Intersection of Identity
By Usama Canon | 2026-01-12T20:35:12.714003+00:00 | Topic: Muslim Identity
The Intersection of Identity - Usama Canon - MSA National
Opening
"In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful."
"Assalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh"
Bismillah, walhamdulillah, wassalatu wassalamu ala rasulillahi wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa minwala. Assalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh. Assalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.
Introduction
Alhamdulillah, one of the most inspiring things beside my dear beloved young brother Majid's words of wisdom was hearing Nisreen say that we're all young Muslims still trying to fit in that category. It's very inspiring to be amongst all of you and to feel some of that youthful energy and attempt to kind of draw on it and build upon it. I'm glad to see, or I saw Dr. Alpoff and Dr. Jawad here, I think they stepped out but those of us that are in the, what you may call, young uncles category are always inspired by MSA and it's exciting.
Next week will make 18 years for me as a Muslim inshallah ta'ala and during the 18 years and shortly before embracing Islam I've been a beneficiary and I've been honored in many different spaces to be at some level hopefully a servant of MSA and I pray that Allah reward everybody who's ever participated in anything related to MSA and that Allah increase MSA and ISNA and we should be prayerful for our predecessors and what I mean by that is that there are a lot of people who 50 some years ago and obviously beyond that worked to set up the very path that you and I tread on today.
We should be prayerful for them, we pray that Allah reward them abundantly that Allah forgive them, that Allah be merciful to them and that inshallah our children and their children's children will be inshallah participants in these very important and very blessed spaces. May Allah bless you all.
Main Discourse
The Complexity of Modern Muslim Identity
The topic is very timely and frankly given Majid's and Nasreen's comments there's not a whole lot that I would like to add but I want to first say that I think the topic is very timely given the very interesting and extremely confusing time that we live in. Young Muslims today are not only wrestling with identity within the already difficult and very complex framework of nature and nurture but are also being nurtured by a seemingly omnipresent geopolitical madness.
Everything between ISIS and the genocide in Gaza, Ukraine, Ebola and the national issues of police brutality or if you will, state sponsored terrorism against men of color and women of color. Everything from criminal terrorism to those very real things to the deadly diseases, all of that we're processing in the very same news feed and I say that perhaps in a proverbial way in the very same news feed in which we see people posting pictures of their chicken wings and their feet on the beach and then another picture of a mutilated child, etc, etc and then we have the ever influencing and extremely problematic in you dating pop culture.
All of you will probably come to those interesting moments that I've come to where you become a parent. One of my teachers said whoever made up the terrible twos has never had a 12 year old and my 12 year old is a really good kid but last night as I'm trying to pack and trying to get ready to get on a plane to come to ISNA, he said, "Baba, what does turned down for what mean?" and I was like, "what?" He said, "what is turned down for what?" and I was like, "I don't know, what does it mean? what are you talking about?" and he's like, "well, what does it mean?" and I was like, "I don't know, did you google search it?" he's like, "I was afraid to" and I was like, "Alhamdulillah that you're afraid to." So then I googled search it and I was glad he was afraid to because, you know, this is the reality we're talking about what is shaping young Muslims identity today.
The Evolution of Faith
We've got to be clear about the fact that it's no longer just a Sunday school or just a Halaqah or just Mama or Baba but there are several hands at play in this regard and I'm saying all of that really to just kind of problematize this whole issue a little bit this issue of identity and more importantly to invite you and invite myself to think beyond the evolving Muslim identity as an evolution that is happening to some external lab rat and rather that we realize we're all part of that evolution we're all part of that evolution in terms of the communal evolution but we're all part of that evolution because we are all evolving ourselves in this very moment.
"Every day Allah is in another glorious affair and every moment He is creating and recreating you and creating and recreating the world. May Allah help us understand that so when we talk about this idea of evolution and I don't mean it in like a Darwinistic way we embrace it and we honor it and we recognize it as an act of God and in that regard we have to be people who say am I indeed evolving, am I progressing, am I growing."
(Reported in Al-Bayhaqi's Shu'ab al-Iman)
"The Prophet (peace be upon him) is reported to have said somebody who is the same person two days in a row has been duped, they have been cheated. In other words time is working against you."
"By time, man is at loss. So if we are not evolving if we're not growing, if we're not bettering if we're not implementing those very important lessons that Majid called us to."
(Sahih Muslim, Hadith 2692)
"Wallahi just this week I told students that we should be saying that three times in the morning and three times in the evening because we have fallen into unfortunately a type of Burger King "have it your way" is there a way to download hashtag easy Islam approach to where we think we're going to grow or evolve without doing some work, but how many of us really when Majid said we should say variants of the hadith in which that du'a is found how many of us really said I'm going to say that three times in the morning and three times in the evening and if you didn't do any, literally, we come to conferences, we get excited, we meet people, we buy some miswaks in the bazaar and then eat a halal taco from the halal taco truck out front and then we go home or did we take something we can implement?"
What did the Prophet say in one of the variants of that hadith? He said whoever says it three times in the morning and the evening :
(Sahih Muslim, Hadith 2692)
"Allah took it upon himself as a right, as a responsibility if you will to please that person. So we have to be people who work and we should definitely be thinking about are we evolving."
Learning Islam: Bifurcated Understanding
One of the things I would like to ask and I'm asking this rhetorically for you to think about is how have we learned Islam and is the way we have learned Islam is it exacerbating an already very difficult journey? In other words have we learned an Islam that bifurcates us? Have we learned an Islam that makes this whole experience kind of a, almost social schizophrenia?
You talked about, ironically you're at MSA, marriage has got to come into the talk somehow, right? It's got to fit in there somehow but you talked at the end about identity and appearance. You guys have probably heard about that website, hopefully you haven't gone to it, I've never been to it but I've heard about it a website called Hot or Not and people put up their pictures they grade it from 1 to 10, if you're 10 you're hot if you're a 1 you're not you know what I'm saying and so, are you hot or not? are the persons hot or they're not?
Arabic Saying:
"As they say, even a monkey in his mother's eyes is beautiful. So you may not be hot by the standards of somebody assessing you on a website but in your mother's eyes, boy you're beautiful in your mother's
eyes you're beautiful in your dad's eyes you might just be acceptable but in momma's eyes, in momma's eyes you're beautiful.
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim?
So do we have like a hot or not type of understanding of Islam? In other words, am I a good Muslim or a bad Muslim? Good Muslim, bad Muslim, hot or not? Imam al-Shafi'i said something very important I want you to think about that, he said no Muslim ever obeys Allah without sometimes disobeying him and no Muslim ever disobeys Allah without sometimes obeying him so who's ever good outweighs their bad, we consider them amongst the righteous. In other words, this is all a process when we talk about identity to try to do as much good as you possibly can in this very very short window of time you have been given called life.
Framework for Understanding Muslim Identity
As I begin to wrap it up I'd like to provide a framework for us to think within, number one, what does it mean to be Muslim? There are all the conversations about what it means to be Muslim in terms of methodology and ideology and in terms of group affiliation and in terms of political stance etc, etc, there is everything that it means to be Muslim in terms of how much I pray, how much I fast how I pray, when I fast or break my fast, whether I'm part of the moon fighting problem or not there's all of the questions about what it means to be Muslim, about what I wear, who etc, etc, but really what does being Muslim mean? Am I Muslim? It means, what am I doing?
Islam is ultimately what you do and this is why when Gabriel came to the Prophet (peace be upon him), he said tell me about Islam, the Prophet told him about actions, Islam is that you do these five things, the five pillars and for time's sake I will not go into them as I assume you know them well that's what it really comes down to, what am I doing? And if we just ask ourselves that question in like a more authentic, real kind of agitational, authentic way what am I doing? Even in terms of politics and activism, am I a clicktivist or am I an activist? Am I somebody who is just involved in online critique of situations or am I actually doing something in the community and in the world moving toward good and as an agent of change what am I really doing? As a Muslim you can look and say, what am I spending my time doing? Am I learning? Am I remembering Allah? etc.
Being a Mu'min
Being a mu'min obviously has to do with how we know Allah, what we believe about Him what we believe to be conceivable and conceivable and necessary to believe about the Divine, what we believe similarly for the Prophet (peace be upon him) or what we believe about the end of time or what we believe about the afterlife, but at one level, being a mu'min, the question of being a mu'min is, what do I believe? What am I thinking about? Where is my heart and mind center? What am I involving myself with in terms of my heart and my mind? And that's part of identity as well.
Being a Muhsin
But part of identity, and I think this is really important is attempting to strive to be people of ihsan. Because being a muhsin, rewinding when Gabriel asked the Prophet (peace be upon him) what is iman? He told him six objects of faith. You have to believe in these six things that you know well. But being muhsin or being someone of spiritual excellence, being someone who excels, the Prophet (peace be upon him) tells us that it means that you worship Allah as if you see him and if you fail to do so, you know that he sees you.
The Soul's Reality
But another way to ask this question is what is being a muhsin, someone of spiritual excellence, what am I? What am I? Because when you ask the question of identity, naturally there's questions of gender, there's questions of race, there's questions of ethnicity. Within race and ethnicity there's questions of subsets of those racial or ethnic groups. There's socioeconomic realities, there's accolades behind your name of what you studied.
Those are all part of what you are as you alluded to imagine. But let us not forget, and I mean this in no type of fluffy weird kind of like double rainbow silly spirituality way. I mean this in a real way.
Let us not forget that in addition to being these physical beings that are walking around and living and marrying and procreating and wearing clothes and going to conferences and et cetera, that beyond all of that, behind all of that, underneath all of that, you're a ruh. You're a soul that knows God. You predate the world itself.
You predate race. You predate gender. You predate space. You predate time by way of the fact that Allah created you as a pre-eternal reality called a ruh. And he brought you forth from the loins of your forefather Adam and asked you:
"Am I not your Lord? And you and I and everyone else testified it, indeed you are. So beyond all of that, beyond all of the stuff of physicality, which is real, and as Muslims, one of the beautiful things about our faith is we are not supposed to check out of our physical realities, check out of our cognitive obligations and our theological, but we're also to remember that behind all of that, I'm a soul.
I'm a spirit, as it were, and not in some type of strange fluffy way.
Poetry:
"O you servant of your physicality, how miserable you will make yourself. Are you attempting to profit from the very place of bankruptcy? Look back to your soul and seek the perfection of its virtues. It is
because of your soul, not because of your body, that you're a human being.
So when Allah created Adam, what did he tell the angels? He said, so when I form him, and then I blow into him of my soul, then prostrate to him. He didn't just say I'm going to form this human being, prostrate to him.
Practical Advice for Identity Navigation
So I'm saying that to remember that even beyond all of this stuff, and we have to be clear that as Muslims and in conversations at MSA, we've got to have clear conversations around identity. You'd be really surprised the conversations that happen offline with young Muslims when it comes to identity. You'd be really surprised about the deep levels of crisis that are happening for Muslim youth about identity, what it means to be a Muslim, what it means to keep on hijab.
I remember asking a young student, a young lady who was mutahajiba, I said to her, I said, what's it like wearing hijab? She said, why do you ask that question? Because I never did it before. It'd be kind of awkward like national brother wear hijab day. I'd never done it. I said, what's it like wearing hijab? She said, mashallah, it's such an honor. Alhamdulillah, I just feel so. I was like, really? Is that how you really feel? She goes, no. Astaghfirullah.
She goes, it's horrible. She goes, I'm always hot all the time. That's the other part of the conversation that we, again, minimize, that it's a struggle. To be a woman wearing hijab is easy for brothers to just go undercover. But the sisters rocking hijab are constantly repping the deen. What does it mean to be? What does it mean? Brother, do you have that beard because you have a beard or just because you're trying to be like a baseball player? You know what I'm saying? What does that really mean? All of this stuff of identity.
But we've got to move beyond that. And we've got to be a community that is, if you will, ruh-centric, as it were.
Three Practical Suggestions
Really quickly, I would like to offer some really basic suggestions of advice that will help us in navigating this whole conversation of identity.
First: Good Company
Number one, Majid talked about good company. And he talked about the friends that you keep. And he translated the hadith in the most liberal, completely inaccurate, but extremely on-point way possible. And I'm not picking on you. I'm praising you.
(Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 6168)
When he said, the Prophet said, let one of you consider whose YouTube videos you watch. That's not obviously what the Prophet... I'm not picking on you. But what he's saying is mad real. Be careful of the online sohbah that you're engaged in. And that's what you are trying to say, if I'm not mistaken. Right? The Prophet said, so let one of you consider who you keep company with. Yeah.
And not only who you sit with, but also who you sit with. Who you sit with in terms of online space. That's really important. But the people that we interact with. But camelbacking on that. We don't say piggyback. We say what? Camelback.
Camelbacking on that, I would specifically invite you to sit with the elders. And the older the better. The older the better. Try to keep company with old people if you can. Ask them for words of wisdom. Ask them what life has taught them. Because they represent not only a very important subset of the community about which the Prophet (peace be upon him) said, if you don't honor them, you're not one of us. But also they represent a time gone by.
They represent a world that no longer exists. They saw people that will never see. They experienced things that we never experienced. So in our processing identity, it's important that we anchor ourselves in being in touch with people who are older than us. And the older the better. Sit with them and listen attentively.
If you're going to use your phone in their presence, use it for one thing and one thing only, and that's for the voice memo. Press record and sit down and say, uncle, auntie, grandma, grandpa, give me some words of advice. What has life taught you? And when they say it, they give you the words of advice. It might not make sense right when you hear it. But later on, at some point in your life, it's going to make sense. It's going to click.
So listen to elders. And if you have some type of disinclination from keeping company with your own elders, then keep company with other people's elders. In other words, if you don't have an uncle or auntie or grandma or grandpa that you can keep company with, try to keep company with other people's grandparents and ask them for advice and for words of wisdom.
Second: Service-Oriented Community
The second thing I will say in terms of this idea of identity is make sure and thank God for MSA and thank God for all of you, make sure that we're a service-oriented community. Because one of the most important things that will help you have a healthy sense of identity and help you have a healthy sense of a wholeness is that you be a service-oriented person. By serving other people, it'll make sure that it keeps you intact.
Remember that in the most intimate spaces, behind closed doors, where there was no onlookers besides his family, the Prophet (peace be upon him) is described as having been in the menial service of his family. Doing things that other people don't like to do. So from the house outward, to be service-oriented people.
But we've got to be careful that we're not service-oriented when it comes to a convention or to an event on campus or when there is a camera or when I'm going to get some exposure, but then when it comes to the most important people that I'm to serve, I'm no longer a service-oriented person. We've got to be very careful about that.
Third: Critical Self-Conversation
And finally, let all of us have a critical conversation with ourselves about what it really means to be me. What it really means to be us. And let us be honest about that. And let us support one another in that regard.
The Reality of Our Times
Because see look, the Prophet (peace be upon him) described the end of time and I'm not saying like next week or next year and I'm definitely not saying 2012 because that would be awkward if the world ended two years ago and nobody saw it. But we're at the latter stage of human existence. The Prophet (peace be upon him) said that my coming and the last day are like these two, holding his two fingers together.
(Sahih Muslim, Hadith 144)
He (peace be upon him) describes the end of time as a time in which there will be discord, strife, sedition, fitna. There will be drama, fitna like pieces of a dark night. Continuous pieces of a dark night.
(Sahih Muslim, Hadith 144)
A person in that time will come into the morning a believer and by the evening they're a disbeliever. Then by the morning they're a believer and by the evening they're a disbeliever. Imagine said something and we may have laughed or we may not have got it. He said we're in this conference right now but you might have to drag me out of the club here tonight. He wasn't. He's not going to go to the club.
I ain't going to let him go to the club. You can go to the club. But what you're saying is what? We're all in the hands of Allah. And in the time that we live in he said, a person will come into the morning a believer and by the evening they've lost their faith. May Allah save us from that.
And then he says and by the morning they're a believer and by the evening they've disbelieved. And one of the interpretations that a person will go on like a rollercoaster, like a violent ride when it comes to faith. You gain faith, you lose faith. You gain faith, you lose faith.
Closing
So may Allah ta'ala never take our faith away from us, ya rabbi al-alameen. And ya rab, don't let our socio-economic status or our ethnicity or where we live or what group we're part of or who our sheikh is or anything else ever ever veil us from your divine reality, ya rabbi al-alameen.
Closing Du'a:
I apologize, I went one minute over. We were supposed to end at 6:45. Please forgive me for that.