Interfaith Youth Work

Interfaith Youth Work

Opening Remarks and Clarification

I would like to put a little caveat on what Yigu mentioned about the Mauritanian taxi driver. Some of my biggest fans happen to be taxi drivers. I was with my father in San Francisco and we were walking across the street and this taxi stopped in the middle of the road and rolled down the window and said, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf! Yo! Jazakallah Khairan! And then he drove off and my father just looked at me and said, Do you know that person? But I will say why he said that I was beloved of God.

And it has nothing to do with me. The village that he happens to be from, they're all convinced that they're all beloved of God. And they figure that anybody that gets there has to be beloved of God.

So, I just wanted to correct that. This is a wonderful thing. It's extraordinary to see so many young people.

The Power of Youth and Their Role

We were just talking about Bob Dylan earlier and when he spoke at the Tom Payne award he was given back in 1963, he said it was very depressing to see so many bald-headed people in the audience. And that he really felt that the world's problems had a lot to do with the fact that bald-headed people were largely running the world. And he thought people with more hair should run the world.

So, I do agree with that basic philosophy. I think the young people need to have a coup d'etat and really get rid of a lot of the old people that have been around far too long and have become far too cynical. And that's one of the major problems with being around too long.

I used to be convinced that as you got older that mortality became more present in your life. But what I discovered is actually as people get older, immortality becomes more present because they've been there so long. And you have your tea and your coffee and your marmalade and your toast and it's Groundhog Day and nothing seems to change.

And if you remember in Groundhog Day he just kept trying to kill himself. He was trying to kill himself. He was trying to get out of this thing.

Personal Journey and Awareness of Mortality

So, I think a lot of people, young people I think, are often much more aware of their mortality. And that's simply what happened to me when I became a Muslim. I was what precipitated was a car accident when I was 17.

I actually converted when I was 18. But mortality was just so present in my life. And I think in many ways my own life as a Muslim has been shaped by that awareness of mortality.

Learning from Criticism and Intellectual Humility

One of the things that I admire about Imam Shafi'i is how he achieved such good character, and he said, whenever I would hear my critics, I always took their criticism seriously.

Because often your critics will reveal to you things about yourself that your friends won't, because love blinds, like the Arabs say. People that love you are often blinded to your faults, which is why in marriages, when they begin to fall apart, suddenly the spouse notices a mole that they never noticed before, or certain aspects of their spouse that they really didn't notice, because when they were in love, those faults were veiled from them. So another thing that Imam Shafi'i said is that he never debated anyone except that he asked that God would reveal the truth on that person's tongue so that his ego could submit to it.

The Danger of Intellectual Arrogance

The danger of being right. And intellectual arrogance is a major problem in academia, it's a major problem with people that things come very easily intellectually for them. And religious people who often have very rigorous trainings, if you go through a serious religious training, you often study Islamic tradition, you study logic and rhetoric, you study grammar, and you study debate.

Khattab and Hilal are part of the Islamic curriculum, and Shia scholars now are probably the most formidable debaters in the Muslim world, because they still focus on these areas. But you can also become very arrogant, and a great example of that is Imam al-Ghazali, who was an 11th century theologian who could win any argument, and he became so arrogant, he was an unbearable human being. And he admits this, and his book is one of the great religious autobiographies ever written, which is called Munqidh min al-Dalal.

In English it's translated as Deliverance from Error. In that book he says that he became an impossible human being, that religion was not healing him, it was actually making him worse. It became a disease for him.

And he went through a period of radical skepticism where he doubted everything, something many religious people refused to even contemplate, the possibility that I could be wrong, this whole thing could be wrong. So, this religious certitude. And I think there's a possibility to have a certainty about your faith, but an uncertainty about your understanding of the faith, which is very important.

Interpreting Scripture with Humility

One of the things that in the Islamic classical tradition, one of the things that all scholars are taught, is that if they ever give a religious opinion, to end it with, and God knows better. Not to assume that you are articulating the position of God, but rather you are attempting to understand Scripture. Scripture is in words.

Words are open to interpretation. And this is why there's always a hermeneutic tradition in any great religion. I recommend for any Christian to read St. Augustine's On Christian Doctrine, and to look at how these early

Catholics understood their tradition, the necessity to have the tools to enter into a book, that is believed to be from God, in the Abrahamic faith.

It's very dangerous to arrogate to oneself, the idea that I'm speaking on behalf of God. That I have an open line to God. You know, 9-1-1, and God answers, and I can call on His help and emergency.

The idea that God's directing me inwardly to do what I'm doing. This is an incredibly dangerous idea to put out there in the world, and increasingly so in an environment in which grand narratives are seen for what they are. We're in a period of time, it's a fascinating time, because for the first time in many ways, large numbers of people are realizing that there are other large numbers of people that have completely different worldviews than they do.

Historical Encounters Between Different Worldviews

They have a completely different metaphysics than they do. For centuries, Christians grew up in a world, in Europe, where Christianity was the world. There was no other alternative.

And not only Christianity, but one definition of Christianity. The Catholic Magisterium. The Eastern Orthodox.

When the Muslims first met up with the Byzantines, what happens? You get a period that's called the Iconoclastic Period, where suddenly the Orthodox Christians go around smashing all of the icons, because the Muslims said, thou shalt not make unto God any graven image. Isn't that in your book? Don't you believe that? And so this dialectic that occurred between the Muslims led to the Christians saying, they've got a point. Early Protestantism.

They went and busted all the icons. The only saved icons that we have, and this occurred in the 8th century, the only icons that we have are the ones that were under Muslim protection.

Because the Muslims would not allow these Christian fanatics to go into the monasteries and destroy the icons.

That's iconic, ironic history. So, this is what happens when people come up against other people's views of the world. It forces them to look at their own views, and there are many examples of that in history.

Islamic Encounter with Greek and Buddhist Thought

The Muslims were introduced to Greek thought, and it shattered them. There's a period in Islam where there was a major crisis because suddenly all this Greek philosophy was translated, and these were scholars, and they were reading it, and they were, this is pretty powerful stuff. And suddenly they were looking at their own text through the lens of Hellenistic thoughts.

And you see Aristotelian presentation of knowledge as introduced into the Muslim world during this period, but what's interesting is in the theology of Islam, it was the Buddhist influence that eventually defeated the

Hellenistic thought in the Muslim world. All of the Afghani Muslims, they were all Buddhists. Balkh was the center of Buddhist studies.

Nagarjuna and his logic was studied in Balkh, Afghanistan. And so when these Afghanis became Muslim, they brought all of these intellectual tools into Baghdad and into the Iraqi Kalam environment of theology, and suddenly they have the idea that you can have a paradox, you can have an antinomy, you can have something that is neither-nor. And this is why the Muslims say God is neither imminent nor transcendent.

That's not a Hellenistic idea. That's a Buddhist idea. But that's part of the Islamic doctrine today. That God is neither connected to creation nor disconnected from creation. It's a very fascinating part of Islamic history. My point is that when people are confronted with other people, the best thing that they can do is learn from them.

The Challenge of Confronting Different Ideas

But often we get entrenched out of fear because it challenges us. And suddenly this person doesn't believe what I believe. I just got a letter from a young man who studied in Walla Walla, Washington, where I happen to have been born.

Whenever anyone asks me where I was born, I say Walla Walla. And they can't believe it. Because Walla Walla in Arabic means, by God, by God.

So their response to me is, Walla Walla? Really? That's another way of saying, I'm really an Arab. Walla Walla. But he was studying at Whitman College, and he told me he grew up in Saudi Arabia, had studied in the Saudi world view, and suddenly he was taking courses reading Nietzsche, reading Hume, reading Locke. He had to take a Western Civ course.

And he said it created an incredible amount of turmoil in his heart. He said he was weeping at the night. We forget that there's people out there having these human experiences in dormitories all over this country, all over the world, being confronted with ideas that they've never thought of or heard before.

And this is the power of ideas, that they cause this inner turmoil, like the sand in the oyster shell that can eventually become a pearl, if we understand what the purpose of that agitation is. But he was right in telling me that he was having this major crisis in his life. And he said in the end, it was this incredibly liberating experience, because he was able to go back to his tradition with all these new ways of looking at it.

Embracing Difference and Diversity

And this is why it's very important for us to be open to the other, to not be afraid of the other, to embrace the other, to experience the other, because the Arabic word for difference of opinion is ikhtilaf. And it comes from a word khalafa, what you leave behind, and the word khalfiyyah, which means your background. The idea that everybody who comes into a conversation comes with a different background, and differences often come about because of our different backgrounds.

They are not necessarily wrong, they're actually ways of enhancing and enriching our human experience. And this is why it's so absolutely essential for us to recognize the immense danger in the certitude of religion. I really believe that this is an incredible danger in the modern world.

Religious Madness and Human Nature

And if we don't, as religious communities, and I'm talking about the religious people, if we do not address this fundamental problem in a very deep way, we will continue to have the type of religious madness that is not just occurring in the Muslim world, it would be nice if it was only the Muslims that were crazy. Right? Wouldn't that be wonderful? Well, the problem is, the Muslims are convinced it's only the Christians and the Jews that are crazy. I was in Saudi Arabia, I got into a taxi, and this Saudi Bedouin, Bedouin taxi driver, recognized me, because I have a television program on an Arab satellite thing, he recognized me, and he said, Man, you're a guy from America, and he said, Can I ask you a question? I said, sure.

He said, Why do they hate us? And I said, Well, partly because 15 out of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabians. He said, Do they know anything about fate? And I said, Well, some people believe in fate. He said, If they understand fate, it helps them to deal with crises and not becoming hateful.

This was a taxi driver. You know, if they understand that bad things happen in the world, that you can actually deal with those in ways that you don't become hateful towards other people. And I just thought that was such an amazing, wonderful way of looking at it, from this very simple Bedouin taxi driver, and I can assure you, in my travels around the Muslim world, Ed Bradley asked me, Why do they hate us? And he had told me, right before that, that he was just in Egypt.

And I said, Well, you were just in Egypt. How did they treat you? He said, Great. I had a great time.

I said, Well, maybe they don't hate you. I mean, that's called begging the question. There's an assumption undermining that.

We're not asking that fundamental question. Do they hate us? There's just an assumption that they hate us, and I don't believe that. My experience in the world, as long as I've been here, my experience is generally human beings treat you with dignity if you treat them with dignity.

The Power of Human Kindness

This has been my experience. I read about horrible things that happen, so I know, theoretically, that very bad things happen to people. I'm talking about my anecdotal experience of the world. My anecdotal experience of the world is generally people are actually quite good. And the lesson that Tolstoy teaches this doctor is what most people need is human kindness. Human kindness.

Human kindness transcends religion. This is another major danger with religious people is that they're absolutely convinced that morality and religion are one and the same thing. And so they're unable to recognize

Essential Morality and Human Nature

But essential morality is a human thing. It's something that transcends. It's something inherent to our nature.

But that emerges when we raise children with kindness and love. If children are raised in environments of kindness and love, this is the type of attitude that they will go into the world with. Erickson's trust versus mistrust, the first essential crisis.

Are we able to trust the world? Or is our caregiver neglectful so we come to mistrust the world? And how many young people out there mistrust the world because of the way that they were treated? So there are many things that are wrong with our religions. And in Dawkins' book, Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, which is worth reading. It's actually quite an extraordinary book.

The Metaphor of the Moth and Religious Light

I didn't agree with a lot of his attempts at understanding religion, but he gave one beautiful metaphor where he talked about, because he asked, as an evolutionary biologist, where does religion come from? And his argument, and I thought it was quite a gripping argument, but I understood it in a very different way than he understood it. What he said was that in evolution, oftentimes you have side effects of something that is beneficial. And he gives the example of the moth.

He says that the moth has a guiding mechanism that uses light, celestial orbs, like the moon, the stars. And so at nighttime, in order to get back home, it uses the light to know where it started and how to get home. But he said when it comes across a big light, it commits suicide.

And he says this is religion. There's some benefit, but religion is where it went wrong. Now I really think that that is a valid religious metaphor for much of what's wrong with our religions, that we are blinded by the light of God instead of being guided by the light of God.

The Importance of Humility

And that's where that humility is so important, to be humus of the earth, to be a low thing, a humble thing. And this is the essence of good religion, is that it should inculcate in us a humility, an intellectual and spiritual humility. One of the most beautiful things that I ever heard from a Yemeni teacher, somebody said to him that he was going back to America and he said it was going to be very difficult to live because he was in a completely Muslim environment. It was going to be difficult for him to live amongst these disbelievers. And he said, well, I'll give you something to help you do that. It's a true story.

He said, anyone that you see, assume that they're better than you in the eyes of God. Because you don't know what their state is with God. Nobody knows that.

And so always assume they're better than you. And that will help you to live amongst them. That's classical Islamic teaching.

That's not a redaction. That is the way the Turks were taught. The Masnavi, Rumi's book, The Masnavi, was taught in all the madrasas of Ottoman Turkey, of the Ottoman tradition.

Sufism and Self-Knowledge

It's not something, the traditional tasawwuf, it's not, in Western orientalist tradition they often say that it's a sect in Islam. That's not true. It was considered mainstream Islam.

It was mainstream Islam. And the essence of Sufism is humility. And a recognition that we're fallible as human beings.

And being non-judgmental. Raghib al-Isfahani said the most important thing for a religious person is to know themselves. And he said the reason for this, and this is a thousand years ago, he said the reason for this is that the person that has self-knowledge will never see a human being do a heinous act except to know that they themselves have done it or are capable of doing it.

Like fire is capable of coming out of flint. That it's the human soul. That anything that anybody does out there, as a human being, you have within yourself the capacity to do that.

The Power of Tolerance and Exposure

You're so important because if we can teach more and don't underestimate the power of tolerance because a lot of people talk about respect and respect is good and they diminish tolerance. There's this idea that tolerance is too low. You have to respect another person.

But tolerance is a very beautiful word and it comes in medical usage. When you're multiply exposed to a substance you develop a tolerance for it. The more you're exposed to it the greater the tolerance. This is why an alcoholic can always drink you under the table because they're exposed to it so often they can take a lot more alcohol.

The same is true for the other. The more we meet each other the more we speak to each other.

And I'll end with one example of this.

Building Bridges Through Personal Encounters

I brought Rabbi Lerner to a Muslim audience in Toronto. There were about 20,000 Muslims there. And his wife, who's also a rabbi was very worried and scared.

And she just said, Is he going to be safe? Is he going to be safe? And I said, He'll be safer there than he would be in New York on the streets. So they came and then I brought her and Rabbi Lerner to meet a Muslim scholar there who's a brilliant man from Mauritania. Really brilliant man.

And they sat down and I saw this woman relax more and more as she was listening to him explain how we share Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and these are our stories and we have so much in common. And there's so many reasons why we should be bonded. And really alleviating and she said to me after, It's so important for us to meet.

We should meet these leaders. I don't think she ever sat with an Alim before. I don't know, but I don't think she ever did in that way.

It is an extraordinary thing. This is the best world that we have. This is it.

Religion as Solution and Problem

And so we have to make the best of it. And religion is certainly a great place to start. We have powerful tools within our religious traditions to bring people together to solve problems. Not to be part of the problem. But religion can also very much be part of the problem and we recognize that and see that. We have to address that.

In honesty, humility, and a recognition that all of our religions have immense shadows. Like the Jungian shadow. We cast an immense shadow.

Abraham has an immense shadow. Jewish, Christian, Islamic tradition is filled with things that we have to recognize. They're very disturbing.

They're very troubling. Hinduism. Even Buddhism.

Buddhists have the best press. I wish the Muslims had the press of Buddhism. But trust me. Study a little Buddhist history. There are some pretty intolerant Buddhist leaders as well. When everybody gets into power, they tend to abuse it.

It's the nature of power. God bless this organization. The work that you work out.

Closing: Hope in the Next Generation

All of you. It's just really, for me, very heartwarming to see all these wonderful young people. Let's get to work for all these young people.

Really. I'm serious. I was with a 16 year old girl last night who's the daughter of a friend of mine.

Since she was 7, she wanted to be a marine biologist. She just went to the Bahamas. She cleaned up a beach.

She was talking about Styrofoam and what it's doing to the fish. And she said, I love sushi and the fish is all going to disappear. But she was just so filled with hope.

Real hope. And wanted to do something. And that purity of intention, that goodness that's in that heart, we have to encourage that.

And we have to help our children navigate this world so that they don't become cynics. That they're open to the possibility of becoming saints. Thank you very much.