Memories & Milestones - A Personal Interview (Host: Dr Mehdi Sajid) | Mufti Abu Layth

okay so let's get started welcome to utrecht islam nervy conversations it's a pleasure to have you an absolute honor to join you as always and it always lightens up my evenings whenever i see you thank you so much same here same here so i wanted to to tackle a few uh things with you in our discussion today um i have a few topics that i would like to to pick your your brain on but first of all i would like to get to know you better or let's say

give the viewers the chance to get to know you better how did mufti abu leith become mufti abu lei tell us something about your journey and how you got interested in islamic scholarship and how you decided to become a mufti for those who don't know you i think you see the journey was in plateaus it was in kind of levels the incremental uh stuff but there's certain um landmark kind of um

i don't know maybe junctions uh which i made certain you know i chose to do something so some that come like as flash bulbs to to to my minds definitely in this journey a key point was uh going on omara as a teenager so i must have been about um probably just about turning 17 probably and actually probably between 16 to 17 you're just about turning 17 yeah and my mom took me along to omran even though i had started to do things like pray

but i wasn't um that interested in in something uh academic or you know studying the deen to that extent nor did i envisage that such things could be possible i mean that just wasn't even in my you are born and raised in the uk right yeah yeah yeah birmingham okay just for for the background for the viewers yeah i mean so born and raised here regular schooling college um when i say college here college is pre you know between secondary school and universities so um did that and then that it's at that stage that's where i'm

at um i'd started to i went on umrah and i remember i just went along obviously it's a nice thing you know fair enough you're going to makkah and stuff and and and you know it really kind of hit me um i think they were i mean okay there's a um the aspects which i see worldly and there may be some other worldly elements that now you know in hindsight i just in recent years thought back about but the worldly elements were that i was really

i felt i don't know whether disappointed is the right word or dismayed that i didn't know a single word of arabic and you know because everything was uh people do speak don't get me wrong people could speak urdu and some people could make out english but i felt um you know i don't know anything i didn't know la la and i remember once like at a shop reading something about kulushay is for this much real in like everything and and i remember thinking oh kulushi isn't that like you know some of these duas we've memorized

uh you know and um and i remember saying to someone once uh just i just said it like a stuff for allah i mean and and he assumed i could speak arabic this was whilst at umrah and he started speaking to me and um i felt a bit of a disappointment in myself that you know come on like i don't know no arabic at all but i would say i mean 80 percent of the muslim population worldwide yeah doesn't speak arabic true why did it bother you uh that's a good question you know especially at that very young age i would say

it wasn't a you see at this stage it was a it was like a statistics an awakening it wasn't something that was like massively bothering me but i felt a as a certain disappointment uh like okay there was this one day when i was in umrah and uh i had the gown on you know the whole i mean the though and i wore that black and white uh kind of you know the the the the scarf and and i put and they and they gave me that black you know the the actual alkali thing as well

and i remember a few people assuming just oh maybe i'm an arab or i know palestinians or certain people wear that a lot the black and white one and and a few people kind of just speaking to me in arabic in the haram and i remember some person was speaking to me as though he really wanted to talk about something and like i don't know i'm not saying you want to talk about something personal but you just want to talk to me about something and i couldn't understand even a word and and he was quite surprised that i don't understand arabic and and it's not a it's not a tremendous big deal on the big scale of things but i did feel a little you know damn you know

like it's it is a shame i don't know any arabic yes now this did trigger in me a thought that you know what i should study a bit of arabic you know a bit of conversational know how to say how are you this and that and and this small flame that began there it then triggers an entire journey because you know knowledge is one of those it's that you know manhu manila is you know this is once you get onto it it's an addiction but that's where i feel there was a very um it wasn't just a spark a flame did begin

there but from from watching your videos i realized that you are very fluent in urdu also i mean which is in itself i would say a great achievement uh to be raised bilingual in in in the in the uk uh that's one of the main things that a lot of muslims in the west are struggling with basically how to raise their children you know and and give them you know not only their religion and culture but also to transmit their religion and culture but also their language their native tongues yeah and it seems to have worked very well i mean you see it's interesting in

your case because poetry for me is the highest level of command of a language and i see you you you enjoy or do poetry etc which is i too it says to me at least although i don't speak urdu at all but i just assume that okay you you you must have a very high command of that language if you can enjoy portugal i mean you see it's it's interesting because urdu um even though you see for us growing you see it's not actually our uh mother tongue in the sense that like we spoke like so my parents we speak a more rural

language um it's a bit like i mean they call it uh like bahari or patwari it's it's it's like a dialect of punjabi but it's not urdu and there is an overlap in obviously words but you see i remember once discussing with someone how is it because later on when i in part of my journey i went to pakistan to study but urdu was something that came reasonably naturally to me and it was like i knew for example masculine feminines i knew words i knew like i would see people in pakistan making mistakes but i would know that oh that's not how you say it and i remember thinking how do i know

this because we never spoke this as kids at home and it was really you know by the uh dare i say the barakah of bollywood i think that you see because we grew up you watched a lot of bollywood movies like you see so my dad he loved bollywood movies when we were kids i don't know about now or in later you know later on in life but when we were kids almost every day he would in the evening play a movie and we would just sit down and watch it and obviously i mean back then what else was there to do so uh and and and that's what gave that and

as a child you're watching every day it became you know like it was a really good foundation for for language yeah yeah yeah and so you come back from umrah and and uh promise yourself to to learn arabic and how yeah what's the next step after that what happens right this is you know um that i um i was saying that an otherworldly aspect that i only in recent maybe one year or so or maybe a bit more it just

it occurred to me i think sometimes you know about the barakah of certain things and i know i don't come across as that kind of a person but i do sometimes think about like destiny and how certain things were you see i remember that you know when i went to umrah now i didn't really know much and i remember up until that stage my pronunciation of arabic was ridiculous because it was the same like what we've learned the kind of urdu arabic as in you know not asap and you know not knowing how to the ha or the irene and stuff like that so i remember i was in

medina so i was in uh the prophet's mosque and obviously that same age you know not very but culturally got that affinity with obviously the religion and the value and everything um i remember i met someone you he would have been older than me you'd probably be in in his i don't know i'm assuming maybe mid-20s something like that um but he was he was a pakistani and he was from pakistan but he was in uh madina now so and i don't know i can't recall how he started talking to me maybe

what i don't know but he was speaking to me and he was really concerned about like um he wanted to read something it was um and he was he seemed really concerned i i can't recall now why he was so concerned about something and he felt that ayatollah kursi would help him um and and so i i remember saying to him that yeah i believe it would because um you know as a kid when when i grew up we used to have this frame at home and it was written actually in urdu and it said that you know it was ayatul

kursi but it said on there that any person who reads this at a time of difficulty allah will alleviate their difficulties so as a kid i'd kind of read that and i thought oh this is a like a special magic like a a special thing that i can if i'm ever in trouble in life uh i'll read this and he'll help me so as a kid i used to do that anyway like when i'd be stuck uh and not being religious but still and so i said to this person yeah you know that's definitely yeah it will help you and um and so he and he was really kind of anxious and and he said to me but i don't know it and you know will

you help me so i said to him that you know what yeah i said i'll tell you what like yeah i'll go with you and and for some reason we couldn't find something so we buy the profits uh in the prophet's mosque by the the tomb section uh by the actual rover of the prophet and we sat down and i said to him i tell you what i'll just read it and you just repeat after me just i'll go word by word and um and i did and obviously i'm just this kid and he's kind of just doing that but it meant so much to him right and you know it just occurred to me

um in this i think it's just been a year or something that i don't know like sometimes i wonder maybe certain actions we do in life um and it has a i don't know like a barakah to it that it kind of completely realigns your trajectory so how do you interpret that episode that particular episode i don't know man like i feel that maybe that you know unbeknownst to me it changed the kind of trajectory of my

life because i was not really in any way shape or form heading towards anything religious and i wasn't from a religious family and we weren't really and i wasn't from an academic perspective of you know like even studying well at school or in fact i when it came to my final exams we call them gcses i literally just walked out i said uh i remember i we went on some holiday and we weren't really allowed to go and we went to pakistan came back and i remember the deputy head having a go at me saying what the hell are you you know doing and but i had turned 16 and i just said he said well do you

think you'll be able to do your gcses like this and i said well i don't care and i just walked out of school when you say you didn't grow up religious what do you mean exactly i mean in the sense that they were right so obviously women because what you have said about ayat kurti et cetera everyone could you know think okay that that is already very religious depending on how okay sure you define religion what do you mean by that when you say that that's a good question right so uh i suppose in that sense you're right i did believe in allah and i did believe so when i'm saying not very religious i'm not juxtaposing it with

atheism um at all i'm juxtaposing it with a um a more integrated or a more immersed uh lifestyle with islam as in being actual like trying to pray all the time or trying to uh you know obviously we there were the fundamentals so i was mo i'm seeing it more as cultural versus a an a um an intentional lifestyle right so a more pure understanding of islam which you're living as opposed to just cultural muslims i would see myself as a

i was like a cultural muslim i valued obviously i resp you know i respected islam uh if somebody swore to islam i would obviously be a you know i was one of those cultural muslims in that sense but i didn't really i wasn't interested in you know if somebody said to me would you want to learn the quran obviously as it you know sounds nice but i wouldn't really be interested in doing something like that i would think um you know it's for movies and maulanas and stuff like that that's what i meant yeah so you missed the exams and what happens how does your perspective change no so my point of saying that wasn't you know

later on in life by the way when i came back i had to read those i had to redo those exams because i never took them as a teenager but i mean um you see i was just trying to give an example of you see this is how it appears to people around me because i'm not from a somebody who's so studious so nothing really prepared you for for being a uh an islamic scholar not at all and i i think it's you know it's um it's what destiny uh has hidden for you i guess you know it's a

um you see it began like i said it was an incremental journey it was not i wish i would love to say you know i sat down one day and had this vision i'd love to become a musty and it didn't really work like that i when i came back from umrah i um i so i knew that there was a chef who used to live just down my road in fact i've had him on mine trap chef iqbal who's a renowned uh maliki scholar and i asked him that look would you just teach me basic arabic and i and i was a lazy student i'm gonna be honest with you in the beginning um and everybody's lazy with something as so long as they take it for granted and

i remember chef siddique well i used to go once a week not do my homework you know we're doing medina books and uh and then shakespeak well just went away to pakistan or he went somewhere for like months and i realized oh well now i don't even have a teacher and it's not like today you know you can't just find an arabic teacher it's not like you go online and so it really hit me that at least you know i had somebody was teaching me and and now he's not even here it's there's been you know months are going by so at that point i got i proactively began to learn and you know this is how learning takes

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