Muslims Agents of Positive Change

Muslims: Agents of Positive Change

By Imam Omar Suleiman - IOK ILMspiration Conference 2019

As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu. Audhu billahi min ash-shaytani r-rajim. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim.

Alhamdulillahi rabbil alameen. Wa l-aqibatu lil-mutaqeen.

Allahumma salli wa sallim wa barak ala abdika wa rasulika Muhammadin wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa sallam tasliman kathira.

Opening Remarks and Unity

A few things first and foremost so I don't forget. I want to congratulate IOK and all of its volunteers, staff, everyone that put this together. I don't want it to be lost upon us how significant this moment is when three institutes come together to work together and to put forth inshaAllah ta'ala the first of many efforts in partnership.

So may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala bless IOK for always serving in this capacity of unifying, being a vehicle of unity, not just here in SoCal but honestly around the country. Alhamdulillahi rabbil alameen. And that's something that stems through the mashayikh and the staff and the volunteers and the students as well.

And it gives me so much hope to see that spirit being imparted inshaAllah ta'ala upon everyone that comes through these doors at IOK and leaves these doors with that same spirit of unity inshaAllah ta'ala and brings that to their communities. So alhamdulillah when Sheikh Nouman Beg reached out and said, what do you think of the idea of IOK Yaqeen and Qalam doing something together? I said, that's amazing, sign me up. I don't know what you have in mind, but let's do it inshaAllah ta'ala.

We've talked about how we can unify our ranks in different ways inshaAllah ta'ala and bring projects together, but this is a phenomenal step forward bi-idhnillahi ta'ala.

I'm from Texas. I'm from New Orleans. I live in Texas. I'm a Palestinian. Welcome to the Arab Israelis in the room.

That's a pretty amazing analogy that you gave there. I was like wow. Now when you all talk about women's accommodations in the masjid, you now have an analogy that you can operate with that I think beats any analogy that I've ever heard for our sisters.

Islam and the Isms: Introduction

But my topic is one of Islam and the isms as a whole. Islam and all of the isms. And subhanAllah this is something that I've been doing a lot of reading and research in at a personal level first and foremost for my own enrichment.

We have to keep ourselves honest. Are we trying to fit Islam into another world view to give it more mobility or acceptance? Or does our religion have something unique to offer to us and to offer to the world around it? That incredible pristine religion that gave life to the ugliest region of this world at the time in 7th century Arabia. What does it have to give to 21st century Trumpistan? What does it mean to us here and to the world around us? Is it really just a language?

And this is something subhanAllah that one of my critiques of the rising religious left though in some ways we know what the religious right does in America. The religious right has lost all credibility except with itself due to its overt hypocrisy. And so there's this new movement of the religious left that's growing. And a lot of them happen to be my colleagues that would identify as being from the religious left.

And I would say to them that look are we just going to put collars on our essentially politicized secular language? And is the religious left just the secular left with collars? Is that all that we are? Or is there something authentic to the intervention of religion into America and into the world right now?

As a Muslim I believe that Islam shakes up the world. It shakes up the society that it operates in. That it poses a level of tension that is ultimately to the benefit of you as an individual and to the benefit of that society.

The Prophet as the Living Quran

Personally what is it that gives me the greatest strength in my faith? It's the seerah of the Prophet. I struggled with faith for years. I still struggle with faith but I struggled with it at some point in my life to a point that I didn't even identify with it. And what makes me love this religion more than anything else is that it manifests in the person of the Prophet. The seerah takes it out of theory.

It's in practice and it's through this one man that was able to truly change the world in a way that would make it unrecognizable in regards to what it was before. It is the Prophet. You want to see the Quran in motion? It's the Prophet.

(Muslim hadith 746)

If I have any doubt in my mind about what Islam is supposed to represent as an intervention into the world, I look to the person of the Messenger. There is nothing about his character that I'm shy of. There is nothing about his character that doesn't make me proud.

There is nothing about his character that doesn't give me something to aspire to. And there is nothing about his character that doesn't consistently and perpetually inspire me as a Muslim to rise to a better standard. I look at him and say, how can I be him? How do you be him? One thing about the Prophet, never complacent.

Continuous Progress in the Prophetic Mission

When you talk about progress, the Prophet for 23 years, you can see identifiable progress even in the tarbiyah of his companions through those 23 years. He was moving them and building them over those 23 years. There is no year of stagnation in the seerah of the Prophet, even in Mecca.

There is not a year that something revolutionary in its nature was not legislated in the Quran or in the person of the Prophet. Even in his most vulnerable moments, he was still challenging Meccan society and refused to become complacent in Madani society and kept on moving and moving and moving. And yes, the sahaba were uncomfortable initially because anytime you have to change your way of life, it's going to be uncomfortable. But there is no span, no year in that 23 years that's a year of stagnation, where things froze.

Even the year of Badr, even the year of Uhud, you see that Allah was building the religion, that there were new legislations that were coming, that were reforming the worship of the believers, that were reforming the ethical paradigms of the believers, that were moving them forward in regards to character. No year in the 23 years of the Prophet's message is there stagnation.

Authentic Religion vs Other Isms

And I want to speak to this inshaAllah ta'ala as sort of my way of looking at this topic of Islam and the other isms.

First and foremost, if you are trying to shape your Islam in accordance with the other isms, you already have a problem. If it is genuine religion and authentic, then you have to give it room to form independence of all of those other isms and reduce them to noise in the background without ignoring the real problems that they speak to. Because most of them speak to genuine problems and we believe we have genuine religion that speaks to all of those different things that those isms speak to.

That does not mean that we hate everybody that identifies with those isms. That does not mean that we take an elementary look at all of them. That does not mean that there are not ideas of value that come through different ways of thinking and different isms.

That means that when you have genuine religion, it forms authentically and it forms out of a sense of security that it has something of substance that at no point becomes irrelevant or distant from people. That Islam can speak to every time and every people and that is part of its universality.

Understanding Human Nature

So I want to approach this in a few ways inshaAllah or approach this first and foremost with this.

People. Let's start with human beings. Most human beings are not ideological. Most people are not ideological. Most people do not interpret the world around them ideologically. They interpret it through what Shaykh al-Muslimah mentioned, experience.

Most people develop their world views and develop their thoughts and their approaches and their pathways in accordance with experience, not ideology. In fact, subhanAllah, I was reading something which was really interesting. In 2016, twice as many people were willing to identify as democrat or republican rather than conservative or liberal.

I'm going to get back to that in a moment because what that means is and I'll get back to the sentence. Most people are not ideological but they are tribal. Most people are not ideological but they are tribal.

So we'll get back to that in a moment. But at the first level of this, personal. Most people interpret the whole world around them disproportionately through their own personal lens.

And why shouldn't they, right? Three people that Shaykh al-Muslimah interacted with, why should she not take those three people and cast that on the world around her when those three people represent 100% of her experiences within that domain? Of course she's going to do that.

When Haji Malik al-Shabazz, Malcolm X, subhanAllah, wrote his autobiography, he talked about how the white devil doctrine was convincing to him. If you watch the movie, literally, there's that moment where he goes through and he thinks of every single white person that he had interacted with in his life and he said, seems pretty devilish to me.

That was enough for him to be bought into a doctrine. Does it mean that all white people are devils? No. But at Malcolm's time, when Malcolm went through and went through that, you know what, that makes sense.

Because he went through every single person that he had interacted with, or at least those who he had interacted with in a meaningful way in the 1940s and 50s and said, yep, white devil. We naturally are drawn to ideology through that lens of personal experience. It's who we are.

Prophetic Validation of Experience

It means something. And the Prophet did not negate that. In fact, in his da'wah, the Prophet did validate people's experiences.

He acknowledged their experiences. He talked about the way that they felt. He spoke to them in accordance with that experience.

(Bukhari hadith 127)

You speak to people in accordance with what their intellect can grasp, and the things that are familiar to them. The Prophet, all of his amthal, his analogies, if you read through Sunan Tirmidhi, Amthal an Rasulullah, the parables of the Prophet. The Prophet gave parables that people could relate to, to help them understand the horror of sin, to help them understand the urgency of good, to help them understand this life in comparison to the next life. He gave a lot of analogies.

So those experiences meant something.

Doubt and Experience

It's understandable that you interpret world through these experiences. And that's why for example, at Yaqeen Institute, we started and we said we're gonna combat doubt. Doubt is not primarily an intellectual problem.

Most people don't arrive at doubt in Islam through an intellectual crisis. The intellectual crisis is often catalyzed through an experience. And then that experience leads them down a certain path.

And if they don't have the spiritual anchor or the personal anchor, then they're gonna keep on entertaining those thoughts further and further and further. So one of the things that we started researching in year two, Alhamdulillah you're seeing the fruition of now, is the trauma series. The relationship of trauma and faith.

Trauma with a big T, trauma with a little t, trauma in regards to your family life, trauma through the loss of a family member, trauma through a breakup, trauma through an abusive parent, trauma through an abusive spouse, trauma through marriage, trauma through divorce, trauma through children, trauma through work, trauma through poverty. So many types of trauma. Trauma through Islamophobia, right? The things that are happening around us.

The Relationship Between Experience and Authority

The point is that it's only natural that you approach ideology through that experiential lens. Why is that so important for us to understand? To the point that you naturally, psychologically, will encounter God or you'll view God or deal with God in the same way that you have dealt with authority throughout your life. If your authority figures in life were abusive, highly disciplinary, employed more negative reinforcement than positive reinforcement, or the opposite of all three of those things, and then God gets introduced into your life as the ultimate authority, you're likely to deem Him, or you're likely to encounter Him or experience Him within that same domain.

Because that's your experience. So of course there's the personal. And the personal has something to do with whether or not these ideologies are going to appeal to us or be averse to us.

Shahwa and Hawwa: Desire and Deviant Thought

Now I want to move on to the second thing. So it's personal. And that's, subhanAllah, by the way, the relationship between shahwa and hawwa.

Shahwa and hawwa both get translated as desire. Hawwa, if you look at hawwa throughout the Quran and the Sunnah, it usually refers to deviant thoughts, not deviant desire, deviant thoughts. Okay? Deviant thoughts.

Deviant thoughts often is rooted in deviant desire, unrestricted desire. So when the shahwa gets too much and poisons your thought, then you're likely to go on a path of hawwa.

The Prophet does not speak from hawwa, does not speak out of desire.

The Prophet is always governed by revelation. Whether it's convenient or inconvenient, the Prophet deals with revelation. It's always in accordance with revelation.

No one of you truly believes until your hawwa, until your way of thinking conforms with the way of thinking of the Prophet, conforms with the sunnah of the Prophet. At the ideological level and at the practical level.

The Corruption of Desire

Even if they're falling short, as we all are, meeting that level of the Prophet's practice, but it's there. And Allah mentions the opposite.

Do you see the one who took their god as their desirous thinking? So usually hawwa is at the thinking level, shahwa is at the lust level.

But if your lust is uncontrolled and becomes your guiding force and direction and purpose in life, that's likely to poison your thoughts and your intellectual trajectory as well. And then you can justify everything. You have a lust for power, then you will manipulate scripture to give you as much power as possible.

And that's not always talking about a head of state. I've seen lots of that in relationships and marriages. Everybody knows their huquq. Everybody knows their rights. Nobody knows their obligations. You tell someone, you need to be more like Muhammad, she needs to be more like Khadijah.

No one wants to talk about this stuff. Right? I know my rights, because if lust for power and authority is what's guiding me, then I'm not looking for response. I will read all of that, even at a personal level, into the Quran and the sunnah of the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam).

Tribalism in the Muslim Community

So that's the personal. But the second one, I said that people are not ideological, but they are tribal. People are tribal.

Division in the time, even in madani society, in the lifetime of the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam), while he was amongst them. Rasulullah (صلى الله عليه وسلم - Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam) is amongst them. And what did shaytan succeed in doing amongst them? Through the mouth of a hypocrite, Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul.

Dividing them once again, back to their old tribal affiliations. Aus and Khazraj in Medina, these people who are willing to put everything behind, to greet the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam), to meet the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam), to risk it all, and take in these people from Mecca, because they don't threaten their tribal identity. Take them into their homes, give them half of their stuff, all of that.

But when the call of jahiliyyah came back, the call of ignorance, Aus and Khazraj once again, they were able to split to the point that the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam) walks away from his own masjid, seeing them quarrel once again. They retreat. They retreat back to their tribal identities.

Even the first major fitna, the death of the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam), of Musaylim al-Kadhab, Musaylim of the false prophet. His followers knew he was a false prophet. But he was from Banu Hanifa.

So they said, the liar of Banu Hanifa is better than the truthful one of Quraysh. We'll take him. So people are very tribal.

Healthy vs Unhealthy Tribalism

Tribalism, both in the sense of political tribes, and religious tribes, and things of that sort, usually appeals to insecure people. Because I find security with the group. I find security with the group.

By the way, there's a healthy manifestation of that too. You know what it's called? The jama'a. The group.

And the jama'a is not one group. It's amazing how even a hadith which is meant to say that the hand of Allah is with the group, meaning the body of the Muslims. It's not one group of the Muslims that says we are jama'at, so and so.

Let the identity that brings you together as a group of people be the Qur'an. The rope of Allah be the Qur'an. Not a political affiliation. Not a tribal association. The Qur'an that binds you together. And do not become divided amongst yourselves.

Allah's blessing is always with the group. Allah's blessing is always... You know what? You talk about institutions in the Muslim community and you got people that try to tear down all the institutions of the Muslim community. I will take an imperfect institution, an imperfect unity over anarchy any day, over division any day, that's unrestricted and that has no end in sight.

Because shaitan preys on who? This is not my view. The Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam) said shaitan preys on the lone sheep. The sheep that's away from the flock.

The Need for Community

So we crave group. We crave identity through togetherness. And that's why we need each other.

We need our masajids. Even if your masjid is imperfect.

The masjid is the home of every believer. It is a safe haven. Without it you're spiritually homeless.

We need it. We need that place. We need that group to come together once again.

And not let ourselves retreat to tribes within the Muslim community. So people are not ideological, they're tribal. They tend to cling together.

The Problem of Echo Chambers

You tend to look for someone else that thinks the way that you do. And then your truth and falsehood doesn't become about what's being said, it becomes about who's saying it. SubhanAllah, if you think about social media today and the echo chambers and the silos, be honest.

Those of you that are on social media quite a bit. If you remove the names of all things that are said on social media, would you still retweet the same things that you retweet and share the same things that you share and bash the same people that you do and celebrate the same people that you do? Probably not. So truth and falsehood become lost in who's speaking, not what's being spoken.

Motivated Cognition

People are not ideological. They're personal and they're tribal. There's something called, by the way, I read a book on it. I'm not a psychiatrist. Please, all of the psychiatrists in here. But subhanAllah, I'm

fascinated by psychiatry.

One of my greatest regrets in life is not doing a degree in psychiatry or doing a degree in film. That's another story. Motivated cognition.

If you Google motivated cognition, the same way Shaykh al-Muslimah googled feminism and got feminazism. I thought that was hilarious. I saw everyone's eyes go, wait, what? If you Google motivated cognition, motivated reasoning, most people are familiar with the term confirmation bias, right? You look into the Quran, you look into the Sunnah, you try to find what's there and you get it.

Let me find it and then, yes, this is what I've been saying the whole time. Allah says it too. The Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam) said it too, see? And then assign all of the language to it.

Motivated cognition speaks to the general way in which we approach these things, about the personal way in which we approach text and approach ideology, approach thoughts. It is emotional reasoning and when you emotionally reason, you are inherently, objectively illogical. Of course you're not going to be logical because you're going to use all sorts of dodgy reasoning and dishonest thoughts to fit things into your perfect worldview.

And so it doesn't become about what type of feminism, if any, is compatible with Islam or any type of ism. It becomes what I want to be compatible with Islam and my worldview for the sake of my trajectory. Okay, so it's emotional reasoning.

Islam is CCC: The Three Principles

It becomes dodgy. So there are three things that I want to mention inshaAllah ta'ala in conclusion. I want you to remember these three.

Islam is CCC, not CC. He's not doing too well right now. InshaAllah he does worse.

Islam is CCC, three C's. And I want you to remember these things. Number one, current.

1. Current - Islam is Relevant to Every Time

Islam is current. There are two problems that I see typically when Islam is spoken about in conversation with these ideologies or conversations with our times. Number one, the only time we bring Islam into it is to say what is not compatible with Islam.

As if to suggest Islam has nothing to offer. So amongst practicing, and I hate the word conservative because it means so many things, but let's just say orthodox, mainstream, mazid going, whatever it is, connected, conservative. Usually the word activism gives you like this allergic reaction.

And the only thing you think of is what's haram about activism. Is that all Islam has to say about the world around us and the issues around us is what's wrong with it? What's wrong with activism? Really? So

there's no authentic way to engage the slate of issues? That's what the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam) brought? Nothing? Except for a creed, a doctrine? That's it? So what's haram?

If the first thing that comes to your mind is what's haram about it, that's very indicative of your view of Islam, not your view of the world. Islam has so much.

The Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam's) seerah is rich. There's stuff to draw from there. So Islam is current.

And by the way, the greatest threat to religion is not refutation. The greatest threat to religion is stagnation. When people don't think that there's a role for it to even be discussed in the realm of ideas, when the ideas are not even worth being refuted anymore, when people don't feel like it speaks to their lives anymore.

It's something my parents used to do, my grandparents used to do, my great-grandparents used to do, right? The Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam) said there would come a time where people would say Allah, Allah. They don't know why they're saying Allah. It lacks meaning.

It's just the language at that point. Why are they saying La ilah Allah? Well, my dad used to say it. You find people, subhanAllah, I've been to areas in North America and South America, and you find people that don't eat pork.

Why don't you eat pork? Well, my parents were Muslim, and they just taught us not to eat pork. That's it. Islam is current. It's not stagnant. Just as there was no year of stagnation in 23 years of the life of the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam), there is no stagnation in Islam until the end of times. It's always current.

It always has something to say about the world around us. It always speaks to us.

2. Consistent - Islam Survives Temporary Trends

The second C, Islam is consistent.

Genuine religion has to be able to survive temporary trends. One of the things, I teach a course on maqasid at SMU. We just don't call it maqasid at Southern Methodist University.

We call it the Principles and Objectives of Islamic Law. And we were just studying last week the way that rhetoric, that discourse, in a colonized Muslim world started to address Islamic ethics. Basically, the goal was to reshape terminology within Islam to fit colonial sensibilities to put Islam on par with the rest of the world.

To say that Islam was not regressive. You're already starting from a faulty foundation because your goal is to get over an insecurity. A lot of times, many ways of thinking also married Islam to a temporary secular