Dr Mehdi Sajid | Politics of Power, Patrileneal Forgeries & the Problems of Orthodoxy | MindTrap #32

[Music] [Music] all right people are let me bring up the profile picture first of all

of the esteemed guests tonight people allahu akbar just look at that photograph and people i present to you the mahdi that you've all been awaiting at the awaited messiah if you like this is dr mahdi though so dr mahdi sajid all the way from germany people let me bring him right in assalamu alaykum for giving us this time tonight and i have to say you have the

patience of a saint martial thank you very much for having me right now it's an absolute pleasure people first of all let me just do a quick uh sound check with me right on facebook and youtube just to make sure everything's coming through fine guys can you hear us if you can't well you know there's a reason someone bookman

you know it's uh those of you on facebook on youtube is the sound coming through all right is it cool i don't want to be uh just in case we're having some awesome incredible convos and then all of a sudden you say well you know we can't even hear what the hell you're on about mufti [Laughter] ah right so somebody said uh sound is good you're doing it soul man you're doing it you're doing it right so people without any further delays the reason this took so long

is it took me an hour and a half for god you know for i i don't know why but for some reason streamlabs today obs was it just would not let me launch and it just kept crashing kept crashing uninstalled reinstalled reconfigured all whilst having professor right there just having to put up with with my technological ineptitude may i say but shukran shukran for hacking it

doc doctor for those of us uh who uh for some the viewers who may not be familiar with some of your work uh dr mahdi is he's from mainland europe from between from germany but also also teaching in the netherlands but i'd like in your words tell us a bit about your academic journey that has been leading up to this very moment in life for you to be on mine trap

of course well um right now i am assistant professor of arabic and islamic studies at utrecht university in the netherlands but i'm still living in germany between germany and utrecht because i've i'm originally from morocco but i moved to germany when i was 19 20 years old and i've been living there ever since so i studied a western philosophy and islamic studies in the beginning i wanted to go with engineering

okay and then i had a life crisis at that time i decided to yes somehow i was i was bored to be honest with maths etc although i guess the dream of every moroccan father is to have an engineer is that is that how it is not medical yeah yeah medical that's one of the i would say one of the main problems of of islamic thought today right because a lot of people are underestimating the importance of philosophy of the

humanities in general so if you have only physicians and and engineers uh well who's gonna think uh you know produce islamic thought and who's gonna produce uh all these kind of uh other beautiful things um so i i decided to to stop what i was doing and and and and give it a give it a shot and one thing led to the other and then i found myself you know preparing for a phd and then after that i finished my phd in

germany in bonn and then i was offered a position in in in the netherlands as a postdoctoral researcher to work in a project on muslims in interwar europe because that was a main part of what i was doing in my doctoral project so i took it and uh one thing led to the other and uh now i i got the position the rest is history just uh right we're usually encouraged towards the stem field alright that is

definitely yep i'd say that muslims definitely just somebody mentioned that they felt uh dr mahdi's sound was coming through uh a bit low but i mean i it's registering absolutely fine on my end here and the equalizers are picking it up well but just increase the volume so all right it's better right now right well it's loud and clear dark it's loud and clear so uh islamic studies i mean is this an interest you've had all along is this just is it a familial direction that you've been put in through by family your personal interest why why the interest in islam i mean

come on now you're in germany living the high life in bonn [Laughter] well um here's the thing uh the i grew up in morocco in the 80s and 90s and to be honest islam was not really a topic of discussion in moroccan society at that time professor i just realized that you've got a bit of that professor from la casa de papel from money nights look going on oh my god i just realized professor has got that professor look going on

he was he was my favorite character from money heist anyways so you're gonna have a lot of fun tonight and i hope we're gonna rob some bank by the end of it this is season three this is season three of the show you haven't realized yet ah right so yep you were saying sorry before i rudely in trouble so um islam was not really a big topic in morocco in the 80s and 90s well everyone was muslim obviously but you know no one was really having these tough islamic discussions or theological discussions or whatsoever

but then it started changing in the 90s and uh i went through uh school like any other moroccan child i guess but then when i came to germany um a few months later 9 11 happened oh wow and a lot of questions you know started emerging about islam and is this really islam and what has islam to do with it and and etc so i started really getting very interested in these discussions and one day i just realized that this is what i want to study

and of course i didn't study the traditional muslim sciences in that sense but at least you know i was very happy to be studying islam in a in an academic in an academic context let's say you know where you would have many tools to understand what is going on both in you know with regard to your own self how you are thinking about certain topics how you are viewing the world and what is going on out there you know with the with islam and what is islam you know and and all these kind of sects etc are

like many names just to give you an example the kind of corrupt throw them out they throw all the names out i'm going to the kind of curriculum that we went through in public school in morocco you study islam you have no idea that you are studying for instance mataki juris jurisprudence or ashari theology or whatever it's just islam you know no labels were used back then but this is today a completely different story so i was going through that but then and then i was really very uh surprised to learn in germany you know when i was

uh uh taking all these classes that there is a big family out there a big muslim family out there and it that it is a very complex discussion too and uh yes i just um i mean you you coming from uh moroccan heritage this this whole rich resourceful um world of maliki and you've got that the subwoofer element as well like you mentioned the the junaidi kind of saluk

you mentioned after 9 11 there's this greater kind of consciousness or conscientiousness of muslims that are we you know which islam is the islam and are where is it being hijacked and who truly represents us i mean what what do you feel about this this whole the moroccan kind of um tint on islam because can we call it a moroccan islam i mean people are calling uh i mean i'm not coming up with that that's a label isn't it moroccan islam what

shed your thoughts on that with us i mean shed some light on what's the moroccan islam um it is a label that has been used uh at different times in history but as far as i know as i'm informed it is a label that has been heavily influenced by french orientations and anthropologists basically in a time where moroccan nationalists embraced reformist islam from the middle east and to to create a sort of contrast

between what they were inspired with and what they used as a religious ideology against the colonial power moroccan islam was this kind of you know more cultural native element you know in in in moroccan society according to to these french anthropologists yeah and the whole thing was uh not really uh reused after that it emerged after the terrorist attacks in 2003 on in casablanca yeah

this is a moment in time where the morocc in which the the moroccan government took the decision to reclaim this label and to use it as a political tool to combat somehow wahhabi and ikhwani influences that the moroccan government had allowed to enter okay moroccan society from the 70s onwards and that's really something very important i think to understand the evolution of this concept because moroccan nationalism like

like i say like i said was really a reaction against this traditional moroccan islam the malikiism etc a lot of you know moroccan nationalists deemed maticism not really fit to to answer you know the new modern questions and and challenges so uh they saw in the reformism of muhammad abdul and rashid riddha and these kind of these other guys a a better alternative which they took but what happened is after the independence in

uh the most dominant ideological movement in in moroccan society at that time in terms of discourse was uh were all these leftist ideologies okay and to combat these leftist ideologies and by leftists are we going do do we mean communist or do we mean just generally liberal yes socialism is probably arabic socialism yeah is is is probably very uh important concept a concept that was huge throughout the arab world i mean in the middle east you know you've got

syria iraq and all of this in egypt and that's really something important because very often we tend to forget that islam as a political program did not emerge as a winner post colonialism after the colonial uh period it was arab socialism it means you're speaking for for the arab-speaking part of the islamic world it is arabic socialism like you said in syria in in in egypt in iraq in yemen in algeria

and many other places so this was the dominant discourse and as a reaction to that the the moroccan regime at that time deemed it important to allow um muslim brothers first in the 70s brothers what do you mean muslim brothers muslim brothers okay muslim brotherhood organization to to um enter the moroccan landscape okay so uh and and they had a very huge influence uh for instance uh

uh this daughter hadith in morocco was an idea that was suggested to the king by some iranis you know who came to morocco wow the first guests on uh which are you know uh offered during ramadan in the presence of the king the first two guests were also very famous iranis so you had this climate you know two ideologies competing with each other but after 79 when i was born

because something's happened this year you know this uh the gel has emerged it explains everything now so 79 you have many things uh taking place the seas of of mecca of the haram in mecca obviously but also the iranian revolution and this whole idea of exposing the revolution and as a reaction to that morocco allowed wahhabism to enter uh uh into morocco and a lot of um isn't it also the kind of time due to the kind of saudi american

alliances uh and the exportation of of few of petrol and or just oil sorry but isn't it also the time that saudi are kind of forging an identity on the international muslim landscape they're kind of becoming a somebody because i mean because there's an era where saudi arabia exists as a nation-state but it's still very bedouinized and it's not really you know doesn't have that overshadowing image and then it starts to emerge clearly within the 70s it's coming and yeah so yeah indeed that that that's really it because

uh many measures taken taken by the saudi government are were an answer to what was going on in the arab socialist countries like for instance um the university in medina in egypt the sultan islam radio is a an answer to sultan arab you know led by the egyptian government so a lot of these measures were being put in place and and morocco

went with that and what's interesting also in terms of geopolitics you have also the uh the war in afghanistan yeah and what's incredible is at that time uh not only were these mujahideen heroes but it was absolutely okay to ask for support uh uh monetary or otherwise for the mujahideen in afghanistan and a lot of moroccans would with the blessing of the authorities go to afghanistan

fight the war with the mujahideen and come back and and and be seen as heroes i mean it gave rise to you know because there was such a green light it gave rise to an era of mujahideen and by mujahideen i don't just mean a people the mujahid backdrop the mujahid landscape the mujahid discourse the fact that islam all of a sudden it gets brushed all over with this very kind of militant side of it is is being you know it's being brought to

the forefront there's all stories always about fighting how muslims always fought how uh and this becomes a very and also with that is the other the kafir contrast us versus them yeah so the problem is also the definition of the cafe because uh at that time i guess the cia are but they're the friendly ones at that time the russians or the soviets were the bad cafes but the problem is always when this kafir definition gets mixed up with the ideology of say it you know about

governments living in the jahidia period and now you have people trying to you know kill government uh official and you have a civil war basically or or or a situation that could lead to a civil war within your society and this is what happened in many countries uh the killing of anwar sadat in 81 i think and also the attacks later on in casablanca now the government realized okay we these people are dangerous because now all this ideology can be turned against

against us against morocco now we have to intervene and these mosques who were you know um at the beginning in the beginning opened with the blessing of the government where wahabi preachers were had you know all the freedom of the world to teach whatever they wanted to teach now the government had a problem with what was being taught and preached in these mosques and another interesting note here is that how you know you mentioned the whole ishtarakiya the socialism the kind of leaning in on communism and it's it's not seen it's it's as you mentioned

it's almost the salvific point for especially the many arab countries post-colonialism this thing of you know it's all about everyone everybody's kind of mushrook it's socialism it's not just for the elite it's not and it's not seen as something that is anti-islam uh it's just seen as independent and forming an identity but what's interesting is with the russian afghan war the new kind of all of a sudden because here the russians obviously epitomized communism and socialism so they become the new villains in the muslim world

which then also problematizes uh and this whole thing of uh socialism and that's an interesting kind of like a twang as well that happens indeed you you had a similar case in the spanish civil war because uh general franco um made use of many moroccan soldiers in the in the spanish civil war and one of the um arguments or uh tools that he used in terms of propaganda was to convince these moroccans that

they were fighting the red devils who were the communists in in spain so it was basically presented as a war between those who believe in this case muslims and christians of course in spain against the unbelievers you know who were the the rojos the the red uh communists in spain and it's it's just interesting yeah i mean wow so and this today is uh it's interesting because even though many of these things seem clearly like history

but today we're still seeing all this competing this kind of competition what is you know what is islam moroccan islam is still a kind of a gown or a robe that now the moroccan government or the moroccan administration is still presenting to the world as is turkey presenting the turkish islamists we are the no we are the actual pioneers of the muslim world and you've got saudi arabia still trying to obviously hold on to right yeah indeed so you have indeed a big

competition between many islams and you can throw there also the azhar islam from egypt and others when it comes to fatwas and where muslims look for fatwas et cetera so you have a competition absolutely and the question is always how do you claim authenticity of faith you know in these discourses because every discourse would claim uh authenticity in the moroccan case is the school of medina the love of the prophet which is you know tied to sufism and not every sufism it's the sufism of al-junaid you know the sober

sufism this this other ecstatic sufism that's uh something uh that that a lot of uh you know people in the government had a problem with but when you go back in history for instance if you take a look at the 19th century for instance and you have a scholar like a famous maliki scholar muhammad ibn zafar al-kittani

mohammed jafar kitani published in the late 19th century a three-volume had geography which was basically a summary or a a compendium of numerous geography had geographies excuse me stories of saints from morocco and his focus was on the saints of fess okay and it's just fascinating to to read the the you know this geography because you find a lot of profiles because you have not only the fukaha

also presented at sen as saints but also many so-called ecstatic sufis you know the baha'illa and including many women and that's very interesting and one thing about this baha'il and that's where i found the whole discussion very interesting because this is a maliki scholar who is teaching at yin the story of this bahadi many of them they had it seemed if we take these stories at face value a right to transgress in society

they were allowed to break many rules the moment you were recognized by the society as a saint as a berlur you had the right to do whatever you wanted so you have stories of people pissing in masks just and and doing other things i'm just i'm just thinking am i did i hear my imagination playing up right now there is a story of someone who was uh masturbating in moderate and you went too fast okay and he was masturbating

and and someone else uh went and and he beat him up and and not not as a metaphor beat him no no no literally according to the story and something bad happened to that man on that same day the one masturbating exactly so what's really incredible is see the lord protects the lord protects protects those who engage in contemplative reflection

indeed so when when when that bad thing happened to that person the city took notice that this is a saint and we should you know let him be and after that he was allowed to do whatever he wanted so you have a lot of these stories also from women who would do some incredible things who would you know go nude uh in the streets and and and and whatever kind of thing this is this is in a state of watched are they saying or in in an ecstatic state but they are exempt from any kind of inquisition or questioning or

you know there was a book i came across once that um it was uh is written by some egyptian selfies actually but it was attacking the sufi sofia and what it was simply the person who authored it was saying that look unless the al-azhar clergy denounced this book i'm going to publish my work which is this little book and it's just got a bunch of stories from the tab so because they didn't denounce it he then published in saudi and

mass printed it but it had a bunch of these stories in there about lok wakana you know it would say uh [Music] you know this was from his karamat that he would give the khutbah naked you know it's i mean i've done a couple of those karamat in in the bathroom i mean it's like these were his miracles that he would just sit there naked whilst on the member giving and this is in dignified books you see and and it's exactly what you're saying this kind of license this carte blanche to be able to do there's no reproach

and there was there was a story where they said there was this one wali who uh he if he walked past someone um and if they were if they were with an animal like a like a donkey or something he would say to them he would say hold the head of the donkey whilst i whilst he penetrates the donkey and if and and they would say you know do that whilst you know do this and then they would say but if the person there was a person who said to him

what the hell are you doing are you going are you crazy and then he you know this kind of an affliction uh afflicted him and he got this you know he was paralyzed there and then and and also you find some other incredible stories where you got to to grade sufi masters because you see for instance you come across a story where it says you know that this great sufi had his fat his spiritual opening when he performed oral sex on someone oh okay whatever you heard these things how do we

how do we join this join that gang but you know there's one thing interesting about these stories which explains also the force of sarafism in in the 20th century and that's the whole concept of shame because when modernity came in when the this modernist progressive discourse came in and many of the people who had studied in europe or also in the colonial powers themselves etc and some of them were very um very christian you know in a fundamental

sense sometimes they were just shocked but what by what they you know observed in muslim societies so they associated a lot of these practices with being regressive with and and they explained a lot of uh supposedly alleged problems of the muslim world yeah with these kind of practices and this is a discourse that was picked up by the seraphia yeah because you see when you then contrast this with a pristine

version of rasulullah rasulullah you know this is this is what allah and his messenger are saying and and to be fair these kind of practices no non-related person would you know in their common sense think this is generally okay like they may those involved with that sheikh may turn a blind eye to him but those who are not involved with the shir would think what the hell is that about you know so and and that explains also part of the rise of salafisms and [Music]

there is also a wave behind it i mean shame at the end of the day is is not static um shame uh the things that you are shocked by can can be very different from one context to the other from from one period of time to the other and this is something also you see clearly in the in in for example if you are talking about sexuality um just to give you an example also from the 19th century that i have studied you had a moroccan diplomat his name was a safar and a safar was sent on a diplomatic mission to paris

in 1845 or 46 if i'm uh uh not mistaken and safar was shocked by the fact that the french people were not attracted to young boys to real men and he said how you know how in hell can these people only be flirting with women and you know having sex only with women what about the point he's like bloody irrationalists exactly and this is something you find in a lot of fat words also in the mariki school in north africa you know the

whole man discussion the beard starts growing etc which which seems to have been a different category also yeah a friend of mine explains it you know explains this uh focus on a lot of fukaha on the on having a beard on growing a long beard with this with this complex basically because growing a beard opposite is the moment where where you move from being a passive uh active to active you know sexual

partners i see i see that's interesting according to him no it reminds me of uh uh i think it's the quota of thracimakus i think it's trusimacus who says that as a boy i stole the men from their wives and as a man the wives from the men and it's fascinating like i see see this this kind of write of that now this person has entered he's now i'm part of that crew now i never really thought of this in that sense the beard but many of you think these things you know if you jump into the 20th century

these are now things that people are ashamed about you know where everyone seems to be saying how can you allow these things as muslim and this is not real islam so we have to discover for ourselves what this true real islam is about and this is a force where of the sarafi discourse where it tells you well you have the hadith and this is the answer i mean it is a very problem you know it's face value it's a very compelling kind of uh

slogan a very compelling brochure that they present isn't it like look because it's what people want religion and they want kind of simplicity and you tell them allah and his messenger full stop and it is also some a a way of practicing religion that is focused on how you do things right do you pray like this you know with the cupboard do you put your feet that way do you do that way or you know whatever and and and you get lost into these kind of

details without necessarily having the opportunity to think in that in depth about the theology about history about you know a lot of uh concepts uh that are definitely flowing in the way you understand islam lower the this you know lower order kind of thinking skills required for this but then when you think about it the common person out there i mean i know now there's a culture of trying to be critical especially in the west and try to be enlightened but you know if we're going back uh several

decades then worldwide there isn't this thing of you know let's be critical and let's be and it's and it's amazing that i've said this before that i feel that muslim culture may be unique and i say this ironically in the sense that it has many muslim many muslim societies have a culture where being intelligent is seen as a negative like they think oh he's he's trying to use his aqua the aqua is demonized as a kind of like uh almost as a shaytani thing that you know this

oh you're trying to use akal oh he thinks he's so clever this you know in just being no you should be simple and kind of like dumb but not it's not that they're saying dumb is good but they're trying to say the acl is evil and this reminds me of excuse me no no go for it no and that's it really it reminds me of this anecdote of um it's a very famous anecdote of a rosie you know this is you know a faith like the faith of all the people where uh according to the story he was uh he entered the city and and people gathered around him and and

an older lady asked who is this guy and they told her this is a razi who had i don't know how many proofs for the existence of god and she replied does he need you know a proof you know to begin with do you need a proof to believe in god to believe and when it was reported to him he he said oh god grant me a faith like the like the fate of this older lady but that's a problem because at the end of the day um you had many schools in islam historically speaking who were very much arch oriented

yeah in in contrast to knuckle oriented to text oriented but then they either disappeared and not necessarily because they had the weaker argument that's not something i i believe personally but because of political circumstances and and other issues um and also what's what's very interesting is in terms of the discussion was somehow put under the authority of the text and it is something that a lot of muslim scholars went with so you had also many if we take

sunni islam as an example you had many uh um schools of law who were oriented you know like and hanafi madhhab but when you look at the hanafi madhab later on and even today yeah you would be shocked if you read abu hanifa's you know early works and in his views on many topics and and and this is a a way of you know uh creating a an illusion of orthodoxy you know that has never existed and you see that in the in all the schools you'll see in the maliki school imam malik

for example was also like other people who class who classified like even ibrahim and other people would put imam malik amongst because he would reject hadith based on what he would think was reason now but even the later malakia we even though there's several maliki's who did continue with this kind of the amelia and they saw things like oh this is what the amal does it's fine or we'll substitute this but the the trend that dominated seems to always kind of see that as um hmm

with suspicion and it's i like the way that um dr sherman jackson has he termed this this whole process as i think i'm not sure what century he specified it to but definitely from like the eighth muslim eighth century onwards there's a crypto shafization he calls of all the mathhabs they become very hadithi impact on on the whole discussion of also is is just immense and what is interesting he did not only influence the sunni schools but also the shia schools if you take for example

the definition of sunnah this is a and this is something that has been you know accepted by cross across madhhab in islam and now you have a discussion okay can you include the sahaba in the sunnah in which sahaba and for the shia groups can you include the imams in the sunnah is the amal of the imam also a sunnah or not and does it differ from the sunnah of the prophet or is it a continuation or a new

manifestation of it so a shafi had a great uh impact in in that regard but what is interesting there is a new a lot of research being done right now on the chef hey i came across a tunisian uh lady um she is a historian of that of this period of this particular period of the eighth ninth and tenth century her her name is um let me try to remember her her name najiya al-warimi okay she's from the fergat or is it just i i hope that i hope that

for her but this lady argues for example that that means the saved sect people yeah the seller our brothers yeah always quote that are you from the philip indeed so she argues that a shafiai and she has written a book about that that he was a zaydi in the at the beginning is zaydi muatezili and then under haruna rasheed was a a a trial of many people because he was a judge in yemen and they brought a lot of people who were zaydi and asheville was amongst them and

yeah because they're this yeah definitely because he was brought up on the mechanic he was brought up in shackles wasn't he yeah and he from that moment on he he he realized that he had to to change his medhab and during that time you had two streams or two discourses competing with each other in the opposite caliphate according to to this scholarship on the one hand of course the hadith who are not you know always these uh poor victims uh oppressed people you know uh that the would

you know uh treat unjustly et cetera that's pure propaganda they were a real mob hundreds in many in many cities like a real mob uh there is no other way to put it and on the other hand you had the matazira the philosopher and and and all of these other groups and this is the era where orthodoxy is being forged isn't exactly like everybody there's a there's a huge everything is up for grabs i mean who is the dominant strand within islam yeah and there is a an argument that the barmaki

family the empire the baronica of the barami tragedy were the protectors of these rational movements in islam so this is the argument that she's making so ashafiri because he was trained in marathi theology which is very rational and is she alluding to when haruna rasheed has them wiped out that this they lose their protection is this thing one of if if if i remember well one of the things that she says is because of the pressure that al hadith put on on the political authorities

that they started to get rid of of these other medahis and their protectors that's one of the reasons why the baramika were killed according to her yeah i mean and a shafiai because he was trained in matasiri theology he was able when he embraced the hadith approach to argue for their positions with a very in a very irrationalist manner in a very you know sophisticated i i i i would like to say in a very sophisticated manner that championed their med help against the other madame

because he was so good basically but then you know the irony is i find imam sheffer he's sometimes kind of i mean i don't mean this with any disrespect but i find him kind of autistic in his uh like if like i find his ruling sometimes like so just like you think is he like it's not it's like they only live in a textbook like they don't belong in the real world because like so every time you buy and sell there should be a hut but you know you should give a sermon before you buy something you should

you can't buy something with just you know pay authority by just giving money and no there has to be always verbal you have to say i am buying otherwise it's invalid you know his rulings on what is impure if something here this becomes impure uh everything rituals are so strict the ruling the fatwa that if a person uh if if the if the teeth or the tooth of somebody comes comes off it is now nudges and impure and if they hold it back in and it manages to kind of uh stabilize they need to knock it back out afterwards because they're carrying

impurity and i think like what the hell is what was that but but i do i do feel that his you know um the way he conceptualized sunnah yeah and also you're right but you're right he's arguing in [Music]

at the end of the day yeah and sunnah i guess the way he he he he prepared sort of platform for a lot of people comes after him says in history he says you know he was they say he came across in whilst he was in yemen uh a woman with the who who was a kind of siamese twin is it like she she had just one lower body but two upper bodies like joint from the hip and he was so curious so he just to explore he married her did a quick short [ __ ] and cardi yard says that's that's

he said that's marrying two sisters at once that's i mean but that's that's something very interesting because uh what i mean you're right that would be interesting but that's in terms of sorry you mentioned i think you meant the siamese twins i thought yeah that would be interesting but that's digressing from the more serious stuff no indeed i would say that that's more serious your example was more so i mean i mean you could be pinned down with two arms and with the other two you could be kind of slapped it's like how do you how do you combat

forearms absolutely so the whole conceptualization of sunnah became very rigid after him and he he he opened the gate because you had a whole discussion about sunnah before and after that even understanding the sunnah in terms of trajectory ethics right as a an ideal that needs to be renegotiated every time in every new context you stay true to the principle the spirit spirit of the law right not the letter but

i think that chef and others after him of course prepared the ground for two things for this rigid understanding of the sunnah and for the hadithification of the sunnah you know of really tying the sunnah to the corpus of hadith which is extremely problematic but it become became sort of a sacred thing that you are not allowed even to you know to question and this is what what what the sunnis seems to have been what's fascinating is that you see imam shafi'i himself was not even he wasn't

like from the hadith he wasn't a mahadith he himself admits that his knowledge on hadith is very weak exactly yet he is always seen at the forefront of it you know this is exactly like he champions this the if the hadith is we go with it and yet he he's not that clued up on which hadith are always sahih or not but but this is exactly the point where this scholar is saying he has this zaydi uh uh muatasiri training because he he he was not really very familiar with hadith that what she is claiming

and i think it makes a lot of sense if you understand you know the the whole evolution because there are some turning points in his life and you know the idea that his vehicle was was different in iraq and then he changed when he came to egypt etc so you have to to have the bigger picture i always felt that you see when he was in iraq part of his recognition um is from the fact that he has some association with malik you know because of and imam muhammad gives him this

huge kind of almost like you know what was your you know what did imam malik say in this and what and he gets this prestige yes and he and maybe this is the formation of this new hymn this you know this hadith uh kind of project but when he returns to or when he goes to cairo to egypt the the problem there is he as a as somebody associated with malik is all of a sudden a nobody because he's surrounded by all these egyptian malekies

who have been with malik for decades so nobody bats an eyelid to him anymore no you know it's like now saying kaala malik means nothing so it's interesting that he here starts opposing malik you know he starts saying malik got this wrong and imam ali got that wrong and it's just interesting how you know human dynamics if i remember well this is what got him killed right yeah i think it was yeah it said that right it was it was a maliki i think something i forgot his name but this is also what led to to his killing

is uh because he was seen as someone who who would go against yeah matic and who who was not fit to go against manic i mean yeah and they say i mean it's he got beat up and although he didn't die there because but they say eventually he fell ill and and then because of that beating you know he got weak and then later on he died from that kind of weakness he never recovered uh but yeah i mean he was but you know something i do find him very once again rational on you see this is the irony on he's one of the he raises some interesting questions

question marks on each ma and he in his reseller he will say you know what is it and what is uh who do who are the ulama by the way he will say that and do we do they all have to express it and does anybody how do we know who is a an island within islam because there is no islam except somebody you know you know some people think he's up there and some people would say he's at the jail and so i mean but that's that's very interesting because uh if you are uh trying to to think about the evolution of the concept of orthodoxy

exactly if you exactly my point and take a look at you know for for instance today no one would even dispute the fact that the hanafi's are part of the the sunni orthodox family yeah but if you go back in time and and see how hadith perceived abu hanifa it's interesting and and you you you would be shocked because they didn't deem them like in in the time of imam he was not deemed as being representative of orthodox islam i think he even qualified him as model

or something i mean they people when he passes away even they say uh many great imams like i think i believe sofiana though the other people they praised they said that thank god he died and they called him a kazaban and they said that this person is nothing but an enemy of islam and it's amazing how how that it's it's absolutely the flavor absolutely changes and politics plays a role in that with obviously becoming the supreme judge you know if you also think about the evolution of the medici method

in north africa for example um if you saw today you know thinking about what is moroccan islam you have this trinity of you know maliki ashari and and sufi but if you go back in time and anderus under the murabit rule yeah when yeah he was introduced yeah and it was being that was a scandal exactly two times in the 12th century people are shocked to learn that the yacht was one of the people saying burn it exactly so that's the thing but later on you you there is an amnesia

yeah that also contributes to to to this um orthodox mind somehow that everything is well and we're all a big family and everyone loves you know one another and we're forgetting that imam malik in and of himself was somebody that was very anti any innovation and he didn't accept this good innovation in islam the way later on you know we're saying sufi maliki ashari this kind of this thing he would never i mean his attitude was like so he was so extra against anything you know they say uh what's

um comes and he's praying in the prophet's mask and as he's about to pray he puts his kind of shawl in just in front of him and then starts his salah and malik asks the security to to during his prayer just throw him out of the mosque he says that and they say to him that don't you think we should uh wait or something and he says he says throw him out even if it means breaking his legs and and he's and they say well what's he done he says well before he prayed he puts the shawl in front of him he said where did he you know

in this masjid then he has the la i mean that that poor guy was probably just like you know where should i put this shawl i know i'll just put it over there so nobody mix it you know i think this whole because you're bringing something very important here too to understand the evolution of islam historically at least and that's the concept of innovation because at the end of the day every sect is claiming to be following the footsteps of the prophet you know like you ought to be practicing the true form of islam but then when you go back in history you find many crucial

persons and and episodes that took place which introduced many innovations that were afterwards seen as a contribution to orthodoxy and i'm just going to give the the example of omari the second caliph omar in my understanding and i know a lot of people would disagree with me was clearly a mushy head on a lot of issues and he was not following the sunnah on many things the two famous things that he where he himself himself qualify them as biddah are

forbidding yeah and salat where he is reported to have say what a what what a beautiful bitter this is or a good beta disease and but when you think about his role in this in this whole process i find him very interesting because he was the one who did not allow the hadith to be written down yeah and he was the one also who was preventing people from spreading hadith uh you know outside of medina uh you know spread the quran and not the hadith

i know you you could you could see him as a the first quran only [Laughter] guy somehow i find interesting that you see from the seerah of omar radhilan we also see that he was very um i don't know how to say sympathetic to the or not sympathetic isn't the quite the right word really i feel impressed with the whole jewish tradition of uh like the the whole uh this thing of the scribes even in the hadith when the prophet salallahu says to him what are you reading and he says

i'm reading the torah and the prophet says why are you reading the torah you know just following he was taking us into deep waters no but i don't mean in a in a bad way obviously it's not in a bad mood yeah this is a very serious decision i find it because you see the reason i say this is because becomes muslim as well in omar's time and a lot of things like even this thing of like rajam in the quran allegedly as said um saying that they attributed to umar saying that he's saying that look i used to read this in the quran

right so this a lot of these things i feel were israelites were kind of like even if they did come from um if they did then they were where he is being uh impressed with the whole because the jewish tradition was in that day and age an academic tradition right because they were people they were scribes of scriptures of documenting of writing the arabs weren't people you know the prophet says

and you know we're like we're simple people we don't re we don't write and and keep dates and things like this whereas the uh whereas the jews had this kind of they had calendars that worked on a 19-year metacycle they had dates they had history they had laws rituals and you can see people would be impressed with that some people you know if you have an inclination towards this you can think wow those people are so developed and i feel a lot of that judeo kind of ritualization creeps in to islam i mean that's a very good point

which is which makes a lot of muslims uncomfortable to talk about but it is what it is at the end of the day because a lot of these things you find in sahara bukhari in other you know authority authoritative texts for in the case of omar i i also have that's my understanding of it he was also the one not only under which uh kab embraced islam but he was also the one who gave cab a platform to preach in the mosque of the prophets which is something just you know very interesting as a concept and i do understanding

uh like you my feeling is that they were not only impressed but they they had a sort of inferiority complex somehow because they did not have this uh scholarship you know this deep scholarship as the the jewish community had and this is something you see also not only under omar because kab became his one of the main people you know in his in his gathering cab is the one also going with him to jerusalem and telling him stories et cetera and and then you have this like imam malik transmitting in the mata

spending an entire but spending go traveling and spending an entire day or perhaps days with mount sinai studying he's saying that i would learn and i would talk about best if you if you if you want to think also about the evolution of the tafsir school the the school of mecca was also very much impressed by by the new converts islam and there is like enough textual evidence you know that that that that leads towards thinking a lot of things a lot of opinions that he had he took

directly from from kaab and web and and and and many others and and and you can see and this is something important if i may because now you have two things you have um a tradition within a tradition and it creates a lot of problems you have um two spectrums you can say in terms of primary texts of islam now if you think for example let's take a concrete example to make it uh palpable the women issue in islam if you read the hadiths that were that are transmitted and interestingly always by the same

ones right abu huraira and others you would be just shocked how misogynistic these hadith and this way of thinking and the problem when you start with hadith to approach the quran as in exigent as mufasir you you you try to reconcile both the hadith and the quran you have for instance this hadith just to take one example of god talking about you know the the whole uh creation episode of adam and eve uh

in paradise and and and and the forbidden fruit etc i mean the quran is very clear the quran talks in in the dual form if there is a responsible either they are both responsible or adam in later verses yeah but when you read the hadiths it is clear that it was eve yeah who sort of you know put a spell somehow under adam who who who who seduced him with sex and as a punishment and that's the thing also that that is very interesting to understand also the

the end the evolution of certain very anti-women positions in phike now you have god saying well as a punishment to you you will get your monstrous menstruation every month yeah you will give birth in pain yeah you will uh be stripped of uh you know of your intellect uh uh in en of your deen and as a as a mufti or they will have to always shave it's just

it's just like for like but now when you approach the quran with this kind of mindset because this is a mindset it is clear that that the whim the woman women are according to this reading inferior to men because it is absolutely compatible with the sahih hadith and this is i think a problem also in also with a shafiah and later on but this is in my view the genealogy of a lot of problems so you have for instance in the 20th century many um uh muslim intellectuals and arab intellectuals

in general talk him about this idea of not only the quran only movement but also of trying to do tafsir [Music] and and because a lot of them realized there is a a lot of there are a lot of contradictions here and these hadith are very problematic because later on you have also competition with the christians

yeah you know if you are saying that jesus is coming back well he's not only coming back but he's coming back and he he will pray behind the muslim imam you know and and you have a whole new discourse that is evolving as a reaction to what is going on with the other religious communities towards whom i believe a lot of muslims a lot of these arabs at the beginning had a an inferiority complex you know to to put it in that way and a lot of you know material

from these tradition was definitely uh because you see like and you see so another interesting example which i spoke about a while back now was this um this thing of the blood money now when you look at the but this is an example coming i i feel it shines right here because when you look at the quran it just speaks either in the single sense of like you know of nafs you know nafsan or who does this with enoughs and enoughs then they they need to give this you know this is the

the kind of consequence or so on now and there are some sunnah and and it's interesting that malik does bring that imam ali but like so for example there's a hadith that the the prophet would say uh that that the are from each other and that you know if that their blood is equal uh now i feel that that is a sound sahih transmission of the sunnah but then you'll get these other things teaching you that oh well actually the blood money of a woman

is actually just going to be much less maybe at best half or it depends if she was from this religion than even less and if she's than a man and and this then just you see what i find shocking is not that this appears this concept because fair enough that this i feel that did come through that israeli kind of channel and it gets but it proliferates and becomes the like ruling this now if you when people challenge it it's like what the hell are you challenging what's very interesting also you know

just to come back to your hadith you know that in in western islamic studies there is a very interesting discussion about who this minoon are supposed to be i mean i'm thinking here about the book of fred donner okay muhammad and the believers and that's a very serious discussion because in his his point was that in this category of minoon you had also jews jews christians and christians who were part of this

early muslim community and it is only during the umayyad period that this distinction is being made now between those who follow the prophet muhammad only and those who do not and you find this also in a lot of uh early texts that the jews did believe in the in in the in the prophethood of of of of the prophet of muhammad but as as someone who was sent to the arabs not to them so they would say yes you are a prophet but not to us to the others

yeah okay and that's uh i think a very fascinating that is fascinating and there's some christians who i believe uh i believe john of damascus is amongst them as well who or these early christians who document that when they describe muslims that they encounter they describe them as uh fringe christians like they say these christians are just a bit weird like they do these kind of slight practices differently but but they assume by their general practice they are christians and they had a huge

influence also in the evolution of kalam of islamic theology because john of damascus i think was the one who who challenged muslim on on the status of jesus christ and he quoted the quran saying well your book says uh uh kalimatu who yeah so he's the word of god exactly so which means and if you say that god's speech is pre-eternal so jesus is automatically pre-eternal yeah and and i've always found that a fascinating you know just because like why the quran chose certain

words which uh you know it played on an entire narrative that existed without fully embracing that narrative for just allowing a bridge but also you understand the position of alma tezilla as a group saying no the quran is created it's not they that they were necessarily against islam and against sunnah or whatever no but in their view in their conception of theology this answer solved a lot of other problems you know who were everything is interrelated and and stating that god creates something well

now you can discuss the status of in a very different manner and this is something you have even today i would say personally from what i've been studying and you know in the uh writings of muslim intellectuals in the 20th century's century one of the main issues is till this very day what is exactly the set the status of revelation yeah i mean that's such a fascinating discussion did the prophets hear the quran the arabic language of the quran you know the quran as we read it today

did he uh receive the wahi you know whose nature is unknown to us and he translated it into his yeah because it was arabic yeah because i was in one of the episodes of mind trap it was with dr khalil and we were discussing this same thing as well and i was saying that look there are because we were highlighting that within even the sunni tradition this is within the sunni tradition so people like bajuri and others and they will in their commentaries of and siuti as well i believe they would write that well

we you see because the ash ali position is the calamul azalee allah speech is not the quran because our arabic is man-made and it's finite and the infinite cannot be trapped within the finite but then they say okay at what point does this be this become that so they then disagree and some people feel that maybe uh it's through gibril is the medium that jibril is this source that way it's been created and some felt maybe it's in the mind of the prophet

and i said that uh and and bakalini writes that that the quran on arabi is not the killer and and he says that and ali and he says that this i i i'm in line with this opinion and all are mentioned all five are mentioned in the commentary in the sunni commentary on but i'm in line with the fact that it's in the mind of the prophet that he expresses it he appears to him that's a very courageous position yes so i'm but i'm not saying you see to

be careful i'm not saying that the prophet is coming up with it so like imagine like imagine i'm sitting here i've got i've got an idea and i'm thinking to myself what's the best way of expressing this idea how shall i word it i'm not saying it like that i'm saying it like it appears into his consciousness the words like so like and a good example is i mean not a good example but a bad terrible example but an approximation is like uh um it's a thought experiment which nothing to do with this is more to do with things like

free will the concept of free will and where people where you're asked like if i was to ask you okay in your mind i want you to think of five cities uh and just list them in your mind and then you get a bunch of people and they list them in their mind and say well okay i want you to write them out and they write them and some maybe because of things you've done there or a link or you might think well you know something in germany or something but they will be several cities that you will for example you may have thought of like if i expanded the number but there will be so many others that

you know but at that moment they didn't pop into your consciousness yes so for example luxembourg like you might i mean or like let's just say luxa or like you could say cairo at that moment maybe cairo wouldn't have occurred to me but i know cairo or like if somebody was to say uh you know you could choose any city but the question is why did only some come into your mind and not others yes so even though you had knowledge of them so this discussion in psychology you're in science of

what determines precognition you know what brings things into consciousness so in this sense these words they are appearing to the prophet in his consciousness and he's expressing them so and then he says that i in in the hadith in bukhari that revelation comes to me

like a ringing of a a bell and then these words so this is how i see it but it is in the mind of the prophet not in the mind of jibril for example gibril to me is the expression of what the prophet is encountering this you know this uh it's more of this phenomenological experience yes but yeah this is actually the the position of many uh muslim intellectuals in the modern period uh you know i'm thinking about nasa hamid abuzaid uh for example you know who had a a lot of who got

himself into a lot of trouble expressing these kind of thoughts in egypt and you it continues with many others i'm thinking for ins for example about abdul karim surosh in iran he goes a step further what what does he what's up i remember well he he he understands right now revelation as vision so the prophet had a vision according to his theory and he expressed he expresses his vision into his own words but what is interesting if you look at the sufi literature you find

some hadiths who are deemed life and but they are very interesting one of them is that one day the prophet asked gibril where do you get the why from exactly and he told him i don't know it's it's behind the curtain it's uh hijab see this is just as a but the story goes on and he tells him you know what take a look behind the curtain to see who is there and according to this hadith he he he looks and he finds the prophet

and he tells him a women so he was so surprised and he he was saying is it from you to you and this is a hadith the the reason why i'm bringing it wow it was usually just mind-blowing actually by sufis to explain the whole theory of anural muhammadi you know this whole idea of the prophet being not only the best of creation but god's khalifa on the cosmos you know that he is basically the link between creator and creation

and that he has a foot in each one of them somehow and these kind of hadiths go into you know you can interpret them as as as an argument for these kind of theories that that uh blossomed um i would say especially in north africa if you and that's also something very interesting in the way the prophet was conceived in islam because you really can make an argument that you had a period of time in the beginning where the prophet was not very much idealized in that sense you know that he brought the message and uh

and did everything he was supposed to do but at the end of the day that he was a a human being like like all other human beings and you find it for instance reflected in in the early sufi tradition in the 9th century among the suvies of baghdad there was a a sufi named al-wasati who was asked about the tastleya you know sorry okay okay and this was the uh this encouraged his students to do a lot of tesla on the prophet you know to invoke blessings on

the prophet because according to him your heart can be connected only to one thing it is either god or the prophet it cannot be both but what's interesting is from the 12th century onwards you have a revolution in in in in the way the prophet was conceived and a lot of these theories were coming from from the muslim west from an andalus and morocco al-qaeda obviously is one that comes to mind with the shifa and that's interesting because if you compare for example a shifter

with the seer of ibn hisham um even hisham has something like um i think 10 miracles al-qaeda ayad has something like 120 or 130 if i remember well and later in the serial halabia you have something like three thousand miracles it's just kind of how it's growing exactly exactly another element is also obviously the influence of ibn larabi

exactly which existed before him yeah but he was just genius in the way he presented you know the theory to the world and in morocco the suvism that will develop from the 13th century onwards with the shadiriya and others was really based and centered on um idealizing the prophets on the tusley as a practice and later on it be became even a political theology with the um who's the author of the

rat uh uh al-jazeera of course al-jazeera was the one who introduced this idea in morocco also who who made the tesliya like so the tuslier for people is saying you know saying what we call sometimes commonly known as the root that's exactly yeah exactly in arabic so he made it so important and attached the whole political theology to it which uh opened a door for the sheriffian dynasties that will come and and and reign in morocco you know the idea that only a sharif only a

descendant of the prophet in his family doesn't it also become a kind of tool that look we love the prophet and you know we we show like our proof is that we are representing this um you know muhammad this vosliya and if you're not doing it you you see because the moment i make the claim there's a power dynamic involved already isn't it like because the moment i say we should be reading read the read the fact that i'm saying it i'm already

in a power position absolutely because by default it's assumed i represent it and you have to come back to ashavi also here i mean the guy is really unavoidable in this discussion was the one who made the teslia in the in the second part of the cheshire obligatory in the video yeah that's one thing and also he had his own formula of of uh which which is right now his thing that

this is him being accused of being a in his young age so he says and later on what's really interesting in terms of geography um you find from the 12th century onwards i i forgot the the work uh but but there is this story that someone saw a chef in his dream and his had a vision of us and he asked him you know this famous question okay oh yeah that one you know what did god do with you or whatever the greatest of all questions people ask by

he granted me paradise and i would i was welcomed in paradise like a bride and he asked him how did you earn this position that's fascinating what's interesting is the kind of answer that he gives it is not because he was uh one of the founders of us it is not because it was a great legal mind was it because of the siamese twins and he get the happiness he brought them

that would be a whole new chapter he says well god said the happiness you brought them mufti that would be your vision when you see him but anyway his answer was because of uh this teslia formula that he has in kitab um uh he has a very short formula his own tesliya on the prophet and it's interesting because from the 12th century onwards every great saint of islam including the sahaba and in every other scholar had an an own tosliya formula

and and later in sufism every sufi tariqa brotherhood would use this the tastia of their sheikh because now you have the whole conception that this is also a fat a spiritual opening a sort of revelation a gift a spiritual gift given to the sheikh as a sort of ejazza to to help people grow spiritually so the tesliya becomes the identity of the tariqah you find it with the shadi the shadow this very they use the tastier of

[Music] you know the famous [Music] you find it with al jazuli with derek is this not what becomes something to is this not what something they used to almost as their stripes like this is our group and this is our kind of like territorial in a way as well it becomes a kind of a bonding as well but in a in that way obviously not apart from others it sets them apart in terms of aurad you know in terms of invocations they are the winner of the tariqah but also it's important because when you

read these different formulas you find different conceptions of the prophets you know doctrinal positions towards him being uh the norah muhammadi the muhammadan reality and and and and this formulation is supposed to give you an insight on how this sheikh or tariqah you know how great they are and how close they were to the prophets and then you find later on it's it's really interesting in the 19th century just talking about more were still discussing moroccan islam in the 19th

century you have three tariqas very strong tariffs that emerged in the in the moroccan context in the north african context the tijania the the uh catania later on and of course the darkhawiyah right and all of them had their own aurad their own tusla and and and tesla was became really a doctrinal statement sort of identity that sets you apart from the others and it is supposed to show how close you are of course to the prophet that you

are the real hair of the prophet in this time yeah but i mean doesn't this this is what i'm saying it becomes something to where the uh you see on on one hand obviously it's it's it's great that you know people are sending salah was a salaam upon the prophet but on the other hand you see by championing it it it's the kind of antithesis to what it actually is because people then you see will measure other people as you don't love the profit as it you know often sometimes is said

that oh people who don't celebrate the maoli don't truly love the prophet it's it's all you know interconnected to each other because uh also how i mean just the discussion that you still have till this day do you say allah in his mind he is following the sunnah yeah because in all the formulas that were that were attributed to the prophet there is not as heed in these formulas yeah and what's early what's interesting the early

part of the ummah this discussion in the first few centuries uh a couple of centuries was this muhammadan yes and you know and have mercy on muhammad kind of condemned that and in all the formulas there is nowhere wasabi nowhere is it no no all the foreigners attributed i think there are like 40 uh of variance

no you're right because hence malik saying the al or his followers because if that's the discussion and later on it became really a theological statement of uh to add wasabi basically saying we are not shia because we really say wasabi and here we are reading discussing this whole idea of sahaba you know uh

of the sahaba basically that all of them are trustworthy you know it's an issue of beyond reproach exactly and many other non sunni have you looked into ever with this uh the development of the term and by extension the concept then of sahaba emerges because this is not the actual natural arabic word for companions is it because it would be like the prophet would like in early islam they would have probably said or maybe sahab or sahib or but sahabah

this becomes an institutionalized term later on isn't it which is now i mean for centuries now it's been the term that the the sahaba we understand i i've often been intrigued with this the the we at what point the origin i did look into something where somebody showed me but i didn't i found that um it didn't really the dots didn't match up about ibn mukhafa and i thought um doesn't really make sense interesting because you made me think about this hadith um

right uh he he did not say sahaba tea no like even even on the other even in the other hadith in the mata where they the prophet said oh and on the day of judgment i would say and they will say so this uh oh you know uh or the other one [Music]

haditha using all the hut but this term it's an interesting term and i've been often intrigued that i wonder at what stage that kind of comes in and then just takes over the whole exactly i think i mean the the early texts that i came across uh using the word sahabi we're from i would say the late 1st century you know and and this is where the concept of sahabi also emerges because it is also you are in the midst of this political

discussion between the umayyads on the one hand the shia on the other but also the zubairidz which is also very important it gets lost in the discussion [Music] and in his group who were in charge politically of the hijas because you know had to it was only under hajjaj that they took uh took part of of hijaz and this is also something very interesting because when the abbasids came into power uh they had two problems in terms of his historiography

uh if they say we are uh members of the family of the prophets the question is well you are his direct descendants why should we you know go with you as you know the his cousins or whatever it is what it is and and on the other hand is also um the abbasid movement in the beginning was historically uh an in a movement anti-umayyad yeah i mean originally i would have thought they were part of the shia movement but it's just but once it becomes like well as

they get closer to the actual seat of power they think well it's all up for grabs now and this is also where the seerah gets written because when you see also from who um even even is uh it's it's basically the whole zubairi connection it's not the umayyad uh connection so now you you had to find someone who is not too shy and you know not very emoy so you had to strike a balance very slowly wow okay that's really

hmm that is really interesting i i see that i mean on a completely unrelated note because i've been reading into a lot of this i've been doing a lot of research on the chains i've got to do an episode on the all these i need to do with the age of aisha okay and the interesting thing is because i find them all on the age of aisha at the time of her marriage um now i find that the issue comes in or the actual coming down to rawi zero who who is behind the manipulation of this text

is i feel um because and i felt that he may have done it obviously being the nephew of aisha he he did this i feel that maybe just to counter certain um you know allegations and insults and uh at the time where people may be accusing isil of things and so he's kind of further pushed this whole thing back was he not the transmitter from from whom ibnis hawk uh took a lot of material to write his yeah yeah he was it was because orwell was one of the key

uh transmitters and and and even the sierra i mean that's this that was just a side note but the sierra thing is really um intriguing because it's such a mess to it's brought it's basically just brought forward this militant aspect of um you know of alleged warfare this is what the prophet was all about it's just magazine and yes this is it really yeah and i find that that's so intriguing because you know

the question being asked is why is it muslims obviously from the time of the prophet to let's say the end of the 200s so you've got almost 200 years of islam right now why is it that during these two centuries muslims did not none of the of the three they did not write even though i mean just to kind of lay the backdrop first of all before i asked the question and this is not me asking this is the the questions being asked that look this was a time

especially during the latter part of mass uh you know of writing of uh mass transmission through scripts imam malik has transmitted from him at least uh a hundred thousand fatawa uh yes the the mudawana in and of itself is about thirty thousand massa several hundred thousand or over a hundred thousand issues in this so this is the time in which people are writing

has taken has taken place i mean and not just simple tadween i mean a hundred thousand fatah that's like immense kind of like very detailed so in this era how is it that muslims are still not one written a basic creed of what is it they're telling people that for example this is how if you've got a neighbor you don't tap this nail into the wall if you've got sharing the path you don't do it like this if you're buying tomatoes with this and they've got books on this but nobody's written by the way teach your kids this is what they should believe about god

that's not even a simple thing two nobody's written a commentary on the quran read and and i know there is obviously you could one could argue makatil and a few people but there's no real seed like as in saying a commentary on the quran and nobody has written really from these imams a seerah like there's no basic biography yes of the prophet and and then these are the questions and now what how how i mean how would you respond to that i mean this is a very um indeed for any historian and believing

muslim a very um tough questions question because you have a lot of theories but one thing um that is undeniable is that the seerah was written because the abbasid authorities wanted it to be written i think it was abuja al-mansour who who who asked for it to be written so the whole tadween uh era takes place under uh the the watchful eye of the abbasids so that that's that's one thing uh the other is also in terms of theology and also in terms of

the seerah itself um you had the hadith you had a lot of free weights but you had also competing views of the seerah putting certain people you know in in this version in a better light than you know compare compared to to another and most of it was politically motivated i mean let's not forget that uh also talking about orthodoxy that ali

was cursed for a long period of time under umayyad rule until um stopped him being cursed you know on the friday prayer and uh there is a whole and this is something we know but the main question i think for historians is what about these other sects that disappeared because we know about the khawarij only from the point of view of their adversaries we know about many people who were deemed deviant or heretics

etc from the point of view of their of their adversaries but what was their version and that's a very tough question to answer but the the thing with the sira that makes it very tough is also because you you would have wished for an alternative version as a historian i'm speaking to have survived in in the shia community or communities in plural or among the other sects of islam but they all followed the version of even in ishaq basically through ibn hisham that's also another

you know the abridged version of it so it's really tough at the end of the day a lot of western scholars are speaking about two things to separate these two um the prophet of um uh the historical muhammad yeah and the muhammad of the faith and the two are very much separated from each other and that's indeed a very interesting point for further research because i've i felt that one of the reasons may have been

um i felt that the it may have had something to do with the hmm maybe the confidence in um obviously they were all confident people but the if i can maybe use the the term audacity okay to be able to present a creed because remember in early islam there is no like there is no name sunnah there is no there's just muslims there is no orthodoxy is just muslims and there is no

it's still being kind of forged out yes now for a person to make a stand like let's say imam malik made a stand and said okay we will teach our kids this this this this could subject him easily to becoming a target from other people to say who the hell does he think he is the prophet never set this out how can he set it up and i felt that maybe a similar thing with tafsir right was that people may have felt that they could easily become susceptible to becoming targeted like if you see i can

like let's say i'm a mohadis i'm an imam i can teach hadith all day i can teach my fatwas i can teach i'm in medina the but if i start saying and hear when allah says this this is what he really means now people might say you know who the hell do you think you are telling us what allah really means the need for theology as such um came later with the conversion of many non-arabs uh who had uh

i i find that answer lacking for a simple theology because because you could say look when you look at their fatawa infect they are dealing with ridiculous trivialities yes like you know all this and this and you know oh my god he he you know he bought a sack and the sack had this this much wheat missing and this was like this and you rented a shop for so much time and you gotta remember by this time like the time of imam malik there are already many non arabs who have embraced and have been kind of brought into the whole persian thing and

so i simple creed for children like just saying like almond to be like or malaika t what could be you know something like this it wouldn't really uh like i don't think it that was something and to say that there was no i think it was obvious don't you think so especially the one you you just mentioned a man to believe humanik this is what you find in the quran like like literally in the quran but the the challenge comes you know with these other questions of how do you understand that jesus is the word of god oh no yeah no i didn't mean it at a complex theology becomes very complicated even but

but even at this simple level there's no document there's no they never they never include it in the so for example when they're giving the fatawa they'll never say like they'll say this is how we'll teach kids how to pray you know my my understanding of it is you had a competition of ortho praxis not orthodoxies because the focus one orthopraxy okay on how how you practice what is the right practice of islam not what is the right dogma of islam i see so this is the the doing

so you had this competition uh in the beginning because you really can make an argument depending on how you read this early islamic history as it was reported in in the uh history books of muslims because some people would think for example that the fact that abu bakr became the khalif and after him omar et cetera was a sort of secularization of islam in itself because if you believe in the hadith you know that would say it should have been ali from the very beginning you know the shia point of view because

there is something very interesting about also and this is a hadith that you find in this in the in the sunni sources as well there is an interesting hadith it is known as hadith in the hadith of the one who repairs the shoe okay and the hadith goes like this that reportedly the prophet you know came uh uh um and and and he was sitting with abu bakr and omar and told them something in the lines of there there will come into a time where someone will fight for interpretation for t wheel in the same manner

that i've been fighting for revelation for the why and abu bakr and omar asked am i this person he said no no it is khasi for now and in this hadith you find [Music] and ali was repairing his shoe and now this opens the whole discussion about the role of ali if of course it it's it's a different theological point of view but from this shia point of view if you if you just try to understand okay where are they coming from with this whole theory you realize that the imam has the role of explaining the

weed of the text so that there is of course this the text but there will always be an interpretation of the text and some interpretations are more acceptable than others and the only way to make sure that you have the right one is to follow those who those who were chosen by god to interpret the text and this is an argument that this the that the khalifs obviously did not accept because now we have we are separating two things uh does this person has also to be politically in charge

or not that's a and that's a different discussion uh but at the end of the day when you when you see of how things went historically uh the early sunni community took a stance was that an and and and made it a sort of democratic process basically yeah uh where everyone who is qualified who who has you know earned his his uh paid his dues can can uh be an authority it was a kind of a democratic meritocracy meritocracy i like that yes it was like that wasn't it yeah

and i suppose the whole the alternate version would be uh like in the shia sense it is also i mean they do say that obviously they see said ali from a meritocratic point of view that he obviously has merits but it's also a tradition of bloodline so it's like the traditions of old in the sense that people to really rule it should be the same bloodline isn't it um you can't just have new people jumping on the scene and this is where the discussion about the khawaris historically becomes very important

because at the end of the day uh you know despite you know this whole very extremist violent aspect you know that some groups had the khawaris as a movement you can have you can read their their history in the sense that they said you know we don't want anyone from quraish ruling because at the end of the day it was a competition between banu umayya and banu hashem through the line of ali and his sons yeah and they said no every muslim who is pious can be in charge politically of the ummah

yeah so so and and and it is a very interesting way of approaching politics because this whole battle between the umayyads and and the the hashimiz is something that still impacts islam till this very day somehow right and and yes you can read a lot of uh later developments along those lines i i feel that it's a very good way to you know by triangulating certain things to also be able to have a good idea on what was

um what we can confidently say about islam so obviously the differences aside but let's for example in a previous previously i've uh in a video used that point as well to respond to not saying that's the main point but a point to respond to this thing of uh also the mecca question that makkah was actually in petra um saying that well actually even if you know one of the points i've mentioned is that okay fair enough there's all these other evidences and i've responded but when you take three heavily opposing

uh fraction factions like the the sun sunnis obviously not called sunni at that time but the sunnis if you like the shia and the who couldn't stand each other in early islam they would never have tolerated the other moving the qibla and they would never have gone with it yes and they would have made a point of secretly transmitting that this is their hajj and this is actually over there yeah so i feel that triangulation method to establishing some of the early living

tradition is a is a good method yeah and also with regards to the quran obviously there is this very uh tough discussion about the quran you know and and the earth etc which is which is very long and and complex but at the end of the day you you really can say that the main authorities of all these muslim sects do have the same quran to a certain degree you know if you think about the shia today they they have exactly the same quran you know that is being read

among the sunnis elsewhere but you know i just wanted to come back to to the discussion about because it reminds me also we're talking about uh the evolution of orthodoxy and they are really fascinating in the sense that what's your fascination with enlightenment i have to go back to to the history of morocco because at a certain period of time a lot of moroccans followed the regime right at the beginning when when the arab conquerors or however you want to see them came to morocco

the umayyad rule had made a lot of these native moroccans the berbers into second second-class muslims and they had their mawali system elsewhere where you had to be connected to an arab tribe and it always made you second-class citizens some and and and many historians have made an argument that the umayyads did discourage conversion to islam because they wanted the jizya to be paid which was a higher tax so in morocco a lot of these berber realized where we are being treated not very well from the umayyad authorities and they rebelled against them

and they adopted the khariji madhab and every time in the history of morocco when the population was and that's really interesting um when the population was dissatisfied or disillusioned with the theology in place they would go with the competing theology you know because later on they went they they became shiri they went they when the fatimids you know were in charge they they adopted a lot of their theology and then even the one of the first dynasties in morocco

is the the idris dynasty and idris himself was a a zaidi who fled the abbasid uh persecution of the surah to morocco and this is something that you find it's it's really interesting as a continuity in moroccan history because you find at different moments in time a lot of prophets even people who claimed uh prophethood uh uh emerging in this moroccan context or even mahdi's a lot of melodies in morocco and another matter

i'm the last and true one so follow me people yeah no but that's a very good point about how people often you see faith or theology better still is is often a political tool it shows uh you know what i'm fed up with you this is where i pledge my allegiance it's interesting that uh the andalus under the revival of the umayyads bani miya over there then choose the motherboard as a as a state method whereas the abbasids have the motherboard

i mean uh whether that had some i'm sure politics always is there's always some angle isn't there of power [Laughter] yeah but the the thing you spoke of is so true and fascinating i was thinking about this actually just last week uh going over certain things about this whole this you about being a client to the arab tribes you have to you know this is uh and you are second class and what and it's interesting that this word has uh i believe that's still that that is the root for this word that it has lived on in the

indian subcontinent uh as a word for somebody who is up to no good okay so they call like somebody who is uh basically like a thug or something like this like they will say you know mawali um and it's and it's interesting that it's used when we go to early islam although initially there was this thing of you know people who these clients of the arab tribes and then by extension slaves right but then it's just used non-stop to non non-true arabs as in

those who become a rival sized but are non-arabs in essence that's also a very big um issue in islamic history this whole idea of superiority of arabs you know with regard to or compared to other muslims yeah and it runs very deep it still impacts i would say for instance the the way many modern muslim states have defined themselves for instance if you think about morocco morocco understands itself to be an arab country of course but is it really the case

because sixty percent of the population does not speak arabic that's one thing sixty percent does not speak arabic you have many uh important berber or amazigh tribes with their own languages yeah and and i i assumed that i knew that they have their languages the amazir but i assumed the majority of them were just bilingual like they could speak arabic and some of them can but many uh just just do not speak uh speak the moroccan colon colloquial colonial colloquial dialect

and it's it's very interesting because many families also who believe to be arabs are berbers who who were i've read i've read a study it's been several years now but i've read a dna study of a genetic study of of morocco and it was also looking at spain as well and it was speaking about about the kind of arab haplogroup and where it exists um but interestingly it had i mean i'm going to quote it wrong now because it's been like so many years since i've read it but it was showing almost if i recall

anything accurately almost up to 90 percent if not more slightly were not actually from the arab haplogroup but they were just aerobicized with time they were actually just berbers like this was in north west africa like in morocco it started in the under the uh were the ones who um well the story is a bit uh starts earlier with the fatimids they had an issue with the hilari tribes and the hilari tribes were war arab

warriors who were just you know thinking about conquest it's argued that they were sent in in essence to kind of because they were an unruly tribe in their wars in in spain but also allowed them to to to make morocco their home and it is only at this at this point that you may argue that morocco started to become um culturally arabized somehow and the influence of the arabic elements became more and more important but what you said about the dna is very interesting because there are many studies

done on the y y chromosome yeah that's what i meant the haplogroup to see where they are coming from many many indeed are i think if i recall correctly uh i'll just actually um because i'm pretty certain it's the j let me just see uh hyper group j i'm pretty sure that is the the um the arab haplogroup is it not let me just see half a group j yeah it is happy group j is the uh i believe one of

it's the main arab haplogroup so um when when when if you look at studies on where this is diversified throughout the globe and who so there's a lot done on on spain as well so they've checked where do they have uh and where do several like in southern spain they will have several like part of the genetic makeup will be berber roots but uh so even though they are european but they've got those genes as well so you can tell that so many generations back there was mixing exactly but surprisingly they were showing that actually the overwhelming majority of morocco

were not genetically arab but they were arab as in by today culture but they weren't genetically of that haplogroup but you know the whole idea identification with with arabs uh officially really started in the 20th century it became a nationalist creed because the the nationalist movement in morocco defined morocco as an arab muslim country yeah and the problem with that kind of definition um it it may apply to a lot of people who see themselves that way but in morocco you had until that point

a very important jewish community moroccan jewish community who were native moroccans and many of them were there before the arrival of the first muslims and on the other hand also the the all amazing tribes who are not arabs and who could not identify themselves with the arabs so the the whole history of the amazir movement had to be rewritten to make the connection with arabs so the first i remember the first lesson in the history class that i took in morocco was that the amazing or the the berbers

came from yemen you know just to establish you know this is true this is fascinating i'll tell you this this is fascinating because you see me i feel this is my kind of uh i'm i'm in line with the fact that this whole you know this kind of uh this genealogy when it goes back to adnan and katan and all of this i feel that's just kind of made up the arabs kind of to that extent they just made it up uh i mean they were obviously people of that kept genealogies and they kept their answer but when it got to and i was reading into some of these that

even the southern arabs were most likely a different people and and it seems that because in their language i was reading the book uh arabs a three thousand year history and they were showing studies of how they would just end words with an okay and that's how they wrote word most likely that region was to do with the desert or something and it may have been assumed that is this a person's name now and then the argument is the theory is that adnan is then just

created on that wasn't to rival him so adnan becomes a character that is then a rival to patan not only that but also adnan is important in uh his connection to ismail of course of course because now you have you know different things because on the one hand also just talking about the hadith you know there is this statement that the prophet would never go up in his genealogy over adnan but then later on you find a an unbroken

genealogy until uh uh that reaches to to abraham through ismail yeah and it is basically this whole idea that this is the millet ibrahim the true one you know that has been revivified with islam and a lot of rituals are being adopted in that name for instance if you think about i mean it's a bit of a controversial issue no no if you think about this is the place for control circumcision for example if you think about the the proofs for circus is for circumcision

in in the tradition well first the quran doesn't say anything about circumcision and then you have to go to hadith and the hadith you have something if i remember well that that ibrahim performed circumcision when he was 80 years old yeah okay now that is in some of the narrations but let's just roll with that because the problem now is now you are connecting this hadith when you ask the the about why is it obligatory

yeah they say well we were older than the quran to follow millat ibrahim and this is what ibrahim is doing but then now you have the whole idea of okay he did it when he was 80. so how long did he live and you go into a whole discussion i don't know how many years he lived you get some incredible numbers but at the end of the day when you go later on okay this is the quran nothing the sunnah well some some very questionable hadith and then you when you when you see the opinions of the you are just shocked if i remember well a shaft because we spoke a lot about the shaft

said something that it was worship obligatory for both males and females or something hence the the fgm is a huge issue the female mutilation within chef like countries like malaysia and indonesia where they suffer from that you know this uh abrahamization thing i've spoken of that i felt that this was not that ibrahim alaihissalam obviously was there he existed but i felt that this emphasis of ibrahim al-islam as the father figure of the arabs is it was kind of forged in the sense

that whether whether there was a link through ismail or not i'm not saying they may have been but the way it was created was a forgery just to establish a link with the northern arab kingdoms who were christian the byzantines and the sassanids and these people because you see the quran mentions nothing about ibrahim alaihissalam being the father of the arabs and things like this and when you think about it i always you know before i started researching this for years i found this really intriguing i had a question mark and nobody could really answer it for me

i used to think that look in the seerah books and in these books on history we read you know these different arabs and i was thinking okay so they say the arabicized arabs begin with ismail because it wasn't an arrow so okay tikka so fine but why is it that those arabs the original dakartani arabs are not given that place of oh they're the original arabs because i would have thought by common sense you know if somebody is let's say a hybrid then the pure

you would assume wow well arabs actually come from qatar right now whereas they would say no no no the best of the arabs are now the this and then this particularly this tribe and then it's quraish what is your answer to to that how do you to the question you just asked about how do you explain this uh this thing don't so i don't believe this thing is true so i feel that what it is is that the uh like in that book and in several other things they show a lot of research yes that it's very so the arabs as a people generally were scattered you've got the

arabian peninsula and the arabs generally arabia was split into three as i mean that was by the byzantines romans but however you've got the northern kingdoms which is modern-day middle east iraq lebanon that kind of place these there were an immense amount of let's say if we want to call them arabs that lived here now these people stemming from other like from the nabataeans and because they were kind of arabs in essence and so you've got this kind of people but they didn't identify as arabs this wasn't an identity in fact the byzantines probably felt they were byzantine

and they felt and the sassanids uh probably felt there with them and the nabataeans the offspring of them then you've got arabia desert you've got the uh which is the hijaz and this part and into the arabian peninsula and then you've got arabia felix which is the southern probably modern day yemen yes the southern had their own kingdoms which were well-known kingdoms the axomites and all of these uh with history and archaeology dating back you know exactly a couple going beyond a thousand years before the prophet right now those people would have spoken a different language but it had similarities indeed that there

was obviously shared words and similarities but they were different and they wrote it differently and hence the arabian that was prevalent was the southern arabian they used to call it al-muslin exactly and what happens is the northern kingdoms used a different script from nabataean script called el jason and they so with the rise of islam what i felt was that you see before islam rises before the rise of islam you read in history that the northern kingdoms was a very popular city hera which is in modern-day iraq which is where all these poets uh were

from you know would be nabira and all these others would hang around up there so labe and alaska and all of these now you see these writings oh in history we learned that sofiane abu sufyansari would have trade in hera he would go there and he comes back with he brings back um somebody by the name of i believe bishop malik who he uh marries one of his daughters and he tells him that oh teach us um script the script and he's one of the first people to bring the script

into hijaz and he's starting to get popular now with the rise of islam as the quran as the prophet emerges as islam starts to emerge there is an active choice to choose the half of jesus over musnat yes we're going to use the nabatae in that kind of script to write the quran and hence uh i believe this is why i believe it was accurate that people like muawiyah or were amongst the early people to write because they were from that family who were writing now and even in the battle of where you're going to see uh in the battle of badr

the prophet saying look if you can teach them people of yathrib to write you can go free yes so this script is being migrated and and we're seeing that when after the prophet and after islam has got some kind of a stronghold and now muslims start to do their conquest further north with um and other people you see when they move into the northern kingdoms that had a history of prestige they had these great poets these great what what what makes your heritage special to them because they come from a rich tradition of christianity they come from a rich tradition and you

know it's interesting that you see when early muslim when muslims go up north uh as i mean in as islam spreads there's a lot of fairy questions can we read the other can we not the other can we read al-fatiha can we read uh can we do this with the pharisees can we do pharisee why are there no questions about greek you see because greek was heavily prevalent in in the whole byzantine thing because the greek most of them were arabs by they shared this arab background so they could

understand they had similarities with arabic so they didn't really need a translation of the quran even if they didn't fully speak like that but they could understand it whereas the persians couldn't understand all together so but my point was that to create this link to forge a stronger bond like you were mentioning with a later group like tesla and other things here in early islam i believe the abrahamization project began in saying well we actually all have one origin abraham i think there is also a very important element in the connection to is and that

that is the competition with ishak basically claiming that now the muslims or the arabs are also the the true chosen people of god yeah because you you had this discourse going on you know in the jewish community that they were the chosen the chosen ones but now isma'id and the whole story of ishmael and that he is the dhabi yeah the sacrifice the sacrificial islam yeah because and this is something where you find a lot of uh a divergence of opinion among

muslims who who was the the uh you know child that had to be sacrificed is it is hakor or you had an and even in the hadith if i remember well you have contro a lot of contradictions in some in in the one i know and even with the behind you know as he referred to himself it's interesting on that note just a side on a tangential note that imam malik was of the opinion it was his heart many others yeah many others i think even even rb also later was the opinion that it was his heart and and others indeed

yeah indeed but as i think a the way i understand it in his historical context is really not only championing the theology that we are the true milla of ibrahim but also we are the true bloodline of ibrahim i mean legitimacy isn't it but i felt also what was important in early islam was carving an identity you see this thing of arabs didn't exist in that way like they were arabs but they didn't think of themselves as a people

that were united no now this yes that this identity being carved out i feel the abrahamization of it helps massively because it helps from it includes even the jews it includes even like it creates bonds like it and then ibrahim the story with mecca then brings allows muslims to present why our thing is important like our side why is that arabia important well abraham built the kaaba yes you see so so it kind of gives this because to the northern kingdoms

the the arabian peninsula especially the hijas thing was of insignificance to them like they didn't see that as anything important they weren't like of great civilization or and so to them saying well ibrahim alaihissalam and this is why i feel that even i've said like the story of safa marwa is actually made up in my uh understanding and it's just that you know this is that these were sacred sites based on pagan practices but it lost its meaning pagan meaning indeed and the muslim and this is why if you read the quran the quran just says you

know it means so it's but this is part of that abrahamization of saying well look this we are all connected through this i mean i i mean these are my kind of uh just theories on it there are some people who push them a lot further their theories uh i was reading up because i was reading up uh about a few works by the historian ahmed usman who's an egyptian

very controversial views he has but it's interesting some of the things are factual about abraham i say factual hasn't accepted like abraham uh doing the circumcision much later when he comes back from egypt and what is factual is the egyptians were amongst the oldest civilization to circumcise yes so they this understanding is he does this from their tradition but why does he do this from their tradition now ahmed osman his theory is that you see in

the bible and in some islamic literature it does mention that when ibrahim is traveling with sarah he's he's fearful and he says well you know say you're my sister and so on and but and and she's taken in in the bible she's taken by the pharaoh because she's really beautiful and he marries her now and then the pharaoh gives abraham a slave because sarah says well give him you know somebody is lonely and he gives him uh now the interesting what ahmad osman claims is that according to the biblical version

she stays with pharaoh until so long until pharaoh then later realizes oh well he why did he not tell me that was his wife and this is wrong and sends her back with him but when he sends her back she is already with child so she's pregnant okay and that child is according to him is ishaq his heart yes who this is why in the bible abraham is critiqued for for his son not looking like him and you see according to him the whole figures the chronological figures are different so he says

that moses the the pharaoh was dawood yes so he puts david free as a pharaoh and this is why david is such an important people to the jewish people right because so he has a really intriguing way of looking at things and he's trying to improve his it's just whoa that's really the problem with these um uh stories pre-islamic stories in general yeah that were adopted heavily by muslims you have to do a lot of gymnastics you know to keep them alive to keep the system

working and if you compare this to the quranic approach like the quran is not interested in this kind of detail exactly i mean it's so fascinating that just on that note sorry that even many uh islam critics will say today that you know when you like patricia crone and these people who've passed she's passed away but her works are very popular today michael cook and others even fred donner says the same thing that look if you read the quran the quran imagine you just read the quran and there was no history of islam alive it's very difficult placing anything anywhere like you can't even

like even countries ain't named you don't know where this is happening you don't know you know it's just like it's it's it's almost just it's it's in its own it's just floating it's not also the kind of dogma and that's very interesting the kind of dogma that emerges out of the quran alone it's a very simple dogma you have monotheism you believe in god and there is only one god that there is a day of judgment that everyone would be held responsible for his actions or her actions um that they are angels and

and other you know things out there and that's basic and be a good man or good good woman and that's it basically but then when you compare that to how islam has evolved in time and now it's really super now you need to spend at least i would say 20 years studying theology you know now it's like time to understand what you are talking about now it's like masha'allah you believe all these 234 things but do you believe that 235th thing no kafir

no you just lost your membership but tough luck i mean that's not even phil connell you're just a cafe that's really you know talking about i just wanted to to ask you about something that i'm um i've been reading a lot about um because we talked about earliest the early islamic history and i really do have the feeling sometimes when we think about this right that's really fascinating i've just been trying to read through something about this you know and it is i think a very tough discussion that a lot of people should be more

interested in because it makes this point of how theology and orthodoxy will evolve later on because what what a lot of people kind of want to remember is that you know abu bakr sent an army to fight musselma or muslima who pretended to or claim to be a prophet and that was of course non-negotiable not acceptable but then when you read why certain tribes didn't what didn't want to pay zakat to him

yeah and that some of them uh believed that it should have been ali and or or had a problem with him with abu bakr being the head of the community it it just you know uh gives you another perspective if i can add to that that what i find very interesting is i mean not even so much about the worker versus ali thing at all but what i find very interesting is uh you see this if we look from the documentation perspective the prophet only collects

uh in america in the in the year ninth year of history he collects uh some zakat now it only seems from the records that certain tribes only paid it it was not the whole of arabia and it's not certain whether some of them are just paying it out of goodwill or is it a kind of a compulsion it's not clear but what is clear is there's several tribes that are in treaty with the prophet like i believe some from hatfan and other places and and they are giving something to the prophet that is clear and

and some others are coming and they're giving something but is are they giving as their goodwill gesture are they giving us no we are comp coerced to give this it's not very clear it's not clear and and what's not and it doesn't seem the entirety of arabia is giving you but what happens is this obviously with abu bakr radhiallahu and as he emerges you see this becomes a a stance that he takes and i feel that the reason that what's happening here is because this famous statement you know man

you know who refused to or made a distinction between uh the the kind of whatever it is that they've tied the camel with and oh he prevented me oh sorry my mana ani palan who prevented even this from me i will fight them yes this kind of a harsh statement you see it was it was encroaching on several matters it wasn't just i mean there was the aspect okay there's a concept of zakat but we have to remember that the arabs were a kind of uh like the bedouinized arabs were kind of proud

people a warrior tribe so one of the greatest problems they had was paying tribute like paying monetary tribute to someone like they had allegiances but when they pay money was seen as a kind of that this was one aspect but another aspect you see what's interesting is which i found very particularly very interesting is the you see the person who comes to collect to collect you no longer have a right to privacy of assets he can come into your property

and see what is it that you have so this concept of privacy is kind of compromised it's very interesting but it is on the other hand it is the ultimate submission if you are to gain submission at this time you will break the back of any resilience that may be there and i think this is a fascinating point and i think oh baker made that stance one obviously for financial reasons it was needed uh let's say we need tax and but i feel it was a way to like everybody would like to force out

that submission because the thing that i'm struggling with um is also to think about this zakat [Music] that they that a lot of tribes did not want to pay to him was this maybe an understanding of them that um there is a difference between the religious and the and the political because you know paying it to the prophet you can make an argument okay this is religion right now but now it's politics and it's something completely different um yeah i i feel that people especially in the past have

said that that that they've used the verses of the quran and so but this is tuzuki you are oh i mean it could be the the zakat as well but you hudmin not the other people and they have said some people said look bani hanifa and these tribes said well you know we would give it to the prophet but you're not the prophet but i i feel that's so that's what the quran is saying yeah yeah to the prophet talking to the prophet to the prophet yes so so there was that argument and i feel that that is

that is true that it is it's not clear that uh when they were giving it to the prophet were they giving it as a compulsion or as a kind of offering some people were definitely giving it as in look we don't want war we want troops and we want there were definitely some tribes but all of arabia was not giving uh to them to the pro because the prophet when these collect when he receives zakat from them within several months he passes away so there isn't that you know this thing isn't kind of fully articulated okay what are the rules and okay it's gonna be this much and we're gonna do it like this and

uh but i do and i can't understand why the arab tribes would feel that look why give money you know we're not gonna give money okay we're you know fine we'll be with you but we're not gonna kind of give you money uh but this is and i can understand from a political perspective you would need money but also i feel it would be the it would be the litmus test like if you pass this you will have it unlocked you are the ruler yes yeah like you know if you if we if we if we give in here then the ground ahead will just be rocky

like we we have to crush this and i feel it was less to do with it being let's say the pillar of islam no and more about the we have to lay the law like we are that's also a way of you know if you think about it from an um a political point of view of what was going on in medina and the kind of opposition that uh that abu bakr had not only from from ali and the members of his family but also from many uh ansar in medina itself

when you have a war and you send armies outside then you what's interesting on a side note with that is uh i mean it's the the murderer of uh what's this or is it the other side isn't it the uh uh in buhari he because he is also finds problems with um you know the way things are being done but he's murdered and and in bukhari mentions oh ajin murdered him okay you know there's a hadith i don't know if you see they say that there's a gym

for rama for ada because he was found with like i think like an arrow or but you just found dead one day and he's the leader of the tribe um and so he's found dead and they just say hey uh khalid took care of and it's it's one a horrible story that he that they just wanted to to discuss things and that they were definitely muslims and

and he he he killed the leader of the tribe it's not this woman a slave uh and the pr i i think why it is important to rediscuss the these uh stories is because for a lot of not a lot of muslims but for some muslims they are seen as precedents and that's you know there is a craziness about these stories that should be addressed because because no he's not a muslim because we ruled he's not a muslim so we can kill him and we can take his wife and his children as slaves

it sets precedent for a lot of trouble and you had this trouble you know this continuity of trouble until isis you know when you if you if you think about the this horrible example of isis this is the kind of precedent in my understanding that was set for them if you say okay which which kind of islam are you following well here here it is here are the texts and you have to yeah no you know i feel that that's very somehow very good because you see i have got a video on youtube where i'm addressing should we because i because the question i've been

asked that look why can't we uh it's to do with adela to sahabah why can't we critique the companions or look at them objectively and i give a whole scenario and if anybody wants to watch that please watch it's not long video but i go into it in better detail than i would be able to now but i just explained look you've got this option and you've got this option and i on and i feel nobody really does justice anyway because i feel that what happens is with the on one option obviously you've got the veneration where there's just we don't critique anyone everybody's just venerated the other is where we critique but the problem is okay the sunnis tradition generally won't

but then i've said that the the shia tradition will but then they won't critique said ali they'll just critique non ali and everybody else and so i said look it's best that we just don't and we venerate that's what i feel but that said i think this is a very important point you've made i never really thought about it from this angle and i think that is a very um a very important i i honestly do believe what troubles me is the kind of precedent in terms of that these kinds of uh examples are setting because it has again to do with how do you define sunnah because if you follow

the whole that companions are like the stars and it doesn't matter which one you follow it will you know you will be guided uh how do we assess this kind of precedent you know in terms of in terms of because now who has the authority to declare someone muslim or not muslims because for a lot of people until that time they were thinking well you are muslim if you believe that there is no god but god and that

muhammad is the messenger of god and that's that's basically it and you find many hadees also go into that direction even um it doesn't even have a muhammad rasool so how do you uh you know address these contradictions that's very this is a very powerful point i mean i yeah when you think about it these because you know often we will get i will get people say to me you know like in comments not in person but in comments they will say to me things like they would write that oh you know oh this must have you know if

he was in the time of the sabbath they would have killed him or they would have you know they would have cut his head off like such and such and or they would have done this or they would have done but these stories are what they it's not the issue isn't about me the issue is that these they've got an image haven't they there's this image that oh in that day and age this is what people were doing if they felt you were a heretic right now i think that such narrative such theories such beliefs that this is how islam or was lived it needs to be addressed because that's i mean

that because that first of all i mean i i wouldn't believe that that is how it was generally lived and if it was by some people on some occasions those occasions do need to be addressed i mean the whole concept if you think about it of what has been labeled islamia is extremely problematic uh because i there is a there are a lot of you know reasons to doubt that they had anything to do with religion with spreading religion uh but that being said you know it

i by the way i just wanted to to to salute you for your position on the high gas sofia oh a friend of mine shared your your whole take on that and i really find it it's it that's the right position to have in my view because i've listened to too many other youth online uh and like you see some people are really disconnected from reality i've listened to the take of uh uh sheikh dadu you know i haven't yeah i haven't heard his work this gentleman

is you know he is really disconnected for he's talking about this um what happens when a muslim ruler enter a non-muslim territory in how the others have to submit and pay jizya to him and he talks about that muhammad al-fatiha or whatever his name was bought the aya sofia from the christian and that's complete nonsense i mean the guy named himself the ghazi so when you are hazy you just take things and whatever you're in people yeah and and and and and what i found very unfortunate in this

whole higher sofia thing is this is a missed chance for muslims to say you know erdogan could have said you know what let's give this hijo sofia back to the christian orthodox community yeah you know there are many uh or some uh turkish christians there uh let's let's you know do some something good some something beautiful because the problem that that i personally have with a lot of fukuha that something has been declared halal doesn't make it

ethically beautiful exactly it might be halal that's okay because the the books that's what that's what i was saying that look i'm not trying to say what erdogan did was haram and i'm not trying to even get into the haram or the was it legal obviously it's his country it's that country's legal within that country but i was just trying to say is it right or wrong from you know and you know in that sense but imagine the kind of impact that it would have had had if he said you know what let's give it back and and and let's open like a new chapter

with the christian community his but that wouldn't play into his story of trying to lead the muslim world because he's trying to become absolutely not indeed indeed and that's really i mean it just unfortunate but but it is it is what it is it's the kind of uh very weak ethical positions i i find that a lot of muslim leaders and scholars unfortunately have been taking you know it's it's also this whole um wow uh we we are back on track and we will be great again and we have it back

the rise of populism this whole not being like populist kind of leaders or feeding to that populist audience of like yeah uh you know this in a trump in an era of trump i mean this is what we're seeing isn't it like rallying oh masha'allah play the adhan you know allahu akbar like i saw people sharing this on youtube and they were so emotional you know the other and i said masha'allah but come on let's be real the athans everywhere in istanbul you know you're not gonna really be like oh my god i've never heard the athan before so and and this is it's speaking from a position

of inferiority and you know people when they they when they're insecure they do things like this when people are secure and you know it's interesting we spoke a lot about history but you will see that at times like historically even in the you know when you read up on the umayyads or sometimes the abbasids or different people when they're dealing with other people why is it that they weren't sometimes imposing this in fact you know they would be like look if you want it just yeah have a truce and it's because of security by that time they had a sense of

like security of themselves we don't you know we're established like i don't need to feel that you don't need that yeah and and i feel that this is such a uh this insecurity is a big thing with unfortunately within the muslim kind of scene it's also something in my view that um destroys the whole islamic scholarship because if you have a a muslim mufti or a muslim scholar in general who is arguing from the point of view of insecurity whether he knows it or not or um a lot of his rulings will

smell like you know insecurity yeah but the problem that a lot of people who are not trained to see that will see will take it at face value this is what islam stands for yeah and you see it creates a lot of problems and you see that in many things i've said in you know i've got a video on where i speak about um it's i think it's called the madrasa crisis or something but i speak about the same thing with misogyny you see people are dealing with insecurities that they may not may or may not be conscious of but then they are then they're kind of lashing out

like so i gave the example of where you'll have maulanas with even in certain towns in the uk but they live in almost like a village you know some of these towns up north they're not villages but they might as well be but they but they are like you know they've got madrasas and these guys just grow all their lives like they'll be just in this madrasa they just wear it they wear wheel got dopey on now when they go out and about people look at them differently like this must create an you know a psyche of like oh like oh i'm being looked at and i'm being different and and i said and they must see other muslims for example who

are riding on the buses for example boyfriends girlfriends things like this they must see all this but they're not a part of it and they see all these girls who are into fashion and they see all of this but it's not a part of their world now one day one when one of those that cut when a woman like that comes to them asking them oh look uh i've done this you see this is where part of that rage comes from absolutely in saying well this is haram you know your filth anyway this kind of thing is just yeah so did you did you watch unorthodox

i haven't seen that yet oh you have to okay it is on my list it is a fascinating uh uh book obviously but also the the the mini uh theory of on netflix is really interesting yeah because it it discusses exactly what you what you were talking about oh is it what happens to you when you grew up in a closed community because it is about this hazidic jewish community in in williamsburg in brooklyn and um the whole it's very closed environment

so there is no or a very uh small amount of interaction with the outside world you live inside these imagined walls and it does a lot to your psyche and and and the the point why i'm bringing the series i don't think that it is jewish necessarily you see a lot of parallels of course with a lot of you know um muslim communities when you when you are you know when you grew up and you are socialized in this kind of manner in a bubble uh you may be many very often like the kind of mountains that you have

described it it is very difficult because uh how do you want to explain to someone or give a fatwa to someone when you don't understand where he or she is coming from what kind of life he is living what what kind of mistakes he has been doing etc because you have absolutely no idea about his world or her world and you have first of all to be and also this this thing adding to that uh doc is this thing of where they feel that they whether it's right or wrong but in their world they feel wronged or they feel that you know uh

like i've lost out in this so we're so for example in the muslim world who hate on like obviously let's say they're living with and i'm not saying this is their fault but let's say they're living in poverty or the country doesn't have a good system and doesn't have now they see the west and they see these countries who don't believe in god and then they have better systems let's say a health service things like this technology and there's this there's a natural like you know not having causes unfortunately a natural hate or envy towards the having now the

problem with that is also you have to the only way to survive that is to lie to yourself so you have to invent a theology yeah that explains your situation that gives meaning to your suffering the reason why i'm not taking part you know in this uh whatever beautiful culture out there or whatever you know things that i'm associated associating it with is that i am on the right path and exactly the pattern of god there's only one and all of them are going to hell and you start you know psyching yourself

and the fact that i've lost out on let's say this this this this but it's okay because god's gonna give me in the afterlife but then the problem is you know they they're gonna look at you mahdi and say well he doesn't keep a long beard and he's got this and they're gonna you know look he's listening to music and and he's claiming he can still do that and god that robs them of this this narrative because the narrative is okay we've sacrificed it for god and he will you know i'm like i said that maulana is sitting on a bus now he doesn't have a girlfriend he doesn't have this now he's

thinking well it's okay but god is going to give me something better reward now he hears people listening to music he thinks look i've given up music it's okay i'm not i haven't got an earring on i haven't got this but then he sees people that are doing that they are listening and they're saying well actually it's not even haram and now now that's a huge spanner in the works but one of the things there have been some studies done on that uh to take the the most extremist example uh many of the isis fighters when uh obviously isis turned out to

not to be what they believed it would be yeah lost their faith completely in islam or even in god because this was the only kind of salve salvific experience that they that they wanted it to be or that kind of salvation that they that they wished wished it to be and when they realized it's not that they completely you know they were lost many many of them many of them and i just really think that especially as a mufti and i'm not a mufti obviously you know uh i'm i'm i'm okay not being one

but the thing is i really think you need to be exposed to a lot of things and a lot of culture i thought you meant like and in life experience and and and and you know and and life experience is i think a key word yeah to be able to give fatwas to people because many things are not even don't even have a religious aspect to them many things are just you know psychological issues that people are struggling with i think being secure to a great degree of yourself you know like and this is why i think it's important that

people who take this path to islamic learning they do try to be stable financially they do try to do different like they try to exp one the experiences right but they come from a position of or they try to attain a position of at least to a considerable degree security of themselves i feel that that ties into compassion then because the other thing you know like like we spoke of the aya sofia this this is then the perfect example of those people in their mind having a win over like hahahahaha like we got it you see like to the west

it's a kind of like a her like i stick my fingers up to you and we got the ayah sofia serves you right and it's the same thing i said earlier on about the misogyny it's like well now comes a girl that all you know she's got her hair like this she's got and this is the thing that this person couldn't can't have and she comes and says you know i say all right i wear nail polish and i want to do will do over it stuff why should i make life easy for you exactly you know because also the whole discussion about tarji because as a mufti you have to do you have to um yeah weigh the arguments

and choose one from from the past scholarship that that you deem you know uh uh will answer the question that that that you have been asked and and i'm always just amazed by the kind of target that a lot of movies out there are doing because they're always choosing the most difficult you know harsh option out there and it's easy to be harsh isn't it because that is it's the most predictable but it's also i mean sophiana thought he said every anybody can say it's haram that the real uh you know ichthy hard is in seeing

in saying that yeah finding a way out finding ease but i mean it's also power dynamics isn't it like i feel it in a in a world where movies or maulanas or mullahs or these kind of shoes are have no real they you know wield no real power right this is the time where they get to stump it like to say you know i have a theory and i don't know if you would agree with it but i really do feel that a lot of them um do change a lot of their opinions you know uh uh throughout the years uh

but the problem when you have followers the followers don't let them they don't let you they don't let you change your opinion this is exactly what venus yeah so it's really i i i i've met a lot of people a lot of uh scholars who think very differently you know when when you speak to them like one-on-one but when they are like uh preaching or uh being you know uh this public persona they're saying the exact opposite of what they're believing and and i don't think that there are necessarily hypocrites or whatsoever but

i do believe that's also one of the problems of of the mob out there i mean and it's making you know it's i feel that's adding to it's kind of messing them up gradually psychologically but yeah this is so true you know i've got you know in on my phone you know for this mind trap this an example of so many shu that will kind of like they will chat to me in a certain way but they like look no no no sometimes they'll be like oh look i can't come on because you know i can't my following won't allow me yes to be seen talking to you

so and sometimes it will just be well in person i have to present a particular and this is you know i i spoke about the famous case of like shaykh khadi recently one of his major issues challenges is how do you deal with your own the frankenstein you've created because you know and you can't really you see when you're that popular as well walking away isn't easy because you know popular who doesn't love attention [Laughter] it is a tough it is a tough issue honestly and and i do feel for a lot of them

and i just you know thank god that i don't have they don't have that i don't have followers in that sense because it is i mean it is such a great thing just to change your opinion or something because new evidence is being presented to you and you said okay this makes a lot of sense actually it's a great and you you rethink your position and it's just so enlightening but the problem is when you have constantly to censor yourself because now you are speaking to to an audience that has this expectation from you and it has that puts a lot of pressure also on

you i mean that's that's not fun i remember somebody wants making you know one of my haters making a video clip about me where i had changed an opinion like maybe a year and a half later or a year later and they were trying to say oh look at the contradiction and and i commented on i i covered it in my monday night saying that you see to me this is an amazing strength like i see i think it was i could be wrong i think it was on uh men wearing gold

okay so i was he takes a clip from one of my monday nights in the early when i began it like now i'm on 170 something but when i in the early episodes and i'm asked and i said that look scholars generally i said as far as i'm aware scholars have always said it's haram um there doesn't really seem to be a difference and then he takes a quote from my just towards the end of last year or something or last year where i said well there's a difference of opinion and i quote some of the sahabah that disagreed and i said well i and ibrahim saying there is no each man then i said look i find myself in line with this opinion that it's not

haram now they said oh well look a contradiction and i said well you see to me that's growth you see like it's the ability to be able to learn something and think well you know what in hindsight i actually agree with this now because look i see this evidence you know i'd say these are life skills if you if you think about it you know from a more general perspective because i mean everyone should give him or herself the right to be wrong to make mistakes and to correct them after afterwards because if you don't then you you'll have a lot of you know issues you know in the way you you you you approach life

in general you know and religion is is just one part of it but i just found it very unfortunate this whole discussion because the problem for a lot of people who are not trained in in islamic scholarship this is what islam says right so they have to also it is presented to to them as you have to die for these kind of positions because this is part of the of the faith of the akita and we just you know when you do research many things are just not part of the akita like many things that people think yeah it's true i mean it's not it is a

pillar of islam it's not it's amazing when you look at the actual teachings of the prophet it's that in in the the best of this the most easiest of this is the best of this deen but people today professor it's it's been so amazing having these discussions uh we i know we've gone on for so long and really i know prior to getting on i've had you waiting uh whilst i was going through all the technological issues here on this side and we've this has just

been so uh full of i mean i've i've totally loved it i know some people are saying whoa it's been over three hours right so alhamdulillah that's amazing um if people want to reach out to you uh doctor where should they where should they reach out what should they how can they connect with you i am on facebook and instagram as well under my name are you just with them with their thoughts you're like they just have to think of me and i'm with them thank you i wanted also to to thank you very much for having me i really enjoyed our discussion and uh i really

salute you for a lot of very courageous positions that you are taking and god bless you man thank you so much thank you so dearly appreciate oh we forgot to cover how you actually came across just very impressive people you have to check this out doctor mentioned this to me doing some research on um psychedelics because i've came across a tedx lecture from a certain roland griffiths where he talks about psychedelics and the kind of breakthroughs that they have now in medicine

and i realized that john john hopkins university which is one of the leading medical institutions in the world they have a whole center for psychedelic and consciousness research so i i wondered just what would be the position of islamic scholarship if muslim scholars address that issue or not and unfortunately i didn't find a lot out there but i found three things one from islam q a from al-munajid who said who did the yes of alcohol that it was forbidden uh the other one was ayatollah rouhani

surprisingly one of the leading shia authorities today who is okaying psychedelics and you can find the fatwa easily in google if you if you if you google it and move to auburn oh my god here it is here to serve you this guy is this this mufti is awesome that's it's been it's been awesome thank you so much for having me we have to thank you we have to do this again inshaallah thank you dr matthew it's been an absolute pleasure love to thank ladies and gentlemen the

man the myth dr mahdi find him on instagram make sure you follow him once again people take very good care of yourselves i'm gonna bring up my final screen by the way i've launched my patreon are you on patreon by the way dr mike no no okay i've launched my patreon so you can check it out check out the tiers the the services that are being offered you can join these different groups and stuff cool much love over and out folks [Music]

i can't find the exit page now no we have the other problem this is god now we're ending on that