arab world by Sheikh Taqiuddin al-Nabhani. May Allah reward them for their steadfastness, courage and contribution to the topic. However, the appeal of their movements has dissipated and today they fail to inspire the vast majority of Muslims that look to an intelligent and radical solution for our malady. Dr Anjam calls for a new way for thinking on the subject grounded in revelation",
      "Muslims and non-Muslims how Islam's thought should be considered as an alternative to the contemporary decaying world order. Dr Avamir Anjam is Imam Khatib Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at The University of Toledo, he's an author of a number of books and I will place his biography in the description of this program.",
      "appears on the Joaquin Institute website, Who Wants the Caliphate? It's a very long read but I would urge my listeners to really read it because it really provides an interesting perspective on the subject of the caliphate. So my question to you really is why the article and why now? Thank you very much for inviting me",
      "and for a really wonderful set of questions that you've sent me, and for this opportunity. What prompted me to ask this question was... Or rather what made this question urgent for me? Because the question I think is perennial in Islamic thought. And I argue anyone who looks at Islamic thought whether you look at law or whether you",
      "look at politics or even if you look at ethical literature, you find that there is a sense in which there's some problems. There is an assumption that Muslims live in an order that is Islamic and there are certain questions for example in Islamic law that can be resolved only by quote unquote Sulpan or the Imam. And Sulpan here just means in this Islamic legal literature of authority",
      "which is the authority of the caliphs. It has always assumed that Islamic law can't really exist, unlike it's often assumed to in a modern period. It does not exist without an Islamic authority, and that is Islamic political authority. And so I think the question is why made it an urgent matter for me? In short, it is the bloody borders of the Muslim world",
      "the migrants, the snowballing migrant populations, the Muslim children found floating on European floors. Take your pick. They are the ones who want it and I wanted to question in this lodge, this quote unquote spokesperson for Islam, Western Muslims or elites that are moneyed or Muslim most of all",
      "Muslim, most of all the Muslim despots and their servants and attaches and establishments clerics. They don't speak for Muslims. The majority of Muslims in my view are what's most important to people who do not benefit from the shrinking benefits of citizenship and protection by their nation states. And many of them never did.",
      "those are the ones to me are the the ones that should be at the center of any moral and ethical islamic thinking and i think about this question strictly within islami theology and law uh within islamic ethics uh within the imperatives of the quran and the sunnah and reason that is authorized by",
      "our religion and To me there is no doubt that It is the as Prophet Sallallaahu Alihi Wasallam said in a hadith that you know, if you're moving in a caravan You should move at the speed of the slowest One among you and to me. That's always been a moving metaphor For how you think about collective decision-making and collective visioning of community?",
      "of the community and that is essentially what politics is. I think it has been an error made by some, even representatives of our ulama or tradition who go for power and money. And unfortunately many of these people become spokespersons and representatives as if they embody and own and speak for the tradition but they only are doing so because somebody",
      "phone and I wanted to take it away from him. Now, it seems to me Dr Anjan that you do see the caliphate as an idea that transcends the current problems in the Muslim world. You talk about the despots and you talk about Arab oil monarchies and how maybe Muslim scholarship has been compromised by these governments but it seems",
      "the caliphate provides a solution to the prevailing liberal order. Can you expand on what you mean by that? Right, I think that's a very accurate reading of what I'm trying to do. I'm not saying merely that the calipha should be back because Muslims are suffering but rather to me Muslims are",
      "and discussed, and negotiated with the intellectuals, the honest intellectuals and scholars whether they're Christian or non-religious or Hindu or Jews. And so to me these are two different levels of the discourse. The fundamental one say when I'm speaking to Muslims, to believers, I must emphasize",
      "the that there uh that we owe other Muslims a fundamental debt and by we I mean the privileged Muslims who have time to think and who have security of food and lives and limbs. We owe it to increasing majority of Muslims,",
      "not have either those protections all together or they're barely hanging on working two jobs and living in essentially these polluted trash cans of our countries and societies. And that the beautiful societies that they did have, that the best features of their societies are being both attacked intellectually by Western lackeys",
      "by Western lackeys, by half-cooked intellectuals, by superficial modernists on the one hand but most of all they're being taken away by the despots who want to keep them on the edge so that they don't have time to think. I think we owe it to them to do this thinking for them. Now the liberal order has",
      "has many Critics and I would in fact say that most serious thinkers in the world today are Deep critics of the liberal order. I don't mean to their critics in the sense said well a liberal order should be fixed up this way or that way but Many serious philosophers and political scientists and you know folks who were doing history colonialism And for those who are looking at economy and capitalism",
      "Are deep critics of the liberal order in the sense that it is what has brought us Us as humanity on the brink Of total disaster That that it, is the biggest alibi of capitalism Um, so liberal order was always unrealistic. It has been hypocritical and imperialist In both in the senses it's unrealistic in its dreamy vision of uh",
      "of human rights for all, but then it necessarily falls into hypocrisy and imperialism because not everybody can have it. So you basically ended up with an order where some have at the expense of others. And then the winners become so big that they can indeed create great prosperity, you know, for any pyramids to be built, the great marvels of Egyptian civilization",
      "Egyptian civilization you need a million slaves. So basically the pyramids of modernity require many, many slaves around the world and so to me liberal order is not...you know liberal orders liberals see themselves as critics of that order oh we want equality but in fact by taking away the most important element",
      "values that are pre-political and non-politic around which people can build communities and create resistance to capitalism. By taking away those, right? That's what liberalism by definition is there are no values that pre- political. By take those values away it leaves individuals, communities broken into helpless individuals depending on states who have",
      "states that have inevitably secular and self-centered logics, um, that often of course ally themselves with capitalism's very capitalist elite of various kinds. So I think there is a fundamental structural problem. Second the current nation state order is unsustainable in my view uh it's unsustain able both economically politically morally it's irrational",
      "because there are always minorities that don't fit in the national narrative, whether they're Kurds in Turkey or Sunnis or Shiites in Iraq. You always have basically people who don't sit and of course United States and Europe have fought wars for precisely those reasons so I think that the model is problematic. It's also un-Islamic in my view.",
      "in my view, deeply un-Islamic theologically because sovereignty of a group of Muslims has no justification in Islamic legal or theological orders. In other words there is no justification for say Egyptian Muslims fighting a war with Sudanese Muslims where an Egyptian believer and atheist",
      "fight side and side, side by side to kill the Sudanese because the Egyptian state, the nation-state has decided, has declared the Sudan their enemy. Nation-state logic requires even if you take away all the other undesirable parts of nationalism, nation-states loyalty requires that this must happen. That if your soldiers",
      "soldiers are not uh if you don't give your loyalty to the state and follow the follow that imperative um then you are not a proper nation-state citizen you're a traitor that's the fundamental logic of the nation-states and it is fundamentally unislamic and what you're seeing with saudis are doing in yemen or what iranians are doing",
      "massacres, they're just a result of this nation-state order where to their Muslim populations they may do this propaganda and justify it in sectarian religious terms which I think is a sign of how that It doesn't work an Islamic sort of religious framework But the real logic is real politic of regional politics So to me nation state order is at a few radical level",
      "theoretical level on Islamic. Now you're right that the nation state is going through a period of de-globalization and the rise of populism, nativist populism but when you evaluate some of the counter arguments or the counter currents against the prevailing liberal order Islam currently doesn't feature as a prominent challenger to this",
      "the most prominent challenge comes from within it, comes from the left. If you think about Noam Chomsky or others in that tradition they tend to come from the Left of a post-socialist tradition. Why does Islam not feature in this debate at the moment? So I think part of my response to your question is yes and no. Partly I agree that Islam is absent from certain avenues",
      "of exploration and you're right that leftist liberalism, not full-fledged sort of socialism but certainly leftist activism is at the forefront to this. But only if you're looking in those elite spaces which are allowed to talk and which we ascribe valence and importance",
      "Valence and importance too, but I think that Islam features everywhere To be a negative negatively as of course in the war on terror which defines the modern with the current world order after 9-11 for every country one Israel China India Myanmar Islam has become the other the enemy that justifies policy that just identifies",
      "identity politics of a new kind. And so Islam is, of course there always as the fodder for white nationalism or for the Chinese state oppression and for the Indian right wing Hindu fanaticism and for Myanmar Buddhist fanaticist. Islam is always there and it doesn't appear in the solutions because people are of course scared. I mean that's",
      "The answer that is da if you are about powerless a powerless activist in Egypt You were scared to think of your solution In terms of Islam, even if in your daily life You practice Islam So it's only in those broken spaces where? You have no hope that you don't even have anyone Looking out for you to fear",
      "those ungoverned areas where talking about Islam becomes the only option and you know, the Uighur would ask what are other Muslims can we know? What can other Muslims do to help us? It's the Uigurs. It's Rohingya. It is the Palestinians. It s the Kashmiris who were asking these questions and these minorities, these populations are increasing not only is it an outside threat of course but",
      "but the Muslim authoritarian rulers themselves use this war on terror and this sort of negativity about Islam to, then they co-opted very successfully. In fact, they co opted most successfully because they stand most to gain from the threat",
      "in which they will not have the absolute power that they do. So I see that Islam appears, in fact, the world is obsessed with Islam. Yes, I suppose that is the case Dr Anjam. The world is obsessive with Islam but it's obsessed in the context of terrorism and war on terror. It doesn't see Islam or at least for debate hasn't moved",
      "to the prevailing liberal world order. I mean, back to your article you talk about the rise of ISIS and you say that it took the rise a bad caliphate for us to discuss the rise up a good caliphates but I must note in recent years especially in the second wave of the Arab Spring Islam has been notably absent if you think about the current demonstrations rocking",
      "parts of the Muslim world, Iraq and Lebanon and Sudan. You actually observe the absence of an Islamic counter-narrative and what seems to have replaced the vacuum of political activism is a call for a civil democratic state. It seems like it's business as usual. We're back to the preserve of the nation state.",
      "I don't quite see it that way. I don think that how people in Lebanon and Iraq see their very practical possibilities is really a comment on either their ultimate desires or what a reasonable, sustainable alternative could be.",
      "Leaders political scientists and thinkers who have the luxury to think long term So in this sort of very limited very reactionary politics So I'll give you an example some of these people who are very active in Lebanon would be a friend of mine if You were just sit down and talk to them about what their real Aspiration would be they would say without missing the heartbeats. Yes, we look to a day when Muslims could be",
      "when Muslims could be united. But they don't have the imagination and the luxury of thinking 10, 20, 30 years down the line. They don't that luxury because they have to respond to a very immediate problem. So I didn't think that's necessarily",
      "Muslim aspirations are people you know even if you go and survey people, people respond to what they see as would be a beneficial thing immediately to them so most of these surveys in fact you know surveys which show some of the surveys which I were like you know 80% Muslims want Sharia and Islam in their governance and someone. I don't think that",
      "to pull Muslim thought. But when I do go around and look at what younger, especially younger scholars and activists are thinking about, I find that I have never seen in my active life where I have been involved",
      "late 90s, as much clarity about the desire for the caliphate as I'm seeing now in the last few years. Now in your article you talk about the three main arguments against the caliphate its undesirabilities unfeasibility and whether it's religiously necessary why do you argue these uh free counter-arguments are without merit?",
      "um these three elements of religious necessity whether muslims are obliged to do that or not it was an agree it has been agreed on by ijma and by definition remains in any account of islam um that is not entirely modernist many accounts of islams that's not entirely that hasn't entirely thrown away uh the traditional usul effect",
      "Ijma is the main source of norm-making. And to me, if you are willing to do away with ijma then there can be no religious argument in my view because even the Quran... The meaning of the Quran is stabilized by the community and the agreement of the ijmas so as hadiths. So if you're willing to",
      "willing to do that then intellectually there is no coherent way to approach tradition whatsoever and that's why i don't engage with people who might say oh those were just you know abu bakr was was just making up sort of a political uh decision in ali and omar we're doing this just politically we don't really follow the ishmael umma to me uh the argument to those people cannot be religious because",
      "point there's only um utilitarian arguments and there are only political arguments possible after that so i make the argument that it is religiously necessary necessary by jama all the scholars who who in islamic tradition has signed on to this and repeated this but if all of them are useless for you then i have no religious argument for",
      "a perfect muslim uh in in certain sense but the argument to me should be about between such people should be above feasibility and desirability right so the question then is feasibility let's take desirabilty first and i argue that if you look back at if you stand back and look at the Muslim world today",
      "You have a range of failing nation-states or increasingly authoritarian nation states And the nation state order itself is coming apart. There has to be something new because Increasingly nation states are no longer what they What they were designed to be in 19th century Europe and The two day waves two world wars that changed the world order, and that's how nation states",
      "how nation states sort of in very broken and questionable state already lost their best impetus and best days. That's how they came to the Muslim world, Arab in Arabia, South Asia, Arab countries, North Africa. And the Nation State Project never took roots there. What you now have, you do have nationalism which is different from nation-state",
      "And that nationalism is driven more by regionalism and cultural differences, ethnic differences and class differences. That has very little to do with nationalism. Nationalism remember is supposed to overcome all of those other differences and consolidate people but you'll find that people for example Arabs brings a perfect example why young people who can speak Arabic contribute through the same shared public sphere in 22",
      "22 Arab countries they but they seem to belong to the same sphere and their enemy if you will is a shared elite The military elite or what have you? And so and then now of course in the rise of sectarianism You have two blocks the four three block Saudi block Turkish and Qatari block and then you have the Iranian block and these you have again They're all transnational",
      "loyalties transnational considerations so my general argument is that the nation-state never took roots and his we stand at a moment in history where nation state has fundamentally dissolved into something else that the nascent state elite structures and institutions do stand but they have become simply as gatekeepers for multinational corporations",
      "for global capitalism. So the elite still are there and they would use the flag, and they've used their militaries but what they're trying to do is something entirely different from what nation building was about in the 19th century and 20th century early 20th Century I think that this national nation state model is unfeasible because it cannot guarantee either citizenship",
      "citizenship it cannot guarantee equality and it cannot guaranteed freedom and dignity for its populations even if you take the Islam out of the equation and in my view so if you the Islamic right the presence of Islam in a population which is very I believe strongly held once",
      "a further destabilizing factor for the nation-state because by its very nature Islamic authority does not recognize borders. And even in the West, the only way you could do this nation state was completely either subordinate religion or create your own national religion like the British did. For instance if",
      "know if you go in Egyptian streets the last couple of decades Saudi authorities who belong to a different nation-state have more of a sway than any Egyptian authority to say for example at typical Salafi and similarly you know if your following Al Azhar University and and the authorities that are big there their fatwas",
      "loyalties are far more important than any authorities within the boundaries of your nation state. So Islam by its nature makes it very difficult for people to keep their loyalties to a specific territory, so it does not work with nationalism. Now people make the normative argument that Islam is against nationalism and whatnot and I think that is correct but i'm making an",
      "more political theory and social science. I think that so long as there is an Islam, so long you in the UK are talking to me in the US, and you think that Islamic arguments that I will make have some validity for you regardless of our national origins or citizenship we're talking about Islam making the nation state loyalties right subordinate",
      "in certain ways. So I think that is happening and has been happening regardless, and it's not going to stop happening. And how about the feasibility of a modern caliphate? Often people talk about why this is impossible. Why it's impossible... My short answer to that is just your lack of imagination. That should not be just because you happen to have a full tummy and that's because you",
      "Your lack of imagination or your lack of courage and this I give this example in the in the article as well look people thought for 2,000 years that democracy was something that happened for a couple hundred years in Athens and It was it was a crazy idea And then people imagined it. And now it is it has become effectively a new religion to the modern world At least with enough last century",
      "People used to say, for example the Arabs are different. I mean as you know when I went to grad school The wisdom on the street in the academia and the academic Halls of Academia is there? Of course Arabs are difference Muslims are different so they don't first of all They can't take Media right that they don' have objective news And then late 90's Al Jazeera came and some of the best reporting",
      "reporting in and it's in my view, it's better than CNN and it is better than BBC today in many respects even though it has to like not to its political masters But it is a very it's the kind of thing that people don't realize but it was revolutionary for the Arab world that people can can analyze facts and and And deal with with difficult questioning difficult questions and debate",
      "People said that the Arabs don't The Arab Street is different. They like the boot In fact, this was the argument that many who were going to their rock or made That they only understand the boot but now Lewis made this argument a number of times in 1990 I think and then later again 2003 and Then you have the entire Arab world boiling over and saying we want dignity and we want these people out And it's so in a way",
      "in a way that was at least at first extremely you know it was nonviolent and organized and so on. So I don't think the lack of our imagination is a good excuse now, is it a logical impossibility? Obviously not. Is it something that has not happened well it was 100 years ago",
      "number of ethnicities to live together under one caliph so it is not something that's you know serious impossibility it's simply that people think for reasons that are in fact beyond me that the nation-state is a permanent feature. In fact philosopher Taha Abdurrahman whose work was recently made more popular by Wael Halak",
      "in his recent translation, Reforming Modernity I believe. He makes this argument that and something that I have noticed quite remarkably in certain Muslim circles that in certain circles the nation state has become a metaphysical reality like God so they're just as for you to be a Muslim you have to believe in God",
      "you think of the current order of the state as a given and This has become true in fact even for some reformists and As well as traditionalist establishment clerics, and I think that is a That there has no intellectual warrant right? It's not something that they've argued in the books and debated And you know what we can't really imagine anything else. But now it's something it's an attitude of",
      "of helplessness. Now let's talk about the historical notion of the caliphate many modernists would argue that Islamic history is riddled with inconsistencies, with discontinuities and with instances of repressive khalifs and they would surmise that a modern caliph just wouldn't stack up when considering the types of checks",
      "balances that a more liberal accountable system would provide. Post-enlightenment, the West has developed a form of representation which safeguards minorities and safeguard civil liberties. I'd say there are a number of confusions in that very common way of thinking but again,",
      "and more of a feeling in an attitude of helplessness because we are confusing a lot number of things when you think as a political thinker and a full historian of politics you know one thing for an absolute fact this is something that I can be absolutely sure of because absolutely any political history",
      "Rebellions and it has violence and it had his repression. It is taken to be in the field a fact that political order always has people sometimes You know, the truth and justice could be on one side or the other side or it's sometimes it's just too complicated to figure out who's right but one thing that's for sure is that you have Violence and instability and different kinds of rulers so you may have",
      "You may have, you know... And so the simple answer to that is show me a democracy where you do not have corruption, where you don't have oppression, where we do not tyranny of the majority. Show me a liberal order which did not engage in horrendous acts of violence if it... and you don t. I mean, you just simply don't",
      "any such examples, any such orders that lasted for any period of time and govern any significant stretch of territory. Politics is just that it's kind of like you know in the personal life I like to use this example I do in my article is that if you think of a Muslim who has not committed a sin and then as soon as you commit a sin if you say well Islam doesn't really work because look Muslims commit sins they don't",
      "saying it is impractical. And I just say that, well you just don't understand what morality and freedom of choice mean if that's your argument. And similarly, if you think that pointing to Caliphs who didn't quite do it right here's a good reason for dismissing a political order then you don't",
      "of sort of proportional and comparative nature. And then one has to compare likes with likes if you're a proper historian and proper political theorist, so for example, you cannot compare the short-lived or rather a bookish treatment of one order with what's wrong with this order of an Orientalist and enemies account of the other order, right?",
      "other order right so you have to uh so comparison is not straightforward in other words and when you do that kind of comparison you realize in my view uh that the caliphate um yes there were significant discontinuities and those discontinuaries existed all over the world at the time and they continue to exist today in the liberal order",
      "Was there oppression? Yes. And the oppression exists all over, so we're really talking about then simply a comparative preference for one or the other. Now, the second part of your question which also I think is a correct assessment",
      "on the fact that most of our self understanding is indebted to orientalists telling us our stories, of who we were. Our own understanding is extremely biased and extremely self-deprecating in part because ulama in our tradition had lost control",
      "of our own history and of our tradition. And that is a serious problem, but that is the problem that cannot be solved by closing your eyes and saying well it was always bad so basically just there's nothing we can do about it, but rather in my view taking control of that, of our self understanding, of knowledge about ourselves",
      "about ourselves our knowledge about our past and present or future requires institutional and political control and uh autonomy of and that is where the caliphate should be in my view so i don't think that those feelings are or attitudes stand to",
      "serious analysis. They become serious only, in my view, this is based on my conversations and you may point out that there's this and that that you didn't consider but in my when I'm talking to people say for example who have recently come to the west, the United States or some European country they left poverty and they came back and had a lot more opportunity here became much richer than",
      "Richer than they were and so they were like, well look Look at this world what it has given us Look at the freedom and democracy and beauty here and look at all the bad things that are happening in the muslim world Right and that's become The view through which muslims a middle-class bourgeois muslim think about islamic history And particularly western muslim and westernized muslim because we specifically live especially those who can talk those who",
      "make their voice heard are those who live in liberal bubbles around centers of knowledge production in the West which happen to be if you will, the ivory towers of the world and And so Muslims like myself. Of course we are we have to be very happy about the fact that Opportunity that I have in the west in the United States. I did not have in Pakistan and",
      "And for me to now, of course I can counter my narrative with many people who found African-American Muslims, for example, who have exact opposite narratives. So it would be a battle of personal narratives who find their freedom where? Now, to what extent was the historical caliphate a single unitary institution?",
      "You talk about five broad models of the caliphate that lasted throughout history. And so is the calipha really a description of a single system or is it a description, of a very general idea which can translate into a number of iterations depending on the era in which the Caliphate is applied?",
      "the caliphate as a model um if you mean by the caliphaite as a single institution which with details on sort of how the administration is going to be laid out and power is distributed then yes the califate is not that but if you think in a way that is more organic and internal to islam which is that there isn't ummah there is a global community of believers",
      "of believers and they are obliged by god by universal agreement of muslim scholars to obey to follow a certain a given law uh sharia in a certain morality and have obligations to each other as brethren in faith um and that there are the ones who appoint an authority over them that may or may not be you know perfect at the best but nonetheless it is a caliphate in the sense that it is",
      "that it is a successorship of the prophet's authority and care take care taking off his community so basically if you think about political institutions in administration and governance then yes it seems very discontinuous and that's entirely understandable if you",
      "what is essential has transformed so that a typical alim of the Ottoman era did not think that the Ottomans were that different from the Mamluks before them or the Seljuqs before them, or the Buyyids before them in the sense that the basic society and its essential problem of Muslim self-government governing themselves were essentially the same which is why they're following",
      "jurists from those eras without saying hey, those jurists sort of do not constitute an authority for us because they lived in an entirely different place, a different society. And none of that happened because the society continued. Differences were you know there was always differences but what you did not have is",
      "have is a major sort of a rupture that you have in the 19th century colonial period and then in 20th century the rise of the nation-state those were major ruptures but nonetheless as I emphasize in my article that depending on how one looks at it there are different models of the caliphate that in its essence what a caliph eight is a Calif is not a",
      "a ruler of a state, ruler of territory per se first and foremost. A caliph is the head of the ummah and the territoriality in Islamic political imagination is secondary to the community whereas in the modern nation-state territoriality is the first consideration",
      "transcendental considerations community is forged um and nationalization if you will national history is created a myths are created so um you know benedict anderson's idea of the imagined communities communities imagined and then taught in high school and then wars are fought and flags are glorified and nations are built that way uh well you have",
      "Muslims, including some very well-meaning Islamic thinkers who are not historians cannot disabuse themselves of the categories in which they think. And those categories are modern and recent but they don't know that. This is what some of the scholars when they say people take the state to be a metaphysical reality, that's what they mean",
      "that they think that the questions that they're asking are trans-historical, translocal and therefore God must have provided and the Prophet must have provide answers to them in specific terms because these are timeless universal fundamental questions. But those who do history, those who are aware whether traditional Muslim historians",
      "historians or modern historians Are aware that these questions are recent and this was in fact one of the points of debate between traditionalists and and and reformists what are the categories in which one should think it and I my own thinking about this is very historically informed I do not first of all subscribe to this view that you had a model of the land his model was",
      "What we all look to that's a real caliphate and then after that there is complete decline in fact I'm writing a history historical survey of of that period precisely in part two to make that point. Then in fact to me some of the best institutional innovation takes place in the time of the Maliki Marwan and then After that the Abbasids continue the institutional development and At the same time, there is some deterioration",
      "one of the reasons why I don't engage with much existing caliphate or pro-caliphate discourse by some people who have done great work, whether it's Hasb al-Tahrir, Sheikh Tufayl al-Din Al-Nabhani, Dr. Israa Ahmed in Pakistan and many other such groups in fact around the world. Surprised to find there are many, many such groups, many more than you typically think",
      "typical thing and but their thinking is a historical so even though i appreciate that they keep the idea alive sometimes the way they're presented makes the idea ridiculous um in the eyes of those who may otherwise be willing to think about it um and and so in short my argument is that look if the caliphate",
      "medieval theocratic absolutism as some of these people present, then it would indeed be a bad idea. It would in fact possibly even worse than the kind of disaster that exists today. But I demonstrate however, sort of gesture my article and demonstrates in my work that both history and normative Muslim theory, both medieval and modern suggest a range of possibilities for the actualization of the caliphate",
      "and that the longest lasting version of the caliphate was sort of how it consolidated in the later basset period um and it was a not absolutist institution it was anomocratic meaning that it is the rule of law uh not the rule",
      "which the powers of the caliph were limited in both in practice and in theory neither the theory nor the practice were perfect they were not perfect reflection of what Islam teaches but they were a betrayal of what islam teaches but rather they were very practical sort of adjustments to a difficult world this was also a world by",
      "reasons why the abbasids went down was because you have uh invasions of nomadic warriors from the north and um and ones that continued for centuries until the rise of the ottomans so and this by the way is happening across the world from china and japan to western europe you have invasives that lead to breakdown of imperial orders into smaller kingdoms and then a few hundred years they come back together",
      "So there are material historical reasons why the caliphate took various forms. And it is on that basis, that I argue that in a modern world when both technology and availability of education, the availability of means of long-term governance and agreement",
      "enable us to think of large systems with large diversity, whether it's like the United States or China or European Union that can be governed by a single federal apparatus with large local autonomy. So it's an undergraduate project where you think about a caliph basically",
      "basically telling everybody what to do that's just uh sophomoric and unacceptably bad thinking but i think that um a unification of economy a unication of defense which may be a top-down project which may",
      "But those, I argue that are unification or defense, unification of the economy and movement of labor and movement goods. Those would be decidedly from an economic perspective, from political perspective, a social perspective good things for this region. Let's turn to the West now, of course any project to reimagine the caliphate is going to be up against",
      "up against a machinery which at its very least wants to prevent the rise of peer competitors around the world. And in your article, you mentioned that for a century now Islam has not allowed to be Islam and I get from that that you believe there is a political project to keep Islam submissive. In fact,",
      "the West would only settle for an emasculated Islam. I mean, what how do you imagine the West will react or respond to any serious intellectual endeavour political endeavour for Muslim unification? So there are a couple of things that I think have a couple",
      "is west and modernity um that are not real things so i think that they're western elite and the western elite is what i mean when i use the word west but the western elites are embattled they are divided they are humans they make you know they they make decisions",
      "The Western elite of course do not want Islam to become a threat to them That is rudimentary. But at the same time the western elites are so embattled So we're living in a world where? the West has lost credibility if there is a the West West is not a happy place It is a rich place, but it's a place that knows that it's going downhill and it is going to hit",
      "hit the bottom very, very soon and that it has destroyed the only planet we had. And economic inequalities that it's exported all over the world are going to come back and hit it very hard and that its enemies are within. And so I don't think that although the Western elite or many Western elites",
      "pose the idea at first but to me they're not an interesting problem um a consensus uh or a serious discourse among muslims thinking 10 20 30 40 years down the line creating that consensus that look this is something how we have to have our own imagination about our future that's a much more interesting problem to me to me the dictators in the muslim world",
      "are not the biggest problem either. They are going to be our biggest obstacle, but they're going to a successful obstacle only if they are more committed to their interests than young thoughtful Muslims, the younger generations of Muslims",
      "Survival and decent honorable survival. I think that if we are if you can show that look we can last We can survive Whether it's MBS and mbz s'and and dictators of the world And then these are these people are going to Turn to better ideas or better ideas that are out there I Think of history not in terms of sort of revolutions",
      "of revolutions or evolution or education but rather um you have moments and cracks when the ideas that are available in the discursive sphere they're picked up by whoever happens to be in power and",
      "simple-minded in fact nationalist who is going to look for what are popular ideas that are available at this time and if nothing is available then uh you know he's gonna pick up the most simplistic nationalist ideas that're uh that are avaliable. He's gonna read a book by written by a modern, by some orientalist about Islam and it's gonna try to implement that model because that's all that's available",
      "course that is our greatest challenge as Muslim scholars and intellectuals. Now what do you hope to achieve from your article and your engagements on this subject? Well I hope that mine is the first drop, perhaps it's not even a first drop it's one of many drops that are already there collecting in the bucket. I shouldn't say it's the first job in fact that that's patently false. There are many people whose work has inspired me",
      "And I think that's how it begins. Before the flood, there are drops. Now without going into the specifics of the different movements that exist that either place the caliphate as a short-term goal or a long-term goa,l it is fair to say that these movements have lost currency on the Muslim street. If you think about",
      "or Hezbollah, those days are gone and we now have a vacuum when it comes to caliphate discourse on the streets in the Muslim world. Now some could naively then surmise that's because there is a decline in the belief in a caliph. I suppose you argue otherwise so how would",
      "or otherwise, of these movements? So one of the things that people often do is they confuse social movement organizations with social movements. And in some ways, the two... Social movement organizations become the center when a social movement is dead or threatened. And I think that the particular movement that you mentioned,",
      "wonderful work and also I think they have serious flaws but these are social movement organizations. They don't control the vast majority of Muslim thought, and they control increasingly less because they fail to produce most interesting ideas, most original thinking was most compelling thinking that is what needs to be done",
      "to allow Muslims to think, to break through certain false narratives. To disabuse ourselves of a number of impossibilities that we have imposed upon ourselves but also of the simplistic narrative and I think also we are tyrannized by",
      "by the present you're always thinking when I say we I mean Muslim thinkers particularly normative Muslim thinkers the ulama or intellectuals who are worried about Islamic sort of you know stage of the ummah they're always thinkin g about you know I have this question that somebody has asked and I must answer it and I",
      "society without interest and without usury, it's such a big problem. You either tell them a solution that they can implement today or you have no answer to them. This is the conversation I remember from when I was teaching in Qatar and there was a debate among Muslim academics working on the question of Islamic economics and they're criticizing very deeply and thoughtfully",
      "the quote-unquote islamic banking system um and they're saying there's nothing islami about it whereas the sharia scholars are saying well what to know what should i tell people if there is no islamid banking then there is on islamim banking and i must say that that is okay for them so the answer for a mufti is basically i have to find one or two other to give a yes",
      "uh listen to me and i'm gonna lose clients and there is there's nothing but of course often in real life the real situation is that you're you're living in a structure where both yes and no are bad answers and and you gotta question the structure you got to ask deeper questions and you've got to think longer term and that longer-term thinking requires",
      "that our scholars, our institutions do not grant. And that is the space that I think we need to create first in our minds and our discourses and then hopefully in our institutions. Jazakallah khair, Dr. Amir Anjan for your time today. Now if my listeners wanted to find out more and wanted to read more about your thoughts on this subject where can they go? Good question.",
      "Write in fact a book on this to turn my article into a book. So there is going to be certainly more but if there is anybody who would like to provide a critique Draw my attention to something I said that was wrong and I'm sure there were many things that I said were wrong There's anything good that I sat it is certainly from Allah sparta and me But and so I am extremely happy to to hear any",
      "criticism and any pointers for improvement, especially as I develop this argument into a longer form. People are more than welcome to contact me. My email, you can use my university email. It's really easy to find me on the internet. Well thank you for your time today Dr. Ovamir Anjum and may Allah accept from you and your great",
      "your great work and bring this to some sort of fruition inshallah in a positive direction. Ameen, you as well."
    ]
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    "text": [
      "if you know Islamic history and if you follow Islamic sects, Islamic scholarship there are a bunch of beliefs that are attributed to Khawarij. The Khawari believed in this and they believe in that but that's usually um through the Khwariz in the second century. The first century Khwajir at this time they had two uprisings. The First uprising was when they parted from Ali's army and fought uh begin to fight him back",
      "years later we're going to see the second rise of the kawarij which you're gonna talk about later in this first rise of very little actual reports exist about their detailed beliefs in other words it's not clear that they had any separate theology other than takfir of the sahaba they said that other companions and all other muslims who had not joined them are",
      "But they were also known as fanatically pious, righteous warriors. They called themselves surat. Surat is a term from the Quran which means those who have sold their soul for Allah. And they were all so known as muhakkima because they said that tahkeem is wrong. La hukma illa lillah. There is no hukum, there is no judgment except in Allah that human beings cannot judge.",
      "judge on a matter that God has already given judgment on. They were known as Haruriya because Harura was the village where they gathered after they left Ali's army and they're known as Ahl al-Nahrawan because ultimately, when all negotiation failed, Ali surrounded them in a place called Al Nahrawan and there was a battle in which the Khawaris are massacred",
      "There are some reports that nobody survived from Ahlan Nahrawan, which is very unlikely. It's clear because there are some people later they say that they were at Nahrawon but nonetheless this is how the fitna of the Khawarij temporarily ended when Ali fought them at Nahlawan"
    ]
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    "text": [
      "Simply put, ISIS is not Islamic because they excommunicate other Muslims including other Muslim scholars who might disagree with them and correct them. And we can talk about why any specific practice of ISIS is brutal but the answer would come back well don't you in Islamic law tolerate disagreement maybe this is a disagreement.",
      "There are certain kinds of disagreement, certain kinds behavior that all Muslims historically since the first century have disallowed and have said this is a heretical act. And ISIS falls squarely within that as Kharijites. There is no disagreement. The Sunnis and the Shia, in fact, the reformed Kharija themselves, the Ibadis agree on this",
      "and then turning to violence it takes you out of that discursive community that is Islam."
    ]
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    "text": [
      "بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم الحمد لله والصلاة والسلام على رسول الله",
      "in Palestine. The genocide that is going on, that has of course deeply pierced our heart and our consciousness but I want to start with a slightly different angle. I wanna remind us of the Prophet's practice when 70 of his companions were treacherously murdered.",
      "showed a new meaning of rahmatan lil alameen, mercy for all the worlds. He prayed against those who had treacherously murdered his companions, the Quran reciters, for one month in qunoot in every salah. And that's a practice in Toledo, Ohio where we come from our local imams have since",
      "The Quran, it comes from the Sunnah. It comes from a heart of a believer and that is the sentiment that is my strongest support our strongest support So let us pray for Gaza That Allah gives victory and support and strength and mercy",
      "our people, our brothers and sisters, our men, women, and children. And that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala takes to account the enemies of the ummah and the traitors when the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wasallam spoke of Taifa Mansura a group that will be victorious in a hadith",
      "and has mutawatir, narration with slightly different wording at the ending but when the Prophet ﷺ spoke of the people that will stand for Islam he spoke that they will not be harmed. لَا يُضُرُّهُمْ مَنْ خَذَلَهُмْ وَلَّا مَνْ عَادَاهُم They will not",
      "and instead of the enemy, the Prophet says those who betrayed them. So khidlan, betrayal it is as if the Prophet ﷺ is prophesying looking at our day, our situation today and saying they will not be harmed by those who betray their duty, their sacred trust to protect Al-Quds, the Holy Land",
      "land or protect the ummah, the sacred blood of Muslims. And that was rahbatun lil'alameen, that was mercy for all worlds because that is what mercy sometimes requires and that is a register of being an ummah of being together that you cannot fully realize until",
      "from the bottom of your heart that you must protect like you protect your own children, like you",
      "that being an Ummah is not just acceptable, the Ummah it's not just exceptable but the Ummat is exceptional. And I want to repeat the words of Dr. Osama Al Azami our MC today that we needed a matrix 50 years ago perhaps 100 years ago and had we had that",
      "would not be happening today. The people of Gaza, we have heard they expect endless cruelty and brutality from the occupying forces but it is the Ummah that they are pleading to. It's the Ummat that surprises them that despite these sentiments",
      "possess. Somehow the enemy doesn't fail to do what the enemies, the occupiers, the settler colonizers must do but the ummah keeps failing despite our desire, despite our sentiments of solidarity and to repeat",
      "The insight of Honorable Nur al-Izza Anwar that Gaza is enough to show us where we are today and that not only the horror but also the hope that we see, that is the starting point of what I want to talk about today. So why Ummatics?",
      "That's my topic. And I want to say that what I'm trying to do here is present a philosophy of ummatics, but also remind...I want to remind us that the journey of becoming an Ummah again",
      "important as the goal that we seek, that of the flourishing of Islam and Muslims. And so let me begin with the etymology of ummatics. The word ummatix I coined this term in 2012 although it's been used in a certain an adjectival way to refer to the ummah, ummatiks but",
      "politics, law and community in Islamic thought where I studied and thought of the word politics in the Greek city. The Greek city is polis and the idea to think about the community that lived in the city rather than thinking just about your own interests as individuals or families or clans",
      "what made polis politics. Politics is the practice, the mental space, the way of thinking in which I go beyond my very biological impulse to protect myself and my family and to think of a larger unit. But as I studied Islam's sources,",
      "and Islamic tradition, there was no nation state. There was no territorial state about which Muslims primarily thought and theorized. It was rather the community created by la ilaha illallah Muhammadur Rasulullah. It wa s the community of faith. And therefore I have always thought that politics is",
      "Muslims' engagement with the larger community. Or rather, I should say it's an incomplete word, it's a complete concept that is ummatics at the heart of our thinking about the world, our solidarity in how we place ourselves in the world. And thinking about ummatiks, thinking about",
      "long is essential to us as human beings, and also to the perfection and improvement in our character as individuals and as social beings that we seek. As Professor Yasmeen Taifallah so eloquently reminded us in her reflections. So to begin with I want us",
      "to go back to Gaza, but in fact before that I want us to imagine bring to mind the image of the Syrian Kurdish boy that was found that washed up whose body washed up ashore on the shores of Europe, Greece. That two year old boy who is trying to escape",
      "escape from the abode of the Ummah, Syria, Turkey trying to ride a boat. It was in fact an inflatable boat that drowned in no time few miles from Turkey and the body was washed up ashore and there are many countless examples",
      "protected by the Ummah. They are trying to go through, there are people from Afghanistan to Morocco who go through various Muslim countries only to get to the poorest European country. I remember the haunting experience, the memories of a Bosnian grandmother when",
      "You see many, many Muslims who pass through Bosnia. They're coming from the Muslim world but they don't stay here. Our houses are empty. But the abode of this ummah no longer protects its people. So that's first image. The other image is that of that little boy in Gaza",
      "who walks up to a hospital with a backpack dripping with blood because he had picked up the body parts of his little brother, who had been torn apart. In a genocide that is fully televised, in a genocide we have seen unfold for the last 75 years",
      "That's the image of the ummah to me. And that boy, to me represents not only the horror but the courage it takes to pick up the dripping body parts of your brother to put them in a backpack and walk them.",
      "courage that I hope I can wear today. I don't know if I can find quite that much in my heart but al-qudsthu lana these are the words of a young girl when she is pulled out of the rubble in Gaza in the first few days of this genocide and her first words are al-qudsthu",
      "is ours, that we will not give up and that spirit of hope to me is absolutely crucial in recounting that story. So what I want to talk about is not the horrors of Gaza but rather the gulf between this hope",
      "people of Gaza and the Muslim street across the world has shown that there is an indomitable pull that we seem to have in moments of this brotherhood and sisterhood,",
      "they are our people. We seem to have as an ummah more religiosity, more faith than any other religious community in the world and our military capacity is also",
      "In fact, quite impressive. We have some of the larger armies in the world numerically and also technologically the Ummah is at a stage where if these armies, these governments put their weight they in fact could at least stop the ongoing genocide. And yet that divine sense of obligation",
      "that we feel as individuals does not translate into collective action. The beliefs and principles that we carry do not become a persistent discourse that leads to collective action, and our iman does not become that deterrent's capacity to protect the ummah.",
      "And so, ommatics is the framework through which we answer this question of that how to bridge that gulf, how to breach that gap. I'm going to make a number of related points, five points about why ommantics? Why it is ommastics",
      "that we need to bridge that gap and to respond to the divine obligation of being a united Ummah. Let me start with the first one, Ummatic exceptionalism. We are used to thinking about American exceptionalism, and what that means is that Americans think",
      "we can overcome the fate that befalls other people, that we can work and we can change. That kind of optimism and also the sense that normal rules do not apply to us because we have some kind of divine mandate which then becomes secularized but that's what American exceptionalism means. And I want us to think instead of a",
      "exceptionalism that Sheikh Omar Suleiman referred to. Ummah is not just acceptable, it is exceptional and what that means is theologically the foundation for Muslims, for all Muslims. And that in fact is also the message of our logo Ummatan Wasatan It is an ummah that is wasat and wasat means the best ummah but its best in a specific way",
      "specific way it's also the middle that is most comprehensive in its virtue but it is this part that i want us to think about that when allah says gives",
      "that we have to humankind, that we must do something. And the minute that a collectivity of people must do some thing they must organize and if we fail to do so then we become...we must confront the warning that is given in the Quran",
      "the verses in Surah Al-Baqarah 84, 85 that speak of the Jews of Medina who were divided among themselves into three tribes and warring. They were participants in the Arab pagan Arabs wars so they would participate with their Arab partners as tribes",
      "in killing each other, and yet personally they were pious. And as pious individuals, they would ransom the Jews that came around. And it is as if their piety when it came to their social and personal obligations was unquestionable but",
      "the book of Allah, you become exceptional. Normal laws that apply to other people do not apply to you. You cannot prosper except through Islam, except by responding to that call, that call that makes you ambassadors or prophets. Other people may prosper by merely material means",
      "The Jews at that time before Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wasallam were the chosen ummah. And now with Ummatan Wasatan this mandate has been given to the ummah of Muhammad salla allahu alaihi wasalam and if we do not turn back, we will confront the same or we confront rather the same penalty",
      "double humiliation that is warned of in this verse. So, that is my case for why there must be ummatics, there must for us a way to engage in collective action to protect the Ummah and for that historically by consensus of Muslims that has meant imama leadership which is always both an institution",
      "inshallah we will talk more about but the next point I want to make is that leadership in this Ummah is always ummatic which is why instead of speaking of the Imamate or Caliphate, we start by talking about the Ummah itself. Meaning that it is the very responsibility that Allah has given us",
      "that requires us to become an agent, to take action and that is where the Imam leadership and government are simply outgrowth of that. And the future, a future Imamate must be a government. It must be",
      "that must respond to and learn from the best of human experience that's available. And yet, it can be an imamate. And we speak of the caliphate because although that word is maligned as referring to some kind of medieval absolutism,",
      "We must reclaim it from the extremists and the ignorant people who want to hijack it. But we must ask what is the content, the institutional content,",
      "And therefore, it reminds me of a great Algerian intellectual Malik bin Nabi's phrase that the Ummah became colonizable before it became colonized. And we must therefore at Ummatics, we take it our mission to become self-governable so we can self-govern.",
      "that requires learning agency, that requires hope. And hope does not have any rational argument. You either have iman by which you can look at the world standing against you and say yes we can. I was once talking to a dear and respected sheikh in America,",
      "and he said, we cannot do it. Muslims always fail. It's too hard. And he wasn't reading from his books because in the books it's supposed to be an obligation. It is this empirical experience and feeling of hopelessness that overwhelms our thinking",
      "Our thinking and so I gave him, I told him about you know Elon Musk wants to go and colonize Mars. Do you think it's possible? And he said, I think it is possible So setting aside the ethics or the feasibility of that You can colonize mars Some humans can colonise mars but these humans those given mandate by Allah",
      "are not able to do what a hundred other nations have already done. And a closer example is European nations that engaged in two world wars and yet were able to conceive of a European Union, and transcend the idea of the nation-state that was Europe's own product. One of the reasons",
      "The reasons that is given for why there can be no Ummah, is that Muslims cannot overcome our internal differences. That the Shia Sunni, Sufi Salafi, Isha'li Athari debates and differences are unbridgeable. But why?",
      "Why? There is no rational argument. Historically, it has been possible there are good times and bad times. And the very idea of the modern institutions of politics is how to negotiate people who deeply disagree and yet can come together for mutual shared interests.",
      "deep differences that inshallah many of the scholars here will continue to deliberate for an academic way in shot for an economic deliberation and then a practical way to manage those differences I'll end with a final reflection on the objections that are often given of Muslim extremism and authoritarianism",
      "as being the trump cards for why Muslims can not. Whenever we are colonized, whenever colonialism happens it happens because some people are picked out from the colonized population to become tyrants over the rest",
      "So autocracy, authoritarianism and tyranny are necessary symptoms of internalized colonialism. And when we look at the contemporary axis of autocracy a term that my good friend Mohammed Fadl here might be credited with there is an axis of",
      "the result of intellectual and spiritual colonialism that we have accepted. And their diagnosis of the Muslim problem today is terrorism, and if there's one thing I want us to remember it's that this is a lie. The problem that Muslims",
      "Its best name is authoritarianism. And those authoritarian rulers are agents of settler colonialism. And so I'll end with those who say that we can protect our religion even as we destroy the spirit of our people, the institutions of our",
      "In the words of al-Mawaridhi, no deen loses political authority except that its rulings are altered and its symbols are obliterated such that every leader adds to it new heresy in every era a new weakness.",
      "comes to a polity if it lacks a deen that unites the heart such that people voluntarily submit to its obligations and unquestionably come to mutual aid for its sake. Such a polity is reduced to tyranny and corruption.\" And that accompanying image is the last comment I'm going to make, the accompanying image of the Ottoman Caliphate in the 19th century.",
      "Coping with Defeat, speaks of how the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, despite its many enemies and its many flaws, was what kept Muslims, Muslim extremism and sectarianism at bay. And it, in fact, was, in many respects, a forward-looking and a progressive entity.",
      "And that as soon as it broke down in 1924, all kinds of extremism and authoritarianism have become endemic. And so what we often think extremism is the obstacle to umatic unity but in fact",
      "and the process of unification that in my view is necessary to combat the fundamental problem, the fundamental problems authoritarianism and hence extremism. My time is up thank you very much for your wonderful audience. Salam alaikum wa rahmatullah"
    ]
  }
]