Tinkering with Religion in the Garage
By Zaid Shakir | 2026-01-16T06:47:28.422954+00:00 | Topic: Iman
Tinkering with Religion in the Garage
Opening Prayers and Gratitude
In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds. Peace and blessings be upon the Master of Messengers, our Master Muhammad, and upon his family and companions.
And peace and blessings be upon you. Our Lord, all praise is due to You, as it should be due to the glory of Your Face and the greatness of Your Sultanate. Exalted are You.
We praise You, as You have praised Yourself. O Allah, send blessings and peace and blessings upon the Master of Messengers, our Master Muhammad, and upon his family and companions. And send peace and blessings upon them.
Peace and blessings of Allah be upon you. All praise is due to Allah, All praise is due to Allah, Who has guided us to this. And we would not have been guided if Allah had not guided us.
All praise is due to Allah, Who has revealed the Book to His servant and has not made it an obstacle. All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds. All praise is due to Allah, Who has blessed us with this wonderful gathering.
Blessings We Enjoy
He has blessed us with safety and security, two of the great, great blessings that we can enjoy. He has blessed us with food. He has blessed us with shelter.
He has blessed us with clean water. Brothers and sisters, how could we not be thankful to Allah?
Introduction to the Topic
To start, I'd just like to read the write-up for the talk I'm supposed to give. To remind yourselves and to remind myself of what I'm supposed to talk about.
Also, to be able to make an excuse for not talking about all of it, because as you see, it's very wide and very deep and would take a very, very long period of time to cover. So it's called Tinkering with Religion in the Garage. Modern societies have become fundamentalist in their secularism and have effectively banned religion from the public square.
Religion has been relegated to the status of a personal hobby to be practiced behind closed doors. Does public morality suffer as a result? Is religious morality inherently divisive or divisive and disruptive as many believe?
Originally, secularism in countries like the United States, England, and Canada was not antagonistic to religion but simply deemed that there would be no coerced state religion or religious tests for politicians. Is the current judicial antagonism towards religion in general incongruous with the idea of majority rule in democracy given the majorities in the U.S. and Canada are still ill-informed by religion? In America, some argue that the Ten
Commandments are congruous with the values upheld by the Founding Fathers but the Supreme Court has prohibited any public displays of religion in government buildings.
Have we adopted the French model of laicism and if so, is any room left at all for religion in the public square?
So that's very deep on the one hand but it's somewhat superficial on the other in that it states a case for a certain type of relationship between religion and politics, government and the people but it also misstates the case to a large extent.
America and the Constitution: Religious Freedom
So the first question definitely at least I can speak for America and I believe for Canada, maybe Quebec is a little more nuanced in this regard that America is not a laicist society and any effort to make or transform America into a laicist society would be unconstitutional because the very first amendment of the American Constitution contains what are referred to as the religious clauses namely that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. So two principles are established in the very first amendment to the United States Constitution.
One, that Congress cannot create a national religion and some people argue this was in response to the relationship between the British government and the Anglican church and there are other arguments. The second is that government shall not give preference or privilege to any religion over the other and everyone is free to practice the religion of their choosing. So if I choose to be Muslim I have just as much right to be a Muslim as a person who chooses to be a Jew or a Christian or Zoroastrian as to build on Dr. Jackson's example.
Rights Through Citizenship, Not Confession
I have just as much right as they have and the government cannot give any privilege to any religion over the other and that should be an arrangement that Muslims find extremely acceptable and especially so those in this audience who just heard Dr. Jackson's exposition on the passage from Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah's treatise dealing with the rights of religious minorities. Our rights though are not conferred by confession. They are conferred by citizenship.
They are conferred by belonging to the political community of the nation and by accepting the rights and the responsibilities of that membership and understanding even as a minority there are no religious majorities that have any rights more than the rights that I possess. Now from here these brief introductory remarks want to move on to another issue raised in the introduction that we read and that is the role of religion in the public square. Now when the framers of that introduction mentioned that there is no role for religion in the public square they are extremely mistaken.
Two Types of Religious Roles in Public Life
Religion has, does and will play a very important role in the public square but we need to differentiate between different types of roles. To use the categorization by a scholar that I respect tremendously, one of America's leading public intellectuals, Dr. Cornel West in the context of Christianity he says that there is Constantinian Christianity, the Christianity that justifies and in fact is wedded to the imperialist project of the Roman states
and states that would be wrong and then there's prophetic Christianity, the Christianity that raises its voice for truth and justice, for fairness, the Christianity that raises the kind of voices that, the kind of voice rather that those prophets who are mentioned in scripture raised against the oppressive and tyrannical political social and economic powers of their day. So there are two different types of roles.
Constantinian Religion: Justifying Oppression
In the United States, the former, what Dr. West identifies as Constantinian Christianity has always had a very prominent public role and a very prominent public voice. That sort of religion to leave Christianity out of it, that sort of religion justified genocide against the original inhabitants of what is now America and the usurpation of their name, of their land rather, in the name of a doctrine called manifest destiny. Part of which included the idea that God has destined the American people who are the European settlers of what became America to establish their rule as the song puts it, from sea to shining sea.
That was religion in the public square. The institutions of slavery of racism, of white supremacy were defended by some on religious grounds, were justified by others on religious grounds. The wars, the many wars that America has engaged in, including the Civil War, for some were justified, were rationalized, were defended on religious grounds with scriptural arguments.
Contemporary Examples of Constantinian Religion
That's a very prominent public role. Today in the United States there are those who are arguing against environmental protection in the name of religion. They condemn the movie Avatar that it encourages the deification of the natural world.
This is a religious argument that environmental protection is encouraging the worship of the creation and minimalizing and marginalizing the worship of the creator. I don't endorse that argument. My point is this is an influential religious argument that has weight in the public square amongst many politicians.
Similarly, a religious argument calling people to environmental consciousness is to call, is to fail to call them to religious consciousness. And the role of religion is to encourage religious consciousness, not environmental consciousness. These are arguments made in the context of religion against environmental protection.
So these are ways that religion has influenced or had influenced and has influenced in the public square. There are those churches and religious establishments who are one hundred percent behind the wars in Iraq and in fact in Afghanistan. You cannot find an ecclesiastical, very few ecclesiastical councils in the United States who condemned those wars at their outset, including the Catholic Church.
Despite their strong history of arguing sound and moral for religious causes. Now there's another type of religion, what Dr. West refers to as prophetic religion. And prophetic religion also has a long history in the United States.
Prophetic Religion: Moral Activism in American History
Prophetic religion has been described by the term moral activism. It was religion and religious figures who were
at the forefront of the struggle to liberate America's slaves. Probably no institution played a stronger and more prominent role than the Quaker Church.
That's religion in the public square. Religious individuals motivated by a strong religious consciousness articulating a message that was steeped in religious symbolism and religious meanings were influential throughout American history. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom we're all familiar with, as a Christian minister, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was at the forefront of the civil rights and the anti-segregation struggle, primarily in the American South but throughout the Americas.
The Berrigan Brothers, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, both of whom were ordained Catholic priests, were at the forefront of the struggle against the injustices of the Vietnam War. And they were instrumental in starting the Catholic resistance movement. And some of the most well publicized and galvanizing acts of resistance against that war were undertaken by the Berrigan Brothers and other people who were motivated by religion.
That's religion in the public square. Now we can look at the issue of recent judicial activism and argue that after Vietnam and after the civil rights movement and after that early history of moral activism, you see a backlash where the court is engaging in anti-religious rulings, where a culture that was described by Professor Stephen L. Carter as a culture of disbelief was being consciously cultivated. But I would argue that culture has always existed.
Historical Cycles of Religious Skepticism
In the aftermath of the Civil War in which both sides were arguing that God was on their side, there was a period of tremendous religious skepticism after the bloody outrages of that war, the bloodiest war this country, or the United States rather, has yet to fight. The excesses were so severe, the burning of the South, the bombing of Charleston, South Carolina, the brutality of the war, that people said if God's on both sides I don't want anything to do with God.
And that skepticism built momentum in the early part of the twentieth century, and you see the beginnings of anti-religious judicial activism culminating in the Scopes Monkey Trial in which those arguing against scriptural-based explanations of creation, arguing for evolution eventually won the day.
And there was no, for many, many years, long decades, there was no counter-attack from the religious forces. So judicial activism arguing against religion is nothing new in the United States. I would argue that that climate of anti-religious sentiment, that climate of judicial activism that appeared to prejudice religious institutions and organizations and sensibilities, that it's a result of something deeper than religion itself, something deeper than anti-religious sentiments.
Root Causes: Corporate Power and Societal Transformation
I would argue that it's rooted in the incredibly pervasive transformation of American, particularly, but Western societies in general since 1990. That transformation has been ushered in by the concentration, unprecedented concentrations of corporate power in three areas, in the area of information technology, in the area of finance, and the area of media. And then that corporate consolidation wedded with state power and state control culminating in the situation that we see today.
That these forces have conspired to rob people, the individual, of real meaning in his or her life in the sense that the forces arrayed against the individual are so great that the forces that have been unleashed by that combination of powers that we just delineated create a universe where an individual isolated and atomized has a very, very difficult time finding meaning in his or her life. And as a result of that lack of meaning becoming very vulnerable to the forces unleashed by that collectivity of influences in ways that are perceived to be anti-religion. But in a sense they're just plain anti-human.
And of course religion has always been an integral part of the human experience. Now, I would argue that for religion to be taken serious it has to be relevant. Increasingly since 1990, religion has not been relevant for the overwhelming majority of people in deep, serious ways because religion has failed to provide real meaning to people.
Religion has failed to provide understanding of those forces that are shaping people's lives in ways that are unprecedented in human history. And as a result, people tend to give up on religion. Brothers and sisters, as we move towards the conclusion I would like to state that for religion to be serious, taken seriously, religion has to be relevant.
Making Religion Relevant: Two Essential Tasks
And for religion to be relevant it has to do two things in this situation that we find ourselves in. Number one, it has to reclaim its role of moral activism. Religion has to once again become the conscience of politics because if religion does not become the conscience of politics, what do we see increasingly? Do you know what I'm looking for? It could be anything.
Religion, for religion to take on that role again, it has to once again become the conscience of politics or politics will have no conscience. Politics will become a game of a sale to the highest bidder. If AT&T can bid more than IBM then AT&T gets their name on the bag that's being given out at the DNC convention in Denver.
And AT&T gets exempted from any prosecutions for major telecom companies being involved in domestic spying. AT&T gets exempted from any prosecution associated with the abuses it might have been involved in with various political characters and actors because AT&T is the highest bidder. If Comcast is the highest bidder, then Comcast gets to be the force that ends net neutrality because Comcast can pay the most money to the most lobbyists to influence the most politicians so the FCC says well we need new rules to govern the internet.
The Consequences of Money in Politics
Even though it was developed by public money it's now facilitated by private corporations so they should have consideration in privileging flows of money towards them so that they can give you, if you can afford to pay, instant internet connectivity, clear pictures, television light clarity, or they can limit you and you get fuzzy scrambled pictures, you get dial-up speed connectivity that's what's happening in our society the best money, the best government money can buy unless the people stand up, motivated by their religious consciousness and insist that the values of religion have an impact in politics. That's our responsibility and if we don't do it, it won't get done it's that simple brothers and sisters if we don't do it it won't get done and we meaning religious people,
Jews Christians, all people of religion, not just Muslims and there are people of other faiths who are already attempting to do it we have to add our voice to theirs we have to add our votes to theirs we have to add our numbers to theirs, and if we are really a community of prophetic religion then each and every one of us will be willing to add his or her voice because each and every one of us understands that for us, it is not a religious choice it is a religious duty, because Allah not encourages, orders us:
"Be you upright for justice, witnesses for Allah"
That's Quran, that's not scholarly opinion Quran so we have to bring that social consciousness to the political arena for the sake of both our communities and communities of goodwill throughout these lands and for the sake of generations yet unborn because what we do today or what we allow to be done today will shape the future of generations unborn just as we are living realities that were put into motions by generations born long before we ever saw the light of day in this world.
Islam's Relevance to the Human Condition
Secondly at an individual level we have to boldly assert that religion specifically because we're Muslims Islam has something to say about the conditions the postmodern and as some now say the post postmodern condition is created the conditions of alienation the conditions of atomization where our lives are being abstracted and we're existing in our little virtual worlds disconnected sometimes from the person sitting next to us on the plane or next to us in the classroom as we talk to someone ten thousand miles away via these various instruments and tools that have been given to us but we can't communicate with our neighbor we can't establish community in our neighborhoods so we search for virtual communities but a virtual community by its very name will never be a real community and it is real communities and only real communities that give meaning to individual lives but those real communities have to be created by real individuals and not virtual individuals by individuals whose lives, whose consciousness, whose hearts, whose sensibilities sensitivities are shaped by higher principles and who are moved by higher principles and we have to let people know that Islam is relevant in that regard because Islam can give humanity back to those people who have been destroyed and we've seen it with our own eyes.
The Transformative Power of Islam
The people Dr. Jackson was talking about, those seventy percent children born out of wedlock who don't know their fathers in many instances, whose social mores and values were shaped by the street and not by the nurturing environment of the home. We've seen how these individuals who were reduced to cold-blooded killers who had no compassion whatsoever, no consideration for the life, the rights the property of others have been reshaped by Islam have been turned by the hundreds of thousands in the dungeons of America's prison system into meaningful human beings, living meaningful lives, into compassionate caring human beings who wouldn't hurt anyone who didn't transgress against them. We've seen that with our eyes and that is a miracle that is a social miracle that's happening before our very eyes and that is the power of Islam and that power we have to we have to embrace it as individuals and when we embrace it as individuals when we believe in its transformative power when we believe that it can transform the Jahiliyyah of twenty-first century western societies just as it transformed the Jahiliyyah of seventh century Arabian society and create a society of
meaning, create a community of consciousness if we believe that brothers and sisters there's hope for us and there's hope for our lands and there's hope for this world and we have to join with others who are making similar appeals, who are advancing similar arguments from within the context of their faith tradition and give people a viable alternative in terms of reminding myself and yourself of how relevant that message is at the individual level.
The Politics of Cooperation Over Conflict
I want to summarize the last part of what I just said in two catchy phrases One is as a community we have to give priority to the politics of cooperation over the politics of conflict there are those in our societies who want to elevate conflict to the norm in human societies as it was in the pre-modern period people were fighting all the time you read pre-modern history it's the history of unending wars but something happened in the last one hundred and fifty years or so collectively as a human family we carved out a reality where war that was once the norm in human relations and Dr. Jackson has written about this in a very powerful article in the context of Islam into a situation where war has become the anomaly yes the anomaly in relations between states there are two hundred countries in the world namely one interstate war where two states are fighting each other two hundred countries namely one interstate war where two states are actively fighting each other you'd be hard pressed to do it some of you study political science you'd be hard pressed international relations you can name a few civil wars you can name a few invasions and occupations if one country stopped invading and occupying you wouldn't be able to name many we won't say that country's name but these are anomalous situations these are no longer the norm but there are people who may who using flawed arguments about human nature that we are inherently conflictful we have how many seven eight thousand people in this room no fights now if we were inherently conflictual that's just our human nature.
The Scorpion and the Frog: A Story About Nature
I'll tell you a story about nature because I have five minutes and I only have one minute to go so I can go off on a tangent. The scorpion and the frog went to the river bank and the water started to rise and the scorpion you know scorpions and water don't mix so the scorpion said to the frog he said Mr. Frog if you give me a ride to the other side of the river so I can be saved from this flood I'll be grateful to you forever and the frog looked at him and he said man you tripping Mr. Scorpion you're a scorpion you're going to sting me you're going to sting me and the frog said the scorpion said listen Mr. Frog if we're out there in the water and I sting you you're going to die and I'm going to drown I don't want to drown I'm trying to get you to save me so the frog thought about it for a minute and he said okay get on so the scorpion jumped on his back and the frog started swimming across and you know how wet frog looks real shiny and the scorpion started looking at that shiny back that back looks so inviting and the scorpion he's like man I'm going to drown he said I don't care whap and the frog said why did you do that now we're both going to drown and the scorpion said it's just my nature.
Conflict Is Not Our Nature
But brothers and sisters conflict is not our nature if it were there'd be at least one fight going on in here if we took a poll how many of you had a fight within the last twenty years of your life probably no one would raise their hand now these are false arguments people don't have trouble getting along people can be moved and
manipulated by demagogues people can be sold false arguments about their nature and then be led to conditions that are undesirable but we because it is in our nature have been able to make war an anomaly because it is in our nature we've been able to come together by the thousands we've been able to peacefully coexist in our societies but there are people who have a vested interest in sending us back to that premodern condition because they profit off of conflict the majority of people who do not buy into that argument we will have to come together and we will have to strive and struggle and fight and organize fight in peaceful ways and organize institutionalize so that we can not only protect these advances in human dignity in these advances in human organization in these advances in human institutions that are consistent with the highest principles of our religion but that we can build on them we can build on them so that we can leave our children something to build on so they can take this project even further that is our task our duty our responsibility our calling in these western lands but it's not going to come without a struggle it's not going to come without a struggle because as we said there are people who profit from war there are people who profit from conflict there are people who profit from incarceration there are people who profit from destroying the lives of others and we as a community of faithful have to speak in a prophetic voice and say we are going to make it unprofitable to profit from the suffering the oppression the exploitation of other human beings.
The Gates of Paradise: Our Ultimate Goal
In my final minute I want to bring this back this is one minute I'm not making it up Shaykh how much time I have a minute don't read what's on the screen. Allah reminds us:
"And those who feared their Lord will be driven to Paradise in groups until, when they reach it while its gates have been opened and its keepers say, 'Peace be upon you; you have become pure; so enter it to abide eternally therein.''" (Quran 39:73)
And those who believe will be ushered or those who reverence and respected and guarded the commandment of their Lord they will be ushered to paradise in groups, groups based on their level of piety, based on their devotion, their sincerity, until they come before it and then the gates of paradise are flung open and the guardians of paradise say to them, peace upon you. In other words, you're about to enter a realm where those ruinations that you experienced in the world will no longer exist. You've done good, you've done well.
Doing Good in This World
This is what it's all about brothers and sisters, it's about doing good in this world. Allah is good and pure, he only accepts that which is good and pure, enter it to dwell therein forever. I say this to say individually, socially we have to give priority to the politics of cooperation over the politics of conflict and individually we have to give priority to salvation over even liberation, understanding that at the end of the day, our living in this world is about salvation, it's about being ushered before the gates of paradise and having the gates flung open before us.
A Life of Goodness and Prophetic Voice
It's about looking back over a life that was filled with respect and reverence for the commandments, the
prohibitions and the principles rooted in the divine law and in revelation and the struggle to understand that and to implement that and institutionalize and operationalize it in human society, that's what it's about and it's about being able to look back over a life and to see a life of goodness, a life that's tayyib, a life that has brought about an individual that's good, a life that's been nurtured by that which is good, a life that has articulated words that are good and beautiful and not vulgar slang and dehumanizing, misogynistic and other demeaning, dehumanizing messages, a life that is as qualified by an effort to extend good to others, to those fellow human beings we share this world with, to those animals, the plants, all that we share this realm of existence with and knowing at the end of the day that we have tried to pass this heritage on in both its individual and its social meaning to those coming after us so that they will have the courage, the conviction, the motivation to speak with a prophetic voice and not afraid to bring those prophetic cries for justice, those prophetic cries for equality, those prophetic cries for fairness and equity out into the public square.
Conclusion: Building Strong Individuals and Society
That is why we strengthen ourselves as individuals so that as a strong individual we can come together with those of similar strength and work to create a strong and wholesome society.
As-salamu alaykum.