The Middle Path

The Middle Path

Opening Prayer

"[In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. May Allah's peace and blessings be upon our master Muhammad, and upon his family and companions, and grant them abundant peace. Open for us Your wisdom and spread upon us Your mercy, O Possessor of Majesty and Honor. O Allah, send blessings upon our master Muhammad and upon his noble family. There is no power nor strength except with Allah, the Most High, the Most Great. All praise is due to Allah.]"

The Meaning of Brotherhood and Sisterhood

Alhamdulillah. First of all, it's a very bizarre experience that I think a lot of us are having here in the United States of late. I think the social disintegration that's happening so rapidly and as things begin to unravel and even a lot of people that I know, immigrants are talking about maybe going back to places they came from which don't look that appetizing either now in a lot of areas. But one of the things about Muslim countries, even when things break down, people really do recognize the word brother and sister.

Like that word actually means something in many, many places around the world. And I've experienced the beauty of that word, not so much as it's articulated, ya akhi, but the real lived experience of somebody treating you like a brother or like a sister.

Cultural Wealth vs. Material Poverty

I was thinking a lot about United Against Poverty. I actually think it would be better if we were United Against Wealth. Because I've actually lived in the poorest countries in the world. I mean literally the poorest.

Like I was in Nigeria, I was in Mali, I was in Mauritania. I lived in a place in Mauritania where the rich people had all of their possessions in one box. And the poor people didn't have a box. I mean really. And my own teacher, Marab Tarhaj, may Allah preserve him, he was actually considered relatively wealthy because he had a few cows that were milked every day and that's where they drank their milk. The milk in Twaimrat is organic milk. It's not pasteurized, homogenized, it's not 1% or zero fat. It's just right out of the udder.

So what I noted about living in the poorest places, and I literally lived in a shantytown. I mean a complete like open sewage. The houses were made out of Chinese tea boxes. Literally they were dissembled from tea boxes and that's how they made their houses. And I lived with a man, Al-Maqari, from the Masooma clan, in his little hut made out of tea cartons. And these were some of the richest people I have ever known. They were rich in community. They were rich in culture. They were people that could quote the greatest Arabic poetry ever written. Most of them memorized the Quran by heart. And for entertainment, they would discuss grammatical points. These were really rich people. They were not impoverished, unless you want to identify poverty as material poverty.

America's Cultural and Spiritual Poverty

And I'm not really against material poverty, but I'm very much against cultural and spiritual poverty. Because I think what's happening in this country is we are the most culturally and spiritually impoverished nation in the world. The fact that the number one best-selling novel right now is a pornographic novel of no literary merit according to the critics that have read it. But this is what's happening in America. Every airport I've been to has a whole row of these novels just lined up for people just to devour them off the shelves. That is poverty.

It's poverty not to have, if you're from this culture, it's poverty not to have ever read Melville. So that when somebody like Chris Hedges can tell you about the Pequod or Ahab's Quest, you don't have any cultural references to know what that means, despite the fact that even the poorest Americans a hundred years ago had very often read that book. Because literature is not the property of the wealthy.

Literature and the Impoverished

Historically, literature has actually been the property of the most impoverished people. Some of the greatest writers were impoverished people. Read the life of Edgar Allan Poe, somebody constantly in debt. A drug addict dealing with the despair of living in the United States at that time, and a lot of his literature is about that, those aspects. Dostoevsky. Read about their lives. And yet they produced this great body of literature because they were not culturally impoverished. They may have been materially impoverished, but they were not culturally impoverished.

One of the most celebrated artists in Western tradition is Van Gogh, and he was a completely impoverished person supported by his brother. Never sold a painting during his own lifetime. Another very tortured person, but somebody who had a richness of vision that people are still entranced by his paintings.

The Disease of Luxuria

So, I think that a lot of what's happening in this country is actually from luxuria. Luxuria used to be one of the seven deadly sins. That's the Latin term for lust. Luxuria. You know, gluttony and lust. That we're a surfeited culture. We're too full. There's too much.

When people talk about the 99 and the 1%, we're 5% of the world's population and we're devouring most of the world's natural resources. The average American is in the 5%. The other part of the world is the other 95%. So,

when we're talking about the 1% and the 99%, some of the people in that 1% are drug dealers in inner cities. Really.

Rejecting False Dichotomies

So, the whole dichotomization, this desire to kind of split the world into good people and evil people to me is a false dialectic that I think as Muslims we should reject. We should reject it. There are wretched, demonic people amongst the poor and there are decent, angelic people amongst the wealthy.

And the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم had poor people with him and he had wealthy people and without the wealthy people he could not have done what he did for the poor people. But he transformed the motives of the wealthy. He transformed their motives. He didn't create a class warfare. He didn't make the poor people hate the wealthy people or the wealthy people feel contempt for the poor people. No. He gave us a different criterion to judge people.

The True Criterion: Character

We were talking earlier today about intellectual arrogance because you see so many people in academia that are filled with intellectual arrogance, a sense of their inherent superiority because if you learn even a little bit you quickly see how far ahead you are from a lot of people out there and that can lead to a type of contempt because you have some kind of intellectual training that other people do because you can work things out quicker than other people can work out because you know these references and other people don't know these references. But the reality of it is that Islam put a different criterion for excellence than intellectual excellence. It's spiritual excellence. It's being a human being. And that is open to the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich and that's what separates people.

So that street sweeper, that janitor might have more humanity ounce per ounce than that PhD professor at Yale University. He might have better character, more moral integrity. He might be a better father, a better civic member of society because the real judge of people in Islam is a judge of character. It's not anything else.

The Prophetic Standard of Character

The Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم standard was a standard of character and he said in fact the standard of that standard was how you treat your women because he said that a man is judged by how he treats his women. خيركم خيركم لأهله وأنا خيركم لأهلي (Sunan Ibn Majah 1977, Sunan al-Tirmidhi 3895) - The best of you are the best to their women folk or their families and I'm the best of you to my women folk.

So he was letting us know right there what the standard of judgment, how you judge a person because you've got all these people out there giving all of their declarations and proclamations and telling you what's right and what's wrong and they go home and they treat their wife like dirt. They treat their children as if they're subjects of Pharaoh. So the whole stratification, if you're talking about good and evil, give me a break because it's all the way down.

Greed on Main Street and Wall Street

This whole crisis, this global crisis that started here in this country was about greed. It was greed on Main Street and greed on Wall Street. All those people that went in and lied on their applications about how much they were making because they wanted to get that house for... They didn't even understand what type of mortgage they were getting. They didn't know that it was going to balloon in a few years. They didn't care. They just saw an opportunity to get some property and maybe it'll rise in price and in a few years I'll flip it, pay off my debt and make some money. It was greed. Greed on Main Street and greed on Wall Street.

And that's why Islam doesn't talk about the wealthy and the poor. It talks about character. It talks about the moral character of people and how you transform people.

Islamic Economics vs. Modern Capitalism

I was asked to talk just about the Islamic economic system in relation to the Western economic system or this modern system of capitalism. You can't even compare the two. There's no comparison. Our system is based on real wealth, a bimetal economy in which money actually has intrinsic value.

People say gold doesn't have intrinsic value. Then why do people kill for it? And the only reason they kill for paper dollars that don't have intrinsic value is because they think that it has intrinsic value. But all you have to do is put a fire to it and you'll see how valuable it is. You put fire to gold and you'll see how valuable it is because gold is indestructible. Gold doesn't corrode. Silver doesn't corrode. They don't oxidize. The gold coins that were minted by Caesar, you can go down to a store probably here in Stanford and buy one of them if you have enough money because it's still around.

The Dajjalic System of Fiat Currency

This whole dajjalic system, fooling people into thinking that worthless paper has any intrinsic value, fractional reserve banking. Abraham Lincoln, when he needed to fund the war, he wanted to borrow money. So he asked the bankers and they told him, well, it's going to be on this interest rate. So he said, to hell with it. In the

Constitution, we can print money. So he printed up greenbacks. That's how he paid for the war. They were non-interest greenbacks that were printed by the U.S. government.

Then why today are we borrowing money from a private bank and paying them interest? And the interest now represents 25% of the national debt because the bankers run the situation. They wrote the laws. They wrote the laws. And people don't know this because they're no longer educated. And if you want to know why it's getting so bad out there, it's very plain and simple because we have ignorant people.

The Problem of Ignorance

We have an ignorant population. And when you have ignorant populations, then you need more and more draconian measures for social control. And this is the history of the world. You just read about it in your history books and you'll see the same tactics are used to control ignorant people. Educated people are the dangerous ones. It's not ignorant people. You can control ignorant people. Seriously, they're not hard to control.

Bread and circus is one way. That's the old-fashioned way. Now it's MTV and McDonald's. That's just a modern version of panem et circenses. That's what the Romans used. But it's the same game.

Cultural Starvation in Material Abundance

You look at what they're devouring on their... Look at the cultural impoverishment of this society. You know, people aren't hungry in this society. They're starving to death. They're starving to death. And they're starving to death even though they're overeating. The reason that they have to eat more and more is because there's no nutrients in the food. So you're wondering why they're all getting bigger and bigger out there? Because the more they eat, the hungrier they feel. They're not satiated.

All you have to do, come to California and we'll give them a real meal like brown rice and tofu. You'll see how quick they're hungry. Really, they won't be hungry. If you eat a real meal, you go and eat... The Indians eat dal. You don't see fat Indians down in those villages. Because they eat dal. They eat real food. They're eating real bread that they cook with their own hands. Chapatis. They're eating chapatis. And they're eating dal. And they have better nutrition than all these people out here. They have better nutrition.

The Rich Eat Like the Poor

But when you go up into that 1%, you know what they're eating? They're eating dal and handmade chapatis. Really, they're eating the same stuff the poorest people are eating in a lot of these countries. Go to Malaysia and you see how poor people eat. They're eating real vegetables that they grew.

The Prophet's Respect for Possessions

The Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - ṣallā Allāhu ʿalayhi wa sallam) one of the things about him that amazes me, and everything about him amazes me, but one of the things that I've contemplated is the fact that he named his personal belongings. And what I realized about that in my estimation (والله تعالى أعلم - wa Allāhu taʿālā aʿlam) is that he was honoring goods that enhance our lives.

He had a name for his comb. He had a name for his turban. He only had a handful of things in his life. If he actually took all of the possessions that he had, they would fit into a very small box. But he named them because they were meaningful things to him.

The Culture of Disposability

We live in a society that gives stuff no meaning. It's not only nameless, it's discarded as fast as people buy it. We have engineered obsolescence. Things aren't built to last.

If you want an idea, because I'll be your first customer, I have an idea, like I want a shop called Till Death Do Us Part. Things for people that want things that last. Because when I was a kid, if you bought something, it lasted.

Things That Last

But the brooms that I was pushing when I was five years old, they were the same brooms I was pushing when I was 15 because they were built to last. Now you go and you buy a broom and you sweep your sidewalk three times and it's broken. And then they tell you, well, it's cheaper to just buy a new one. That's what they tell you now. It's just cheaper to buy a new one.

We have to reject this whole culture of consumption. We have to reject it.

The Shift from Goods to Financial Instruments

The Islamic tradition, most of the, if you look now, the wealth in this country, 40% of the wealth is not an economy of goods and services. That is the old American economy. It was an economy of goods and services. You produce things, you sold things, or you did things for people. Like you hired a carpenter and he would do something for you or your mechanic. So goods and services.

Now it's financial instruments. It's making money off of money. This is the economy of America and it's an economy that takes wealth away from the middle people and increasingly to the upper echelons.

Richistan: The Land of Billionaires

There's a Wall Street Journal op-ed writer who's been covering the wealthiest people. He wrote a book called Richistan. Richistan, like Pakistan, but it's where rich people live. There's some rich people in Pakistan, trust me, because if you want to talk about wealth moving up, right? But he wrote a book called Richistan and what he shows in that book, he had lower Richistan, middle Richistan, and upper Richistan. And then in upper Richistan, he had a town called Billionaireville.

A population of 1,230 people. Those are the people that are billionaires. They have half of the wealth of three billion people on the planet. Half. Eight trillion people, eight trillion dollars, half of that goes to 1,230 people and the other half goes to three billion people. You think about that. The inequity that exists today on this planet, and we're part of it, and I'm going to just tell you a few things and I'll close out with this.

Traditional Islamic Commerce

Tell you a few things. One, historically the Muslims had something in that, you know, when a merchant comes into town, you don't have to ask where they got their goods from. This is what the Fuqaha taught, you know, that there's bara'a and asl, and if it's a halal thing to purchase, you don't (لا تسألوا عن أشياء أن تبد لكم تسؤكم - lā tas'alū ʿan ʾashyāʾa ʾin tubda lakum tasuʾkum) (Quran 5:101) - Don't ask about things if you find out it's, you know. So if somebody comes in, he's a merchant, you don't ask where he got it. You can buy it if it's halal. That's traditionally how they viewed it.

I think in societies where most wealth acquisition was relatively just, that's fine. I personally don't agree with that opinion today for things that we know about and that we're able to do something about.

Taking Back Our Communities

And the single most important thing, I think, to deal with the impoverished conditions that we're living in this country is to begin to empower people to take back their communities. We have to make our own clothes, stop buying clothes that were made in sweatshops. We have to, really, this is what we have to do.

We have to reestablish family as the central most important unit of a society because Islam is about preservation of family. It's one of the six fundamentals. Preservation of family.

The Disintegration of Family

If you look now in the inner cities at the disintegration of the family, because if you take the father out of fatherhood, if you take the father out of motherhood, if you take the brother out of brotherhood and the sister out of sisterhood, what do you have left? You have the hood. That's all you've got left. That's it. And people cannot survive in those conditions. They will die.

Camden, New Jersey, Chris Hedges wrote a whole section on his book The Empire of Illusion about that town. They're going to dismantle the police force in Camden. They don't have money, so they're just going to regionalize it. Highest crime rate in America. Just leave the poor people there. There's children on the streets. It doesn't matter, because these are throwaway people.

A Moral Obligation to Inner Cities

What has to happen, and the Muslims, and I'm going to chastise here the immigrant community. I really believe that the immigrant community made an ethical mistake as well as a strategic mistake in not seriously taking the existing indigenous Muslim communities that you find in the inner cities to heart and recognizing that they had a moral obligation to help them build community centers, to help them build their mosques.

Investing in the Best and Brightest

So, we have to be real about helping these communities. We want to get the best and the brightest, give them scholarships so that they can give back. We don't want the migration up. Right? This is what happened with the black middle class and upper middle class. They just moved up, and they didn't pick anybody else up with them, and now they're completely alienated, and you have completely separate African-American communities in the United States that can't relate to each other. Right?

And the situation is so bad in places like East Oakland. Really, it's so bad, and it's right next door. It's right next door. We're seeing social disintegration, and we have a moral responsibility as a Muslim community.

Victory Through the Weakest

We have a moral responsibility to serve the underserved. The Prophet ﷺ promised us that you are given victory by the weakest amongst you, and he meant du'afa. He meant like poor people. That's who he was talking about, and he lived amongst them, and Allah commanded him to be patient with the poorest of people who call on their Lord in the morning and in the evening. Be patient with them. Be with them. Don't hang out with the rich people. Hang out with the poor people. That's what he told them.

Allah told him to be with those people. Elevate them. Lift them up. Bring them up.

Dignifying Poverty

We need to dignify poverty in this country because poverty in this country is a blemish. It's like something's wrong with you. You're like a moral leper. It's God's got his... This is Protestantism at its worst. This idea somehow that God's grace is when you get lots of money.

Matthew 19:21, quoting Christian scripture here. Matthew 19:21, when the man comes to Jesus and Jesus says, go and sell your garment and give it to the poor. Go and sell your goods and give it to the poor, and you'll have a

treasure in heaven. If you want to be perfect, go and sell your material possessions and then give it to the poor, and then you can get a treasure in heaven and you follow me.

The Catholic Tradition of Renunciation

The Catholics took that very seriously, and that's why in the Catholic tradition, the highest thing is to renounce wealth. That's what monks do. They have a vow of chastity, poverty, and obedience. Chastity, poverty, and obedience. All those nuns in those Catholic schools, they were all working for free. They were working for free.

The prophet Elisha chose poverty over wealth. He was given a choice to be a slave prophet or a king prophet, and he chose to be a slave prophet. He lowered his standard of living so that other standards could be raised up. That's a challenge. That's a moral challenge for people. It's a moral challenge.

The Danger of Wealth

Wealth is a dangerous thing. Sayyidina Ali said, (حلاله له حساب وحرامه عقاب - What's halal from wealth, the permitted, is severe reckoning, and what's haram is a chastisement).

That's why the Zuhad, in all the books they say this, the people of Zuhad, the people that give up wealth (أعقل الناس - They're the most rational, intelligent people).

Lowering Our Standards

We have to lower our standards of living. Really, because we're living on a planet right now that's in peril because of all this wealth acquisition, all this greed, because that's the fundamental problem. It's about pamar. It's just wanting more. When is enough enough?

If you watch any program, you watch any of these animal shows, you know those animal programs? I was once in West Africa with an Egyptian-American from New York, and we were in a Jeep out in the middle of the Sahara, and he saw all of these wild animals. He said, Man, this is just like the Nature Channel. I said, No, no, no. The Nature Channel is like this. Yeah, you got it wrong.

Natural Limits vs. Human Excess

But if you watch those programs, when the lion gets the zebra, watch the other zebras. You watch them because they're all running, but right when that lion gets the zebra, they all stop and they go back to eating because they know, you know, Harvey's gone. The lion got his lunch. You know, it's over. But the lion will not eat the whole flock because the lion has a limit, a natural limit.

Aristotle said, Man is the only one that has no natural limits. (كَلَّا إِنَّ الْإِنسَانَ لَيَطْغَى * أَن رَّاهُ اسْتَغْنَى - Quran 96:6-7) - Surely, man goes to excess when he deems himself wealthy, when he deems himself wealthy. Allah is the wealthy and we are the poor.

السلام عليكم