Islam- An American Religion

Islam: An American Religion?

Opening Reflections on Culture and Religion

Junaid reportedly said that water takes on the color of the cup. He was probably referring to the state of a Gnostic, you know, the state within the heart where we know God. But I think the saying also relates to the relationship between religion and culture.

That is, water is Islam in this metaphor, and the cup are the pre-existing cultures that it enters into. I would argue that Islam doesn't come to do away with our cultures. American cultures, Arab, African, Pakistani, Iranian, it doesn't superimpose itself, rather it takes away the idols that we've added, both to our cultures and to our hearts.

The Prophetic Restoration of Abraham's Legacy

This is clear in early Islam, the time of Abraham, peace be upon him, the time of Ishmael, all of this predated the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him. And so, when the Prophet came, he's restoring the rights of Abraham, of Ishmael, of Hagar, he's removing the idols from the Kaaba. And in a similar sense, we can argue that, you know, there's a lot of good in the origins of Western culture, which is quite diverse.

There's not a monolithic Western culture. There are, you know, white Muslims, black Muslims, Latino immigrants, and many people of diverse faiths. Yet, there is an innate goodness in all human beings, and this is clear from, you know, our Judeo-Christian heritage, the Sermon on the Mount, the Golden Rule.

Western Philosophical and Literary Heritage

It's also clear from Greek philosophy. A lot of the early Muslims believed that Hermes was the Prophet Idris, one of the founding fathers of the Greek philosophical heritage, who went on to inspire Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus. Also, many of our great writers, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Blake, these were clearly people of inspiration.

And I would also argue certain ideals in the United States are also noble, if not all of the realities. The Bill of Rights, the Constitution, Women's Rights, the Civil Rights Movement. But we also have our idols.

We also have our idols that need to be removed. Racism, war, sexism, consumerism, materialism. It's an honor to introduce a speaker, an educator, a scholar who's well-versed in both the Islamic intellectual tradition and Western culture.

Introduction of Sheikh Hamza Yusuf

Sheikh Hamza Yusuf is President and Senior Faculty Member at Zaytuna College, America's first accredited Muslim liberal arts college. He's an advisor to the Center for Islamic Studies at Berkeley's Graduate Theological

Union. He serves as Vice President for the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies, which was founded and is currently presided over by Sheikh Abdullah Bin Baya, a world-renowned Muslim scholar and jurist.

In addition, Yusuf joined the Emirates Fatwa Council under the leadership of Sheikh Abdullah. He's also the author of several books and scholarly articles, including Purification of the Heart, The Content of Character, Caesarean Moonbirths, Prayer of the Oppressed, and Agenda to Change Our Condition. He was recently named America's most influential Islamic scholar by the Muslim 500.

I'd like to add that Zaytuna College was, you know, the place that I actually not only have learned a great deal from the lectures of Sheikh Hamza, Imam Zayed, Dr. Bazian, but I also found love there. It's where I met my wife. So it's a true pleasure to introduce to you this evening one of our great thinkers and someone who I think can help heal the divide ladies and gentlemen, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf.

Sheikh Hamza's Opening Greetings

(السلام عليكم - Assalamu alaikum) (الحمد لله - Alhamdulillah). A lot of familiar faces tonight.

(الحمد لله - Alhamdulillah). First of all, I just want to really thank Sam Hirbad for doing such an incredible thing that reflects our tradition, our religion. There was so much commitment to excellence and beauty, so I just want to thank him.

It's just to come here and see something that normally would be part of this culture's hegemonic presence. It's very overwhelming and powerful sometimes, but to see something that reflects another part of America that is often just set aside and people don't realize that Muslims have been here from the start. We've been part of the fabric and tapestry and culture of this country.

African Musical Heritage and Islamic Influence

People, I read a book years ago called Africa and the Blues, and I was once in a Tijani zawiyah in Mali. I was, I think, 19 years old, and they started singing this song, and I was thinking, where have I heard this before? And I realized it was American music. It was literally a, what they call a Bo Diddley beat, and it really struck me as just so strange and familiar at the same time, hearing these people singing (لا إله إلا الله - la ilaha illallah - there is no god but Allah), which a lot of people don't know is actually a 4-4 beat, which is the basis of most American music.

It's usually 3-4-4-4. Sometimes you get into some jazz, like 6-8 and things like that, but it's generally a 4-4 beat, so you have (لا إله إلا الله - la ilaha illallah), and it's 4-4 beat, so you hear that, you know (لا إله إلا الله - la ilaha illallah), and that's right out of the African slaves that came here, and in this book, Africa and the Blues, one of the things they pointed out, it was a musicologist from Germany that did this, and this is something I think Sylvia Duf points out also, is that there was so much suicide on these ships that they started bringing these African, itinerant African musicians that would do dhikr in Shad on the ships to keep people's spirits up, right? So this

comes into America, and you see the influence of it in the Mississippi Delta, which is where a lot of the slaves arrived. In fact, back in the 1920s, there was a blues band from Mississippi called the Mississippi Sheikhs.

Tribute to Amir Suleiman

So anyway, that's a little side. I just want to say I don't feel like the main speaker. I think the main speaker preceded me.

Amir Suleiman, what an incredible gift, and the artifice that goes into that, if people think that this stuff is just, there's inspiration undeniably, but there's a lot of really incredible hard work in the craft, and one of the interesting things about this tradition of spoken word is that it's really added a third type of speech that the Arabs identified very early on. So traditionally, the Arabs had nathar and navam, prose and poetry, but there was a third type of speech that they called saja, which is very similar in Arabic to what we just heard, and it was a type of inspiration. In fact, somebody once began to spontaneously recite saja in front of the prophet after he recited some Quran, and he just said, stop, because there's a relationship to poetry and revelation, which is why many prophets were accused of being poets, and the Arabs accused the prophets of being a poet because of the relationship between the two, because inspiration is very similar to revelation, and a true poet is inspired.

Poetry and Divine Inspiration

A true poet, and there's a lot of people that write verse, but a poet like our brother Amir Suleiman is an inspired person who's coming up with things that really, in essence, they're kind of a conduit for those words, and it flows from, in fact, the prophet once, when Hassan Ibn Thabit was reciting some poetry, he said, recite this poetry because the mushrikeen, it really affects them, and then he said, may God inspire you with the Holy Spirit, and that's where it comes from. It's all coming from these angelic realms. So I would like to talk tonight a little bit about, if I just push on the main, yeah (بسم الله - Bismillah).

(بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم - Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim - In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful). We begin everything with (بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم - Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim). There's a lot of debate on what that ba is, but it's definitely a ba al-isti'ana, (نستعين بالله - nasta'inu billah - we seek help from Allah).

Arnold Toynbee's Predictions

Arnold Toynbee is a very interesting character. In 1947, he wrote an essay called Islam in the West, and this essay is a very interesting essay because he talks about this awakening that's going to happen in the Muslim world, and he talks about fanaticism will arise out of three places, probably Afghanistan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. It's 1947, and he talks about how it'll probably be left to the Americans to deal with this problem.

One of the things that he said, though, was that pan-Islamism is dormant, and he was a great historian, so he really knew about pan-Islamism, this kind of spirit. Yet we have to reckon with the possibility that the sleeper

may awake. If ever the cosmopolitan proletariat of a Westernized world revolt against Western domination, and this is a lot of what's happening right now.

There's a lot of people. The Chinese are fed up. The Africans are fed up. The Indians are fed up. There's a lot of people just fed up with the Western power that's existed for so long, and he talked about that the Muslims could take up a kind of anti-Western leadership and evoking the militant spirit of Islam, and he talked about the possibility of a race war. It was very troubling.

Prophetic Hadith About the Europeans

I don't agree with this vision. I think I would prefer to look at it like the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - sallallahu alayhi wa sallam - peace and blessings be upon him) said, Your companions are the Europeans as long as there's good in the world, which is related in Kanz al-'Umal, and Mustawrad al-Qarashi, he said once in the presence of Amr ibn al-'As, he said, The Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) said the end of time won't come until the Europeans are the majority of people, and Rome is Europe. If you look at Rome's sacred history, all of it goes back to the Aeneid, to Romulus and Remus, to the foundation of the city of Rome.

The Venerable Bede in his history of England says that the English people came from Rome, so the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) called them Bani al-Asfar, the white people, and they're very powerful people historically. Their great gift was in organization. The Roman cohort was 12,000, and the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) said 12,000 people will never be defeated for lack of numbers.

The Noble Qualities of Europeans

I suspect that he was looking at the Roman legion, that that's where that number came from, because they were indestructible as a military force, but when Amr ibn al-'As heard that hadith, he said, Think about what you're saying. He said, I heard it from the message of God. And he said, if that's true, they have four beautiful qualities.

He said, They're the most forebearing of people during civil strife. And he said, And they're the quickest to recover from calamities. And then he said, And they're the quickest to return to the battlefield after fleeing from the battlefield.

And then he said, And they're the most kind to the poor, the orphans, and the handicapped. And then he said, And they have a fifth quality that's especially beautiful. They constrain their rulers from oppression more than any other people.

So he was looking, if that's true, that the Europeans are the majority people. And Amr ibn al-'As said, because the majority people would be imitating them. So he said, if that's true, he chose to look at the good qualities of the people.

Calling to the Better Angels

And this is calling people to the better angels of their nature. This is what Martin Luther King did. And anybody who's ever really been able to effect change in this civilization has done it by calling the people to their higher selves, not calling them to their lower selves or reminding them of how despicable they can be.

And this is something that our prophet was especially gifted at. A man who fought him for over 20 years. It's amazing. He had the gift of winning over his enemies and making them his friends. It's much better than destroying your enemies or suffering a defeat at their hands. So I reject that vision and would like to look at another possibility.

The Declaration of Independence and Constitution

This is a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, which shows you that a lot of work goes into a good piece of writing. People think Thomas Jefferson just wrote it out. He actually originally said, he took Locke's formula and said that are endowed with a certain inalienable rights or unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.

That was in the original draft. It's a little too materialistic. He put happiness. He went with Aristotle, eudaimonia, and happiness. We all want happiness. And then we have the Constitution.

First Principles and Religious Freedom

These are the first principles. First principles get to the axioms of a culture. If you look in the Constitution, Article 1 is that the Congress shall make no law. And this is the first article. This came after this was an amendment to the Constitution because people were worried about rights being infringed upon because that's what Britain had done to them. So they wanted to ensure.

So they made these articles. And in Article 1 here is that there are five freedoms. And the most important, it's interesting that the press was, it's the only business mentioned in the Constitution to protect press because they really believed you needed a free press in order to ensure an educated democracy. They had to know the issues, which is why corporate press is so dangerous because they give you now the corporate interest. In fact, now they don't even do that anymore. They just give you entertainment.

Everybody knows about Stormy Daniels, but nobody knows about the $20 trillion national debt. But this was the point that it made it that people were free to worship as they understood. Thomas Jefferson had a famous statement.

He said, whether my neighbor worships one god or 20 gods, neither robs my pocket nor breaks my bones. It's a beautiful sentiment. And this was traditionally the way the Muslims went.

Islamic Tradition of Religious Tolerance

When they went to places, they adopted this approach. With the exception of the Arabian Peninsula, there's

debates about where it is. The Arabian Peninsula is equivalent to the Vatican State.

You can't build a mosque in the Vatican State. You can't live in the Vatican State as a Muslim. You're there because you're Catholic.

And that's the Hejaz tradition, although people of other faiths can come into the Hejaz and there's even a khilaf about Mecca and Medina. But the Hejaz is specific to, it's like a sacred space for the people of Islam. And so the intellectual origins of toleration in the Western tradition, because historically the West was not tolerant, unlike the Muslim tradition, which has bleak periods.

Human Fallibility in Religious History

It's undeniable. Imam Zayed, I like to quote Imam Zayed on this. When you read Muslim history, you should take Iman vitamins, because we forget that Muslims are human beings.

It's like right now the Catholic Church is going through, I want to tell my Catholic brothers and sisters, we know what you're going through, because people, they think now Catholicism is pedophilia. They think Islam is terrorism. Catholicism is not pedophilia.

Catholicism is St. Thomas Aquinas. It's St. Augustine. It's Julian of Norwich. It's Master Eckhart. It's John of St. Thomas. Brilliant tradition.

Great intellectuals. But it has fallible people now running the institution. We have a president right now who a lot of people are embarrassed about.

Personal Anecdote About Embarrassment

I was in Rome, and I saw a cardinal. He asked me where I was from, and I said California. He said, oh, the United States.

I said, yeah, these days I like to say California. And then I said, you know, we're a little embarrassed about what's happening in Washington. He said, we're all embarrassed, my brother.

So the whole world is embarrassed, right? So anyway, I don't want to trash Trump tonight, but we have to remember that the presidency is an institution that's not necessarily an individual that embodies it. We've had terrible presidents in this country, and we've had some good ones, but it's an institution.

Fallibility in Religious Practice

And that's the nature of religion is that it's fallible human beings attempting to practice and oftentimes falling short.

And so when you read Muslim history, there are periods of persecution. The Jews were persecuted in Andalusia in Spain at one period. In fact, Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi took in Momoyn al-Din, Moshe bin Mamun.

He had to flee persecution in Spain, and he went to Egypt, and he was taken in as a refugee in Egypt. He actually became an advisor to Salah al-Din and his personal physician. So John Locke and Hobbes were influenced by this man.

Edward Pocock and John Locke

Edward Pocock is a very interesting character. He, the Pocock Library in Oxford has 400 Arabic manuscripts that he brought from Aleppo because he studied for four years in Aleppo, and he became a scholar. This was the personal teacher of Locke.

So Locke is considered one of the most influential people in terms of what influenced the founding fathers of this country. And John Locke was very intrigued by Islam. In fact, he was actually thinking about pursuing the Arabic studies, and he was convinced not to do that.

But the point is that he studied the system of the millet system. And if you look at the Treatise of Toleration, which John Locke, he uses the Muslims as a case study in there. But what's very intriguing is that the first edict of toleration in the West came from Transylvania, which was under Ottoman caesarean.

The First Edict of Toleration

So it was a Christian edict that tolerated all sects of Christianity. Before that, if you were other than a Catholic, you were persecuted. And even the Protestants initially persecuted groups that didn't follow their view of things.

So the Anglican Church, if you look at this country's history, you had Christians coming here, fleeing religious persecution from Protestants in England. So this is very important that America begins as a place of fleeing for religious persecution. It's very interesting.

Quranic Verse on Religious Freedom

And religious persecution is a very interesting problem. This idea of forcing people to believe what you believe.

And the Qur'an is clearly... (لَا إِكْرَاهَ فِي الدِّينِ - Laikraha fi al-din) - There is no compulsion in religion - Quran 2:256), which is in Surah Al-Baqarah, is a late verse.

And Tahir ibn Ashur says, we should see this verse as abrogating all the verses that would indicate anything else. The Prophet was told, do you think you can convince people? You can force them to believe? You can't force people to believe. And in fact, if you study the Ashab al-Ukhdud, the people of the trench, it's a very interesting story, which is a historical fact.

They were religiously persecuted. And that's why Allah judges for them against the Jewish ruler of Yemen in that period, despite the fact that his Aqidah was probably more sound. But if you look... So this is a treatise of toleration, which is for religious freedom in the Jefferson.

Jefferson's Legacy

And this was what he was... He was most proud of three things. It's on his tombstone. One, that he'd written this edict of toleration for religions.

The two, that he was the writer of the Declaration of Independence. And the third, that he founded the University of Virginia. These were the things that he really felt were his legacy.

Muslims in Early American History - The Mississippi Discovery

So Muslims in America, where do we come in? Well, if you look, the discovery of the Mississippi, this is 1541. And this is a famous painting by William Powell. And I looked this up.

Powell said that he based this on the most accurate historical sources that he found. So he based this. And this is one of the things of hidden in plain sight.

So if you look at his picture, who's with him there? And this hangs now in the Capitol building. So there's a Muslim wearing his turban and helmet. He's a Moor.

Because the Spanish, when they came over, they thought they were going to India. Which was controlled by Muslims. And so they always brought translators and Muslims with them.

Arabic Names in Spanish Territories

And this is why, if you travel around, you will notice a lot of Spanish names, like Alcatraz is Al-Qatrus. You have a lot of Arabic names wherever the Spanish went, because they had Muslims with them. They called them the Mudajjanun, the Mudajjariz.

The Mudajjanun were the domesticated Muslims. Right? And they brought them with them. And that's why you find in Mexico, you find all these names like Nura and Fatima.

And these are names from the Spanish that brought Muslims over. And they were here. So this is early on the Muslims were here.

Ottoman armor was discovered in an archaeological dig in Virginia. There's evidence that the Muslims were here before Columbus. These are debated points, and I understand that.

Evidence of Early Muslim Presence

But forgotten roots. And there was a scholar that found Arabic inscriptions in several places in the United States. We also know that the Seminole Indians, if you look at their dress, they're clearly wearing West African garments.

They're wearing turbans, askeolah. If you look at a picture of askeolah, he basically looks like a West African Muslim. So we're pretty certain that they were here.

The Founding Fathers' Views on Islam

So what were the Founding Fathers' views on Islam? Well, George Sale, and I actually have, there's not that many copies left, but I actually have an original copy of George Sale's Quran, published in 1734. And Thomas Jefferson, this is in Thomas Jefferson's library. And this was the Quran that Keith Ellison was, when he became the first Muslim congressman, he swore his oath on the Jefferson Quran.

And symbolizing this, you know, this goes back a long time. This was the first translation I read, which is very strange because it's a very, it's actually a pretty good translation, but it's written in very archaic English. But it was the one that I found, for some reason, at a used bookstore, and the first one that I read.

So somebody gifted it to me, so I think. Now, another really interesting character was Henry Stubb, who wrote an account of the rise and progress of Mohammedanism. This book was never published because he was afraid of persecution.

Henry Stubb and Nietzsche on Islam

He really praises Islam. It was a book that we know was in the library in a manuscript form with Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes. Henry Stubb was the first European to really praise Islam and recognize that they'd done things that the West had to catch up.

In fact, Nietzsche, who dies in 1900, Nietzsche was writing mostly in the 1870s and 1880s. Nietzsche in The Antichrist actually says that Muslim civilization even makes our 19th century civilization look very late indeed. We haven't caught up yet.

So a lot of fair-minded Europeans were aware of this amongst the intellectuals. Benjamin Franklin, we heard in Amir Suleiman's poem today. Franklin's an interesting character.

Benjamin Franklin and Native Americans

He wrote a little pamphlet about the narrative of the massacres of a certain Indian tribe. They killed tens of Indians, including women and children. And so he was very disturbed by this.

There's two great blemishes, I think, on this country that we're still dealing with. One of them is just the incredible mistreatment of the native peoples that were here originally. It could have been very different.

And there were enlightened Americans, even at this time, that recognized that it could have been different. But this is one of the great crises of Tawfiq is something that is determined by God alone. And the other, obviously, is the African-American and the slavery.

Again, you had enlightened people from the very start. But unfortunately, they were a minority. So in this treatise, which is very interesting here, you can see that Benjamin Franklin says that he's rebuking these Christians who mowed down these Indians.

Franklin's Pamphlet About Khalid

And he said that Muhammad, when the account was brought to him, applauded the men for their humanity, but said to Khalid with great indignation, O Khalid, thou butcher, cease to molest me with thy wickedness if thou profess after a heap of gold as large as Mount Uhud and you should expend it all in God's cause, thy merit would not efface the guilt incurred by the murder of the meanest of those poor captives. This goes back to an incident where some captives were killed. And when Khalid was a relatively new Muslim, but when the prophet heard about it, the first thing that he did when he got the message was he turned to the Qibla and he said (اللهم إني بريء من ما صنع خالد - Allahumma inni bari'u min ma sana'a Khalid - O Allah, I disassociate myself from what Khalid has done).

I have nothing to do with what Khalid did. And then he immediately got Diya money and sent it to pay to the people whose relatives had been killed. What's interesting to me is that what Benjamin Franklin says in this pamphlet is basically they would have been better off had they surrendered to Muslims because Muslims, since Khalid was, he says this later, since Khalid was rebuked by the prophet, Muslims have never harmed a captive, which is quite tragic what's happened now because that was the attitude of Benjamin Franklin.

And he knew about the captives of the Barbary Coast. So it's not like he didn't have history about this. So, oh, how do I go back? Can I go, yeah, there.

Benjamin Rush on Religious Education

Benjamin Rush is another very interesting character. He was a physician, believed that the great crisis was the African-American crisis, wanted the slaves to be freed at the time. He felt that all men were created equal, had to apply to everybody.

There's a beautiful story. I read one of his books where he, it was actually an essay, but he talked about how he went to the African-American church in Boston and helped build this church. And then he said, we all sat down to the table of brotherhood and ate black and white together.

These were some of the Christians that really felt that this was real Christianity to see these people as equal to us. So he actually said, and this is very interesting, such as my veneration for every religion that reveals the attributes of God or a future state of rewards and punishments, that I had rather see the opinion of Confucius or Muhammad inculcating upon our youth than see them grow up wholly devoid of a system of religious principles. And this is a man who knew something about Islam.

This is not somebody who was ignorant. Many highly literate people. This is another very interesting event that happens in history.

Joel Barlow and the Treaty of Tripoli

Joel Barlow, who for people that had to do Norton's anthology of American literature, I don't know if they still do that. When I was in school, you had to do this Norton's anthology. But in Norton's anthology, there's something called Hasty Pudding.

Joel Barlow wanted to be the poet laureate of the United States. And he aspired to write a true epic, which he called the Columbiad. It never took off.

But he did have one poem that was famous. It's called Hasty Pudding. And he was part of a group called the Connecticut Wits.

He was George Washington's ambassador to the North African states, Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Libya. And he actually wrote Hasty Pudding in Algiers. Because Hasty Pudding was a type of sweet dessert that they ate in colonial America.

So he was missing that dessert. The baklava wasn't doing it for him. Anyway, he meets with the dey.

Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli

And he did these treaties for Washington that are very interesting. But in the Treaty of Tripoli, there's an Article 11. And this was a treaty done between the Libyans and the Americans.

And in Article 11, in the original treaty, so, as the governor of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Muslims. And as the said states never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mohammedan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. This treaty was ratified without one dissenting voice in the Senate.

But Article 11 was not in the original translation. That's very interesting. But this is what they gave the Muslims.

George Bethune English - Early Muslim Convert

So, anyway, John Adams becomes president. I found out about George Bethune English from reading. I was reading the Jefferson Adams correspondence, which is really an interesting read.

There's letters between the two of them. They had kind of their adult life. They had an ongoing correspondence.

Very interesting letters. Adams was a real believer, and Jefferson was, they called him the atheist president. He was a deist, probably.

Harvard's Early Arabic Studies

But anyway, I found out about George Bethune English because Jefferson said, I just read George Bethune English's travel log up the Nile. And in the footnote, it said, George Bethune English, an early Muslim convert to Islam. An early American convert to Islam.

This was his PhD, not PhD, because the highest degree at this point in America was the master's. They brought the PhD from Germany. It was a research degree for specialization.

Harvard's Early Arabic Studies

The grounds of Christianity examined by comparing the New Testament with the old by George Bethune English. He got a master's with honors from Harvard. And in it, he proved he knew Arabic.

Hebrew, believe it or not, Arabic was taught at Harvard in the colonial period. Isn't that incredible? And if you go and look, and this is a true, true fact. If you go and look at the dictionary of Webster, the very first Webster, you know Noah Webster.

All those Webster's dictionaries, anybody can, Sam, this is an idea for you. Anybody can do a Webster's dictionary. It's out of copyright.

So you just call your own dictionary Webster's. He did the first dictionary. Why? Because he wanted to have a spelling that differed from Europe.

Hence, we write color, C-O-L-O-R. They write C-O-L-O-U-R. We spell jail the way it's pronounced.

They spell jail, looks like goal, G-O-A-L, even though it's pronounced jail. They say tomato, we say tomato. They say potato, we say potato.

That's why, where's Catherine? South Africans, they do all this. They say things like raunch, dead of ranch. Raunch sounds like raunchy.

Webster's Dictionary and Arabic

So he wanted to write an American English and standardize it. He wrote a beautiful book that you should read for your children. It's called Webster's Advice to the Young.

And it's pure Unitarianism. It's beautiful. Any Muslim could read it and wouldn't find anything offensive in it.

But in his book, he wanted to prove in his first dictionary, 1828, that English went back to Hebrew. But he ended up saying it was actually closer to Arabic. And in that dictionary, and I have a copy, a facsimile of it, in that dictionary, he has all these Arabic typeset in Arabic in 1828 in the United States.

Amazing. It's like, where did they get Arabic typesetting in 1828? We're still having a problem with Apple and Arabic typesetting. And I finally found out by somebody high up at Apple why there's no Arabic typesetting that really works very well.

Because we bootleg everything. So they just don't have a monetary incentive to make good Arabic software. Arabs think it's a conspiracy. They're just trying to keep us down. No. No monetary benefit.

Muslim Slaves in America

So now this is the other amazing, the slaves in America that came, it's estimate, this is a picture from probably Senegal. And if you look, the tragedy of this picture is you can see the Muslim in the back with the robe and the hat. That Muslims were heavily involved in the slave trade.

Not all of them. Omar Tal, one of the great West African scholars, was a mujahid against the slave trade. So there were Muslims that really recognized that it was wrong.

But like now, you have Muslims in sexual trafficking. I mean, whether or not they're true Muslims, it's called the true Scotsman fallacy. We would say they aren't true Muslims.

But they're Muslims and they get involved in these things. Coyotes, like you have Mexican coyotes that bring these poor Mexican people over the border. They do the same thing now with the Syrian refugees and then some of these women end up, God forbid, in sexual slavery and things like this.

So there's good and bad Muslims. It's like there's good and bad people everywhere. But these Muslims, it's estimated, it's obviously hard to prove this, but we know that it's between 10 and 30% of the slaves.

And we have documentation. Sylvia Duf, Alan Austin did a lot of documentation. So we know that out of the millions of people, and this is why the Bahia revolt in Brazil, this was a slave revolt.

They were corresponding in Arabic. That's how they were actually corresponding in their messages so that the Portuguese couldn't read it, the Portuguese Brazilians. So there were huge populations of Muslims in South America, in Central America, some in Mexico.

And then there were large numbers of slaves that were here in the United States that were Muslim.

Yarrow Mahmood - A Notable Muslim Slave

Yarrow Mahmood is one of my favorite characters. You can see he designed a Nigerian type of hat.

So this was a picture that was painted by the man who painted this, Charles William Peale, painted George Washington. And in his own diary, he said he originally intended to, Yarrow Mahmood was a freed slave who lived in Washington during, this was done in 1819, but he lived during the founding of the country. He was known for saying his, walking up and down Georgetown, saying his prayers.

He was reciting the Quran, which is a very North, West African thing to do. The West Africans at night, they go out and they do what they call their surat, you know, where they review their Quran. But he was noted to do that.

They said he would chant in Arabic, his prayers, walking up and down Georgetown. He was very well loved.

He'd been a, he was a, he built houses from brick and he had his own house.

He was freed. But Peale said, he originally intended speaking to spend one day with him. He ended up, he liked him so much.

He spent three days with him when he sat for him because he enjoyed the experience so much. So you can tell he's got an etched smile on his face. Like he's one of these people that his, his just, the default setting of his mouth was in a smile, which there's not very many people like that.

Some people like Trump has the default setting of an intense frown or really a scowl. He's always, he's got that scowl on his face, you know, but you can see this beautiful smile.

Abdurrahman Ibrahim bin Suri

And then here's another extraordinary, Abdurrahman Ibrahim bin Suri. Suri, he was actually the subject of a film that was done by Michael Wolff and Alexander Cronemeyer about the prince. What was it called? Prince Among Slaves. So this was a man who was freed.

He went around the country lecturing, raised money, actually got his family freed and ended up.

Ayub Suleiman Diallo

This man is another extraordinary man, Ayub Suleiman Diallo. This is a, from Senegal.

Beautiful man. He was actually painted in England. He became a cause celebre.

He, he, the Unitarians were so impressed. He learned English in a few months and he was a theologian. So he would debate against the Trinity and the Unitarians were so impressed with it that they would take him to debate against the Trinitarian preachers in the churches.

And he ended up going to England. He was, he was honored in England and he ended up having commercial ties with the English traders and going back to Senegal. So another, I wanted to do him first because I was involved in that but I really thought that he was just such incredible.

He was clearly a wali of God. I mean, I believe this because, you know, in the prison, he was put in jail for a short period but they all just couldn't help but really admiring this man.

Omar bin Said

And then this is an actual photograph of a Muslim, Omar bin Said, another extraordinary character with an amazing story. He was also educated and this is, this is actually from his own hand. Yeah. That's actually from Surat Mulk and it's accurate.

So he wrote out Surat Mulk in his thing.

George Washington and Muslim Slaves

George Washington had a character who's kind of a gopher character, Tench Tilghman. And in it, he asked him to find him some slaves and in the letter, he actually says they can be Christians or Mohammedans or atheists as long as they have good character, equal opportunity slavery.

As long as they have good character and a nice face, right? That was his criterion. So we have pictures of him. So this is in the actual letter.

That's in his own hand. So he says they could be Mohammedans. So clearly there were Muslims that he knew were good people to have on the plantation, I guess.

And yeah. So very interesting history this country has. But here's a picture of him, right? And there you see in the back, right, look at that.

There's a little turban on. They called these Blackamores. It was a status symbol of a Muslim slave.

The War of Tripoli

The War of Tripoli is probably one of the great tragedies in American history. Washington did not want a war economy. He did not want a standing army because he did not want the burden that it would take on the treasury.

And believe it or not, the Treaty of Tripoli and Algiers cost the US government at the time $850,000. That was the deal that they paid to the Muslims of North Africa. And that was one third of the federal budget at the time.

Amazing. But Washington did not, he thought it was better to pay tribute than to get into a war economy because he just felt it would really do what it did to the European states, which was create massive debt. So now we have a, you know, we have almost a trillion dollar budget now for the, it's moving up upwards.

I think it's about $600 billion. It's crazy, war economy. So Jefferson, when he became president, he wanted to, he didn't want to pay tribute.

And so he said we should go to war with them. So he begins the thing, the US constitution.

American Naval Technology

One of the things about the Americans is that the technology has always been extraordinary. At this time, the Americans developed ships that were built with oak from Georgia and they called them iron sides. And the French and English thought they were made of iron because the cannonballs would bounce off of them. The oak was so strong, it wouldn't penetrate the wood.

Letters of Marque and Reprisal

But if you read the constitution, there's something in there called letters of mark and reprisal. We have some lawyers here. Who's a lawyer? We have a lawyer. Did you do that in constitutional law? Yeah.

What's a letter of mark and reprisal? It's basically permission for private ships to pirate ships of the enemy. So the US constitution actually grants the right for piracy on the high seas. So this is what countries do.

If you had a treaty with them, they didn't attack your ships. But if you didn't have a treaty with them, they would attack your ships. So when the Americans broke off from England, the English pressured the Algeria and Libya and Tunis to actually target the American ships.

The English ships weren't being harassed because they had treaties with these. So they said, no, no, no. You have to target them, put pressure on them.

So this is what happened. Now, this is a very decadent, unfortunately, and we have some Algerians here. So I don't want to.

I love Algeria. I studied in Algeria. But the Algerians were, the government was pretty decadent.

Nothing's changed. It's been going on for a while.

Bainbridge and the Ottoman Caliph

But Bainbridge actually took the Philadelphia into Istanbul in the Marmara Sea. He goes into Istanbul and he meets with the Ottoman caliph at the time. The Ottoman caliph said that he was so happy to see stars in the American flag.

He said, we too have stars. And he said, the beauty of this is that there's enough room in this world for all of us, just like there's enough room in the sky for the stars. That's what he told the American. He said, there's plenty of room for us.

And so Bainbridge, though, loses the Philadelphia and it runs aground on some shoals.

Stephen Decatur - American Hero

And this young man, lieutenant, he could have almost been president of the United States. But I don't know if people know, but there's cities all over America called Decatur. They're named after, this is the first major hero

superstar in early America. This man led a raid on the Philadelphia. It was in the harbor.

And they dressed up as Muslims. And they went in pretending they were a Maltese ship that needed help. And so they lined up alongside the Philadelphia to destroy it.

Because at the time, the Philadelphia would be like today having a nuclear warhead or F-16. It was very advanced technology. And it would have really given them an advantage.

Peter Lyle - The Renegade

And here's the most bizarre thing. And this is the weird thing about history. There was a character in Libya.

The Karamli were the rulers of Libya at the time. But there was a character in Libya named Peter Lyle. Peter Lyle was a Scotsman.

And they had these characters called renegados. These were Europeans that became Muslim. They called them renegados, renegades.

The Spanish called them renegado, but it became a term used even amongst the English. Peter Lyle had been impressed by the Americans when he was a young man. And if you know about impressment, it was a horrible thing.

If you want to read a good story about it, it's Billy Budd by Herman Melville. But impressment was where they would just come alongside a ship and force people, or they would take people from the shore and just bring them onto the ship. It was basically like a slavery.

He had been impressed on an American ship. He hated Americans. He became a Muslim.

He actually rose to the level of admiral. And he took the name Murat Rais. So he was Amir al-Bahr, which is where we get the word admiral from.

He told the Libyans, the Americans are cowards. They don't know how to fight. Just, we can deal with them.

Big mistake. So this was the beginning of the special forces. So they went in.

This was in 1812. It was actually before it. But they went into the harbor in Tripoli, dressed as these.

And this is Decatur. This is, sorry, Preble. But Decatur goes in and leads, it was basically a suicide mission.

They actually thought they were going to die, and they were volunteered on a suicide mission. And as you know, most congressional medalists of honor go to people that died doing something. So there are suicide missions.

They don't, I mean, suicide bombing is haram, and I've always been against it. But the idea of sacrificing your life for others in war is known to be bravery. So that's what they do.

They end up blowing up the ship.

General William Eaton's Desert March

And then General William Eaton leads an army of, it's a very bizarre army. This should really be a film. But he leads them across the desert from Egypt. Half of them are Arab mercenaries. He leads them across with this small group of Marines into Derna in Libya.

Because the brother, the two Karamlis, one brother wanted to usurp the other brother, so he sided with the Americans. And this constantly happens in Muslim history. You see this again and again.

So he goes across the desert here. And then, so that's, this is a picture of the Marines attacking Derna. And then raising the flag.

It was the first time the flag was raised in a foreign nation. I don't have sound, but it goes, from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. So that's Tripoli.

That's the Marine hymn.

The Mamluk Sword

Now, this is the Mamluk sword, which actually became the official sword of Marine officers. So they still have Mamluk swords. Very interesting. It was actually given by the Egyptian ruler. To the Marine officer.

So, and it became the standard for the Marines.

The Zouaves in the Civil War

So here's some Taliban, right? No, they're not. Those are Americans.

That's a civil war. Both sides were, they had these, they called them Zouaves from Zawaya. And they used Moroccan designs because they were still enamored of the Moroccan, all the, a lot of the military stuff comes from Muslims.

All these designs on the, so, but in the civil war, they had these Zouaves. They were Americans. They weren't Muslims.

But anyway, so we've been here from the beginning.

Early American Writings on Muhammad

And we had, this is Reverend George Bush, who's the great, great, great, great grandfather, I think it's eighth or something, of President George Bush, wrote the life of Muhammad, right? That's amazing. Washington Irving wrote life of Muhammad.

When he deals with the age of Aisha, he just says, he doesn't make any comment about it. He just says what was known that women in the Arabian Peninsula matured early. That was his only comment because it wasn't shocking to pre-modern peoples, getting married at 12 or 13.

And there's debates on that.

Alexander Russell Webb

But this is another extraordinary Muslim, Alexander Russell Webb. He had been a consul in Philippines and he got to know the Muslims in the Philippines. He ended up becoming Muslim.

Noble Drew Ali and Early Immigration

Noble Drew Ali. It's very interesting. Some of the African Americans attempting to discover their Muslim roots.

This was the beginning of this. And from these type of events, the nation will emerge, which will bring Ellis Island, the first Arab immigrations that happened.

In the 1890s. And then obviously, the Melungeons are very interesting. They think that they're probably have Muslim descent.

But the Melungeons, they think Abraham Lincoln might've been Melungeon. Hence his interesting features.

The Washington Monument and Ottoman Connection

Another thing, the Washington Monument, which was in the Washington Monument. And believe it or not, I was told about this by a Turkish, a historian of Turkey, who told me that on the 14th floor, there is a Tughra from Abdul Majid Khan to the American government. When I went there to film this, we got permission to film. They did not know this Tughra existed.

And they swore to us that there was no Turkish, this was purely American. And they went up to the 14th floor on the elevator. Sure enough, the Tughra was there.

They didn't even know this. And there it is. This is in the Washington Monument.

Sultan Abdul Majid donated $30,000. It was the largest single donation for the building of the Washington Monument. And on the Tughra, it says, he did this in order for there to be peace between the Ottomans and between the Americans as an act.

So this is to support the continuation of true friendship. Abdul Majid Khan's clear and pure name was written on the lofty stone in Washington. That's what's written in Turkish.

He also, he was so happy with purchasing Winchester rifles that he sent all these Turkish workers and they built a Winchester factory based on Turkish architecture, which exists to this day. And it's got all this tile and calligraphy. American history is bizarre.

The Jefferson Building Dome

Now, the interior, I'm almost done. So I've gone on a long time. And it wasn't anywhere near us.

Oh, wonderful. That's what we heard before. But interior dome of Thomas Jefferson Building.

So on this dome, it gives all of the influences to America. That's what it was meant to honor, all the influences of America. And the only two religions that are mentioned are Islam and Judaism.

It's just amazing. So there it is. And they've got a mathematician.

So you can see there, Germany, Italy, Spain. These are all influences. England, France, America, Egypt, right? Judea, Greece, Rome, and Islam.

The Supreme Court Fresco

On the fresco, this was done in 1932 on the north wall of the Supreme Court of the United States. They have a fresco of all the greatest lawmakers in human history to honor the whole concept of law and the making of law. Because that's what the Supreme Court does.

It judges law, the legality of a decision of a judge. And there is a symbol of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad.

There were some Muslims that actually tried to... They petitioned to get this removed, which really bothered me.

First of all, and that's why the next slide, I want to put this. So there on the north tree is a great lawgiver. It is a symbol.

It's a symbol of the Prophet Muhammad holding a sword, which is government to enforce the law and the law together. Because governments need power to enforce the rule of law. But it's very important always to remember, ceci n'est pas un peep.

You guys know French. What does that say? This is not a pipe. What is it? It's just a picture.

A pipe is something that you can smoke something with. You can't do it with that. It's not a trick question.

Understanding Symbolism and Representation

That's not a pipe. When they draw these pictures, you have to look... If they're doing it like in that case, it was to honor the Prophet. But if it's to denigrate our Prophet, that's not our Prophet.

And if you think it is, you're a kafir. Because the Prophet, when they attacked him, they called him mudammam. It's in Sahih al-Bukhari, which means the blameworthy.

They took Muhammad, the praiseworthy, and they made the name mudammam. What did he say? He said, isn't it wondrous how God removes them away from me? They're talking about somebody named mudammam, and my name is Muhammad. So, like, when I hear these people saying Muhammad, Muhammad, Muhammad, that Muhammad is not Muhammad.

They're talking about some character named Muhammad. That's not our Prophet. His name is Muhammad, right? It's a ha with a shedda over the meem.

(محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم - Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam). That's our Prophet, not Muhammad, Muhammad, Muhammad. I don't know who they're talking about.

They're not talking about my Prophet.

The Treaty with Morocco

So this was a letter of peace and friendship. This is the oldest treaty in the history of the United States of America, and it was to the Moroccans. The Moroccans were the first people to recognize the sovereignty of the United States. That was the Sultan of Morocco. It's the first country to recognize the United States' sovereignty.

And this has been unbroken. The first piece of land that was given to the Americans in a foreign territory is the American legation in Tangier, which I visited. It's still there.

There's an American there. It was the palace of the Sultan who gave it to the Americans to house their diplomatic corps. It was just given as a gift.

The Omani Ship to America

I'll tell you another story that I didn't mention in here, but it's a very fascinating story. In the 1830s, Sultan Said and this is the same family that rules Oman today. Oman is a very fascinating country because Oman is one of the— It's a very old— They're several hundred years, and they ruled a lot of East Africa.

So Tanzania, Mozambique, all these places. So they had an empire there. But he noticed in the 1830s these American ships coming and how powerful they were.

So he had an Omani ship built to sail across the Atlantic. He filled it with gifts and, unfortunately, two concubines. So he sent— The concubines were for the president.

But they show up in the harbor in New York, and these sailors came down with their turbans and their beards. If people see Omanis, they know that they traditionally had big beards and turbans. And they were a big hit in New York.

A lot of people were going down to see the ship. They brought all these gifts. The Congress debated about what to do with the gifts.

And this is the beginning of the Smithsonian. They sent the concubines back.

George Washington's Farewell Address

So anyway, George Washington, his farewell address, he cautioned the Americans to observe good faith and justice towards all nations, cultivate peace and harmony with all, religion and morality. Not our religion, but religion and morality. It's nakira, right? You see that among some of the Usuliyin. So this is my hope.

We need to recognize that we have to live together. We have weaponry now that can destroy large numbers of people with literally the push of a button. We're living in a time with just incredible instability, very dangerous times.

We're living in a time where individuals can get hold of nuclear materials and create, really wreak havoc. And we just have to pray. You know, really, people need to pray.

The Power of Prayer

The Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) said that prayer wards off harm. There's three, according to Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, there's three things that dua does. If it's strong dua, it literally will ward off whatever harm is coming.

If it's not strong enough, it gets overwhelmed, but it can mitigate the harm. And the third, and this is in a sahih hadith, the third is that the prayer and the tribulation, they start fighting and they keep fighting until the day of judgment. So the tribulation doesn't come down.

So don't underestimate the power of prayer. Really seek help in prayer and in patience. But we really need a lot of prayer and patience.

Living as Muslims in America

Our community is a beleaguered community, but we're also a very fortunate community. We're not oppressed in this country, by and large. I mean, the idea that we're oppressed, I think, is a false narrative.

We have a lot of incredible opportunities in this country. But the most important thing is that we live our Islam and we practice it. And really, we be upright people, virtuous people, because people recognize that.

And in a time where everything's falling apart, the poet said, turning, turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconeer. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world and the blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity. So we really need to... You have to live up to that. (كنتم - Kuntum) is in the past tense, right? But Omar said, the only way you can fall into that is to do the conditions.

Gratitude and Closing Thoughts

And I want to thank Sam again for this wonderful forum that you're doing. May God give it great success, continuity, perpetuity. May he bless all of you and the people that come here and inspire us to do similar works and to show who we are by our actions and our deeds.

God does not look at your forms or your colors, your complexions, but he looks at your hearts and your actions.

And to translate that into grammatical terms, God doesn't look at nouns and adjectives, but he looks at verbs and adverbs.

True Morality Based on Actions

And just to give you an example of this, all morality should be based on verbs and adverbs, and false morality is based on nouns and adjectives. So just to give you a quick example of this, if I say a Palestinian killed a Jew, the noun Palestinian should be irrelevant, and the noun Jew should be irrelevant. The question is, what was the verb, killed? And then you need an adverb. Why did he kill him, right? Justly, unjustly, in self-defense, that's an adverbial phrase.

That's morality. It's never to look at the nouns and the adjectives, but look at the actions and the adverbs that give you an understanding of those actions, that qualify those actions. Why? And that's true morality, and that's what we need to inculcate.

We need to inculcate a morality not based on color, not based on wealth or gender or any of these things, but based on what people do and why they do it. Thank you.

Question and Answer Session - On Taqlid and Independence

I have a couple of questions I'd like to ask. I've heard you in the past speak about some of the virtues of, you know, American culture, including independence. So we have these binaries in Islam, Taqlid and Tahqiq and the Naqli sciences and the Aqli sciences, basically this juxtaposition of a tradition that's transmitted and one that's realized within.

So how can we grapple with this within our tradition of legal scholarship, Sufism, this sense of needing to receive something from teachers and needing to develop our own independence? (بسم الله - Bismillah).

Well, Imam al-Ghazali, I think, said the best thing. He said, know the truth. Know men by the truth, but don't know the truth by men.

Which is a difficult thing because you need people to learn. We have teachers and we have people that we have to learn from. So the beginning of learning is belief.

The Necessity of Humility in Learning

We were just looking at something yesterday in a class that we were doing at school about that, you know, a student has to accept their ignorance before they can remove that ignorance. There's something that's called compounded ignorance. There's a famous story.

Bruce Lee used to tell this story, but it's a story that comes out of samurai tradition, actually, about a man who went to study with a master and they're doing the tea and he's telling him he learned this from so-and-so and he learned this from so-and-so and he learned that. And so the master just keeps pouring the tea until it overflows.

And then the student says, why are you pouring the cups full? And he said, well, it can't take any more.

And he said, yeah. And he said, well, it seems that you're full also. So I don't know what I can teach you because you have to go to a teacher with a type of humility.

And if you don't have that, you can't learn. So I will remove my signs from people that have arrogance in the earth without any just right. And so humility is very important of just maintaining a type of humility.

Intellectual humility is important, spiritual humility. There's the story about the imam. He's in the mihrab and kind of has an epiphany, falls down and starts saying, I'm nothing, I'm nothing.

And the muezzin comes in, he says, the imam's nothing, what am I? He falls down, he says nothing. Then the guy who comes in, who sweeps the mosque out, he sees the imam and the muezzin. He's saying, they know the whole Quran by heart, I'm just ignorant, what am I? He falls down, he's saying, I'm nothing, I'm nothing.

Then the imam says to the muezzin, look who thinks he's nothing. So that's spiritual pride, which is a real problem, right? That's a Jewish joke that I just switched to imam. It's originally the rabbi and the cantor.

But that's the nice thing about Jews, about religious jokes, you can just change the names and they fit. So that's very important, is just humility. And also taqlid is a negative thing in our tradition, but it's a necessary thing for somebody whose ignorance is just to have humility and recognize that they need to learn.

Universal Principles in Islam

And we should all try to learn. I think the most important things about this tradition is a lot of the basic principles are not, they're very simple and universal. Like for instance, if the Muslims just took one verse of Quran and applied it, you would change the world.

Speak beautifully to people. Like if you just applied that one verse, or return a wrong with a right. You just apply, these are not hard things to understand. They're hard to implement. But they're not, seek help from God with patience and prayer. There's so many principles in the Quran like that.

So I think it's important to recognize that this religion is multi-layered. At the highest level, you're dealing with some of the most sophisticated thought in human history. Our theology is very deep, it's very complex.

It has profound metaphysical foundations. And then at the same time, it can be understood by very simple people. And I'll give you one example of that.

The Gas Station Attendant Story

I was in Morocco, and I was at a gas station. Somebody was filling gas, and I had a turban and a jalaba on, so this man thought that I was learned or something. So he came up to me.

He was a gas station attendant. And he was a young man. He said, you know, I'm studying at the university.

I'm just, I do this for, but he said, I have a philosophy teacher. He's really confused me. I said, what did he say? He said, he said that, you know, everybody says, you know, God created this, God created that, but it begs the question, who created God? And so I told him a hadith in Sahih Muslim that the Prophet said, (لا يزال الناس يتساءلون - la yazalu al-nasu yatasaalun - People will continue to ask questions - Sahih Muslim 134).

People will continue to philosophize, because that's what philosophy is asking question. And they'll say, who created this? And the answer is Allah. And who created this? And the answer is Allah.

Until somebody will say, who created Allah? And he said, if you hear that say, I believe in Allah. And so I told him that hadith. I saw the inshirah in his heart. I saw it on his face. His whole face changed. And he said (جزاك الله خيرا، فرجت عني - jazakallah khairan, farajta 'anni - may Allah reward you with goodness, you have relieved me).

You know, and he just said (آمنت بالله - amantu billah - I believe in Allah). You know, and that's the beauty of guidance. Like the Prophet's like, it's a very simple statement.

But what the Prophet was essentially saying was, you can't think beyond the unthinkable. You know, there's a famous mathematician called George Cantor. He has Cantor's theorem, which says that the whole can be greater than the part.

Well, Cantor believed that you could have an actual infinity, which Aristotle said you couldn't. And most mathematicians say you can't. So Cantor said, if you have an actual infinity, the even numbers could be equal to the odd numbers.

So he said, so the part can be equal to the whole, right? That's Cantor's theorem. Cantor ended up in a straitjacket, literally in an insane asylum. He went mad.

Why? Because he contemplated infinity. The Prophet said (لا تفكروا في الله - la tafakkaru fi Allah - do not contemplate the essence of Allah). You know, do not think about God, but think about the gifts of God.

Because if you start thinking about God, the word in Arabic (إله - ilah) is from (ولها - walaha) which is to bewilder or confuse, right? You can't think about God. All you can think about is the attributes of God and the gifts of God. But to actually contemplate the essence of God is haram.

Faith and Science

I mean, look, scientists, they have belief too. They never talk about it. Their belief is in the order of the universe because all their science is based on the assumption that the universe is orderly, that these laws will actually work. I mean, Einstein, his laws, E equals MC squared is based on the idea that you can measure energy, you can measure mass, and you can measure the constant, right? But what Einstein said is the only thing that he finds unintelligible about the universe is its intelligibility. That's somebody who we know why it's intelligible because God made it to correspond with our minds.

And that's why a believer's knowledge, irrespective of what faith you're in, and I'm not a perennialist, but irrespective of what faith you're in, you are advantaged over a materialistic scientist because all he can determine is how. We know why, and that's a great gift because why is at the essence its purpose. Like, why are we here? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What's gonna happen when we die?

The Unity of Prophetic Message

And one of the most amazing things about prophets is, unlike philosophers, philosophers, every single philosopher that comes disagrees with his teacher. Every single one. Like Aristotle said about Plato, I love Plato, Plato's a friend, but the truth is a greater friend. So I have to disagree about these archetypes, right? You look at every single one of them, they disagree with their teachers, with rare exception, I'm talking about the great philosophers.

All the prophets say the same thing. Every single one of them. How did they do that? Why do they all say there's a day of judgment? Every Jewish prophet that came, none of them decided, oh, you know what? I disagree with Isaiah.

None of them. And the prophets of Isaiah confirmed the previous revelations. Jesus said there's a day of judgment. He said you're gonna be raised up. You're gonna be resurrected. Moses said you're gonna be resurrected.

All of them said the same thing, the day of judgment is coming. So that's an amazing thing. So I think Muslims, we have to recognize what a gift we have.

Religion as Solace

And then the other thing that we have, and again, people need solace. And religion is the essence of worldly solace. If you don't have religion, you're going to have to find something to opiate the pain of being in the dunya.

And I just spoke to a lady today who's losing her 13-year-old child. You know, this is dunya. This is a very difficult place to be in.

"[And We will surely test you with something of fear and hunger and a loss of wealth and lives and fruits, but give good tidings to the patient - Quran 2:155).]"

Imam Zamakhshari in Al-Kashshaf says, he says (بشيء - bi shayin), because whatever tribulation you have, it could be greater. You lost one child, you could have lost all your children. You lost one arm, you could have lost both arms. It could always be greater.

But then he says, but Allah is warning, you, (وَلَنَبْلُوَنَّكُم - walanabluwannakum). We will test you. And so he's giving us a heads up that you might, everything might be fine today, but you can wake up tomorrow with a diagnosis. And your iman has to be as strong, if not stronger in that situation than it is today.

But for people to say, you know, people say, Dylan has a wonderful line. He said, you say you lost your faith, you know it's not like that. You had no faith to lose, and you know it.

What is faith if you can lose it? And that's why this place is difficult. And religion is the necessary fentanyl to get you through the pain of this abode.

The Believer's Reward

But our prophet told us (صلى الله عليه وسلم - sallallahu alayhi wa sallam), that the person who had the most difficult life, the believer that had the most suffering in the world will go into, there's a river, which is called the river of life in the afterlife.

And you go into it, and you come out of it, completely renewed. And that man will be asked, have you ever known suffering? And he will say, (لا والله - la wallahi), I never knew suffering. This is the one that for 60, 70, 80 years is now looking at infinity and in perfect bliss.

And people say, you know, the afterlife's a hype. Well, good luck. People have been saying that for a long time.

You know, we make a choice in this dunya to believe or disbelieve. (فَمَن شَاءَ فَلْيُؤْمِن وَمَن شَاءَ فَلْيَكْفُرْ - Faman shaa falyumin waman shaa falyakfur) - So whoever wills - let him believe; and whoever wills - let him disbelieve - Quran 18:29). Whoever wants to believe, let him believe. Whoever wants to disbelieve, let him disbelieve. You have a choice, but just know the choice is going to have consequences. It's a long answer to a short question.

I apologize. It's brilliant.

Question on Faith and Philosophy

I'd like to ask just two other quick questions related to your response. Do you see a harmony that can be established as there was in, you know, classical Islamic history between faith and philosophy, between, for example, Abu Hamid Ghazali's Mishkat al-Anwar and Suhrawardy's Hikmat al-Ishraq? There seems to be a connection. There were philosophers, people of faith who based their writings upon the Quran, the writings of the theologians.

I mean, first of all, I would say that Allah has created a creation. You know, your endeavors on this planet are diverse. There's all these different people. There are very simple people, and those people actually are lucky.

You know, simple faith, you know, there's a famous Fakhruddin al-Razi was walking once with all these students in his trail, you know, and this old woman saw him and she asked one of the students, who's that? Because she's amazed all these followers. He said (أستغفر الله - Astaghfirullah), you don't know, that's Fakhruddin al-Razi. He has 70 proofs for the existence of God.

And she said, if he didn't have 70 doubts, he wouldn't need 70 proofs. And when Fakhruddin heard that, he said, (عليكم بإيمان العجائز - alaykum bi iman al-ajaiz) - hold fast to the faith of old women). You know, have the faith of old women. You know, that's real faith, right? And so there's a great blame.

Simple Faith and Complex Theology

You should never belittle simple people because some of the most beautiful followers of the Prophet were simple people, like that woman who used to sweep the, or Firfirah, you know, Firfirah. Does anybody know who that is? Firfirah. Sometimes it's called Kirkirah.

Does anybody know who Kirkirah was? Nobody? Wow, you guys should know these people. Kirkirah, a newbie. He was one of the servants of the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - sallallahu alayhi wa sallam).

You know, he loved the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - sallallahu alayhi wa sallam). Do you know who Safina was? Safina? (مولى رسول الله - Mawla Rasulullah). He was a servant of the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - sallallahu alayhi wa sallam).

He was a freed slave and he served the Prophet. And he tells, this is a true story. He tells that he got lost in a forest and a lion came and was about to attack him.

He says (وي حق - way haqq), you know, watch out. He said (أنا صفينة مولى رسول الله - Ana Safina Mawla Rasulullah - I am Safina, the servant of the Messenger of Allah). And he said that the lion, he said, he came up and started nudging him and then he walked him through and he warned any animal that threatened him until he got him out. And then he said, he said, when he said that, he wagged his tail as if he was acknowledging it. And then when he left, he said the lion hum huma, like hum, hum, as if he was saying goodbye to me.

And we have many examples of that from Sahaba. So these are simple people that had profound faith. But you also have Einsteins.

Religion for All Intellects

You have people like Richard Feynman, who are thinking about some of the most abstract things on the planet. Religion has to encompass the whole spectrum. It's not a true religion if it can't satisfy the most brilliant people and the simplest people.

And that's the genius of our religion. And this is why I'll give you one example of this. Bruno Guiderdoni, all right? Bruno Guiderdoni is in the top 10 cosmologists on the planet.

He's a physicist, astrophysicist, which is our highest material science, astrophysics. You can't get any higher than astrophysics. He's an astrophysicist.

He was actually responsible for looking at background radiation and analyzing background radiation from the edges of the universe. I read an article about him in the Herald Tribune. And in that book, and in that article, he talked about how as a cosmologist, he looks at the universe as signs that need to be interpreted.

And I was thinking, he should read the Quran. So then when I Googled him, I found out he had become Muslim in France. And this man has over 100 peer-reviewed papers on galaxy formation, right? I mean, he's really one of the top scientists in the world.

And we almost had him at Harvard. And Harvard was so excited about getting him. We were going to do a thing because I corresponded with him.

But he said in one paper, he said, as a scientist, I had to be true to my intellect. And he said, but as a believer, I also had to satisfy my heart. And he said, I found Islam was the only religion that could do that for me.

That it didn't negate my intellect and it asserted my heart.

The Role of Philosophy in Islam

And so philosophy, the Muslims, philosophy is dangerous because if you're not grounded in tradition well and you go into philosophy first, you can really get confused. Especially modern philosophy because a lot of modern philosophy is very atheistic.

And these poor students go into university courses and take these courses in philosophy. And these guys are powerful Sophists that really know how to argue and confuse people. But philosophy as a subject in the Islamic tradition is essential to the religion because in having a metaphysical foundation for your religion, you can defend it in a way that can't be defended without that foundation when great, what they call obfuscations or shubuhat come.

And in losing philosophers, we lose defenders of the faith. And then the defense becomes the bludgeon. You know, it just becomes the hammer, which is no defense.

So you need philosophy to be part of the religion. And I just literally today, I sent to Ustad Abdullah Ali, Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah was interviewed on Sky News and the interviewer who was from the Gulf, one of the Gulf states, he said, Sheikh, you're always quoting philosophers that some ulema say philosophy is haram. And he said, philosophy is hikmah.

And he said, philosophers are men and they sometimes have wisdom that we can benefit from. And he said, the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) said (الحكمة ضالة المؤمن - al-hikmatu dallat al-mumin - Wisdom is the lost property of the believer - Sunan al-Tirmidhi 2687). Wisdom is the lost property of the believer.

Wherever he finds it, he has more right to it. And so there's great wisdom in philosophy. There's great wisdom in poetry.

Poetry as Islamic Art

Poetry is one of the great art forms of Muslims. And that's why people like Amir Suleiman are so important. Because that art form, it's a sign that we're maintaining our humanity.

If you have a culture that doesn't have poets, you're in big trouble. Really. Because poets, what they're doing is they're using language as the art form.

And language is the highest thing that we have as a species. And this is why the Quran is words. And there are many beautiful art forms, but we share those art forms with most other creatures.

I mean, beavers build extraordinary dams that are marvel to look at. Bees make beautiful works of art. You know, they're tessellated honeycombs. Beautiful hexagrams. But the poet, his art form is the gift that God gave us. (الرحمن - Al-Rahman - The Most Merciful).

He taught human beings how to articulate. And this is the great gift. And that's why our community was always a community of language.

And you cannot understand language at the deepest levels without having a philosophical foundation for the languages, which is why we had great grammarians. We had great rhetoricians. And if you study them, they were profound philosophers of language.

Really. And Noam Chomsky is coming next week. And if you're here, is it next week? He'll be here October 26th.

Ask him about the Arab grammarians. Because Noam Chomsky knows Arabic. And there's a Palestinian Arab who wrote a PhD dissertation, which I read, Dr. Omer had.

I gave it to Dr. Omer. The PhD dissertation showing that a lot of his theories were actually preceded by Iraqi grammarians in the 4th century. Right.

Metaphysics as First Science

And metaphysics. Metaphysics is the first science because it's the science of first principles. And you have to have a metaphysical foundation.

The Quran has many, many metaphysical implications. But because it's a revelation, it's not a book of philosophy. But embedded in it is a metaphysical perspective that has to be drawn out.

And I'll just give you one example. There are two ways to look at the world. One is that the world is evil by its nature.

And there's all these horrible things that happen in the world. And the other is to see the world as a testing ground for your own spiritual growth. Because things are going to happen that are very troubling in your life.

But the Quranic perspective is that he does these things in order for you to grow. And so the believer grows by it. And the disbeliever is stunted by it.

And that's the difference. That's a metaphysical understanding that if you don't have that, the world will confuse you to no end. Thank you for that, Sheikh Hamza.

Question on Contemporary Challenges

The last, I'll just briefly ask one last question. And I think you've alluded to this in your talk. But how would the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, respond to some of the challenges that we're facing right now in the United States? You know, racism, sexism, tribalism, but in particular, war as well, which I think is at the root of a lot of our problems.

Wars abroad. How can we grow as a community here while at the same time being concerned about what's happening?

I mean, first of all, you know, the Christians have what would Jesus do. Like that's an evangelical principle. They always ask, what would Jesus do in this situation? We know what the Prophet, peace and blessings, would do in any given situation because no prophet is more detailed historically than our prophet. So we know how he dealt with all these various situations that he found himself in.

The Farewell Address and Major Problems

And I would argue, one, that the Prophet, peace and blessings, dealt with all the major human problems that we should be concerned with in the Farewell Address. The Farewell Address, which is recorded in a few different

iterations, but essentially deals with economic injustice, which is based on usury. And usury is one of the biggest problems on the planet, and nobody wants to talk about it. It's just amazing.

The second was racism. He dealt with racism. And what's amazing about that hadith is he said, (لَا فَضْلَ لِعَرَبِيٍّ عَلَىٰ عَجَمِيٍّ وَلَا لِعَجَمِيٍّ عَلَىٰ عَرَبِيٍّ وَلَا لِأَسْوَدَ عَلَىٰ أَبْيَضَ وَلَا لِأَبْيَضَ عَلَىٰ أَسْوَدَ إِلَّا بِالتَّقْوَىٰ - la fadla li arabiyin ala ajamin wa la li ajamin ala arabiyin wa la li aswad ala abyad wa la li abyad ala aswad illa bi taqwa) - There is no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab, nor of a non-Arab over an Arab, nor of a white over a black, nor of a black over a white, except by piety - Musnad Ahmad 23489).

What really struck me about that hadith is he did not collectivize. He said there's no preference of an Arab individual over a non-Arab individual. And there's no preference of a non-Arab individual.

He didn't say (لَا فَضْلَ لِلْعَرَبِ عَلَى الْعَجَمِ - la fadla lil-arab ala al-ajam). He did not collectivize. He brought it down to where the problem is, in the individual heart.

Racism as Individual Problem

And this is, we will not get rid of racism until we recognize that this is an individual problem. It can have collective realities when large groups are racist. So it does have, but always within those groups are good people.

So in the history of America, you have constantly white Americans that were fighting against racism. Many of them having terrible lives because of it. You know, just horrible lives.

And you've always had those people. And then you've had the fence sitters. And then you had the people that were just clearly wrong.

But if you collectivize, it's a crime against those individuals amongst that group. And that's why the Quran always, it talks about (بَنِي إِسْرَائِيلَ - bani Israel). It says (مِنْهُمُ الْمُؤْمِنُونَ - minhum min muminun) - among them are believers).

(لَيْسُوا سَوَاءً مِنْ أَهْلِ الْكِتَابِ - laysu sawaan min ahl al-kitab) - They are not all the same from the People of the Book - Quran 3:113). It's always giving you, look, there's people among them that are good. There's people among them that are decent.

Don't collectivize them. So the Quakers. Yeah, the Amish, all these people.

John Brown, yeah, exactly. So this is really important. Then he said there's no preference of a black, a white man over a black man, or a black man over a white man.

He went both ways. He didn't just say, because the problem then was, you know, the white against the black. That's been the problem on this planet for a long time.

Varna in Hindu, which means caste system, means color in Sanskrit. So this has been a human problem for a long time on this planet. And you will find in many, many cultures, before the Europeans ever showed up on the historical scene, this problem existed.

Arrogance as Root Disease

And it's an iptila. It's an iptila in many cultures. But the iptila is a test to see what you're made of, what's your mettle.

And we have people that, despite everything, just did amazing things. So he dealt with racism, you know. And racism, the word (عنصرية - ansariya) is a modern word in Arabic.

Racism is a species of arrogance. It's (كبر - kibbr) - arrogance). The real disease is arrogance, to think you're better than another person, especially for something as stupid as the color of your skin.

I mean, that's just stupid. You know, it really is. And then you have, it's just crazy.

You know, you've got these white people that do all these things to turn brown. And then you've got black people doing all these things to turn white. It's, I don't know.

It's very odd, you know. But that is just, this is called an accident in philosophy. So it's not an essence.

It's not an essential quality. Because it can change. I can go out in the sun and turn dark.

And somebody who has black skin can literally lose their pigmentation and turn white. It does not change their essence. No.

And so that's where Islam looks at the essence of people. And what's the quality of, you know, the content of their character. What are they made of?

Abu Dharr's Lesson on Racism

And the beautiful hadith of Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, when he called, you know, some say it was Bilal. It's different in the riwayat. But he said (يا ابن السوداء - ya ibna al-sawdaa) - O son of a black woman), which is almost like using the N word for the Arabs, you know. But what the Prophet said to him, to me, is very profound.

He said (إنك امرؤ فيك جاهلية - innaka imruun fika jahiliyyah) - You are a man who still has some jahiliyyah in him - Sahih al-Bukhari 30). He didn't say you're evil. He didn't say, he said, you've got something to work on.

You know, you haven't gotten this religion yet, if you've still got that. But he recognized him as a believer. So people have things to do.

We're evolving. And we have to allow for people to evolve. The idea that somebody was a racist 30 years ago, and that means he's a racist today, that's criminal.

It's criminal because people evolve. And so that's it.

Addressing Sexism

And then he dealt with sexism. And he said, Your women are in a compromised situation. And women are compromised. People don't like that fact.

But when societies break down, it's the women that suffer. You look at the Yazidi women. They were just dragged off.

The men were killed and the women were dragged off. You look at the sexual things that are happening. So most women are physically weaker than men.

And that's why rape occurs far more often against women, for that reason. Because it's hard for them to fight off a strong man. And there's women that could throw me up on that mat there and knock me out and do it.

That's true. But we're talking about the vast majority of women are compromised physically. So they can be overwhelmed by a man physically.

And that's why men have to be taught to honor women and to be chivalrous. And these ideas of removing this from culture is very dangerous. This whole modern movement against masculinity is very dangerous.

Because masculinity, there's a reason why men are meant to have masculinity. It's to protect and defend. These are important qualities.

And this idea of just removing that from society, it's anti-fitrah. And it belies inherent impulses in the most noble qualities of human beings. But we should see the equality of men and women before the law, before God.

And intellectually, there are many women that are far smarter than most men and vice versa. It goes both ways. Intellect is very close.

The difference between male intelligence and female intelligence, by and large, is negligible. It really is. And that's been proven.

Women are perfectly competent at learning anything that the vast majority of men can do. There is, however, a very small select group of mathematical geniuses that tend to be male. That's just a fact.

That in spatial reasoning, you have a very small select group. But that's not men. That's just a select group.

I mean, they literally could probably fit into this room on the planet. So what, men go around boasting we're smarter than women because of that? It's just stupid. You know, these are stupid.

You're the ones that go insane thinking about infinity. Exactly, yeah.

Manipulation of Nature

And then finally, the last thing in that farewell address was he talked about the manipulation of nature, which was the intercalation, taking the natural order of the calendar and changing it. And manipulation of nature is another threat to our species, what we're doing now with all these manipulating genetics and things like that. So I think he summed up all the major problems on the planet. Economic injustice, which is class warfare.

Racial injustice, which is racial warfare. And then gender injustice, which leads to gender warfare. And this is, we have to avoid these wars because they're not wars we want to fight.

They're wars we want to prevent. And we can only prevent them by bringing these prophetic truths and getting larger and larger numbers of people to commit to them. Thank you so much, Sheikh Hamza.

It's very nice to see you. It's very nice to be here. I'm honored that you've invited me into your company.

Amir Suleiman's Poetry Performance

As he said, my name is Amir Suleiman. I'm going to recite some poems. And the time that I have to recite a little bit, I want to make the floor open.

I don't want the organizers to get nervous. (إن شاء الله - Inshallah) won't go over my time. But I do this poetry.

What I do, I've been doing this for a living for a long time, at least for a young man. I've been doing it for a long time. And I do it in all kinds of spheres and all kinds of communities, domestically and abroad.

And it's very nice to be here with you because in this, not just this community, some people that are actually in this room are some of the people that grew me in my Islam and matured me in my Islam. And so I'm very happy and honored to be here with you. Also, all the poetry that I'm going to recite, I've heard it all before because I wrote the poetry.

So it's not new and terribly exciting for me in that kind of way. I could be at home with my feet up, eating Cocoa Pebbles, watching reruns of Martin, reciting my poetry. But instead, I got out of my bed and off of my couch and I came here to recite for you.

I'm saying all that to say that you are the only thing that's making it special for me. The poems I've heard before, you're making it special. And I'm thanking you for being here with me to make it special for me.

And I hope to do something special for you. All that being said also, if there's any questions or comments or concerns, I want you to feel free. I just happen to be here standing with the microphone.

But if you have something to say, I would like for you to go ahead and say it. And we can have this to be more of a conversation than just a presentation. And that would make it even more special for me.

We in agreement for that? That was like 7% of the people here. It has to be a consensus for it to work, right? Yes? Okay, good. And I love you too.

See how nice that was? That wouldn't happen maybe if I didn't open the floor. But he felt comfortable to say that and that made me feel very nice. Thank you, brother.

I love you.

First Poem - The Lord Will Come

You know, they say the Lord will come like a thief in the night. Perhaps the Lord will come in the things that I write and the things that we bleed and the things that we read and the things we recite.

Maybe they're afraid I'll spit fire and these kerosene streets will ignite or that I'll spit water in these barren streets to give life. And I've learned the thing that pulls the fiend to the pipe is the same thing that pulls a human being to the light. The love of love, a means to cope.

So I try to inhale their dreams and exhale hope. Homeboys say, man, the people either feel it or don't. So you can inhale their dreams and exhale hope, but you better chew coca leaves and spit out dope.

And that reminded me of a passage and I quote, a law will not change the condition of a people until they change the condition of what's within themselves. End quote (إن شاء الله - Inshallah) I won't falter.

Steady rock of Gibraltar, swift traversing waters. Verses I've authored, I offer as a solemn sacrifice upon the altar in order to alter the current conditions of our sons and our fathers. And they say we need more black mayors and black lawyers.

I say we need more black John Mayers to win Grammys for singing songs about our daughters because we are caught in a culture of defeatism, worshiping victims and martyrs. We are not victims but victors that we would witness our honor, our brilliance, our resilience, and our beauty as father.

And pimping hoes, tricking dough, Gucci and Prada. From Silo Street to Simpson Road, we are shook in the trauma of terrorism that precedes Al Qaeda and Osama. Forget Ben Laden and Ben Franklin, enslaved my great- great-grandmama, karma, great-great-grandfather, karma, indigenous nations of reservations, karma, but we caught in a coma, sleep. So the truth will have to come like a thief in the night.

But if you're awake, you'll hear it in the things that we write, in the things that we bleed, in the things we recite. And because the truth will come like a thief in the night, being awake, I've learned, is the meaning of life. Are there any questions, comments, or concerns? I made a promise that I would open the floor for you.

If there's not, it's okay, but I just want you to feel free. Thank you, thank you.

Second Poem - Writing My Insides Out

She asked, what does it feel like when a poem comes out? And I said, it's like I'm writing my insides out and I gotta get it out before my pen dries out, before my ego finds out, can't let my ego find out.

Because when I'm writing my insides out, my every fear, my every flaw flies out in my ego where those fears and flaws hide out. So whatever I do, can't let my ego find out. If I couldn't write my insides out, I don't know, I'd probably blow my bloody mind out.

Instead, I write and recite to bloom your third eye out. She said, oh, that's what Danger Deadman Walking's all about. I said, yeah.

She said, well, I'm glad you took the divine route. And I said, yes, I took the divine route, but it's only a matter of time before the world finds out this is both heaven and hell coming out of my mouth. She asked, where is the truth hidden? I laughed, not because she asked, but because as I'm living, I'm learning that the truth is hidden everywhere.

Literally everywhere. There is no place you can scour, search, and visit except the truth is in it. The truth is hidden even in the question, where is the truth hidden? The truth, the truth isn't hidden.

It can't be hidden. It is a true and living. Those that are seeking to hide the truth try to convince me and you that they hid it, but they didn't.

It is not that the truth isn't being spoken. Perhaps we are not ready to listen. Certainly we are not ready to listen.

And you may be at home in my poem, and if not, you may just visit. And if you can't visit, maybe you shouldn't listen. My poetry's not for everyone.

It's no navy blue Yankee fitted. In fact, it's highly acidic enough to burn through the mind of a critic. Why be a cynic? When we're moving beyond the speed of light, there is no difference between time and distance.

Such I am both here and there in the same instant. For instance, I'm both man and infant, both devil and angel. I'm both the witness and the witnessed, both a monk and misfit.

I am the medicine and the sick. If you would like to know what the truth is, and I wrote the answer to access to the seven senses, and I told sis, hold this close to your heart until your soul sits still in a summer solstice. She said, I can't keep my soul still.

It's hard to hold my focus. She said, I've noticed that I can't seem to focus on any real goals. I can only focus on what's closest.

She said, how do you know what your goal is? So I don't. How does one save the souls of the soulless? An eviction notice stapled to the heart of the heedless. Souls left homeless.

No place to reside, and so they hide out and slide in the bodies of two-eyed men. So my lyricism is an exercise in exorcism, but the exoteric call it esotericism. I learned Jihad from Rumi.

The Sunni call me Shiite, the Shiite call me Sufi. The Feds say I have WMDs for what I do with the loose leaf, because what I do with the loose leaf make devils lose sleep. And I don't care who's on whose deen.

I follow the one who was sent to the seven heavens and lands on two feet. And it may be too deep, but it is only by his light that you can see through me. And if by his light, we have sight, then what is the meaning of day? And what is the meaning of night? And I would like not to say that I'm living at night, but I'm living very late.

Also, (إِنَّ الْإِنسَانَ لَفِي خُسْرٍ - inna al-insana lafi khusr) - Indeed, mankind is in loss - Quran 103:2). Rough translation, I'm a loser. I aim to block his light, yet claim to follow his sunnah.

The truth is, I wish I could sing so I could mask the bitter truth with sweet melody. Unfortunately for both you and me, I only know how to speak straight with direct diction that doesn't allow for mistakes. She said, but you speak so whole while the beat breaks.

It's so ill, it's so real. I said, it's so real, but I'm so fake. She said, but you sound so sure.

I said, that's the point, I'm not sure. I'm barely afloat in the sea without shore. And if you think what I saw, then you will certainly know that certainty without flaw is often delusion and no certainty at all.

And when it is certainly certainty, it can be like the drunken monk, a man so on his square, looking at any moment he will fall, but he never falls. At that moment, she paused and began to recite Vagabond. I was surprised she nearly memorized my whole poem.

She said, if I'm a traveler in this world, then where do I find home? I said, just keep your nose to the grindstone. Tell your mind to never mind the unknown. This is why I rhyme like a spirit of God is in my poem, because in the beginning, there was the word.

And before that, there was the unheard, the unseen. There's nothing past, but the present. There's nothing past the past, but the present.

Just as the moon begins with the crescent, it seems that way, but in that, there is the lesson. Any questions, comments, or concerns? Everybody's okay? I don't know that. (آمین - Ameen). (الله أكبر - Allahu Akbar)

I love my teeth. Thank you.

Third Poem - The Lover, the Love, and the Beloved (Excerpt)

I mean, I want to recite something that's unfinished, and I'm reciting it for the purposes of receiving the blessing and benefit from all of you and your prayer. There's a poem that I've been working on for a long time. Nine years. That's a long time for me.

And it was an intention. I had no idea that it was going to take so long. It was an intention in the spirit of this event.

How it applies is that one of the signs of the maturation of an Islamic community anywhere in the world is they develop poetry, praises, and prophets that are in their language. And everyone has made the offering. Obviously,

the Arabs have made the offering, the language, the people who speak Urdu have made the offering, people of Wolof, people of so many languages have made the offerings.

And we have poetry that people, obviously, have written in English. I'm praising the prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - sallallahu alayhi wa sallam). But I wanted to write a, you know, they say in search of the great American novel.

I wanted to write an agreed upon epic poem for (سيدنا محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم - Sayyidina Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam). So I'm in the last part of it. (إن شاء الله تعالى - Inshallah ta'ala), we'll be finished.

And this (ربيع الأول - Rabi al-Awwal) (إن شاء الله تعالى - inshallah ta'ala). It's called The Lover, the Love, and the Beloved. And it's basically, the poem is, I won't recite the whole thing now, but the poem will be in recitation, maybe 40 or 45 minutes long.

So it's a long poem. That the affair, the whole affair, the whole affair is love. That is the beginning of affair and the end of the affair of everything.

That Allah (تعالى - ta'ala) was a hidden treasure desiring to be known. And if any of you have been in love, have any of you been in love? If you've been in love, put your hand like this. Seven people have been in love (إن شاء الله - inshallah)

Well, for you other poor souls who have never been in love, let me tell you something about what it's like to be in love. When you're desiring to be known, if your beloved knows you, you don't care who else knows you or doesn't know you. If you wanna be seen, you only wanna be seen by your beloved.

In fact, if you dress nicely and your beloved doesn't see you, wear the same clothes the next day because your beloved didn't see you. It doesn't even count. Anyone who wants to gaze upon you doesn't count.

Allah was a hidden treasure desiring to be known. And what He created is the reality of His beloved (محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم - Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam). And what an amazing thing that is.

That He created (سيدنا محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم - Sayyidina Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) for himself and He created the rest of the creation for him. Such that when (آدم عليه السلام - Adam alayhi salam) was seeking repentance and leaving the garden, he asked for the haq of (محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم - Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam). How do you know this name Muhammad? Allah is asking him.

Of course, Allah knows. And on your throne, I saw (لا إله إلا الله محمد رسول الله - la ilaha illallah Muhammadur Rasulullah) and I know you would not put a name next to your name except that it was great with you. After He creates this reality, this light of (محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم - Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam), the next thing He creates is a pen.

And after that, a pad. And He creates a great love poem for (محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم - Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) which is the universe. Everything that is happening and everything that will happen, written in the presence of His beloved (محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم - Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam).

And even in English, the word we have universe, uni means one, verse means poem, that the whole universe is a poem and the poem is about love. So we are all in love. There's no place to go actually other than being in love.

The only way to hide from love is you have to delude yourself. You have to deny it. But we are all essentially soaking in love, living, breathing in love.

Our existence, the ionic and the covalent bonds of love affairs, everything from the material and immaterial world, love. So I wanted to write about that.

And I wanted to write praising this one, the body that that reality came into because Allah (تعالى - ta'ala) could have made the great ocean Muhammad and we would have had to all go to this ocean and like bathe in it or drink its water or something like that.

But He didn't make it an ocean. Could have made the great planet Muhammad and we would have to look in the sky and we would have to say prayers on this planet or the great mountain Muhammad or the great sky Muhammad or the great tree Muhammad or the great anything (محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم - Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam). We brought him in the form and in this form, in our form and what a great honor that is for us.

So I wanted to praise him in his form and also praise his reality that preceded his form and that goes past this one. But without talking too much, I just want to recite something of this poem such that in hopes that you'll pray for me and pray for the completion of it because it's in service of all of us. All of us, it is a gift from us to him.

You know, someone came and asked about the character of the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) and (عائشة رضي الله عنها - Aisha radiyallahu anha), our mother, asked him, don't you recite the Quran? Of course, I recite the Quran. He was like the Quran walking. So everything, he is the Quran walking.

The Quran is (محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم - Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) lying down. And the creation, the (كن - kun) of (كن فيكون - kun fayakun - Be, and it is) is as if Allah said Muhammad, which is the (كن - kun) of (كن فيكون - kun fayakun). So I say, you are the sun at noon.

You are the calf in the noon. You are the ba in the seen in the seen and unseen. You are a shoreless sea.

You are a nightless day. You are the meaning of being with the angels we pray. (اللهم صل على سيدنا محمد الفاتح لما أغلق - Allahumma salli ala Sayyidina) (والخاتم لما سبق ناصر الحق بالحق والهادي إلى صراطك المستقيم وعلى آله حق قدره ومقداره العظيم - Muhammad al-Fatih lima ughliq wal-khatim lima sabaq nasir al-haqq bil-haqq wal-hadi ila siratika al-mustaqim wa ala alihi haqqa qadrihi wa miqdarihi al-azeem - O Allah, send blessings upon our master Muhammad, the opener of what was closed, the seal of what preceded, the helper of truth by the Truth, the guide to Your straight path, and upon his family according to his immense worth and magnitude).

Me seeking to praise the beloved is to throw a handful of dust into the desert to increase its vastness. It is to spit into the sea to increase its value. It is to light a candle to support the sun. But may God be my witness that this poor poet attempted what is unremembered memoir recited from a dismembered member of a mind bewildered, a heart more beaten than beating.

Love did not descend upon his heart with a slow, long drip of cool honey. No, love set upon his heart like a flesh-hungry flame. No, love set upon his heart like a pack of wild wolves.

Don't you see their bellies fat for my flesh? Don't you see my blood in their teeth? Let the red grin be as evidence that it is not that I was always heartless. I used to be able to love he, she, they, and them. But now my heart has been consumed by a ravenous love that devours anything other than itself.

I have fallen in love. I have not fallen in love for what is beautiful. I have not even fallen for beauty itself.

I have fallen for the well from which beauty drinks. I have fallen into the well from which beauty drinks. And it was Tijani, Inyas, and Sisay like Joseph's brothers who cast me into its bottom.

But this well's darkness is brighter than the sun's light. Let the King of Egypt throw down a rope. I will throw the rope back and tell him he is trying to sell me his junk for my jewels.

He's trying to trade me his dirt for my diamonds. Why be with the one who has the keys to the grains when I'm with the one who has the keys to the garden? Let this poem's parchment be as Joseph's garment. Put it beneath your nose to heal your blindness.

Put it beneath my nose to heal my blindness where I wept myself blind seeking to find it. I run it between hilltops searching for a sign of you running to and fro between Safa and Marwa between beauty and breaking between a love that empties and a longing that fills. Beloved, just give me some hope that one day I will drink from your hand that I will smell your neck.

For these words they'll celebrate me in truth these words humiliate me. My words can't match your worthy and my love cannot match your lovely. I'm a poet, a poet without the words.

What is a poet without the words? I'm a tree without the limbs a fire without the light. You are a sea without the shore a day without the night. For these words still celebrate me but in truth these words humiliate me.

I've lit a candle to express the sun. I spilled water in my hand to describe the ocean. My words can't match your worthy and my love can't match your lovely.

You are immense. I am a mess. Beloved, what can a poet bring his prophet? What can a pauper bring his king? When you are already the sun at noon you are the calf in the noon you are the ba in the seen in the seen and unseen.

You are a shoreless sea you are a nightless day you are the meaning of being with the angels we pray. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Thank you.