Dr Syed Hammad Ali | Interpretations galore, Inequality & Ibn Araby | MindTrap #37 | Mufti Abu Layth

[Music] [Music] alright first and foremost let me just do a quick sound check just to make sure the audio is coming through let me bring up

mercente right here people on facebook and on youtube just make sure uh right so let me just check i take it you can all hear me absolutely loud and crystal crystal clear people so right you doing it you're doing it somebody said the blur filter is annoying well so can life be annoying well just let us try it actually a lot of people are liking it let's see all right so tonight people let me bring before you

first and foremost what you can see right here the profile picture right there people alright that is you have saiyad hamad ali our esteemed guest tonight hailing all the way from canada i've i'm going to mispronounce the name of the city so why not bring on the guests

where is it you you're from yeah so it's essentially close to calgary it's a small city known as ledbridge so that's yeah so that's where i am currently located at um for taking the time out to be with us tonight to share your thoughts um precious research on mind trap it's uh it's it's an absolute honor to have you here for our guests and viewers and those who follow my trap that are not so familiar with your work

a bit about yourself uh doc um i know you're a phd i did i did say doctor to be doctor inshallah very soon soon within a couple of months i take it so inshallah a bit about yourself in your in your own words uh doctor right so basically i've been fortunate to study different disciplines different subjects and um after completing my high school from canada i've stayed with my family then in pakistan and that's where i was fortunate to study islam with classically trained scholars so then

some of my teachers were students of great mahatma singh like abdul rashid and normani rahimullah along with that i was able to pursue an amphibion human resource management and then i came back to canada and then i was able to do an msc in strategic management and currently i'm just completing my phd in sociology i'm hoping to complete it i'm doing it from university of calgary i'm hoping to complete it by inshallah by december uh unfortunately the covet situation delayed it a bit and your phd it's in sociology what specifically what's your

area of research your thesis right so to summarize that i'm looking at how muslim socio-economic conditions are shaping their religious views and also their social attitudes so for example what are the impact of different population proportion changes of muslim populations on their views about others about the religion and the approach that i'm taking is a quantitative approach that is there's data that i have secondary data and based on that i'm looking at how muslim views are shaping and so so the more the more the cha-ching the views change with that as

well it does it sure does and research does show that and hopefully we will be talking about how economic to improvement leads to individuals holding more open tolerant liberal views right awesome just before jumping into that a bit about your because you you you have a background in uh islamic studies as well you know you've taken that very passionately in the past as well dedicated an entire portion of your life to that um just a bit about that experience uh first of all we you studied in pakistan is that correct yes i did study yes in pakistan karachi

initially when i had gone so yeah so you went to karachi and um initially i got admitted into a medical college but my my desire aim was to study religion and so i dropped out of that i was in my third year of mbbs or second year i can't recall and then i actually went and studied you know that must have been a huge disappointment to your parents though

it was i would to be honest my parents were you know they helped oh wow i'll be honest even till now yeah my parents were you know they said if you don't want to do it that's okay but just don't forget that you need to learn so actually my parents were the ones who were saying that you know you need to acquire knowledge wow because i i just thought that every parent's this parents dream is you know mirabeta be doctor doctor yeah yeah but my parents they were cool about it they were they understood that i wanted to seek knowledge i didn't want to per se like you know be a typical uh malana i was trying to seek knowledge and when i went into the madrasa a lot

of times you're given this you know this um a perfect picture um you know this idea and yet that's not the case and so after spending quite some time there i decided that that wasn't the route i'm going to be taking and so then i started studying with you and that's how i got it jazza in hadees and fair like and so my primary teacher then became who's he's the son of sheikh abdul rashid and no mani the famous mahadis yes of course so that's why i studied fair hanafi fair and then hadees and so forth and at the same time i pursued my m and phil

in human resource management you you you had uh you spent a brief time with mufti as well i did how was that share those experiences [Music] for those that for those people who don't i ain't too familiar mufti zerwali is on youtube is he can be depends if you're in the right youtube algorithm a fit quite a phenomenon he has his peculiarities what is interesting to observe is that um i studied with him at that time when

apparently coming on youtube having pictures videos were forbidden and that work is kind of now that's the reason i'm doing this this type of research is that what are the factors that are making uh even the scholars in the community to hold different views so here's a person [Music] and he did not consider taking pictures or coming live as being permissible and yet after 10 years or so suddenly it's become permissive yeah so one has to then think what are those environments what are the social economic factors that are influencing them and it is not to criticize him but the

thing is that we need to recognize that individuals are a product of their own society and they cannot then be taken as a reference guide for muslims who are living in different socio-economic environments that's very well said actually very well and that's linked with the and i know we're going to come to that as well linked with the proliferation of views isn't it it's kind of like a bottom-up approach as well exactly exactly for example i was quite when i was in madras i found it very ironic that you know we would be told that certain things are forbidden and yet when we would see those who are

in a position of power doing something that was forbidden for to the students then you do question the power relationships that are transpiring such a setting you're like so it was quite interesting experience and i have come to the conclusion that to acquire knowledge if people assume madrasa is the way i'm sorry to say this but it's not the way because what happens is that the different interpretations that are present within the corpus that islamic tradition they're not presented um you know

and unfortunately in the pakistani madrasas i feel that there needs to be more recognition of differences of opinion rather than saying i'm right and all others are heretic that's problematic because when we recognize that when whatever text we're reading we are giving our subjective interpretation to that text absolutely i mean uh and just just briefly before moving on from mufti zarwali is known for his temper sometimes you know he gets angry really worked up and you know if he finds out somebody in fact i don't know if you're familiar with this but

there was um some scholar called i don't know maulana habib or something or dr habib from karachi who who kind of opposed him on something wrought a refutation or said something about him so he wrote a refutation he got all worked up and he wrote this refutation against him and he titled it from assam al-musib [Laughter] which meant which translated as the the kind of piercing arrow uh in the in in in the backside or the butt of habib

this person habib but he's somebody who used to be known for his temper did you ever see any of that or was that just uh how was it when you were there so since he you know i did study with him and i completely do not accept his views but having said that i've studied with him i'm not going to into the the experiences that i had but yes unfortunately they were um quite um they were not the best of experiences at times but having said that what is more interesting is that if you notice that in the past our scholars used to dispute with each other so for example we know that imam

mohammed shaibani wrote a refutation against imam malik but he still studied with imam malik of course we know that they used to write kitab they would write rather against each other but they had that level of respect towards the other person and i feel that is at time missing in our community just because we disagree with someone we start using such you know strong words towards the other person i don't think that would be a way that we can progress then because we have to recognize the differences even existed at the times of the companions yeah no absolutely so that is one thing i feel like that has to be taken into

consideration all the books that you see he's criticizing the maliki school of thought the madina but you can clearly see he's not now it's not becoming a personal vendetta or like a personal uh criticism of imam malik in fact he knows from imam of course of course yeah no absolutely and so then you've come back to uh canada you've enrolled on this embarked on this phd why sociology sociology of all things i mean people watching this are probably thinking what the hell is sociology no i'm just that's a joke obviously everybody watching this is enlightened

[Laughter] and interestingly and this is the loss within the muslim world is that there has been so much focus on these uh hard sciences that is those sciences that are focused so much on quantitative approach what sociology does is that it makes you recognize how your societal experiences your societal your social reality is influencing you and that is why for example i sometimes share this you're not going to find an extremist who has studied who has a sociological background because within sociology they're training you to accept different diverse views so sociology enables us to recognize

what are the trends transferring in the community so for example because of that we're then able to say that okay this is happening if these types of situations happen then we can anticipate muslim views for example becoming more moderate or more conservative in this way what sociology does is that it's looking at the whole society from a lens of understanding what are the general trends and and the thing is it's trying to listen to the people rather than trying to enforce a idea on a people it's listening to the discourses of the people and then recording that discourses so that it could transmit the knowledge that is accumulating through these discourses

so so the reason that i took sorry sociology was that no no no i was going to say yes so i mean you obviously this whole aspect which people have neglected that you know all of these factors and but a phd that's quite a commitment to the to this because i i felt and that a lot of times whenever we're having these islamic discourses whether it is the muslim it is a muslim apologist for example or an anti-muslim critic we notice that they're always saying islam is this or that not recognizing that the text of islam

whether it is the quran or the hadees they're being understood through different lenses because they're being influenced by their own socio-economic realities let me give an example abu hanifa was heavily influenced by his city kufa and he would take the opinions of those kuffin scholars he knew where else imam malik took the views of the madani scholars why because he had understanding of that so we reckon we have to recognize that and so what happens if we recognize this then we can also know that there are multiple interpretations of islam rather than you know trying to criticize islam or the prophet we have to recognize that the criticisms can lay at the level of interpretations of islam because you'll find plethora of

interpretations ranging from the most extreme to the most conservative and you will find all of them claiming that this is islam no absolutely absolutely and a you know honing in your research focusing kind of zeroing in on what you really focused on and that was the salvific aspect the salvation to do with who basically who who wins in the afterlife [Laughter] right are we just wasting our time or is there

success to come so fast who's wrong who's just tell let us know who's definitely going to hell and who's going to heaven so so that's the interesting thing like so salvific or issue or topic is part of my research of course i'm looking at other issues as well muslim social issues so i've been looking at their religious views and also the societal view their social attitudes but talking to salvific it is interesting to note immediately and you know sometimes we hear that people say that you know why

is it that non-muslims would suffer eternal little damnation right they would argue that and then we would find muslims saying oh no there is salvation hope the problem is that we don't recognize both are coming from their own social economic backgrounds as one conditions first of all we need to recognize that there has always been a difference of interpretation on this issue yes the dominant interpretation the pre-modern world was that only muslims would attain salvation but there was always that level that hope because of the issue of god's mercy encompassing everything and god mercy overriding his wrath that may be the case but there are also other factors that come into play so

the muslim world on an average maybe 20 percent of the believe in this question about whether non-muslims can attain salvation so in my research i was looking at this question that does islam only lead to salvation or do other religions can also lead to salvation for their followers okay so that was the question does islam lead to salvation in the hereafter or can other religions lead to salvation now when this question was asked in the muslim world majority of them said only islam yet when this question was asked to american muslim this was a 2011 survey majority of them believed that other religions can also lead to salvation

a majority of american what muslims muslims okay yes american muslims u.s muslims believe that other religions can lead to people to attain salvation as well now that interesting then the question comes you have people in the muslim world who are opposing this you have this in the american muslims who are agreeing to this that is salvation can be found outside of islam now immediately this question when you look at this data this just at a descriptive level then the question comes what's islam's position on this and we have to recognize that at times

this notion that we take islam to be shaping muslims is problematic because the reality is that our social economic cult environment influences how we look at the world and based on that we then have communications you and i for example are having this communication in this claim space we are creating this type of discourse whereby others are listening and that influences their thinking and this type of thinking and discourses in turn lead us to look at the text and re-evaluate so then what i did and this is the quantitative approach i took okay i looked so basically using the data i

ran a logistic regression logistic regression means that we i'm doing a predictive model rather complicated stuff here sorry for you no no bring on all the terminology we love the terminology what did you say it's called logistic logistic regression using stata so these are like data analysis program now this is the thing that often when we talk about these issues we're trying to find quranic interpretations like someone would say surah 2 verse 62 that you know it says all those who those who believe uh the jews the christians the sabians all those who believe in god no fear upon them i'm paraphrasing this but the thing is that you'll

see other scholars saying no no no this has been abrogated this is not this is not any more acceptable but then you would have our people arguing saying that oh no this when it comes to divine promises god laws and god's promises are not obligated it's only at the cam level at the legal issues this has been taken there has been countless discourse on this yet i as far as i'm aware research taking this quantitative approach is still missing so then i thought based on the sociological theories one theory says and this is known as the intergroup contact theory the intergroup contact theory says that once you have friendship with people outside of your own community your views about them are going to

become more tolerant positive intergroup contact theory yes integrate the groups people integrate yeah right next was that i wanted to look whether converts would be more likely to accept this notion that salvation can be found in other religions because their parents relatives are non-muslims compared to bond muslims and at the same time i wanted to look at whether economic situation has an impact i'm just gonna you know tell us look how we lie back relax and listen to the salvation and the

damnation of humanity so so the question was interesting was those who have more non-muslim close friends so those who have a large proportion of non-muslim close friends in their friendship network compared to those who have only muslim as their close friends or most of them as close friends so i repeat those whose non-muslim friends have are they are more in their close friendship network they are more likely to believe that other religions can lead to salvation compared to those who who said that their most of their

friends or all of their friends are muslims why did that happen because when you have these positive experiences with people of other communities they re once you experience this positive experience it shatters your preconceived notions about others and so then when you're like oh this person has been so nice to me you know he has always been there for me god is merciful what would happen to them so what happens they go back to their text and they find interpretation that would suit that and this is what happened in terms of those who have more non-muslim as their close friends than those

muslims who report they only had most or all their muslims this uh study sample these were what americans canadians westerners what were they american muslims 789 and this was the limitation that i had and of course you need to do further research other samples but it does connect with the theory right second i found that converts again more likely to believe than bond muslims why again it does make sense because if and this is interesting because i read an article by dr jonathan brown where he talks about this issue and the first thing he started was he said that my son asked about what would happen to grandfather

because his grandfather uh he he's not an he wasn't non-muslim may he rest in peace so what happened was that he said he's in heaven so my point when i'm trying to say without you know saying he's right or wrong that's not my intention but my intention is to show how our different environment does influence i want to ask i i i feel sometimes that many comforts that come to the religion they usually have i don't know maybe it's just my experience but they tend to have a tendency

to be quite awkward about the religion maybe it's just something about the ritualistic nature that draws in people that are almost autistic or something but i find them sometimes much more harsh than regular muslims so i'm surprised when you said converts being more open uh they i i mean i'm i'm happy to hear that but i'm quite surprised because my reaction has usually been with converts sometimes being over like they over identifying and trying to stamp out

their new identity so much that i you know they tell me things like i don't visit my family on christmas i don't do this i don't and i've said to them why you should you know but they but they tell me no um you know this is my new dean and so what what did you find when you spoke to converts so so this was one other part of my research was doing actually interviews with muslims in in in in alberta and the thing is that we have to recognize perhaps one other case might be is that converts like for example we have to differentiate between those who are highly educated and those who are coming from a

lower income background that would have an effect so for example i spoke to a muslim a woman was a woman who was a convert and she did her master's from a top university in islamic studies and it was interesting to see that her views were views that perhaps the dominant was you know the dominant interpretation of that normative understanding it's it rejects that um we have to also recognize that we're talking to converts initially they do show that strictness but with time they do adapt and if they don't and if they don't that is why we do have and this is another issue that perhaps uh muslims

need to be aware of that whenever we have muslim converts many of them leave as well because they don't get the support they get this strict interpretation of religion and that's problematic one another thing at least in north america we need to recognize is that the emergence of that is this for minorities the there are two forms of it wasati and the salafia the wasati was people like tahaj they were residing in america so a lot of forms of these you can say more open to engage different views just for people viewing that ain't too familiar with that is something a notion that um a focal

point or a you know a focus point that had been more amplified in recent maybe just the last two decades really which was about the fec or the rulings for minority muslims or muslims living as minorities throughout the world that's now right and that was specifically focused for the western muslims and the thing is that with that we see that this form of the wasathiya form became more prominent in north america compared to perhaps we would argue in europe and you see that for example in uk there is a still

more acceptance or more connection with trade with diobandism barrelism and such and such that is still that may not be the case for canadian muslims so that is another factor that has to be taken consideration and secondly what what why do you think that is one of the reasons that there is this difference is that those who came to europe after world war ii from the muslim world most of them initially came and there was this intention they wouldn't come back and they were just coming as for the labor market and they were usually coming from the low income group within their own countries and from rural places so they migrated and this is where

actually the europeans did also now you know there's this issue of integration and immigration the thing is there was assumption that they would go back but then recognizing the you know the facilities provided by european societies and the freedom and all that many of them decided to stay well this was not the case for not american for muslims going to north america already many of them were highly uh educated and we're coming from middle and high income groups and so clearly the starting phase of americans of muslims in north america compared to muslims in europe differs and that can clearly be seen now the outcome of that that is the the the what is happening in

terms of the differences you would find the north american muslims holding more open views as compared to muslims in europe again it's not good to generalize but these are types of certain forms that are appearing i've spoken about this on some previous shows as well that the muslims within the uk predominantly hailing from what is a rural village um lifestyle back home and even if uh some of them were for example they had wealth back there even if they did but it's not so much about the wealth

because the moment they come here they've come into a working-class setting so they've come into things like factory work so even if you did own all these lands back at home and you did these things but it was still a village mentality and you've come from that into a working class kind of so even if later on you did do things like like i think the the pakistani let's say muslims within the uk they have i think a considerable amount of for for example wealth they're not like generally i don't i don't get the impression that i mean maybe some are but generally they

quite they're okay or and some are very well off but it hasn't really changed that rural mentality you see like so there's an interesting distinction it's not like wealth doesn't necessarily change it like you come from a village this kind of chodrahat you know chodris and they do this and the caste system and people are still fighting over petty things and you know he's kind of built a wall on my land and we're gonna you know this kind of mental which is totally different to a city you know you've got a doctor an engineer a lawyer totally very different and

and yeah i would also perhaps and more data needs to be looked at it but when i was doing my preliminary research i noticed that american muslim most of them do report that they do have non-muslim as their close friends this is not the case you know in such a such a high percentage or in such a way that in america if you compare with uk muslims yeah so there's a lot of uh i i mean i don't know if the word ghetto is the right word but there's a lot of concentration of muslim communities here so when muslims came here they lived obviously there was security in numbers

so they they came here as laborers and so they weren't like educated so it's safer to stick together and then they just proliferated in these areas so you've just got some entire areas now and you know which are just entire like not intact but almost entirely or heavily muslim and so they don't i mean they might mix at a uni level they go out and they mix but you're right they i don't think they're anywhere near the americans and that is why it is so important that muslims have interactions with non-muslims whereby they can sit together they can have these discussions unfortunately now what is happening is

that there is a lot of misunderstanding transpiring between both muslims and non-muslims you know for example within europe yes you're seeing this movement whereby new contemporary opinions are emerging but the thing is that they're not being you know people are not aware because a lot of times when someone who acknowledges pluristic interpretations sometimes the community might say oh no you know we can't accept such an interpretation there is that mistrust unfortunately whenever there's going to be a mistrust between community between two groups it leads to more strict interpretations both in terms of one's social attitudes and also towards uh in terms of religious

absolutely i mean here in the uk the the usual interaction with the non-muslims is when they're selling them drugs [Laughter] i'm joking i'm joking but yeah so i see now that that's very fascinating though that the um the american majority of the american muslims and i take it i assume like uh canada would be very similar to that anyway that they have this very accommodating view for non-muslims wow yeah yeah and that that is why you can see for

example now you have muslims who are in in their they're into politics they're part of uh groups they're you know they're entering into uh into positions whereby not just at the you know engineering level or medical level that's usually the case right that most of the many muslims initially they came they were working in these types of sectors and field but they are now going different fields as well so they're going to politics and um this is a good sign in terms of showing integration but the same time what is happening and this is one thing that people were initially concerned or what if muslims go into politics they would try to implement you know some form of islamic law no that's not the case

what is interesting is that in fact secular interpretations liberal interpretations are being used to interpret to interpret to give different views about muslim terminologies let me give you an example so you know when the muslims migrated here they came you know they didn't ask scholars but now the scholars had to justify so they gave the notion we are going to give dawah now gentlemen speak of davao what does it mean we need to convert people right no but now what is happening is that some of these scholars are actually connecting dawa as a form of civic solidarity they're connecting it as a form of you

know spread engaging positively sharing each other uh sharing with each other their different perspective there shouldn't be any forceful conversion and literally they're using these words like known as atifa which means which means attachment so what is happening the notion of civic solidarity is making this notion of civic solidarity is being explained it's being used to explain dawah where is this in canada in north america these types of interpretations dr andrew march he has written an article on this source of moral obligation whereby he explains that why how did scholars give permission for not for for muslims to live in non-muslim world but before that what is also interesting

to note a lot of times we think oh does islam allow us to live or not in a muslim in a non-muslim country the reality is that millions millions of people migrated to the west once they settle down then they then the scholars recognized in the arab world muslim world subcontinent world that okay we need to give some justification the reality is the ordinary muslim was not interested in what the scholar would say so this form of interpretation is a retroactive rationalization of the reality so the people became the mustafi asking questions and they in turn influence the scholars that is an important point to recognize bottom-up approach

yes well if we consider the scholars as a top top approach i would yeah i would consider them as you know at the horizontal level left and right yeah but i mean absolutely so it's basically the it's by public demand that's what we're saying innocence yes and and what happened with that and there's another recognition that scholars they themselves have discussed is that okay if you don't forgive this view the an ordinary muslim by ordinary i mean someone who's not trained in fair and all that they would just take another viewpoint so now there's actually a religious market yeah the people have become the clients

and they're people different scholars as selling certain they're selling their own product so we have the religious market yeah this is it's true in a way and this is uh you see i uh i g i get um criticized for this that look oh you know mufti abu leith what he does is he makes things easy for people he gives fatwas you know he gives fatwas everything's halal everything you know so people go to that so the assumption is that i'm not saying people don't do this but this is their point that people are

shopping and they're coming to you know they're seeing something easy and they want something easy this guy's giving them something easy so they're taking it right and again it dep so this is important to recognize these dynamics exist and these are types of ways islam is being shaped then the question comes and so as my research shows then you know we know that this issue of salvation was such a main component yet we see such difference opinion then it's difficult to argue what is the right interpretation of islam we cannot then say that it is islam that is shaping muslim as strongly as then we can say it is muslims in their changing socio-economic environment influencing the

interpretations of islam i mean can one make a claim that there is just one interpretation of islam it is so the problem with that is that we need to recognize whenever we're reading a text we are subjectively interpreting it that is why scholars differentiated between sharia and fair they would argue we fit is that human endeavor to understand the divine mind but the sharia is something that only god knows for example dr khalid abu fazal in his book great theft of islam i think that's the name he argued for clearly we see that also being argued by dr rumi ahmad

as well because there is reality is that is a it's a form of human endeavor it's a form of human struggle to understand what the text is saying and you know we can discuss about issues about so many you know this these problems that we are facing and we will find that two groups are taking the same verse and giving different interpretations this is what has happened between the wasathiya and the salafia groups that is within the you know we have narrations that would say that the prophet has nothing to do with a person who lives in a non-muslim land something like that but then the scholars would argue those who would they would say oh it was for that

context it was just for that time it was not at this particular time that it was different i'll give you another example another example the notion of islam and well here's the reality that was the general perception but now scholars living here finding that in the western societies muslim by and large have more rights than if they live in the in muslim world generally speaking so for example it's a reality that my parents migrated i can get a citizenship here my son is born he gets a citizenship here there are some arab countries you can never get citizenship even if you live for 40 years

right so that form of certainty of being a citizen of a country that is a positive sign so now what happened this positive experience made some scholars within the fifa say oh you know what no no it's not there anymore this is now known as that there's a treaty or there's a peace it's a land of tawa it's a land of spreading islam so you can see how clearly their environment is has influenced them see his here's the thing you see tim to me

just preparing for the kuffar i'm about to say no so to me the sharia is what i've referred to in the past as it's a kind of kintsugi effect it's like the the art in you know japanese art of mending broken bold decoratively so as to make them look even more appealing than they were and you see the sharia were remedies social remedies for the social problems from

that society it wasn't like so for example here is arabia and they've got some problems going on let's say like everybody does and it could be buying selling fighting killing stealing anything so what we're going to do is well how did the chinese do it let's import an entire system and put it here and prior to that nobody's heard of these things rather rather that these people these rules by and large existed amongst them so the sharia is kind of uh it's just

re shaping some of the rules where they're excessive it's kind of curbing them in and giving them back with some limitations so for example when a person stole sometimes they cut his hand sometimes they might have cut his arm sometimes they you know they killed him now the the quran so at the time it restricted it to you know just to the hand which was already a custom it's not that the arabs had never heard of cutting the hand they used to practice these things so this what i find is it's strange that you see and and i know this is probably very controversial as i

say this not not so much what i'm even that is but this part i feel in some ways the scholars have taken the sharia as a demigod that allah can only be like allah without this sharia is nothing like it doesn't like to them this like people say that how can they be on islam if there ain't rules of how to you see to them god can only mean something if he's telling them off i i just find this i don't know i don't know what

are your thoughts on this i i know this is a bit weird but since since you study people [Laughter] so you know since you mentioned and you use the word demigod what i would say is that and i would refer related to the book that we were previously discussing shahab ahmad what is islam i think it's a brilliant book and if anyone gets the time they should read about it some scholars you know more from the traditional scam they would say sharia is like water you put a water in a certain cup it's going to take its shape you put it in another cup it's going to take another shape so that's how they see it but then we if we take this analogy then we have to recognize it's the shape of the cup that is influencing what is sharia to be

perceived we don't know what sharia is at that level when we talk about the notion when you say demigod instead of that we can then consider this is what a lot of people assume sharia is absolute it might be absolute at the theoretical level but when it comes to its application at the worldly level it has always been subjective it has been it will be we can clearly see the difference between the alu roy and the hadees or the coup funds versus the people of madina right now having said that this is important to recognize that a lot of us and this in the past in the pre-modern world yes they were these strict patriarchal rulings but it was

also there was also another form of rel islamic interpretation which was heavily influenced by sufism and philosophy even if the average person didn't know but they had that and that's why you see mirza khalid's poetry being influenced by ibn arabi's [Music] i absolutely think so because when he says that point where he you know he recites this couple he's saying there's something wrong that

because he's talking about if anyone has read it now we use the notion of you know in the divine mind all of us where and then we were given existence which we can discuss later but these are things that we can notice the pictures that the muslims made you know leila majnu had also an esoteric interpretation it was the notion of that divine love so what has happened is that unfortunately with the modernization that has transpired and also certain regions having that influence you have a very fake oriented islam that has emerged in the present time that negates this more inclusive acceptance form

so now what has happened is that when you said oh yeah people want to show you what has happened is that in their mind god is absolute and he's giving us laws like a king yes that is part of this is the islamic tradition now i'm not saying this is my view or that yeah i'm just simply explaining that this was one view but the recognition was that in the past beside the notion of tanzir that there is allah and there is the creation there was also the notion of tasbih between and this was the idea that wheresoever you turn there is the face of god or he is so forth so what has happened is that in today's world it's a very hierarchical approach we are taking

we believe this is what the current says and we will apply that not recognizing this other form of interpretations that have always existed so when you said that from that perspective it makes sense that we're just focusing on text the pre-modern world wasn't just focused on text there were three levels pretext and this time quoting shahab ahmad's approach there was the pretext there was the text and there was the context and this related to the revelation that was given to the prophet of islam may i explain what the pretext was go for it what's the pretext the concept pretext was there is that divine ultimate reality that has sent the text

now how can one reach the divine reality that can be done through philosophy or that can be done through illumination of the heart and then you had those who would say you need to take a literal interpretation and then there was this inter understanding of the text related to it and then these effects transpired at the context level at the societal level so you found that the pictures that people would make of leila majnu are the pictures whereby people are sitting drinking wine these are pictures of the past they were considered as muslim islamic pictures because they were in their views representing something more divine so it was related to the pretext understanding of the divine love between the creation and the creator

so this amalgamation as you can see had so much different various flavors within this interpretation of islam that unfortunately has been restricted yeah um i see no absolutely and and the reason i was saying in this particular way um it's more i'm not you see it's not that people say the sharia is god in the sense okay but it's in practice people not all people but there seems to be many people who to them

if god is only understood through these words of halal haram if there is no halal haram they might as well not be a god because to them what's the point of islam then and i find that so shocking that people say to me that yeah but what's the point then and you think i i i just find it like so wow that you that the only point for you is that there are simply don't do this don't do this please do this or you must do this that is it it very reminds me of a certain like kind of

rabbinic tradition you know within judaism and how whether it was the levites or certain people who who had this very everything is about this lord and they reify the the kind of rafication and then the deification almost of this law that's why i i um yeah i kind of feel that sometimes that you know sagar when he says that um

and and in a way that people they do their bandagi but that they will worship but they need like an idol they need something to worship through and to some of these people it's the laws i mean as bizarre as this sounds people are probably thinking mufti's lost the plot now there might it does make sense because if we notice what happened once the muslim world got its independence from when you know they were once colonized and they got independent you had political islamic movements emerging and they were always arguing about implementing god's

law so this influenced the muslims to assume that okay god you know islam is simply a set of laws whereby we have to establish in order to make a muslim land and darul islam otherwise it will remain as darul so this was significantly influenced also by the political ideologies that were transpiring at that time and that is why no no i i was just going to actually just share an example of something i'd

write okay of a hadith that had actually i've been looking into this topic it's part of the research i was just discussing today as well so i'm just bringing it up here it's a very fascinating hadith initially brought to my attention through uh dr yasmin amin but also then since i've been looking into it's a hadith that is from the sunni tradition it's from abu dhabi uh it's in the muslims of ahmed it's in al-haqim it's in baihaki's sunnan

as well um okay so the hadith people it's from said arkham three people he's telling the prophet that these three people came to ali so all of these because you see towards the later part of the prophet's life ali is a he he's sent to yemen on several occasions a prophet sends him

he collects taxes sees some of their affairs sees to their affairs comes back so he has this relationship uh with them and hence they a lot of the the yemenis were very pro-early as well after uh in in the time that came after but so in this incident these three men have muslims they've all had sex with the same woman in one uh within a short span of time and within one menstrual cycle that same purity uh uh period so and and it mentions that she's she's had this child so they're all claiming that it's their

child now just coming back to this text they come to ali so this so there's a few things in this in this narrative that i just want to point out one is that these men are all admitting to having sex with this woman yeah two that they don't know who the child belongs to and they're all kind of making a claim to the child three they come to ali radhiallah and to resolve this matter now the way he resolves it is he says to them

he goes about and he says well okay i'm going to make two of you take a particular he says that you three are basically in dispute it's like you've all got partnership and you're disputing something um and then in the end the interesting thing is he kind of resolves it by saying he having a discussion with them but then he he says he drew lots okay a lottery basically uh allah

so in the end eventually the one who who got who won from this draw they gave the child the lineage to that person and the others he had to pay them some compensation as though and so there's some compensation involved as well about the dear but when the person tells the prophet this says rasulullah uh rasulullah

all these people the sunni traditions now what's interesting is in this hadith there is no mention of um there's no mention of had of punishing those people when it comes to who should we give the child to they it ultimately comes down to a lottery which by the way in other on its own people consider haram almost you know like drawing lots almost especially to gain something and it's interesting that you have this and then you have certain um scholars like uh

ibn okayim has a whole section which we were also discussing today where he says that look and i'll go over this in my monday nights with mufti anyway for the viewers in more depth but him explaining that that drawing lots lottery is a is it is also an accepted method in certain times and he also quotes this incident amongst other incidents in when it has been used in islam by the prophet and or being condoned by the prophet now what's interesting is here is a method here is something a hadith and i'm quoting hadith here

that people will kind of lose their mind to hear like because they will be like what the hell is is that on about because first of all that it's haram it's you know there's no hud going on there's no this going on and is this too not the sharia i'm asking because that that's it's the action condoned by the prophet sallallahu alaihi by his companion ali and it's so different to somebody saying kill the people kill everybody involved kill the lady and kill the three men i mean look how far up on one incident

the prophet is laughing and saying on the other incident people are saying no let's kill kill kill i mean what is going on here what is going on sorry i've i've lost your is it on mute it's not all right now can you hear me sorry i think you've got me yeah sorry about that um so yeah so this is one thing we have to recognize that look you have taken a hadees and you have given it an interpretation and it just cannot be simply rejected and therefore this is one interpretation of religion people would criticize you but then they would have another reason they would say oh this is

it goes against the mutawater which is the quran and therefore such and such and on that thing there yeah and i know we've discussed this a bit earlier on but it's so amazing that and i'll accept this criticism that people could say well look fine you're saying this about drawing lots this hadith it's in several books etc etc but but you know we want to go with we feel there's a contradiction with the verses or certain verses but when we present to them the verse that there's no coercion in islam and a person is free to choose his faith

they say but you know he is a hadith in that you know whosoever changes his deen then kill him and these apostasy laws isn't this just people picking and choosing when they like when they want they they will say okay you know the quran revolves around the hadith and when they don't want they just find that hadith problematic they'll say you know shield it with a verse of the quran right and this is what is transpiring and therefore so first we then have to recognize that muslim as a community they're shaping islam how the pers the way they're looking at it the

principles they're using it that is shaping islam i'll give you one thing which i want to share with you and i think this is important to recognize that you know when you mention this hadith it reminded me of another narration and you know we have heard about this that there was a woman who was caught stealing and the some of the companions they wanted to you know release her from if they didn't want her to be punished and was said that if the the daughter of the prophet right there's this i say hadees but here's another interesting thing this is mentioned

so there are two companions so these two companions had two different they were the governors of two different places so there was these p individuals who were slaves at that time they were brought and these are two different episodes they were brought to the companion and they were told the companions were told in different situations so this is you know in other different regions but the the gist is the same is that basically that those who caught these poor people they were saying they were accusing them of stealing so you know what the companions did the companion said to these two people like say you didn't steal and they said no we didn't steal and

then they were told go you have been freed now i do wonder why did they do that because maybe they recognize that you know they're coming from a low income background they may not have the they may not have in uh the the courage to negate those who have caught them because those who have caught them they're coming from the higher part of the society and when that narration is mentioned where the prophet sallam is saying that he's trying to show that law is equal for everyone but then these companions also recognize that those who are in this situation they didn't have the opportunity for example they were trying to find excuses because that is what part of also islamic laws are that you try to find

excuses before punishing so my point what i'm trying to say is that all the time you would hear this one narration about like if someone does a crime you must punish that but you don't look at the practices of the companions as to how they deferred the punishment by using what let's be honest this is a loophole you are telling the person you haven't stolen and she or she and he says oh we haven't stolen and therefore they're released they're not given any punishment but why did that happen perhaps it happened because they were coming from the lower part of the society yeah i mean it yeah so it's interesting as well some people highlight i was going through a particular book called um

in god's path and it's interesting that in that book the author highlights that you see as islam spread he said that what's fascinating is that what do people think of islam spreading like they have this impression that islam comes and it does this makeover and he says that you know look and this is a non-muslim obviously he says that from the historical histographical the archaeological uh studying papyri studying uh just other records that we can find

it's very clear that when muslims arrived the day before they arrived the the the natives had rules and laws like naturally they would have had a way of dealing a way of doing treaties a way of buying selling and when islam landed there and took over in a position of power the day after islam was in control they still had their previous rules and laws and it's not how people think that he said that it's you know he said it's interesting that people

think that islam kind of comes and uproots this practice and puts in this practice and he says that actually the papyri and all of these things are really fascinating that um he actually shows in fact he also quotes certain examples saying that look here is an example of a of some papyrus that is found slightly pre-dating islam from let's say the middle east region on how certain people dealt with a particular issue now you know let's say a hundred years later when islam is there that same ruling is there except

now that ruling is also allegedly part of the sharia or it's now a hadith and he says you know this is just very interesting except you know now they they will just do the same things but now they'll just say well you know the prophet salallahu salaam said this i mean i'm not saying obviously that's his whole take i'm not saying it's entirely like that but it's interesting still you know what he's pointing and so we can see that the indigenous culture that was present in those places they were accepted and unfortunately now what we're seeing is that we have this notion that islam is monolithic so you'll see a lot of

the subcontinent of the the subcontinent form of islam was heavily influenced by persian culture it was influenced by ibn arabi mullah southern and all that but just to see for example we do notice those who often become more religious what type of dressing they're doing a very you know they will wear that um type of yeah yeah exactly that is not part of me [Laughter] so this is very important to recognize that unfortunately we are now assuming that there is a certain form of islam

and that is it the islam that was being practiced in these bengal to bengal to balkan region in the pre-modern world they had accepted their own culture and yes they would justify their culture through islam because now they're trying to find a retroactive rationalization it is what is happening even today the notion of islamic banking exactly exactly right i so will said so this is what we have to recognize that you know the reality of the muslims once they're there now the next step is like okay we gotta find some for those who are [ __ ] minded not for those who are like they're like we need to find some reason for that and

they will find a reason and by the way this author is holland right robert hoyland so what's interesting as well is he highlights that he said that the middle east it's it's it seems very clear that the middle east had a very um it had it was familiar territory for for islam or or if he doesn't use these words but if i could say like almost like fertile ground in the sense that they were mainly monotheistic people or people who were familiar with monotheism

so either zoroastrian or you've got christian heavily christian or jude you know jewish tradition whereas he says when islam starts to go further east like into the bulk into uh reaching south asia or or beyond towards just central asia and things like this those regions he mentions weren't actually familiar with this strict or this kind of monotheism the way the middle east was familiar with it and he says that in the middle east islam was to them it was on one hand

it was it had enough to be distinct it had its own kind of thing but at the same you know on the same token it had enough to be related to christianity so it was kind of like a distinct identity but still a very familiar kind of identity whereas in the bulk or beyond you know into central asia those people islam was just an alien to them so he highlights how things like sufism and these kind of mystic non um these kind of like super rational uh kind of interpretations were

played a very powerful role in kind of meshing islam for those societies then right exactly and and yes that is true so for example again i'm quoting through from the work of shah ahmed what is islam the late scholar may god bless him have mercy on him he was a you know he did a pioneer work um so this is interesting people were not aware of the sahih sitha as we are today we have these websites we go and immediately find a hadith that justifies or if you want to negate something we'll find a refutation they were more aware of what masnavi of rumi they were aware of hafiz for them this is what islam was

for the average muslim it was only a few and in fact even the fukuha they were not as well versed as into hadees because then they had these muthasa types of books right or they would have their own later fair books the ones that were con written by the matakari the point is that this mystics mysticism or you can say this esoteric sufi perspective then became part of the muslim community and it's because of that we don't find that they were such intolerant views that perhaps we are finding now that are emerging amongst those who take religion as you know as very important in their lives yes there were people of the past there

as well but they understood that within this just just to just a slight kind of uh addendum thing that uh not so much about whether they take islam to be religion to be important but how they stamp it out on other people yeah by yeah so when i say religion is important because now what has happened is that we're taking a very identity uh very an approach that focuses on identity so islam becomes an identity my identity then entails that i need to wear a certain islamic libas yet the and so we would have scholars we know in the past they would say

wearing panda and shirt is forbidden yet the prophet of islam himself wore roman kings for example as mentioned in narration right so what yet we connected by saying oh there's a narration that says you should not imitate the disbelievers yet the reality is that the prophet i mean of islam just that thought you know just that thought the prophet dressed in roman clothes like this thought is it's like a sledgehammer to the you know the glass construct of so many kind of fundamentalists today

i just heard somebody sent me a clip today about you know certain preachers going on stamping on about you know the shabba bilco anything that is seen as remotely resembling what the the non-muslims are known for what they dress as what they do in their haircuts anything that is seen as resembling them if you do it that is then haram and you know i just heard this clip today obviously needless to say i just laughed at it but but this thought that here is the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam

himself dressed in roman garb right and secondly one of my teachers he told me one day that he said the soap that they wear this is actually bidah i said why he said how ca in you know the companions they were warriors they went into battles this common soap that they wear this dasha can they run in that you know what they do they you know when they have to play soccer they have to uplift it and then right so that was not the libas of the companions by any way it wasn't because how would they fight would they you know uplift it that's a very good point actually

although some of them did fight like that if the fight broke out and hence there is that poem and the whole thing on uh um that they would get ready to run but you're right generally um one would assume because they had you know what they used to call the hulla their suit of the day and age and it involved i know it involved obviously a lower garment upper garment the izar being like the sarong thing underneath exactly the upper garment i've i've never that's interesting i wonder how low it went then

it may have been like a shirt or a mess right right so that's the thing they didn't wear this typical one dress you know they had that bizarre and the upper dress as well you know for example in pakistan we have that azad that some people wear in the ruler area something akin to that would make sense but that's my point now why you know off take another example there's so much focus on the notion of innovation there's a certain style that people wear on the top as correct me if i'm wrong it was the com the companions used to wear a turban and again the turban is not a sunnah for some they didn't wear this way and yet there's so much focus on that if anyone keeps a different dress it's like

when you wear a western dress then oh you are doing an imitation well based on the logic of the notion of buddha wearing such cloth that gadara whatever you call it isn't that bizarre exactly exactly the gulf the gulf kind of ataria yeah right right but the thing is that we don't call these bidda or something these are cultured dresses and every community has that and we recognize that so it seems very absurd that if someone would say let's live in the west but let's wear for example our own culture clothes it's it's quite problematic to say and the reason is that it's it's moshavia it's imitation with the with the non-muslims and then one more thing i do want to mention

there are a lot of times people criticize the non-muslim but wasn't there a narration narrated by ahmad al-aras who said about the byzantine the romans that they have three good qualities one of those qualities what that they stand up to their oppressed leaders and we do notice that within the western society so right there was that and they're the first people if disaster happens they're able to recover from it and they give the poor and the charity this is a sahih and this is not my narration so my point is that what is happening is that unfortunately because of this miscommunication not being able to interact with people we are creating these types of just

today the lecture i was listening to i mean this particular one somebody actually sent it to me because um it was a a podcast it was it had i didn't recognize the other people but it had dawaman in there and it was about four three four other guys and they were just speaking about different topics oh that's it's called chai with bhai or something but there was there was no chai there but but anyway they were uh but there's a particular point where they're speaking about dress and haircuts so one of the other guys i don't know who he is but he alludes to me and hence somebody sent it to me saying hey check this out and the guy says well you know there's

some people today who would claim that they are of like you know of knowledge yet claim a title yet they'll have a chain on and they'll have like a fade haircut and so on but the discussion then carries on they don't focus on me but they just carry on talking and and the and the things that were being said were that you see they acknowledge that it's not haram to wear regular clothes like you know t-shirt trousers whatever but they say that um that if we had why do we want to wear a thobe

they say we want to wear a thobe and and i think that one man says that he holds a circle or something and if anybody comes there that does not have a thobe they get you know that they're not allowed and he says the reason being because he says we want to wear a though because this is the dress of the people of knowledge and i just found that very fascinating because i thought the people of knowledge how who the hell are they i mean how has that been restricted to the gulf i mean i don't get like i'm not saying there's no people of knowledge in the gulf there are but

you know people of knowledge exist all around the world there's no such thing as the people of knowledge are those who were a lungi and they're the people of knowledge so i mean this is just coming back to what you're saying that this definition that we decide something we then make that the the the thing and then we justify it by that same thing you know we just say well why we do this is because the people have knowledge with this and the people of knowledge well it's the cultural address anyway [Laughter] what is interesting is that you know and

when we look at people who hold such views well such views you know these people their shaykhs or their people of knowledge they were of the view 10 years back that camera tv videos all of this is haram and yet we are now noticing that all of them are coming on videos so this shows the problem in how they're defining knowledge it's simply that whatever the sheikh says that is what we're going to accept it let's be honest a lot of scholars in the gulf there i say majority of them were of the view initially that taking pictures or having videos is completely prohibited yet when they found the benefit of that

and unfortunately we have to recognize benefit is not simply saying oh i'm going to spread islam there's also i was going to say that you see i i would translate what you're saying benefit thee as currency like they when they found they were at a loss unless they because unless you uh start taking photos unless you make videos of yourself you nobody's going to go to you know this is that i don't know it's yeah right so if i may add so this is a form of social media yeah exactly exactly capital not actual capital that basically because when they're going to come to some european country

everyone is going to be treating them nicely they're going to be sitting in a nice car and everything i'm not saying that this is a general way of saying but i'm saying certainly that there is that element that can be present so this is a form of you know for a lot of average muslims like they do ask this question okay suddenly they're coming on tvs suddenly they have all these smiley pictures white background how did that become permissible when you were saying 10 years back it was completely forbidden no right so now what happens is that people like you know unfortunately who are their followers and saying that this is people of knowledge i'm sorry but like you have scholars who are sheikh hamza yusuf he wears pantene shirt but what would happen is that

like people are shaykh hamza yusuf would be considered as deviant as sufis and all such but here's the problem another a lot of people don't recognize and this is especially an issue with the salafia movement is that rulings are also shaped by the political dimensions or the political reality of the present of the time they are found in so for example women cannot drive ten years back that was the ruling suddenly you find a fatwa oh no woman can drive in fact it is good i found that to be the dumbest of all fatwas you know honestly amongst the dumbest i have to put out there that women can't drive i don't mean in a capacity sense that are they that

it's haram for them to not be able to drive because basically god will throw them in the hell fire for driving a car so that is the thing that are not people are not people so aware self-conscious self-reflective to think that how is it possible that these same people they're holding as people of knowledge might hold a view and suddenly they change because of the political influence that is happening this is the problem that happens that when we consider people as you know what not recognizing you know they have done a lot of good but they're also human beings having their own limitations

and so you know this is important that the past scholars for example they wouldn't blindly follow anyone they would criticize they would follow even imam muhammad and abu yusuf they would critique abu hanifa they wouldn't agree with them they would say if i said that i think this is the view and i know you you've done a lot of work in this as well and we spoke earlier that they would be sometimes and they still are very accommodating when it comes to their own self-interest and at times male interest because the fukaha by and large are generally men now i mean it's it's not women can become fukaha but the the way

it generally is a very male driven kind of field uh or institution so there's a lot of rulings accommodating for men a lot of the script has been written to accommodate for men you know just sexual needs things like this now when it comes to women it's not like those rulings don't exist in islam isn't that the case but that there's very accommodating rulings for women that will exist in every single topic that you can imagine is that is that not the case right so what we have to recognize that the pre-modern relig world religions and

that doesn't include islam it includes all major religions there is significantly influenced by the patriarchal structure that was present at that time so we have to recognize that the society you know or the interpretations were very andro centric by andrew andrew means male so male centric follow follow reality freud would freud would play that way but yeah okay so we need to recognize that male centric and that meant that men and remember men were the interpreters heterosexual male were the interpretators not women and generally speaking so what has happened is that i'll give

you an example and this is what has happened and this is what then people observe and start think about it so you will find rulings for a muslim man saying that okay when it comes to beard there's khalaf you can keep more than one fist you can keep one fist you can keep a chin strap you can have this one and you don't even need to keep this one exactly why so what happens you are giving leeway flexibility to muslim men to be part of the society but for a muslim woman it's like no you have to wear a niqab and if not then hijab well here's the issue in the tafsir of ibn ashur he says pila that there are some who have given permission so why not why not take this view when you can find views from men that makes

them it makes their life easy secondly we have to recognize that when it comes to just on that note just so people are aware that what you're saying about ibn that what we're discussing is the issue of hijab that hijab what we're calling hijab the head covering the that this uh that there has been some difference but it's been kind of like uh it's been it's been drowned out or attempts to drown it out but scholars have said that look that a woman you know she doesn't have to cover or they or they've kind of alluded to to that difference but it's not capitalized even though this ruling

of the woman covering her hair is not explicitly found in the quran you know one could say it's alluded to or it's inferred from certain the verses of uh you know but it's not explicitly found so one might assume that when something isn't explicit you know people are more willing to exercise a kind of leniency right another thing we need to recognize that when it comes to these things this topic should be dealt by muslim women unfortunately it is a muslim man who is defining the parameters of hijab and

niqab it is the muslim woman who should be discussing about these issues and women related issues why is it that men are men have not experienced giving birth it is woman who experiences being a mother giving birth going through all the different physiological changes yet we find men are doing that and so there's that patriarchal reality which we have to take into consideration i'll give you another example of how you know you know this views that we're talking about they became normative that you have to cover your hair ibn ashu what he's presenting becomes asha's a rear view i'll give you another example of a woman's testimony the pre-modern muslim for kaha as

mentioned by bhadra during his party of bukhari uh in his said that the majority of scholars held their view that a woman's testimony is not acceptable in hadood okay this is what they said like punishments and things like this yeah right now interestingly yes this might be the case but taws and this is he said that a woman's testimony is acceptable in all conditions except that he didn't prefer that they should see you know he didn't feel that it's right that a woman should see some two people

committing uh uh uh having an affair right but the point is he didn't say because of for some intellectual level as unfortunately we have these people who argue for that no yet my question then is why was this opinion ignored and why did this other opinion become the normative interpretation in the community isn't it a crime that a woman's testimony is not accepted if for like this has happened unfortunately in pakistan

were kind of accommodating uh on on on that issue i thought they do it through loophole to table but the point is the hanavith also says when it comes to hadoop laws women's testimony is not acceptable and that's why there was this reaction by the progressive movements again against the al-haq's hadood ordinance so we have to recognize these are the problems uh i'll give you another example you know the in the surah al-baqarah verse 28 to the uh the ayat regarding death the about about you know business transactions what is interesting is that

sorry no that's just yeah yeah can you can you hear as well i think i can i can hear it like coming back it's a very odd time to be vacuuming but yeah carry on okay sure so that ayat and this is what the scholars you know and this is good these views that i'm presenting they are coming from muslim female scholars we need the voices of muslim women so that it becomes part of this discourse because unfortunately there has been too much emphasis of man's interpretation so now what has happened is that this ayat of then that it was related to business transaction yet the scholars connected it and how did they connect they said basically a woman's testimony

is not acceptable except in business transactions so they had already a prior assumption that woman's testimony is not accepted except this because the quran allows why did that emerge unfortunately there was the patriarchal attitude that was present at that time one cannot just deny that take another example we have the in terms of the relation the marriage the general interpretation of the past was done through the notion of men are protectors however this verse has only been said once that men are protectors in relation to women why did not the scholars of that time use the concepts such as um

because they have been mentioned more than 20 times in the quran and then based on that how they connected the notion that the no the idea of marriage is that a woman and a man basically man can have relationship with women and in return she will be able to get housing and such and such now these types of interpretations are cannot be accepted in 21st century and the reason they came was because men were giving their interpretation so this is something that we need to also look at absolutely absolutely no i i uh yeah i mean do you feel

as well that on that the sciences in and of themselves fear sharia that these things don't attract women to it do you feel that as well or is it just that they are why are they not as many women in this field the reason is that a lot of them initially when they start so we have some people who were really uh well i'm not going to share those experiences but the thing is that because i need would need their permission but what i can say in a general sense is that many of them for example they want to study wasan but when they look at the

issues how the fear has dealt with women it becomes really disheartening so for example if you look at the issue of compensation unintentional homo site for example now men's if a man is killed the compensation is more than compared to a woman's blood money that you know the blood money idea the compensation that would be half so the thing is that they find these types of interpretations as problematic but having said that once they do read this they are coming up with their own interpretations and challenging these patriarchal reading like dr asma birla she has written written a book unreading that patriarchal

interpretation of islam or of the quran something like that along that line so what is at least happening is that while there are few those who are delving into it they are challenging this now again i know people would say that you know these opinions they are feminist opinion they're this and that i'm sorry this is the way to negate this is simply one is negating what is being what is happening in the ground the reality is that at least in north america muslim women are standing up and challenging these patriarchal interpretations and which is good i mean but it's seen as uh in in those cases it's

seen as uh uh kind of like trying to sub you know like an insurgency people see as very rebellious but i was because i was asked i mean on going back to that question i was asked recently that why are they sorry can i sorry can i just add one thing this might reminded me dr akram nadev wrote a book al-muhaddisat women's scholars and just to give you is that this is the problem that a lot of times those who are more religious don't recognize you had females the female hadith scholars who would sit where the prophet of islam

is resting and they would give a jazza to men and today you have an issue of co-education you can't have co-education so my point is that still at least in the past there was also the recognition that women could be a scholar now we have this hyper-masculine approach towards religion which is becoming problematic for a number of muslim women and we have to think that into into consideration sorry i interpreted and interrupted you but no no not at all i was just uh curious from a sociological perspective as well that i was asked recently that why uh are the why are these fields

male dominated and i felt that okay i mean it's a admissible that historically you know things were disadvant you know disadvantageous for women to kind of participate in but today you know especially in the west for example that's not the case but why still and i felt that the field of islamic law is a bit like the stem kind of fields that it doesn't draw

it doesn't draw as many females to it as as it does males that the female mind generally is not it doesn't find it as appealing so given so for example research in a lot of uh european countries has shown given an equal platform women still tend not to uh go towards the kind of stem fields like mathematics and engineering and stuff like this whereas men do and women tend to go towards other fields even given an egalitarian approach um i i felt that the sharia is a bit like

that as well like i think it's a bit dry i would take a different approach and even when you talk about the stem research one might be saying that that is not the case i mean not all research shows that and secondly we have to take into consideration so if you're controlling for everything but there's a socialization aspect men so from a young age this is what research also shows that females are motivated to do something else they're not focused they're not motivated by their parents and relatives to go into stem so that did you not feel that do you not feel that the male and the female

psyche and the brain uh not from an egalitarian perspective but from a kind of uh from from its kind of proclivities and modality perspective do you not feel that they are different no no the reason i say is that because socialization has an empha has a lot of significance how a mind develops but a lot of the a lot of the research would be against that wouldn't it not really a lot of contemporary research would be that there's the notion that there isn't any essential difference it is being influenced by the socialization process that is affecting

uh from an early age for example no i'm just curious because so you would feel that given let's say men's and this isn't about the biological structure of size but more about modalities and the way they they construct the world is identical to females so yes i would say that we cannot give an essential differentiation between genders we have to recognize this socialization so for example the male brain does have more dedicated to visual spatial areas there's also androgynous uh the

areas that have been accepted that have been impacted by the androgynous kind of receptors with all the testosterone that females generally wouldn't have but even in other aspects uh there is a difference i i would assume that that is quite biological but it's not i'm not saying a difference is that one i'm not trying to say that you know these are better than them but i would assume that the brain are not identical even if they're not identical i would still suggest that how your socialization process happened that has a more impact

it is like the tabla rasa and how the tableau ross is then being added to that by the the ideas and the forms that are being given that has a more stronger influence on one's outcome so this is one approach that is taken for the stem difference that you have mentioned do you would you feel that given an equal plane men and women wouldn't would be equally drawn towards things like let's say more nurturing fields i believe so yeah i think so i believe that you know i think so so for example why is it that women become more they become teachers at an elementary school and men

are not it's not because you know men cannot be cannot have a more nurturing personality it is that from a very young age men are told to be tough to cover their you know they can't show their feelings we have words in urdu unfortunately we use don't you know don't cry so those things have to be taken into consideration that is why i'm not you know for me it is very difficult to take this essentialist approach of differentiation because then this was also used unfortunately based on that then this can also be used for giving a very misogynistic interpretation of religion which has been utilized then i mean because i'm not saying that there's no

socialization i i would feel that there is definitely socialization does exist but i would feel that given an equal plane men and women not always but in several occasions would drift in different directions that men would be driven generally for certain things i i feel that there would be there would be a huge socialization aspect to that as well but let's say for example the uh the the nurturing aspect that we spoke of i would feel that women

inherently are more driven towards a kind of a motherhood that they would have this kind of more nurturing soul to them by default i'm not saying men are not incapable of nurturing but i would feel that then that it wouldn't be an equal plane that even if if they're all the same let's say you had 100 men 100 women and they were all treated equally i don't think a hundred like the majority of the men would grow up thinking i just wanna uh you know being so care i think that testosterone in them would still bring out that side

the the very the different kind of that the you know there's there's a kind of like a like an aggression that the kind of which you see the aggression and these things can't go hand in hand with as much nurturing like you can't be as aggressive as awesomely nurturing and like these are kind of counterparts and i feel that hmm i don't know what i take it you would disagree i would because the thing is that you know i would argue counter argue and say like okay this notion of angry being an angry young man again it's a socialization process that is happening my argument would be more to that that a

we like this time i would say the reality is that muslim women have not been allowed to enter this into the into this world of fear clearly they were not we know as a fact that even mukta sal khudari the scot that the alcadori you know for example i think it was him that he would go and ask his wife about issues about [ __ ] you know certain issues and she would give him the views and then he would come to his students and say that this is the opinion and then they found out that he's going to his wife the point is that we have unfortunately created these gates whereby we're not allowing muslim women to enter certain fields in fact dr aisha chaudhary has written an article on this

regarding you know we do have even the islamic studies has different forms of approaches one is the orientalist approach but then there's the patriarchal approach now there's a new form that is emerging the intersectionalist approach intersectionality is a theory that is whereby there are minorities that are coming into this that is people of color women and such and such so those who do not may not hold normative opinions for example and this is part of the discourse that is happening um so this is something i think that is important to recognize another thing no no no sorry guys i finished that then i've i've just got a point going back to but yeah yeah

another thing we have to recognize is that many of them have entered this but then they are not taking this very classical approach whereby they're talking fake from this traditional way as we are defining they're actually looking at from different way now they are criticizing this form of that emerged in the past and the reason now they're not being recognized is that partially it is maybe it is also the reason that population are not taking them seriously we still have unfortunately idea that a sheikh is someone who wears a thob and has a big beard for many people it's difficult to recognize a muslim female scholar

who for example does not wear a hijab and i'll give you an example that the author aisha chaudhary shared in her article that same one so she said that basically she went to morocco to discuss about she was in a panel regarding women's right and there was the sheikh who comes and he's trained from jamilazar he has this beads you know the typical how you have people carrying beads and first thing he felt uncomfortable because she doesn't wear a hijab and when she started criticizing questioning him started giving a different viewpoint he got upset and he is like i'm the sheik you should listen to me you are not so he was trying to the he was trying to lower them by saying look i'm qualified based on what where he was dressed and studying from

jamal azer and because dr aisha hasn't studied from an institution so what except she has done a phd from an ivy league that is the university of toronto my point what i'm trying to say is that my point what i'm trying to say which is important is to recognize that this chef because he was being questioned by a woman he wasn't able to accept no i i agree on that i 100 agree and and i think that is just um that is clearly cultural and that is people it's a dent to the ego and then they feel i think it's a dent to the ego to be undermined anyway and then more so when you think the other person you you're judgmental

in thinking the other person doesn't you know he doesn't even look the part and even more so if you're very sexist to think from that gender you know like a woman i agree with definitely with with that i on on just a tangent going back to that discussion since you know your area of research is sociology i'm curious you know with this uh the kind of egalitarian tabula rasa clean slate uh perspective would you feel that women so for example um this side to women let's say this

side that we see in society that let's say there's more a preponderance to uh to nurture to to be caring to be emotional to be in contact with the emotions that kind of side that that that is in society this kind of narrative uh do you not feel that that should be the case then or do you feel that women should continue to to be like that or should they kind of by like go more to it because there's this image that like let's say men are not as in touch with their emotions and there's this discourse that men should be

more in touch but women let's say are generally seen as like in society or as being very emotional or they're being very nurturing or they're being very let's say do you feel that that should be then brought down so what first i would say is that you know for example the notion women are emotional that has actually been justified to say why their testimony is not acceptable so that is one issue that i have when we generalize secondly i don't mean by here by the way i'm not saying the you know like people just diss women in saying well they're just emotional i don't mean in that sense but the general social archetype of the female

uh that is this this kind of nurturing loving or let's say this caring this kind of mamta this kind of side that you see right are you saying that should be dull down to new yeah what i'm saying is yeah what i'm saying is that is a woman's agency it is her right to decide what she wants to do and how she wants to be it is not the domain of men as in myself to say oh this is what i want i should accept however they want to define that that is true but would you feel okay let's say would you feel a woman that had let's say uh less of that side of this kind of

femininity which is to some extent socially constructed in some extent i would argue it's natural but just uh to some great extent but people might challenge that uh wait wait a minute let's get your take quickly on that do you feel femininity is constructed constructed okay socially there is that social construction element to that and i just want to say like when we're talking about this gender look we have to recognize even the gender has a traditional understanding to it the notion of masculinity for example that is a gender construction it is important to recognize that the traditional notion of this gender binary

does not exist anymore in the contemporary world and it's important to recognize that the person the way they're defining themselves we have to accept them no okay that that's true how they're doing it but let's say would you find do you think in society like you would find women uh i mean is would you find that appealing to you as as as as being a man being on this side of the the defense so to speak would you see a woman with like lacking or less femininity as as a more true archetype or something

appealing to you as a man so for me what would be if a woman if a person wants to define themselves as a woman i would accept that i'm not going to feel like oh they have less or more i would you what would you find more because would you not because if i i understand that there's a certain amount which is going to be socially you know designed but a woman let's say not that's not feminine because i would as a person i would find femininity incredibly incredibly attractive as a feature and that's your perspective maybe for some they they don't have that perspective

and if one you know so this is what we have to recognize for some that may not be the case but you don't feel that these things to a great extent are just in in nature because animals have male and female and they attract obviously they see femininity and they see masculinity they haven't been socialized through that sense it's just part of the yeah that may be the case but then we are also different from you know animals we rsvc that are way more highly uh developed in terms of our cognitive processes as well so for me personally um yeah i have a when you're asking about my personal opinion

like i said for me the main thing is that if someone is defining themselves from a gender whatever gender they have whether they call themselves binary transsexual transgender if you know whatever they are comfortable with i will recognize them for that and there is a reason why because i myself am coming from a minority faith if i'm getting that recognition from the lgbt community for example so i would have to recognize them as sure and in fact this is what is happening within the i mean i'm not disagreeing with you see like if let's say there was a man who is effeminate or there's a woman who is very kind of

masculine in her approach now i'm not i i don't have a problem with them i'm not going to be like oh what the hell are you you know you know why are you like this i would accept them however they are i'm not going to discriminate but do i as a person feel society should move in a direction where they neutralize these aspects of masculinity and femininity i don't personally feel that society should do that but because i feel that these aspects are like i mean if people chose to do that individually i i would you know i wouldn't discriminate against

them i would accept that's their choice but do i feel society as a whole should move towards a gender neutrality generally we have to recognize that sometimes what the society decides can become another form of tyranny so for example let's take an example of tattoos in the past in canada if someone had a tattoo you know he or she wouldn't get a job so this is very important to recognize that we're talking about the how should the society decide it can lead to tyranny as well and these are discourses that have to happen through dialogues and coming to a consensus

whereby we make sure that the minority of any form of minority is not you know they're not losing their right that is important absolutely i mean we've this is hypothetically we wouldn't be able to you and i we wouldn't be able to influence society in that way i don't think individual people would but let's say if let's say we had this is just a kind of like a thought experiment if it were up to me let's say do or do i feel it should not that i'm forcing people but do i feel society should move towards a gender-neutral

so this masculinity and femininity have faded away there's just you know maybe but if you want to say anatomically male and anatomically female individuals exist but they there is no nobody behaves feminine effeminately nobody behaves in a masculine way it's just neutral do you like i don't think i i would find that a nightmare as a person i wonder what the thing is that you're not yeah the thing is you're not gonna find something like this happening because everyone is different in terms of how they're going through their socialization process but having said that this should not become a way like if someone doesn't want to identify themselves with gender for

example then we're like no this is not right how the person feels comfortable and if the society then decides at the end of the day we have to recognize that the society evolved based on how the community or the population of that of that society is looking at so you know we have to recognize that in fact we're seeing this changes even among the american muslims in terms of how their views regarding these types of topics are evolving right so for example if i and i'm just gonna give you an interesting data ten years back for example in 2007 the question was asked should societies uh support homosexuality

or should society discourage 30 percent some or something like that this is muslim non-muslim this is just generic survey so this is muslims in the u.s they were asked that should society support homosexuality 30 or some said that today more than 50 percent are of the view that the society should accept not suppose i should accept homosexuality now my point is that this is the difference that is emerging and then you're seeing different discourses that are transpiring you have some people who would say that you know in islam it's not allowed but we're living in a secular state and therefore we should support as a minority some are challenging the pre

inter pre-modern interpretations some are still not agreeing but this is what happens that values constructions of values happens through dialogues now i just want to like on this issue of the you know uh about homosexuality there are different opinions now that are emerging within american muslim discourse i mean i i was asked about that as well and i i made a video basically saying that look some ulama in islam it is a minority opinion but some ulama in islam did say homosexuality was fine now i said that look if somebody chooses to follow that that's their business and let people be

i i did say that that let people be you shouldn't harass people and and for a sociologist what would be interesting is that why would a person like mufia boulez come to this because questions were coming to him so the community becomes that mustafi is asking a mufti to provide a fatwa and so he this is that sociological process or the change of socio-economic environment that is influencing different forms of interpretations of islam so therefore then to condemn and say oh islam is against this group or that becomes problematic because you for example you are a reaction or an outcome to what the community is asking jonathan brown has written an article

and he got a lot of criticism from certain individuals he came up with this view so because so he came up with a lot of you know he came up with his justification quoting for example this is how discourses transpire now at the same time you have some and majority of them in the muslim world they still don't accept this but as we learn more as we engage more as we go into the uncharted territories we are going to find things that we're we're explaining we're talking about we're forming formation views that we're not present and i agree with you

doc i mean like if we look at um like let's say growing up in the 80s um i'm probably older than you but let's say as a kid i was a kid in the 80s and growing up in the 90s um homophobic remarks for example were very commonplace yeah most jokes were like that in fact when i was growing up and even till after it was very common to say things were like oh like if you did something oh that's gay they would say that and make a lot of these kind of jokes society as a whole the social consciousness of

society is kind of shifted now people they might some people might still you know do that but a lot of people now recognize the offensive nature just as when we were kids in the 80s racism was commonplace and people you know they would say [ __ ] this [ __ ] that all this kind of stuff you know uh say to black people you know the n-word this that it was like very common here in the uk in the 80s now that's just me being a kid i mean but as i got was a teenager in the 90s then even then it was

actually around but by the 2000s it definitely has kind of gone like people in fact if a person you know if you said to a person like now or even you know since like a decade if you said to somebody you know racist they would get very offended that like even if the person was about to have a fight with you about something and and you said like you know you racist this and the person would be extra offended how do you call me racist like it's now permeated the social consciousness that racism is unacceptable and i think that's a great achievement and in a similar way it's what's

in what's kind of growing is this understanding of uh this homophobia that you know like people are homosexual we shouldn't kind of uh you know we shouldn't persecute them we shouldn't diss them we shouldn't kind of do this kind of stuff i shouldn't just you know make life hell for them now what i'm intrigued by is i find this a more western phenomenon western muslim phenomenon that they are very strongly that many not all many very strongly um homophobic like like they have to make a

point about it all the time now when i was in pakistan i spent many years in pakistan i studied in the middle east in syria uh you know i've visited other places as well but those places i studied spent years and years there religiously they held very similar views they were you know not accepting of let's say homosexuality at a official level but there wasn't this kind of neces like this kind of active hatred like there was just like like in pakistan they would just kind of mock it and they you know it's seen as uh like

oh yeah you know like they you know they say gandu this that and they just mock it but they wouldn't there isn't this kind of thing like oh my god let's go attack that person or you know they hate this proactive hate why has that been triggered in western muslims so first of all you know we one thing has to be noticed is that unfortunately there is a segment within the muslim community who hold very you know who hold homo negative attitudes homophobic attitudes and that's a sad thing because the reality is that and this is you know one has to

recognize this a lot of times in many instances it is the lgbt community that comes in the defense of muslim minorities in the west and yet unfortunately when we hold these views that are very homo negative that's not conducive for a healthy dialogue having said that also we need to recognize that this change amongst american muslims that the majority of them are now embracing more positive or this more their ex they are supporting homosexual rights is a positive thing in that sense they're recognizing uh their how the system how the their experiences are are making them evolve into recognizing

that just as we're minorities they should also be given the right so this itself this data it's quite interesting to notice that more than 50 percent of american muslims support homosexual rights um having said that we also have now muslims like people who are you know they are muslim scholars and they are gays as well so we are having a unique form within west at least in north america now the reason that you you know when you're saying oh some of the western muslims may hold um intolerant views well it also matters depending on the economic situation what data shows and there has been a research on that i have an article right in front of me economic inequality and intolerance attitudes towards

homosexuality in 35 democracies but this is not done for the muslim survey it's just done for a different country are you saying economic as in the poorer they are the more is that what you're saying so the so what research shows is that those who are established economically speaking what happens is that when you are in a country like that is economically struggling you're more focused towards your own meeting your material wealth meeting your material needs that is your you need a house and everything so if you see anything that is different you start to fear that differentness that differentiation this is what happens in a lot of countries that are economically

struggling they start to criticize others i do wonder whether pakistan is that reason that you're seeing these types of religious intolerance because there's the economic difficulties that individuals are facing right so now what happens is that once you're in an economic developed country and you are prosperous as well not just the country but you as well that now you don't have those material concerns you shift to non-material concerns that you're shifting towards those things that you feel are going to make the society a more just so you focus on social justice why are american muslims more supportive of homosexual right it's because of them as a community generally they're in the upper level in terms of the

income groups if you look at other other groups other communities they tend to be on the higher level but if you would see the european muslims like in france at times they're struggling like in uk there is that struggling phase as well so to argue that it's we know western muslims hold that no it is to see okay generally those are holding strict views are they coming from the lower income group because if you look at american muslims who are more settled more established they are tempting to have more open views and that is why you're seeing articles written by aliakin they're being written by who correct me if i'm mistaken but if that be the case then uh doc

then the muslim world ought to be very preoccupied with this topic of homosexuality but actually it isn't it isn't because it does it's not in the right now a because um generally you have your cultural historical um you know exp what you call forces factors involved as well these things are not discussed because they're considered established but i i see i mean you've lived in pakistan i've lived in pakistan i had a uh pakistani uh doctor psycho psychiatrist on as well you dr youssef in one of the episodes and we touched up

a bit on this topic as well uh it's interesting i actually feel that there's a greater sorry i was just looking for a book as well i just bought a book the other day by uh it's a really fascinating book by dr uh what's her name madhavi menon an indian who's written on the sexual um well the kind of i don't know the term she uses but which i suppose i was going to say fluidity but that could be interpreted in other ways but the kind of um the impermanence of the sexual nature the flexibility the agility

of people's sexuality in the indian subcontinent she's done extensive research on it and she's got several lectures now she actually highlights how she's not a muslim but she highlights the is the islamic part in that as well like she mentions how a lot of the sufi shrines and the sufi saints they would have this kind of gender fluidity that they would dress up as the dulhan of the fulan saint and the you know being the and in a lot of the poetry as well you get amir and other people speaking in a feminine form for the saint now you see in

in countries like pakistan even today i would argue that there is a much greater fluidity actually of uh of sexuality that they're not actually in like guys will always go holding hands with each other and and doing all the which people here are much more uh you know that they find that gay basically if you know if you're just sitting there and your guy friend just held your hand you're gonna be like

one thing you know there's one book i would recommend it's written by dr scott google homosexuality in islam so it you know he talks about again you're saying he's an american muslim convert and he's talking about and he's a gay muslim and you know it's a really interesting book so what we're noticing is that why is this emerging because people are trying to find an islamic ruling or justifying right but when you're talking about the past and by justification i'm saying again we're having this reality and we try to find some sources within the text to justify whatever position one is taking so you know part of my sociological training is not to say which is right or wrong it's simply to observe what is happening

as a phenomenon the muslim world as you're saying you notice one thing i notice you're saying they're going to these sufi shrines and that's the thing that when i was talking about this balkan to bengal region there was this you know it wasn't a very fake oriented muslim community in the past like today we are we are hypersensitive is this halal is this haram that wasn't the case and so a lot of things that you know they were given at different interpretations or they wouldn't like consider it as restrictive as unfortunately we are finding it today amongst muslims that is very true those who are pregnant so that is the problem that is also emerging um you know

what i've at times heard you would say it is the folk version of islam well that folk version of islam was more pluralistic and encompassing of absolutely absolutely and that happened because of these types of philosophical teachings and sufi teachings that were part of the society absolutely so how do you explain the type like uh let's say um um daniel hakikochu kind of kind of type doctor and it isn't about names but i know you definitely don't want to get but i'm just giving an example to make it kind of concretize uh you've got you know educated

presumably reasonably affluent i'm assuming uh you know being from uh having been to harvard very well uh articular you know in that kind of structure of society where i'm assuming he's not just worrying about uh survival at a food level um but yet very concerned with these kind of issues all the time that it dominates the discourse and i see this unfortunately with several western american especially muslim imams who i otherwise find very chilled and relaxed but i find that they

seem to hate liberalism and i don't because liberalism in europe means something different to america but what and when you ask them what what's the problem because i just understand liberalism has less power to uh authoritarianism to the to authorities but they will the first thing they bring up is if the left are allowed gays i mean this is like the the kind of pandemic fear that they have that everybody's going to become gay and and i don't get it i don't understand why this scare and these people are like you're saying you know they're from uh affluent

backgrounds they're educated they're in prestigious positions they're not the kind of poor people right one thing i would mention and again i mean like as you can see i'm not um not going to engage in terms of no yeah yeah and i don't mean to just to be clear for the public as well for yourself uh doctor i don't mean to kind of drop names on you i was just giving an example for the viewers but you could keep it general of course right so in general what we do notice is that and this is what we have to recognize that when the fake books were written they were very you know right wrong right wrong and so this type of mentality has influenced a lot of people even the

educated one because they're coming that frame of mind with that that they're saying what is the truth and so they take a very uh they take a very uh um empirical approach you might not empirical approach but they take a approach that's saying that this is one best way the thing is that this is problematic and they're not utilizing the other interpretations or the other dimensions of islam so they're very fick orientated and they believe this is islam a lot of these people when you would see those who come on this dawah scene they don't mention sufism they're always talking about halal and haram in bukhari and muslim the reason is that this is how they

understand islam to be and if one takes this interpretation of islam than the hassan component as in the hadees of the prophet of islam which is that you worship god as if you see him that is missing and so i feel at a lot of time there is that unfortunately spiritual there is a lack of spiritual development that is transparent i want to add the uh um you know doctor say if i could please you see i i understand that side you know there's these people who who are almost what i and i don't mean this you know in a way to say on people who suffer from things like

autism but i find this kind of religious autism that some people bring to this uber black and white and you know everything must be a virgin you know regimental but there are but i find from a lot of regular american kind of imams who i otherwise find quite like awesome like and like even people who i love and respect like let's say you have to say tuna institute with all it's most of its kind of imams and you have other people who i find generally icons but there is this

and this kind of fear of the left and of liberalism especially in america and and when you ask these people that what is it that you're afraid of because here we understand liberal to mean the state has less authority over you the the first thing that they mention for being very kind of uh conservative ultra-conservative is that they will promote they say that if the left are left to it they will promote lgbt values and and

so i see this must be a kind of a huge concern even amongst non-muslims i'm assuming in america is this something you've picked up on in your studies or is this just something we see over here or i don't know you know i feel one of the reasons can you hear me right yeah hello okay so what i feel one of the reasons might be is the effect of modernization itself what do i mean by that when modernization came the idea was that there's one best way of doing everything and the muslim world was heavily influenced by the modernization process that's why you started finding that

you know instead of uh recognizing multiplicity they were always trying to find that one best way and now what has happened for a lot of muslims is that they're saying that okay if we accept lgbt where do we then you know hold our grounds they're afraid to recognize that religious interpretations are not immutable as is being argued and they then feel that okay if there is nothing to hold on to what would we know what is islam and so there is that also issue i feel because that is what i've heard as well they would say okay where do we stop but then that one has to be honest and ask

okay this is a continuous community discourses and it's going to evolve so i feel that is that you know that level of there's that fear that the final frontier [Laughter] what i would say is that that's why sufism was also you know it it became a part for these communities they didn't have issues that because sufism itself the forms of different uh theories that came emerged that but in perspective it takes a very deconstructive position actually so no i was gonna say yeah that is true yeah about it

do you first of all feel that the the the people in power uh in muslim circles especially that that's who i'm talking about like imams etc they are very like they our impression is they don't like at all uh anything to do with liberal like they see this as an insult in america so the so we have to differentiate between the imams and the ordinary muslims like the ordinary muslims they're okay with them that's why i said majority of american muslims are supporting the imam many of them are trained from where either from

salafia institute or from deobandi institute we know those who have studied and these madrasas you can't even challenge certain the opinion of their teacher let alone you can think about it even like i mentioned like respectable and things very dear to me as well i respect and love like zaytuna institute um you know it's something which isn't like that it's a very contemporary model but yet they will very clearly make that i mean they will be very clear that we you know we it's not only we're not a part of that but a disdain for liberalism and for the left right so what would what is happening is yes

that might be the case as this is you can see but these are platforms whereby you will probably see after 20 30 years these institutes themselves are shaped evolving into becoming more liberal in their approaches right now this is the standard but because they're giving space for discussions among their students soon there is going to be difference of opinions that are emerging we can see this as an example of yakin institute the articles they're writing whether it's about the kerat whether it's about social attitudes they are going they're creating views which they themselves say oh we're not holding this

but that they are presenting that itself is something to be considered otherwise 10 years back these views could not even have been discussed so what happens is that while these institutes might hold these views sooner or later they're going to be challenged and then there's going to be discourses happening so it's always that thesis and these kind of yeah yeah exactly right that is how dialectic approach that would happen and it would lead to something new so no doubt what you're saying about zaituna is or other institute that might be the case but in time because remember like for example there's in the past no one would like 20

years back you would not see muslim woman being the you know the main speaker in a in a gathering now they tuna inviting muslim women those who are trained in islamic studies for example why did this happen because they're facing a new situation and of course what would happen they're going to justify it go by going to the text like dr akram nadaveen wrote in his book this he found this sooner more liberal views are going to be coming and then there will be a retroactive rationalization that is to define these these um you know define these actions as being permissible in religion

but stretching the parameters to include the non-muslims as well in places like america do you feel that that holds true though that people they have a disdain for liberalism i cannot say about non-muslims because that is not my focus of research so unfortunately i cannot add any insight if i would say anything it will just be nonsense you mean like the stuff that i usually just say no not at all not at all that is not the focus of my research like because that's because that's interesting because when

i it's the impression i get and i sometimes feel that like so for example there isn't even when you look at their political parties there isn't really a socialist party that kind of like here in the uk you have like labor which in essence is socialist you know it's about like general welfare and i suppose in canada you do have general welfare though and stuff like you have like the health system and stuff but i suppose it's still linked to the uk as well uh in some way but yeah there's one thing i might just one point i might mention and this is written in a book i think secularization and sacred by philip norris i have to check it

yes american sorry yeah american non-muslims also might hold really um conservative views and the reason compared to european right the reason might be is that american society has more income inequality compared to europe european countries so that might be a reason but you know because it's not my part of research so i'm sorry i cannot add any valuable insight tying into uh affluence and economic prosperity do you you know there has been several studies and you're obviously very familiar with them with your background to show that look as uh affluence grows and prosperity

economic prosperity there is a decline there's a kind of like a negative correlation between religious fervor and you know your kind of economic prosperity would you feel then that there is ultimately as this booms higher and higher on this end there is no space ultimately left for god so what is happening is that and you know these are we're living in a post modernist world you can say and we have also there are different factors like globalization and all that so what is happening now with regards to religion

it is shifting from being an institutionalized to more individual so now people do believe it's not that god has gone away because there's this notion secularization theory this was the idea that the more secular society gets the less religious people will become but still we find people being religious the reason is that the form of religiosity is changing in the past what would happen is that you would have institutionalized religions that is not the case anymore because of globalization what has happened is that knowledge has become a public domain knowledge is in the public level now for example i don't have to go to a mufti in a madrasa i can simply google and to find my own

view i can even you can go to youtube channel and just watch it exactly why this is halal according to muslims i just need to my default kind of premise is all things by default because themselves says this is the amongst them that everything is permissible unless it is stated otherwise this was the majority of views like you mentioned so having said that what is happening is that god will be there but the way we are assuming and that is why people are now focusing more towards spirituality maybe that's the reason that people are also reading into agrarian philosophy and southern philosophy

because what is happening is that many people are not finding that that you know the notion that we go to the mosque and we'll find some peace inner peace to be the case there are muslims who are not attending mosques they're muslims like they don't go to the jummah because they say in the maliki school of thought as mentioned in ibn rush one school of the one viewer within malaki is that it is further fire so as long as mufia bullet goes and pray i'm done with that you know then they've had it if they're relying on me this ship has long sunken

so you can see that god will be there but the way we are defining the relation with the creator that is changing that is why people are saying we're spiritual that they're believing something but the notion of god as given in that institutionalized religion that you know he's severe he's going to punish for everything that is where the fake orientation also comes that is being great because what i've seen is that i've seen that there was in the last maybe two decades um prior to these last few years there was this huge pushback against religion and this very

demonization of religion you know you saw uh people insulting religion religion was ridiculed it was dumb and stupid to believe in god it was seen as very anti-scientific it was seen as you know backwards and neanderthal-like almost primitive but i find in the last few years this seems to have now that atheism has kind of you know there was this fervor to it in in as it's kind of really you know in the militant days of of dawkins and the militant days of of uh christopher hitchens and sam harris and this whole

but as it's taken root and stabilized uh you know as it's become like now now it's there it's a it's it's a clear contender it's not going anywhere now they themselves a lot of people have started to feel that void of what you know what you refer to as spirituality or that connection with the transcendent uh or the loss of community or the loss of even like people you know you you see in some of the lectures they will now say you know that is true that you know what do we do here because this seems i would argue it's an

innate um kind of a yearning that we have for something transcendent um and it's kind of brought them in some ways brought some people to saying well okay what i'll do is i'll connect but just not with any organized religion right so yeah that is what is happening this notion of void and we also see this also in the approach that social science for example is taking in its past social science was very a positivistic so uh discipline that is always looking at numbers and trending but then there was the shift recognizing that look numbers that is this empirical approach is not enough so they started to take this qualitative whereby you're looking at this

ethnographically phenologically and so forth recognizing that the reality of an individual is based on his own understanding so that's the that's the thomas theorem that says that you define reality as the way you're assuming to be so there was that loss especially we're living in a world that having been modernized in such a way that we have lost that connection community connection in the past you used to have community connection for example with the covet situation now you have jobs people are working from home so they're not even having interactions with their colleagues and all that so human by itself is a social creature and it also it requires it thinks about why am i here

with this vast universe what is a person like me doing here so these are existential questions that is why there was an article written by a scholar who said so long as death remains these existential questions will remain religion is not going anywhere the forms would change of course so true and just a quick note before i want to come back to um you know where you're speaking about religion and you spoke about the plural plurality and i know you've looked into and you've mentioned before akbarism this whole akbaridin philosophy but just before that just on a tangential

note with what you're saying people are now more and more online and the need for human interaction i feel that without face-to-face interaction it's it's incredible how devoid we become of compassion and empathy we become very you see it's because it's just a name and a profile and we just have to you know like the amount of hate that is spewed on online on things like twitter on you know social media platforms

because it's it's just a person it's just a name like it's not even like even if there was a photo but we can differentiate between the electronic thing and a real human and i don't obviously we can differentiate but i mean we can we emotionally react differently yeah right right and i agree because that human component is missing but another reason is that i feel even if we are meeting face to face that level of respect or tolerance is still missing because now we're looking at at times human beings we're looking at them we're looking at them

as simply numbers we have lost that idea that they're also part of us and that's where you know burying philosophy would come for example the climate issue that we're having climate crisis that are transpiring we don't recognize that the nature around us is also part of our reality we see it as a form of using it so that we can gain through it economic benefits you know i mentioned this just the other day that and it was on my mufti's meet up and obviously the person we were kind of a disagreement but i mentioned that the quran says

that you know from a primordial source of origin some water some liquid got created all life like we are ultimately all form for all forms of life are ultimately related we are related with nature yes and that is what the sufi matter physicians this is what they were talking about so the notion of vajud itself like what is vajud and the difference between a jew and mahiya is what is it what is it and what youth is is it the reality is that for a lot of

people and that's why they were able to show more tolerance is that they recognize that the other person also participates in this vajud now one can say oh we don't have any proof for that and this that's fine but i'm just simply showing the effects of that those acknowledge that okay the other person i disagree with but because he's sharing this with what is happening is that he's going to be more careful with the other person rather than seeing him as an enemy you're seeing him that he's a different shade different modality different form of the jews so when you talk so when you're talking about just the you know this this everything's come from this original primordial entity the

sufis they would say there's more to it and they would say where so they would quote these verses the sufis they would say wheresoever you turn there's the face of god and they would also say that you know there's the ayat in surah al-fusilat it says that we will soon show our signs within the horizons and in themselves until they know that it is the truth the word who refers to both as in both the cosmos and also to the individual self and god in the quran says that who

wow i allah really thought wow that is amazing i never thought of it like that before yeah yeah so the quran then also says that what zalika and now who will have what you're trying what you're saying here just for so for the views that allah says that uh we will show them the signs in in the soon we will show and i've said this this meant in in the cosmos and then bringing it back to the quantum or in themselves but going on the verse following on to say hatayatabayan until it becomes manifest and clear to him

until it becomes clear to him that it is the truth or that he is the haqq this is what you're saying right right so that so the who refers to the most and now this is what the scholars would say that the unknown who can be for both the cosmos and all that and at the end who is the truth so now what happens is that if a person takes this way even in the bad things that he's seeing he finds goodness because what he's saying oh this is all different forms of arjuna they have different grid this is the origin or the etiology this is the birth the genesis of

anil haq is this this is the manifestation related to because here's another here's another thing that we then have to recognize that when we say that and then by the worst after that you know it's continued says is it not sufficient that your god is witness over everything so it extends then now with having said that why would the scholars take this view because they know one of the attributes of god and i'm talking this from a sufi perspective right they would say that god is the truth so the shahada we recite la illaha in allah if you remove the elah and you put in haqq so what it means is

that there is no truth except the ultimate truth there is no truth except god so then they say okay we see everything around us so there is that notion of it is he but then also lesaka misli mislihi shayyun there is nothing like him so that is why ibn arabi would say look with the two highs there is the tanzi component it is not he but then there is also he it is he so in everything that you see this is what happens because we as human beings are made of we have two forms or not two forms we have two things the names the non-existence

but then the vajud that came and doesn't it say in bukhari i believe that god created adam in his form surah i mean it is a a hadith obviously critiqued by some but yes that god created but adam in his form so the sufis would say that this is what it means that we can understand this and of course there's another in the quran it says that god blew his spirit into adam so so what happens is that there's a recognition that everything at the end is waju so but at the same time they recognize that human beings have limited capacity so my vintage or my point of view is

true but it can also be challenged by another point of view because the ultimate truth only lies with the divine and the divine can only know itself because we cannot know because there is nothing like him so the more we know him we aren't getting to know him but we cannot completely know him in this in this view of just coming to understand this this is um you know heavily put forward by uh [Music] and the whole it's very very controversial topic that is known this that everything in essence because

what it's saying it's not saying that in a way it's not saying that oh well this is god you know this phone or because this is how it's criticized isn't it that the salafis say well if god is everything then when i eat this apple i ate god you know that's a very kind of a dumb critique of it isn't it i mean what if you briefly or just in some ways break it down what is what

interestingly arabi never used it was a student who used it for the first time but yes we do find the concept of in the works of ibn arabi now here's one interesting thing why is it that ibn arabi became such a prominent scholar that people would follow in the pre-modern world from the balkan to the bengal region there must be something to his works now when he's talking about wahhda he sees different levels of hierarchy the reality the essence the zaat the zaat is something that cannot be defined it is unknowable ineffable laissezka misli shayon but the whole

cosmos comes through his names it is through his names that the different formations of reality are coming into existence so all of these things that they are they become in ishara referring to his defined divine names so when we see something for example we see something that you know a judge what do we recognize he's providing justice god is a god is a judge when we look at a mother the mercy that she is showing to the son what is she reflecting the mercy of god so the divine names are being shown through this way and these divine names are coming from that that ultimate reality

that cannot be known because the thing is that if you try to define the ultimate reality you're restricting it so yeah on an at an ontological level uh the is when when it's expresses that everything is in essence a you know every being is in essence a part of is just the being which is god how does that tally does that tally in two ways is that in the sense that god is through everything he he permeates everything or is it in the

sense that we simply exist in the imagination of god are we uh are we in the uh the way uh north uh conjures characters and has a story are we simply in part of this story that is in the mind of god not imagination but the mind of god yeah so our archetypes were in the mind of god one can say and that's why you know he said uh when it was that i read dubai much

he was said that now he has come in he has been given existence so he has been separated but the sufis would say you have to be separated because to act to actualize divine love there has to be feroc there has to be separation only through separation can there be visal so when god said kun that was the separation and it is this journey because now what is happening is that the separation has made the love and the beloved vlogging the beloved in this case the creation longing for in the words of me where he says

and here up they they say could be translated you know one of the amazing aspects of it could mean from myself you've kind of torn me in pieces but um i see so that is why there's separation otherwise you can experience that divine love at the same time it makes sense that you know why are there so much diversity because we'll take an example look when we say everything is vaju it doesn't mean everyone everything has equal degree of what you

said it's not just in the mind of god no it is that the mind of god had it and then we came through this existentiation that we were given existence why were we given existence the sufis would say so that we could recognize so that we could experience this joy of what existence is because our in our reality was what non-existence non-existence is connected with darkness it is connected with uh separation from the good so we wanted that and so as a blessing it was given to us and that is why then the sufis would say maliki yomideen connecting deen with dane

that this is the loan given to us the existence is given from god and the reason and therefore he would ask us what did we do with it wow so now having said that we also have to recognize that their degrees of gradations and when we see a politician we say look at that politician right absolutely right when we say a person is norani the sufis would say we have to recognize this this gradations of degrees of

so the closer you are to the divine you're going to get more light so it is like the example you are in a room let's say your lamp the the room's bulb is on the right side whatever is closer to that right first of all if it's closed there's complete darkness if you turn on the light the furniture that is closest to that light would have the most intensity and the door is the furthest away from that bulb so it wouldn't have that much intensity so this is the example given to recognize that one who gets closer to the divine they would find more intensity in them and in fact what did the prophet

do for god make me a light allah make the [ __ ] it's beautiful to allah exactly so why and there's a and doesn't it say also in the hadith and the sufis they quote a lot that when allah loves someone he becomes his eye his side his hearing the hand with which he strikes so what is now happening is that the person is getting closer to the divine and so he is acquiring the beautiful attributes of what justice treating nicely and so forth so what

happened is that the sufism became a form of ethical discourse within the community the sufis would say if the more you get closer to allah the more these rahmah attributes of his you would show because god has two main component the jalal and the jamal and god is beautiful and he loves beauty so as you can see that the example i gave you in the room the further away you are from the source of that light the more darkness a person would have so this is the idea given that if a person goes away from the divine light the further they become trapped in this darkness and the darkness means they don't have any feeling of goodness

now of course people can criticize it from an empirical sociological perspective but this is one discourse that has always existed in the muslim world in the pre-modern muslim world i'm talking about the medieval song yet this is missing in the most in the present contemporary was this what uh i mean we you mentioned the akbarian kind of philosophy was this his goal and objective what he was trying to set up sorry like of akbar in his because the akbari dina akbari

his philosophy is known as sorry earlier on when you mentioned and i thought you meant because of pluralism i thought you meant you know akbar the moral king okay right okay his philosophy is known as philosophy now his goal was what his goal was to make a person al-kamil the insaan al-kamil is the perfect human being who becomes the you can say the connection between the divine and the creation within him he finds the divine attributes and that is why he would then say that god created adam in his image

and there's a hadees right so one of the attributes of god is almost as well oh right yes so now you should become the mirror of the moon the divine right so that he sees himself through that oh you know there's two interpretations that have today just blown my mind i've never the one was what you mentioned about an i'd never come across that before and this mean obviously hadith very well known

but he is a reflection of the divine wow okay that is it is yeah that's why it yeah that's why ibn arabi said that you know a person of faith whenever he reads the quran he will find multiple all the time you'll find new interpretation and in the quran it says where the trees the pens the trees the kalam and the ocean upon seven oceans the ink the words of god cannot be extinguished because if we recognize that words of god that is the quran then in the muslim philosophy god is infinite that cannot be defined so therefore how can his words be constricted and that's why

arabi was so comfortable with accepting that there are going to be pluralistic multiple interpretations and because because i have come across on the verse of the quran where he says [Music] where he says that this means that the verse means that indeed your lord is one god now his interpretation was that this verse was being addressed to people generically as in including the kuffar

and not just to muslims but saying ultimately no matter what you're worshiping he was trying to say you're ultimately worshiping god yes if i may add to that the quran says god has decreed that you worship one god the ayah that you're saying he has decreed now the reality is that even the muslims are worshipping god with their understanding of god is that not a creating in the mind a form of god so if we would say you have taken one form of of the understanding of god it is true the mother is alive they're taking the tanzi approach someone is taking a more thus b approach

so that is why he is saying whatever you do no matter no matter whatever you do that at the end of the day these are manifestation tajali of the divine even and vajud is what it's not for you this is not something that is just outside of your eyes the outside of your body the thoughts you're creating these are mental forms of vajud the doubts you are having these are doubts of that are formed based on vajud so what is now happening is that if a muslim prays to god he has a general notion of allah so ibn arabi would say this is a form you have given to god

so what is is this not the same thing what another person is doing except that person has given a uh corporal image of god so what he's trying to say is that no matter what and that's why he became so controversial is that people don't understand what he's trying to say he is saying that whatever you think of god you're limiting him and yet remember lesaka misli shayon there's nothing like him you know the question here is though that with this understanding with the you know allah and tying into look you know the creator of the the great majestic cosmos with everything and

you know right down to the quantum uh allah has with with just mesmerizing um you know perfection for it to exist now why one would question here why would a god so magnanim amazing and you know in his splendor why would he be trying to threaten people and set muslims against other people and saying look what jahi dilku farah al-munaf and do this and do that and when you know what ultimately everything

all of being is contingent upon his being so what difference does it make i mean we are just you know we just not even ants in in his world right so yeah these are some questions that do come up with you know once we recognize this form but then the um you know

the muslim scholars they would it's it's not an easy question when you're talking about this like okay why are these coming but they would say at least when it comes to the issues of and i can speak from a salvific perspective is that these are threats that for example are made so that just like a parent might say if you don't do this you will be grounded it's part of a discourse a kind of a narrative it's a part of it exactly a narrative a discourse and so this is that has to be considered at the same time we have to recognize that the divine names themselves have a conflict amongst them so god is

revealing himself in manifest form through these divine names so you have the jamal and the jalal attributes and so there will always going to be these forms of differentiations that are going to be happening and this you can see in the manifested world now does it give a clear answer no there can be more concerns raised to that but this is how the muslim scholars would i in the past when i've been asked this as well have kind of uh said that my understanding is that you see just as in nature for things to permeate and to survive

and thrive that there is they require a kind of um they require an antagonistic reaction for it to for it to kind of like we mentioned the hegelian kind of dialectic things don't just even in nature just go like this there is an antagonism and then there is a kind of reaction and an antagonism and a stimulus and in a similar way these discourses have been created that you know there will be these muslims have been told to go forth and do this and this is the narrative for it to kind

of spread out the way it did a competition so that this is this is this can be taken as an approach as well that as you've mentioned that to construct something there's always going to be coming difference of two groups are going to come they're going to have differences and then they construct together clearly we are seeing this in this post-modern world sorry we're seeing this in this uh uh postmodernist well that basically how people are coming together they're coming to something that is greater than them that is something beyond them so yes that may be the case but then someone can argue why even have these conflicts

at the end of the day we have to recognize that this is the divine theater in which the divine is manifesting himself this is how the superiors say and that we are fortunate to experience that and the reason we go through these difficulties is to experience knowledge experience divine in its full gloriness in its full radiance because if we just felt goodness we wouldn't know what bad is and once we know what bad is we a appreciate what good is but now we have a complete form of knowledge so it is making us closer to understand what the divine is because the divine cannot be restricted to any thought

because again that is yeah i mean it's very well uh said this and i i agree with you these are very sometimes um challenging kind of questions people put up it's not uh it's not easy but i think i think that's a you know tremendous answer to it do you feel that consciousness because i i translate often the rule as consciousness i don't know what your thoughts are on this and does consciousness ultimately at some level uh whether i've said maybe it ties into some kind of a stream uh maybe it's

connected then some stream then maybe it has some connect ultimately with the divine all right that that's a that's a really good question and here's the thing why you know we're talking about i said it is important for muslims to learn about islamic philosophy because they have focused on these issues consciousness self-knowledge when i'm now let's look at mullah sadhara mullah sadhara one of the great scholars uh he was his in terms of he was from isla shari but in terms of sufism he accepted ibn arabi he accepted sarwardi and he accepted uh um

no and what is interesting yeah [Laughter] [Laughter] that is why i said that you know when i said about the madrasa they don't teach you research they don't teach you how to to go into knowledge is because they have this frame structure and that they would say follow this was a islamic scholar was significantly influent by ibn arabi sarvardi and um if nessina for example

so uh now the issue of consciousness look the problem is that and this was the issue they had like okay how can i know that laptop that is in front of me is exactly what it is what if there's this epistemic gap if there's a gap in epistemology right so then they came up with this issue of it

that there is a unification that transpires between the knower and the known which is true it happens through your self-knowledge so one of the books that i've i've been reading i've read it once i'm reading it again within a group reading session is written by dr ibrahim kalin who is a student of dr sayed hussein nasser and he has written the book knowledge and later islamic philosophy with regards to these questions i would suggest you should read this book and also doctor said nasa's work he's a brilliant scholar he you know he was trained in traditional uh philosophy

by people like alama tabatha bhai um so sheikh hamza yusuf also recommends him so you can see he has a really he's very knowledgeable man so now the thing is that here's one thing this is how the muslims start you can doubt everything but you cannot doubt your own existence so you have that self-knowledge that's cartesian isn't it descartes the partisan has that issue that he bifurcated the the quality and the quantities of the things so there was the rest externa and internet so that's the reason that it didn't go that forward but before him came if nessino where he

spoke about the hanging man if nessina said that if you remove the limbs of everything still a person would be conscious of himself so the thing is that whatever you have doubts you cannot doubt your own existence if you doubt your own existence you're certain that you're doubting so there's always that element of certainty right so now you have that level of certainty what is interesting you are listening to me but this knowledge is being transmediated it's being mediated by yourself knowledge yourself cannot accept anything except itself yourself the knowledge of yourself cannot accept anything except

itself that you are able to take that information that is coming outside of you from me and put it make it part of yourself means there's an isomorphic relationship what is happening yeah iso means same and morphing mean form right so there's something and that's where this whole notion of also comes that there's something similar because only the light can know the like that i'm speaking to you it's you're able to listen to it but it is being mediated by your knowledge of yourself so it is penetrating it is entering yourself it's kind of being subsumed into me as part of my knowledge assumed and yes and

right what is happening you see your intellect is increasing it is increasing and that is what happens that there's another form of reality this is how the soviets would say or the metaphysicians would say now that this has happened at the end of the day all of it goes back to that divine conscious all of that goes back to that ultimate reality because why because yourself cannot be created from any other thing except itself it cannot be anything except itself so the principle of yourself has to be the divine self oh wait just break down whoa that's so

right that part again yes so you're coming to the self is the the kind of primordial the ultimate uh building block that we reach it is the ocean it is the ocean without the shore it is the ocean without the shore before you think about yourself you will find that yes you don't have any invitation now we know the self cannot be anything except itself okay it can where did the self come from it has to come from that principle and that is what is this is where allah breathes into adam

yes yes and therefore vajraval over jews is what it does not depend on anything it's it is necessary in itself so that is how also through one's consciousness one is then able to understand what the divine consciousness is and that is why though people know this is a hadees that is not sahih but it can be found through quranic principles as the quran says that those who forget themselves god forget forgets them so what was the opposition yeah exactly so one who knows himself knows his lord that is incredibly profound that is

incredibly profound i have to say wow this this you know what this discussion needs to be had on mushrooms [Laughter] wow i mean you know that's an interesting topic that this the the sufi saints of the past or other mystics they had this kind of uh this this relationship to some extent with uh with psychedelics and things like this i'm not sure if your research has extended into areas like that i i haven't i haven't looked into that they might have been but these scholars like ibn arabi and all that they were not like these as far as i

know based on their history what i've read in fact ibn arabi what is interesting ibn arabi was actually also a mahadasha the reality is that he studied with 70 he studied muslim bukhari and by the way just to make it more interesting he was of the view that a woman can lead men in prayers as well you see he was in rahiri no interesting people argue that but he considers what's the history ah right okay wow that makes more sense to be fair that does yeah he did not restrict himself to any school of thought because he recognized that the truth cannot be limited you know the more i

um you know as with time passing by uh dare i say the more i age but with time passing by i've grown an increasing fondness to um you know uh ibn arabi mahitin ibn arawin obviously the maliki one i've always been fond of but this for a different perspective this and i've started to find this whole realm so just overwhelming this thing of consciousness and and i feel that it's it's kind of left in a lurking in a corner in the

general islamic discourse because the muslims are feared because they consider him he was known as unfortunately his critics among the more literal is called him a sheikh al-aqfa this is that means the most disbelieving why did they used to call him the red sulfur thing the the brittle ahmar thing search for the red sulfur i can't recall exactly there is actually a book on written yeah you think there is yeah i'm sorry i i've read something as well years ago i can't recall it now there was something about

that they that it's like the hot stuff or something in it that they used to call red sulfur sorry yeah i i can't recall but one book i would recommend about it is the sufi path of knowledge by dr william shirik he is another he's another student of dr sayud hussain nasser oh by the way doctors say those sentences all of these there are those who were criticized because they edited you know they came up with the studies yes yes there was this uh because they said he influenced or was part of the editorial team i don't know whether he was directly right no no it came it came through actually it was just the harper collins yeah so he came and his students all of

them are part of um all of them are his students our close students right the reality is that this community that is the community of dr said and history that the most intellectual uh people that one can find one of the most intellectual people one finds in the muslim community because they are the people who have looked at ibn arabi and all that so what is interesting is that one thing about ibn arabi he wasn't like a person who didn't know about hadees or fir he was quite increa acquainted with hadees sciences as well he has names he has both women and men as teachers okay yeah no that's a very important point because

people might assume that oh you know this eerie fairy talk coming from uh you know he's some guy who's just it hangs about you know maybe certain kind of uh uh you know you get these mausoleums and you get these kind of darvish kind of people this understanding is not clued up about the sharia outfit but he was a great scholar from a fairy uh kind of you know perspective that's very good to to clear yeah so another thing is that the muslim the difference between the pre-modern muslim world in terms of knowledge is also that

there was an understanding that there is there was both emphasis that is the intellectual and the transmitted unfortunately in the modern muslim world those who want to study islam they are more and i'm talking about the sunni world in the sheer world you still find that the akhlee transmit the ugly form of knowledge that is the intellectual sciences are being spread in the sunni world all you have is the most of it is focused on the nakhli transmission transmitted but the thing is that a lot of narration like i said al mohammed moment and we also know there's a narration that the prophet was a person who spoke few words yet he was he was his meanings they were

vast they were expensive they had more than one one saying there's another racial relationship that he said that he'd been given and that would yeah with brevity of speech that means like using just short words but the meanings have you know they have exponential kind of ex expands to them exactly so how can then one just assume one interpretation of the prophet thus when we say sorry there has to be another level of interpretation wow that is profound i mean putting

ibn arabi to aside but this whole talk of consciousness of this kind of stuff this i meant is left lurking in a corner it's not part of the islamic discourse today why is that because what has happened is that we have been influenced the modern muslim world came after their colonization end in and so they were heavily influenced by this notion of science and technology so with all this notion of consciousness ah it's not empirical sufism not empirical there was a rejection now what has happened in the west is that they have recognized the

limitations of this positivistic approach this quantitative approach that is why they're moving towards qualitative they're moving towards like in social sciences ethnographic studies or phenological studies so now it's being incorporated sufis studies as well and that's why they're appreciating that because see the problem is yes we might have rational mind but then someone can question what are the limitations of the rational mind like for example i'm looking at the data and based on the data that i'm creating trends how did that how did that perception of general trends come into my mind these are the questions people started looking some are looking at from a neuro uh from some are looking from a um

neuroscience yeah neurological neuroscientific perspective but some feel now we should look at this perspective as well and that is why you're seeing that a lot of scholars non-muslims they're working on these topics but in the muslim world we're still you know in that stage whereby we're thinking that empirical approach is the way and that is why you know when you ask me in the beginning not many people are taking sociological studies why because the emphasis has always been on what engineering doctor yazada's now that is happening is computer science and mba because this idea is that we take this one route this empirical route that is the way and it has affected the whole thinking unfortunately

i mean take the issue of keratin as well this notion it has to be like you know this is what it is ah to be honest if one looks into the keratin they will find all the differences in the past imam tabari he a lot of you know he didn't agree with i certain keratin in my response i had said that the quran i'm not sure if you're familiar with it but i had said that there was an inherent dynamism in the quran that it was meant to have this facility where people who are receiving it could substitute certain things if it created ease for them uh yeah there is yeah i mean so we have

a narration there was an article written by akeem abdullah bin masood who was amongst the quran if an ajimi a non-arab would come and he couldn't recite he would give another similar meaning and say can you not recite now of course one can say that perhaps this another word synonym this other word that can be exchanged perhaps it can be you know if the prophet had given that might be the case but what i find is more interesting is that the early people were more flexible in their diverse views more accepting than what is happening today's world they recognize the differences and this is effect the companions differ

sometimes i quote about you know prayer issue unfortunately this is such a big issue in the subcontinent world how to pray interestingly it's like 1400 years later still fighting over how do you pray so i quote this isn't it i quote this is an example volume iii um and this is a saying narration because either it's narrated that he said that um when he used to pray he used to do rafa then only once like the hanafi's do his son

his father the second caliph he wouldn't do it now the point is that if we take a muslim interpretation if you assume all these narrations are saying i'm not taking sociological at this case i'm just trying to explain from a muslim perspective in that way then well here's the issue omar is a sahabi his son is a sahabi how is it possible that they differ in their prayers the reason is probably they were taught different ways because the sunni interpretation is that both were companions close to the prophet not just that abdullah ibn zubair whose father is zober whose grandfather is abu bakr from the maternal side he used to do sudden like the malik holding your

arms by the side as you pray now is now if he didn't know how to pray wouldn't his father grandfather say what type of prayers you're doing now it's fascinating that you have something so um so in your face like the prayer which is so ubiquitous it's everywhere it's five times a day and yet there isn't arguably a single clear unquestionable sahih adith on where to place the hands the reason the reason is that it seems and this is one of the things we have to see within islam from the beginning diversity was accepted i'll give you another narration

when the time there was a person who came and he was he asked the prophet as to the times of prayers now you know that when it comes to asia there is the mislain and the missile the shadow right so this companion who comes the prophet one day taught him to pray us or when the shadow is equal to one's length and then the next time when the shadow is equal to two shadow two length two length as in the person's uh height so if it's twice the height and then it was told that the prayers in between that we and remember we didn't have watches in those times we didn't have ghania so what it happens is that there was a diversity that was always acknowledged from the early i felt that in early

islam the self period there is a much greater uh security of faith that the muslims carry than later muslims because it's a sign of insecurity that you have to stamp certain things out because people who are confident they usually like they might say something you know it's like imam malik when he's asked that the sunnah and what the way of the prophet and he says that you know should we instruct somebody to do the sunnah and he says he says like you know you you you just tell the person this is it and

you you don't need to stamp your authority on someone this this sense of confidence that they had yeah it's yet exactly and at the same time they didn't have issues with diversity this is what i feel at the same time it seems like yes they were living in a patriarchal society the early most important but still within that you do find that there are things they're doing that even now we find it problematic for example umer made a woman inspector of the market this is a narration according to sheikh al-bani who considers it as jaiyad or hassan i might be mistaken but this is what it is now imagine today a lot of clerics

they're saying women should stay in their homes there's a new form that unfortunately is emerging among the conservative clerics is that they don't even want their their their their their wives or their female relatives to that their name should be known yet we know the names of the prophets exactly exactly and the quran leading by example with maryam um yeah exactly so so we have to recognize there's so much into it and it's interesting like you know how they for when it comes to women rights unfortunately there are many we have this patriarchal approach where we are restricting their

rights this is very unfortunate that is you know absolutely wow wow doc it's been amazing you know it's uh it's wow and i know you've had an uh a very long day as it is today and we've taken uh so much of your precious time but i really have thoroughly um enjoyed this conversation it's been amazing it's been it's been just so much enlightenment just from for me and i'm sure the viewers feel the same is if people i know some people had been mentioning in the comments as well about uh if if somebody want to reach out with you

to you if they want to connect um what is the the best platform to do so and secondly are you involved in any local teaching or teaching online so you know i just created the skype id for you so you can share that with them our fries what about generally social media are you on uh no no i don't like social media too much issues like always everyone is just too many too many exes chasing after you why no why are there too many political discussions happening

it's really tragedy people are dying suffering you know and we are arguing because we're living in privileged societies we can right now discuss and then go eat burger and then condemn and say is a coffee and all that look by essence everyone is good let's come to a dialogue let's sit together even those who make fun of islam talk you know if you want to win over people show your character in islam the emphasis has always been on character building sure if they criticize islam okay that is fine they're criticizing interpretation islam because we don't know what islam is because it is how we are shaping it to be but let

us come to you know let's sit together and let's not argue and unfortunately this is becoming a business now among the lot of those who are communicating islam by condemning criticizing others that's not healthy that's not the ways of the salah absolutely absolutely couldn't agree more i mean it is character that assen that it is through character that we captivate the hearts of people it is not and this is why i say exactly the same thing if people want to criticize islam i have no problem i say criticize it let us see the best of the arguments

that you have it for those who are seeking legitimate answers inshallah we will answer it or somebody will rise to it and answer it i have in my experience never seen personally islam to ever not rise to the challenge right and and another thing we need to recognize is that because we are you know we have that non-existence given us existence so we are in that stage that we cannot know everything in other words we need to be humble and recognize yeah this is my opinion but i might be mistaken just like the scholars in the past would say like this is my opinion of being probably it is right

but your opinion it may be wrong but probably it can also be i so agree with what you're saying say and i often i often i just want to say that i you know people who in fact there's been whole videos dedicated to me about this by people who hate hate me unfortunately that i often try to respond to questions by saying look i feel um that this is what this is in my understanding this is what uh the ruling is and and people have uh you know they've taken out so many cutouts of me say and and i'm doing this in the you

know i've seen the clips people have sent them to me and saying where they say hey check out you know this guy and i'm being asked a question and i say well i feel or in my understanding or i believe or not often in my understanding or i feel and they're showing that on like 20 different times i'm saying that and they're saying what a joke you know who gives the hell what you you know who gives a damn what you think or what you feel tell us what the quran was yeah right and right and the thing is the quran sunnah the moment you pick any book it's not just the quran pick any book you're going to give your own exactly and this is why

i do this because i am being transparent that look yes i'm reading that verse of the quran in my understanding this is what it's demonstrating you see none of us have access to the mind of god you know we do we don't know is that the exact you know the ultimate understanding i personally believe that the the verse of the quran of superpositions that they can mean different you know people can take different meanings from them by default but you see i'm just being transparent about it so are the other chefs doing exactly what i'm doing but they are just presenting it

dogmatically they're saying no no no i'm not saying this this is the view or this is the ruling allah say i'm telling you just i'm just a kind of voice piece on behalf of god the truth is no when you read something you automatically apply an interpretation exactly and this has to be recognized but i think the good thing is things are changing uh people are starting to recognize that a scholarly view presented as a hajj as a proof is not the case or being considered like oh this is the definite interpretation because of the spread of knowledge in the past people listen more because there was an excessive knowledge

today it is accessible if i don't agree with you for example i can find another view right but the main thing to recognize is to show humbleness and humility and main thing is correct because you know a lot of times the reality is that if islam spread in the past it was through adam and character which unfortunately a lot of times we don't we're not showing that having said that at the same time one shouldn't take this exclusive interpretation and say oh i have the truth and no one has if one believes in wahadata truth is found in everything even those who are exhausted absolutely and there is

i believe there's an author of i think it's i'll have to double check it but where he actually says this about somebody says that hukuma lies this and he says don't say don't say it's the judgment of god yes say that is my reading and understanding of what and hence you know and i get criticized the reason i'm saying this is i i read sometimes like people will come on my videos and put all these comments and i get so this is one of the criticism that they keep trying to smack at me that you know who the hell wants your view

but my point is that this is exactly how imam malik would answer if you read the mudawana if you read imam ahmed his father if you read that they would say that oh the best of what is the best the most beloved to what i've heard or ara i think or they would say akra i dislike that one should do this they wouldn't say so often you know this is allah is saying this they saying they would say that because this is their interpretation ultimately right and another way of looking was that sofiana authority said that if i will look at someone who's practicing

another way that i don't know i would resume the best and say oh he might know something that i don't know that is also important yeah that you know it's there's such a beauty to that legacy there is such a beauty to it and it's a and it's a shame that we're losing that legacy because we're having people who are not fully trained and they're speaking you know like they say above their pay grade and they're coming on you know they're coming on youtube they've just learned islam in two years and suddenly they wear that soul when they speak about islam and it's tragedy that thousands of people then listen to them because the reason is that they are

presenting islam in a way that is only one interpretation and that's not what islam is about islam whether we like it or not is something that it's a muslim discourse it's a discourse among muslims and that is then reflected through this idea of what islam is oh shukran shukran jesus and i just want to mention if anyone is can want to be connected you're more than welcome to share is that is that what the best the skype is is the one right okay i just want to make sure as well is that just uh that's just your name

isn't it ali 2 0 2 0 ca oh okay just so guys you heard that it's all one word isn't it yes let me just type it to you if i'm not yeah okay so sayyid ali ali right 20 20 20 20 ca at the end for canada yeah i'll just put that in the comments there people do connect right once again

allah bless you and your time and shukran for sharing your thoughts and your evening with us it's been you're welcome thank you for absolute pleasure ladies and gentlemen demand right with that people have an awesome evening wherever you are do remember to subscribe if you have not subscribed to my channels and click notifications then by by being part of that would you think i'm gonna have to somehow squeeze you out of that

consciousness people stop being stingy show the love that's it take care of yourselves wherever you are i'm putting up the exit page people stay blessed salam alaikum