Reclaiming Our Faith- Negotiating Modern Theological Fault Lines

Reclaiming Our Faith: Negotiating Modern Theological Fault Lines

Opening Invocations

In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate. (As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu.)

Allahumma salli wa sallim wa baraka ala Sayyidina Muhammad wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa sallim tasliman katheera wa la hawla wa la quwwata illa billahi l-aliyyi l-azim.

Allahumma iftah alayna hikmatak wa inshura alayna rahmatak. Ya Dha l-Jalali wa l-Ikram. Wa salli allahumma ala Sayyidina Muhammad wa ala alihi l-kiram.

Introduction to Contemporary Theological Questions

Alhamdulillah. The topics that were put out on the internet and people were asked to vote on them, I thought all of them were good and so I thought I'd just talk a little bit about each one because I think it relates to the conference itself, what we're going to be talking about, these theological fault lines, and a lot of the problems that we're dealing with.

The Rights of Neighbors in Islam

The first one was about two hadiths in relationship to the current global situation of Muslims. The first one is: be kind to neighbors. Whoever believes in Allah on the last day, let him not forget about his neighbor, honor his neighbor. And then the other one was whoever believes in Allah on the last day, let him speak well or be silent.

And we know in a hadith the Prophet (peace be upon him) said that Jibreel would come to him and keep telling him to be mindful of the neighbor to the point where the Prophet (peace be upon him) said, I thought he was going to have the neighbor be included in the inheritance laws so that they would actually inherit from the wealth of the person.

What's interesting about the Muslim understanding about neighbors is that this was never understood in the history of Islam to exclude neighbors that were not of your faith. It always included Jews, Christians, and any other peoples that were your neighbors because the neighbor has a right over you.

Historical Implementation of Neighborly Rights

In fact, in the Zahiri Madhhab which was practiced in Andalusia for some time, originally from Iranian jurists, in the Zahiri Madhhab they considered it prohibited to go to bed without checking if 40 neighbors from each

direction in your hay went to bed satiated. In other words, they took literally the hadith: he does not believe in Allah on the last day, who goes to bed satiated and his neighbor is hungry. As if it negated your faith that you could go to bed neglecting your neighbors.

Muslims in an Interdependent World

So, what do we make now of this interdependent world where people, the Muslims are no longer at the gates of Vienna, they're inside treating the patients of Vienna in their hospitals. What do we make of this new situation? In some ways it's not new and that's important to remember that this idea somehow of a pluralistic world and a multicultural world is new. It is new in the West because in the Western tradition any type of difference was very often crushed with impunity.

Difference of religion was not tolerated until really after the Protestant revolutions and reformation that led to these horrible religious wars, led to the enlightenment and then finally to accepting other Christian sects and to a certain degree the Jewish people. But now we see in America that people of various faiths living side by side, we for instance, our school right now, even though we've got a campus that is going to go through a renovation, but right now we're teaching our students in a Baptist seminary. So, we're Muslims renting from a Baptist seminary.

Now, granted these are Baptists in Berkeley, California, so they're probably a little more open-minded about having Muslims teaching their theology in their seminary, but that is the fact of modern American society. We have mosques where parking lots are shared with synagogues and with churches and it works out perfect because we show up on Friday, they show up on Saturday and the others show up on Sunday, so they have their problems on different days. But this is a reality of American society.

Historical Multiculturalism in the Muslim World

The ancient Muslim world was very multicultural. It was very pluralistic. There was interaction with many different cultures. In fact, it's arguable that the Muslims were eventually conquered by the European colonialists because they had created a world in which the military was becoming increasingly less important. There were so many good relations between different countries that the Muslims were trading with the Chinese. They were trading with the Hindus. They were trading with the Christians of Central Asia. This was the reality of the Muslim world, a highly multicultural world, and you can see it linguistically in many of their statements.

The Core Commandment of Love

But the inculcation of love of the neighbor, and this is one of the most important commandments of Christianity, love your neighbor as yourself. Love God with all of your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. This, in reality, according to Martin Luther, was a reduction of the Ten Commandments to two central commandments because if you look at the Ten Commandments, they can be summed up in these two commandments. Love God with all your heart, so that would mean honoring the Sabbath, not taking his name in vain, and then love your

neighbor as yourself. That would mean not coveting his goods, not coveting his wife. So, that really sums up Christianity.

Judaism can be summed up, according to Rabbi Gamaliel, one of the great scholars, again, love God, and then love your neighbor. Everything else is just commentary.

Islam, according to Fakhruddin al-Razi, can be summed up in two statements:

Worshipping the Creator and serving His creation.

The First Hadith: The Foundation of Mercy

The first hadith that is taught in the tradition of Muhaddithin is the Musalsal bil-awwaliyah, in which the Prophet (peace be upon him) said, in an unbroken chain that's taught to this day as the first hadith given to a hadith student:

Ar-rahimuna yarhamu-humu r-Rahman. Irhamū man fi l-ard yarhamkum man fi s-samā'

Those who show mercy, the Most Merciful shows mercy to them. Show mercy to those on the earth and the One in the heavens will show mercy to you.

So, the amount of grace that you get from God is commensurate with the amount of grace that you show to Allah's creation. That's the first hadith, based on the idea that the Prophet was a rahma, a mercy to all the world.

Dealing with Extremism: A Complex Challenge

So, that leads to the next question, which is how we deal with extremists. This was put on there and I think a lot of people voted for this. If you look right now, everything is being brought up again. The news is filled with crazy Muslims. All the talking heads have come out. Obama has just announced a major outreach program to the Muslims, the Muslim community in the United States, hopefully not involving entrapment.

So, a lot of Muslims, when they hear these things, it's like the Native Americans used to say, white man speaks with forked tongue. Now, you can say, I don't know what we'd have to do now because not just the whites are speaking with forked tongues anymore. Probably work out better to just say that a lot of people speak with forked tongues these days.

Who Should Address Extremism?

So, how do we deal with our extremists? First of all, it's not on us to deal with our extremists. The vast majority of Muslims are not obliged to be dealing with extremists. Those who deal with the extremists are two. Law

enforcement agencies, if that extremism involves violence, whether it's in the Muslim lands or in the lands other than the Muslims, although according to one view, anywhere where Muslims are able to pray and fast and practice their religion, it's a land of Islam.

And the Prophet said:

Ju'ilat li al-ardu masjidan wa tahūran

The whole world has been made for me a place of worship and a means of purification.

And he said, go where you want and wherever you find good, stay there. So, how do we deal with the extremists? The law enforcement has to deal with those who are violent. But not through entrapment and other things.

The Problem of Preemptive Action

We come from a system of law in the West that does not believe in preemptive law enforcement in the way that it has become imagined today. In fact, Eisenhower completely anathematized the idea of preemptive war and he actually said that this is a Nazi idea. We don't have that in our understanding of a just war. The idea of, oh, I'm a little worried about these people and so let's go crush them before they crush us.

And we have, unfortunately, a best-selling author in the United States, New York Times bestseller, that argued for a preemptive nuclear strike on Muslims. And there was no uproar about that. If Muslims argued for a preemptive nuclear strike on Europeans or Americans, what would people be saying about that? But we have somebody here who's arguing for a preemptive strike, that it might be necessary at a certain point to kill them before they kill us. This is the type of madness that we're dealing with.

Extremism as a Societal Problem

When I was asked to speak in Washington about extremism, I said, look, extremism is as American as apple pie. This is one of the most extreme societies on the planet. I said, nowhere in the Muslim world do you have water drinking contests to see how much water a person can drink. They had a woman die here in Southern California in a water drinking contest because you can actually upset your electrolyte balance and die.

But they were, let's see how many, they had a cockroach eating contest where a man died after the cockroach eating contest and the prize for the contest was a boa constrictor. And he ate the most and somebody said he was the life of the party. Well, he was the death of the after party because he literally died from eating so many cockroaches.

Cultural Extremism in America

Where in the Muslim world are you going to have a watermelon eating contest? Where are you going to have a

hot dog eating contest? And yet you can go on YouTube and I'm sure you'll find hundreds of videos of people having hot dog eating contests. That is an extreme form of behavior. We have extreme sex in this culture. We have extreme music. For the first time, you ask doctors, especially those who are in ear, nose and throat expertise, about young people losing their hearing because they're listening to music at extreme levels.

And then if you don't think we have extreme violence, just look at some of the gun culture. The type of gun power that people are obsessed with. They go out and shoot machine guns. You don't need a machine gun to kill a moose. People hunt fish. They fish with dynamite. You just go, drop the dynamite, it blows up and all the fish just come to the surface. That's one way of... That's not the kind of relaxed...

A Tale of Two Cultures

I mentioned last week, I saw a Chinese man flying a Chinese kite in San Francisco in the park. We have a lot of Chinese in San Francisco. They go out and they do Tai Chi publicly. And he was flying his kite. It was like he was doing Tai Chi. And I was just watching him. And then this man came from the indigenous culture, not the ancient indigenous culture, but the indigenous culture. It took me a while to work out when... Because I would hear my Muslim immigrant friends say, oh, he was American. It took me a while to work out that meant white. That's like a code word for white. I didn't know that. I said, what do you mean? He said, you're American, you have citizenship. I mean white. That finally came out.

So anyway, this guy was an American. He's got his supersonic kite that made a noise that literally you almost had to plug your ears. It was like a drone striker of kites. And he was flying this kite around. And there's a Chinese man just flying his kite like a Tai Chi master. And I was thinking, what a juxtaposition of two cultures. One that inculcates quietude and stillness and harmony. And the other that is obsessed with adrenaline rushes.

And I know ER doctors that go skydiving on the weekend because nothing beats splitting open the sternum and doing a cardiac massage. The only thing that'll even come close to adrenaline rush like that is skydiving on the weekend. Skydiving is an extreme sport. In fact, I would argue that anybody that skydives if they're not in the military is a stark raving lunatic. I would never jump out of a plane unless I absolutely had to. And you'd probably have to push me out even if I had to. That is a crazy thing to do.

The Islamic Perspective on Life

Muslims respect life. They don't risk their lives unless they have to. Mauritanians think you're a lunatic to swim in the ocean. Mauritanians live on the ocean. They never go swimming. They think people that swim in the ocean are mad. Because they know what's in the ocean that you can't see. And in this country, when I was a kid, they had a film called Jaws. Nobody swam for months after that film. Because they realized what was in the ocean.

Understanding the Roots of Violent Extremism

So extremism is a human problem. But when you have extreme conditions, a certain type of extremism

emerges. When you have the type of imbalance that we have in the world today, you cannot be surprised at violent responses to those incredible conditions that people are suffering under.

And I would argue that the African-American situation in this country led to the type of violent responses, even though, again, if you studied COINTELPRO history, you'll know that a lot of this was entrapment also. But the militancy that emerged in the 1960s was a result of extreme conditions.

Addressing Genuine Grievances

And I heard Brzezinski, who was in Carter's administration, I heard him give a talk about dealing with Muslim extremism, and he said, if you do not deal with the genuine grievances, like the grievances of the African- American community in the 1960s, if you don't deal with those grievances, then you cannot expect the type of violent response to stop.

You have to look at what is being said. McChrystal, one of these generals who was in charge of the special forces in Iraq, said, we have to understand why they're fighting. We want to pretend, like this false narrative that, oh, they just don't like us. They don't like our freedoms. Okay, well, why aren't they bombing Sweden? Sweden's a more open society than the United States. I mean, this mythology that has been created around these scenarios is just unacceptable.

The Need for Comprehensive Understanding

People deserve a better understanding of the problem. And if we don't give them a better understanding, they won't be able to address the real issues here, the real problems. The Palestinian problem has to be addressed. You're looking at over 60 years of madness in Palestine. Sixty years. And even going back further into the 1920s, when you had the British mandate and bringing in a lot of the Jewish immigration.

And if you go back and read that early period, it's a very interesting history. And I was surprised to know that one of the first Zionist questions, I read a book by a Zionist, who argued that one of the first questions was that they would succeed or fail based on how they treated the Arabs. So the original settlers in Israel were concerned about that problem, but it just became a response that we see the results of it today.

One of my Syrian friends said to me, why isn't anybody doing anything about Syria? And I said to him, well, welcome to the club. That's what the Palestinians have been saying for the last 70 years. This is the human condition.

The Medical Analogy: Treating Extremism Holistically

People are overwhelmed, but if you don't address the real problems, I'm talking about the root problems. If you look at what we have as an emergency, when we have things like Boston, these are emergency situations. In a medical system, you have the emergency room, but you also have the intensive care unit, you have the other

units that take care of people of lesser extremes, and then you also should have in place a preventative system of medicine where you educate the people about exercise, about staying well.

Health care needs to be addressed from all of the issues. The only way this country has dealt with the extremism is like an emergency room situation. There's no other addressing going on, and this is a major crisis.

The Arab Spring and Economic Factors

Now, in the Muslim world, I would argue, again, and over 10 years ago, on a hard talk, I talked about the type of pressure that Muslims were under and that it was a miracle that they hadn't blown up yet. It was obvious to me. In fact, the last trip that I made to Egypt was right before the revolution, and I said to somebody that I was with, this place is like a powder keg. It's just going to go off because you could feel the pressure. You could feel the stress.

People are living, and then, unfortunately, they don't make the connections that there was a direct relationship between the Wall Street collapse and what happened in the Arab world because as the real estate collapsed, suddenly everything goes into commodities. All of the basic food commodities shot up. Muslims suddenly who were paying 20% to 30% of their salaries on food were now paying 50% to 60%.

The Tradition About Economic Justice

And there's a tradition on Abu Dharr. There's another in it. But it's mentioned in many of the books. Abu Dharr said, I'm amazed at a man who the government is not providing a situation where he can get his daily livelihood that he doesn't pull his sword out and go out and find it.

St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Catholic tradition, says that a man who's starving to death is not sinful if he breaks the window of the bakery and takes what he needs to eat.

Global Economic Injustice

People are stressed out. What do you think about the slave labor in Bangladesh where these people are working in these factories? Look at that. And some of us are wearing the clothes that they sewed. That ethically we're participating in this incredible global imbalance. All you have to do is look at the news I have a picture. I saved it. It was on the Khaleej Times. It had on one side of the front page, it had the Prince of Wales and his wife dancing and waving wands at each other while they were playing a game. They were visiting a Harry Potter museum. And there they were dancing and waving the wands. Right next to it was a Syrian man covered in the rubble of a bomb blast.

And I'm looking at these two pictures thinking, what is wrong with this picture? This is the world that we're in. This is the global situation.

A Commitment to Non-Violence

And I am, everybody knows, people who know me, despite what these right-wing people say, but people who know me, I have never advocated, never publicly or privately, people that know me privately and publicly, I have never advocated violence. I believe that modern warfare is completely unethical. I'm opposed to it on ethical principles.

If the Muslims of the past, in pre-modern times, when swords and spears were their means of fighting, if they said going against the government was prohibited because of the great harm that it leads to in a society, what would they say today? With modern warfare, with bombs, with weapons of mass destruction, what would they say about war today?

Islam as a Civilization of Peace

Muslims were not blood crazy. They did not, this whole idea somehow that it was a violent civilization. No, it was an Irenic civilization that loved peace and worked hard for peace. But they were living in a war, in a world in which war was the norm.

Today we're living in a world in which war is also the norm in some places, but in the majority of places it's not. We can travel all over the world for the first time in human history and be relatively safe. And the areas that are dangerous, you'll get warnings from your embassy about visiting those places. This is unique in human history.

Mitigating Extremism Through Constructive Outlets

So I would argue that extremism is not going to go away. It's not going to go away. Humans are extremists, and it's not going to go away. What we have to do is work out strategies to mitigate extremism, to pacify it in a sense, to give outlets for extreme ideas that are not destructive. We have to be able to criticize.

We had a Code Pink lady who interrupted Obama the other day. She goes and she interrupts him, and she says, Stop the drone strikes. There are eight times more drone strikes since Obama's been in office than Bush. Eight times more. All those civilians, we don't even know how many civilians, they say it's less than a thousand, but we don't even know. There's no real counting going on. But there have been many civilian deaths in the drone strikes. Where's the accountability?

But we had this lady interrupt President Obama in his address, and then when she was taken out by the Secret Service, she was interviewed afterwards, she said, They tell me it's rude to interrupt the President. I think it's rude to drop bombs on civilians. I mean, I'm sorry, that's pretty solid logic if you ask me. That's pretty solid.

Recognizing Barbarity in All Its Forms

We can't be, you know, the Nazis were gentlemen. A lot of them, they were erudite. Rommel was an erudite man. He was a well-educated man. Hitler was a vegetarian. He loved dogs. He loved children. There's all those nice pictures of him with children patting their heads. Goebbels was a PhD in philosophy. These were people

that listened to Wagner and Strauss. They were educated people, erudite people, but they were barbarians, and it's not progress if the cannibal's eating with forks. He's still a cannibal.

So it's important for us to look at our own extremism as a nation because it's the pot calling the kettle black. You know, this guy that hacked some guy to death in England recently, that is a barbarian act, but it's a barbarian act where the barbarity is clear. It's open for everybody to see, but dropping a cluster bomb from 30,000 feet is a barbarian act. It just, in all of these institutions that we have in this country, and what we need to do is ally with the good people and try our best to mitigate the extremists in every group, wherever they are.

Confronting Denial in the Muslim Community

Finally, about extremism, as a Muslim community, I believe there's a good deal of denial in our community. I know Dr. Sherman Jackson has highlighted this. He's one of the few scholars in our community that has highlighted that fact, and I think there's a lot of denial.

I got a letter a few years back from a Somalian American who had gone to Somalia, and he wrote me a letter, and he said, I used to think that this whole argument about extremism was a Western fabrication, but I have seen firsthand what extremist ideas do in my own country of origin. He said, it's devastating, and he said, please talk more about this problem.

We have extremists in many Muslim countries now, and there are people that are getting more extreme because the circumstances are getting more extreme. We have to have serious concern about Syria. They're not allowing Syrian refugees into a lot of the Western countries because they're worried. So here's real people suffering in traditional areas that would have given them relief, like Denmark and Sweden and these places, and the United States. They're worried, and they've got pressure from their right-wing groups to say, don't let them in, because they're just going to cause problems.

So we have to realize the seriousness of this in our community. Our imams need to be much more educated about these problems.

The Future of Fiqh in America

I'm getting a message to conclude. Two more points. Fiqh, and the future of fiqh in America. Fiqh is not fiction. Fiqh is something that is a human attempt at understanding what God meant. One of the great scholars of Islam, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, wrote a famous book, I'lam al-Muwaqqi'in. The Muwaqqi' is the one who signs in the name of. And what he said is a mufti is essentially acting in proxy for the lord of the world. And so he has to be scared. He has to be careful at what he does and what he says.

The Crisis in Contemporary Fatwa

We have a crisis in fatwa. We have Sheikh Google giving fatwa. Sheikh Bing giving fatwa. All of these search engines now where people get fatwas. We have also too simplistic statements being made in public forums. Fiqh

is a very complicated affair. It's not something that can be reduced to sound bites. The ahkam of Islam are subtle.

Individualized Jurisprudence

And they're also closer to homeopathy than allopathy. That there's not one answer for every person.

Homeopathy looks at the individual. Chinese medicine looks at the individual. You might have too much heat. You might have too much dampness. So they'll give you different herbs than they would give another person.

Like the man who asked the mufti is it okay to smoke when I'm praying? He's making dua. He said no. And then another man said is it okay to make dua if I'm smoking? He said yes. His student said what are you doing? He said well the one man he's in dhikr and he wants to go to ghafla. So I said don't do it. But the other man he's in ghafla and he wants to go to dhikr. So I said do it. It's a different understanding.

Fiqh as Human Understanding of Divine Law

So it's important for us to recognize that fiqh is a human project. The sharia is from God. Fiqh is the human understanding of sharia. And the Prophet we don't have a theocracy. That is an alien concept in Islam. We do not have a theocracy. Because humans will always apply the rulings. And the ruling of God you never know what it is in a certain... It might be a capital offense in fiqh. But with the ruling of God it's not. The best thing to do would be to forgive. So you don't know what the ruling of God is. So you cannot have a theocracy in Islam.

Nomocracy: Rule of Law

You can only have a nomocracy which is a rule of law. And law is a human project. We've been given a constitution from God that we call the Quran, the dastur and the hadith. These are the constitutional principles of law. And there are very few things that are fixed in stone. And Sayyiduna Umar he suspended hadd punishment. We know this. In 'Am al-Ramadah. And this is called fiqh al-waqi' wa l-tawaqqu'.

This is what Shaykh Abdullah ibn Bayyah says. And one of the most important things in fiqh you have tanqih al-manat, tahqiq al-manat, takhrij al-manat. There is a process of understanding when a ruling is applicable. And it's an usooli process that needs trained people to do it. But one of the most important elements is tahqiq al- manat which is when a... Understanding what a thing is. What is the tasawwur of a thing. The situation. And then what is the appropriate ruling that is for that situation. That takes a lot of time, practice, mentorship with skilled people.

The Neglect of Traditional Fiqh Education

We've neglected our fiqh for too long. We have unfortunately in the sharia schools throughout the Muslim world the poorest students go to them. This is a fact. And we have to deal with that fact. So we have people that do not have the requisite skill sets to be studying sharia that are studying sharia and they end up causing a lot of harm. We have a lot of problems in that.

Commitment to Tradition and Usuli Understanding

So in the United States of America we need a fiqh. I'm a traditionalist. I'm committed to the four madhhab and the fifth for the Ja'fari school for the ithna 'ashariyyah. I'm committed to tradition. But I'm also very aware of the necessity for taf'il al-usul for actually implementing an usooli understanding of the situation. Understanding the maqasid, the qawa'id, the aims and imports of sharia and how we apply these principles in our given circumstances and situations. So this is a very complicated thing.

Raising Children in a Digital Age

And finally, last thing was how to raise children in a digital age. Good luck. I'm doing my best. It's a real struggle. It's a daily struggle. You know, I dreamed of having children that never saw a Disney film. Hayhāt, hayhāt. You know, but we're in a new era and we don't fully understand it.

There's a new book that just came out called The New Digital Age. I haven't read it, but he's addressing this issue that we're in a new age and we don't fully understand it.

Closing Remarks

I'm looking forward to the discussions that are going to take place today. And I'm really grateful for the show. I know that you have very busy schedules and I know that Los Angeles and the greater Los Angeles area has a lot of programs. And so you've honored us in coming out to listen to us and hear what we have to say.

Jazakum Allah khairan.

Aqulu qawli hadha wa astaghfirullah li wa lakum wa li sa'ir al-muslimin.

I say this statement of mine and I ask Allah's forgiveness for me and for you and for all the Muslims.