Islam, Citizenship, and Religious Liberty

Islam, Citizenship, and Religious Liberty

Introduction by Teresa Ladrigan-Welpley

Good afternoon, and welcome. My name is Teresa Ladrigan-Welpley, and I serve as the director of the Bannon Institutes in the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education here at Santa Clara University. The work of the Ignatian Center is to provide leadership to advance the integration of faith, justice, and the intellectual life on our campus and in the larger community.

And one of the ways in which we seek to actualize this integrating vision and mission is through events such as today, when we come together to reflect on pressing contemporary religious and cultural issues and consider all the dimensions of our response as individuals, as a university, as a nation, and as a human family.

Key Questions for Today's Discussion

What is the relationship between Islam, citizenship, and religious liberty? How are current streams within our contemporary American political discourse sometimes informed more by Islamophobia than the founding principles of this country? Is Islam compatible with the free exercise of religion? What might we learn from drafters of the recent Marrakesh Declaration in Morocco, which championed the full human rights and citizen status of religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries?

We are very privileged today to reflect upon these pressing contemporary questions with Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, a contributing author to this Marrakesh Declaration, and president and co-founder of Zaytuna College, the first Muslim liberal arts college in the world. Several faculty, staff, and student leaders from Zaytuna College join us today as distinguished guests. A warm welcome to all of you.

To offer our formal introduction of President Yusuf and facilitate a dialogue following President Yusuf's remarks, I would like to invite forward at this time Dr. Fareed Senzai, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science here at Santa Clara University, and longtime friend of President Yusuf. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Senzai.

Introduction by Dr. Fareed Senzai

Thank you, Teresa. It is an honor and a privilege to welcome all of you here this afternoon. Our discussion today on Islam, citizenship, and religious liberty couldn't be more timely.

The Current State of Muslim-American Relations

Today the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims is at an important crossroads. A time when tensions are high and the very place and identity of Muslims as citizens in America is being put into question. These are certainly troubling times. When one out of two Americans has an unfavorable view of Islam and Muslims.

Where one out of three feels that the civil liberties of American Muslims should be curtailed. Amidst a

ratcheting up of divisive rhetoric that we're hearing during the presidential politics and the debates that are taking place, we're also seeing criminal threats against mosques, harassment, and bullying of kids in schools.

And violence targeting citizens simply for being Muslim. A time when speaking Arabic will get you kicked off a plane. Or for instance, the North Carolina man that forced himself upon a Muslim woman on an airplane, he walked up to her and said in effect, take that hijab off. Take that thing off. This is America. The man then proceeded to pull the hijab off of the woman, leaving the woman's entire head exposed.

These are indeed troubling times. But those of us that care about religious freedom and understand that this discriminatory backlash doesn't just harm the Muslim community, it hampers the rights of all Americans and violates the defining values of our country. Yet at the same time, there are Americans that continue to propagate animosity and hatred towards Muslims. Americans who insist they have never met a Muslim. Or those that have but continue to view Muslims through a prism of the security lens. For them, Muslims cannot be trusted. They do not belong.

When religious leaders like Franklin Graham suggest that Islam is a violent religion at its core, at a time when 24-hour news propagates all of the images that we see of beheadings, Muslims are often then consequently targeted and attacked. We then also see, of course, Muslims engaged in violence. And that only reinforces the animosity towards Muslims. The San Bernardino attacks is a case in point. Clearly it is not an easy topic for us to address and to tackle.

Introducing Sheikh Hamza Yusuf

But today we have an extraordinary Muslim, a Muslim leader who has devoted his life to tackling some of these very difficult and contentious issues. We are fortunate to have Sheikh Hamza here with us this afternoon. After all, who better to address and examine the question of citizenship and the right to belong than a man born as Mark Hanson, to two academics in Washington State and raised in Northern California, who converted to Islam and has now built the first Muslim liberal arts college, a man that has devoted his life to educating about Islam and Muslims.

I have known Sheikh Hamza since I was in high school, growing up in Sacramento, when Sheikh Hamza would occasionally come up to give talks to a packed audience. It was a time when those of us growing up in a place like Sacramento had very few Muslim leaders to look up to and very few that we could learn about Islam from.

I have since gotten to know Sheikh Hamza much better, both personally and professionally, including the many joint conferences and events that we have attended, including a project that we both participated in for several years.

It was an initiative spearheaded by an extraordinary individual named George Russell, who established what was known as One Nation, an attempt to address the tensions that exist between Muslims and non-Muslims. I also had the distinct pleasure of serving on the initial board of Zaytuna College, when the school was initially

launched, and then later as a member of the Academic Affairs Committee when the college began to establish its first round of classes.

As you heard from Teresa, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf is currently the president and co-founder and senior faculty member at Zaytuna College. It is the first Muslim liberal arts college in the United States. He's also an advisor to Stanford University's program in Islamic Studies and the Center for Islamic Studies at Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union. Sheikh Hamza serves as a member of the board of advisors of George Russell's One Nation program. He also, in addition, is the vice president for the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies, which was founded and currently presided over by Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah, one of the top jurists and masters of Islamic sciences in the world.

Most recently, Sheikh Hamza contributed to the writing of the 2016 Marrakesh Declaration in Morocco, affirming the rights of religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries. He also met with Pope Francis in Rome to discuss the implications of this declaration.

Sheikh Hamza Yusuf will speak for 30 minutes this afternoon, followed by a brief dialogue, and then we'll have time for questions and answers. It is my distinct privilege to introduce one of our country's most distinguished and well-recognized Muslim scholars to finally welcome him here to Santa Clara. Please join me in giving a warm Santa Clara welcome to Sheikh Hamza Yusuf.

Sheikh Hamza Yusuf's Lecture

In the name of God, the most merciful and the most compassionate.

Praise be to our Lord and peace and prayers be upon our prophet and upon all the prophets.

Gratitude and California's Spirit of Innovation

First of all, I really want to thank the college, the university for inviting me. The Bay Area is, I think, one of the intellectual hubs of the United States. We're also a very odd assortment of ideas. Some of the craziest ideas come out of California, but also some of the most interesting and progressive.

I was, just to give you an example, I was inspired by the fact that we had the largest solar installation in the world back in the late 70s. And out of just passing by there one day, I was so inspired by it that I asked a friend of mine to see what it would take to get Mauritania completely energy independent with solar panels. And he did an incredible project for me. And I ended up presenting that to the government in Abu Dhabi. And from that came the largest solar installation in West Africa, which is in Mauritania, which is providing 10% of the energy to the state of Mauritania. And we opened that two years ago in Nouakchott. As you fly into Nouakchott, you see just this incredible massive array of solar panels.

My point being that California is an inspiration for some of the most creative thinking that we have. And the Bay Area in particular is a place where I grew up. And I think in many ways my religious understanding is

informed by my early experiences in an incredibly tolerant place.

San Francisco's Religious Heritage

Our main city is named after St. Francis, who is attributed by the Franciscans with ending the Crusades and actually met with the Muslims in Egypt. And they were very impressed with St. Francis. He convinced the Pope to allow, instead of going on Crusades, to allow people for penance to actually make a pilgrimage to Assisi where he was.

We're also a state that's named after saints, despite the fact that in many ways we're probably one of the most sinful places in the world. But those saints, like Santa Clara, are reminders, nonetheless, of what this state was founded on. It was founded on a deep and profound religious belief from people that brought a great religion to people that, I mean, these are all arguable and debatable points today, but in many ways benefited from that tradition.

The Concept of Citizenship in Islam

So I want to talk about citizenship, which is an interesting concept, because in the Islamic tradition, citizenship, the actual word in Arabic for citizenship is مُوَاطَنَة - muwatana. And a مُوَاطِن - muwatin is a citizen. وَطن - Watan is the place you're born. And historically, citizenship is conferred upon people based on birth. You can be naturalized, but it's a birthright. If you're born in a place, historically, you are a citizen of that place.

One of the interesting verses in the Quran is that the Quran swears by the city of Mecca, and it says that the Prophet was a lawful citizen of that city. In other words, that he had a birthright by being born into that city. He had a right to be there, and he had a right to think freely, and he was being wronged and oppressed. And so citizenship is a birthright, but it's also related to the idea of suffrage or enfranchisement, the idea that we can actually participate in our government. And this idea is a relatively new idea.

Greek Citizenship vs. Modern Citizenship

Arguably, the Greek concept of citizenship does not have a lot to do with the modern concept of citizenship, because it was for free Greek males in a society that was largely driven by a slave labor force, and women were certainly not part of the citizenry. But it was also, interestingly enough, our first historical account of what we would call today a direct democracy, because the citizens were not passive citizens, they were active citizens. They actually had to participate in government. They had the responsibility of participating in government.

Civic Duty in Modern America

And that's something that in our culture, many people do not have any sense of civic duty. I'll give you an example. For years, I got off of jury duty, and most of us find ways of finagling ourselves out of jury duty. But at a certain point, I actually realized I never want to be judged by a jury that needed the $10 a day that they give you for being on jury duty. And I really felt that I'm not going to do that. And I actually served on a jury once,

and it was a felony case, and it was a very powerful experience, I would say. There's something, if anybody's been in a jury room, there's something very mystical that happens in jury deliberations.

But civic duty was considered, when this country was founded, something very important. But again, it was free-property males, and they were basically largely Anglo-Saxon. So our idea of citizenry, even in this country, has evolved and changed. The suffragette movement, which was a very powerful movement, to enfranchise women and allow them to fully participate in the government.

The Evolution of Citizenship Rights

The idea, and this is a Kantian idea, oddly enough, as well, as enlightened as he was, the idea that a citizen should be somebody who was actually independent, and not an employee, an employer. They should be independent in their means in order for them to be involved in government, because they would have more of a sense of obligation, and they had more responsibility and more concern about the government, because it would affect them. And they didn't feel that people that were uneducated, or were not propertied, or were not independent, should be involved in making decisions that would affect laws that would, in turn, affect those people that were independent.

So this was a debate. My point in all this is that citizenship has been a, it's a debated term, it's a contested term to this day, what it means to be a citizen, what are the rights of citizenship, what are the obligations, the duties. We have a Bill of Rights, but we don't have a Bill of Responsibilities.

Governance in the Muslim World

In the Muslim world, you largely had what was known as الْحَاكِم - al-hakim and الْمَحْكُوم - al-mahkum, the ruler and the ruled. The idea of being a subject was the normative experience for most people in most parts of the world for centuries, and this was certainly the case. However, in the Muslim world, just like in feudal Europe, most people did not experience a type of intrusive government in their lives. In some ways, today, the government is far more involved in our lives than they were in pre-modern societies. Leisure time in pre-modern societies was much greater.

Life Among the Bedouin

I'll give you an example. I lived with Bedouin in the Saharan Desert, and the Bedouin are completely free people. They are self-governing, by and large. They live in tribal units. Their lands, even nomadic people's lands, are very well-known and demarcated. They know if people infringe upon their lands, it'll create conflicts over water and other natural resources, like grass, because grazing rights are very important to that. One of the things the Prophet said is, people share grazing, so the right to graze your animals is kind of a universal right in the Islamic tradition.

But, in many parts of the world, peoples lived without government. When you get into any type of sophisticated societies, you need laws to govern those societies. Hence, citizenship is a concept that emerges out of that. This

Aristotle's Three Categories of Human Existence

He, in fact, talks about the three ways of being in the world, of being a slave, of being in a type of infantilized condition, which he would place women as the third, not the children, but as the third category, which is a citizen. So, he actually used the woman as an example of a citizen in the family, because she was under the authority of the husband, but the relationship was more of a relationship of mutuality, as opposed to a type of dictatorship. The children were in a situation of a benevolent despotism, and then the servants were in the situation of slavery.

He argues that these are the three ways that human beings exist in the world. They exist as citizens. They exist as subjects of benevolent dictators, which is the father and the mother who are caring for the children and decide for them. And then, he looks at the third category, which is the slave that has no rights or authority in their own lives. They're simply dictated. So, it's a type of dictatorship that they're under.

Congruence Theory and Social Institutions

In our culture, we, in many ways, reflect what Epstein calls congruence theory, because one of the things that strikes many immigrants that come to this country, particularly friends of mine that have come from the Muslim world, is that they're always struck by the idea of giving children a lot of choices. So, for instance, I have Arab friends that cannot believe that American parents will ask their children what they want for dinner, because in many, many cultures, the children are subjects. They simply get dinner and they have to eat it. Whereas here, what would you like for dinner, dear?

Now, interestingly enough, according to Epstein and congruence theory, that is necessary for a democracy to thrive and survive. Why? Because what he says is that governments will only work to the degree with which the system of government permeates the social institutions of the society. So, if you have dictatorships, you need dictatorial parents. If you have dictatorships, you need dictatorial doctors. You go to the doctor, you're not going to have a conversation with him about what you think the best approach to this problem is, because you've Googled it and read all about it. It's not going to happen in a lot of places in the world. They're going to get upset about it. And the same with the teachers.

I have a friend from, I'll veil the country with charity, but he was in a Muslim country and he told me when he was a young boy, the teacher was telling him the pig is haram. And he raised his hand and he said, why is the pig haram? And he said that the teacher came up to him and said, put out your hand, and he whacked him. And he told me that he learned never to ask a question from that day forward. That is, that makes perfect sense, according to Epstein, for a society to have a dictatorship or a tyrannical government. You have to replicate that behavior in all the social institutions so that the people in turn internalize these ways of being.

James Baldwin on Race in America

If you want to see one of the most extraordinary talks you'll ever see, I would watch James Baldwin's debate with William Buckley at the Oxford Union. And one of the things James Baldwin says is that very early on, a black child learns what it means to be black in America. But he says what also happens is that white people learn what it means to be white in America. That a lot of us are unaware of how we internalize social systems that dictate to us ways of being. And what he argues in that debate and why it's so powerful is that white people are as much a victim of racism as black people are. That he got the longest standing ovation, according to the BBC man, that he'd ever seen at the Oxford Union after that address.

Tyranny in the Muslim World

So Epstein's argument is very relevant to our situation now in the Muslim world, which has social institutions that are unfortunately very tyrannical. People unfortunately associate that with Islam and think somehow this must be Islam, because they're all Muslims and all those governments are horrible. They tend to forget that, for instance, in West Africa, Senegal is a democratic government. Senegal is actually an incredibly liberal society with their religious conservatism. They are a very wonderfully functioning society.

Just recently, they refused a visa to the Sheikh al-Azhar from Egypt because the Sheikh al-Azhar gave a stamp of approval for the Sisi coup and they said, we're a democratic society and we don't want a religious leader that sanctioned a coup because it threatens the security of our government. So there's an example of a Muslim state that's democratic, that does not function as a tyranny or a despotic state, but people don't know about it.

Examples of Democratic Muslim Societies

Malaysia is another example of an incredibly multicultural society that has Islam as the constitutional religion, despite the fact that it has Hindus, it has Buddhists, it has animists, it has what are called the orang asli, orangutan in Malay language means jungle man. Orang is man, so orang asli are the original people, the aboriginal people who live in the jungles. They're animists. They're in Malaysia. So this multicultural society, or Turkey, which despite the tensions that are going on right now, Turkey has been a democratic society for a considerable amount of time.

Iran definitely has Vilayat al-Faqih and there are certain things in their constitution that would, I think, cause people here pause. But, lest we forget, Iran today, compared to the American experience 200 years ago, is an extremely progressive society.

American Ethnocentricity

And so I think one of the things that we tend to do as Americans is project on the world our view of the world. When we were Christian, we had a civilizing enterprise of proselytizing Christianity and, in particular, Protestant Christianity around the world. Hence, we have the American University in Beirut. And the Protestants went around the Muslim world establishing these centers.

Now that we're a capitalistic society, we go around with liberal democracy as the idea that we want to convert everybody to this. Very often, we fail, I think because of our ethnocentricity, to actually see that other peoples have different ways of viewing the world. Some of those ways might be wrong as far as we're concerned and some might be right or wrong. But, nonetheless, they are the ways that they view the world.

Many women in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia do not want to be liberated from the hijab. Now, there are people in critical theory which would say that's double consciousness. What we need to do is liberate them from their backward thinking. Again, this is the type of patronizing attitude that a lot of people in the west have about other peoples. We simply have to recreate the world in our own image.

Japanese Culture and Deference

I was just in Japan and I was stunned at the incredible deference that Japanese culture has to foreigners and to other people. I was in Tokyo walking around the city for five days. I did not hear a horn honk once. And when I asked one of the Japanese, don't people use horns here? He said, no, it's considered very rude. Man, I wish we would learn something about that in San Francisco, right? Because I have what they call a vasovagal response for the doctors in the room. You know, like I go through the roof if somebody honks the horn, my kidneys just literally go through the roof. So, I really appreciated the quietness.

And everybody was so, like I held an elevator for people on a few occasions and they run and say, so sorry to keep you waiting. And they're like bowing and I'm like, wow. That's for keeping the elevator door open. What happens when you do really something for them? Really wonderful culture that I think has retained some of the beautiful things of traditional society. And in many ways, we in the West have lost many of these things because of the negative aspects of tradition.

The Theocentric Nature of Muslim Society

The Muslim world is still profoundly theocentric. Even secular Muslims use, we have words like goodbye, which used to mean God be with you. We don't really have the type of words in our culture that are informed from a religious perspective. My father constantly used Godspeed whenever he would say goodbye because that was something that was said when he was a young man in this country. Godspeed, you know, go with God. The Arabs or the Muslims say, go with God.

One of the things that's really interesting about that, you know, we call this rocket the Challenger. Muslims would never do that. I mean, calling a rocket the Challenger is, for a Muslim, insanity. They write things like, may God be with us. You know, when you get on an airplane, on all the airplanes, it says like (بِسْمِ اللَّهِ - Bismillah) (فِي أَمَانِ اللَّهِ - fi aman Allah) (الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ - Alhamdulillah). They put like God's name and asking for a safe journey, not like Challenger. Like, who are you challenging? Because, you know, so the Muslim world is profoundly theocentric, and for that reason, Islam, and I was happy to see this in this week's Economist, Islam still must be part of the solution for any of the problems facing the Muslim world.

In no foreseeable future can Islam be relegated in the way that much of religion has been relegated in Europe, less so, but nonetheless, to a large extent, in America also. Islam is still central to the Islamic ethos.

The Marrakesh Declaration and the Question of Dhimma

And for that reason, my teacher, Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah, convened, and this took five years to get to Marrakesh. People think these things just happen overnight. It took five years. It began with a meeting five years ago in Nouakchott about citizenship, and the reason that he did this was he was so troubled about the debates about jizya, and jizya, for those who don't know about the Islamic tradition, jizya is the idea that in a Muslim majority state or a state being ruled by Muslims, non-Muslims go under a status, what is known as dhimma (أَهْلُ الذِّمَّةِ - ahl adh-dhimma).

Dhimma, or dhimmitude, and this is the grist of a lot of Islamophobic material out there, and there are many websites about dhimmitude. I actually saw a bumper sticker a few weeks ago in Santa Clara, in San Ramon, that said, (أَنَا كَافِرٌ وَفَخُورٌ - ana kafirun wa fakhur). It said, I'm a disbeliever, in Arabic, I'm a disbeliever and proud, which is again a kind of in-your-face statement about how people think that Muslims view the other.

Brother and Other in English and Arabic

It's interesting, one of the linguistic, intriguing linguistic aspects of English and Arabic is that in English we have other and brother, but in Arabic you have brother and other. So in English we say brother, and so you have other embedded in the word brother, but in Arabic you say (آخَر - akhar) which is other, and the word brother is (أَخ - akh), it's embedded in the word other, and I just think that's a very interesting thing. So we have to see the brother in other, but we also have to recognize the other in brother, and this is something that a lot of people have a difficult time doing.

The Quranic Verse on Jizya

So he had a series of meetings to talk about the problem of dhimmitude, which is in surah, the 9th chapter, it's the last chapter revealed in the Quran, and it's the idea that those who disbelieve in God and his messenger, that they have to pay a jizya, and it says (حَتَّىٰ يُعْطُوا الْجِزْيَةَ عَن يَدٍ وَهُمْ صَاغِرُونَ - hatta yutu al-jizyata 'an yadin wa hum saghirun - Quran 9:29), and there's a lot of debate about what that word means. Some say it means humbled, some say it means humiliated, and you will find debates in our books about this.

The Medinan Charter as a Model

The sheikh, what he did was he looked at our tradition and he said that the first relationship that the prophet ﷺ had with the other in Medina was full enfranchisement, and this was the Jewish community, and this is called (صَحِيفَةُ الْمَدِينَةِ - Sahifat al-Madinah). In some ways, it's the first written constitution, even though the Athenian, even the Spartans, they had constitutions, but they were not written, and this is a case where the prophet ﷺ actually had a constitution written down, and in it, the Jews are given full enfranchisement in the state to practice their religion and to have mutual defense, and they're entitled to their religion, they have their own

religious courts, and fulfill their functions, and so it was a full enfranchisement. They were not seen as less than the Muslims in that state.

And most Muslims think that this was abrogated, but Fred Donner shows in his book on Islam, Muhammad and the Believers, that actually there were Jews on the Arabian Peninsula up until the 19th century, historically documented. Ibn Ishaq, who's the most famous biographer of the prophet's life, says that Omar expelled the Jews from Medina that did not have the contractual agreement of the Medinan charter, and so the Medinan charter was maintained even after the prophet's death, which means that it was not abrogated.

So what Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah argues in the Marrakesh Declaration, and in the essay that he wrote to substantiate it as a jurist, he argues that citizenship is an Islamic concept, and that the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ did enfranchise the Jews, and that this should be the model for Muslim states today. The OIC acknowledged this.

The Ottoman Abolition of Jizya

Now, two points, and then I'll finish. One, the Ottomans already abolished Jizya in the 1830s under Sultan Abdul Majid, and they did it with the Sheikh of Islam and with the scholars at that time. It was agreed upon that this was no longer an appropriate relationship to have with minority communities in the Muslim state. This is all that Sheikh Abdullah is trying to do, is basically substantiate within our own tradition the normative practice of citizenship in the modern world. It's the one that makes the most sense.

Now, people would say, well, why do you have to go back 1400 years? Because Muslims believe that Islam is a revelation, and if you do not convince them from their revelation, many of them will not accept the charter. It's as simple as that. They will say this is just the words of the kuffar, and we're not obliged to follow it.

ISIS and Medieval Attitudes

ISIS is a good example now of people that are reviving medieval attitudes, and in some ways I take offense at calling it medieval, because I've spent a good deal of my life reading medieval writers, and I'm always struck by how enlightened many of them were. When we talk about dead white men, most of those dead white men actually spent a good deal of their lives in jail. Many of them were killed by the state. We tend to forget that.

The only good Indian is a dead Indian. Malcolm X gets a stamp after he's assassinated. Martin Luther King gets the day after he's assassinated. That power structures tend to incorporate their dissidents after they're dead, because they're no longer a threat to the power structures anymore. So I have a defense for dead white men, because I think a lot of them had a lot of interesting things to say, and I don't think they were all white either. St. Augustine was from North Africa, lest we forget.

The Importance of Islamic Education

So my point being is that if you do not substantiate this in our tradition, many Muslims will simply not accept it.

Is Religious Liberty Compatible with Islam?

So having said that, I'll just end with one thing. Is religious liberty incompatible with Islam? The only real answer to that is, who's Islam? I think for many people in the Muslim community in the past and the present, in some ways religious liberty, as it's defined in the modern world, is incompatible with their version of Islam. The Islam that I embrace, which I believe is normative Islam, I do not believe religious liberty is incompatible with Islam, and I think I could make a very powerful argument. I certainly think I could do it from the Quran, and I'll leave you with three verses.

Had God wanted, everyone would have believed in the world. In other words, He gave you free will. And then it says

Are you going to coerce people into believing? Because all you do when you coerce people into believing is create a religion filled with hypocrites.

The other verse in, that was in verse 99, the other verse is in Baqarah, 256, second chapter, 256. The Quran says,

There's no coercion in religion. Falsehood should be in clear contradistinction to truth.

And then finally in chapter 18, the Kahf, it says,

Whoever wants to believe in this, let him believe, and whoever wants to reject it,

let him reject it.

Most of us love chocolate. I just bought some Japanese chocolate for my family, and people are usually happy with chocolate, but nobody likes chocolate when it's shoved down their throats. Thank you.

Dialogue Between Dr. Senzai and Sheikh Hamza Yusuf

Question 1: Muslims as a Minority in the United States

Dr. Senzai: Well, thank you so much, Sheikh Hamza. I think a lot of questions were raised. In many cases, questions about Muslims as majorities, living in majority countries, Muslim majority countries. What I'd like to do in our discussion is talk about Muslims as minorities in the context of the United States. And within the United States, especially within the context of what we're seeing politically, how can you reflect, could you reflect on the place for Muslims here in the United States as a minority community?

Sheikh Hamza: Well, first of all, we have to remember that Muslims have been here from the start. There's substantial historical evidence that's proven that at certain periods, about one-fifth of the slaves that were brought here were Muslims. We have handwritten Qurans from slaves. We have Arabic letters from slaves. Sulayman bin Ayyub is a good example of that. Prince Abd ar-Rahman is another example of that, that the film was made. I think you were involved in that, yeah, with Michael Wolfe.

Dr. Senzai: That's right. Right, Unity Productions.

Sheikh Hamza: So we also have the earliest example of a white convert to Islam is George Bethune English, who got his master's degree, which was the highest degree at the time, at Harvard. At Harvard, believe it or not, Harvard was teaching Arabic alongside Hebrew. And if you get the first edition facsimile version, you can buy it, of Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary, hence we get the word Webster's Dictionary, but that was the first American dictionary. He wanted to prove that English was from Arabic, and I mean from Hebrew, but he ended up feeling that there were actually more Semitic roots in Arabic that were related to English. So the book is filled with Arabic typography. And so he's got earth, ardh, baby, babus, cave, kahf. He shows all these Arabic words. And so they were teaching Arabic in the United States in the 18th and 19th century.

So Muslims have been here, and they're here, and you know, notwithstanding some major events where you would have incarceration, like what happened to the Japanese, which has never been constitutionally declared unconstitutional. It has to go to the Supreme Court, so that's never happened, and FEMA does have internment camps for a national emergency or something like that. So I would hate, God forbid, if there was some kind of nuclear dirty bomb or something like that. Who knows? I don't know. So it's a very troubling prospect, but I think Muslims are here in large numbers. It's a highly educated, as you know, community, and there's also a lot of really hardworking, decent Muslims that are here, like many other communities.

The Irish Catholic Experience in America

One of the things about the United States is, historically, most communities have been forced to duke it out, other than the Anglo-Saxon peoples that came here. The Irish community, if you study their history, the Irish community fought hard. There's a very interesting book, When the Irish Became White, which is about Irish Catholics. People think Kennedy was the first Irish president. It was actually Andrew Jackson, but he was Ulster Irish, Protestant, so they weren't really considered Irish. But the Irish Catholics had a very hard time in this country, but what they did was they duked it out on the streets. They created world class teaching institutions, and now one out of every four Americans has some kind of Irish roots, and St. Patrick's Day is the biggest parade in New York and Boston, so good things happen if people work hard enough and are willing to kind of take the blows.

Question 2: The Intra-Muslim Debate on Religious Freedom

Dr. Senzai: In regards to the question of religious liberty and religious freedom, there's an intra-Muslim debate that's taking place about the extent to which religious freedoms and liberties should be granted, especially when it comes to, for instance, attacking Islam. We see sort of the violence that erupts when cartoons are drawn in the image of the prophet, and there's this intra-Muslim debate about that. What are your thoughts?

Sheikh Hamza: Well, I would say, first of all, that the idea of vigilante justice is totally prohibited in the Islamic religion. No Muslim is allowed to take extrajudicial action in any situation, so there are blasphemy laws in Islam just like there were. There still are blasphemy laws in some European countries, so it's not like these things have completely gone away. They just don't implement them anymore. I mean, the last person to be killed for blasphemy was in Scotland in the late 17th century, so it wasn't like Europe didn't have these things also. The Muslim tradition is a pre-modern tradition, and so it has many of the sensibilities of the pre-modern worldview.

Muslims Need to Get Used to Being Offended

In today's current situation, I think Muslims, first of all, need to get used to being offended. The Quran has many verses about being offended. (اصْبِرْ عَلَى مَا يَقُولُونَ - Isbir 'ala ma yaqulun). Be patient about what they say.

(لَتُبْلَوُنَّ فِي أَمْوَالِكُمْ وَأَنفُسِكُمْ وَلَتَسْمَعُنَّ مِنَ الَّذِينَ أُوتُوا الْكِتَابَ مِن قَبْلِكُمْ وَمِنَ الَّذِينَ أَشْرَكُوا أَذًى كَثِيرًا - Latublawunna fi amwalikum wa anfusikum wa latasma'unna min alladhina utu al-kitaba min qablikum wa min alladhina ashraku adhan kathiran - Quran 3:186). You're going to hear from the people that were given the book before you, meaning the Jews and the Christians, and the polytheists, much odious or noxious statements, and it says to be patient and don't get angry, and so there's a lot of things about just not getting angry.

The prophet once heard somebody call him Mudhammam, which means, it's the opposite of Muhammad, it means blameworthy, because Muhammad means praiseworthy, and he said, isn't it interesting how God has removed my name from their tongues when they want to curse me, and he said, they're talking about somebody named Mudhammam, and my name's Muhammad. You know, in other words, they're not talking about me.

The Image is Not the Thing

And so those cartoons, anybody that says those cartoons were the prophet Muhammad, as far as I'm concerned, is not a Muslim. You know, there's a beautiful, Magritte has a beautiful picture, and it says this is not a pipe, and it shows a picture of a pipe, because we forget that the image is not the thing, and so if you make an image of something, it's not that thing, those crucifixes, it's not Jesus on the cross, you know, and so any image that's made, especially if it's a caricature, it's certainly not our prophet, it has nothing to do with our prophet.

And then Muslims have to ask themselves, have you contributed to the drawing itself? Has your behavior contributed to the perception of this religion? So when Muslims do heinous things, unfortunately, Islam gets blamed, and with Christianity, that's not the case, because we're in a society where Christians are fully enfranchised. I know some people would debate the war on Christmas and things like that, but Christians are enfranchised, so when one Christian does a crazy thing, all the Christians aren't blamed for it, but unfortunately, we're not in a situation where Muslims are fully enfranchised in this country, so when one Muslim does a crazy thing, Islam is blamed for it.

I mean, a lot of these people clearly have mental illness. I mean, the man that flew the plane into the IRS building after writing a serious political screed, you know, he was just considered a crazy white guy, but if his name was Muhammad, that would have been a terrorist act. It's as simple as that. So, you know, the Arabs say your preposition works and mine doesn't, you know, like you have different grammatical rules than I do.

Question 3: Zaytuna College's Mission

Dr. Senzai: Santa Clara University, as you know, is the oldest institution of higher learning in California. It's grounded in the Jesuit tradition of educating citizens and leaders of conscience and compassion to build a more just and more humane world. Can you reflect on your mission at Zaytuna College, especially within the context and rooted in Islam? What are your hopes in achieving in embarking on this initiative?

Sheikh Hamza: I mean, I would say that the Catholic and the Islamic tradition share a lot of things. The central thing that they share is a profound dedication to education, but another thing they share is a profound dedication to the instrumental arts. And by art here, I mean power, the ability to do something. Historically, the instrumental arts in both our traditions were the language arts and the number arts, the qualitative and quantitative reasoning. And so in the language arts, it was grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

Grammar as the Gateway to Learning

There's a wonderful fresco by Botticelli of a student being led into the other six liberal arts by grammar, and it's personified as a beautiful woman. And overlooking them is prudencia or wisdom. And one of the things that we don't realize is that language is incredibly complicated. When we speak, I mean, I was in a hotel recently and we asked for, somebody asked me what I wanted. I said, an omelet with everything except the meat. And so the omelet came with everything, with nothing but the meat. And the reason was, is the person's English was

limited. And the concept of an exception, using except, is actually a complicated concept in language. Like had they said no meat, it's very clear. But to say except meat will confuse somebody who's not a native speaker sometimes if they don't know the language. So we don't realize how complicated language is.

St. Augustine on the Liberal Arts

And historically, On Christian Doctrine by St. Augustine, St. Augustine argues that you have to learn the liberal arts in order to read scripture. One of the crises in the Muslim world is that the liberal arts are no longer taught. And so people are reading scripture without the liberal arts. If you don't know what a conditional sentence is, you should not be reading scripture other than as a devotional practice. But if you think that you can derive knowledge or wisdom from it, you're going to get in serious trouble. And there are many things in the Quran that are highly nuanced.

The Sophistication of Arabic Particles

In the Islamic tradition, the last book that you read in our scholastic tradition is a two-volume work. And I showed Graham Wood this book, who studied Arabic at Harvard, who wrote the article for the Atlantic. It's a two-volume work just on the particles and prepositions in Arabic and how difficult they are. There are several, just (fa) in Arabic in the Quran has several possibilities. There's something called (فَا السَّبَبِيَّة - fa as-sababiyyah) which is the causative fa. There's a fa that is related to it happens after time has transpired. It's a conjunctive fa that happens after time has transpired.

So every sentence in the Quran, in the Catholic tradition, they used to study the sentencias, which were the sentences. They studied this in seminaries for sometimes for 10 years. This is a book of sentences because there's so much sophistication in great writing, especially inspired writing by great theologians. And so we've lost a lot of this and our complex compound sentences are diminishing in our writing. You can see this very clearly in modern writing. We're losing the sophistication of language.

The Crisis of Grammar Education

Many of our students are incapable of reading Melville. I sometimes wonder if David Foster Wallace really left the world just because of a kind of despair. Because he's a very sophisticated writer that sometimes writes sentences that last for a page. And he was teaching students English literature and he said he would always begin with a crash course on grammar because the students couldn't read.

And one of the things that I have done is just give students the first sentence to the Declaration of Independence. And I've done this in several classes, not just at Zaytuna but at other places. And out of 50 students on average, three or four actually get the main clause of that sentence because they're unable to identify the difference between a subordinate and a main clause. We've had a war on grammar for about 50 years. It's literally been a war on grammar. And grammar matters. Let's eat grandma. Without that pause, we could become cannibals. So commas are a matter of life and death.

Questions and Answers

Dr. Senzai: We'll open it. We had some questions that were written down. We can take some more as well. If you have them, please put them on the cards. Someone asked, please continue to express your thoughts on how ISIS revives or leverages medieval Muslim traditions and behaviors.

ISIS as a Modern Phenomenon

Sheikh Hamza: Well, I mean, first of all, they do not, they are a real reflection of modernity. They're not, they're much closer to kind of Maoist or radical Marxist tradition. A lot of people are unaware of how profoundly impacted Marxist thought has, I mean, even in our colleges and universities in the United States, critical theory, which I mean, we can trace it right back to Karl Marx and Karl Marx, who has undeniably some brilliant criticisms about capitalist society. But overall, the end justifies the means is a Marxist concept. It's not a religious concept.

And so the idea somehow that you can just enslave people, the prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) said that there's three people that he will be an advocate against on the day of judgment. And one of them was (مَنْ بَاعَ حُرًّا - man ba'a hurran), the one who sells a free person, and Omar wrote to Amr bin al-As about taking people as slaves in Egypt. He said (اسْتَعْبَدْتُمُ النَّاسَ وَقَدْ وَلَدَتْهُمْ أُمَّهَاتُهُمْ أَحْرَارًا - Mata asta'badtumu an-nasa wa qad waladathum ummahatuhum ahraran). When did you, what right do you have to enslave people that their mothers gave birth to them in freedom? You know, they're free people.

Slavery in Islam vs. Chattel Slavery

And so this idea, slavery is an anathema to the Islamic tradition. There is undeniably a component in historical Islam of indentured servitude, which was largely a way of reintegrating war victims and refugees into a society. We have in our Islamic law, the ability of anybody who's in indentured servitude to get money from the public funds to be freed if they so desire. And so this idea of modern chattel slavery has nothing to do with Islam at all. And so what these people are doing is not medieval in dark ages. It is a gross distortion.

And I'm not going to deny that within, I've spent enough time in pre-modern books to know that there's some really weird stuff in pre-modern tradition. But I could take the Jewish religion, Numbers 31. If you go into the city, kill every male, even the little ones, kill the girls who have known intimately men, and take the girls who have not known men intimately for yourselves, which was concubinage. So that's in the Bible. There's things that are in our pre-modern text.

The Prophet's Declaration of Human Equality

But you'll find in the Islamic scripture, you will not find, there's nowhere where there's racism. And I would argue that the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم) is the first human being in human history to declare the equality of human beings. I have never found anybody prior to the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم) where he said, there's no preference of a white over a black or a black over a white except in piety. And I've never seen that articulated in any other.

And the Quran clearly says (إِنَّمَا جَعَلْنَاكُمْ شُعُوبًا وَقَبَائِلَ لِتَعَارَفُوا - Innama ja'alnakum shu'uban wa qaba'ila lita'arafu) (Quran 49:13). We made you peoples and tribes to know one another, not to hate one another. And even though that's an interpretation, it is a sound interpretation.

So I really feel that ISIS in no way represents normative medieval Islam. There is a strain of radical Islam, even in the pre-modern tradition, that gets pretty ugly. The idea that women who were taken as concubines could be coerced into Islam. Why did they want to coerce them? Because they couldn't have sexual relations if they weren't Muslim. So you'll find the Fuqaha talking about these things. But those things are relics of the past and they should not be revived in the modern world.

Question: Muslims and African Americans Working Together

Somebody asks, it's been said that Muslims and blacks are people that have been oppressed here in the United States historically. And Muslims are the target today. Do you think there are currently any initiatives in which these two communities or two groups work together?

Sheikh Hamza: First of all, I would say anybody that can make a statement like that knows nothing about black history in this country. The Muslims have in no way any comparison to what the African-American people went through, or the Native Americans, or even the Chinese Americans, or Japanese Americans. I mean, I could go on, but we're doing relatively well, let's face it. So you get some rude remarks. Welcome to America. I mean, I'm sorry. We've got a front runner out there who just is as rude as can be and everybody loves him. So Americans like rude people sometimes, I guess. I don't know. But I mean, I just think it's an odious comparison personally. I really do.

The Value of Experiencing Prejudice

What's down the road? I don't know. I'm troubled definitely by the rhetoric. But I think there's still an incredible number of very decent Americans that are troubled by what's happening. And I'm also very wary of polls. I really am because my own experience, I've had the brunt of anti-Muslim thing, but it's a good thing also to experience prejudice sometimes because it gives you empathy.

I mean, one of the things the Bible says is do not vex the stranger or oppress him, for you too were strangers in the land of Egypt. So it's sometimes to inculcate empathy, we need to go through what other people go through to be more appreciative. One of the things that the immigrant community failed to do is to really help the African American Muslim community. That was, I think, an egregious short-sightedness, ethically and pragmatically.

Question: Sheikh Hamza's Personal Conversion Story

Dr. Senzai: Here's a question to you personally. Could you share the story of your own personal decision to convert to Islam?

Sheikh Hamza: For me, my mother raised me even though my great-grandfather built the Greek Orthodox Church that's on Valencia and there's a plaque with his name on it. And I was actually baptized Greek Orthodox. I went to Catholic schools. My father was Irish Catholic. But my mother did tell me that religion is largely arbitrary. You tend to have the religion that you were born into. And so don't think just because you were born into this religion, it's the only truth out there. So she kind of raised us with that idea. And she took us to various religious communities.

I went to a mosque when I was 12 years old in Redwood City. She took us to a mosque to experience, you know, a mosque. I actually did wudu and prayed with the congregation. So she took me to synagogue. She took us to a Hindu temple. So I read the Quran when I was 17. And after reading several different scriptures, and the Quran was the one that really resonated with me because one of the things I really liked about the Quran was I got all the prophets that I grew up with. I think the atonement story I never fully got. But I have incredible respect for Christian tradition.

Appreciation for Catholic Theology

I have spent a lot of time in Catholic theology. I'm kind of an armchair Catholic theologian, I would say. I've read a lot of Aquinas, Augustine, and Joseph Pieper is one of my favorite writers. You know, I always think the Catholics are just so bad at marketing. Because they really do have an incredible tradition. And in terms of ethics, they are the most advanced religious ethical tradition, I think, on the planet right now. I really believe that. They're just so ahead of all the other religions in really deeply dealing, from a philosophical perspective, a lot of the things that we're confronted with. Because people are, there's a lot of shallow thinking out there about what's going on.

Transhumanism and Ethical Concerns

And we're looking at transhumanism, which is profoundly troubling. C.S. Lewis, who was really kind of a Catholic, C.S. Lewis wrote a very, very prescient book called The Abolition of Man, which is a very troubling book. And I would add to that book, a book by Zbigniew Brzezinski called Between Two Ages. And we're moving into a new phase. I don't know if people noticed, but a law firm just hired the first AI lawyer. So it's happening. And it's happening at a very rapid pace.

And we're not thinking about the ethical implications of eliminating diseases. This was called eugenics in the Hitlerian project. We had a eugenics movement in the 1920s, where they, in this country, they sterilized a lot of poor people and African Americans. So it's, you know, I think we really need ethicists. And we need ethicists that can think metaphysically and philosophically. And right now, the Catholic tradition is one of the few that I really feel is deeply rooted in a sound philosophical tradition to be able to grapple with these things in the way that they need to be grappled with.

Question: Historical Examples of Religious Liberty in Muslim Countries

Dr. Senzai: You had touched on this in your talk. Can you provide some examples in history where Muslim-majority countries did, in fact, practice religious liberty?

Sheikh Hamza: Muslims were historically way ahead. And I'll just give you an example. This is a recent book that just came out. It's called When Christians First Met Muslims, a source book of the earliest Syriac writings on Islam. This is a very important book by Michael Philip Penn. The reason it's important is because most Western Orientalism looked at Byzantine sources. And people forget that the Muslims defeated the Byzantines. So most of those sources were polemical. And so they would attack the Muslims and say horrible things about the Muslims in the same way that we said horrible things about the Huns during World War I, when they weren't like the Nazis.

And certainly the Iraqis in Kuwait, we know what they said about throwing the babies out of the, and then we found out that was a PR firm that coached that daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to say that. It never happened. The Iraqis didn't pull any babies out. But this is polemical. In war, the first casualty is the truth, they say.

Syriac Christians Loved the Muslims

And so in reading this book, I was struck by how the Syriac Christians loved the Muslims because they were liberated under them, because they were oppressed under the Byzantines. And so they were saying how wonderful the Muslims were and how incredible. And also Fred Donner, who is a world-class historian, showed in Muhammad and the Believers that there's no historical evidence that Muslims destroyed any churches in the conquest. He said there's no historical evidence.

And one of the things we have in Usul is called (اسْتِصْحَابُ الْمَاضِي - Istishab al-madi), which is a very sophisticated, backward approach to a current situation. So traditionally, you look at precedent and how it affects the present, so how the past. But there's also a way that jurists in Islam look at the present and how it informs us of the past. The fact that these great churches existed in Iraq for 1400 years and the Christians perceived the Muslims in those places is proof that the Muslims always honored those.

ISIS's Destruction of Churches

So the destruction of these churches is completely alien to the Islamic tradition. The Muslims did not forget their religion for 1400 years. And then this enlightened group called ISIS suddenly realized here's the true Islam that we're going to implement. It's just complete nonsense. So these great churches that have been destroyed, this is one of the greatest crimes in our history. And unfortunately, they are a sect of people that claim to be Muslims. And it's going to be a blemish on our history, just like the burning of the Church of the Sepulcher was on the Fatimids when they burnt it down and 70 years later caused the Crusades. But lest people forget, Muslims immediately rebuilt that church. And recently, Sheikh Mohammed paid for the renovation of one of the great churches in Jerusalem.

Christians and Jews in Muslim Societies

So the Muslims, you know, they honored the Christians. And I have a, 200 years ago, I have a book by Sawi in Egypt, where he says, it's sad to hear so many Muslims saying, I wish I was a Christian, because the perks that the Christians got, the Armenians in Ottoman Turkey were called the Millet-i Sadika, you know, before the Armenian crises, they were one of the most honored groups in the Ottoman tradition. And the same is true with the Jews, the Shaprut was what we would call a prime minister today under Abdur Rahman III. So Christians and Jews, and even Buddhists, the Barmakids were from Buddhist shrine keepers, the great Buddhist traditions of Central Asia.

So the Muslims, you know, they had multicultural, multi-ethnic civilizations. This whole idea that we're the first multi-ethnic civilization in history, it's just stupidity. You know, it's just a hallmark of our ignorance. And they're undeniably, I would argue that America is probably the most progressive civilization in human history, in terms of legislating non-discriminatory law. I think that's, that would be a fair thing to say. But the Muslims for pre-modern records, nobody compares to the Muslims. And I say that objectively, as a student of the history of that civilization. I don't think any society, and Toynbee and others would also, I think, you know, make that point as well.

Question: Thoughts on the Future

Dr. Senzai: In terms of the context of what we see today, both within many Muslim countries, as well as the tensions that exist in the United States, and the amount of Islamophobia that continues to exist in this country, and in many ways is getting worse. What are your thoughts about this context? And are you hopeful for the future?

Sheikh Hamza: I think Islamophobia is a problem globally. I think it's a problem in Muslim countries. And there's a lot of fear that the rulers have of kind of awakening that comes from Islam because Islam has a profound justice-based element in its tradition. But as far as I'm concerned, I think, you know, overall, the Muslims are doing relatively well in this country. I think we have dropped the ball. I think we dropped it after 9/11.

I made arguments for preempting, the study you were in that meeting we had 15, 16 years ago, yeah, where I made these arguments about having a getting, you know, a national organization and to start dealing with the anti-Muslim rhetoric that's going to emerge in the coming years.

Dr. Senzai: That's right.

Sheikh Hamza: And nobody listened to me at that time. So you know, Cassandra was cursed with, you know, seeing the future, but not being listened to. So it's kind of a bummer. But that's the way things are. So in terms of what I see, I see, if Donald Trump gets elected, I think it could be very problematic for the Muslims. I think if Hillary gets elected, Huma Abedin might end up being the chief of staff at some point. So I wouldn't say I'm hopeful. I know enough about history to know how bad it can get. But our religion is a religion of optimism. We're challenged to be optimistic. And so I'm probably an optimist trapped in a pessimist body. So let's hope for the best and expect the worst. Inshallah.

Closing Remarks

Dr. Senzai: We, as you know, we're taping this on C-SPAN. And so our time is quite fixed. And so I'll stop there. Please join me in thanking Sheikh Hamza Yusuf. Thank you.

Teresa Ladrigan-Welpley: Sheikh Hamza, on behalf of Santa Clara University, we just want to extend our deep gratitude for your presence with us and your thoughtful engagement and reflection and entering into dialogue with our community. And thank you, Fareed, for your facilitation and also to all of you for coming today to participate and for your thoughtful engagement. Please join me in thanking once more our guest. Thank you.