Ustadh Sharghzadeh | Rumi, Religiosity & Rituals of sex | MindTrap #50 | Mufti Abu Layth

[Music] what is going on we is back allahu akbar uh somebody said i hear mufti in the background allah akbar you're doing it you see that's me into your consciousness

i take it you guys can hear me all loud and clear uh all right so let me just yep i've got a an all clear on youtube just double checking facebook all right people i take it it is all clear yep you doing it you do when it people look at that they're so pleased that there's another stream this people is audio is good it's all good all right so what do we have for you today people what do we have today

let me bring in front of you the profile of an esteem of our esteemed guest for tonight look at that people allahu akbar right there now right so people that picture that you're seeing right there them that's that's just that's just a zoomed out now the zoomed in legend himself allahu akbar

just your brother you're the ustad man people damasi caballeros let me present to you ladies and gentlemen the man the myth this is the legend people this is you know that's how you the one of the east the man from the east the one who it's considered in line with the superhero people

you're too kind man thank you no shukran for taking your time out uh for joining us uh tonight um people i take it everything is yep i'm just double checking that look at that people sending giant hugs right so those of you that are not so uh familiar with some of the great work that has been that is being done and has been done by uh ustad is uh from uh uh from iran and the usa uh interestingly enough people let me tell you a little joomla marta

here from birmingham in the uk usa to birmingham in the in the uk people but i thought you know i thought birmingham was just alabama there's many cities in the united states big and small named after weird places in the world not to say birmingham is weird but there's a lot of british city names i mean york new york things like that of course and but there's also all the arab countries because of biblical reasons not all of them but a lot of important ones like there's damascus alabama lebanon ohio no way damascus yeah there's damascus lebanon

palestine all the era a lot of arab jordan a lot of arab countries that are in the bible there's and it's funny because you could go to a place where all the people who live there hate or seriously dislike the residents of damascus today but it's damascus virginia or something and there's even a place called arab but they pronounce it arab of course they don't say think i have arabs yeah i think i have seen that actually yeah wow so uh usted um a bit about your journey i mean you're uh born and raised in iran and you uh have an interesting sense of

discovery along the way you end up in the us of a uh you know you've um you you start looking into certain deeper understandings of islam of the faith and then obviously the islamic sciences whether it's going to be the arabic language or other things but then you find yourself coming back to um farsi and that too uh the legend jalaladin arumi [Music] why rumi was that why rumi so i guess i should add actually let me turn this light on i forgot i have i

have a light here in my face there's so much coming from your face there's so much noor coming from your face maybe this will help but fajr but fajr will come soon enough i don't actually maybe this oh wait there we go is it working all right there we go this is better so i was actually born in the united states oh right okay immigrants from iran yeah wow and i was raised between both countries but when i was in america i was always living with my grandparents and i'm actually in my grandparents home right now in iran and they knew no english they didn't know anything about america they might as well have been in iran but in america when we were there so that kind of

drew me closer to here so even when i was there it was as if i was here because if there's they can't speak english we just spoke farsi at home or persian as it's known in english and i kind of felt immersed in the culture more there's there's more degrees but it tends to be that iranian americans are more american assimilated they're they're kind of known for being not religious or maybe not even muslim anymore but i kind of grew up in a more religious environment and i also did grow up here and there going back and forth but my journey i would say began when i was in high school here and i was really fed up with with religion this is one thing that i think muslims from western countries don't

quite get is it it can be kind of frustrating to to live in a muslim country and see islam you know kind of portrayed in a way that let's say isn't the best way and i went to america and finished high school and i uh started university and i was ready to kind of live a normal life in the united states you know get a job like anyone who you know was leaving the muslim world behind and after a while just start to feel as if this just wasn't it that just getting a degree and getting a job that life kind of felt more empty so i started to to look for spirituality and eventually i kind of found it in islam it was kind of reluctant because to me you know being a religious muslim it's you know these like being

a sheikh or like an annoying religious guy no fun you know boring life things like that it's not that boring i mean it seemed for me you know but then i befriended muslims you know i joined the muslim groups and i slowly became reacquainted with the culture that i grew up with but uh after studying university i decided to move to jordan and i spent about a year there i did some studying on my own i studied arabic and michigan and islamic studies but that's when the real meat of it happened and i studied you know arabic and some basic islamic sciences tasawa things like that and i was translating rumi the whole

time posting the translations on the internet and i was talking about how he'd been mistranslated misinterpreted things like that but for some reason uh randomly i got on twitter one of my friends actually in jordan said you need to get on twitter and i said you know twitter is where the memes and the politicians are that has nothing to do with me but i posted about this topic of rumi being westernized and secularized and derooted from islam and it just randomly went viral it was in ramadan i don't know many people may uh many of you whether you're familiar directly with or start or not but you would maybe have come across the i'd like to call it even a movement

almost called that uh and this is the the phenomenon that really went viral isn't it right right and so it went viral it was amazing i was just walking through i was walking the street in jordan my friend just said don't make a twitter account and just post what you post on instagram on twitter i said okay so you know by the grace of allah you know spotlight just went viral and then from there it kind of became a thing and my goal even still as i was pursuing islamic studies in jordan was my family my friends were saying okay come on come back get a job you know that's enough i came

back to america and then all of a sudden a million people were knocking at my door messaging me saying oh my god we need a book you know talk to us about this what is going on it's amazing it seems like people in academia knew that this had happened that rumi's poetry had been mistranslated and and you know basically stolen almost i would say in a way didn't know about it for some reason muslims everywhere from all over the muslim world just everyone and it was ramadan muslims were hangry you know they're hungry and angry so they shared it and then the first time i'd heard that term was by sheikh

mohammed yakubi saying we are hungry and i was like what is this angry man yeah and and you know ausable men you know from speaking about the self but it it it feels amazing it did really become a movement like you said you're now on twitter sometimes i'm there on social media and i see muslims talking about this like i see memes and you never used to see this before this the thread but like roomie wasn't talking about your girlfriend or your boyfriend or stuff like that or yeah just like he was talking about not your ex right right exactly it just feels like so amazing to think that you know i was yelling at the internet for so long and it seemed like no one really noticed but then randomly

it just it clicked once and i'm just so happy that the message is out there now because i feel like there's so much work to be done to undo all the damage because because there is this perception that rumi was not a muslim and it's argued by some people isn't it yeah even here even you'd be surprised you know many of the phenomena that exist in the west are just as prevalent here maybe every other day if i walk in the street and you know i'm at a bookstore looking at a roomy book and someone will ask me oh like what is this and i start talking and say oh you know he wasn't a muslim you know and i have to explain to them even here you know in the heart of the muslim world and the heart of the civilization where

he's from and unfortunately this is just a product of these translations that i i speak about in the thread and maybe we can talk about where basically he's been mistranslated and and misquoted there's a very famous quote where he says uh and it's actually from a persian poem he says uh [Laughter] there's this poem written not by rumi but attributed to him incorrectly where he says what should i do all muslims because i don't know myself i'm neither muslim christian nor jew now

we know in the sufi tradition these types of poems are very common where like amir there is no islam in me but of course we all know that amir khosrow is a muslim right this is just like it's for the sake of the poetry you know like when uh someone says i'll kill for you i'll die for you we don't literally mean that it's like a loving thing so this has been translated into english as i am neither

muslim nor christian or jew nor zen or buddhist no any other belief system and these quotes are re-translated into urdu arabic persian and then people in the muslim world like in the streets and tehran will say but what about this poem you know where he says i'm not a muslim look you can read it and then you know i explain by the time i even want to explain most people's attention span has already run out you know they don't want to care the poets of that era you know pre-colonialism and that you find especially i mean these poets that are of that east or you know whether it's going to be iran that region or even

into hindustan at that time india you'll find a lot of them say these kind of things almost in defiance of institutionalized religion that they're against is isn't that the because you see mir says this ralph says this you know like they will say on many occasions in fact meals famous uh where he says uh he says [Music]

why you know it's been ages since he abandoned islam but they would say these kind of things but on other occasions they would obviously praise allah and say something religious yeah yeah so i think this is so difficult to unpack because there's so many things clouding this because on one hand we're living in modernity after colonization we're so far from that era we don't live in that context we're not initiated into the traditions

so it can be so confusing to unpack and explain these things and from the first glance you know average muslims are just like yo well what's going on this is like so kufri you know how could they say that of course you know some people like from south asia or iran are initiated into these but generally this was a tradition that existed in sufi poetry where you kind of from the zahiri the external basis you kind of break some of the molds of traditional islamic you say overtly blasphemous things but in the internal sense there is it's deeply islamic if that makes sense and there was always this tension between the two types of islam so there's one type of islam that's just

islam and that's probably represented by the salafi movement today where these muslims would say look you just pray you fast you gave your zakat you do your hajj you know your pillars whatever you're done very robotic outlet right it's very robotic and the sufi say yes of course that's part of islam you know all those things are important but that's the first part of it then the second part of it is to go down another layer and to understand yourself and to understand god and to think more deeply about these things right i mean you can just do the basic phrase and just you know call it a day but you won't you might not get anything deeper from doing that so they kind of go at deeper layers and and these things are so

unpacked and layered it can be difficult in just one sitting to to explain you know how a muslim poet can say you know i'm not i'm not a muslim i'm a catholic and he's still a muslim so yeah maybe it seems kind of nonsensical you don't know because when you think about it you see one of the most profound sense of comfort is being comfortable in is in this in this violation of taboo right right because you see they're trying to say this is the ultimate taboo isn't it with god and and being on such in such

comfort zones with it i mean it's it's you know when you think about it it's incredibly profound obviously you can understand that society society is going to be like what the hell are these on about i think one problem also that exists is in the modern world we have this sense of boxing people in where we think of the category to put someone and we think okay i'll fit you into this group and then i'll fit you into this group but one thing we need to consider is that people are multifaceted they have they have other they have many sides of them so for example there's one hoffa's poem where it's pretty funny where he says

he says i will not give up the wine glass in lovemaking add him to my whatsapp group i've done toba a hundred times and i'll never do it again and then he says he says he says the the religious advice person he told me kindly go quit loving and he says there's no need to fight brother i won't

that's it just does he go on go go go yeah and then he says he says the sheikh insultingly told me wine is haram don't drink it anymore and i said yes it's haram but i don't listen to any idiot hi hi but this same poet who seems who seems so irreligious he has other poems where he says hafiz don't be upset as long as you read the quran you know be happy where he says hafiz spend long nights in prayer and wake up for dawn prayer he says hof is

his name is hafez because he memorized the quran he says read the quran from the 14 rawayas so this was a controversy recently the qarat and the holes and the narrative stuff he says it he had memorized the fourteen that that were existing around him i guess at the time so the same person that has excuse me memorized and he's a hafiz and he's a scholar and all this stuff he also has a poem where he says ah you know forget all this stuff and even rumi he has he has poems where he says you know my sweet lip lover doesn't say anything sour and he doesn't let my mouth lip love him yeah yeah he writes his poems and says he doesn't let my

my mouth run drunk with wine if you google that today god knows what images will come up no these are poems by rumi and they're accepted in the muslim tradition as islamic poetry by an islamic scholar many famous islamic scholars had poems that were very racy by modern standards but you know we've become puritans but because of colonization we've become hardcore puritans you know rumi he literally has a poem he says he tears my clothes off in the morning and says come i'm tearing mine off and this is in roomies it's it's sitting in one of these books right here where has rumi been all my life in his mass navy in his mass navy he has

he has stories about a woman who's adulterous about even bestiality he's a story about yeah yeah but the thing is and these were considered major books of scholarship the mass navy was considered second to the quran and hadith books in in the persianite muslim world it was a very serious text studied from bosnia to the bengal and it included all of these things i mean sadistan was another text that's on a similar level it includes all kinds of anecdotes and jokes about things that would considered way too taboo to talk about these days yeah so you know in a way for me studying these poems it's like unlocking our consciousness before colonization

you know we don't understand how much we've been affected yeah you know we've we've gotten to a point where even talking about the existence of a concept like sexuality is like taboo in islam you know but i mean we have the greatest ulama of islam we're like telling excuse me sex jokes and their hallways we have transcripts of of their husbands rumi one of his famous things is the analogy of this dunya being this large breast which everybody just kind of sucks you don't have to go far you don't have to go far to find these just these types of things people behave this is this is this is a that way you know these harami's

imagination wonders right right yeah right now i mean there's it's full of humor like there's one part of the messenger where rumi says that imagine a puddle of pee like before there was roads you know that the horses would stamp and there'd be little puddles and they would pee too so their foot their where their foot stamped there would be a puddle of pee and imagine a hay because you know there was always be hay around you know they lived like basically like a villager would live today yeah and even in cities the material of the walls was hay and dirt that's what everything that the walls it's called call galen persian he says imagine a straw falls in that puddle of pee and a fly sits on the straw and wind starts blowing the straw in the

puddle and the fly says look i'm the king of the world i'm the captain the wind i'm going this way i'm going that way i'm navigating the high waters and you look at the fly and you say oh my god look it's a little fly you know going around and pee and that's us in the dunya this is the analogy in the mas navi right he's saying we think we're kings of the world but we're really just to fly on a piece of straw and pee you know floating around but if you tell this to a modern muslim wow what is this talk of pee and flies and all this this you know this non-muslim stuff so yeah in a way studying these texts can can help unlock like i said unlock our consciousness from before colonization

can give us a window into what muslims used to be like and and i'm circling back to that sense of comfort and security that people had with their faith you know iman was not something that was they didn't fear that it kept breaking you know like oh my god is my iman still intact they were very comfortable in this absolutely yeah absolutely we we uh to borrow from sheikh abdul hakim we have anxiety islam i think i'm pretty sure he said that we're in a state of agitation where we're so worried about you know crossing lines we're so blocked in

boxed in we're so straight jacketed you know we're worried that we'll get techfeared on twitter if we say something wrong that these you know salafi internet mobs will come run after us and you know kick us out of the dean but i mean again someone like hafez his book it's full of things that are you know on from just a very basic reading would seem very against islam especially by our standards but his book was one of the most important books in persianite islam in the ottoman empire and the persian empires i mean jamie you know maulana jamie who wrote many famous notes he he gave him two nicknames hitarjoman al-israr the translator of secrets and lassan al-khaib and jamie wrote he

has a here's a book where it's kind of like atar's tat karate like they write biographies of saints he wrote that i don't know if hafez was a sufi i can't tell you for sure but every sufi should study hafez wow and that's that's the same guy who wrote the poems that i said i won't do toba and i won't you know i'm gonna keep loving things like that so wow that you know it's it's amazing because you know this this this path of mysticism or gnosis this kind of this alternate knowledge um it's very interesting that in islam

you see sufism this kind of tuskia thing was in many places this kind of let's be more spiritual let's be more like it was in north africa it was in you know in egypt it was in the middle east but in the east in the shark and when it goes towards hindustan and these places it really becomes a unique phenomenon in the sense that i mean some would argue that maybe they blended in other cultural practices religious practices they had

from pre-islam but they were very comfortable with it so these figures who would then challenge institutionalized islam and and they would also be quite untouchable from a you know the public kind of revered them to the extent in india you'd get like people ancient india even modern india and pakistan but you'd get these almost crazy people that would be like this

you know these kind of like and they would be at these kind of khan pass or bars and and sometimes you know they would appear to have like almost a separate license to be able to do what they want and they're allow you know like a lot of them would dress differently they would have jewelry and it's just it's just fascinating how they had this amongst the common people and obviously in some ways the roots of this is with people like rumi you know you see these um institutions iconoclastic practices like

like even the word this dancing thing right right i mean this is um i mean tell us about tell us about that this whole swirling worlding i i don't necessarily endorse all the practices that all sufis do like any religious group or group of any type of group there's going to be good and bad people honest and dishonest people so i'll say that and and definitely know yeah when it comes to dean you should really be careful who you take your deen from and the practices that you do and because you know you can you can are you reading a script right now given to you by the uh the saudi arabia if you need help

just blink twice there's a lot of i will say that there's i don't know i don't want to say a lot but there's a there's an element of they call them goofy sufis in english there's an element of people who maybe they're a bit extreme or maybe there's some bad people who pretend to be sufi so there's definitely some practices that exist that i wouldn't necessarily co-sign all of them or say that they're all good i i i wanted to say that you see when i was when i'm saying these making these observations i'm not making them from a um um like as a mufti per se like i agree i'm not trying to say that these are good things in islam i

understand yeah yeah i wanted to give that as a and basically as a disclaimer because i sometimes this happens like someone will message me some weird thing or like so is this okay with you i just want to say like you know because there's some groups that are considered sufi but they're not really muslim and they say things that are like against islam but you know i'm basically trying to protect myself from this oh of course i'm not necessarily saying everything out there because i'm i meant from and you know from an observational of course it's very interesting so that no one's misguided in child i don't want to of course look at that mashallah

but basically i don't know if words can explain it there's a saying that they say sufism is like it's like honey you just need to taste it you you can't quite explain it but when you get to the spiritual state there's certain actions and expressions that might seem crazy to a person who's not there but it seems so right to the people who are there it's they reach this level where the things they do or it might seem again weird to us it's almost like if someone stubs their toe they might yell out really loud for example and that might be weird to us like you know why are you screaming but if you're the one stubbing your toe you know exactly why you're screaming so the same thing goes with these sufi practices some of them the whirling the

chanting the screaming the jumping up and down and the hadras and stuff like that where if you're not there if you're just seeing the video or even just there in person but you're not into sufism it might just be like yo you know what's going on but but these are deep spiritual experiences and they're real i've experienced them they're definitely real and this is part of sufism it's an experiential knowledge you know it's it's not passed down in you know like these books you know it exists in these books of course but you could read all these books that i have and never be a sufi but you can also be illiterate and never read a single book and be the best sufi you know out of all the sufis and this is one thing that the sheikhs you know they've always said even recently i was listening to a song

about one of the shaykhs here in iran was saying don't just sit in a corner and read a bunch of books and think that you became a sufi you know sufism is experiencing you know it's it's about the the living the deen not just practicing the deen but living the deen you know feeling the love for allah and his messengers but there's this one uh poem by this not really well-known sufi scholar unfortunately in outside of iran named sheikh mahmoud study he has a he has a book that i think i have it right there it's called golchana it's a commentary on sufism and it explains this phenomenon really well he says

so i've translated this he says the shell inside of an almond will decay if you take it out before it's ripe all the way but when it becomes ripe with no skin it's well if you peel away the skin and you break the shell sharia's skin the seed is the truth eureka between this and that lay the sufi tariqa so he's saying basically wow that's your translation to this yeah this is this is on my page it's on instagram it's at persian poetics it's just one word so he's saying he's comparing the sufi the the muslim basically to this the seed inside of an almond

he's saying if you just break the shell the almond will rot but if you wait until the almond is ripe and this is a common metaphor in susan the cooked the cooked you know marie the follower who's who's gone through the the process and and he's reached martha he has understanding of of god in the divine reality the muhammadi reality and things like that then you break the the skin you know to get to the cooked the cooked shell the skin is sharia you need the sharia to cook you you know you need to follow the deen to get that but then once you get to the modifier you break you break out of it and then that's why some of these you know these elder sufis have practices that that aren't in the sharia like

spinning you know or some of the movements what do they call that spinning in they call it sama they call it it's different so some groups look at sam you know what oh my god you know what i need to start studying farsi you're too kind some of them spin some of them go like you know like this maybe you've seen before and there's different movements but basically the idea is that it's a path you know and the sharia and the tariqah they take you to the path and the end goal is is reaching allah you know so there are certain things along the way it's interesting because

a sharia in in its actual meaning is is it's like a reservoir or something to drink from it's it's that's what it actually is um and a person even though he drinks from the he does not remain there in essence you know you don't just remain at the place to drink do you right i mean you're exposed to the journey supposed to keep going but the place to drink is where you resort to to to for that kind of sustenance isn't it it's not your uh you know it's the actual path

which one must really stick to people you think i can't be mystical no definitely that's correct that's a great metaphor i've never heard that before it's fun but there's certain there's certain elements of sufism where they kind of are outside of the bounds of the traditionalist understanding of sharia and this is kind of where some of the disagreements between sufi oriented people and more strict sharia oriented people and and persian we say we say dry you know they're very dry they're not they're not as well you know right exactly so this is this is where some of this this stuff happens there's some tarbia things like some tests that they should put their their

students under that it wouldn't be considered like a normal like a normal thing for muslims you know like do khaloa for 10 days don't eat anything for 10 days you know they they put you through certain tests and and they they prepare you you know it's a long process kind of stuff it triggers um hallucinations and stuff like that i mean yeah definitely i mean sensory deprivation they would go in a room for 40 days a room the size of the room that i'm in and they would shut the lights off and just sit there for 40 days fasting praying you know just maybe just drinking water or something like that and definitely this kind of induces kind of a vibe where you experience things differently and

something i say to people sometimes i get sent maybe by haters or someone who's curious like videos of hadras and like yo what is going on this doesn't make any sense they're all jumping up and down and one thing i say is you need to be in an environment to feel different things there's you know when you're in that space and the hadith is happening and the zikr is happening you feel differently you know you might do things that that might not be normal some sufi is like they have chance they scream you know they're they're in like in a different state it's just it's not normal you know it's it's kind of it's different than the normal existence that we're in yeah and you know it's something totally different just on a tangential note to that it's uh

heidiger he actually the philosopher speaks about that about this this thing of you see having like hot and cold kind of perceptions or observations of things and the the heart is when you're actually experiencing and the cold is the kind of remote just commenting on something without actually because there's a you know you could say like you you know what's this crazy nonsense what's this kind of uh ridiculous absurdity but when you undergo it you could be like right absolutely this is actually you know this is amazing yeah yeah right definitely and and one thing i'll say is i'm sure there's already people

saying oh my god what is this craziness and the comments i can't see them maybe you can see them but one thing i'll say is that it's hard to understand until you experience it one thing i would say is if you're going to judge it be kind until you feel it at least try it you know if you go to hadra and you're not into it then that's fine but but at least give it a chance because one thing i'll say is it it lasted and it spread everywhere for a reason many parts of the muslim world that are even muslim spread because of sufism like southeast asia that's what the guy with the bat said at the wuhan wet markets he said just just give it a try just one chance the drug dealer says the first try is free right because look just just give

it one try just bite into this bat trust me you know like until you don't experience it right right definitely but but one thing i'll say is even jokes aside there's things have a lasting power for a reason right it wouldn't be a widespread universal phenomenon if there wasn't something there yeah you know there's a reason that from north africa to indonesia there's sufi movements and groups throughout all times throughout all periods despite you know any type of political issues or attempts to get rid of them even in turkey you know the republic tried to get rid of sufism as much as it could same thing happened in this country and so many countries but it always persisted

turkey they tried to get rid of yeah absolutely when the ottoman empire collapsed okay the new turkish state viewed sufism as kind of this like ancient relic you know superstitious they're weird they have shaykhs because sufism was part of the ottoman empire like the establishment right and that was one of they destroyed all the institutions and sufism was just one of the institutions that they more or less destroyed with some exceptions i mean it's kind of like a longer separate discussion of course but but it persists in in turkey i mean regardless of any time to get rid of it it's something that you know continues to persist and these these you know back and forth have existed in rumi's writing you know he writes about them

where some very you know strictly muslims try to like you know refuse what do you call the moist ones what do you call the other i guess you could say masked you know drunk this is a good word wow yeah exactly look at that cheeseburger as in the bollywood song right right okay so must is uh being drunk in farsi right exactly the most common metaphor in sufism actually it's it's like you can't go to a single sufi poem without coming across this word basically it's a common word in in in order but we must

yes people say they mean it's kind of like yeah it's buzzing it's epic but okay yeah like so you know rumi did you do you feel that in his day and age he was also you know creating these waves or is this all posthumously something that this kind of he becomes this legend you know much after him how do you feel so it can be hard to know these things for sure because it's all clouded in legend one thing that is important to note again i feel like studying these books opened this world to me otherwise you know i wouldn't have known this

it's not apparent it wouldn't be obvious the understanding of history is so different in modernity as a timeline of factual events that were documented and definitely definitely happened the way that sufi histories were written and these taj karas it's almost like the way uh i don't know maybe the gospels were written by the early christians it's not so much writing literal historical events but writing religious truths if that makes sense so it's not so important that the event literally happened what's important is that it's like documenting this this person as a character in the tradition so ultimately for that reason the early

historical sources about roomie it can be hard to verify how true they are but based on i think my best guess is that roomie was definitely famous in his city now how famous he was outside of his city probably not that famous and that's because information traveled very slowly then yeah but um many sufis that are very famous now it's a posthumous thing basically of course so like they'll they'll be known in their community in their city maybe generally and maybe someone in nearby cities will know that they exist but then once they die and their poetry is collected and copied and taken to new cities and then usually what happens is their students when they die they don't want it to

collapse so they they pick a leader and then they start the sufi order in the name of the you know nash bandi for example is named after sheikh nash ban chishti is after sheikh shishti you know the mev levy is important to maulana things like that um you know it's a tradition that's founded afterwards and then then they really become famous so maybe i'm sorry maybe in their lifetime they were only known in their city and and that's it or maybe their province and and rumi's is this mev lavi uh is this more his his his children bringing this to the forefront or whatever definitely yeah so

his um his son uh no i'm sorry sultan valad mixing his father into something sultan valada when he passes away he becomes the leader of his sufi order and his sufi order is a bit different because most sufi orders have this this thing where it's like a sil sila that connects them to the prophet salallahu sallam all the way down through people to the current shaykh so if you say like the sheikh of the national bandits today he has a salsa that takes him all the way back to abu bakr and then the prophet you know and the mouth of these don't really have it this way it's

just founded after mawlana passes away it's not like he took the tariq from anyone so the the person that runs it is i'm pretty sure it's called uh chaleb it's called the chalabi it means something in ottoman turkish like some honorary title and it's run by his descendants actually that's i think it's the only tariff that's like that where it's been in his family like son to son to santa santa for like dozens of generations and it's it's based in turkey in in konia where he's where he's buried as well and it's it still functions and it's the only sufi order that was spared comparatively spared the the republicanization of turkey when the

ottoman empire collapses and all the sufi orders are purged the melodies kind of saved themselves a bit okay i see and and what's with this whole you know this nisba rumi the roman right right everyone hates this title because i get a message once a week i think of someone who wants to claim him whether it's afghan or turk or iranian so why do you call him rumi so basically he he wasn't known as rumi until a few centuries after his death but basically rumi means the roman but it's confusing because we think of rome

as in italy but they call them roman because the byzantine empire was this is like a modern naming byzantine it was called the roman empire and they controlled anatolia that was their base in the eastern roman empire so they call it anatolia room which means rome in arabic so he became known as rumi in the west mostly he's not really known as rumi outside of turkey and europe and america and everywhere else they call him maulana which means our armed leader our mola our master or mevlana and turkish or molavi which means my master and that's what his students called him and most persian speakers still call him that um turks and arabs call him

fairly certain some people who are kind of more adamant about insisting or are making sure that it's known that he's from balf which is in modern day afghanistan they call him maulana muhammad oh do they call him okay yeah any in iran like um i'm pretty sure this will have it oh it doesn't have his name on here that's interesting but if you were to go to any book published in the persian speaking world i don't know where his name would be on this i guess they don't even have to put it um he would be called well this doesn't even have his name see that's how famous he is but um if there were to be a book with his name on it oh no here it is

wow okay yeah because yeah because my understanding was that you see the um it's the the kind of persian um kind of sultan that was ruling over that region of rome which was byzantine you know not the like modern-day turkey basically and that's where why you know this whole thing because he's associated with that but what's interesting on just a side note there is even uh things like like what we think of today as like you mentioned because when we think roomy roman we think rome in italy but uh like when you think of

um turkey not the country but the actual you know the the bird turkey so it's called in arabic like we call it turkey and it's called a rumi you know a decor for me so uh because it's and and if you're gonna yeah because if you're gonna associate it with turkey and we call it turkey and english because so yeah it's just i mean just as uh right it's interesting definitely i think i've gotten some criticism quite often about why i call him molana rumi because they think i'm trying to erase his origins or something but basically the reason i call him roomie is because he's known as roomie in the

west i'm trying to correct his image but i add the maulana to to make it more or authentic so i don't call him just roomy if i can help it i call him maulana roomie so the both the authentic elements and then the later you know created element basically i mean people would argue ustad and that you know that let's be real they're gonna say look these people brought in this kind of experiential aspect this gnosis or this mysticism but some people would argue that they damaged the perception of islam and they distorted

the sharia and things like this what what are your uh you know your thoughts or responses to to these kind of claims because these are common claims often found sure definitely so one thing i'll say is sufism definitely did not damage the image of islam if anything improved it you know it spread islam spread to many parts of the world via sufism you know in south asia it wouldn't have been islam wouldn't have been as deeply rooted had it not been for tessawoof and the same thing can be said for southeast asia in china and many of these lands in persia islam was spread by the sufis because it's one thing to just conquer a land and control it you can leave and then everyone converts

away but it's another thing to have staying power and actually finding a way into the society and a lot of times it was through the sufis because the sufis have a much kinder usually approach to non-muslims they have this this understanding that okay because a lot of sufi tariffs even accept non-muslim students they're they're not technically like sufis but you can still learn and sit with us and learn you know to a great extent kind of ecumenical like they kind of saw other people as also uh you know will attain salvation as in everybody so you see for example in india they weren't that harsh about trying to convert the hindus it was more about trying to be

a more loving person and things like this right right so it's easy for someone who lives in arabia and i mean that like in the peninsula to say oh all non-muslims go to hell and they're all evil and don't befriend them and don't say salaam to them because they don't have any non-muslims near them right but if you live in india or iran at a certain point or southeast asia and you have buddhists and hindus and jains and all these people around you it's kind of hard to look around and say all these people are evil and nudges and filthy and shouldn't say salaam to them and you know stay away from them and don't befriend them and all this stuff at some point you know you see okay these are people they're humans too they're just like uh they're very decent and they're very good right as well

exactly so so a lot of times the sufis say that uh salvation is determined uh by ahmad not necessarily belief strictly belief right my one of my teachers here i met with him recently and he gave me an example for this he says imagine you're on yom you're in and they're asking you know who will go to heaven and who will go to hell and this big fancy you know mufti saab sits and in iran we still have these people you know because iran i think people maybe because it's shia they don't they overlook it but iran's really run in a way that muslim countries used to be around you know our goddess you know wear turbans and they give death

they don't just just to be the word mufti it's not used that much in shia no it doesn't exist they don't use it the concept is different yeah yeah yeah but yeah they have a margin yeah but basically like someone like dressed like me would be sitting and ruling and so my my teacher said imagine on yom kiyama we have this this guy who sat and he says you know i was a mufti and i was okadi and i i was wrote for sahil bukhari i did all this stuff and i used to stream on facebook and youtube i did all this for the dean but he gave two death sentences that were incorrect they were innocent people he he gave

incorrect death sentences or he was unjust or something like that or he was harsh with someone so the person got turned away from the dean and that person would have been a great you know adam but alas they didn't or he he's took a bribe or did something wrong you know but then you have another guy who's like armenian and he was a good person his whole life and didn't bother anyone or you have some guy who's just a kafir aslan just a coffer actually not even armenian but he never bothered anyone he was always nice he always helped people who will go to heaven and uh my my teacher said a hundred rahma's on the kafir that doesn't hurt an ant and shame on the muslim who hurts other humans you know and there's another saying in sufis it's saying

that the sheikh of the town said that drinking wine is haram but drinking the blood of people is halal this is this is common points that is bringing against he's like very dry he's very dry you know like some of these leaders it's like are you even a muslim man they sit on the member and they so easily just like call for the deaths of other people like so thoughtlessly you know these all these people should be killed and they're they're so flawlessly calling for these things and these are the good people you know these are the the people who will be saved and will go to jannah but some guy just because he didn't believe will end up going to hell even though even though he was a great person so these are some elements that of course you know bring sufi's

yeah i mean no it's so true that uh you know people who are um they you know have the authority to sign on behalf of god or they think they have the authority to sign on behalf of god that the oh sorry we've lost your audio there uh i i thought i could hear a uh oh there's a back yeah you're back okay good good so um it's it's amazing not only the arrogance but the the see arrogance aside the atrocity

that is unleashed with this you know the power to sign on behalf of god definitely yeah it's it's it's it's so um the thing in itself is so electrifyingly horrific that wow you know you give people power definitely yeah and and and what they do with it and it's interesting that how you know many of the self like you get people like uh um i believe it's sophiana athori who would say that he would say anybody can declare something as haram that real understanding of the deen is

being able to show people that it isn't haram like being able to know the like anybody can be like basically being a tyrant is so easy by human nature by creature you know just but just by the very raw nature but being able but being benevolent trying to create ease for people that's going against the nerves you know it's like because people fundamentally look people want ease for themselves but they don't want to necessarily help others like to think about what's in it for me why should i help someone and this is where you are actually countering that navs in trying

to create ease right right there's a there's a line by the the port hof as i said he said [Music] hurting people is a kufri thing it's it's kufur and that's ultimately the i think the basis of tasawaf is it's more about actions and in the same way that our knowledge is experiential with action with ahmad it's not just you know reading but it's not just ill but it's also amal the the islam itself you know it should be kind it should be merciful you know the rahmah that that is said you know we

start every surah almost 113 of the 114 surahs start bismillah you know do we ex do we show that rahma right if someone's a kafir but they're you know they they really embody that are they really worse than someone who's a muslim but they're just a filthy i'm sorry person so many people especially now and who do dawah on the internet you know especially these salafi movement people there's no beauty you know it's just it's just ugliness but they they're like the most muslim out of all of us if you look at it just from their paradigm it's ironic it's ironic wow

today dean is not measured by you trying to strive for a sense of mercy which is really what the messenger of allah is actually just sent for today it's actually reflected by how harshly kind of strict you can be absolutely yeah yeah if you look at you know especially a lot of these people who who have this like dream if you actually look at the actual caliphates that they lament the fall of like the ottoman empire and you look at the way they applied sharia it was they always went for the easiest path for example if a woman did zina and she

was pregnant i mean back then they didn't have the technology and things of today you know an unmarried woman is pregnant you know it's it's clear what happened and a lot of times the goddess the godz would actually declare that the woman i'm sorry for this topic but would it was impregnated by a gin they would they would say she was impregnated by a jinn the father is a jinn and that way they would avoid having to do the punishment which of course we know would be very harsh so in islamic law i mean we find all kinds of basically the the people applying it we're finding a way to be you know apply it basically as little as possible to be as nice as possible to avoid having to you know apply the punishments versus

we have people here today who were gung-ho about it about doing these things yeah where do you think this comes from what's your take on it this you know this thirst for like uh this insatiable uh thirst this unquenchable uh appetite for trying to almost drain the blood in a literal sense as well where do you feel it's coming from what are your thoughts on it i'm not sure i think it's this kind of puritanical almost protestant version of islam where i don't think anyone goes in thinking okay i'm gonna be evil and think evil things i think it what happens is they

enter the movement and they're slowly fed the framework and then by the time you get to the end of it you're stuck you can't backtrack you know it's like if you push your finger into a chinese have you do you have chinese finger traps in the uk they're like crops so they're these little see they used to give them like to the kids i don't know why but there are these little it's like a little fabric thing where if you stick your finger inside it that's easy to stick

and if you pull it out i need to it's a good thing i made this 18 plus two basically your fingers get trapped it's genius it's this little it's a little paper contraption it's made out of paper but it i mean you have to tear it to get your fingers out but basically when you enter the salafi movement and you take all the premises that islam must be practiced exactly the way it was done and this is what they did and this is what's in the quran but on then you get to this point where you you feel like if you deny this then you're kafir you know you're breaking away from islam and you're biden whatever so then you end up going down these paths and you get to that conclusion

and for us looking at them it's like whoa you guys are nuts but to them when you're in that paradigm for so long it feels you know very obvious it's almost like there was a cult in america where they believed that they were going to be raptured and some sort of end times cult and they all drank uh literally they drank kool-aid to commit suicide and for us as a group leader he was yeah he was like there's like a saying in american culture to drink the kool-aid where the leader was like if we all drink this kool-aid he put poison we'll get raptured like we'll get killed and raptured to us looking at them like whoa you're crazy do you drink poison and die but for someone who's been initiated into a cult type of thinking group thing for so long the craziness is normal by the end of it

so i think this is the same thing with these salafi movements is that when they get to saying yeah we should have hadood i'm sorry in london like these salafis in london will say yeah you know we're going to chuck people off the buildings into you know central london we everyone thinks they're nuts but to them that's just totally normal to think that you know because i i feel that then i've spoken about this on my monday nights um that this really dates back a few decades um that's it i mean but it's it's like post world war ii

probably like late 60s in the 70s this thing is emerging you start to see this sense of you know something's happening and then through the late 70s into the early 80s you have the rise also of what is this mujahideen movement right right but there was something going on in that kind of collective consciousness that people they wanted a sense of a kind of power a sense of maybe the messiah's gonna come right maybe you know you had in makkah you had

you had also 1979 you had things uh like the iranian revolution i mean what what are your thoughts on that actually um just touching in on this briefly because it would have then changed a kind of psyche that is still the that is still pretty much the uh especially in iran yeah absolutely i think generally these movements especially the self movement it's kind of a lowest common denominator thing if you look at someone who needs an is looking for an identity is confused is upset growing up and

as a minority in a western country and you you give them this kind of harsh strong you know this is us very simplistic reading of something that doesn't require much thought here it is laid out in black and white in 100 pages you're you're a perfect muslim and also kind of feeds into the ego as well you know look at someone who's studied for 20 years and you've just converted to islam 10 days ago and your name is abu jihad al-baritani or something and you say oh your coffer it kind of makes you feel big you know like it's an equalizer in a way like i'm one year into the dean i couldn't even tell you like the the what's necessary for wudu or whatever like the steps but i can say that this scholar of 50 years of study is a kafir but with

the iranian revolution i don't know i feel like it was a course correction in iranian history because we had been so abused and it just felt like there were so many injustices by the west with the the coup d'etat against our prime minister which the anniversary of it i think recently passed or i think it's coming actually i'm sorry losing track of the months with covet with so much foreign meddling and so many things and and iran just had been generally on a decline for two centuries and then you know again we talk about religious movements a religious leader comes and there's kind of like a frenzy and there's kind of this feeling in the air that you know something's happening and then the whole country kind of moves in a

direction and something happens and go ahead because because i you see i had read um i've read from you know in the book romani's ghost and it was kind of speaking about the revolution and things like this and his rise um it was very informative for me because i had no idea for example how active he was in france and you know people were writing to him and he'd be but there was this kind of vacuum being created in iran um and there were several factions that were kind of struggling for that liberation let's say absolutely and there were secular factions they

were kind of like communist factions they were many different things um and romani was also part of that as well this this kind of um this kind of resistance and when it happens he kind of takes the the kind of baton so to speak and just rises and um and it's quite i mean what that book seems to argue is that it wasn't that people were all planning on him rising but it was just a resistance at the time it just kind of happened yeah and it just happened that he rose from

the multiple kind of factions that were there definitely yeah absolutely when the iranian revolut and this is the thing we talk about understanding history from a modern perspective it can get clouded kind of like with the sufis when you think about the past you know iran's revolution is always called an islamic revolution and it was an islamic revolution but it also was other things there was like you said you know socialists of many factions there was um there's the mujahideen which is a very weird group and then there's they're like kind of a like islamist communists and there's two de party which were just kind of normal communists kind of russia aligned and there was you know secular democrats and islamists of different kinds because again islamism then there was different strands

and the iranian islamism that we know today was just being formed at the time so there's a lot of different strands but i think ultimately what happened was you know when the country fell apart in the sense that the leader left and people were figuring out what the future was yeah it's the muslims had a few things they were the most organized because you know if you're the leader of a political party you have to create a base and bring people and convince them to read your literature and do all this stuff well the islamists already have the masajid those already are variety they're pre-built into the fabric of society and the islamists are also more appealing because if you take an average you know populist they what's the average level of education especially at that time in a poorer country

are they going to understand and relate to you know communism which is atheist or democracy you know no islam is like near and dear to their heart you know it's so powerful like allahu akbar you know these slogans you grew up with them and you know it just feels right of course we should rule by islam so ultimately through through that and also through some maneuvering and just some i guess maybe better wits on their parts they they took power um i'm not an expert i don't know much about this other than what i've inherited just from being iranian but yeah definitely the revolution wasn't necessarily islamic but it ended up being islamic i'll put it that way

did it have any you know with this whole emphasis on farsi and things like this as opposed to english and did it also revive things like roomie or these classic farsi poets did it or not really well it's rumi especially is kind of controversial because there's elements of the religious establishment in iran that do not like rumi and those are probably the same people that we talked about the dry religious people they're they're not really interested in him but i would say generally speaking they kind of enjoy a level of popularity that transcends the government that regardless of what happens to the country that rumi hoffa's side he will

always be loved by the people they they really do have a special place in their hearts but i would say generally the country's ethos is islamic now yes so it wasn't secular as before now it's more islamic so whatever is related to islam even tangentially is preferred compared to maybe before so to the extent that you know they can portray roomie as similar to the narrative of the state currently they'll appreciate rumi and you know if anything just because he's a muslim and he's a scholar and things like that yes so there was some of that definitely there was like a reorienting towards more islamic things but not necessarily

in the strand of rumi because he comes from a different mazhab that's its important distinction he's a hanafi and this the of manafi the madhab here is jafari and he's kind of distant as well in a time frame sense and he also kind of doesn't appeal to the masses as much as other poets okay so his his popularity didn't really have much to do with the government coming or going i would say it doesn't really make a difference now so somebody had mentioned here whilst we're speaking about the kind of rising and uh sorry the uprising and multiple factions and you'd mentioned there were communist groups and socialist groups and um and and i think i don't know if you'd

said it but i think somebody was trying to quote you so i don't know whether they were quoting you saying that islamic socialist and they said lol just out of curiosity i know you you have had some thoughts in the past about um things like capitalism and socialism and islam um right i mean if you share some uh you know some of your views sure you've been vocal on it in the past definitely yeah i would i would say that in terms of especially western politics i align more left i'm more left-leaning and i think a lot of muslims are their reaction they think of like russia invading afghanistan and

communists being atheists and things like that and that immediately turns them off and there's kind of this propaganda from capitalists that you know islam is necessarily a capitalist religion and they say that prophet muhammad sallam was a caravan traitor and things like that and bazaars and the quran encourages you know doing being doing like you know sale transacting things like that one thing i'll say that is capitalism is definitely has elements that are very against islam you know usury ribba the the way that poor people are not treated uh or they're not given the you know the help that they should get let's say in america and countries like that there's elements of capitalism they're very harsh to the poor and i think there's elements of socialism that kind of

can kind of maybe counteract some of that i i don't necessarily agree with either ideology completely and i also agree that that specific islamic socialist group the mujahideen khal they're very kooky they're kind of a cult basically so i definitely don't agree with them you know in any way what's totally against them but i think there's elements that islam and socialism have in common you know caring for the poor making sure that everyone's doing well not just leaving people behind in that sense and i don't know there's talk about islamic economics i studied economics and university that was my main area of study for my undergraduate degree and i feel as muslim societies develop we need to think about these things because right now we're at a point where we're just

trying to survive you know and shall we can do better than that but once we do better and we're not we're not at the whim of the western countries where they just tell us what to do in the economy but we can actually make our own choices i think we need to think about what islamic economics would look like in modernity and i mean we had an islamic economics before majority but we don't have it now and we can borrow maybe some from capitalism some from socialism because yeah of course we have private property and inheritance and all these things that communists don't like but also there's elements of socialist thought that aligns with islamic caring for the poor caring for the the lowest among you things like that and also that carrying a collective

uh burden at times you know this thing or foreign fire this thing over you know that if your neighbor is uh starving whilst you know you you sleep with a stomach full then this is not you know do you really have a man why you know on this topic there's been in certain countries there's been uh historically a rise of socialist kind of communist groups within muslim countries so for example uh or certain parts of whether you can look at india or even in pakistan or i know especially i think in bangladesh i think there was a uh

at some point powerful uh that it was that it was a group whether whether they influenced many or not but it was a powerful group but where these groups rise they seem to detach themselves they don't seem to use religion in any way like so they would say like lal salam you know the red salam and really read this and the read that but they wouldn't use for example god said this or god they would speak about socialism and communism and and that kind of stuff but almost detached from religion altogether uh i'm not sure if you've experienced that and will come across it and if so

why do you think they were were taking such a route like that and not trying to incorporate religious teach teachings right because i think ultimately communism stems from like a materialist worldview that is different than the way islam understands the world and it strives for things that islam definitely does not call for it for example the quran acknowledges that you know it says we created some among some above the others i don't know if i'm quoting it correctly basically acknowledging that not everyone's the same people have different abilities they'll have different risk you know for example communism wants to make everyone's risk the same you know well if god uh allotted everyone different risk

then how can that be you know there's things like that interesting is one of the the first kind of examples of of a socialist state being set up was by the karamita was within the muslim world in muslim history going back so far back in history that you know we're talking almost a thousand years back and these people what they uh and they ruled for like at least i think it was over 20 years and it was a huge part of what would have been the gulf and parts of the middle east uh i was quite surprised when i first learned that that oh wow the karamita what they set up was um a

communist kind of state they spoke about you know everybody and they're very strict and it had pros and cons but but yeah so i so i just i it was just a question that i thought well you know people who for example argue for uh capitalism will use religion to argue like they'll say look allah says these you know prophets but i've not heard people often today who are muslim or from a muslim orientation and communist use islam and i think they could as well so definitely i think there's this misunderstanding that islam is a capitalist religion if we take capitalism in its most basic

sense and yeah maybe but capitalism today you know the systems that it entails caused the housing crisis and extreme poverty and riba loans i mean loans with huge amounts of interest and all kinds of terrible inhumane things i mean you just need to look at the state of the poor in america a lot of the poor in america live worse than people in you know developing countries so we just need to look at that to know that the way capitalism is practiced is definitely not fully in line with islam but i think that there's this sense that i think maybe the russians invading afghanistan and kind of this idea that okay the communism and islam are diametrically opposed and the once used islam

a bit in that way and kind of that i think saying a bit is being very generous because i i i argue that they really to stop the russian advance they they funded this really i mean they they funded this whole mujahideen movement which then uh you know it's ironic that they portray just russia as this ultimate right that it's coming with this anti-islam you know this anti-god because it's interesting because i in the past have asked i mean i'm not a communist but uh obviously i do agree with socialist values in the sense that liberal social values like

in the uk we have like whether you know parties like democratic parties like labor are ultimately a socialist kind of party it's for the public there should be more things like the national health service and things like this but you see when i remember when i used to study people would like when i was in pakistan in the madrasas or different parts people had this inherent kind of almost this quick knee-jerk kind of reactionary hatred towards the word communism and and they felt that it was almost like an islamic imani viewpoint that you know of course

this is antithesis to faith and you think well okay but why i mean i i'm i don't have an issue necessarily as much with capitalism but i i don't see why people feel that well this because by that standard so with this then i'm just thinking you know if this because they're both kind of arbitrary the way i say right yeah i think i mean ultimately neither of these modernist systems will fall in line with islam completely and there's elements of both that are with islam and there's elements of both that are against islam like i said you know in capitalism there's private property and inheritance and things like that and in socialism they give you know free things to the poor well guess what in

islamic states the bay told mall used to give food to the poor that wouldn't exist in a purely capitalist society you know that's an element take it from socialism so and i think we have this we have this thing where we react before we think as muslims a lot of us where we have this idea of what's what what's right and what's wrong and the second we hear something that we think is wrong we just shut ourselves off and and we're not trying to hear it you know so if someone who is not you know familiar with the tessa wolf or things like that and they hear that and others dancing okay there's no dancing islam it's haram i don't even want to hear it or if they hear that communism is an atheist ideology which is true they don't want to hear it you know but

in my opinion we should see what good we can take and leave the bad why should we have this point of view where we should just hate everything that seems to not fall in line with our values why not see what's good and pick that up and leave the bad and and it's used synonymously in many on you know in many places with atheism you know it's interesting that it is i think somebody had mentioned in the comments as well that in bangladesh it is literally synonymous for atheism and and i i can understand that it is because you know people say well oh karl marx and so on um and and i find that very just quite amusing

because i think well like you said i don't see how any of these ideologies they're not necessarily uh part of islam i mean they they're not necessarily totally alien to islam either but religion works differently could have aspects of both right right i think ultimately i feel as if leftist ideology is more in tune with the islamic ethos because their goal although i'll say elements of their goal is misguided you know it's impossible to create perfect justice on this earth where we're humans but their goal is is at least more noble because the goal of capitalism is to just collect wealth and to just create more wealth and more wealth and

more wealth and that's ultimately what drives all the decisions and capitalism will this get us richer and the quran you know it speaks against it speaks against people it says you know woe to every backbiter and things like that and uh who think who counts as money and thinks that it will make him everlasting right it's speaking against these people and i think ultimately the capitalists if we think of the peak capitalist we think of someone like jeff bezos who just has an insane amount of money that no human should ever need or want or something like that but on the flip side if you look at leftists again not saying i agree with them completely but their goal is establishing justice it's a noble or gold in my opinion i i agree with you that's one of the aligned

with the lesson right the just like i can't remember which i'm sorry for those watching i haven't slept and it's almost fajr because the time zones are very weird [Laughter] that's that's the intoxication that's the the whole the knowledge the fun of them used to do that they used to stay up from maghrib to fajr time he was doing zikr welcome to our world i mean i i stay up as well as a vampire but i i'd like to say i stay up doing zika and remembering allah but you know i mean how much how much lies can i tell

in one in one evening you know i want to just as a quick note then coming back to the other topics you see for me it's not so much capitalism but i see the harms in kind of this consumerism as a kind of culture and it's more than a culture sorry as not as a culture as an obsession yeah it's not it's not a good way to live it's completely you know miss priorities in my opinion where people are just obsessed with brands especially i feel like maybe even here in this part of the world is becoming more than the west where i mean in the west in america it's common

to see people in the street with pajamas basically on but here you know you have to wear the latest clothes and the nicest brands and you can't have to change with the fashion updates and things like that and you know the nicest car and it's such a vahidi you know external way to view the world it's almost like you won't get accepted as a groom like if you propose to a girl's hand if your car is not the right model or something like that is that the case in iran because now after hearing farsi i'm thinking yeah should we go try our luck [Laughter]

to try but uh if you don't have the the nice new model car you're not gonna get any attention will a ranger cut it or no that will definitely cut it oh okay all right we're in there as many muslim countries there's a 100 import tax on cars so it's double whatever it costs in foreign countries you know speaking about iran and and this is similar with other parts of the world as well uh but iran does have this at least it has this impression of islam um definitely right but there seems to be this huge a rise or a spike in things like atheism

um or especially i mean in many parts of the world not just iran but i'm just saying you know often it's mentioned on social media that there was another case and there was another case and stuff like this is there a discontent with faith do you feel and if so what what's triggering this sure sure yeah what i'll say is human beings they they tend to go towards what's prohibited you know uh the arabs say cool yeah whatever is whatever is prohibited is wanted so there's there's one element and there's another thing that a sheikh said i can't remember who i think it was khalid abu fateh he said if you strive

to make people angels they'll become demons so if you add these things together where you have the government all things that's where all the real fun is i just think about it if the only thing haram was like not to eat cauliflower or not to i mean we'd all be like proper mutsuki's level 3000 right right and you know there's this general there's a general thing where people dislike authority and they tend to not want to be aligned with authority and iranians even more iranians regardless of what the government is they're always very critical and perhaps that's a good part of our society keeps you know the leadership in check

but you know in egypt where they have a brutal excuse me anti-religious government [Music] all the egyptians have become religious and they all the women were hijab and the men were phobes and in iran where the government's really religious the people become secular this is just a natural you know human nature natural yin yang kind of like right yeah that whatever the state doesn't and then you know whatever ideology you represent as the state whatever wrongs you do or mistakes or missteps they always become attributed to the ideology so when i talk to people about islam and things like that here and you know find secularized people and or even atheist people and they say well no i mean how could you be muslim look at

you know what's happening and what what happened here and what happened there and this is the thing where when you carry the mantle of something or when you you know you your whole you know you're like keeping the flame of something alive like you're claiming that you're the representative of something then whatever bad you do becomes ascribed to that thing yeah and this can have you know negative repercussions unintended consequences and this is one of the problems we're facing in modernity is you know how to reconcile being muslim and having a state and what does it mean to have an islamic state in the 21st century and you know things like that and generally it's a problem in everyone in the muslim world i mean even in saudi arabia land of tahiti there's like a rise there's a rise of

atheism saudis are all over twitter but this is like a thing now there's like a huge atheist i'm not huge but uh you know like a problem and it's because of how they are obviously you know trying to shove something down people's throats metaphorically and maybe in some cases literally unfortunately so some of these khadi you know as an iranian and being in iran i'd love to pick your brains on the general public cultural sentiment when it comes to what is the perception

of iranians on just just general sunnis worldwide like is there a i mean i know that's a hard thing that's a hard one no it's fine um one element is that iranians know that there's a large sunni minority in iran there's kurds there's turkmens there's some persians who are native sunnis and they're persian from iran not immigrants or anything and there's arabs as well there's there's i'm sure baloch there's there's a few there's talish i think as well there's there's a lot of ethnic groups mostly in the periphery of iran on the border regions that are sunni natively and iranians are aware of this okay so

that's one thing and also more well-read iranians are aware that iran was sunni for for actually i think still a majority of its shark history was it was sunny so they're aware that roaming and things like that their favorite people are their favorite poets or sunni so they're aware of that as well i think the new the discourse is more nuanced the elements that are against te san non or sunnis are mostly against what they mean is wahhabis when they say the salafis so when they say sunni they mean people in saudi arabia wearing the katra saying you know but if you get the average cheer percent they either don't care enough to have an opinion or if they do it's probably nuanced you know like the person who cares enough to know

would know that you know his kurd neighbor kurdish neighbor is sunni as well and things like that so so there's that um and recently there's been this uh narrative shift i wouldn't say narrative shift but there's this new movement with the government specifically pushing sunni shia narrative they have unity week and the supreme leader yeah the supreme leader who meets with odama from all sunni countries and including suni oleman iran and you know they speak about how it's important to to be together and you know i had no idea about that this is no that's amazing they've been they've been trying to to their credit you know they may i don't know how genuine it is

if it's a good faith or not but from what i've seen there's been more and sometimes i talk to you know random people who make a point to say you know you know we of course we respect sunnis regardless of all differences we respect them they're our brothers you know we love them things like that and um what was the answer there was one last point a lot of the practices and shiism that sunnis find distasteful have been moderated like tatbir the beating yeah yeah that's been banned um cursing of the sahaba and of the the prophet's wives and and other characters that that's illegal now is it okay yeah it's illegal there's a video

uh that spread right after it got illegal where a guy was in public he was like cursing some companions and stuff and the police literally hauled him away they literally just dragged him away and they're like this is illegal you can't do that and they just like arrested him or something so they definitely that's you know much respect for that i because the reason i'm asking as well is because it's interesting that you know it's i don't know about in i don't think no it's definitely not the case in all muslim countries but in some muslim countries like when i was in pakistan now pakistan is a country that is still quite there's a strong root in fundamentalism there

so but when i was there you see the the general there was a like the floating narrative when it came to sheism was simply and you know for the most part just propaganda uh negative strong kind of something to just like oh they are completely it's a misguided evil kind of like this and they they're up to all kinds of nonsense even though in all honesty they you know it's such a minority even in pakistan that you don't need to be insecure you don't need to think well i need to kind of play you know attack these people i mean

psychologically or with words because they're a minority anyway it's not a threat but so i was curious that i wonder how um you know within iran whether it's like an equal propaganda against or not um that's always you know it's sure yeah um i would say that there's different strands of shiism yeah i mean aside from the fact that there's ismailies and fiverr zadie and baktashi's all kinds of groups that are either she are associated with shias but even within the 12 or shias that are the the vast vast majority of shias in iran i don't even know if the other groups are

present at all um there's there's there's certain trends so there's some trends of shias that are very conservative and they resist the unity type of uh rhetoric hotliners right i think they would be represented by in your uk you have yasada habib and amman and things like that like these more hardcore shias which uh they they don't believe in the whole unity thing and they're probably the shia counterpart to the the sunni propaganda against shias where they say stuff like sunnis or you know and that they they're stuff like that you know their enemies are the prophets it's like a very far right kind of right but yeah

but in iran the government does not like that and they're against that type of stuff but then the and there's a spectrum of the other side of you know to what extent the shias that are pro-unity or reconciliation to what extent do we reconcile to what extent do we insist on resolving issues and things like that but i would say generally the rhetoric for against sunnis for shias tends to be not as bad as what i've seen in the other direction and i'm not trying to be biased that's just my honest opinion which which is quite strange actually because you'd right imagine it from the minority towards them and not from the you wouldn't imagine because that usually it's about security and insecurity right so i would say

people are probably already commenting like what is this guy talking about but one thing i would say is ignore the internet because there's a lot of crazies who are really loud on the internet from either direction but my sense of an average person is an average sunni i can't speak about iraq or afghanistan around but an average sunni would never be in like unsafe in iran you would never feel that you couldn't pray in a masjid or that someone would harass you or hurt you or anything never literally never you can praise this anywhere you want and no one will say anything to you if anything they'll be curious and just ask you where you're from and you know what you're doing and try to make you feel welcome there's really there's it's really a climate shift i i mean i can't say how it was 20 years

ago maybe when i was very little but it's it seems like there's this it's shifting in the direction of you know let's let's be as nice as possible to to you know people from other madhya you know not just sundays but i feel that there's some elements in the sunni world unfortunately where this shia propaganda has been fed so deeply that she is don't feel comfortable like i've heard from you know i've heard in egypt i've heard i've seen it i'll i'll tell you as a maliki we the maliki method prays with the arms down on the side now when i was in my early stages of maliki fair and i it was in damascus i used to pray with my

arms on the side we call it subtle now the shia prey like that and when i went to pakistan i used to do satel and uh when i was in karachi you see i stopped because people told me look listen you're going to that you're not going to but you may get shot you know it's like people might think oh this is a shia and they might just attack you so you know it's better to be a bit careful so i thought oh actually this is a good point i never really thought that happened right

it shows people's ignorance because when i was in jordan i talked to a maliki another mother and he was taliba elman i mean when i was fresh i knew almost nothing and he knew a lot and he said that randomly when i pray people will either stop me or wait till i'm done and saying ah your shia you know you're a kafir or your doll in madil and and all this stuff and he'll say bro like i'm uh i'm like an allen in the maleki math i i teach and you know i have to lob and things like that and and uh i'm like a scholar of this dean you know with all due respect to the real scholars you know he would say and they would be oh no i'm saying this shows the sheer ignorance of people

that they're here to call people kuffar or misguided and they don't even know that their brothers and sunnah pray that way yeah you know ultimately what i would say about this stuff is if anyone truly fears allah and truly follows his messenger salah and you know truly cares about this demon as an honest practitioner i think that's the most honest part or the most important part you know and all the all the differences what difference does it make to us in our day-to-day life as long as we don't we're not insulting each other who cares what people believe in their hearts as long as we're respectful that's what counts especially now you know our civilizations collapsed our countries are destroyed no one wants to live in our countries i

mean i'm here in iran everyone wants to leave you know there's this quote he says well we're busy arguing about which way to hold our hands there's people who are cutting our hands off you know or you know from from either direction east and west i think this is the last thing we need to worry about right now is you know whether the sahaba you know we're good or bad what does that affect our day-to-day you know we can't even keep keep our lights on we've go out into the street in any muslim country you'll get bombarded with children whose rib cages are showing and we have to argue about if the sahaba or or of this or that i mean forget it follow the dean the way you think it's correct and tell the people you care about and give dawah that way and if someone

has another way leave them be you know as long as again within the parameters of respect and things like that yeah because i mean it's shocking how the most important things that when you look at what are called the art of islam um that you know people like charter b and other scholars write that this is really all islam came for and all religions came for the preservation of the self the preservation of faith of intellect of of wealth and of offspring um that the and yet these things that you know having compassion mercy looking out for other people these things

even though people accept them in theory like they say yeah of course that that's what you know islam is about mercy but they just say that by name nobody really believes that anymore right it's just it's just the kalam but yeah it's just a label you know of course you know it's uh islam is about mercy but nobody really fortunately yeah man that's uh you know it's very unfortunate you know reality of course not to say that this is new we've we've had these sectarian issues you know since since they arrived yeah of course but i think right now is at the moment i think you know maybe when we get to when we get to a certain

point we can have a manadera you know like uh according to the rasheed but it has to be asked to be according to the rashid and we can finally come to the conclusion as to you know which moth hub is correct but i think at this point where our dean is literally in a state of collapse we're not at the point you know it's almost like the house is on fire and we're arguing about what color the curtains should be call us our house is on fire man forget the curtains for now let's turn the fire off and then we'll get to the curtains you know and i think that's i think that's what iran's state is at right now when with the whole unity and and things like

that i think they know that it's not like the shia sunni thing will go away yeah the idea is now is not the time to address it exactly i mean and i think that's worldwide sensibility you know that's like that the people with common sense out there and wisdom sorry beyond common sense some wisdom this is what they this is the path forward isn't it let's look look let's kind of let's shake hands and inshallah you know if we disagree on things we disagree who cares and you know it's not like life's so sure if you got a million other problems we don't need to kind of um you know right right lose ourselves in this even even someone like yan

sarkadi used to be hardcore you know she or yeah i don't know if you said kufari it's really but it's so it's so pragmatic and sunschool he said you know if you live in a european country like denmark and muslims are like half a percentage of the population and they're going to ban the the cop yeah is it really the time to say oh no the shirt we're not going to ally with them no for the muslim work together and to the extent that we're together work together and if you know you want to give a khutba about the fadal of hazrat omar he wants to go beat his chest and mourn then do that separately you know but to

the extent to the extent that we have commonalities let's follow the commonalities what's wrong with that and we have the quran we have the the prophet in his in his sunna and together and you know we get we get questioned this a lot um you know in iran it's there's a lot of awareness about the sectarianism now unfortunately and sufis and iran get questioned because i'm sure as you know sufism is largely a sunni trend within islam of course there's sufis of all math hubs but it's it's mostly you know shafi's and hanafi's and malikis and things like that and when we get questioned we we don't like to talk about these issues you know it's it's not a good door to open right off the bat

especially when people say you know um are you shia are you sunni and i think the best kalam that i heard was someone said if being shia means that you love imam ali and al-bait then but it being sunni means that you love the prophet sallallahu salaam and his sunnah then i'm a sunni and i think that's the best way the the best way to think about it you know and and and look look with with us you know with with a pure nia to the extent that you see what someone says follows the quran and sunnah and the established tradition and your your own you know your own wisdom and intellect and what seems godly and correct follow it and to the extent that you see from anyone from any muslim saying something

that seems coming from hatred or dunyawi stuff or or any other issues you know leave it simple as that i hear that um the iranian scholars are quite open to psychedelics there is one ayatollah who said that certain psychedelics are halal and actually part of a job that was translating the resale

like to be a mufti is is much harder in shias let's say yeah they have to release a book with all the majmetawa basically all their fatawa and one of the fatwas they translated was regarding psychedelic usage and i'm pretty sure i don't want to miss call but i think sistani said that they were okay yeah no i've heard that because i remember when i was i did a podcast with um dr dr mahdi sajid and in fact this friday i'm gonna do a live session with him where i'm the guest so people you can follow that but uh he had told me that you see how he initially came across me as a professor in the netherlands he said well he was

researching psychedelics and islam and he came across a an ayatollah who had said it was halal and that was the only person he could find and he was trying to find a sunni parallel like are there any sunni scholars that speak about this and that's where he came across me he said you were the only sunni scholar i could find who spoke on psychedelics uh he said the other being this ayatullah this so i was like all right wow that's interesting right right i think this is one thing that that shia fit has in scholarship generally is that uh for a lot of sunnis i think the abwab of

ichtahad are closed you know the the the new rulings that they've said you know intoxicants what is why would you ask if dmt or whatever is allowed but she is still there i feel like they're fit and away is more up to date and they also have they have a state which their fifth is attached to and that kind of helps keep it up to date versus you know elements of the the sunni world unfortunately the the fifth has become like an archaicism almost where you see they're saying you know if my camel dies while i'm traveling you know these types of questions like is the earth flat around you know ridiculous things but yeah it's true actually because they've

got um i remember them they've got fatawa rulings on sex changes undergoing gender realignment and stuff like this and and and you'd be i remember asking one of the the teachers in al-azhar when when i was there uh several years back and and and even though allah's heard is so advanced they were kind of like still so shocked and behind on these rulings and right the ayatollahs had issued them right i think one thing is that when you when you deal with these countries these sunni countries run by secular governments there's a lot of pressure on those institutions that they're under you know a big watch but in iran they have more freedom of movement

because you know they run the place they're not worried about muhammad dragging them away because their fatwa was wrong or something they have more freedom of movement and there's a more intimate connection with the ulama for shias because for sunnis you don't necessarily have to do takli devan alam if you just do your basic farah that's already in any basic you know book it exists you don't need to do tagli but shias part of the requirement to be a twelver standard 12 or shia is to do active target of a living marja manager just means source right margin source of emulation so if you say the most common one i follow said ali then you all of your rulings have to

come from this person and that includes everything in life you know not just basics but literally everything you do would be governed by this person's it's almost similar to the way that sufis get their sharia from their peer it's similar in that sense right i see it so overlap so for that reason there tends to be kind of i feel like there's more up to date you can go on the websites for shia scholars and they have rulings for no way i've heard i've heard uh you know renowned sunni scholars make this statement uh even the iqbal who have had on a mind trap is a teacher of mine maliki from the uk uh even him discussing uh some of the hd heart

of the shia uh scholars he he he highlights this as well that they are actually way ahead in the current each the heart than the sun i've noticed that as well definitely and and i feel like they're they're ten the mindset is completely different when you deal with shia circles and i've sat with both circles in my life you know hamdallah i've seen them both it seems that the shias are more concerned with the day-to-day affairs what's going on in yemen what's going on in syria when will this happen or how how is this going or you know how can how can we con they're constantly rethinking their approach to the world

versus you know when sometimes and not to criticize anyone but this is just what i've noticed when you sit in sunni circles sometimes i mean aside from maybe like types who were more into politics the average sunni circle like in jordan i noticed they're talking about things that are just so ancient sometimes you know they're so irrelevant for the modern world like rulings for for for things that wouldn't even happen anymore you know speaking of rulings and the question that everybody really wants to know everybody really wants to know you know it's plaguing the mind of it's stopping the heartbeat of many people how

how accessible is muta in iran today come on people everybody's really interested are you personally interested is that contingent i'm just i'm just i'm just waiting for them to open the travel corridor and i'm gonna i just want to be listening to this farsi all day okay i'll give you that the legitimate answer to that but i also do want to talk about this topic a bit because i feel like shias are so unfairly slandered for this topic now that is true basically

was was an accepted practice among all muslims and i think that um the the ishtihad of hazrat omar is what ended up closing the doors but there was some tabi'een and sahaba that were against that but for whatever reason it became orf and tasanon that anymore and it became like a talking point against shias but the only difference between muta and a regular nikah is that there's just a time limit other than that all the the elements and to be honest with you i actually because i've argued obviously that muta is permissible in sunni islam um and i've quoted the scholars ibn ashur the maliki and other people

and in fact there's a whole book of a current day maliki it's uh it's called um it's called it's actually just called uh and it's keratin and that's the title that he says that it's a revision of the topic in sunni thought it's not a reference to shia thought right and and he actually his name is um uh it's it's he goes with the ibm i know this is the classical ibm but this is the contemp he's contemporary moroccan and

he um uh he's he has a debate on youtube really with sheikh fazazi the salafi moroccan he's moroccan and the the other salafish i would like to see that so to answer the question actually though yes it's available i mean just like any marriage anywhere is available if you find someone usually i mean realistically the people who are more likely to engage in it have been widowed before because otherwise you know you would like to get a normal permanent marriage and start a normal married life but i mean there are certain elements where you know a muta on marriage can be very helpful for example

my dad's cousin runs hajj caravans and also ziada to damascus and things like that baghdad and let's say you have a widowed woman and she's 82 years old and she's going on hajj and she needs to be wheelchaired around okay this is not what you know the guy who gets can you imagine the guy who gets sold this contract and he's like yeah yeah i've come here for mutation don't worry about it we got you man we got this and then he's like you can take this wheelchair around he's like so the thing about is that a lot of times when it's done it's not done to consummate it's just

treated as like hacking the mahram system basically like if you need to be a mahram with someone you can just read a muta contract but not actually consummate the marriages you're not required to consummate it you know we like to enter into islam wholeheartedly to let their kids date what they do is they actually do it off for their kids but they include that they're not allowed to consummate it it's really interesting to work around so so let's say what did imam say

every condition that is not in the book of allah is invalid invalid so if you want if you're religious and you want your kid to go out with you know a girl for two months before they get married you do you do basically but just to make them that's what they write in the contract they're just like brother and sister so they can grow um but but another thing actually attaching this question to the to the the day question one issue that we have in islam is marriage

because back then i mean this has been told by my older relatives when you know your parents could tell you were ready for marriage and i won't explain how they could tell that but there was a way they would just marry you you were like sorry and that was that are you ready right cleveland and now you have to wait until you get your doctorate degree to get married you know literally that's the case for some people so you're 28 so from ages 14 or 16 to 28 you have someone who's ready to explode from hormonal you know and they say and they say uh self stimulation is haram well they they walk that back now but anyway

[Music] you you have this is a big problem in the sunny muslim huge because you have these these people who you tell them oh just test you know you know you know what say take a question maybe stuff like that would have worked way back in the day but nowadays when you're in the university dorm and you can literally hear zinna in the room next to you just a simple cold shower will not get your mind off of that right so the sunu world is kind of stuck what do we do early marriages is a nice talking point but who the hell is going to let their 16 year old daughter get married you know

of course not most people would not in this day and age but the shias came up with the solution the shia solution see the people below me just hit the hit the hit the roof with a broom that means shut up oh either that or it's a muta scenario that's really you know passionate right people are flying and hitting the roof so so the the shias came up with came up with an idea to fix this and they just say do mata so if you're like 18 and you want to get married but you know the shaddai aren't there they'll just say okay find like a divorced woman

and do mata that way you know you can stop you know being distracted by i mean let's be frank it's a human urge but you also don't have to get permanently married like the the 40 year old divorced person who's getting doing is under the assumption or on the impression that they're not going to get permanently married to this 20 year old or something right i mean i don't know how much i agree with that i'm not endorsing that i pro i wouldn't you know tell people to do that but at the very least at least it's it's it's an attempt at a solution maybe it's imperfect maybe it's completely wrong even you know allahu allah i'm not a fatih or a mufti you're the mufti to tell me but at least it's an attempt to create an islamic solution and my opinion what

i see in the sunni world of saying take a cold shower and fast that's not a solution to someone who is 28 and unmarried you know so i i totally agree with you man of that you know um a couple of years ago i was called to a conference on um it was mainly um it was for young people who were like college to uni early uni that kind of it was a um like a camp they were at this you know there's a residential so i was there to give some lectures and uh no they didn't have any more if that's what you think this this story

ain't going there that that would be kind if they call speakers and say and for your convenience in the presidential suite we've also arranged and then for once we'll turn up early and on time before time the only way to get muslims to come early and on time so no but what had happened is whilst i was there they we we had this q a at the end and obviously you know young people and uh so they asked this question about not about mutha but they were asking about being uh sexual and you know what you know what what's the crack with this like and

being obviously islam and at that time i hadn't really uh you know i hadn't really embarked on my research on the mata issue and stuff like this but obviously i was aware of mata but i hadn't kind of later on i started researching this issue but i did say at the time that look if i'm to be honest that institutionalized religion with a capital r has kind of failed people today because it doesn't provide a solution and i said that look muslims the scholars need to you know they need to have the courage to revisit this topic because

what we're basically saying is no answer we're just saying yeah oh justin's true let's just ignore the question oh why don't why do you have fasts and pray i mean that's you know that's just being stupid because a person is not asking about fasting and praying and uh you know they're not asking about that they ask about something that is described as the most powerful instinct that we have you know especially according to freudian kind of uh you know through psychoanalysis but even generally it is definitely one of the most strongest instincts human beings or creatures have is to is a sexual instinct now to

completely deny it now they say we don't deny what we say is that look oh why do you just get married like is in the official big well you know big fat wedding that's just crazy because you can't do that as a you know as an eighteen year old or nine absolutely yeah it's ridiculous and and by the time people save up to to do that you know this big fat wedding 1 25 26 27 and sometimes sometimes later like you mentioned you know people want cars they want houses they want these things absolutely cost so much nowadays um and then you see they also lack

experience in relationships so usually a lot of the times people's first relationships come in can be yeah and it can be a disaster because they they don't have this experience on how to just even you know just even being in a relationship they like that or just even interacting with the opposite gender some very strict muslims you know they don't even see the opposite gender ever so how would you even know how to address speak to or you know emotionally connect with even you know dare i say this you know sexual compatibility it's right you know it is an issue people you know

we may joke it off and laugh it off but the truth is you know truth be told that it's a big deal when people have issues in in this arena you know in whether yeah yeah it's it's definitely difficult i mean when you look at pre-modern islam it seems like we're very different we sometimes we think the way we are is the way our ancestors always were but if you look at how even among the sahaba and the tabern and the medieval muslims how common divorce and marriage was it was wasn't as taboo as it is today but nowadays you know god forbid if someone gets divorced and their marriage prospects are just done so and it's shocking how how natural

sex was to them you know it's like when we read it today we almost read it as what the hell is this person saying it's rude it's i'm sorry not rude it's like you know this person has uh bad etiquette in being able to speak like if you read the sayings of uh let's say even omar now he says oh in ramadan he would open his fast by having sex and then he says things like oh before i pray taraweeh at least have sex about two or three times minimum and then you think yeah who wouldn't be in a state of hoshua after that [Laughter]

but you think look this is this is the uh uh they had a very kind of like a oh this is just a natural thing of course yeah yeah and ironically as society has become more hypersexualized in its um advertisement aspect people muslims not people but muslims have become like there's no response to this and and sunnis have come up with this nicara missile which is like a cowboys thing yeah and which is like a cowboy botched up version of muta and you know it's it's worse it's worse because you know what they say

is you basically marry with the intention to divorce like basically you're tricking the girl and i would consider i you know i i i think that's like an abomination like why are you tricking her because yeah you know that yeah because at least in muta there's a transparency everybody knows where they stand you know they say well okay look this is one of these let's have a short-term relationship if it you know we'll see how things go but this is what it is from here from the offset if people are in there in if they're not they're not but to say well look okay let's get married with this lifelong vision and in your mind you're like not yeah

exactly you know i've got my flight booked for the end of the weekend i mean that's monstrous in my books i mean i'm sure there's people commenting right away oh mother's evil and all these things but one thing i would challenge to people who would dismiss it off hand is give us a solution to this problem because it is a problem zina i mean everyone who lives in muslim communities even in muslim countries zina is just totally normalized now there's basically it's it's assumed that almost everyone does it at this point and i wish there was a solution to that i wish it didn't have to be that way but it seems at this point this is a solution right it could be a solution i hope you know i hope there's more than one but we're not thinking about it and by

pretending it doesn't exist and saying oh fast and take a shower and i mean even recently we're so slow they said okay fine it's my crew it's hated but you can masturbate fine well tell us they've been doing that for a long time you guys are 10 steps behind you know i remember i was talk walking with some fellow tallab ilm outside of the masjid of the university of jordan one of them was stroking his beard and he was he's actually from pakistan as well he's saying you know i think i know the solution we were talking about the zener problem he says why don't we say masturbation is makru we can do that and then our friend said yeah we've all been masturbating for 20 years you're just saying we're going to say it's my crew the buck passed on

that already i thought he was so deep into thought he said i'm going to say something groundbreaking to them wow but we're behind you know and i don't know what the solution to the problem is i read something online that was so heartbreaking from a muslim huh who was heartbroken she said all my friends were doing xena in college but i waited and i waited and i waited until i got my master's on a job and then i was 27.

and all my friends who did zina and had great relationships they did toba and estafar and they married the person they did zenna with and now they have kids and they're happy and their community loves them but me i wait until i'm 26 all the men say oh you're old oh she's she's too pretty she's never had any relationship experience she's too religious well everyone says oh you're old you're almost past the age of marriage and i'm childless and unmarried and unhappy and i haven't even like experienced love in my life what can i you know it's almost like going the muslim way makes your life worse in this case you know i mean what can we say you know i mean you know it just it just reinforces that

you know it's easier to steal a bike and pray for forgiveness than it is to ask god for one you're right yeah exactly yeah but yeah the thing is if we don't you know god doesn't burden someone with more than they can handle if we don't make islam a religion that people can handle they'll leave if we make islam so difficult then very few people will follow it you know and the religion was never meant to be so difficult that no one could follow it you know so i don't know no i i totally agree and i'm really glad that you know even this topic was brought up i mean obviously the humor aside in it because i feel that look it is it is a sad state

because what it is even though people will have all these relationships or people will whether you are you know people will be masturbating like you mentioned before or they're doing these things it's the unfortunate guilt that people place on them that they feel that they are cursed and they feel that you know it's just horrible because really all this is coming to them just because of islam religion and religion is a source of rahma and it's a source of to become the opposite and it's become just a burden for these people so that that's the kind of the kind of soul-crushing element really absolutely yeah yesterday

in fact last night i had a heart-to-heart with someone well he actually started it with me and his his comes from a religious family his brother's a cleric he's a mom of uh he's a friday imam for mosques outside the country shia mosques and uh his family is all super religious and he's fluent in arabic he did you know in syria and he's he's super religious and he just straight up opened up to me and said you know what man i'm gay what do i do what do i do with with my life how can i continue being muslim when you know i'm told that i'm evil and that i'm gonna go to hell and all these things it i feel like we don't we don't have answers to give to these people

the way we address these topics i'm not saying that we should change the deen and make what was not saying that before anyone takes that from me but what i'm saying is it's not enough to say you know get electrocuted and tell you until you like women and he told me you know i've tried it all there's nothing i can do it's just not in my fitra i don't know why i was made this way and am i evil or something and he wasn't in the impression that he was going to go to hell just for his desire because we've even lost this nuance we say being gay is haram as if what we mean is doing the action of that specific action not even just any action that specific action is haram but we make them feel that as if they have this

this feeling that they're a kafir and i told them no of of course you know you won't go to hell and he's a talib you know he he knows the quran and he knows hadith he can quote them but he was under the impression that he's going to go to hell ultimately despite all of that because he and he told me i've never acted on it too he said it's just it's just in my mind i can't go away you know we especially in the age we live in we need to think of answers to these questions and we just haven't thought enough and it's sad someone you know as much as we might dislike or find him distasteful at times someone like yeah at least he's trying to come up with something and even that attempt will get him labeled as a doll in buddhism whatever that was so true man and this

is why you know i i made a clip which is on youtube called uh homosexuality and islam a diverse history and in it it's about half half an hour long and i go over all the you know some sorry not all but some prominent examples of people who were prominent people like caleb's or they were imams they were scholars who who who were homosexual absolutely and who uh some of these scholars who argued for the legitimacy of uh homosexuality and i said in it that look i'm not saying that i necessarily agree with these rulings

but what i'm saying is it is true that these rulings exist in our la in our heritage so if it's going to give somebody some sanity in following it then you know who am i to kind of like say to them look you're not allowed to follow it or you're not allowed to if if it's because people you know i had messages from people saying that they uh basically want to commit suicide because because of their sexuality and and that's actually one of the reasons i made that video clip to say look listen at the end of the day if this is giving you a lifeline it's giving you a lifeline this is a

scholar of islam in the past you said whether whether people today agree with it or don't agree with it but it's not right you know what i'm trying to say is that we have to be brave enough to to open up the discourse absolutely yeah i agree you know one way we could open this discourse is actually related back to persian poetry there's a lot of homoerotic persian poetry a hell of a lot poems written about by men about men not just symbolism but straight up sexuality like describing sex acts between men one of the most famous people who wrote about this this might come as a shock is the famous sheikh saadi shirazi the extremely famous islam

wrote openly homosexual poetry in no uncertain no uncertain terms he openly wrote like things like i seek my own gender or writes about man writes about their beards their mustaches no way like yeah he had like a beard fetish going on no they he liked no a different poet that was also into this type of stuff he he liked a thin mustache he said the green line like a little monster kind of like more like what you have oh damn i would have been popular of course no muslims are gay but you just open this poetry and you just come across poems that are written by men about men

and of course they exist you know a certain percentage of people worldwide always are gay so of course some of them will be muslims and poets but we act as if these things don't exist and even just saying them is oh we just lost your audio that's the gin you're back you're back here okay this was said on iranian national tv by a poetry professor he said some of our poets had homosexual tendencies and this caused like an outrage on the internet oh how dare you slander or secular people by the way not even religious people how dare you these these religious people are slandering our poets by saying they but but it was

true man it's not slander it's just it's just a historical fact some of these poems are so obviously by man about man you know what does the modern do with it say he's a coffer or something you know these people are the most beloved muslim poets that we have yeah that's you know speaking of uh the topic of i mean first of all speaking of iranian topics of taboos such as homosexuality you know it brings us to to to to great inspirations come to our mind right that is uh none other than his his his excellency i would like to say the

ayatollah himself the marja a what is going on here i mean what he could have been the next roomy man yeah i know man it's unfortunate you know i think when i see people like him i i feel kind of upset because i feel like his nia ultimately is pure he really does care about the dean and it's it's he is for the dean yeah yeah yeah

yeah he feels bad for muslims that are misguided maybe or in his mind and that's why he tries to reach out to them but it's just the the methodology and the way he goes about it it's just so devoid of beauty it's so ugly you know and is he from a similar part of iran originally where you're from i don't know his ethnic origin within iran part of me guesses that he's azeri of turkic origin i'm i'm part azeri because we have a lot of turkic peoples in iran they're they're a significant minority i don't know why i think that but they they tend to kind of look have his facial features but him and i

have a strikingly similar background iranians raised in america to secular but still muslim family and then they became religious later in life and now they're active online talking to people about islam but you know like like hafez says see this one and that one see the difference between their paths and which one goes one way and what goes the other way you're clearly misguided and he's darling right right i don't know no no so isn't it amazing the people the muslims from iran we used to have imam bukhari

so those are the people the imams that we have today it's crazy yeah this this uh and he speaks good farsi yeah he writes he's written in persian on his website as well actually i saw it was pretty decent and you know despite i think he's a salafi he makes a point to mention that he's not anti his iranian identity because of that he he mentions that his kids speak farsi and that he has persian food and rugs and stuff at home and that you know he's still as iranian as he ever was so i guess i appreciate it that's fair enough that's uh an interesting point so danny boy the iranian speaking al farisi wow he could just

me and him should have me and him should have a talk it'd be interesting two spectrums of iranians wow that you know what that would be you should set that up man seriously i think you i think you would reject me you know i've i've i've written to him asking him to have a dialogue uh yeah yeah yeah he he she saw it was it was seen on uh messenger but he obviously he didn't take that offer up but he ignored it yeah have this idea that if someone's a person of desire that you shouldn't debate or talk with them i don't know maybe where people people are misguided basically people have misguidance yeah

i don't know i just find their dawah to be very counterproductive i i've never heard of anyone who wasn't a muslim who was like wow i should convert to islam because of this or i never heard of anyone who was a liberal muslim who was a feminist who thought oh my god wait a minute feminism is wrong but i've heard of a lot of pious muslims who are very upset and very very hurt i know a lot of muslim sisters who have mentioned that they've had to do a lot of damage control from daniel that sisters will have iman issues because of the his type of anti-woman writers says you should bloody pray in a cupboard i mean right right the hell is that about sorry closely this is an issue we have in modernity where the olympia

are not connected with the people and they're less and less you know nowadays in many muslim countries if your grades are 90 to 100 you become a doctor if they're 80 to 90 become an engineer if they're 70 to 80 become a lawyer and if it's 70 and below you become an islam it's a joke in iran in many muslim countries i've heard that if you can't study anything you'll just go become an islam right so we have we have no connections with the ulama the olamar don't have much knowledge and now we end up with someone like daniel who hasn't studied formally anywhere but he's been to harvard and you know you wouldn't expect right but that's a secular that's a secular potential and he's teaching dean to people i guess maybe he'd call himself the basic die and things like that no

i mean he he thinks he's quite you know he thinks he's right right he's teaching people he should be learning dean he shouldn't be in a position in my opinion at this point to teach dean and you know what one thing is it's it's like this the sufi states it's not how much knowledge that that from the books you have you can have this entire thing memorized but it's it's the amal the action yeah i don't care how much you've learned but when you interact with people do you show that you've learned anything from this dean if all you show is ugliness and bad words and and harshness and meanness what did you even learn from the dean what's the point of all that knowledge if you could have the whole sahihan and quran memorized but if all

you show is ugliness the world what's the point of memorizing all that stuff yeah and you know look i i mean i i was saying this earlier on with to someone that look you know he's i read this post today of his i think it's his wife that wrote it um because he says his wife whatever wrote this on facebook that uh it was saying look women should do this they shouldn't go go to uni they shouldn't study they shouldn't be chasing careers they shouldn't do this they should stay at home they should be and he's kind of like saying look i indoors this is my message now look i look this there's a sentiment of saying look women

uh you know being these these beings super awesome and great at making a home as in being you know nurturing a family i think most people men and women would agree with that message i i certainly would with that message that look i think personally women are will do a hundred times greater job uh i think in nurturing a family than the men will um and i don't think that message is a i don't personally think that message is a toxic message i think it's the way you know the vehicle that he puts this message in

because this is you know like calling women witches and calling them this and calling them that and uh snarling witches who are like uh you know there's this kind of this this misogyny so much of it that this message of because he if he was just to say look people don't neglect you know seeking the dunya is good you know seeking careers is good but look your family always should come first in your mind as a message i think personally i don't think there's anything wrong with that message absolutely uh but i think it's it's the way that this is drowned submerged in all this right right hatred

almost to women do you think i have this problem because i consider myself a traditionalist in many ways i think maybe ultimately our me and uh daniel and i's base values might be very similar but the way he goes about explaining and understanding it is very different than me i don't mean some of his other opinions i mean mostly the traditional you know home family life is important don't worry about careers things like that i would agree we can only think about that like people from muslim society i would even say that i would even say that to men you know like but yeah but the i think the issue is you know the way they go about it it doesn't do any good nowadays when i

talk about traditionalism on my instagram story i talk about this quite a bit you know traditional family values are important getting married is important having kids is important all these things you know because modern the modern world these things are getting neglected more and more yeah and people who disagree with me say oh you're just like daniel aren't you it's almost like you get stereotyped as being like him and i don't want to be associated with that type of rhetoric so like i kind of i'm very careful about the things i say about you know being traditionalists but i i don't know i don't think oh and and i think not to be fair yeah i think as well the problem is that there are certain you see there's certain um

very sensitive kind of like uh woke people let's say you that kind of crowd that if you do say anything they they could just or like very sensitive kind of feminists that will just react to anything and and i think in that sense a lot of people have kind of also reacted to me as well saying oh look you know mufti says stuff which is just i i don't you know i don't know but maybe i say stuff to you it's like one of my mates says about me he says you know what's what's sounds right-wing but isn't right-wing and he says mufti and i thought okay i'm surprised but that's a moment you're doing it i think the issue is

that a lot of our cultural values if you bring them to the west they're the same as what right-wingers have and we muslims are very against the right-wing for their racism and all the other issues that they have anti-immigration anti-health care at least that's the way it is in the west so you become associated with them right so maybe as a muslim and a traditional muslim i have a lot in common as regard to family values with republicans in america but you know but if you become associated with them for that reason then people think are you a racist are you anti-immigration are you empty this this or that and but just but just to be clear i and i'm sure you'd agree with this that you see careers and things like this are for both people

you know it's i mean sorry for both genders it's not you know in his post he kept going on about look don't have careers wouldn't you want women to be equal participants in society my thing is simply about you know mental priorities in life like you know the ultimate thing in life right it's like even a job for me ultimately would always just be a job you know it's like like it's it's not like that muslims in america one thing is that he's speaking to muslims in america muslims in america are very specific demographic they're people whose parents usually came because they were engineers and doctors and things there's refugees as well but a lot of them

and even the refugees kids end up like the kids of the people who are doctors and lawyers and you know subhanallah they end up going to the best institutions and there's a muslims are one of the highest educated groups in america all that so many doctors engineers lawyers and they have this very careerist mentality in the west where a lot of times i've seen muslims men and women forego a family for the sake of their career and their career growth and things like that and i've personally seen that and has unfortunate facts but you know in other countries of course it's different but in america the muslim community elements of elements of his criticism are correct but again it's the methodology and the way he says it and and of course not all of it but elements

of what he says as a kernel of truth yeah there's definitely muslim sisters who look past having a family or give it a second i wouldn't even say it's that's anything to do with religion it's just you'll get certain people who have fallen victim to that lifestyle it's a cultural thing and you'll get men as well yeah yeah so very um and and then you know this whole thing of giving islam this pushing this oh women should pray in the closet and you know this is from the sunnah of the prophet and you think i don't know what closets he thinks the prophet had in his radio his wife prayed in in

in the pantry and you think for god's sake wasn't much to the nebu mix there were there was exactly mixed prayers there yeah and there was no divider or anything it was just a group ah oh but fun and games are fun and games people you know ustad i know you you are exhausted but before what i what i'd like to get some final uh to wrap this up the three you know the top three legendary poets that do it for you yeah and why oh my god that's a different one

so i would say is i love hafez because he speaks to every element of the human experience happiness sadness hope above raising him above roomie number one goes to huffington for me as a general poet yes and i'll explain why hoff is this is a topic maybe for another talk aslan but he went through a lot of changes in life he grew up more religious and as time went on he became a sufi and then he became less religious i think if if our estimations of when he wrote different poems are correct so he he speaks to all elements so if you want to find a poem that's religious he's there if you want to find a poem where he's like i don't know about i'm

doubting this whole thing i'm feeling my iman is low he's there if you want to feel a sufi poem he's there you know love hope despair everything and he's a very good poet technically skilled he's very good you know he has some lines that you're just you're head spinning by how good they are what any killer lines coming to mind you want to move us right here as on uh let me let me bring the palm of actually this is like i have this thing i can't memorize poems and recite them um

come on man you you know farsi poems with that accent no i mean that's all you really need to be doing just learning poetry now so so he has um he has one poem this is just an example of his poetic ability says chashmam on damn kisses see he he has very good poetic skills right he's a very good classically trained poet and he's just a joy to read overall and he's hard to decipher there it's it's unclear who he is

really no one really knows who he is yeah he's a mystery i love roomie but differently rumors it's roomy number two right i think so yeah rumi you know who he is there's no doubt there's no mystery when you read roomie you're never like wow let me figure this out he's telling you who he is he's an asha he's a lover he's a sufi he's he's you know he's in a different world you know and his poetry has a single thrust there's one directional movement love thrust

if you want to hafez is going in every direction possible you know you might end up more confused by reading him but rumi is going from point a to point b and sometimes if you want to go in that direction it's fun but hoff is you know you can go in any direction but roomie and of course the depth of his poetry it's incredible but what i will say is rumi's not a poet he's a sufi who writes poetry hafez is a poet wow for a poet the end goal of writing is to write the poem because they love poetry for roomie the end goal was to describe tasawaf and to give tarbian to teach his students but he happened to write poetry

as the means he doesn't necessarily even like poetry he has a line where he says he said i broke free from this bait this couplet in this gaza in this poem oh king and sultan of eternity he's probably maybe referring to god i mean who knows you can never tell muft

is the wasn't of that poem what's wrong with the meter so the meters in arabic poetry are give they have weird names oh right okay okay okay right these are names i don't want to get yeah no no basically mustalon is the poetic mirror that is i'm tired of these meters and he has another one where he's he's saying he says i can't quote it i don't have him i can never imagine being told off in farsi you'd just be like can you imagine just being told off you'd just be like wow maybe after

the channel i'll teach you some of those but then here's another one where where rumi complains about having to find rhymes so i think roomies his the world he existed in was so expansive and incredible and just it's anything it's almost like putting it into poetry was like filtering out a lot of the gems because he was limited by the vocabulary certain experiences you can you can't explain that you know the the first time you meet the person you marry and live with forever how does that feel how can you explain that so it almost feels like roomies experience you know right the experience of reaching allah you know maybe and who knows if he truly did

but assuming he did how can you write that in words right so rumi's rumi's different he you don't read him for the joy of the poetry he's a good poet the poems are good but it there's no like word play and there's no like fantasy right it's the message so it's different third for me is sadie and sadie in a way mixes them both because he has a lot of messages he he's preachy like roomie he has moral lessons and anecdotes do this don't do that have good adap don't speak out of turn hafiz isn't like that hafez doesn't preach to you hafez isn't interested in telling him hafiz is like the kind of halibut and the kind of

right exactly they're very similar to each other sadie is similar to roomie in that sense that he has something to tell you that you should do in your life he's telling you he's preaching to you but sadie is more similar to hafez in the sense that he's a very good poet maybe even better than hafez he's a genius with words so in child maybe in the future i can expand on on the example that's some an amazing summary and shukran for that comparison you've given you know some incredible insights i'm at your service look at that people look at that so shukran for taking your time out today

it's been an absolute pleasure you do you're very you are active on social media platforms if people want to reach out to you um what are some of the platforms and what should they do if they want to reach out so on twitter instagram and most other social media platforms it's at persian poetics and that's just one word persian poetics my personal it should be listed in the title my my internet name sharzadeh i am on instagram and twitter as well so you can follow those if you're interested in supporting the project it's uh i have a patreon it's patreon.com persianpoetics what we're doing right now is working on translating a book by roomie that's

never really been translated well into english and it's really going to be counteracting a lot of the the false or orientalized or misquoted translations that i talked about earlier which is one of my main focuses we talked about it last today i'm glad we branched onto other topics but if you're interested you know my online presence explains that plenty well so and your book is coming out isn't it right it's in the works but one thing i've learned is uh when you start writing a book it seems like it'll take much a lot much less than once you actually start to get writing it but but i'm hoping that maybe towards the end of 2021 it'll be it'll be out so by the time you know it gets done and added in looking forward to that

so people those are the platforms and uh the the real question that many people were wondering is is the third still single but uh i'd let you hold on to that if you want to are you naughty naughty well let's say that it doesn't matter because in islam you can have four wives a lot you can just assume i'm single a lot there you go see that's the real question right there plus you had the whole discussion which you guys weren't even paying attention to there's no limit on the amount of mutas actually because they count the mutants

as part of the like the maybe as part of the e-mail experience like like you can have the four wives the four full-time you know full-time like employees and and the the muta is extra now you know there's going to be many women in there that are just loading the gun right now and they're like you know what hunt this guy down [Laughter] right so he's just gone ahead and ruined the whole thing he set it all up with this farsi you know this this kind of ooh seductive kind of accent and the shady and and then he just goes ahead and says

this is it now chef it's been awesome having you on i'm at your service brother it's been an absolute pleasure people absolutely do uh if you're not already following he he writes it as but that's because of the accent it's written right it's pronounced as in the east side uh do follow him do reach out um any questions if you're interested in that line of that that art that discipline of poetry farsi right he's your man people and if you haven't already subscribed to my page

then even the poetry of rumi cannot find compassion for you right so people we're going to sign off right we've got to let gustav get some rest thank you for having me thank you so much it's been an honor and so take care of yourself and we'll speak soon inshallah guys we're signing out i'll put up my my exit page if you haven't already subscribe do so um if you've uh not clicked the notification bell

right what on earth are you waiting for get over there and uh patreon as well people the discord app is going live soon so take care stay blessed much love likewise as well