Dr Shehzad Saleem | Scripture, Sexual intimacy & "Sapere Aude" | MindTrap#65 | Mufti Abu Layth

[Music] assalamu alaikum folks welcome back to mindtrap we have an esteemed guest for you tonight i'm just going to bring up the profile picture right before you again a guest who we've had previously on an amazing show in the past dr shazad saleem from pakistan who who came on previously over a year and a half ago we discussed

uh some fantastic topics on the quran today i'm [Music] just going to bring before sorry just one second uh apologies for the i was just trying to transition the screens and that's what happens for joining us uh once again uh chef dr shazad saleem can you i take it you can all hear me you can hear me fine the volume is coming through i'm just going to do a

quick uh while i'm just introducing uh your your efforts in pakistan uh dr saba i'm just going to do a quick sound check as well those of you that uh so on face on facebook and youtube if there's any audio issues just give us a shout i take it everything is fine yep so all right shukran shakira and i see your comments people dr shahzad saleem has been doing some amazing work we do have an uh an intro in our previous mind trap working with the modern institute of allamah

javed ramdisab who's done some breakthrough kind of research and really uh just just really true uh inspiring and revolutionary pivotal really for our age dr shahzad saleem has worked very closely with javed ramdisab continues to inspire many people around the world as especially focusing with their efforts focused on the quran but branching out into many of the topics um so and today's topic we're going to i'd love to unpack some amazing stuff for you guys inshallah but before we get into some of

that i wanted to just pick up uh with you dr saab on what how are the since we last spoke how are the efforts going in in pakistan that's where you're centrally based in lahore have has there been much change i know there's been a lot of turmoil in pakistan as well so um yep take it away salaar thank you very much for the ability for having me once again in pakistan as far as our own work is concerned in the covet era which is now almost at an end we have been doing our work online so education uh

which is primarily our target educating young minds engaging with the youths and conducting various courses so we have been doing that uh online and alhamdulillah quite successfully uh but now that all restrictions have almost been lifted uh so we have these plans as well to have on-campus education resumed once again and but one thing which is absolutely certain is that the covet era has given us this opportunity to engage people online much more and not only does the engagement have this wider audience but also the cost and the time is also cut

down so i would say that uh we might still go on uh in this manner and hopefully inshallah give our best and try our best because basically this is a this is a work in progress uh there is no end to it so educating people as much as we are able to and uh discussing with them uh all sorts of questions that come to their mind as well as debating with them and trying to make sense of a lot of things that might bother their minds so it's basically engagement all the way through education okay what are some of the uh the kind of

things just that you are engaged in in pakistan when when you're teaching i mean what are just to give people a bit of an idea that what what is it that you're that you're doing on let's say you know on the ground in your whether it's week to week or month to month so you see we have a team of about i would say close to 15 people uh engaged in various uh teaching and research activities and there are specialized courses uh for example there are these sunday school courses in which the younger ones they are they are given this opportunity once a week to interact and uh

be taught uh for in a very concerted way then we have the alim course which which is which spans over seven years uh in which people are educated to become scholars and then we have specialized courses uh short courses in which let's say spanning about three weeks or five weeks or seven weeks depending upon uh the need so some of these courses are i'm almost all of them were conducted online now during the covet era but uh maybe inshallah starting from uh this summer or the fall of this year uh many of these courses would be also conducted in person uh personally i have been teaching the

quran the bible the hadees as well as i mean the quran the bible in hadees in a way in which we are able to bring it to the younger generation and then there is a technical study of the quran which is for advanced students which i do also once uh once a week and then we have regular discussions on various social issues which have an impact on religion or vice versa religion might have an impact on those social issues and regular q and a sessions as well uh after every such a lecture or talk and all of them are pretty much interactive and we would like uh people to engage as much as they

can instead of being a monologue it's more of an interactive discussion and so this is how things have been okay now shukran trick run because it's always good to get a uh you know a greater picture you know you said that you've got the islam course going out of curiosity is does it very much from the dars army uh islam course or have you changed certain topics around or very much is i mean i think it's like an anti-thesis to that course it's a very different uh course because the contrary to uh to dash army in which the fick of a particular school of thought

holds much more importance uh in our curriculum the quran is the central point and the quran is taught and so we primarily take people who are already well aware of arabic and if they are not aware of arabic language and there is a ground course or a basic course through which they are made to go through and so it's like a it's like it's not like a course in which things fall in one place so we have various packages and various courses being floated and everyone is required to take let's say 50 courses uh to complete the degree and the ones that are being offered are various in various periods of time so all they need to do is complete those 50

60 courses or a span of five years to seven years and once that is done uh you will get the degree so it's not that uh it's like a sequential thing that you have a first year or a second year or third year it's like every person can participate depending upon the the uh prerequisites of a particular course so this is this is how we are designing it and it just started actually last year so this just one year has been completed and this is the second year uh that will now begin so it's quite it's quite modular it's more about like modular modules where they come in right okay is there out of curiosity is there a uh

hadith kind of parallel or not really well we have these as a subject i mean like like the quran in the subject we have hadees which means that specialized books of hadees and selection from the hadees they are taught uh not in the form of a dora which is just going through a particular hadees it's like selecting them and then training people to understand the hadees in the light of the quran and also making them uh equipped with the fact that how they are able to judge a narrative uh through the raya and ravaya principles which have been uh chartered by our these scholars so it's like training them in hadees literature and of course making them go through this

literature in a very rich way so that they are widely exposed uh to the content yeah okay well that's that's amazing does allamah ramadisha teach on it himself or he does not actually most of the students who have learned from him they are the teachers but it's not that he's directly involved yes the course is uh made under his guidance the curriculum is very much under his guidance but it's not that he cheated because of a number of reasons of course he has sure i mean his age as well

is a big commitment so yes he might give an odd guest lecture or something like that but not a formal sort of a teaching wow okay wow now uh that's i i appreciate you really sharing that with us it gives gives me and many people a greater insight so chair there's there's a huge crisis going on um around the world and especially so in south asia i feel amongst muslims amongst younger muslims and they don't even have to be so terribly young but maybe people

below 40 to so you could say from 35 to uh you know 18 not even 18 i mean even teenage teenagers uh who i they they the impression is that they you know there's a frustration they don't they want to be part of the dean but they are struggling because they don't want to be a part sometimes of what they feel an image or a certain image let's say of the deen is being forced onto them and and on the same token they don't want to

many of them don't want to give up islam some of them may even go that way they end up apostasizing and and other things so i felt this because i've i mean living here in the uk i've had increasingly in the last few years more and more reach from like people just reaching out from places like pakistan and india and i've been quite surprised so i mean but this is uh from a distance you're obviously there in the thick of it um yeah tell us a bit about a bit about this sure well actually uh the crisis that you've just referred to has increased a lot and

you see uh there is this uh radicalization uh process which has started because of the fact that there's this knowledge explosion uh taking place and people have access to all kinds of information and on the one hand we might have very young mind like maybe i have seen 12 year olds and 13 year olds being getting exposed to radical radicalization and then they just leave their homes i have a couple of cases in front of me and they just left their homes and then went off for jihad or they thought that their salvation lies in fighting the disbelievers and they just left their homes and someone they had to be relocated and

brought back and then on the other hand we have a whole chunk of people who are exposed to this uh uh to what we call as atheism in which religion of course has no importance god has no importance and they think that they can find their way and it is only when they are put to some bother or to some trouble that they might realize that there is some something more to life than what they really think otherwise they have their own uh path to follow and then in third world countries like pakistan and india bangladesh one of the greatest challenges is that youngsters and young minds they would like to go abroad to study and complete their education

so this is another thing in which we have a lot of brain drain and the young minds brilliant minds they don't end up in the country that they are born uh they generally their countries go to the states of the united kingdom and get themselves educated on the religious front the things that are even more audio was slightly uh

is is increasing by the day and the radicalization that is spoke of has been back so it was just slightly i mean you your i think the connection was slightly wavering but uh but carry carry on carry on sorry uh not not the audio i think it was just the internet connection but sorry carry on

is it okay now um it's slightly weird uh i can hear you but it's i think on because it's saying from here this side it's reading it as an excellent connection so so i think in this education as you can clearly see okay yep carry on carry on is this okay now uh yep inshallah let's let's let's go with if there's any issues we'll

okay yeah so in uh in madras education uh seminaries which give this education uh the the situation is the same in which we find young minds uh being admitted to be seminaries uh not because of course they have the inclination towards that because at the age of seven or eight no one can decide it is basically the parents who decide uh their fate and they've sent them to these seminaries in which uh religious education is given to them in the same way that i personally would not in any way condone because it's essential that you have the same 12-year ground education basic education given to all

people and then specialization should be the result of that of the pro of the of the final year in which you are able to choose and select for your own self which field you'd like to go but in religious seminaries of course we don't get this chance and what happens is that uh people when they grow up they find themselves being there against their own will and then they turn against a lot of things and we find them reactionary and frustrated and all things they come into play so this is something which is not new it has been there all the while and we have been

suggesting it uh for a number of years that all types of education must be must be begin the same frequency in the same manner such that uh for the first 12 years of education should be common and only after that should people go to a religious seminary or a university and that too by choice not by pushed into that i yeah i've heard that lecture by i'm sure it's on a number of occasions but i've watched it by ramdi saab where he's really breaks that down and explains that look this is and it makes sense what he's saying in essence for for people who haven't come

across it is that a base education system a root education system should be just standardized across the state and it should just be for everyone that equips you with certain thinking faculties critical faculties writing skills numeracy literacy and when a person reaches a certain amount of i'm assuming something like equivalent to the uk college or after the pakistani matrix system i think then they could make a decision that do i want to specialize in islamic studies or not and and i think that's a very profound

insight you know may allah bless him and one more thing that is important is that in the initial years of education especially various instruction uh the the models aspects and the moral verses of the quran they are the ones that should be taught first so for example in grade three or four or five uh uh ethics and morality or verses which relate to ethics and morality they are the ones that should be brought up first and later as they grow up uh the the issues which relate to sharia and for example uh to economics and to politics into the penal code and society into marriage etc they should be introduced second so first the the the

acquired part or the akhla pyaar part should be uh i mean introduced and well grounded in their minds and then later on uh these uh the fish should come and of course they would be able to understand it later on in a better in a better way i remember uh watching something of hamdisab a few i think it's been a few years now and he highlighted some of some of the root issues that need to be um kind of re-embedded and from there he he he lists them very eloquently but from what i recall is one understanding

that so some are very common sense like islam it teaches us to serve mankind but we we shouldn't have this understanding that is that we as muslims for example that kuffar are below they're like a sub in sun you know like below uh dehumanize them and huma muslims have come to rule the world and we have to establish dominion and he and he said that some of these he listed them and he said that some of these common things are so widespread which they are um and they then go on to become a pathology for people

now the question would be how when something like that is so widespread how do you start because if you start saying it's like let's say let's say this simple message that islam has come to live your life and be an example it's not come to rule you know it's not come for kuffar we haven't come to people like a place like pakistan where i'm sure that understanding is so common it's like every person thinks no islam has come to rule the world how does a person even start to present this this more

sunnah kind of narrative how so again uh this is a very complex situation because there is a traditional interpretation and according to this traditional interpretation as you rightly said that islam is or should be the dominant force and only islam has the right to rule and globally it must capture all countries of the world and bring the rest into its subservience and this has arisen because of an erroneous understanding of certain verses of the quran and because of the fact that those verses have a very specific context uh that context is at times uh ignored and and uh just

oh sorry that's my sorry just ignore that that's just a jet it's an airplane so right i like to joke this is my private jet but okay so basically it's this uh i would say an erroneous uh interpretation or to to my understanding something which is not exactly the correct interpretation and there needs to be a counter interpretation in fact there is a counter interpretation of a lot of these verses uh which uh which instill this superiority complex in the minds of muslims in which in which they think that they are superior uh to other religions not only that but within the

muslims themselves for example the arabs would think that they are superior to the rest of uh muslims and this this uh inferiority superiority has its own toll so basically it's it has its roots in uh interpretation of religion that is now very common in which for example you have this target that you have to conquer the rest of the world you cannot be befriend christians and jews you cannot pay salutations to them uh you cannot pray for their forgiveness uh you cannot inherit from them uh you have you must think that they are condemned to hell so basically certain verses of the quran

which have a very specific context they have been extrapolated and extended and a general interpretation which exists is that as a result because we are the people who are superior and the rest of them are inferior so therefore we need to uh we need to do our due now the important thing is that these verses of course we are not going to abrogate these verses they are present they are there but they have a particular context and that particular context needs to be understood uh and the context being that in the era of the messengers of god of course which started with prophet adam and ended up on prophet muhammad there is a specific

law of the almighty which comes into play and in the post-prophetic era which of course extends from prophet muhammad day of judgment it has no role to play and that law is that the almighty sets up miniature days of judgment on the face of the earth in the lives of messengers of god so that people living in the post-prophetic era they are reminded that yes a greater day of judgment is going to come and if their own judgment is not taking place in this world at that instance then they must not forget that one day it shall and the proof of that is that nations to which messengers were sent in the prophetic era their

fate was decided in this very world and this is basically a proof of the greater day of judgment and so therefore in that prophetic era there are certain uh features which are specific to that era for example messengers of god will be sent they will deliver the truth they will be accompanied by miracles and some other very clear uh signs from the almighty to manifest the truth and once the truth is conclusively conveyed to them uh they would be punished uh because of the fact that they had intentionally denied it in spite of being convinced about it so uh what we say as the quran says

that they denied after recognizing it after thinking that it was absolutely correct so the almighty says that well such people who in spite of being convinced of the truth they continue with this so he orders uh for example the elements of nature earthquakes and tempests and other natural disasters to wipe out such nations and this is what happened in the cases of many nations and in the cases of some messengers like prophet muhammad sallam himself the task which was to be carried out or which was carried out through these uh cyclones and through these elements of nature to destroy people who had intentionally denied the truth uh

the task was given to the messengers of god and his uh his followers that the almighty himself would actually give this target to them that as instruments of god's justice on earth they would implement this punishment to people uh for denying the truth intentionally so this is a law which is related specifically to this period now if you don't understand law what you will do is you will end up becoming people like abu bakr bhagavi or bin laden or mullah omar and you would say as you said that well

that in the act or practice of the messenger of god we have to follow whatever he does and since he punished people or since the almighty in the era of messengers of god punish people for their deliberate denials so we have the same prerogative and then they of course as you know they they say that okay our enemy number one are the kuffar or the uh disbelievers without realizing that a person becomes a disbeliever or a kafir when he intentionally denies the truth and this intentional denial can only be known through wahi through god himself even a messenger himself is not a position in not a position to pinpoint a person whether he is a kafir or not it is the almighty who tells people that now the truth has been

conveyed in the ultimate sense and now if they deny then they are to be called as absolute deniers so what has happened is that the jews and the christians of the times of the prophet about whom this deliberate denial was conveyed by by the almighty himself through to his prophets uh they have been analogously regarded to be the same as the jews and christians of today and this is the biggest i think mistake or a misreading of the quran that has resulted in a lot of confusion so stars have been farah you might be knowing him so he was teacher of hamdi saab's teacher's teacher i mean he was the teacher of amina islami so he is to his credit is

this uh very important uh i would say deduction which he made from the quran according to which this established practice of the almighty of destroying people in the prophetic era for deliberate denial is something which relates to this deliberate denial and is specific to that era it cannot be extended beyond the prophetic era and hence directives which are related to people or the advocacies and which have that harsh content or harsh ring about them cannot be extended to to the later people so for example jews and christians of today in any way they cannot be regarded as analogous to the jews and christians of prophetic times because one it was the prophet

himself who was conveying the truth to them two their denial was being communicated by none other than god himself to the prophet himself and he was told that well now that their time is up because they have they have been taking their time they have been uh enough has been enough has happened they have been conveyed the truth to the ultimate extent and now uh it's always destruction that is going to await them and this is exactly similar what's going to happen on the day of judgment so people are going to be punished for deliberate denial of the truth on the day of judgment so all that has happened is that a small miniature rehearsal of that greater day of judgment has taken place

in the era of a messenger of god so that people like us should be reminded time and again when we read the quran that yes if our judgment is not coming immediately right after we do a bad thing in this world it doesn't mean it will never come the only thing is it has been deferred to the day of judgment and hence all those directives which relate to punishment like for example offending non not defending non-muslims or not paying salutations to them not asking for their forgiveness not inheriting from them etc etc they are a class of directives a class of directives specifically related to the era of prophet muhammad this includes jizya this includes apostasy apostasy again is something

which is uh the punishment which was given to those people who had reverted back from faith to their original state because of the fact that they were associated partners with god and for such people the punishment in the hair offers that will not be forgiven so the same punishment was given to them or was supposed to be given to them in this world and if they reverted back to their own polytheistic practices they would be subject to their so therefore apostasy or punishment of disbelief all these things are related to the specific era of a messenger of god they cannot be struck extrapolated they cannot be extended to later uh later periods and this is basically what has been done

that things which were specific to an era they have been extended as i said so uh if you remember in 1994 uh osama bin laden actually came out of that famous council of host which took place in afghanistan and he said that the u.s is their enemy number one and he cited the quran he said the quranic verse is that we that you fight with these leaders of disbelief and exactly all those verses which relate to the messengers of god for a particular reason he read those verses and he said that well this is our this is something which

has been asked of us as well so we also need to fight these people and and bring them to justice or bring them to uh to subserve is this when he says he is speaking about when his concept of it is that the the thing that the that that it's only conclusively been settled for those people around the prophets not those who come after you who for the first time so because we're living with in the era of the third for ice scholar who is the stars so he's he's really uh

made a very phenomenal contribution by presenting the views of us in ferrari in a more precise and more elaborate way but we must give credit to this particular uh area into to sazhemi indian ferrari because he was the one who said that for a messenger of god a court of justice for his nation is set up in this world and and if you don't realize this you'll end up understanding a lot of verses of the quran which do not relate to you simply because they relate the presence of a messenger so as soon as the messengers of god have gone away uh this practice is no longer in currency and if you do so you'll you'll be guilty of uh

actually playing god which which means that in the era of messages of god it is basically god who is implementing this punishment so these messengers themselves are instruments of god's justice they are not doing anything of their own accord so like angels were implementing certain things and they still do in the era of uh in the prophetic era it's basically uh the messengers who are implementing the will of god that will be implemented obviously on the day of judgment as well so if somebody so if somebody asks what is what are what is the purpose i mean it's a very it's a simple question but very obviously it could be complex that

what is the what is the real purpose of islam and muslims if somebody asked this let's say taking them away from this trying to take over the world and global dominion and so what is the purpose what what would you say to that sure so i think the quran itself has has told us that the purpose of religion is tusker which means purification of our deeds and practices both at the individual level and at the collective level so taskia is something which the quran has said is the purpose and the worst which actually has uh which spells out this is the famous verse which says

so a messenger of god he he actually recites the verses of the quran and these verses are composed of two main categories the sharia part and the hikmah part and once he conveys the sharia and the hikmah to the people and makes them understand what this what these two categories are and if people are able to understand and follow them then the result of that is that you get purified you get the taskia individually and collectively so basically it's taskia which is the purpose of religion or in fact every directive of religion has the sole purpose of purifying our deeds and practices and okay and would you add an element of trying to serve

people um in in that as well this you see this this this is something which is a offshoot of this uh when you are asked to be a person who is sincere to your own fellow beings because as the prophet himself has said so you have to be well wisher of people you have sorry i apologize but yeah carry on sorry you're you're bad so you see uh as far as the hikmah just let me explain a little more the components of religion which this particular verse of surah juma spells out are two so one of them is a sharia which is also called the

al-kitab which gives the directives and the other one is al-hikma which actually is composed of moral directives as well as our beliefs so the beliefs for example the five beliefs the belief in god and the prophet and the angels and the books in the last day and then of course the morality which means you have to be charitable to people which means that you are an individual who has to look out for other people you are an individual who is obliged in all sorts that you just cannot be selfish you have to be a person who's looking after the case of other people so that is the the hikmah part of of the quran itself and because the quran itself is the greatest

means of taskia so these verses uh which actually ask people to serve humanity or to serve their own cause and to serve the society that they live in and make a profound contribution they of course are part of our religion the only thing is that we need to understand that the category uh of which they form a part is uh is the nomenclature that we use or the nomenclature which the quran has used is al-hikma which means wisdom of religion and it comprises as i said the beliefs the belief structure and our morality i see i see no i mean that's uh i was asking that because often it is

asked and people do think what you know in many ways the answer can be simple yet it can be profoundly complex but it is ultimately from it is simple as you take it that you are here to twist i mean the faith is here to establish a connection between you and the divine and the tuskegee of which you you spoke and then the extension of that the branches it is to live your life in an exemplary way and to and to serve others as well along the way on this journey speaking speaking of serving people uh doctors are so the youth and the issues we spoke of

previously um uh and saying that there's this rising um kind of turbulence almost amongst younger people about the fact i want to just just drop in there as well i feel sometimes not i feel but psychological studies and sociological studies argue that with the rising middle classes you always get this um this kind of uh the almost this uh this turbulence that we're feeling amongst younger people and it's happened you know what they're going to say in the past in the west and and it's happening now in in south asia

and other parts of the world where there is a rising middle class now in pakistan very i mean profoundly i mean within the next it's estimated uh you know few decades the the range of the middle class in pakistan would be so vast comparatively with other countries because of the population scale so um so so we see a lot more questions being asked sincerely but sometimes that that are really existential and about the faith as a whole and challenging certain narratives and it's in light of that you're doing this course uh i believe and that's uh

you're hosting a course for young people uh just very briefly uh before unpacking some of these topics what is this tell us a bit about this course because it's coming up i believe just within this coming week so tell us a bit about that it's aimed at young people what what are you aiming to get out of this so uh basically this course has two uh i would say two modules or two two distinct uh category parts so the first part is like an introduction to the quran so you see the youngsters or the young minds before you even hand over a book of 500 pages like the quran it's much more i would say

easier to make them first go through the introduction regarding a book which is of 500 or 600 pages so that they're able to have a background of the book that what exactly is the language of the book what's the genre of the book how is it structured what is the history of the book how are the directives spread out in it so it's like it will first introduce the audience to a basic uh background introduction to the quran and then uh the second part is that there are some selected verses of the quran will be discussed so that you are able to instead of giving the whole quran to someone uh because of course as i said it's not easy for people to go through

that so a selected portion of the quran would it has been compiled and that is something that they would be given in the fall of a booklet so that uh before even entering the complete quran they are have they have a glimpse so if they have an introduction to the quran first then they have a glimpse of the quran and once they have gone through this people who are entrusted they will be said yes now is the time that you pick up the quran as a whole and now you just dive into it and and and this is not something that's going to end after about a year or so it's like a lifelong attachment to the book of god so once the the access to the book of god has been opened to you

by knowing exactly what is the structure the background and the language and the knowledge and you've also been exposed to a particular group of selected verses of the quran now is the time that you can pick up the quran and have a lifelong relationship with the book of god and it's like opening that path for them okay and then the second module of the of this course is that they are basically uh given certain glimpses of certain questions that might have arisen in their minds for example uh why is it that we are required to we are so strict in our diet and why is it that halal meat or zabia is so essential for us or why is it that we

need to pray five times a day why is it that we have to fast for a whole month and why is it that we are we have to abstain from liquor or why is it that women have to follow a particular dress code if at all it is something that we think it is a code because there is a wide variety of interpretations how women or men have to dress up is bad something which is compulsory is wearing a particular dress compulsory how is it that could you befriend boys and girls could they befriend one another because after all they are uh they are standing in the same institutions and it's difficult that you don't befriend each other and it's like you just cannot isolate yourself so what are the norms

through which you can conduct yourself with the opposite gender and then things like music for example that can boys and girls they can enjoy music or they can sing various songs or play certain instruments thoughts of religion and then the fine arts for example sculpture for example making portraits or images because as we know the classical stance is that the pictures of living beings are prohibited so therefore uh generally people are people think that they just cannot make any portraits and pictures and they cannot even take these pictures and hang them in their rooms

and and the list goes on for for example that so this is all part of the second module all of these topics quite a quite a bit of uh quite a bit of uh i was going to say masala worth of controversy in those in those things i love that you're tackling it but you know taking the bull by the horns and and just one thing that i'd like to always add is you see uh when we are studying religion we have to understand one thing and that is that it is our humble understanding of certain issues we are not claiming that we are absolutely right of course we could be wrong this is how we have understood and the message that that needs to be put across is that religion

is not something to be emotionally attached with of course it is something but emotions should come later on first you must understand use your intellect because the quran specifically says that you must use your intellect you must think on what the quran is telling you these are the things that all of us have been told to so if you are faced with a new interpretation or some scholar says that this is

my apologies once again people so you see what what teach our young minds is that they must analyze an opinion on the basis of the arguments that are proffered that are presented and some of the arguments might not appeal to them so okay they're fine they can reject that opinion so basically it's an intellectual approach to religion through which they must understand certain directive islam why they should do certain things and why they should not do certain things and once they understand this they must also realize that their understanding can falter as well so today if you think something is right uh a long code maybe you can go along and you find out that maybe i was understanding something and someone

corrected me or my own intellect corrected me so it's like a continuous journey that we have undertake understand religion and we inshallah will not be held accountable for even our erroneous opinions if we make them sincerely if we sincerely come to opinion with all honesty uh we have this example in the quran which tells us that god will hold us accountable according to our own understanding yeah i mean i i tell people of often in my kind of show especially the meaning with malm that look what matters is your devotion to allah

if you i tell people like when i answer some of these questions let's say on music or any of these that look this for example this is an understanding this is what some people have said some people you know you may be somebody who believes music is haram if that's you don't listen to it you know that's you there's nothing wrong nobody's going to come and say you better listen to music that's fine we respect your interpretation this is also an interpretation you know there's many all among with this and it's ultimately about a devotion uh that each person has with god it's not about you know policing you know you're not here to kind of force police

other people in that sense um but yeah so i mean a lot of these topics that you've said they're i think they're really epic i'd love to if we can unpack maybe some of them um so you've started with the first of the first module you've mentioned okay it's more about giving people a kind of access a portal to the quran okay we understand that now the second module which was more i think what people would be curious about especially young people you've touched upon things like relationships you've touched upon entertainment you've touched up on

beliefs and struggles that people may be kind of questioning um yeah i mean let's what is let me start with this what is a common question that you get asked in pakistan today what do you think that's that's controversial of this pot what is a common one that you think you know what that's probably he has to make the top three that i can always ask yeah i think the greatest or the most frequently asked single question whether you're in pakistan whether you're in canada or the us or australia i would say the top question is that how

do how do we all go on to mindtrap with [Laughter] i think this is the this is the question which is which is the most frequent question if people are allowed to ask because at times you don't give them this opportunity at times they have they they fear that if they ask this question uh they might get scolded but if you are given this you give them this freedom that they can come up with any question i think this is the foremost question that i have faced wherever i have gone

and uh and people are genuinely perplexed of course we are talking about muslims we're not even talking about non-muslims we're talking about muslims young muslims young minds and even adults and not comprehending that well is was this the case that he married a minor so to speak uh and of course this is this is a very very important that we have a very i mean of course we have an answer to that but i in my personal opinion think that the traditional answer which is given in this regard is uh is absolutely incorrect and the age of aisha has been wrongly extrapolated and calculated on the basis of certain narratives we have

alternative information which uh which tells us that she was 19 or 21 years old at the time of her marriage it's absolutely incorrect that she was six years old and when she was restored to the prophet himself uh and then after that i would say the second most common question relates to sexual uh areas for example masturbation that is it uh something which uh which men and women have been disallowed and is it that we cannot indulge in this is a sin to masturbate so this is the second most common question and probably i can go on if you if you ask for the first two these are the

first two that i you know just uh just on these since these are incredibly pertinent especially the first one and we'll come to the second as well obviously very important i'm sure a lot of the viewers are thinking don't leave that one out but the this recently there was this whole issue in india with the nupur sharma who spoke out on this blasphemy and it triggered this debate once again because um obviously she said it in a rude tone and she was being disparaging and that's a different issue because sometimes

it's not even you see the issue is sometimes not about the detail but it's about how so if a person is poor and i'm i'm this is a poor analogy as well but i'm just giving an example somebody says you know you you you you know this person's so poor they're you know trump or they like this and they may be poor and they may be home but there's an insulting element to it that is a person is is deriding uh when they're saying that now she obviously was speaking about something and she said well you know i we can say stuff about the prophet muhammad as well she started saying you know he married and bettered the child and things like this and

and then later on uh she did try to say i think i was just stating what the muslims believe i didn't realize i was saying anything uh you know what have i said she said like i wasn't being blasphemous i was just saying what they themselves say in their books and then later on she apologized when she had pressure international pressure saying look if i upset you i don't mean to and she got sacked but um so clearly i i understand her intent there was and it's difficult to judge intent but it appears that she was trying to do something to uh to kind of be to instigate and be rude i get that put that aside but her point that look

muslims say this stuff anyway um it started this whole debate again i've i was noticing a lot of people especially from that part of the world discussing this again is the is this now is the tide slightly changing in pakistan because there was a time where you know i know ram visa was teaching this but i don't know if anybody really i thought there was a time when it was really difficult to just challenge this narrative even do you feel it's changing or is it still really difficult i think it's still the same if if not it has even gone uh more worse verse so to speak

because you see there is this traditional understanding and you are very well aware of that that if there is a narrative which has found its place in the sahih of imam bukhari then it is virtually uh i mean it's like the word of god himself it's it's almost the same so if they think that because of the fact that aisha's age has been mentioned so in in the hadees or the hadith of buhari so if person says this is not true or is not correct then obviously the the backlash is very strong and you're absolutely right that if you take away the disparaging element of nuruku sharma's

words again that can be discounted as well because when a person is angry this is this is something natural to happen but the content is absolutely correct i mean what wrong did she did she state except the stance of the common muslim traditionalists who say that yes she was six years old at the time of marion and she was brought home and she was nine so uh what exactly went wrong there and why exactly did she need to apologize of course as you said uh pressure was there but i think this also reflects on the approach that we muslims have we are generally reactionary so instead of i think trying to calm down

people by answering the questions at hand and neglecting the the the anger or the hatred that the other person might have you must address people address the question at hand a very similar approach was adopted during the cartoon controversy in denmark started off a decade ago and i distinctly remember a cartoon which was actually making fun of the fact that a martyr who is going to i mean a person who's going to die as a martyr is going to be given 72 virgins in in paradise so there was a placard which they placed in on the on a person who's supposed to prophet muhammad and the placard read

that will stop killing people because heaven is running out of virgins because of the fact that you think that you're going to get married so i think the proper way would have been that you neglect the the the disparaging tone because people have a right to disparage and of course i'm not condoning this punishment but this is what but i mean they're non-muslim anyway so they don't really believe in islam yeah the substance is that well is it that really a martyr is going to be rewarded with 72 virgins is it something which is authentically mentioned in the quran or hadees so i think instead of being instead of reacting to these things the proper way would have been and still is that you

either own up to the fact that yes this is what the quran says or the hadees says or if there is an alternative explanation you try to make sense of that there's no absolutely point in getting angry or taking out these loads and loads of people on the roads and uh causing vandalism and destruction or wasting the time of people this is this is the mentality of people who are who have themselves perhaps lost their own cause how can they uh i mean how can if they're justifying something which they they are justifying yeah then i think if a person is is criticizing your prophet or he or she has a different view i think that it's the right of that i i

find it strange that you see it's it's it's so i mean somebody could just do a phd on what's going on in this places like pakistan because you see the populace the general population the hard line let's say traditional conservative kind of islamic view is hanafi in mathur now hanafi in madhhab doesn't really accept as a felk the superiority of sahil bukhari it doesn't really because most of the hanafi first is actually against what is in sahil bukhari and so

when we teach sorry when we studied hadith they would always tell us that look it doesn't matter you know we don't have to accept these things inside bukhari and and that's being taught in all the madrasas and in fact imam bukhari when because in his sahih bukhari says some people said and by that they believe he's talking about imam abu hanifah and they believe he's saying it slightly maybe disparagingly this is what they feel allahu adam that a lot of them when when we cover that in madrasa they're very upset like you know this is imam buhari you know in fact our teacher as well said uh he's passed away nam of the names may

allah bless his afterlife but he said as well you know you know what the how can he say call about but when it comes to this issue it's it's interesting that it's like the manhattan changes because i don't it's like if we could do it's it's fascinating isn't it it's it's like what what's actually going on because you'll do that wheel interpretation of so much of bukhari quite comfortably and you don't you're not fussed whether the hadith in buhari doesn't have to apply in fact most of bukhari doesn't apply to hanover

and this masala i feel this masala is more tied into a reaction from colonialism you know this kind of uh it's a weird reactionary bravado like uh so what if it's if it said you know like the it's in that the you know the profit let's say married her she was this she was this old nine years old uh so what like we don't need the west to tell us that this is wrong i i feel sometimes it's coming from that angle i mean what are you what are you because people in pakistan don't normal people don't accept that for themselves they wouldn't accept like if

even let's say 11 year old if somebody came for their 10 11 year old daughter they would beat the hell out of them they wouldn't accept these things uh in the real world nobody muslims don't accept this in the real world so this issue yeah i mean yeah it's it's a a strange one actually what has happened also is that as you rightly said that the fees are pitched against the uh certain narratives in bukhari but the fact is that the impact of hadees is has been so strong that even the hanafis have become so to speak hadees and they have been deeply impacted by that

and whether they believe something for their own children or not but if it's something which is uh described by bukhari regarding the prophet and if it's it's not as correct they would say this is absolutely correct and uh what i mean this is a this is something of a custom of the era of those times and if he married someone about which everyone was okay about because the custom was there and the tradition was there that you could marry underage girls so what is the whole the noise about so this is how they would typically justify uh such such rulings yeah and i've seen people say this and i've said i mean i've got a detailed video on this but i've said that look there is a

difference between people so people will say often oh if you go back to my grandmother's mom's time they were getting married when they were about 14 sometimes 13 sometimes 50 you know between this age people will say this and sure that has been happening throughout the world but people generally weren't marrying little little girls generally like six-year-old seven-year-old girl that wasn't generally happening even i've heard people try to say um oh this was something the arabs used to do where i mean there's nothing there's where does it say that the arabs used to

marry little girls weird like and this and sometimes they confuse this with the masala that can you do can you marry someone like do a knicker of somebody if they're a child so for example and and this is a good one i think it's worth bringing up some people shared with me recently because of this age of aisha that oh the prophet sallallahu alaihi sallam's daughters were all married and and they tried to calculate the age so they say apart from fatima radhiallah they say oh well zainab and rokaya

so they were all had the nikatan and two were zainab was with uh with abu ass but the other two were with the sons of abu lahab and and so they work out the age so they say well you know such and such was born when the prophet was 30-something and when he became received wahi uh abu lahab broke off he said look break off the nikah so see so they must have been married and they were seven years old um and i don't know if you've seen this i've seen these articles going around saying and and this was not

a this was very what we would call or people i guess in in the indo-pak thing would just call i guess today like a money or it would be they wouldn't have used the word engagement they would have just done any care but it wasn't something like they weren't living together like it was just spoken for betrothed to unless the uh unless they were and the other thing was when the prophet received wahi immediately there wasn't um i mean there's almost an 18-month gap till the next wahi and there isn't initially people haven't turned against him so strongly straight away it takes a you know it takes a little while

and so the eldest daughter zainab does marry during that time because uh blast says that you know he refuses to break it off and and goes ahead with it but it didn't mean that the two younger daughters of the prophet um uh um were living in um what is it married into like a proper cohabiting relationship with the sons of abu lahab so i just thought that was an important point because i've seen a few people you know throw these things around recently on facebook um yeah so uh i mean it's it i i think this is

such an i'm really glad that there is that you guys are tackling this that you are a voice of reason um i i wonder if uh some people have asked me uh not to sidetrack too much on it but just briefly i have in some videos explained that i feel that the whole part of the whole misunderstanding here was um was hisham um

and all the riwayat and there's many riwayats on all of them i've got this chart of them there's somebody who's doing a phd on it and it's really fascinating actually because um he's not even a muslim and he it's it's really i'll try and you know until he agrees i can't if he comes on my trap this guy used to be an islamophobe and he used to hate on islam he wasn't from i think he was from australia or something i don't know but he's a white person didn't hated islam and one of the things he would always attack was the age of aisha so he'd say you know the prophet was

they would say well he had to be allah things like the prophet was a pedophile and things now he this was something he knew a lot about like you would say oh this this evening says in the sea blah blah blah you know he's memorized all these little stats um so what happened is he ended up doing a masters in it because he thought well you know i know this and i'll really rag at the muslims and you know so as he started to do it he got more and more into this thing and he started to and he said he was going with this theory he spoke to me i think last year and he said to me look i there was a point where i believed that this had to

be true because the muslims themselves mention it because if it wasn't true they they would have they would never have mentioned it the fact that it's true and muslims are mentioning it must be true otherwise they would have buried it kind of thing this was his kind of theory and then he said i came across a point where i thought to myself he started he went on to do a phd right so on the age of aisha and he said that i thought to myself that wait a minute could this like he was just trying to play devil's advocate like could this be false and he ended up coming up with so many valid answers on how this age of aisha

could be false and he was really baffled and then he re the answers were so compelling that he changed his whole phd and he did a whole phd on all the asani and he drew these like wonderful elaborate charts he shared some with me and he's got every single sanat that is to do with the age of aisha and there's so many um and he shows that all the rue all the work the narrators at the final level are iraqi every single one at the lowell and he's got them color-coded so you could see he had him like blue

for iraq and you could see the whole thing at the lower level before it reaches the transmitters is all iraq and he then connects it to ibn hisham as well because we were having this discussion then and so but it's people have asked me i've thought in the future inshallah i will try to do something on the island i wonder if i want to ask if ramadisa was planning on doing something like that on unpacking the the island angle or is that something he's not looking to do well actually because of the fact that this might be an additional information uh unpacking the island and also proving

the fact that it all converges to one narrator and hence it could be a narrative there is some alternative i would say evidence which is stronger even stronger and that has been actually brought to light by this the likes of hakeem of the uband uh this is about almost 100 maybe uh 70 or 80 years ago then we have habib rahman khandelwe again a very respected authority so the evidence that i uh always present as an alternative or a counter evidence is basically from their works and which they have shown that if you leave this narrative of bukhari aside and look into the sources of history you'll find a completely

different picture yeah and the way they go about describing this is that well all of our history books they tell us that uh was the elder sister of aisha so all sources tell us that she was 10 years older to her yeah asthma was 10 years older to aisha and then our history books also tell us that she died asma died in 72 hijrah when she was 100 years old she had a very long life she was she had this age of 100.

so if this is correct then a simple calculation will tell us that if she died in 72 hegera at the age of 100 she would be 28 years old at the time of federal yeah and shin since she was 10 years older to aisha so aisha must be 18 years old in in at the time of hijra and if that is correct all sources also tell us and all traditional scholars also believe that the nikah of aisha took place in mecca and the city or the departure took place two years even after that near the battle of badr so at the age of 18 the nikah was conducted

around about that age and the rook city of the departure took place even two years after that which makes it around 20 19 and a half or 20. so it's it's so such a simple calculation and he is shown that these historical uh sources they they tell us the dates of death and birth and they clearly tell us that asma dalian was 10 years older and if that is the case then the symbol calculation would tell us that she was 18 at the time of nikah and 20 near the time of uh this and this is a deal in the scholar

i was very familiar with the research but i wasn't familiar that it was uh the openly scholarly his full name is i mean he writes in his uh okay and so i think that this alternative evidence plus the fact that this is one of the yeah this is true yeah uh other than that he has presented other proofs as well thus he's presented the fact that she was previously in the nicaragua of someone else the son of him and uh the the way that has been mentioned her name has been mentioned in a lot of narratives uh tell us that she was a grown-up woman and the arabic words which are used for would describe a woman

i mean then the narration one of the narration says that when her mother-in-law of the time broke off her her kind of nikka her engagement if you want to say engagement but that kind of nika broke it off the excuse the riwayat say is she said aksha and tus yeah that we fear that she will convert him now what if she was six and he was a grown man i mean what kind of a grown man is going to get converted into a faith by a little child the fact that the mother-in-law is thinking you know what

i don't like this this i fear she's going to convert my son to this new faith shows that she's of age and of reason yeah absolutely absolutely yeah yeah i was just going to say that and a beautiful point that which i have mentioned in my video and ram this mentioned it as well you know credit to ram this up that look if you approach this just from a holistic perspective and you see the fact that in amul huzzan that the prophet sallallahu alaihi sallam with the loss of khadija with the loss of abu talib with the loss of his

familial structure the backbone from his home his family is gone his societal social protection has gone and then to add to the tragedy the devastation of uh if and being attacked and all of this and how it could really take somebody down and you know try and dampen and crush their spirits in this time cola approaches the prophet to say that why don't you marry because you've got children at home you know you you need someone he'll give you emotional support moral support support you take care of your family you know it will give you also an in intimacy as a partner it will be something so meaningful it could help you with the

message and then she suggests to people i mean soda also now the fact that why if aisha was six seven and the prophet says okay yeah you're right i've got you know i've got young children at home i've got all of these why don't i just bring home another child another child that doesn't make any sense it's like well what's the point of that if i bring home another child then i'm just more laden with responsibility how is that helping me i think this you know this this holistic

angle more than anything it kind of seals the it just brings clarity that wow that that's so true at a time of distress the prophet needed support and and the wife would have helped him in so many things taking care of the house and the message and working the prophet all of these things but yeah and i i just think that's so it's so i'm i'm so glad that these things are being raised and are being discussed alhamdulillah and i and i it is going to be a journey but alhamdulillah that we but the journeys began and you know people are

coming towards it they are thinking look this isn't kufar you know stop this blackmailing and if we don't believe it we don't believe it's at the end of the day it's not qatar according to you know most sunni scholars so yeah but so shukran for for sharing that coming to some of the other uh okay so some of the other questions and topics as well for your course uh sexual issues okay this this is a big topic as i can imagine um you know before getting into this i wanted to throw a question right at you that um

you see speaking of nikka and relationships and this is what you're going to be speaking about on your course uh traditionally in islam we had something called and we still have it in the fic sharia books guidance books called kafaa this kind of that there is a compatibility and and people disagreed what should compatibility be should it be social status should it be piety should it be whatever and sure wherever you are you know whatever works but the question is as well that in this day and age uh what do people do with you know with the with the growing curiosity and

and just kind of liberal lifestyle i guess what about sexual compatibility now this is something which uh is like a huge spanner in the works i i guess because it's like well how does religion get around that one because it's it's like uh okay because people would say look in the past everybody you know they kind of shared a similar social mindset and everybody just kind of got on with it and there was a pragmatism to relationships and and nowadays in certain parts of the world maybe more so in developed parts of the world that you could for example there could be a

doctor living next door to somebody who's just uh a death metal fan you know music fan who's a punk who's living next door to somebody who's uh i don't know something else and people have just got bizarre diverse interests and that's in life but sure but also uh the sexual not the sexuality but the sexual kind of compatibility has begun to vary so so people sometimes are much more promiscuous some people then i'm not saying humans are more promiscuous definitely but i'm just saying sometimes some people are more promiscuous than

others this leads to a lot of clashes i'm sure you get all these questions all the time people saying because you'll get sometimes girls will be especially in pakistan and they're not exposed to so much you know craziness and some of the guys are they they're watching all kinds of things online they're doing all kinds of stuff and then you know they get married and it's like well this is a complete mismatch and so yeah i don't know if this is a question that you've been dealing with absolutely i mean you see uh because of pornography being available so freely uh you just click a button and it's there right on the phone

so there are all sorts of different forms which have evolved like for example uh things as as necrophiliacs who satisfy their lust from dead bodies and we have uh people like uh satisfy their lust from through animals and similarly uh amongst uh amongst human beings the most common is oral sex and anal sex so the the fact that whether it is allowed or not and because husbands and wives they they think that they are i mean they are like garments to one another so is it that uh oral sex

is allowed or anal sex is allowed okay and these are the things which uh don't think that pakistan is a country in which uh girls are not exposed to all this stuff you see internet is now found in villages as well okay so long live the internet so it's always everywhere and people have you know it's like that saying that somebody said that they went to a remote village they couldn't find clean water but you could find coca-cola because the smartphones you see the smartphones have have given this breakthrough and they like your computer that you have and almost i mean the the remotest of areas uh would have a smartphone available a service available

so because of this a lot of as you said promiscuity or deviant sexual behaviors or whatever you can call them uh because of the fact that they have now become an industry uh pornography has become a very huge industry uh and uh is so easily accessible that all these things are now readily available to even younger minds at a very younger age i i remember uh back in 1981 this is this is 42 years 41 years ago chicago and there was this and this is 40 years ago there was a slogan which this these girls had in a particular school it read

sex at eight otherwise it's too late sex at what sex sick at eight eight years eight at eight otherwise it's too late okay so i mean you see what what i'm trying to tell you is that the the the amount or the extent of uh uh mystery disturbing it's not it's just become prominent today because of the social media and the other tools that we are that are available otherwise promiscuity or deviant behavior or very early exposure to sex has always been there you read about the romans you read about the greek you read about the indians read

about the chinese uh you'll find or i mean everything is there every i mean something that you cannot even imagine at times would be uh found there uh in in a very graphic way it's just that today that graphic those graphic details which were generally in the form of texts now they have become visually available and people are are practicing them so when this is the case then uh this is the battle for purification or the struggle towards purifying your nufs you see how look at what how islam approaches that islam at the very beginning it tells you that you must guard your gaze not let it take undue liberty so that

the eyes are the the window of the heart i mean if you just your heart wants to stare out it is through your eyes and if this is the fundamental way in which islam wants us to tackle promiscuity or wantonness or love it says that you must guard your gaze not let it take undue liberty look towards other women as if they're your sisters or your daughters like that and of course you're able to talk to them you can talk to them but it has to be in a very restrained way so it is like putting a barrier at a very early stage now what has happened is that uh this guarding of gaze or this this uh

as the quran says no longer features it no longer features in any educative setup that relates to uh i mean which relates to uh in a way that you need to educate your child as a parent or maybe as a teacher that this is a fundamental tenet of islam and when things go out of hand do we realize that we had have actually uh the thing that we had to stop at a very early stage or a very very previous stage uh because we're not able to do that uh we are now running into all kinds of problems so you see particularly would not i mean of course this is a because of the fact that it's easily available and yeah sure i mean

and it's so flooded and you're right it's very worrying especially for the younger the people but coming to this uh let's say you know people we're talking about adults and these questions that are being thrown especially since you've opened the can of worms and you've said things like okay oral sex anal sex these kind of questions being very common um right how do you go about tackling that doctor how do you what do you say to these students the first thing that you need to understand is that we must not make this a taboo subject okay i mean this is nothing to be ashamed of this is nothing

to be uh uh i mean should not be a prohibited or a forbidden fruit so to speak uh this is a question which stares every single person all of us are faced with this question as soon as we enter adolescence and the desire is ignited in us so everyone is faced with this question the only thing is that we at times don't discuss these things or we do certain things without discussing them we might not find out the stance of religion about them or we might be uh very shy or we might be very guilty uh not knowing whether certain practice is is allowed or not so because i deal with

the youth a lot of times uh and this is as i said the second most important question which which boys or girls they raise if they are given this liberty to talk uh that whether they can indulge uh in in masturbation or if they get married if is it okay that they have oral sex or anal sex or is it something disprohibited so you see i think what i try to do and present is the understanding of religion uh or for example how if we have a certain advice from the prophet or from the quran itself and and and try to make sense of that by telling them that well this is the reason why something is not prohibited and this is the reason why it

is but what the important thing is that in order to derive a particular prohibition you have to be a right you have to go to the right place you must you cannot deduce something from a wrong instance so for example if i take up the case of masturbation first uh you'll find there are two areas uh or the two there are two categories through which it is regarded to be prohibited generally by our viarative scholars first is the quranic verse and second is the hadees so let me first start off with a piece which says that something like

in the practice of your hands he's accursed now you'll find that this narrative is is not even authentic it does not even go back to the prophet it is not ascribed to him in any way and it is more of a weapon which the clergy uses to to antagonize young minds that this is a cursed practice it is something which only satan would indulge in as far as the quran is concerned this is just one word which is used to tell people that well this is a sin and you just cannot indulge into it and the worst is

so it says that these are people or these believers are are such noble people that they don't uh they protect their organs except for their wives so this verse is taken to mean that uh the only form of sexual activity that is allowed in islam is when you have a wife with you uh and you are able to indulge in insects with her uh not realizing the fact that uh uh the that this verse is not at all talking about masturbation in any way what is talking about is that when a second partner is involved when a second party is involved it cannot be someone

other than your wife you cannot indulge in extra marital relations wherever it occurs in the quran it is actually proscribing extra military you cannot have out of wedlock and this in no way i mean protecting your private parts does not mean that masturbation or self-gratification i mean not just i mean being i guess pedantic and just the devil's advocate one could say well uh omar malik you know or what their right hand possess and one could say well you know if the hands possess it yeah both cases there's

an individual involved either it's the slave girl of those times or your wife so we see what is being prohibited is that outside of your wedlock uh i mean you just cannot indulge in any relation either it has to be your wife or in the particular scenario of those times your slave women who which was of course later on uh they were slavery was abolished as you can know it's a separate topic that we can discuss so what the quran the point of the quran is actually making here is that indulging in extramarital relations is prohibited so deriving uh the prohibition of masturbation from this verse is a is a as we say in in something which itself is not

established and you're establishing something on an unestablished thing or a de-established thing so i i would say that if this is the case then there is no directive in the quran or the hadees which prohibits this i mean this doesn't mean that i mean you start doing this in a way that you just start gratifying yourself all the time no i don't think anybody's going to incessantly non-stop what what is this thing is that basically religion has not stopped us from this practice but that doesn't mean that for example for health reasons maybe or for some other reasons in which you are indulging in pornography and then indulging in masturbation or doing

some other things first which make you uh gratify yourself uh it doesn't mean that it's ratifying you know running the logic i mean if we were to compute the logic at absurdum um just saying and i remember just to you know extend that let's say the antagonist argument the adversarial argument that all of these scholars that say let's say all the scholars who say it's haram because obviously you have scholars who say it's not haram like ibn hasam and many others and they quote the salaf and so on but you'll have many scholars saying look oh this is haram because of these reasons like oh

only your wife or your partner let's say if it's wife or husband whatever now but all of these girls agree that the the spouse so be the husband or the wife can masturbate the other so so they all agree that so let's say let's take the man as the example so the wife is allowed to uh masturbate him so if her hands can do it and so it doesn't really it's it's abs it's you know it's totally absurd to say well you know technically his hands could be on top of her hands but the moment she moves god forbid he was to make contact with

his own uh appendage this would all of a sudden become haram i mean that's like an absurdum argument obviously but it goes to show that look it doesn't really islam came with a great sim a simplicity like in a nice way i love the way imam malik's teacher when asked about this abu zinad he was asked that you know can we do certain things can we do certain practices and they were asking about certain kind of sexual practices and he said look if you either hello he said if you guys are on your own husband and wife he said if you're on your own behind closed

doors then you're behind closed doors and he said that then you know he said it's what's behind closed doors is behind closed doors and so the person it's actually the nephew uh of of of imam malik's teacher who says to him he says okay and then he doesn't stop he keeps chasing after him he says like so he says okay so uh so we can do this so then he says to him do you do it and and because he's asking him about uh in that particular question he's asking about certain erotic sounds and screams and stuff like this so he says to them look if they're on their own behind closed doors you know they're behind

closed doors that's uh you know between them it's not like this it's like he's saying to him it's permissible so it's behind closed doors so he's so eventually he asks him that uh he says do you do this and it's a shocking reply he gives actually um he says and this is a very respected scholar of of medina you know from the teachers of imam ali he says he says he says

he says that you know if you saw your uncle uh in in in these intimate let's say sexual moments you'd think this man doesn't even believe in god god which is like what the hell was he up to but so you see i think this obsession with this almost ocd obsession of what people get up to doesn't it almost breed more ironically doesn't it breed more promiscuity in a way absolutely right it does yeah because i think people if you let people just be

they'll just kind of be well they the moment you start telling them all these okay well here's a list of 112 things you better not do and here's a list of this many and then people think uh okay and it just makes it all it robs the naturalness of the experience but yeah i think this is good this these are going to be great topics you're going to be teaching doctors i think people will be it's very important you see sex education is a subject that has been uh either under stressed or it has been neglected totally yeah and it is i mean on a very serious note it needs to be uh i mean people need to be taught about it

the do's and the don'ts and at the same time the fact that you have to be a person who is purified from inside as much as possible engage in constructive activities and engage in activities which bring you closer to god but then at the same time they must also be told that if they indulge in this activity because i have seen so many young boys or girls uh i mean they do all these things but they feel extremely guilty and they think that they are doing the greatest of sins because you see this there are certain narratives in hadith literature which are absolutely inauthentic and the the punishments that they prescribe for such an act i mean if i start uh i mean

describing them it's like uh i mean you you'll feel as if it's it's uh it's totally something doesn't this create like a kind of potentially create almost like push certain people into psychological disorders like psychosis almost absolutely you see when you are doing something which is naturally uh allowed maybe in a particular way or in particular context and background and you're clamping it down so what you're doing is you are trying to psychologically pressurize that person you are having him frustrated and at the same time as i was just speaking that you make that person feel extremely guilty as he perhaps is

doing the greatest of all sins and there's no greater sin than indulging in self and a lot of young boys and girls when they feel that they're doing something wrong they actually start hating their own cells they lose confidence in their own self and they are brilliant young boys very low self-esteem yeah a lot of brilliant people who might uh just end up as uh as people who might go to a maybe an asylum or some place to for rehabilitation as uh for their own mental rehabilitation so i think the reason that i always stress this is that we must be clear that if there is a

prohibition of course then there is a prohibition if there is not a prohibition then why are we fooling or maybe we are uh doing something to to let our younger generation not know something and of course this is something which was never prescribed by the almighty if something has not been prohibited in my view by god or by its prophet then who am i who am i to prohibit it i i mean what is the reason that i should what i would also add dr sab is that if a person themself feels look this is wrong i you know this is something i will abstain from because i don't that more power to them i mean

that's their life this is not you see because this this is but if somebody else takes a different opinion they take the opinion that this is not haram you know these all have said it's not that's their choice so it's not about you see if a person wants to choose something let's say more difficult or more of a struggle for themselves that's right that's their life their deen you know they want to if a person says look i'm going to walk every day to a mosque instead of driving my car because you know i want to do this you know it's they're like the problem is when you impose on other people make them feel guilty right so you see as a teacher of

religion it is my job to clarify that my understanding of religion is that such and such a thing is allowed or certain subject is not allowed and my i have a reason to come to this conclusion and my reason is this and this and if you're not convinced by a reason okay carry on with what you are convinced with but when you say that a certain thing which is allowed or not allowed then you must at least try to understand both the contesting opinions and then whatever you think is uh appeals to you to your intellect is the one that you should adopt and follow yeah i mean because that is you see it's it's the weird obsession of other people you see which is like

it's not about let's say me the but it's like why are you touching yourself i mean that's that's just that question at what point the person think that question was okay because there's something wrong at every level because it's you know it's the other person has nothing to do with me it's their life their devotion to god and to be fair the the sexual instinct uh arguably is perhaps the most powerful instinct if not amongst the most powerful instincts from a psychology perspective uh because it's it's the kind of link to survival and kind of tied into kind of going forth and surviving but

uh you see so to just suppress it because the problem today look the problem and this is something i'd love to get your thoughts on doctors have that look what is the solution because marriages are a nightmare let's just be honest i mean let's just you know the elephant in the room it's like marriages are a nightmare i mean who wants to not that marriage is per se or a nightmare but the the kind of social construct of a marriage that we have today is for the most part a nightmare because it's like it's so ridiculously expensive there's so much over commitment from

from families from expectations from it robs it of any joy that that that it's meant to have and then for the most part if it doesn't work out you can't leave it because people feel you know they're trapped so whereas wasn't you know in in a way when you look at the sunnah then you see because if we're talking about the urges and the instincts being very natural and the question is well what are people supposed to do especially with widespread uh like you mentioned sexually kind of excitatory material everywhere i mean whether it's on tv your phone billboards wherever like

movies songs so people have these kind of and they want they need an outlet and nikah unfortunately zawaji especially if i can use it in that sense as marriage as a wedding is so difficult for like you couldn't and it's and on one hand it's almost not even recommended because let's be honest if an 18 year old said i'm about to get married you'd think well okay well this is going to be a car crash in slow motion because you know they haven't got the it's going you know i hope the girl doesn't get

pregnant that early and i hope does because this is going to just you know you can see where this is going to go because i don't know about in pakistan but here you know i'm being honest like men on especially muslim men muslim pakistani men but western pakistani men definitely don't probably mature emotionally and in that sense till probably mid-thirties i mean they you get a lot of this what we call here roadman attitude and you know people this too busy and always fighting even if they're 25 that the men the women maybe they do mature earlier but the man there's a lot of problems with the

maturity so telling somebody at 18 get married is equally such a so it's like where do we go what do we do i mean i know you must get this question i'd love to get your thoughts on it uh if i may wrap this up yeah right so you see uh what i generally have understood and i talk about with my students and those who ask me is that you see a sexual desire is something which is as you said perhaps strongest of desires that you that has to be channelized and has to be given its proper outlet and before you get the chance that you are actually able to bury someone and

you able to do that obviously before that masturbation is one of the options that you have but more than that i think one of the things that you need to understand is that i mean doing parallel constructive activities which involve creativity is something which always uh a human mind relishes so i think instead of i mean stopping people or maybe prescribing them for that a better way out for this is that you indulge in other activities which are also equally attractive and i think the biggest thing which which is also equally attractive uh

as a sexual activity is or i would say it can match that that activity is that sense of uh creativity you see when you create something an artist could create something a scientist could create something sublimation they call this as well in freudian psychology a sense yeah it's like a sense of fulfillment so if our youth are given this this alternative that they indulge more in these activities which in which you make things from your hands in which you do service to the society in which you are involved in a lot of things that engage you in a positive way then of course sexualism or sexuality is something that's going to still attract

you but then it's going to fall in its place it's not going to consume like 24 hours or 14 hours away it does let's say let's say you've got um let's say late college um i don't know like an 18 year old 19 year old let's say they're going to college or uni or whatever it is and now they you know there's a little relationship kind of chemistry going on uh but they they just want to do just amongst themselves make it halal and just see how it goes because they want to they don't know and but if it becomes a

big thing then you know one let's say the families won't be willing for them to be getting married anyway at this stage but they just want to kind of they want it halal but they want to just just just just go with the flow they want to say look let's go with this if let's go with it as long as you know if we feel it's not working we'll part ways gracefully you know with you know we will be respectful but um how would you respond or what what are your thoughts on something like that if you're if you're referring to the fact that they they indulge in a sexual activity there oh no they could do it i mean like they

could do a nicara just between them but it's not a it's not a wedding in the in the social sense of a wedding it's just like let's say they do a knicker uh let's say they say okay you know we you know fine let's say people know they're in a relationship uh let's say all their friends and all these people know but it's not known known like their mom and dad don't know uh but so i mean because you must be getting questions this look because this is happening let's let's you know the elephant in the room this is happening let's not pretend this isn't happening so what are you i don't know what your thoughts would if you have thoughts on

that i'd love to hear some some thoughts because this is you know i understand you see the important thing that we need to understand here is that the word nikah the word nika actually means a public declaration of being husband and wife so if you're not declaring yourselves to be publicly husband and wife it's not a nikai at all and it's i mean it's like a covert relationship and as far as my understanding goes it's not allowed at all by by religion because you see what happens is that uh when you live in a sexual relationship the almighty wants us to announce to the society that well yes this is a husband and this is a wife because there are certain rights which are on certain obligations which as a result

a crew and if the wife gets pregnant for example you just cannot walk away from her by by saying that well because our tempers do not match or our temperament does not match you can just have the baby aborted or maybe you can just raise it as a single parent uh and and that's the end of that so you see to safeguard these things islam wants the union to be a declared union and another thing is that when you walk away you don't know that you are actually i mean something could could always ignite or bring to surface what you're hiding maybe a past relationship could always be exposed out of enmity out of some grudge that you might later on develop with your former partner and then

instead of hiding that you actually bring it to light and start just playing along with this hypothesis and devil's advocate i guess doctors are people could say well look this isn't a secret secret it's not like covert like shh like people know like let's say people on the campus know people at the university people know uh it's not that this is a hidden hidden secret it's not like a dirty secret but it's not a wedding wedding wedding and yes the families don't know and also for things like birth control i mean there's things like birth control

and there's things like uh so i'm just saying putting that in from that argument from playing the antagonistic argument here how would you what would your thoughts be i think i would still not go along with it because you see uh you see what happens is that you the the premise that on the basis of which you are getting married is that whether you're compatible or not to each other i mean the way that you are uh conducting yourself is that let's okay get together see whether we are compatible or not and and lack of compatibility would would result in an element of this of this relationship now if you look up the marriage and history of marriage you

realize that this lack of compatibility or or not lack of compelling compatibility is something which can always change in the later part of your life you see initially you could be very incompatible and it's just like like going along in time when you have children the compatibility factor at times arises because of the adjustment you see in initially when you are given this choice that you can always part ways whenever you like the the amount of adjustment which a person should show to accommodate the spouse it automatically uh comes down to a very low level because you already already have the option well okay i'll just i can just walk away from this relationship so i

think uh you need to understand that whatever the relationship between a man and a wife these are they are always going to be two different people however much they come together they have the same views regarding religion or culture or society the habits cannot always be the same and these habits always account for a different personality and so the key word in marriage is to adjust and accommodate and to understand that well if you are uh i mean if you are adjusting for the other person the other person is adjusting for you so marriage is basically uh i mean if someone very beautifully defined marriage once and i always

do cling to this definition uh he said that well marriage is the union i mean in fact his words were perfect marriage perfect marriage is the union of two imperfect people who come together and hide one another's imperfections wow so perfect you know that they're you are a garment for one another you have to realize that everyone is not perfect if you're not satisfied with one spouse you will never be satisfied generally because you see what you're doing is you're trying to become an ideal you you're trying to find someone who is an ideal person and this world is not a place for idealism

but would you not with the argument dr saab that most people the first one-two relationships often are going to be disasters and they're only going to learn from experience and it's as they mature they become more capable of mature relationships like if let's say we take ourselves like let's say each person i don't know how old all the viewers will be but let's say i was to do this hypothetically with me i was to take myself and detract like 20 years like i go back in time and i meet the let's say i'm 43 now the 23 year old me

um i i don't think i could stand that me uh now the the me now could not stand them the mean then and and and this is all part of growth in life you know we're growing we're developing we're kind of changing even if you go back 10 years you would be very different people are growing at different rates and one of the things about i guess this is this is another very difficult question then with relationships because nobody teaches us how to handle relationships like we don't you don't get taught it in school you don't get taught it from books you just watch it on tv which is not a true representation you watch your parents who in most cases

unfortunately are going to be a very poor bad example of of that so not not to blame them a lot bless everybody's parents i mean but i'm just being realistic so now and you're quite young you're quite inexperienced you're the very person that you yourself in 20 years time will won't be able to stand you so you know you are you're making ridiculously you're annoying you're kind of doing dumb stuff you're immature you're not emotionally intelligent and you know it's it's like a like bumper cars and so it's probably you know especially in

this part of the world i think this is why relationships probably break down uh maybe i'm not saying it's the only reason but then when people reach a certain mature age then they're like oh right okay now i know how to do it properly because i've done a few they're like now don't be a bloody idiot and don't do this i should be you know i should be more understanding of i should be more mature i should be more caring you know how you said that was so beautiful like you said look two imperfect people covering each other's uh imperfections uh perfectly and this this whole you know libasul lakum concept of the garment of the quran is beautiful but let's be honest i mean

you get let's say 20 year old or an 18 year old and it's it's not really it's it's a very different realm it's just pure lust driven i'm not saying there's anything wrong with lust driven but i'm just saying it's a different paradigm yeah it's it's a tricky one i'm not saying anybody has the answers but i wonder what you if you have any thoughts my thoughts are that you see uh just as parenting is an art being a spouse or being engaged as a spouse to the other spouse is also an art so you just said that teaching we are not taught about how to behave as a spouse

neither are we taught in the schools or colleges or universities the best example that we have are the tv dramas or these movies in which they have an entirely different background and your own parents are not the best examples as well so i think the most important thing is that this art of being a spouse or the art of marriage so to speak how to be a person who is who's going to understand and instead of being an idealist he is more of a practical he was a more uh pragmatic in his approach and realized that this is not a perfect place earth is not a place that you're going to find everything in everyone so it's a matter of adjustment it's a matter of accommodating the other

person it's a matter of highlighting the some of the good things that the other person have it's a matter of contributing to the growth of your spouse so i think the the thing that we are lacking severely is this education just as we are lacking in sexual education we are also lacking in in in counseling in marriage and as a marriage counselor myself i see when people come to me and spouses come to me it's already too late when things have crossed their limits and then it's the time for counseling and then people come and say well i did this and that whereas actually the right time for this is even before marriage so before we get married i think if we realize people can come

together and offer this coaching and i think this is part of life coaching which today many people are offering that as life coaches they instruct young boys and girls in the art of marriage what exactly marriage means what exactly should they be looking for and the top thing is that they need to understand is that they are going to bring a new life into existence and if until they are harmonious to each other until they are respectful to each other they will be a complete disaster for the next generation because they're going to watch you and see how you fight with each other how you pick your faults and and it goes on and on so i think it's like

like it's like a thing that needs to be taught as a subject maybe at the university uni level uh parenting spouse spousal treatment and and the art of marriage in which you are actually made to go through these uh some of these exercises in which you're made to understand that look these are some of the common mistakes which spouses do these are the common mistakes which brings us to absolutely yeah i think that's so beautifully said about the art of marriage or the art of relationships and because and i think one thing as well that we could add the doctors that having role models because because the

tv is you know it's so artificial that the lifestyle it's a movie i mean it's it's made for you know entertainment it's not made for um and they know exactly what to say they know the right lines the right dialogues the right kind of quotes everyday person you know they wouldn't know what to what to say in that situation and so people when they look around how do you how how am i supposed to behave in a relationship they look to people that they may know in their in their world and they may be their uncle or their parents or their neighbors or the you know just people they know and i think

good if i can say good or good enough role models would you know maybe it would add to that but then one of the problems with this dr zhab is that you see in this world of instagram there's so much artificiality that it's raised the benchmark because because now when you look online everybody's bloody you know they're on holiday with bae and they're having coffee with bae and they oh they're doing all these nice romantic things and uh and not that there's anything wrong with nice romantic things but they it's fake because even the people in the instagram are not that happy they're just trying to show the world that we're so happy but when you watch 10 people

looking extremely happy and then you think bloody hell i'm a miserable git my life isn't this happy so this makes things so much worse because it's an uphill you know you feel like i can never be as good i can never be as happy as that person in that instagram picture and so yeah i mean yeah well these are some of the challenges that all of us face and every age has its own challenge and just as social media has so many uh advantages and benefits so this is the downside uh in which of course people get frustrated uh they think that well unless you have a very

beautiful wife uh or a very handsome husband marriage cannot even proceed you just cannot even think of going ahead so as you said these are artificial standards in which uh the parent has become the decisive factor the fact that the person is a good person from inside he has a or she has a wonderful character she's a very caring human being all these standards have been relegated because all the stress is on the outward appearance and how a person looks like and this has as you said raised the bar and given such uh artificial uh parameters to the uh to the institution of marriage false expectations

yeah it's also expectations and as a result you see there are so many people who are average looking i mean the almighty doesn't that is not i mean he doesn't produce so to speak uh beautiful people uh all the while i mean there there may be sixty percent who are ordinary looking or average looking so for them life becomes even more difficult because then they are in a rat race or they would like to enter their track race without having the equipment and then they indulge in all sorts of other things to to satisfy themselves and this takes its toll and then you can see how the fabric of the society it totally dwindles and it gets lost in this uh this whole race wow

i mean it's so it's one of those things that i guess it's like a sinking ship and we've you know people were just we're kind of just removing a bucket of water at a time and it's it's somewhat analogous temporary relief you're not talking about the long-term relief you're talking about a temporarily yeah wow yeah i mean and it's true and there's just so many it's it's one of those things i i think i really i'm so glad that you are doing a course on this that you are tackling you know you're firefighting these issues you're kind of at the front line trying to teach people because there's so many questions so many things

people throw up and and it doesn't mean that there are you know it's it's real life it's dynamic it's not about textbook answer it's there's this this movement you know there's a this beautiful clip i was watching where somebody was explaining the laws of physics and he said well you know he takes uh a ball and he says well you know if somebody came and kicked this ball and um and he said that we could actually you know if we knew okay he kicked it from this angle we knew the angle we knew the pressure that went into the ball where it hits the ball the kind of air resistance the directionality we could have very good prediction on exactly where it would

land given the laws of mathematics and physics and he said but then let's say the very same movement with that calculation but he kicks a cat i mean i'm not saying to kick a cat or any living animal or squirrel or anything all the all the mathematics have gone out the window because it's a dynamic creature anything with life it completely changes it's not computational in the same way so these are real life very difficult kind of things and then there's all sorts and obviously you know coming from in pakistan there's so many issues we still have them here and you know in the uk we still have people that will be uh for example marriages they won't allow them

based on and and things like this and they will say you know such and such are from this south and such and such are a low caste and such and such are this we still have that that here in the uk i mean coming from the pakistani thing right here we've brought it along i think now people are slightly moving out of it we've had you know in the uk there was a study done um it was released uh i believe was it late last year early this year but it was a study done on um on disabilities in this is in the uk that children born with disabilities or

learning difficulties and they showed that in that study that uh pakistanis specifically i mean you've got all kinds of pakistanis are a large ethnic minority here but you've got others as well you've got bangladeshis you've got indians you've got many other people as well arab communities and but still they showed that pakistanis contributed to i think was it something like uh three percent or something or it was a small percentage of births each year so like if you count the ethnicity that let's say british pakistani there were small percent i can't remember whether it was four percent or five percent whatever it was but it's a small percentage

but they contributed over 50 percent or up to i think it was 50 or 50 something percent of children with disabilities or learning difficulties and this was because of the kind of uh the in marriages the in further in and in and in and into cousins and it's not just one cousin it's not just like oh this person might it's like they were cousins and they were cousins and they were cousins and uh and it was it was really shocking they they it was it was then people it was on a little uh i think a bbc program as well or something just

a small i think like a half an hour discussion on it but yeah so this was so these are some of the problems people are still grappling now people are trying to move away with them i wonder how the scene is or the landscape is in pakistan with all of this i think it's very similar uh but you see uh one thing that you might need to uh i would humbly request to revise is that pakistan is is part of the same global uh background that you have just referred to it's not that it's it's isolated from the rest of the world of course i mean it's like exactly the same things go on the only thing is that at times they go on uh in a secret way or maybe they're

not very prominent but every single thing that you find in other parts of the world you'll find a reflection of that occurring in pakistan in our educational institutions in our in our villages even though the as i said it would be in a different state style or they might hide it but the fact is that it's no longer a country which is isolated in its practices which you could say well uh it's different from the rest of the country and this is because of the globalization of course social media has brought and precisely for this reason i am a very big advocate of the fact that we must open up discussions on every single topic that comes to mind the young minds especially if they have

a problem with religion if they have a problem uh in any sort of sphere which relates to religion in any way uh they should be encouraged uh to ask those questions and also the answer given to them should be that well this is one of my answers or how i have thought about this question am i i may be wrong and i may be right but what i would encourage you is to continue with your quest you must find out and keep on finding this out and never think that you found the ultimate truth this is an on process and continue till your last breath so the quest for the truth to quest to critically analyze views and to be humble in your views that you can

always be wrong this is the way forward i think and uh or discussing or not making other people discuss things which you think were in disgust let's say two or three decades ago that's not going to solve the problem it's going to worsen it okay no and i just want to say just very quickly absolutely and shukran and i don't you know for any of the viewers i don't don't mean it in any of that way and to be fair that um i i mean i didn't mean it in a kind of disparaging way and to be fair there are now with the younger kind of more generation and also the awareness that's

been created people have moved away a lot from this kind of stuff uh we see now all the the what i see myself as well and many people the younger kind of weddings and marriages and relationships all going on people are all diversifying and they're all kind of uh you know disregarding these some of these ridiculous kind of customs of caste and all of this kind of stuff so alhamdulillah i mean it is very uh promising and uh yes of course and and uh coming to this point i really i'm glad that you um do that doctors are because it's i think it's one of the most

you see it's it's one of the most difficult things for a person who really values faith to say is that look i've got a problem with something about the faith and i think one of the biggest problems is one of the one of another great challenge in that is they themselves are helpless in it so they can't it's like imagine there's a medical issue okay but even what if i need help with something i'm not a doctor now i could try googling but that would be a disaster i mean try googling a medical condition and you know probably tell you you're already dead six weeks ago but so

the uh so similarly you if somebody who's an expert or somebody who's trained can give you now a person is troubled with let's say their faith for whatever reason they obviously don't have the answers to it if they did they wouldn't be troubled but they and they don't know they're not trained nowhere near to get those answers and so for them to muster the courage to turn up to someone and say well look i've got this problem but then it could sound disturbed like maybe they say look i don't i don't know you know i'm i'm disturbed by some of the things that i'm hearing about islam or i'm

disturbed with this particular issue or i've got a problem with that or how do you reconcile this or and then the last thing that ever should happen here is that they be shut down and say you know how dare you question this you know because it's what are they supposed to do i mean that's i feel that such a disservice to allah and his messenger and this deen you know to because it's an amana ultimately to be able if somebody comes to you and fair enough if you don't know the answer you don't know the answer you say look you know i don't know that maybe like it's like this but we can look into it i can you know let me speak to some people

but yeah it's um because this it's amazing when we look at the early self of islam we find that almost for the first one to 200 years a lot of the ulama were very the seller for all about la adri i'm not so sure uh you know if you read imam malik's fatawa in his madawana or even in his mata sometimes when he speaks he'll he'll say things like look um i prefer i feel hip i i love this i like this uh he'll say things like akra i i don't like it you know it's that you

do some very really would you hear imam malik or imam abu hanifa or imam the early imam saying things like this is haram this is you shutting people down very it's i mean it's not that they i'm sure they were obviously certain things but most of the things is this kind of you know a bit of a i don't know i don't like it i'm not sure i don't feel this is right i don't yeah and they're very happy extremely humble in their approach and they let other people give they give that breathing space to the other person they'll well yes if this is my personal preference you can differ with it and

this is how i feel and this that is why they were able to create a generation who was very confident who could contribute a lot but you see as the fake centric approach uh it got dominant or it dominated uh that self-belief and the fact that you would you're a person who is going to be honest about to go out yourself and so therefore you be careful yourself that actually uh slowly uh disintegrated and it became it was replaced by the fatwa of the imam something that you should have decided for your own self keeping in view certain principles so i think that this is very important that we open up

discussions and as you rightly said that people might not be comfortable in raising questions themselves so the alternative to this that i find is that you go to the youngsters you go to people you talk about these issues you open up in these issues and once you do that you'll give the other person or the people the confidence that yes they can also take part in this conversation and slowly and gradually they can be made part of it so giving them this this boost is by reaching out to them yourselves and going up to them and telling them that these are some taboo subjects that were not discussed in yesteryears but yesterday we need to discuss them so

that we can contribute much more to a society which is already uh dismember i mean it's dismembering in various ways yeah i mean and uh uh just the last thing on this to to sum that up you know what when you mention the whole kind of creation or the development of let's say islamic history coming along and the fifi thing i i would kind of put the term there that there was a dogmatism developed and i want you to pick your thoughts just very quickly and then we will uh bring this to an and i know that we've taken so much of your time doctors up what do you think because this is a very relevant thing what

what do you think are the causes of what causes dogmatism like because i and and i get that's a very profound i you know i don't mean to put you on the spot doctor but just if they've got some thoughts on dogmatism because it's fundamentally one verse of the or i would say one misinterpretation of a quranic verse has played its role uh in which uh when you see the word used in very initially in surah baqarah you menu and they have generally been interpreted as that you they just accept something which is blindly i mean they just don't question something and iman is

something like like whatever they've been told they just go and accept it without questioning it i think this is an approach which has on which we have been modeled and instead of linking ourselves intellectually to the quran and trying to understand exactly what a particular directive would mean this dogmatic approach means that you don't question you're just giving a dogma and you whether you accept it or not i mean it could be very faithful for you but you just cannot question it you just cannot ask the reason for it and one of the things that has that has gone very far is this verse if you'll find penetrating in a lot of muslim minds which which still

which are i mean they think that well if you've been told something that you must not question it it's like iman will and for them everything which is told by god without any question wow i never thought of that actually that verse in that sense that you're saying that this was kind of to shut down uh reason to say well you know you know just shut it down just shut down your reason and just accept what you're being told and although this this verse not even means what has been derived from it i mean it has an entirely different meaning but unfortunately a very common interpretation of this word of this verse i would say which is an erroneous interpretation is that you just blindly follow

and accept whatever you have been told and look at what the quran says it says that you have used intellect and regarding the people who would end up in hell it says sorry we had our intellect and we had listened we would not have been the companions of hell so i says this is like recharging our youth and telling them that you can question everything you have the power and the way to get empowered in this in this area is that you find out the reason behind the prohibition or allowance of a particular directive just don't take it on face value because your father or your mother

or your teacher is telling them ask why ask her why and get satisfied with the reason otherwise look for more people who could dissatisfy would you would you say that with anything or only things that bother you i think you start off with things that bother you that's the that's the natural uh i mean the person why is the partner and slowly you extend that other thing as well why because you see as a parent one day you will be have you'll have to communicate these things to your children as well so if you're educated and if you know the reason then it would be much more easier for you to communicate certain things so yes the quest would start off with things that

bother you but i think it should slowly engulf and envelop those things as well which might not bother you but you'd like to find out that why is it that i am uh being asked to do something or ask not to do something wow i mean yeah absolutely very sugar and sugar and those those are very profound words and absolutely i mean i people as well for the viewers i mean if you didn't catch that that doctors have just highlighted especially these people miss relaying or miss kind of not really misappropriating these verses things like you menona people who believe in an unseen or in the unseen

that this in a way is to say well you know it doesn't matter that you can't see it therefore you don't even need to understand it the verse doesn't say people can't understand it but things that they don't see because if you think of it even tomorrow is from the unseen you see we believe in tomorrow like we believe in a better future we believe in hope we believe in faith all of these things technically are from the life after death that there will be life this is only you know it's from the the uns imperceptible in front of us dr shukran it's been an absolute pleasure honestly it's been an honor uh it's been

an honor um just just sharing this this space with you time space and just getting your thoughts uh about your course if can people attend it is it too late what what what's the yes i mean we uh we are conducting these courses at two levels uh i mean the first of them is in a in personal environment it's like a physical presence that that requires this and the course is where it's in toronto so it's in toronto uh uh in a particular space that has been offered i think the seats have already probably uh gotten filled up but the website is uh this is it's not yet being displayed

on the i guess al morris institute canada would be displaying something like that okay the instagram page i know is active i think there is an instagram page there are some other facebook pages regarding moral institute canada in which you'll find more details but later on i do plan to conduct them online or to visit other parts of the world where people might be entrusted uh to get themselves educated on these issues so it's like a it's like a journey that we are about to start in charlotte yeah i think it's wonderful people especially those of you in canada around uh the toronto area or just in canada if you've got time it's going to be it's going to last a week is it or a couple of days

it's basically two sessions this sunday from three to six and then next sunday from three to six it's like a six hour session i mean six hour total ex period uh with three hours on one sunday and three hours on the next sunday excellent and i can just see sean cher in the comments saying look the seats there's still seats left so do join um those of you that are in touch with sean's shirt you can just reach out to him as well or go to the instagram page if you're there definitely it'll be a great opportunity just to meet dr sab in person in the flesh would be an honor in and of itself so get yourself there people i will share some links to the

the pages on on the on this youtube description as well um dr zab if people want to reach out to you is there a platform that you that you have i think uh you can give them my my email address or my cell phone number oh whoa i don't think you know doctor i don't think you know people two years ago when we were together you said that don't do that but you see what i do i mean i'd like to be in the thick of things and why why should i run away now when i am in this uh then there's you seriously if you okay if you you tell me after i've done if you tell me i will put it up there you can just give

my number i mean whoever asks he's most welcome to get in touch with him so there you go that is very very hospitable people i must say and doctors are just share some beautiful reminders uh so that's that's definitely something that really adds to your week people shook around for your time first of all it's been an absolute we've gone through so many topics i mean we've jumped right from uh the right from theology to con to controversial things matters of blasphemy to the age of aisha we've discussed that i mean we've come right through to very difficult grounds like relationships and how to kind of

navigate through them intimacy issues compatibility issues uh prohibitions taboos and then you know this this thing of look being confident to ask about your faith and not be embarrassed i think it's it's been a wonderful journey you've taken us on so shukran once again people if you don't you know if a person doesn't if you don't thank people you haven't truly thanked god so uh shukran once again and people likewise i know it's been quite an evening you guys as well for hanging in there and enjoying do if you want to reach out you're more than welcome i'll share the links for dr sab for me you're more than welcome usually

instagram's a better place uh or you can search patreon as well other than that take very good care of yourselves people and all of you from me salaam online and likewise dr saab i'll be putting up the end slide for the contact page